The narrative that the Spanish Empire executed a sort of universal charity in America crumbles entirely when propaganda is confronted with harsh demographic and historical reality. This romanticized view of the conquest attempts to sell the idea that an entire continent was unified under a single language, pioneering laws, and altruistic access to higher education. However, when we contrast the discourses of imperial pride with hard data, it becomes evident that the laws were a theoretical simulation, education was a segregated mechanism of control, and the Spanish language was a tool that remained far more cornered and limited than nationalism cares to admit.
The first great myth to falter is the alleged universality and idyllic homogeneity of the Castilian language within the continent—a bubble of uniformity that drastically deflates when applying the filters of demographic reality backed by linguists and sociologists. If we subtract Brazil’s mass of over two hundred three million Portuguese speakers and the blocks of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean from the region’s total population, the starting point is already notably reduced. The true contraction occurs when looking within the Spanish-speaking borders themselves, where between fifteen and twenty million people belong to monolingual indigenous communities who never adopted the imposed language and communicate exclusively in ancestral tongues like the Mayan languages, Quechua, or Aymara. If we add the filter of millions of citizens who communicate in highly hermetic and closed urban slangs and dialects—such as coa, parlache, or caló—whose internal codes reduce mutual intelligibility to its absolute minimum in daily life for an outsider, the block of speakers of a truly clean and standard Spanish is trimmed down to a mere four hundred million people. As philologist and historian Gregorio Salvador points out in his exhaustive analysis, Política lingüística y sentido común, this figure, far from demonstrating a global reach, reveals that Castilian was relegated to a very specific geographical strip of the planet. In contrast, sociolinguists and experts in imperial expansion highlight that Portuguese demonstrated a much more universal projection by breaking through the barriers of its continental mass of origin with greater success, effectively spreading across a global network of official and stable nations in Africa (Angola, Mozambique) and Asia (Macau, Timor-Leste), far surpassing the strictly localized concentration that Spanish suffered after the fragmentation of its old viceroyalties.
This false notion of uniformity clashes head-on with the deep fragmentation that defines the Hispanic world, both on the global map and within its own core of origin. The idea of a monolithic cultural block vanishes when analyzing the enormous identity, political, and linguistic fractures dividing Latin American republics from one another, which drag suspicious borders and historical rivalries born precisely from colonial administrative disorder. However, the most resounding example that Castilian centralism never achieved a truly homogenous assimilation is found within the Iberian Peninsula itself. As historians and sociolinguists specializing in the peninsular periphery explain, Spain is, in reality, a plurinational and historically fragmented State where Castilian identity was imposed by force but never managed to eradicate pre-existing national realities. Millions of native citizens in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia use Catalan, Basque, or Galician as their primary, maternal, and daily language, maintaining political reaffirmation movements that reject Madrid’s cultural assimilation. This internal fracture proves that the project of Hispanic homogenization could not even consolidate successfully in its own European territory, making the pretense of exporting an allegedly flawless identity unity across the Atlantic doubly absurd.
To sustain this idyllic scaffolding in the face of obvious fragmentation, the current of contemporary Spanish nationalism has built its own intellectual counterpoint. Authors of great commercial and academic success, such as historian María Elvira Roca Barea in her famous work, Imperiofobia y leyenda negra, fervently argue that the Spanish Empire was not a predatory empire, but rather a “generating empire” that assimilated local populations and expanded its own culture, unlike the Anglo-Saxon model of extermination and indifference. In a similar vein, philosophers from the school of philosophical materialism like Gustavo Bueno developed an entire political theory to praise Hispanicity in his fundamental reference work, España frente a Europa, arguing that the Spanish conquest extended a universal and rational civilizational platform that equipped conquered peoples with the political and formal tools of the Western state. This current argues that focusing on current divisions means falling into the propaganda traps of Spain’s rival powers from past centuries.
However, this theoretical defense of a generating and universalist Hispanicity shows a total disconnection from actual practice when extended to the realm of human rights, where nationalism usually boasts of the Laws of Burgos of 1512 and the theological debates of the School of Salamanca by Francisco de Vitoria. What this narrative hides is the famous colonial maxim that the law in America “is obeyed but not enforced,” a juridical dissonance exhaustively analyzed by legal historians like Víctor Tau Anzoátegui in his reference work on overseas institutions, La ley en la América Hispana. This legal flexibility allowed local encomenderos and conquerors to ignore the Crown’s orders to protect their economic profits through brutal extractive institutions like the Encomienda, the Repartimiento, and the Mita. Demographic historians and experts in the dynamics of the Andean social catastrophe, such as Alberto Crespo Rodas, whose rigorous historiographical studies can be found in La mita de Potosí, and Nathan Wachtel, author of the famous book on the collapse of indigenous cultures, Los vencidos, have documented how millions of natives were forced to perform grueling labor in plantations and deep mines like those of Potosí, under suffocating weekly shifts and destructive unsanitary conditions that caused a collapse of the local population.
