Speaking the enemy language: the solitude of the missionary in Calchaquí lands

Abstract

This paper analyzes the paradoxical simultaneity of the late acquisition of the Kakan language by missionaries and the brutal disappearance of the Calchaquí mission in the mid-1660s. The Jesuits came to master the Indians' language exactly at the time when it stopped being of any use to them, due to the mission's extinction and due to the deportation of its neophytes. This paradox thus calls for further analysis of the status of the now extinct Kakan language within the colonial linguistic economy. The Kakan was a vehicular language and became the enemy's language, associated with a territory (the Calchaquíes valleys) and with a rebellious attitude. Its expansion dwindled over the age of settlement, whose agents promoted the colonial communication languages, and quéchua in particular. Finally, the dispersion of the inhabitants outside the valleys restricted the missionaries' linguistic knowledge to technical use, when they needed to communicate orders to the defeated calchaquíes, then "friendly Indians" in the province militia.

calchaquíes Indians; Tucumán Province missions; colonial languages