Portuguese on the Bolívia Brazil border from a decolonial vision

Abstract

Border territories bring together a diversity of peoples that go beyond the bi- or tri-national configuration of nation-states. These are populations that transit and sometimes settle in these regions far from the national centers, generating their own dynamics of approximation, which are exchanges and collaborative attitudes that coexist with clashes, asymmetries, and tensions in different areas. Regarding the languages present on the Bolivia-Brazil border, Spanish or Castilian and Portuguese transit as the majority languages in use, as well as regional indigenous languages and those from other origins, as well as languages from different countries, composing a plurilingual mosaic. Therefore, this research aims to map the representative areas in which Portuguese is present when crossing the border, in the urban area of Puerto Quijarro, a Bolivian municipality bordering Corumbá, Brazil. This is an interpretive study based on field records with the support of documentary data and bibliographic studies, analyzed in a decolonial perspective based on Rivera Cusicanqui (2010), a scholar who departs from decolonizing practice to justify a discourse or a decolonial theory. In this context, the Portuguese language is extended beyond the geographical limit, forming a new Portuguese-speaking territoriality on the border with Bolivia, a priori called Bolivian Portuguese. Its presence is recognized in the official local documents of Puerto Quijarro, in which Portuguese is registered as one of the most spoken languages in the locality, after Castilian. Its way of functioning is peculiar, especially in the commercial and services sector. This situation is not associated with the teaching of languages in the Bolivian educational system, since in the area of lenguajes of the local curriculum Castilian is present, a foreign language (English) and a native language (Bésiro). There is evidence that the interpenetration of the majority languages in one territory and another occurs in a particular way, as does their intercomprehension.