Between letters and weapons: On the genesis of Spanish teaching in Brazil

Abstract

This study recovers the historical process that established and institutionalized the teaching of Spanish in Brazil and analyzes the grounds on which the discourse of the government archives relied on to justify the inclusion of this language in Brazilian education. To identify the underlying linguistic ideologies and ideologemes associated with this process, we address such a retrospective from the viewpoint of linguistic policies and a glottopolitical perspective. Although the policies that determined the inclusion of Spanish teaching were triggered by South American integration geopolitics, the discourses analyzed vary between this memory, expressed through a rhetoric based on the ideologeme of the great continental family; another one that refers to an Iberian memory, marked by the ideologeme of Spanish as the language of Cervantes; and, finally, a representation that mixes the previous ones and is featured both in the cultured student, citizen of an imaginary bilingual America, and in the learned soldier member of an imaginary bilingual army.