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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers (48th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - January 2006 |
The clergy and their secular allies, furthermore, disturbed the ratio of food to man by reducing the numbers of dirt farmers while multiplying the ranks of townsfolk to be fed. The policy of congregating Indians in pueblos, which exposed them to European diseases, exacerbated their plight. Spaniards, also, upset the ecological balance, cutting down the forest and using the wood for their buildings or for fuel. Within a century, vast stretches of land lay barren of trees. The iron plow cut deep into the soil, often unprotected slopes; when the rains came, they carried the topsoil away, leaving ravines and gullies. Cattle roamed freely, stripping the earth of its grass cover and adding to its woes in time of rain, or, more than once, wandered into the fields of corn and squash tilled by Indians, destroying crops and endangering their food supply. Colonial records are replete with Indian complaints of damage done by cattle.
The pivotal injury done to Indians, maybe the clue to his demise, only students of the human psyche can measure. By intent and by accident, Spaniards altered drastically the native cultures. Conquest was a traumatic experience because the Spaniards made no effort to reach a cultural compromise. The Indians, recalled Bernardino de Sahagún, were so “trampled underfoot that not a vestige remained of what they had been.” Sahagún exaggerated, but none of the major Indian groups, the Aztecs included, weathered the Conquest; only groups of marginal importance to the Spaniards, the Maya for one, survived. Still, even in Yucatán, the Conquest was a terrible episode. The arrival of the Spaniards reduced Mayan society essentially to one class, converting even the native elite, which lost all but a few of its privileges, to milpa farmers. Eventually, there were no native soldiers, no full-time craftsmen, no shopkeepers or millers of flour, occupation reserved for non-Indians. On top of that, the decline of the Indian population in the aftermath of the Conquest, when a large proportion of adults died, hurt kinship ties, the strength of the Indian community.
Subjugation transformed other aspects of native life. Before the arrival of the European, Indians ate raw food and vegetables in abundance and drank alcohol sparingly. The European changed that. Among the Maya, for example, a people who drank sparingly before the Conquest, alcoholism became a major vice and the drinking of aguardiente, a raw, white rum, commonplace. The quality of the diet, most of the evidence shows, dropped as the use of alcohol rose; when this occurred, Indians died earlier. Indians were also told to change their ancestral way of dress, to give up their loincloth for zaraguelles, white cotton trousers, standard wear by the end of the sixteenth century. Women of the humbler families, accustomed to leaving their bosons naked, were shamed into covering them with the huipil, before long their “traditional” blouse.
The imposition of European culture, say scholars, disturbed the sex life of the Indian, making men and women less active. Spanish domination, the enslavement of the Indian, yielded contradictory results. Some Indian women, the evidence shows, wanted, after their menfolk had fallen, to cohabit with Spaniards; the Tlaxcalan allies of the Spaniards may have encouraged such unions, hoping, to quote one expert, to gain “nephews and grandsons of valor and strength equal to that of the Spaniards”; they “were eager to have children by them.” The archives also bear witness that Indian women aborted or killed their newborn. Here and there, they refused to bear children, a practice widespread among the Mixes and Chontales of the south. In some parts of the western New Spain, tribal rulings barred them from having children, while, on their own, women shunned sex with their men. These tribes, it was said, did not want to live on their knees.
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Corregidor and Encomendero fight over profits
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In the next issue we’ll continue with Chapter IV of this fascinating book: A NEW SPAIN
Prof. Germán Estrada
E-mail: estradanav@yahoo.com
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).
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 his website.
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