In order to understand how the discourse surrounding migration has shifted and evolved, it is necessary to identify salient and insightful terms. The Historical Thesausus of Migration and its associated taxonomy aim to be a representation for that topic within the DH space. One example of such terms is vecinos, interpreted in modern Spanish as an equivalent to neighbor in English. However, experts on the 15th and 16th century and the pre-colonial Spanish period often link this term to an early conceptualisation of citizenship within the Spanish Empire (Herzog, 2003). Despite this, there is a scarcity of literature delving into the evolution and intricacies of the word which actually illuminates the link and association between vecindad and citizenship, and even less detailing how the increase in the numbers of colonial settlers to the American continent could have played a part in its evolution. According to Perl-Rosenthal and Erman (2024) it is possible to reconstruct early conceptualisations of citizenship by analysing legislative historical records and extracting other terms associated with the word which often evoke notions of love and protection to assign allegiance and membership.
This case study seeks to go a step further by compiling data that spans different registers and gaining insight into the former usage of vecinos within different contexts. The data sets used for this study bring together 15th and 16th century legislation in the form of ordenanzas or ordinances made by the Spanish monarchy in an effort of maintaining and expanding their domain to the overseas territory and found in the four volumes of Recopilación de Leyes de indias. The ordinances are supplemented by two other corpora compiled from letters. Digging Into Early Colonial History or DECH (Murrieta-Flores et al., 2020) developed by Lancaster University brings together reports, letters and first-hand accounts of the clerics and officers which oversaw the efforts of the Spanish Crown while the anthology of emigrant letters published by Otte in 1996 provides a look at the operation of the word within a colloquial genre. When explored using corpus linguistics methods such as collocates and N-grams, these three distinct data-sets can provide more well-rounded evidence. The collocational analysis of vecinos speaks to the term's aboutness through its co-occurrence with other words while the N-grams show how it was employed at a more discursive level by shedding light on lexical items that are found clustered together within a text. By using them simultaneously while applying them to each corpus individually, the result aims to yield a more substantial baseline of word usage that can be compared to the interpretations established by historians. This study also intends to tie the examination of this term back to larger topics and reflect on how the evolution of the concept of citizenship was influenced by migration in the early age of colonialism, societal structures and discursive manifestations of belonging that were built as a result of this turning point in history.
Keywords: vecinos, collocations, n-grams, citizenship, corpus, migration
References
Herzog, T. (2003). Defining nations : immigrants and citizens in early modern Spain and Spanish America (1st ed.). Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300129830
Murrieta-Flores, Patricia; Jiménez-Badillo, Diego; Martins, Bruno Emanuel da Graça (2020). DECM Machine Ready Corpus. figshare. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12048729.v3
Otte, E. (1996). Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias 1540-1616. Fondo de Cultura Económica de México. (Original work published 1988)
Perl-Rosenthal, N., & Erman, S. (2024). Inventing Birthright: The Nineteenth-Century Fabrication of jus soli and jus sanguinis. Law and History Review, 42(3), 421–448. doi:10.1017/S0738248024000221
Recopilacion de Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias (Fifth edition.). (1841). Boix.