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Would the history of the Americas have been different if it hadn’t been Columbus that discovered them? Hard to say, but probably not; Columbus was just one of the many opportunists floating about Europe and the world at the time. If it hadn’t been him it would have been someone very like him.
One thing is certain though, Columbus was a real bastard. From the moment he arrived in the new world, still thinking – due to his vast under-estimation of the circumference of the world – that it was east Asia, Columbus was thinking only of how he could make use of the indigenous populations. They seemed obedient, quick to learn and poorly defended; they would, he observed, make great slaves.
A part of the old bastard’s arrangement with the crown of Spain was that he would be governor of all new lands he discovered. During his years of exploration and colonisation, Columbus comported himself like a true bastard, demanding great tributes of gold from the indigenous people that had at times welcomed him. He tortured or mutilated those that could not pay tribute (which was practically everyone given the Caribbean possessed almost no gold) and enslaved many more, shipping them (and probably also syphilis) to Europe. The Taino people were scattered over the Caribbean and probably numbered several hundred thousand when Columbus first arrived. A few years later their numbers had halved; fifty years later they were on the brink of extinction.
All this bastardry was brought to the attention of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, and as a consequence of numerous testimonies (he was an unpopular bastard), and also of the overly-generous initial arrangement extended to him which the monarchs quickly came to regret, Columbus was put into chains, and like his victims shipped across the Atlantic. Unlike his victims though, Columbus was released and the bastard died prosperous and old (for the time).
In most countries that care, October 12 is Columbus Day, but how should this day be celebrated? What to do with the bastard Columbus? Columbus’s discovery – although it would be fairer to say he claimed, rather than discovered the New World – set the Americas onto a very different path. It begun the mestizo-isation of the hemisphere, the mixing and clashing and dissolving of cultures which has made the Americas what they are today. Such a shame it all started with a bastard, and that so many more bastards followed his lead.
Columbus’s name has been omitted from the celebrations in Mexico. Instead October 12 has been entitled ‘Dia de la Raza’, Day of the Race, which is intended to encapsulate the rich heritage and many peoples of Latin America, without overt reference to all that initial bastardry. Columbus isn’t going to be forgotten – the Spanish empire couldn’t get rid of him and neither can we – but at least by focusing on what came after him, and not on what the old bastard actually did, we can perhaps get on with overturning the unfinished centuries of exploitation that he initiated, and perhaps we can dare to imagine a hemisphere free of such bastards.
…Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán
Probably the most despicable of the Spanish conquistadors, Guzmán arrived in Mexico after most of the initial conquering had taken place. He defamed Hernán Cortés and insinuated himself into (very corrupt) government, before marching into the west to pillage, torture, enslave and slaughter – accounts of his rampage read like a Cormac McCarthy novel. He also found time to found a few settlements, before he was arrested and spent his remaining days in a Spanish prison. The most significant settlement was given the name of his birthplace in Spain – Guadalajara.
…Mariachis
Traditionally a large band of spiffily-dressed troubadours playing all string instruments, mariachi culture has evolved to include brass instruments and groups of varying sizes and styles. They still wear big hats, and still tend to make their living serenading lovers, or playing weddings and 15th birthdays (although they can be hired on the spot for any occasion from the plazas in which they congregate).
…The Mexican Hat Dance
Mexico’s national dance, the Jarabe Tapatío is a relatively recent invention; the musical medley was composed in the 19th century and the standard choreography was developed in the early 20th century. The dance is (of course) one of courtship, the man approaching and dazzling the woman with his machismo, then disgracing himself with drunkenness, before recovering to conquer his woman (is there any other narrative?).
…Tequila (almost)
The real home of tequila is Tequila, sixty kilometers from Guadalajara. Although the blue agave plant had long been used to produce modestly alcoholic beverages, it was Hernán Cortés that introduced distilling to the area (before Guzmán ruined his fun), sealing the area’s celebrity fate and putting it forever on the booze world map.
…José Clement Orozco
One of Mexico’s big three social-realist muralists, Orozco was born in Guadalajara and is now buried there. Influenced by Goya, Orozco’s murals are grand, bleak things, eschewing idealistic themes such as the triumphs of socialist man in favour of depicting human suffering and struggle; “instead of red and yellow sunsets I painted pestilential shadows… and instead of nude Indians, drunk women and men”. His doom and gloom style can be found in most of Guadalajara’s most famous buildings.
…Gael García Bernal
Politically aware, down-to-earth, multilingual chicmagnet who has played Che Guevara twice (as if he wasn’t loved enough), Bernal was born in Guadalajara, studied in London (where he mixed drinks and worked in construction to support himself) and now lives in Madrid (I think) with his girlfriend and baby son. Bernal is still very active within latin cinema, which is perhaps not surprising given there are about fifty million women in Mexico who nurse daily fantasies of doing the hat dance with him.
