Columbus offered Europe a vision of the Golden Age: “This will be the land of Utopia, the happy times of the natural man”. Columbus discovered the paradise on earth and the noble salvage that lived in it, men that he described as “very easy going, without knowledge of bad, killing others, nor use of weapons”. Why then did he deny immediately his own discovery and attack, make them slaves, and send them to Spain in chains? He destroyed paradise on earth and the good savages of the day before know were “good to follow orders and to work and plant and do anything we need”.

Since then the American Continent has lived between dreams and reality, has lived the contradiction between the good society we wish to be and the imperfect society in which we really live. We have persisted in the Utopic view because the hope of a happy society and the fulfillment of that goal are in the origin of America.

The crisis that made us poor, put in our hands also the richness of culture and forced us to realize there is no Latin-American, from Rio Bravo to Cabo de Hornos that did not inherit all the aspects of our cultural tradition. This tradition goes from stones at Chichen Itza and Machu Pichu to modern Indian influence. It goes from Colonial Baroque painting and architecture to the Contemporary Literature of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez; from the caves of Altamira to graffiti of Los Angeles; and from the first immigrants through the Bering Strait, to the most recent undocumented worker that last night crossed the border between México and the U.S.A.

THE VIRGIN AND THE BULL

Trough Spain the Americas received the mediterranean tradition with all its strenght. Spain is not only Christian but also Arab, Jew, Greek, Carthagean, Roman, and as Gothic as Gypsy. We might have more of an indigenous tradition in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, or a stronger presence of Europe in the Caribbean, Venezuela and Colombia, than in Mexico or Paraguay. However, Spain embraces us all. Spain is our mother nation but it is also our father. Her warmth is sometimes too opresive, sofocatingly familiar. She moves the crib in which the newborn baby gifts lie: mediterranean world inheritences as Spanish language, catholic religion, authoritarian political tradition, but also the possibility to identify a democratic tradition that could be genuinely ours (and not a simple derivation of the French or angloamerican models).

Several traumas mark the relationship between Spain and Spanish America. First, the conquest of the New World, origin of a terrible knowledge that comes from being present at the exact moment of your creation, being observers of your own violation, but also being witneses of the contradictory cruelties and tenderness that formed part of your conception. Hispanic Americans cannot be understood without the intense consciente of the moment in wich they were convceived. A great pain forms the relationship between Spain and the New World: being born with the knowledge that many things have to die so we could be born: the splendor of the old indigenous cultures.

In our minds, there are many Spains. There is the Spain of the black legend: inquisition, intolerance and counter reform, a vision promoted by the alliance for modernity, with Protestantism, melted in their opposition to Spain and all the things Spain represented. Then there is the Spain of the English travelers and the French romantics, the Spain of the bull fights, Carmen and the Flamenco. In addition, there is mother Spain seen for its colonial heritage in the Americas, the ambiguous Spain of the cruel conquistador and the saint missioner, as the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera offers it to us.

The problem with national estereotipes is that they always have a grain of truth. Does the grain have to die so the plant grows? The text is clear and noicy but the context has desapeard.

The map of Iberia is like the skin of a bull, tie as a drum, walked by men and women whose names and voices we of Hispanic America can hardly perceive. However, the message is clear. Spain’s identity is múltiple. Many hands have sculpted the face of Spain.

Two things are interesting in the caves of Altamira. One that during the high Paleolithic the roof where the bisons were painted was already sealed in obscurity. The other is that the cave was discovered in 1879, by a five year old girl Maria de Santuola, playing near the entrance. From that darkness without time, the Spanish bull emerges and takes possession of the land to this day. Its representation goes from the lying bulls of Osuna (from the Iberian times centuries IV y III B.C.), to the splendid representation of the Celtic guardian bulls of Guisando, signed by Brancusi, to the black bull that you can see on all the roads in Spain, the Osborne brandy’s bull. However, the modern representation of the Spanish bull might reach its heights through the tragic head of the animal that presides the human night of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica

THESPANISH CONQUEST

Particularities, war of guerrillas, individualism. Plutarch writes that a group of loyalist called “solidarios”, surrounded the Spanish commanders and consecrated their lives to their chief, dying for him. But when they discovered that the iberos didn’t accept the federation and that their loyalty was only to their land and their chief, the Romans were capable of conquering them the same way the Spanish would later win over the Aztecs and the Incas: because of superior technology of course but thanks also to superior resources of information. When they saw them, the Mexican towns were a mosaic of particularities without any bigger alliances than the fidelity to their location and their chief. Cortes won over the Aztecs the same way Rome conquered the Iberians.

ROMAN SPAIN

They say the genius of Rome in Spain was that they never tried to impose an absolut totalitarian scheme, but they promoted change, openness, mix and circulation. Aqueducts took water from the valleys or the rivers, to the arid planes, the same way that law and language helped the growing sense of community.


