Abstract Bakhtin’s dialogical principle (DP) is a social theory of language that provides the right framework to characterize the Spanish language in the Americas (LAS) in intrinsic relation to the ‘mestizo’ (mixed) culture and identity that emerged from the biocultural contact resulting from the Spanish intrusion in the New World. I present an approach that uses the DP theory of the utterance, which meshes its constitutive extraverbal elements, interlocutors, chronotope, and theme, with the words and phrases uttered. Since in DP the utterance’s extraverbal elements enter into its semantics, content words must function as lexical variables. However, unlike functional variables such as demonstratives and personal pronouns, the lexical variables have unique lexical options (or shortcuts) that work as default values, the lexicon being a historical repository of the lexical shortcuts culturally shared by a community. An alterity theory integrates DP applying to interlocutors and defining the intragrupal vs. extragrupal dialogic contact as relevant for LAS formation in the 16th century. Additional arguments deal with (i) alterity and identity, (ii) the extragrupal dialogism with American Indians, and (iii) the historical vs. cultural chronotopes of the living utterances that initiated and shaped the Spanish colonial discourse in the Americas.