…one more gringo
When I stepped off the plane in Guadalajara I already had a job, an apartment, and a cat lined up; such things I’d been told were impossible for foreign teachers in Mexico, but largely thanks to couchsurfing and a friend I had met in Kansas City this was the easiest settling-in-to-a-new-place that I’ve ever done. Apart from the jetlag; I’ve never been so lagged in my life. For a week all I could do was lie awake watching lightning illuminate the nighttime windows. During the days I tried to make myself explore; I’d drag my enormous head, my heavy hands about the neighbourhood, and then spend the muggy afternoons in a daze. As the jetlag passed though the city around me began to sink in. First impression; the people are incredibly, incredibly warm and friendly. Second impression: they speak way too much English, which may scupper my plans to become magnificently and completely fluent within the year…
I had prefaced my quick trip to Peru with a biography of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and on my way back from Peru I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of his history of the Incas.
Reading a book I’d already had the presumption to summarise and write about was interesting. There were no grand surprises, but I did find that de la Vega’s history of the Incas was not exactly the book I had expected it to be.
De la Vega was born to an Inca princess in Cusco. That makes him a part of the Cusco bloodline. For most of Inca history there had been only one bloodline, but the eleventh Inca emperor, Huaina Capac, had split this line in two, by dividing his lands between two of his many sons. After Capac’s death the sons, Atahualpa of Quito and Huascar of Cusco had fought each other for control of the empire, and in doing so had weakened the empire enough that a ragtag band of Spanish mercenaries could conquer it all in a few short years.
Atahualpa had won the civil war but had been killed by the Spaniards. His kingdom in Quito had been razed to ashes. Huascar had also been killed (by Atahualpa’s men) but Cusco had escaped complete destruction, and so the last remnants of the Incas were those of Huascar’s court, who considered Atahualpa a bastard and a traitor. This was de la Vega’s heritage. The stories taught to him by uncles and other nobles who had witnessed the fall of Cusco, first to Quito and then to Spain, were loaded with hatred for Atahualpa.
In these stories Atahualpa stormed Cusco in a single act of treachery, and set to work butchering the nobles of Cusco. By contrast, the wikipedia-style histories that I had previously read suggested that Huascar, something of a brat of a crown-prince, had made war on his father’s favourite, Atahualpa. Atahualpa had won the war largely due to the experience of his father’s troops, who had been fighting on the frontiers of the empire for decades.
It is almost impossible to tell where the truth lies, and this is the dominant thing I felt while reading de la Vega’s histories. The Incas left no written records (the nearest thing they had was a sophisticated systems of knots tied in pieces of cord, but this was largely used in mathematical capacities), and the Spanish records are far from accurate, bearing the heavy hand of Spaniards trying to justify their greedy, cruel actions, as well as the biases of the translators and allies they recruited or conscripted along the way.
What we know of the Incas, then, is a history written by its losers, by the remnants of an empire that rose and fell with incredible speed, an empire that, as it approached its last days, was filled with melancholy omens and portents of impending doom. The sense of hopelessness and despair that overtook the empire has seeped into its history.
What does come through quite clearly is the consuming greed of the conquistadors, and their disregard for human life and dignity. De la Vega finds justification for the conquest in its bringing of Catholicism to the Americas. He was a man of the church and for him no other justification was needed; it balances his history by finding the positive and negative in all involved.
If however, the bringing of Christianity – and this particularly vitriolic and remorseless branch of Christianity – to the Americas is not taken as an unquestionably good thing, then there is really no justification left for the actions of the conquistadors. The Inca empire was, to me, an in bred family of despots ruling with a heavy hand over their conquered territories, but they were no worse than the corrupt, bloodthirsty empire that overtook them. Their religion was in some respects monotheistic, and according to de la Vega, was moving away from worship of the sun and other objects and towards more metaphysical speculation. If the God of Europe really wanted to be worshipped by the Incas, it seems like he was taking steps to achieve this, without the need for gunpowder, smallpox or the other tools of conquest.
Having read de la Vega’s histories I know more about how the Inca’s built roads and bridges, and celebrated festivals and so on, but more than anything I feel like I’ve caught a glimpse of the protean, unstable nature of history, and of everything that we take, or pass off, as concrete fact.
My ninetieth day in Bolivia will mark the halfway point of my time there. It will also signify that I need to get out; to briefly cross the border – any border – so I can start the baroque 30 days + 30 days + 30 days Bolivian visa process again.
