This article assays how the various theoretical frameworks in the history of language policy and planning (LPP) are reflected upon the discursive performance of the diverse normative agents in the Spanish-speaking world: from governments and other regulatory organisations like language academies to LPP researchers themselves, whose work is pivotal to generate the conceptual and methodological tools of the discipline. An adjustment and contextualisation of the orientations evolved by Ruiz [1984. “Orientations in Language Planning.” NABE Journal 8: 15–34] will help to discern the development of the different paradigms in the Spanish-speaking world when it comes to the writings of mainstream linguists and language planners. It is asserted that an ethnographic and critical approach to the examination of Spanish LPP needs to be assumed in a de facto advocacy of plurilingualism and pluriculturalism.