THE RECONQUEST OF SPAIN
THE THREE CULTURES

The tomb of Saint Fernando has inscriptions in the four languages of the cultural continuity of Spain: Latin, Spanish, Arab and Hebrew, that is, the languages of the three monotheisms: Christianism, Islam and Judaism. Ferdinand liked to be called the king of the three religions, equally respectful of all the “peoples of the book”, the Testaments, the Coram and the Talmud. That way even though political practice forced him to fight the moors his spiritual mission was to recognize the European singularity of Spain, as the only Nation where Jews, Christians and moors could live together. This is the tomb of the saint that, in his deathbed received the Holy Communion on his knees; with a cord around the neck to symbolize his humility before God and the profound consciousness of his own sins. The humanist that asked the Pope to excuse Spanish Jews from using degrading stigmas on their clothes.

Cultural coexistence as explicit politic of a Spanish king reached its peak during the reign of the son of Saint Ferdinand, Alphonse X from Castile, who in 1254 gave his royal permission for the foundation of the biggest university in Spain in Salamanca and created it’s library, turning it into the first state library. That king reeived the name of The Wise.

King Alfonso brought to his court a group of Jewish intellectuals, Arab translators and French troubadours. His Arab and Jewish thinkers were asked to translate the Bible to Spanish, and also the Coram, the Cabala, the Talmud and stories from India. With the Jewish intellectuals, he wrote the monumental “Summa” of the Spanish Middle Ages that includes the compilation of the laws, a judicial treaty, the Astronomy treaties, and two big histories of Spainand the world. His tricultural court had time to write the first Occidental book on an Arab game: chess, which most definitive movement Checkmate is a translation of the arab, “Shah’kakh maat”, kill the Shah”.

The result was a kind of encyclopedia before the encyclopedias that were so popular in the XVIII century. The king of Castile had to call the Jewish and Arab intelligence to complete this task. And it is interesting to know that the Jewish writers were the ones that asked the king to use Spanish language instead of Latin to write these books. Jews in Spain wanted knowledge in a language that all Spanish could understand: Christians, Jews and converts. The future prose of Spain comes from the court of Alfonso and is the language of the three cultures. Two centuries after this king, Jews kept using the vulgar tongue to read the scriptures, comment on them, write Philosophy and study Astronomy.

1942 THE CRUCIAL YEAR

THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS

Isabel and Ferdinand’s public politics were not only religious. Their interest was to increase the monarchy richness expropriating money from the most industrious peoples of Spain. It is ironic that the benefits that the crown immediately got were little compared to what it lost in the long run. By 1942, from seven million people the population of Spain decreased to half a million Jews and converts. However, a third of the population was descendent from Jews. A year after the expulsion Seville’s municipal rents descended 50 percent and Barcelona’s municipality was bankrupt.

EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE

Everything is possible, wrote the Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino, “Nothing should be discarded, and nothing is unbelievable, nothing is impossible. The possibilities that we discard are the possibilities that we ignore.”

Even more significant, perhaps, is the tragicomic Celestine, a novel wrote by Fernando de Rojas after the expulsion of the Jews. Rojas, descendent of convert Jews, wrote his play being a student of the University of Salamanca. It is the story of an old woman, her pupils, two young lovers and the house cleaners of both. A play that takes place in the streets of a modern city without bridges or defense walls, a city where the historic reality shows us the medieval vices and virtues, won over by interests, money, passion and sex. All the people in the Celestine spend a lot of energy going and coming in missions related to those passions. And all that energy ends in the absurdity of death.

The Celestine is a product of the University of Salamanca, the biggest center of teaching in Spain that thought of itself as a humanistic alternative to the growing orthodoxy and intolerance of the Crown. In 1499 after many doubts, Rojas published his book, because he had a keen consciousness of the hard destiny of his Jewish brothers. The world is change, says The Celestine, only change, but along the way change takes all to a bitter and disastrous end. This is the book that taught Spanish people to live their ideals, according to Ramiro de Maeztu. The Archpriest and Fernando de Rojas were humanists that dared to dream and told their fellow men where the dangers were. The expansion of Europe, first to the Orient and then to the Occident, was in a way a triumph of the Renaissance imagination.

LIFE AND DEATH OF THE INDIGENOUS WORLD.

The state successor of the Toltecs, and the final Nation of the old Mesoamerican world was that of the Aztecs. Their long march from the deserts of North America, from Arizona and Chihuahua to downtown México, was portrayed in the vision of an eagle devouring a serpent over a cactus on an Island lake. Huitzilopochtli, which means the “Magic Humingbird”, their God of War, and his priest Tenoch, conducted the Aztecs to the place where they founded their city, Tenochtitlan, in 1325. They added the prefix “Mexico” to the city, a word that means “The Moon’s navel”. This is the oldest town alive in the Americas. The people from the central valley, descendents from the Toltecs, who called the Aztecs “the last to come”, did not welcome the Aztecs.

