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| TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY, a History
of The Mexican people (Chapter 1) |
by Prof. German Estrada
February, 2004 |
THE FOREFATHERS
Long, long ago, in
the New World and Europe, the store of Mexico's
people began to unfold. Mexicans, generally speaking,
trace their family tree back to pre-Columbian and
medieval societies. In the early years of the sixteenth
century, when Hernán
Cortés and his band of plunderers overwhelmed
Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, crossbreeding
got going. That miscegenation was more than just
racial. Though the Spaniards imposed their will on
the Indians, as Christopher Columbus mistakenly baptized
the natives of the New World, their customs, food,
and beliefs, often to a surprising degree, weathered
the gale storms of Conquest. For Mexico, therefore,
the shape of the future starts with "two" races and
cultures literally and ocean apart.
Because Mexicans are
the offspring of Europeans and native Americans,
their meeting, from the start, led to a confrontation
of remarkable consequences. The two "races", the icon used loosely, were, after
all, dissimilar. The Spaniards, say some anthropologist,
had stumble upon an "archaic" civilization, in diverse
ways perhaps living in an earlier evolutionary stage
whose technical accoutrements, by Western standards,
were modest. Cultural and social anthropology, as
a matter of fact, made its reputation as a discipline
from the study of non-Western peoples, of what the
Spaniards encountered in the New World. Bronislaw
Malinowski and his school of anthropologists, who
closed their eyes to all but isolated societies,
would have crowed like roosters over the natives
discovered by the Spaniards.
What draws attention
to this confrontation, obviously, is how and why
it came to pass and, of course, its results. The
themes for analysis are endless, beginning with
alienation by subjugation, which implies, to cite
the wisdom of Karl Marx, loss of the means of production.
The ancients lost, no one disputes, control over
the land, and the foundation of their independence.
Alienation also included the Spanish assault on
family kinship ties, the glue that held together
the pre-Hispanic community, and, most significantly,
on the pagan religion, for, to cite Elsie Clew
Parson's study of Mitla, a town with ancient roots,
when "the ceremonial life of a highly
ceremonialized community is suppressed", much "of
its general culture goes by the board" During the
sixteenth century, moreover, Spanish colonists and
the Catholic clergy made only sporadic efforts to
teach the natives the Spanish language, preferring
to learn the Indian tongues in order to communicate
with them. The few Indians who mastered Spanish usually
did so not to teach their neighbors but, to the contrary,
to interpret for the labor of Conquest beyond the
Valley of Mexico and for the administration of colonial
affairs. "Every colonized people", writes Franz Fanon, "finds
itself face to face with the language of the civilizing
country," which is "used to convey the master's orders." The
irreducible and stubborn fact is that for the natives
of the New World, there was merely marginal acculturation
because the Spaniards offered no olive branch. Actually,
the term acculturation, as defined by anthropologists,
has meaning only for the mestizo, the progeny of
Spaniard and Indian. Yet, regardless of the nature
of the Conquest, the morphogeny of the society which
emerged from the momentous meeting of these two diverse
populations surely is one of the most fascinating
episodes in the annals of human history.
But, preoccupations of anthropologists aside,
we must get on with the story. Where to begin or,
to put the question succinctly, which of the two
societies must we give priority? I have chosen to
tell first the story of the pre-Columbians, for they
were the original inhabitants of Mexico and, biologically
at least, absorbed the few Spaniards who venture
forth into the New World in the course of three centuries
of colonial tutelage. As a consequence, Mexicans,
to underline again, embody the heritage of two civilizations,
albeit one, that of the Europeans, seemingly destroyed
the native one.
Source: From the book Triumphs and
Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his author
Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization.
(W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
We'll continue with
this fascinating book.
estradanav@yahoo.com
Prof. Germán
Estrada is the author of the best selling book,
"México
Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know
About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto
Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books,
Books as well as directly from the author by internet.
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