I find myself reluctant to leave Bolivia and Sucre, even for a short time. There is much to be done here and I have only begun to do it. It doesn’t feel like the time to be travelling. And yet, in my three months in Bolivia I’ve seen a grand total of three towns. So the time has come to expand my horizons; I’m off to Lake Titicaca, straddling the Bolivia/Peru border. And I’m going to drop by La Paz too, where I hear there is amazing Lebanese food.
In preparation for the forthcoming crossing into Peru, here is a short article that doesn’t even mention Bolivia or Sucre, but does talk about a guy who gave his name to a street, a district, and a sporting complex here. I’ve been writing articles about anyone and anything, building a database of information for Condortrekkers to use for promotional and training, and for other generally erudite purposes. Here is the first of many that will be pasted into this blog…
Given that he spent more than fifty years of his life living in Europe, it is remarkable that ‘El Inca’ Garcilaso de la Vega is so widely regarded and esteemed in South America. Given his lifelong struggle for legitimacy and recognition, and the symbolic relevance of this struggle today, it isn’t so surprising at all that all over the Americas, and particularly in the Andean lands of the Incas, you can find streets and districts, universities and stadiums dedicated to him.
The question of legitimacy hung over de la Vega’s life from the time of his birth in Cusco in 1539. The firstborn son of a somewhat nefarious conquistador and an Inca princess made concubine, he was one of the first Peruvian mestizos, and received an education that included his father’s native tongue of Castillian and his mother’s, Quechua.
Despite his mother’s royal lineage, she was later married off to a commoner so his father could marry a Spanish woman. In spite of this seeming abandonment, his father’s will later provided sufficient funds for de la Vega to complete his education in Europe. At the age of 21 he set sail for Spain. He would never see his homeland again.
There was a great deal of strife in the new Spanish colonnies of the 16th century. When de la Vega arrived in Spain he found that his noble heritage counted for nothing, as mixed marriages were not recognised in Spain. His father’s swashbuckling reputation did nothing to advance his cause either. Proud of all of his heritage, de la Vega fought futilely to rehabilitate his father’s name and reputation, even as he took on the nickname ‘El Inca’. Although he received the rank of captain during his short military career, he remained an outsider, living with relatives in Andalucia and never gaining proper acceptance at the court.
In 1572 de la Vega inherited money from these relatives, and finally had the means to return to Peru. By this time, however, the rebellion and execution of Tupac Amaru made it dangerous for anyone of royal Inca heritage to be seen in Peru.
Caught between two unaccepting worlds, de la Vega turned his attention to literature and study. In this field he could express his defiance of the institutions around him, translating for instance a Renaissance Italian work that was partially banned by the Inquisition. His translation was also banned.
De la Vega’s most famous writings were La Florida del Inca and Comentarios Reales de los Incas. The first of these was an epic tale of conquistadores in what is today the south-east of the USA. In it the conquistadores are portrayed as grand and heroic figures, while the indigenous people are portrayed as noble pagans, like the ancient Greeks and Romans.
In his two-volume Comentarios – his best known work – de la Vega laid out the history of the Incas before and after Spanish conquest. His sources were accounts sent from Peru and memories of the tales told to him while growing up in Peru. His account of the Inca empire spoke of a well-run, civilised and efficient state, again similar to Rome. The great weakness of the empire, he wrote, was that it wasn’t Christian, and for the bringing of Christianity to the new world he praised the Spanish. Still, in spite of these two noble peoples, something had gone profoundly wrong, and de la Vega’s account of colonial Peru did not shy away from this glaring reality.
To rectify the profound problems of the Spanish colonies, de la Vega argued, a new approach was needed that recognised the language and culture of both the Spanish and indigenous people. The colonies needed to be ruled by people sympathetic to both groups (such as de la Vega). Against the prevailing attitudes of the time, he wrote of the need for integration and understanding, ideas centuries ahead of their time.
These ideas were to little avail, though, and Comentarios was officially banned, not to be re-printed until the 19th century. De la Vega spent the remainder of his life petitioning for royal recognition, and for the publication of his writings.
De la Vega died in Spain in 1616, largely unappreciated, but destined to become one of the heroes of the Latin America struggle for legitimacy and recognition in the post-colonial world.