Everywhere near the gods and priests and worriers there was in Meso America a whole society, alive, and sensible, around the pyramids, creating the values of cultural continuity. This tradition was one of the strongest realities with which those societies would respond to the meeting with Europe.

Quetzalcoatl was the live giving principle of the Aztec society, in opposition to Huitzilopochtli, creator of war and death. So important for the indigenous world as Prometeo or Ulysses for the Mediterranean world or Moses for the Judeo-Christian culture. Quetzalcoatl was also an exiled, a traveler, and a hero that went away but promised to return. As the others his myth lives through multiple versions and metamorphosis, but transcending them and making them richer.

The great festivals of the Aztec world were the external, ceremonial, expression, of a time when nature and destiny were hand in hand, and myths were vitally believed in. A great example is one of the versions of the Quetzalcoatl legend, transmitted to Father Bernardino de Sahagun in México by his indigenous informants. According to the myth, one of the minor gods of the indigenous pantheon, a dark eternally young man called Tezcatlipoca, whose name means “The smoking mirror” told the other demons: “Let’s Visit Quetzalcoatl, and give him a gift.” They went to the palace of the god in Tula and gave him the present, covered with cotton.

“What is it?” asked Quetzalcoatl while he opened the gift that turned out to be a mirror. When the god saw himself in the mirror believing he had no face because he was a god, and saw the face of a man, a creature of god, understood that by having a human face he should have a human destiny too. That night the demons disappeared happily shouting. Quetzalcoatl drank until he was drunk and had relations with his sister. The next day ashamed he went on a boat to the Orient but promised he would come back on a certain date, Ce Acatl, the day of the cane of the Aztec calendar

When times of destiny and nature coincided under a symbol of fear, the indigenous universe was shaken to the roots and the whole world was afraid to loose its soul. That was what happened when after a series of terrible omens the Spanish Capitan Herman Cortes disembarqued in the Gulf of México, on Holy Thursday 1519.

THE RETURN OF QUETZALCOATL

The time came: Ce Acatl, the year One Cane, was preceded by a year of important happenings in the Aztec world. The waters of the lake where the city of Tenochtitlan was built were agitated forming great waves, throwing houses and towers. Comets pass for hours crossing the skies. Mirrors reflected a sky full of stars in the middle of the day. Strange women pass along the streets in the middle of the night crying for the death of their children or the loss of the world. Even the closest allies of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma, after looking at the sky, night after night, admitted that the prophecies were ready to become reality, and the sea, the mountains and the wind trembled with premonitions. Quetzalcoatl was going to return.

The prophecy of the return of the blond bearded god was going to become reality. So sure was the king of Texcoco of it, that he abandoned his kingdom, let go his army and recommended his countrymen to enjoy the time that was left. And emperor Moctezuma, that rarely used the same cloths twice and was taken care of by a bunch of maidens, started a long penitence, sweeping his own palace dressed only in trousers, while the omens of disaster fell over the terrified city. Was the Fifth Sun going to end?

Moctezuma’s anguish had a temporary relief when a messenger arrived from the coast and told the king there were floating houses from the East with men dressed in gold and silver, on beasts of four legs. Those men were white, bearded, some blonde-haired and blue eyed. Moctezuma believed the time of anguish was over. The gods were back, and the prophecy was fulfilled.

CORTES’S TONGUE

Hernán Cortes didn’t see himself as a god. He was a man and his will moved him to act and use his information and wittiness to an extreme. In Spring 1519 Cortes left Cuba with 11 boats. There were 508 soldiers on board, 16 horses and several pieces of artillery. On Holy Thursday, he set his ships in front of the coast in the Gulf and founded the city of Veracruz, in the name of emperor Carlos V. Some days later, another emperor, Moctezuma, received news from the coast. ¿Who was the Spanish captain that was suddenly treated like a god?

There were some problems with Indian groups in the coastal areas, and soon their leaders found out the newcomers were not easy to destroy. They had arms as lightning and they could spit fire. The principals send them gold presents and other precious gifts to make them happy. But one day they gave Cortes a different kind of gift, 20 slaves between which Cortes choose one.

The expedition’s chronicler Bernal Diaz del Castillo, descrived her as “good looking and with an open character”, the indigenous name of this woman was Malintzin, which indicated she had been born under signs of fight and unhappiness. His parents sold her as slave and the Spanish called her Doña Marina, but the people called her La Malinche, woman of the conqueror, treacherous to the Indians. But with any of these names, the woman knew an extraordinary destiny. She turned herself into “the tongue” of Cortes, who made her his interpreter and lover. She guided him over the long and high roads of the aztec empire, revealing weaknesses and discontentment in Moctezuma’s empire.

As a soldier of Christendom, the Spanish captain soon showed his identity, far from the indigenous illusion that Cortes was a god. His military abilities started to seem strong against the forces of Tlaxcala, outside Mexico City. The brave tlaxcaltecas, fiercely independent from the power of Tenochtitlan, did not want to change one domination for another. They fought Cortes but were defeated, even though they were more, because of the advanced technology of the Europeans.

