AH Plausibility: Downplaying Spanish in Latin America?

Paraguay is distinctive among Latin American nations in that the most dominant language is not a European-derived tongue, but a form of Native American Guarani. Although Spanish is also widely spoken in Paraguay, the Guarani language lives on.

Could other Latin American countries have an indigenous language as the language of the majority? Let's look at some contenders:

1. Mexico - A majority of Mexican citizens continued to speak an indigenous first language by 1820, and this figure fell just below 40% by the end of the century. Philip II of Spain tried to make Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, the predominant language of New Spain in the mid-1500's. Could a Nahuatl-speaking Mexico exist to this day, bolstered by post-colonial nationalism?

2. In Peru, which has a largely indigenous and mestizo population, Quechua was once much more widespread, only falling after the defeat of Tupac Amaru III and the rise of independence.

3. Bolivia, with its indigenous majority, might be in the same state with Aymara,

4. Brazil -This is more of a stretch. Early Portuguese settlers learned "lingua geral," a form of Tupi simplified by the Jesuits, as the primary language of the fledling colony in its early colonial haydays. Like Guarani in Paraguay, it had a cross-demographic appeal over race and class, picked up by Tupi, Portuguese, mixed-race people, non-Tupi tribes, and African slaves alike, but it was eventually drowned out by a mass influx of people who found Portuguese more convenient.

5. Guatemala - Could there be a Mayan pidgin to bridge the gap between the country's highly-diverse indigenous majority?
 
It's not so much the Spanish colonial governments who sought to eradicate the native languages but the governments of the independent nations that forced down Spanish on the majority of the population in order to create a cohesive national identity. Ironic?

All of this is pretty plausible.
 
This requires attitudinal change and not just linguistic change. Paraguay was sort of an exception to the enforced racial hierarchy that grew out of the Spanish colonial experience.
 
This requires attitudinal change and not just linguistic change. Paraguay was sort of an exception to the enforced racial hierarchy that grew out of the Spanish colonial experience.

And even in Paraguay most official documents are written in Spanish. Guarani survived in Paraguay, and not in Corrientes (Argentina) because the Argentinian government invested a lot of money in educating its inhabitantans from 1880 onwards, and that education was in Spanish. Paraguay, completely defeated after the war and with a great part of its male population dead, couldn't afford to do so, so Guarani survived in the countriside (where most people lived).

What you need is some reason for the leaders of the independent movements to identify themselves with the native mayority and to enforce an education in such a language. It's hard, because, as Bolivar said in 1819:

No somos europeos, no somos indios, sino una especie media entre los aborígenes y los españoles. Americanos por nacimiento y europeos por derechos, nos hallamos en el conflicto de disputar a los naturales los títulos de posesión y de mantenernos en el país que nos vio nacer, contra la oposición de los invasores; así nuestro caso es el más extraordinario y complicado

("We aren't Europeans, we aren't Indians, we are something in between Amerindians and Spanish. Americans by birth and Europeans by Law, we are forced to dispute with the natives the titles of possession and to keep the country that gave us birth against the opposition of the Spanish invaders; so our case is the most extraordinary and complicated that could be.")

The thing is, if the Criollos that led the independence movements had chosen to fully identify with the Amerindians in places where these groups were the majority, they'd probably have to, eventually, give them equal rights and make a radical land reform that would make the basis of their own high social status vanish. And while there are historical examples where high classes did comit social suicide in history (as the Samurai in Japan post 1868), these examples are rather rare.

In our timeline, even in Argentina the Criollos employed some Indian symbols in the height of the independence war (such as The Incan sun in our flag or the verse referring to the Inca's tombs in our original national anathem), but these attemps to identify with the natives ceased as soon as the war ended. The Criollos inmediately reaffirmed their European identity, and started reffering to the Indians that still roamed free in the Pampas or Chaco as "Pagan savages".

Maybe if the war of independence last even longer, and the leadership of the war was assumed by radical mestizos or indians, it might be possible for the winners to be so angry against anything Spanish that they chose to identify completely with Amerindians, and to establish an education system in these languages. Probably you'd need independence to be achieved by the late 1820ies/early 1830ies, and have the leaders be influenced by romaticism, nationalism and the Greek revolution. It still wouldn't have happened in Argentina or Venezuela, but might have taken place in Perú-Bolivia or Mexico.
 
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You need a much larger native element to the revolutions which set Latin America free. As it was, the whole movement was led by Criollos, who went on to dominate the nations they carved out of the former Spanish empire.

What you really need is more native participation in - and leadership of - the movements which freed Latin America. The problem is that the Criollos of the 19th century will never effectively identify with the native majority and - as Admiral Brown rightly observes - will not commit class suicide in order to create a more 'indigenous' national identity. You also have the problem that the mestizos will always have divided loyalties, and in most countries are often culturally closer to the Criollos.

Paraguay is interesting: it was isolated, which helped speed up the assimilation of the Spanish settlers into the Guarani majority; there weren't that many Spanish settlers to start with, so within a very short time most of the 'Spanish' in the colony had Guarani parentage of some sort; and in the era of nationalism (particularly during the War of the Triple Alliance), Paraguay's linguistic uniqueness became something to be proud of and played on. If you can replicate more of those conditions in other places, then you might be able to replicate Guarani's success.

So, in short: make Bolivar and Iturbide natives or mestizos with native sympathies.
 
Delay the revolutions.

It's possible immigration can make Italian or German the language of Argentina, too. Bit of a long shot though; you probably need a POD in the 1850s or so.
 
Delay the revolutions.

It's possible immigration can make Italian or German the language of Argentina, too. Bit of a long shot though; you probably need a POD in the 1850s or so.

How? It didn't happen in Argentina in OTL. Most people from Argentina are of Italian descent but they aren't Spanish speaking.
 
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