Conceptions on the castilian language, on the indigenous people and their languages in La restauración nacionalista (1909) and Blasón de plata (1910) by Ricardo Rojas

Abstract

By the end of the 19th century, the educational system in Argentina adopted the idea of a single language. The formation of the Nation-State was based on the European model, seeking to build a nationality to achieve the homogenization of subjects and the language was used as a necessary instrument for this purpose. To do this, various languages and identities were denied, excluded
and expelled to the other side of the border that forms an identity (the “nation”) built from Western models. In this sense, inequality and social discrimination were generated and perpetuated by both policies which established and spread Spanish as the official language and the establishment of compulsory teaching. Many intellectuals of the time have argued and debated about the language that should be spoken in the new state.
This article describes and analyzes the conception of language, specifically Spanish, and its teaching by the intellectual Ricardo Rojas. On the other hand, the representations that it exposes about different indigenous peoples and their languages are analyzed. To do this, we use as sources The Nationalist Restoration: Report on Education, written in 1909, and Blasón de plata, published in 1910.
Rojas seeks the foundation of national consciousness in Spain and in the indigenous people, recognizing them as another link in our Argentine past. Thus, he proposes the study of their languages with the purpose of enriching the research on tradition. This involved controversial debates against the hegemonic intellectual discourses of the early 20th century which were framed in Sarmiento’s thought, in relation to biological positivism. However, his consideration
of the indigenous is that of primitive subjects, from the past and linked to nature rather than to civilization.