CORTÉS AND MOCTEZUMA

This was an encounter of some of the most contrasting personalities in history: A man that had everything and another one that had nothing. An emperor compared with the Sun, whose face was guarded by his inferiors, and possessing the title of Tlatoani, “the one with the great voice”; and a soldier with no other treasure than his cleverness and his will. But the Spaniard was going to reach his goals against all obstacles.

Soon he discovered Moctezuma had rooms in his palace where the walls were made of gold. And Cortes paid his hospitality taking him prisoner and melting the gold. He destroyed the idols and in their place, he built Christian altars. And his second on board, Pedro de Alvarado, after making tricks to Moctezuma in the dices, killed a whole population unarmed and almost naked in the religious festival of Tlatelolco.

¿Were those really gods?. Finally, the people said no. They were cruel and greedy; they were alien invaders that could be destroyed. During the battle of the Sad Night, the indigenous opposition led by a nephew of Moctezuma, Cuauhtemoc, threw the Spanish outside Tenochtitlan. Many were drown in the channels trying to escape with their bags full of gold and Cortes sat under a tree and cried. But he built boats on the lake to return and attack again convinced that the equation of information plus superior technology would give him the victory.

After a bloody site in 1521, Cortes finally won over the aztec capital. It was, as Hugh Thomas said, one of the greatest battles in history. It not only destroyed the biggest indigenous power and religious center in North America till that day, it also meant one of the great crashes of opposite civilizations that existed until then, represented by the figures of Cortes and Moctezuma.

Mexico’s conquest was more than the astonishing success of a group of less than 600 european soldiers over a a theocratic empire. It was victory of other indians against the Aztec king. The victory of the indigenous world against itself, because the results of the conquest meant for the majority of Indians slavery and death. But it was also a defeat of the conqueror. ¿Would it be understood some day that the conquest of México as a defeat of both, the winner and the looser, could be consider on the long run a victory of both?

When Moctezuma and his empire sunk under the bloody waters of the lagoon the original indigenous world disappeared forever, his idols broken and his treasures forgotten, buried all under the Christian Baroque churches and the vice royal palaces, but over this drama you could always hear as a murmur in history the voices of the conquered and the conqueror.

All the indigenous societies of the Américas, with all their faults, were young and creative. the Spanish conquest stop their movement, interrupted their growth and left them sad as it can be read in the “Visions of the Conquered”, compiled by Miguel León-Portilla.

The poets of the defeated indigenous world sang the sadness of the happenings:

Where will we go now dear friends?

The smoke rises, and the fog extends.

Cry, my friends.

Waters are red

Cry oh cry, because we have lost the Aztec nation

The time of the Fifth Sun has ended.

When everything was over and his own people silenced emperor Moctezuma, and the Spanish Crown denied political power to Hernan Cortes for his victories, maybe the Malinche's voice prevailed. The interpreter, but also the lover of Cortes, La Malinche established the central facts of our multiracial civilization mixing the language with sex. She was the mother of the son of the conqueror, symbolically the first mixed race individual (mestizo). Mother of the first Mexican of indigenous and spanish blood. La Malinche spoke what she learned from Cortes, the Spanish language, language of rebellion and hope, life and death, that would be the strongest bound between descendents of Indians, Europeans and blacks in the American hemisphere

THE CONQUEST AND RECONQUEST OF THE NEW WORLD

The Spanish run outside the houses where they were hiding. The Indian companion surprised, tried to protect the Inca. The Spanish cut their hands while they carry Atahualpa’s stretcher. Not one spanish soldier was killed or hurt. As in the Mexican conquest, a double alienation: divine information and lack of advanced technology would defeat the Quechua nation. Divine news: in his deathbed the father of Atahualpa, the Inca Huayna Capac, had professed that one day from the sea, bearded men would arrive to destroy the Inca world.

They would be messengers of the central indigenous deity, Viracocha, who as Quetzalcoatl, created humanity and then navigated to Occident, promising to return. Lack of technology determined even more the destiny of the Incas. Contemporary British historian, John Heming, said, indigenous armies of Peru “could never produce an arm that could kill a Spanish soldier on horse and armed”.

To obtain his freedom the captured emperor offered Pizarro enough gold to fill up a big room, all the way to the height of a man. When the gold arrived, the conquerors melted it. And Pizarro’s promise was not kept to Atahualpa. Prisoner, the Inca could only had the opportunity to choose between being burn alive as a pagan or convert to Christianity before being hanged. He chose baptism and his last words were: “My name is Juan. That is my name to die”.

