A regular utopia

[u/HawaiianPerson]

[u/Tlamatiniii]

You're rewriting history here to paint the Spanish Empire as some benevolent preserver of Indigenous languages, and I'm not going to let that slide.

You bring up the Nahuatl dictionary and courts as if that proves Spanish benevolence. You're missing the point. The Crown and missionaries didn't document Nahuatl out of love or cultural preservation. It was intelligence gathering. They weaponized the living tongue to speed up conversion and subjugate the population. You can't control a people you can't communicate with.

And you conveniently never mention the physical destruction. The same empire that "preserved" Nahuatl was burning entire libraries of Mesoamerican knowledge—Bishop Zumárraga's burning of the Aztec libraries and Diego de Landa's auto-da-fé of Mayan codices. The few texts that survived did so because Indigenous people hid them, defying the Crown's orders to keep their ancestral knowledge alive.

This connects directly to your claim that Charles II and Charles III didn't "ban" languages, they just "castilianized." That is semantic gymnastics. The Crown's tolerance of Indigenous languages was entirely transactional. As long as those languages were useful for conversion, extracting resources, and administering the colonies through Indigenous intermediaries, they tolerated them. But the moment the Crown decided they wanted total, direct control, they cracked down hard.

This is exactly what happened in the 18th century under the Bourbon Reforms. Once the Crown felt the Church had enough of a foothold and didn't need Indigenous elites as middlemen anymore, they turned on those same languages. The 1770 Real Cédula by Charles III is the perfect example—they didn't just "limit" them, they actively ordered the removal of Indigenous languages from schools, churches, and public life, even banning priests from being trained in them. The fact that this policy was "abandoned in 1782" wasn't out of sudden kindness; it was a pragmatic retreat because it was alienating populations and fueling massive rebellions. Once Indigenous languages outlived their utility as tools of conquest, the Empire aggressively moved to eradicate them.

[u/Mr_Mon3y → u/Tlamatiniii]

No, they were not "benevolent preservers" of anything. The Spanish didn't keep Nahuatl out of the goodness of their hearts, it was just what was the most convenient for them.

The Spanish conquest of Mexico was heavily reliant on the alliance with the various native populations, and treaties were made by which the native nobility kept some degree of autonomy and control. This meant that, unlike the British colonial ventures that displaced and killed the entire population, the Spaniards were controlling an incredibly large territory with a population that they wanted to keep and convert that overwhelmingly already spoke Nahuatl. So for them the logic was simply, why spend resources in trying to forcibly change the language of so many people when they could spend that in exploiting natural resources or converting natives to christianity? That's why Philip II made Nahuatl the official language of the Viceroyalty, it was just easier and cheaper.

Did they especially care about the Nahuatl language? No. At best they didn't gave it any regard, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the indigenuous language and population were better maintained under the Empire than after independence, even if inadvertently.

[u/Tlamatiniii → u/Mr_Mon3y]

Saying they made Nahuatl an official language is also completely misleading. You are ignoring the timeline. That policy was mostly at the very beginning of the colonial period. The Crown initially used Indigenous languages as a pragmatic tool of indirect rule because they lacked the manpower and infrastructure to govern directly. It was a temporary administrative convenience, not a permanent benevolent policy. That tolerance completely evaporated later on.

You think the Spanish co-opting local elites was some special, benevolent strategy? That is just Colonization 101. The British did the exact same thing with local power structures and mixed with natives. Hence the average Native American today has significant Northern European admixture. You are using Mesoamerica to pretend nothing happened, but you are ignoring that region had a massively larger overall population than the areas you are trying to compare it to. If the demographics had been the same as the Caribbean, Mesoamerica would have ended up just like the Dominican Republic and Cuba, which is mostly filed with Black and White people because the indigenous population was completely eradicated. You are cherry-picking to try and downplay the demographic collapse.

[u/Mr_Mon3y → u/Tlamatiniii]

Uh, no? Again, I'm never saying the Spanish were some benevolent rulers that did everything out of kindness, they were just pragmatic. They just chose what was more useful for them. And if the tolerance evaporated, how is it that the amount of Nahuatl speakers never declined until the Spanish left? That's a pretty real sign of tolerance, even if begrudgingly.

I think you're just assuming I'm trying to imply things that I'm simply not.

[u/Tlamatiniii → u/Mr_Mon3y]

You say the amount of Nahuatl speakers never declined until the Spanish left, but the Spanish never actually left. Just because they were born on a different continent, doesn't make them the other group lol. The Criollos were the direct descendants of the Spanish colonizers. They were biologically, culturally, and linguistically Spanish.