The subjugation of our American languages and cultures began with the arrival of the European: various actions, some of them extremely violent, provoked regrettable ethnocides throughout the region, a situation that must not be forgotten.
From the nineteenth century onward, with the formation of the different nation-states and the drafting of their respective constitutions, various expressions in favor of the Spanish language began to emerge, to the detriment of linguistic plurality. Behind ostensibly regulatory interventions lay a veiled glottocentrism: the imposition of the language of the conquerors. In this respect, the supposed superiority of Spanish over American languages arose from political consensus and oppressive actions.
In the linguistic imaginary, indigenous languages are devalued. Nevertheless, the work of many linguists has made it possible to recover, disseminate, and give value to numerous American languages. Some could not be studied and have become permanently extinct, causing serious cultural harm, since with each language a worldview is lost.
In recent decades, neoliberal governments, globalization, and market demands have made us focus on values that impoverish the human condition, with cultural diversity left out of consideration.
Within this framework, we understand neocolonialism as the economic, political, cultural, ideological, and even educational dependence of one country on another. However, unlike traditional colonialism, neocolonialism has the particularity that the neocolonized country is not physically occupied by forces of the dominant country but instead officially retains political independence. That is to say, the concept refers to a new form of domination exercised by some countries over others.
The objective of this symposium is to open a space for collective reflection, with a preferential focus on the Andes: a) on epistemic neocolonialism, particularly in the social sciences, and the influence it exerts on underdeveloped societies or countries through centers of economic, political, and cultural domination; b) on linguistic neocolonialism, understood as the persistence of colonial power relations through the control, hierarchization, and imposition of a language (or a specific variant of it) over formally independent communities—a phenomenon exercised not through military force but through cultural management, educational markets, and the soft diplomacy of the former metropoles; c) to think together, drawing on different bodies of work, about the treatment of indigenous languages and cultures and how, through different practices, resistance is offered to the cultural and linguistic impoverishment imposed by this new form of domination.
If there is something that helps renew democratic coexistence, it is precisely networks of solidarity, plural sociodiscursive practices, favorable actions generated by linguistic policy projects, and spaces of dialogue among diverse ethnocultural representations. And it is all of this that this symposium seeks to bring into focus, in order to offer a hopeful outlook beyond the dehumanizing mandates of present-day reality.