AN ORGANIZED MAGIC

The conquest of Peru was paradoxical. Fast as a modern lightning war, gave the impression to end in the very moment it began, with the capture and dead of Atahualpa by Pizarro in 1532, followed by the fast Spanish advance over a country crossed by a splendid system of roads. But after all conquest of Peru was even longer than the conquest of México. First because of Indian opposition. Resistance flourished between 1536 and 1544, constantly bothering the Spanish, until the dead of the Indian chief Manco Inca. It was continued by his descendents until one of them, Tupac Amaru, was decapitated by the Spanish in 1572, 40 years after Pizarro's seize of the Inca Atahualpa in Cajamarca.

The biggest enigma of these people was only discovered recently thanks to airplanes. Only from the air could human eye discover the colossal geometrical designs of Nazca that send us their mysterious messages from the depths of time. Nazca lines, in the valleys of the south of Peru, are a mysterious telegram about the life and death of Peruvian antiquity and as the lines of destiny in a human hand; they continue covering the truths of that land. This enigma challenge us to give sense to a culture based on magic and Cosmo vision, at the same time could propose and renew the relationship between human beings in a society with precision and some times success.

UNDER THE SIGN OF UTOPIA

For Vespucio, Utopia is not a place that does not exist. Utopia is a society and his inhabitants that live in community and disregard gold: “People live according to nature”, he writes in his “Mundus Novus” on 1503. “They don’t have property; but on the contrary all things they use in community.” Moreover, if they have no property, they need no government. “They live with no king and no authority and each one is its own boss”, concluded Américo, confirming the perfect anarquist Utopia of the New World for the European Renaissance world.

The forced labor, European sickness and the brutal cultural crash destroyed the indigenous population of the Caribbean. Some estimations of Indian population in central México calculated as much as 25 million before the conquest, only half, 50 years later “ and only over one million in 1605”, as Barbara and Stanley Stein say in their book “Latin America colonial heritage”.

THE INDIAS ARE BEING DISTROYED

The laws of the Indies were as the thread of a spider that captures only small criminals but allows big criminals escape freely.

A NET OF CITIES

Cities were the center of the new culture. The first university in the New World was founded in Santo Domingo in 1538, and the universities of Lima and Mexico City in 1551, long before the first Anglo colonies university in America, Harvard College, funded in 1636. The first printer in the Américas was installed in Mexico City by the Italian typographer Giovanni Paoli in 1539, while Stephen Daye in Cambridge, Massachussets, founded the first Anglo-American printer in 1638.

There is a more philosophical determinant for the political culture of Latin America because during 300 years, everyone, from Mexico to Argentina, assisted to the political school of Saint Tomas, where they learned that the purpose of politics, it is greater good, superior to any individual value, was the common good. To reach it unity was required and pluralism was an obstruction. Unity was reached by government of an only man and not by whim of multiple electors. In one of the eleven chapels of the church of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca, Santo Tomas of Aquinas presides from heaven the basic political truths distilled in the heart of Spanish America.

Insistence in the common good is given from the top by the authority by concession. This political philosophy could only be modified trough a violent revolution. Again principles and

practices of democracy were postponed.

Some times the crown was capable of taking very illustrated initiatives, as the early creation of schools for the most intelligent Indians, members of the aristocracy of the defeated nations. At the College of Tlatelolco in Mexico, the young Indians learned Spanish, Latin and Greek showing excellence in their studies. The experiment failed because some conquerors did not want the Indians to know more than they did, and even more because they did not want them to translate Virgilio, but to work as cheap labor in the mines and haciendas.

¿WHICH DO YOU THINK WERE THE CONSEQUENCES OF INTERRUPTING HIGHER EDUCATION OF INDIANS IN COLONIAL TIMES? (CALL TO ACTIÓN)

FATHER AND MODER

The marvelous chapel of Tonantzintla near Cholula, in México, is a magnificent proof of syncretism as a dynamic element of the culture of counter conquest. What happened here occurred all over Latin America. Indian artisans received engravings of saints and other religious motives from christian evangelists who asked them to reproduce them inside the churches. But the old builders and artisans wanted to do more than copy. They wanted to celebrate their old gods side by side with the new gods, but this intention had to be covered with a mix of praise to nature and praise to heaven, melting them indistinguishable.

Tonantzintla is a recreation of the indigenous paradise, white and golden, the chapel is a cornucopia of abundance in which all fruits and flowers of the tropic ascend to the cupola, to the dream of infinite abundance. Religious syncretism triumphed and the conquerors were in a way conquered.

In Tonantzintla, the Indians paint themselves as innocent angels towards paradise, while the Spanish conquerors are shown as ferocious devils, bifid and red headed. Paradise alter all could be recovered.

THE GOLD CENTURY

Cervantes created a dissimilar couple. A poor lord that imagined himself as a traveler from old times, followed by his helper Sancho Panza: between them, they make a bridge between the corners of Spain, the roguish and the mystic, realism and survival and the imperial dream.