To delve into this exploitation, Enrique Dussel, in his fundamental work, 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro, argues that Spain’s arrival did not represent the “discovery” of an alterity, but rather the violent submission and assimilation of a historical subject to the needs of the nascent capitalist world-system. In his theoretical framework, Dussel draws from the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose capital book on subjectivity can be found in Being and Nothingness, and the radical ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, whose crowning work on responsibility toward the neighbor is Totality and Infinity, to explain the trauma of the colonial clash through the critical concept of alterity. Inspired by Sartre’s warning about the look of the Other that objectifies, strips away freedom, and reduces the human being to a mere object, Dussel demonstrates how the Empire applied a colonial gaze that dehumanized the native inhabitant to convert them into mere extractive force. Furthermore, relying on Lévinas, who placed the birth of authentic ethics in the recognition of the face of the vulnerable and the foreigner, Dussel recognizes that the Spanish Empire executed a systemic annulment of that face. Instead of responding ethically to the fragility of the conquered populations, the imperial machinery systematically erased American alterity, concealing its identity to force its economic and theological submission. According to Dussel, the School of Salamanca of Francisco de Vitoria did not design individual freedom, but rather constructed a rational justification to expand European colonial dominance under theological premises. These theoretical debates were the screen for a geopolitical need to legitimize the conquest before the Pope through legal traps like the Requirement—a text read to the indigenous people in a language they did not understand to demand immediate submission and, in case of rejection, legally authorize a “just war” to massacre and expropriate them, blaming the victims themselves for their deaths.
This supposed protection entirely lacked the universality required by the modern concept of human rights, since the Spanish Empire protected the theological identity of the indigenous person while actively commodifying and dehumanizing millions of African people through the Asiento de Negros system. As historian Manuel Lucena Salmoral exposes in his meticulous research on the laws and regulations of black slavery, Los códigos negros de la América española, Spain sustained the Caribbean economy on the backs of the slave trade, creating a framework of mercantile dehumanization that contrasted with the moral debates of the peninsula. As Lucena Salmoral points out, the desire for profit among colonial sugar elites in Cuba and Puerto Rico bent any attempt at moral reform, making Spain one of the last Western powers to definitively abolish this lucrative system, dragging it out in the colony of Cuba until a late 1886. Likewise, authors like Aníbal Quijano, whose influential work on colonial power structures can be found in Cuestiones y horizontes, have coined the term “coloniality of power” to explain that this process installed a racial classification of the world population as the cornerstone of capitalist domination—a hierarchical mental and social structure that survived independences themselves.
Faced with this web of segregation and violence, exhibiting colonial universities as monuments of cultural altruism is doubly fallacious, both due to the subjugated and enslaved labor that physically laid the bricks of those buildings and the purpose of indoctrination and exclusion that dictated their internal functioning. These university classrooms were never designed to educate the American populace in a generalized way; instead, they operated as a strictly closed club for the sons of the white elite—that is, criollos and peninsulares—shielded by “purity of blood” statutes that required legal and racial examinations to explicitly prohibit the enrollment of anyone with indigenous, black, mestizo, or mulatto ancestry.
Given this reality, the question often arises whether indigenous people could attend these centers, and the answer is a resounding no, with the sole exception of the so-called “colleges of caciques” (such as San Francisco de Borja in Cusco). Historians specializing in the analysis of colonial education, like Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, whose fundamental research on viceroyal society and teaching is available in Historia de la educación en la época colonial, clarify that the opening of these specific colleges did not respond to a pedagogical benefit, but to a cold strategy of forced assimilation and extirpation of idolatries. In her studies on indigenous acculturation, Gonzalbo Aizpuru details that the empire needed to isolate the male children of the local native nobility from infancy to uproot them from their customs, languages, and original religions. Being heavily indoctrinated by religious orders in Catholic theology and royal legislation, these young nobles returned to their native villages converted into bureaucratic tools and foremen at the service of the metropolis.
As a particular element in America, some of these universities incorporated Chairs of indigenous languages (such as Nahuatl or Quechua). Although nationalism attempts to present the creation of these subjects as an advanced gesture of cultural preservation and respect for diversity, colonial statutes made it clear that they were mandatory learning requirements for future priests. As demonstrated by the philologist and historian of missionary linguistics Ángel Rosenblat, whose classic work on the population and history of American languages can be consulted in El español de América, the study of these native tongues in the university sphere did not stem from a humanistic interest, but from a purely instrumental need for control. The sole purpose of these chairs was to equip the clergy with the indispensable linguistic tools to confess, monitor, interrogate, and evangelize the subjugated native populations in a much more intimate and effective manner, facilitating the extirpation of their original identities from within.