(I wrote up another article after reading the Comentarios Reales. You can read it here.)
c.23,000 – 10,000 B.C. The ocean ebbs low, revealing a land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska. Tribes chase their game herds across the bridge and then are stranded when the waters rise again. Eventually the people begin to move south, populating the Americas from top to bottom.
c.10,000 B.C. Travellers from the empire of Mu, located on the lost continent of Mu in the Pacific Ocean, begin to colonise the world, founding Egyptian and Greek civilisation, as well as Central American civilisation and the Rapa Nui on Easter Island. Shortly thereafter the empire of Mu is obliterated in a single cataclysmic night.
c. 700 B.C. – 200 A.D. U.F.O.s descend from space into southern Peru. They choose as their landing place the deserts of Nazca, their craft leaving great trenches and marks in the desert rock. The local Nazca people seek to emulate these marvellous beings, and begin creating their own lines in the stone, by digging away at the rusty surface stone to reveal the pale stone underneath. They create hundred of runways and other geometric shapes to please the visitors, as well as a giant frog, and some more animals.
34 A.D. Darkness covers the city of Bountiful, located somewhere in the New World. Jesus Christ descends from the heavens to show his crucifixion wounds to the faithful people gathered at the temple in Bountiful. Records of his visit are etched on gold plates by a succession of prophets, the last of whom is Moroni the son of Mormon. Moroni buries the plates, and they are later found by Joseph Smith, first prophet of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
1001 A.D. Leif Ericson, a Viking explorer, pieces together the accounts of various other Norse sailors, and uses these to sail to the New World via Greenland. He establishes a short-lived settlement that he calls Vinland. Later it is renamed Newfoundland.
1492 A.D. Christopher Columbus officially discovers the New World when he sets eyes on The Bahamas. He establishes a colony in modern day Haiti, and begins naming the Caribbean islands. Some of these names, like St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins, are eventually shortened for the sake of practicality. Columbus doesn’t find much gold and most of his captured slaves die on the way back to Spain. It is a very disappointing trip for him.
1530 A.D. Francisco Pizarro sets out on his fourth voyage down the West Coast of South America. In the space of five years the illiterate adventurer and his gang of fortune-seekers explore the coast of Peru, encounter the Inca emperor Atahualpa, capture him and demand a ransom, receive the gold and kill him anyway, route his enormous army, sack the capital Cusco and establish a new city, Lima, the city of kings. Further north Pizarro’s second cousin Hernando Cortes does the same thing in Mexico.
1659 A.D. Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked and marooned on an island off the coast of Venezuela. His adventures inspire Alexander Selkirk to do similar; he is shipwrecked on an island now called Robinson Crusoe Island, off the coast of Chile. Prior to these adventures Crusoe was a plantation and slave owner in Brazil.
1806 A.D. A British force tries to invade Argentina. The Spanish colonial government retreats but local forces defeat the British, and in so doing realise that they probably don’t need the Spanish any more. Jose de San Martin liberates much of southern South America. Simon Bolivar does the same for northern South America. They meet briefly in Ecuador. Mexico also declares independence, as does most of Central America and the Caribbean. By 1825 only Cuba and Puerto Rico still belong to Spain.
c.1849 A.D. The influx of Chinese labourers to Peru begins. 150 years later there are over a million people of Chinese descent in Peru. The Chinese influence invigorates Peruvian cuisine, putting it on the international map and putting a Chifa – Chinese Peruvian restaurant – on every street.
1911 A.D. Hiram Bingham discovers Machu Picchu. Local Quechua people who had been living at the site are eventually replaced by hundreds of thousands of tourists. Bingham lifts thousands of cultural artifacts, taking them with him back to Yale University. His adventures inspire Indiana Jones to do similar.
1934 A.D. Evelyn Waugh publishes A Handful of Dust, a novel developed from his travels through Guyana and Brazil. The sixth chapter of the book may be single-handedly responsible for the lack of tourism in the Guyanas and northern Brazil today.
1951 A.D. Klaus Barbie, a former Gestapo member known as the Butcher of Lyon is smuggled into Juan Peron’s Argentina. He later moves to Bolivia where he buys and sells arms for Israel and participates in a right-wing coup. Peron allowed many Nazi war criminals to seek refuge in Argentina. He also sympathised with Jewish rights, and accepted more Jewish refugees than any other Latin American nation. Argentina has one of the largest Jewish populations in the world.
1962 A.D. Lots of ships from the Soviet Union begin to arrive in Cuba. Officially these are merchant vessels, but they contain an awful lot of soldiers and missiles. Later in the year the arsenal returns to the USSR.
2005 A.D. Andy and I arrive i Santiago de Chile. We speak very little Spanish but are very excited. On our first night we eat cheese empanadas and french fries and drink local beer at an outdoor table of a pub in Barrio Brasil. We think it marvellous and afterwards travel for two and a half months in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Costa Rica and Mexico. Andy meets a girl and we part ways in France. I move to Spain and travel around bits of Europe. Later i return to the U.S. Then I move to Korea.
2008 A.D. I return to Latin America and am immensely happy about it.