MAN OF LA MANCHA

With his book Don Quixote de la Mancha, Cervantes started the modern novel in a nation that strongly rejected modernity. If the Spain of the Inquisition imposed a unique point of view of the world, dogmatic and orthodox, Cervantes imagined a world of multiple points of view through the innocent looking satire of the chivalry novels. Don Quixote is a man of faith, not of doubts; his confidence comes from his lectures, his faith comes from his books.

When Don Quixote leaves his town to go to the lands of La Mancha, he leaves behind his books, his library, his refuge. He reads chivalry novels and believes what he reads. For Don Quixote the mills are giants because his books say so. When Don Quixote is defeated and stands up again to fight, when he leaves his town, he also leaves the well-ordered world of medieval times: strong as a castle, where everything had a recognizable place, and irrupts in the New World of the Renaissance, agitated by the winds of ambiguity and change, where everything is in doubt.

Don Quixote goes back to his town and recovers reason, but for him this is crazy.Don Quixote, again as Alonso Quijada, dies.

Don Quixote says to Sancho: our adventure will not end as far as a reader is willing to open our book and bring us back to life. We are the result of the point of view of multiple readers, past, present and future.

We are free to come in and out of the picture. Free to see the picture and the world in several ways, not only in a dogmatic and orthodox way. We are not finished, limited by certain and definitive frontiers, but incomplete beings contributing to create a past that our descendents should maintain alive if they themselves want to have a future. What we imagine is as possible as real.

THE MANCHA

We all face abstract pressures and try to reduce them to ironic size through the absurd. We would like to live in a world of reasson where justice is concrete. We are some times epic figures as Don Quixote, but most of the time we are as Sancho Panza. We all want to be more significant. However, we are attached to earth by the needs to eat, digest, sleep and move. Saint John wishes to transcend all silence while Saint Therese says, “between the pots our Lord travels”.

We are all men and women of La Mancha. None of us is pure; we are all real and ideal, heroes and absurd, made in equal parts from desire and imagination, bone and flesh. When we understand that we are in part Christian, Jew, Arab, Caucasian, Black, and Indian, without having to sacrifice any of our parts; only then will we understand the greatness and the servitude of Spain, its empire, it’s golden age and it’s inevitable decadency. We are not captured between the destroyed indigenous world and a new universe, we are as European as American. La Mancha reached its full sense in the Americas.

BAROQUE AGE IN THE NEW WORLD: A MIRROR IN WHICH WE CAN CONSTANTLY SEE OUR MUTANT IDENTITY.

MUSIC.

Rebellion and language are part of the Afro American culture, as much as the splendidly persistent rhythmical conducts, the corporeal motions, the esthetics of the body, the grammar of music and dance. From the beginning, the black music allowed a private, autonomous, free and even rebellious rhythm to the audience or the dancer, instead of holding a dominant, foreseeable or pre-written scheme for them, as traditionally was the case with occidental music. The Afro-American music, also from his origins, predicted and practiced the forms of modern music in which a center of tonal reference ends up breaking in multiple centers, each one generating different answers from their listeners. Musical polyphony was enriched even more by the dance imagination of The Americas's black cultures: dance asperformance and the dance as celebration became indistinguishable from each other. The very body attained a sensation of reality, beauty and motion, without the restrictive commandments of the Catholic, Creole and mixed racial cultures.

The joyful celebration of the body, the incessant creation of language, the beauty of motion and rebellious spirit, add up in a political fact indicated by the North American sociologist Frank Tannenmbaum: The black culture has moved foreven to the The Americas. And, without a doubt, nothing has identified so much the United States and Latin America, as the imagination, the speech and the rithms of our common black basin: South of the United States and The Caribbean, the cultural community that extended itself from the Orinoco and the Amazon to the Mississippi, through the islands.

Because no culture of the New World was born from so much suffering and pain like the one belonging to black men, women and children that arrived to the New World in slavery's ships. Even before embarking, many tried to kill themselves.

And as nobody was more silent in colonial society than women, perhaps only a woman could give voice to that society, without playfully stopping to admit the divisions between her head and her heart: “In two parts divided, I have my confused soul: one is slave to passion, and the other measured by reason ”. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Finally, her monastic cell was not able to protect her against the masculine and rigidly orthodox authority, incarnatedin her persecutor, the Mexican Archbishop, Aguiar and Seixas. At 40 years old, she was deprived of her library, musical instruments, pens and ink. She died at the age of 43, in 1695, after they forced her back to silence.

But there was another element of “regression” and “barbarism” at the fields. They were called charros in Mexico, guasos in Chile and gauchos in Argentina, they generated a language and an image that gave voice and eyes to a culture aside from the urban culture. They were next to nature, out of law, bandits on horseback, independent and lonely men on an also blind and lonely landscape, never far from the violence of social life. Their biographies always are close to a usurpation of lands, a violation, a hut on fire or a local leader's pronouncement besides one or two foreign interventions; so the charro and the gaucho are always on the border of the precipice or the guerilla, looking always, sometimes blindly, towards the revolution's abyss. Traditionally, the charro, as the gaucho, told their stories by means of songs. The song of the charro is called corrido. A derivation from the Medieval and Spanish Renaissance romance a newsworthy poem in octosyllables inserted within an oral tradition constantly modified and enriched.

