FRIAS Kolloquium - S. Sessarego

Afro-Veracruz Spanish: African Diaspora and Creole Genesis

This paper addresses the long-lasting Spanish Creole Debate (Granda 1968; Schwegler 1999; Sessarego 2021) by focusing on Afro-Veracruz Spanish (AVS), a vernacular spoken in rural villages scattered across the State of Veracruz (Mexico) by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region during the colonial period. Findings show that, in line with recent works on the origins of other Afro-Hispanic dialects spoken in Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Bolivia (Díaz-Campos & Clements 2008; Sessarego 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019), colonial Veracruz did not present the ideal conditions for a creole language to form, in contrast with previous proposals that have claimed otherwise (McWhorter 2000: 11). Rather, this study shows that the socio-historical factors in place in colonial Veracruz favored the acquisition of Spanish by the Afro-descendant population. Thus, this paper explores creole studies from both a sociohistorical and a linguistic perspective and, in so doing, it adds one more piece to the Spanish Creole Debate puzzle (Lipski 2005).