Mexican writer Gonzalo Celorio, recent winner of the 2025 Cervantes Prize, has sparked a linguistic and historical debate. At a meeting in Madrid, he argued that Spanish was the tool for independence in Spanish America, not a mere legacy of the Conquest. According to Celorio, this common language enabled the communication and cohesion necessary to form national identities, such as the Mexican one.
Language as a unified communication protocol 📡
From a technical perspective, Celorio's stance can be analyzed as the adoption of a communication standard. A common language acts as an open protocol, similar to TCP/IP on the internet, enabling the exchange of ideas and coordination of complex actions. Without this unified protocol, independence movements would have faced greater fragmentation, hindering the creation of coherent national projects. Language operated as the application layer upon which discourses of sovereignty were built.
And to think it all started with a colonial 'ctrl+c / ctrl+v' 😏
The historical irony is palpable. The same language that arrived in doctrine manuals and crown records ended up being the source code with which rebellion proclamations were written. The independence fighters did not need to find a translator for a new language; they only had to recompile the concepts of freedom and homeland with the already installed syntax. A clear case of leveraging the oppressor's framework to develop a completely different application, without paying a usage license.