The charro, like the gaucho, are the Hectors and Aquiles of the Latin American agrarian epic, a second story that gets firm in word and in fact, far from civilization’s and progres’s conventional forms. The gauchos, like the charros, sing their own history. The “payadores” of the Pampas, make us feel they possess a power granted by the absence of any other means of communication. One of the themes of the “payadores” is that the gaucho begins to sing in his mother's belly; they sing when they are born and sing until they die. Of course, his griefs are what they sing; only a song can console them.

The payadores' song was the newspaper of the Pampas. It is the only history book of the gauchos and, finally, the source of the biggest literary work of the XIXth century in Spanish America, Martín Fierro's poem, wrote by José Hernández.

YOU NEED TWO TO TANGO

IN 1869, Argentina had almost two million inhabitants. Between 1880 and 1905, three million European immigrants arrived to the country. In 1900, a third of the population of the port had been born in a foreign place.

Immigration was a progress opportunity destroyed in the future 1960. The cities were lonely. Men were without women. They all recognize themselves in tango, music for immigrants at a city of loneliness and in transition.

In any case, it became the sensation of Europe. It was the first dance in which couples hugged each other in public. Pope Pius the X forbade what he called “this savage dance.” King Louis of Bavaria forbade his officers to dance tango, while in England, Norfolk's duchess declared that it was a dance contrary to the character and good English manners. Nevertheless, English men and women, in 1914, attended in big numbers, every night, to Tango dinners at the Hotel Savoy in London.

In spite of its international success, tango always returned to its source, Buenos Aires, and to its primary function of evoking the mystery and extreme poverty of our cities, the difficulty of living like human beings in our urban conglomerates. However, at the cities, as well as at the fields, a whole culture of encounters, mixed and irreverent, was rising. Language, music, body motions, facial expressions, dreams, memoirs and desires. Little by little, Spanish America realized that it was not choosing simply between modernity and tradition, but maintaining both alive, in a creative tension.

ART

In the world of art, few so visionary creators as patriot and writer José Martí have existed. In his legendary wisdom, he asked us not to forget anybody or anything. However, will we be able to remember the past now that we live in the United States? We need a link, a place full of memories and plans and anecdotes and tales of shared stories.

That is the origin of Hispanopolis. With Hispanopolis, we will be able to remember the past while we create the future.

In Hispanopolis, we recognize the enormous value that artistic creation has in our culture. Art, in each period of our development has told our history, and the things we love and admire more, or the ones that we need to communicate for a thousand reasons.

As image of the agrarian Mexican culture and the sacred, Jose Guadalupe Posada's art was a prognosis of the graphic modern artists that we find today at the big North American cities from New York to Los Angeles. Posada's engravings gave voice to the poor too.

That same way, Hispanopolis is narrowly bound to the street culture of those that lack voice in other media. For that reason, Hispanopolis is your voice.

In Hispanopolis, you can tell your history and let others know the blessings that changed your life, and give a hand to a friend or a stranger that is in the same situation that you have been before.

Little by little, Hispanics realized that the quest for a cultural identity did not run out in the extremes of cosmopolitanism or chauvinism, promiscuity or isolation, civilization or barbarism. Rather it aimed towards an intelligent and good governed equilibrium between what we were capable to take and what we were capable to give to the world. The cultural debate of independence passed through all these dilemmas. We were afraid to be ourselves, forcing ourselves to be different, French, North American, or English. This dilemma simply reflected the difficulty that we felt to place ourselves in the world, to recognize the world and be acknowledged by it. We fought with our own sense of time and with how to live within our own context, without reducing it to a dangerous confusion between the past as delay and the future as progress.

Another big fight is to acknowledge Latin America as another Jew fatherland, the one of the racial groups that arrived from Spain dragging along a cultural baggage that we yet have to recognize.

FOOD AND DRINK

Chocolate, xocolatl, is another Aztec word and another Aztec product. In Moctezuma's empire, it was precious and abundant and at the same time, it took the form of currency. Emperor Moctezuma enjoyed drinking chocolate, but in Europe it was considered too bitter for most of the palates in the beginning. However, Spanish women became crazy with the brew and finally Luis XIV, married with a Spanish infanta, introduced it into Versalles's court. And if chocolate was aboundant in Mexico, sugar became scarce in Europe and attained high costs. In the New World, sugar bloomed at the tropics, invaded ancient uncultivated lands and did it’s first producer's fortune, Gonzalo de Víbora, at the island of “La Española”. When the indigenous workers of the Caribbean became extinct, the black slaves came to take their place, precisely in the new sugar plantations.