This instrumentalization of culture and language is defined by the anthropologist and critical thinker Walter Mignolo in his capital book on the decoloniality of knowledge, Historias locales / diseños globales, as the “coloniality of knowledge”—a process through which the empire establishes its own expertise, languages, and religions as the only valid ones, while destroying, subjugating, or inferiorizing indigenous systems of knowledge. The colonial university, according to Mignolo’s approach, functioned as the empire’s intellectual customs office, tasked with ensuring that no dissident thought leaked through and guaranteeing the epistemic subordination of the continent. These graduates of the indigenous nobility operated as the administrative bridge necessary to secure tax collection and guarantee that the machinery of extracting wealth never stopped. Idealizing the conquest as a process of universal integration requires voluntarily ignoring history and data; the Spanish Empire did not build a community of equal citizens, but a vertical structure of assimilation and exploitation that used culture, laws, and classrooms as weapons of subjugation.
This matrix of forced assimilation and territorial subordination was not limited solely to transatlantic territories; it was brutally rehearsed and perpetuated on the peripheries of the peninsula itself, shattering the fallacy that a homogeneous community of privileged citizens existed under the umbrella of “Spanishness.” The colonizing process itself was profoundly stratified, marginalizing and using the inhabitants of peripheral regions as subaltern labor. As a Galician myself, it is impossible to analyze this extractive machinery without recognizing the scars of my own land, whose reality fits with scientific precision into the concept that the intellectual and economist Xosé Manuel Beiras coined in his fundamental work, O atraso económico de Galicia, when theorizing about Galicia as an authentic internal colony. Castilian centralist nationalism systematically excluded Galicians from political power structures and high viceroyal positions in America, which were strictly reserved for peninsulars from the central core. Instead, the empire used Galicians and Canarians as the anonymous infantry and trench-labor of the colonial effort. As historian Julio Hernández García explains in his meticulous economic studies, La emigración canaria, Canarians were massively displaced through abusive contracts and debt servitude systems to replace or work alongside enslaved Africans on Caribbean plantations, suffering levels of misery and illiteracy that colonial elites ruthlessly exploited.
This intra-peninsular extraction reached a grim historical apex in the mid-19th century, laying bare the absolute commodification of Spanish peripheral populations within its own colonial networks. In 1853, a year when Galicia was bleeding out from devastating crop failures, deep agrarian crises, famine, and a cholera outbreak that wiped out a tenth of A Coruña, an enterprise known as the Compañía Patriótico Mercantil emerged. Ideated by Urbano Feijóo y Sotomayor—a Galician businessman well-entrenched in Cuba’s elite who served three terms as a deputy in the Spanish parliament—the project was masked as an altruistic enterprise designed to relieve poverty in Galicia while boosting the Caribbean economy. In reality, it was a sinister human trafficking operation to feed Cuba’s insatiable sugar boom. As historians Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, an expert researcher at the CSIC whose work on Caribbean migration is widely published, and María del Carmen Barcia from the University of Havana, author of critical studies on Cuban slavery, have documented, Cuba was scrambling for alternatives to black slave labor due to international pressure against the slave trade and a desperate desire to “whiten” the island to stave off slave rebellions. Feijóo’s company recruited more than 1,700 Galician peasants with promises of a prosperous future, a tragedy famously reflected by the melancholic poetry of Rosalía de Castro in her work, Follas Novas. Upon arriving in Cuba, however, the brutal reality of the slave system swallowed them whole. Their contracts were ripped up, many died during the crossing, and those who survived were fed the same slave rations, locked up, beaten, and hunted down as cimarrones (runaway slaves) when they attempted to flee. As local chronicler José Luis Sobrado Pérez notes in his regional research on mass migration, the treatment of these Galician laborers was so indistinguishable from literal slavery that the scandal eventually triggered furious debates in the Spanish parliament.
This structural exploitation has left a lasting, implacable extractive inertia on Galician soil that reaches directly into the present. The coal and mining basins of my country—an industrial plundering phenomenon that I investigate deeply in my own doctoral thesis—functioned for decades as the cheap fuel that fed the industrialization of other regions at the expense of our environmental degradation. Far from being extinguished, this “internal colony” model has mutated today into so-called green extractivism: the indiscriminate wind power invasion destroys our mountains, privatizes our landscapes, and exports electrical wealth outside our borders, while local communities only inherit the territorial impact and economic precariousness. This plundering of resources is executed in perfect coordination with a deep and painful cultural and linguistic crisis. The drastic and induced decline of the Galician language in classrooms and institutions responds to the same colonial inertia that sought the absolute assimilation of the subaltern: stripping a people of their material wealth while eradicating the language that names that land is the definitive formula for domination.
