The Bourbon Reforms, Independence, and the Spread of Quechua and Aymara

Abstract

The extant historical evidence provides little indication that policies enacted by the colonial state had any dramatic effect on the use of Quechua and Aymara in the Andes during the eighteenth century and the independence era. By the eighteenth century, colonial officials had become more tolerant of the two major vernacular language families, Quechua and Aymara, particularly with the spread of popular piety among the Andean peoples. Even the political and religious turmoil surrounding the move to replace the religious orders with secular priests in Amerindian parishes (beginning in 1749), the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, attempts by the Crown to require that Andeans learn Castilian in the four years following the Great Andean Rebellions from 1781 to 1783, the rise of Liberal reform with the Constitution of 1812, and the rise of national states that limited indigenous participation in politics, apparently had no profound impact on language spread and use in the Andes. Instead, historians most often point to the process of ethnogenesis taking place over a long period in the Andes, which can be traced in the documentary evidence from the eighteenth century.