This same structure of assimilation and economic exploitation continues to operate under new disguises in present-day Spain, revealing a cynical historical and philosophical continuity in the discourse of the most chauvinistic sectors. Today, sectors of Spanish nationalism charge harshly against African migratory flows, articulating a protectionist argument according to which agricultural jobs in the greenhouses of Almería or in the harsh harvest campaigns of strawberries and olives could perfectly be carried out by national workers if decent wages were paid. They denounce with feigned indignation that large businessmen hire Cameroonian, Senegalese, or Moroccan citizens for pennies, destroying the conditions of the Spanish labor market. What modern chauvinism is incapable of admitting is that, in their contempt and exploitation of migrant workers, they are reproducing exactly the same negation of alterity that Dussel, Sartre, and Lévinas denounced at the root of the empire. By stripping the sub-Saharan migrant of their rights and reducing them to cheap merchandise to sustain the agricultural engine of the peninsula, contemporary Spain once again hides the face of the Other, repeating the objectifying gaze that its ancestors projected onto the African slave—and onto the “white slaves” of Feijóo. The machinery that nationalism denounces today is not an anomaly of the system; it is the modernization of an imperial inertia born of conquest, submission, and the exploitation of vulnerable labor to maximize the profit of local elites. If we trace the genealogy of this agrarian exploitation and dared to ask the owners of those immense estates and greenhouses what their ideological affiliation is, the answer would shatter the chauvinist victim narrative. No one in their right mind would believe that these agrarian landowners who squeeze the precariousness of migrants belong to alternative left-wing parties like Podemos; on the contrary, they form part of the traditional economic and ideological fabric that finances and sustains conservative and nationalist thought in Spain, perpetuations on peninsular soil the same extractive logic that their ancestors exercised in American haciendas.
This dissonance between the idealization of the past and the contempt for its institutions manifests flagrantly in the very appropriation that nationalism makes of higher education as a trophy of the conquest. It is profoundly contradictory that conservative discourse claims the foundation of viceroyal universities in the 16th century as definitive proof of its civilizing will, when the university, as an institution and concept, originally arose in the context of medieval Europe in places like Bologna under the protection of a corporate knowledge that, curiously, was initiated and managed by the students themselves and their defense guilds, not by the absolute power of the State—a bottom-up development thoroughly documented in A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in the Middle Ages. The true explosion and maturation of the university in Europe was not possible until the outbreak of Lutheranism—a reform movement that hijacked and accelerated the university structure to turn campuses into the headquarters for text translation and free examination, thereby breaking the Catholic intellectual monopoly, a structural shift analyzed in The European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This shock forced the Spanish Empire itself to speed up its educational machinery; the subsequent expansion of universities in America, whether or not it possessed a colonizing character, was an indirect yet direct influence of Lutheranism, which forced a global competition for the control of minds. In fact, the most sophisticated, renovating, and progressive faction of Catholicism, embodied in the Society of Jesus, was born precisely as the Jesuits: a desperate intellectual counter-offensive and a direct reaction to that Lutheranism so as not to lose the battle of ideas. As detailed in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 and institutionalized in their educational manifesto, the Ratio Studiorum, the Jesuits perfected their pedagogical model and founded their global network of colonial colleges to arm their own ecclesiastical soldiers against the threat of the Protestant Reformation.
The great perversion of this cultural transfer lies in the fact that the university exported to America—methodologically enriched by the urgency of the Reformation—suffered a mutation of its own nature during the transatlantic voyage. While in Northern Europe the new university was born with an intrinsically emancipatory force, breaking ties with dogma and driving literacy and criticism, on American colonial soil it was implanted with a diametrically opposed purpose. As demonstrated by the research of education historian Carlos Tünnermann in his influential historical work on university models, Historia de la universidad en América Latina, the viceroyal university was born with an aristocratic, classist character and as an ideological bunker. The Crown and religious orders took that same hyper-developed institutional artifact and instrumentalized it as state-of-the-art technology for subjugation: the university in America was not built to liberate thought, but—as pedagogue Mariano Narodowski explains regarding the Jesuit strategy in his famous book on the modern school, Infancia y poder—functioned as a defensive containment barracks designed to shield minds against Protestant “heresy” and guarantee the absolute submission of the indigenous population, turning a beacon of European emancipation into a colonial padlock.
This is why it is highly paradoxical that academic knowledge, scientific research, and university autonomy do not feature prominently on the priority agenda of contemporary nationalist parties, which usually look upon current campuses with deep suspicion, cutting their budgets, persecuting intellectual dissent, and labeling faculties as nests of ideological indoctrination. Spanish nationalism celebrates the dead university of the 16th century—the one that served as a theological customs office to subdue the indigenous person and react against the Protestant advance—while despising and fighting the living knowledge of the current university, confirming that its interest has never been the development of human knowledge, but the utilization of history as a club for propaganda and exclusion.