Columbus was the first one who saw men and women crossing a village while they smoked tobacco, on Tuesday November 6, 1492, naturally, at the island of Cuba. However, as with the rest of the new things that were arriving from the New World, it took the Old World a little time getting used to these exotic products. Moreover, it took all of Sir Walter Raleigh's elegance, for tobacco to be accepted in England, although King Jacob I noticed that the plant turned the internal organs of a man into a simple kitchen. But if America was discovered because European wanted more pepper at their tables, the only spice found in the New World was chili, the ardent “aji” that father Joseph Acosta wrote was the principal sauce of all the dishes. In his 1591 Natural History of the Indies, the obese and bloody father who went up and down without breath to the big heights of the Andes said about chili that everyone noticed that it burns you going in an out. In addition, his warning continues, taken in excess, it provokes sensuality. More ominous, coca's leafs grew on the Andes and chewing it, Acosta wrote, a man can walk double journeys without eating something else.

In Offenburg, Germany, there is a monument to Sir Francis Drake holding a potato in his hand. The inscription reads “to Sir Francis Drake, who introduced potato in Europe, AD 1580.” In addition, the registration adds “on behalf of the millions of peasants that bless his eternal memory.”

However, when the first potatoes arrived to Europe, they seemed like dirty things, similar it was said to testicles or truffles, “cartuffles, kartoffel.” A Russian religious sect, noticing that the Bible did not mention potatoes, declared them a botanical monstrosity. They did not imagine vodka was going to come from fermented potatos.

What Cortes found in abundance everywhere in the Americas was corn, the New World's bread, and Quetzalcoatl’s gift. America sent it to Europe in exchange for wheat but during a long time Europeans used the corn only to feed pig, which, domesticated, appeared in the New World along the first slaughterhouses.

ANIMALS

Cattle and horses constituted, maybe, the biggest new thing. If Bernal Díaz del Castillo could specify how many horses arrived to Mexico with Cortes (16 total ), some years later, escaping from the power of the conquerors, horses returned to a wild state and formed immense hordes of wild cimarrones, moving around freely through the immense distances between Colorado and Patagonia.

Wheat and the cattle, emigrating towards the south like ancient tribes originating in Asia, would lay the foundations for the great agricultural riches of the southern cone, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. The English, French and Dutch buccaneers, (named like that because they dried and smoked meat, a process so-called bucan by the Caribbean Indians), captured the savage cattles.

Not everything was peace. In addition, the mastiffs and bloodhounds got to the New World. They were used to follow and catch fugitive Indians and later on black slaves. In Puerto Rico, Ponce de Leon considered his dogs so important, that allowed them to share his food and receive a Spanish soldier's stipend. However, dogs, same as other persecution's objects, also fled and formed savage herds.

European plants that arrived to the New World were a little more stable and watched closely. Olive trees, grapes, oranges and lemons were counted between the European new products in the Americas. Vineyards were so precious that at colonial Chile armed guards surrounded them: excellent precaution, considering that Chile continues producing the best wine of Latin America. Savage oranges soon spread out of the subtropical lands, and sheep were perishing at the tropic, but reproduced marvellously at highlands and pamper plains. Donkeys settled down in the Americas, but in their melancholic look, there was also an aftertaste of amazement in front of new American animals, not mentioned in Noah's Ark, as Acosta wrote.

Vicunas and guanacos appeared in the heights of the Andes: while over them, unseen birds to European eyes flew. The condor, strong and light, and vultures of fast wings and accurate look, cleaning cities and streets, descending on all kinds of cadavers. Parrots were talkative. The Aztec guaxolotl was delicious, French called it dindon, the bird of the Indies, and English, characteristically disoriented, called it a Turkey. The beautiful quetzal waned in a cage because his vocation was to fly freely. Below them, The Americas's new cities.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE MOVEMENT OF PLANTS, ANIMALS AND PEOPLE BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW WORLD, AND HOW COULD YOU COMPATE THAT TO MODERN MIGRATION? (CALL TO ACCTION)

THE BARROQUECITY

The undeclared dream of many of these capitals was to be related to the court, and this gave them a parasitic varnish, underlied by great division, inside each urban center, between the rich and the poor. While an European capital, in spite of all his injustices, could develop an intermediate commercial and professional sector, in Spanish America noblemen only were so because they possessed mines and haciendas outside the city. Being obeyed, admired, and respected, was the Spanish-American nobleman's vital purpose. Those who could offer these services surrounded him. In the New World, feudal respect was easy to obtain.

Satirical posters showed and ridicule the ambitions of a high-society anchored at a sea of poverty. The privileged were few, the outcasts many; and, between them, pickpockets, prostitutes and beggars complete the scene, just as at baroque cities of the Gold Century in Spain.

GOYA'S EPOCH

THE DREAM OF THE REASON

Aristocrats walk dressed like bullfighters, and actresses are the queens of Madrid. They all impose the style over the contents, the cult of beauty and youth, the consecration of the pose, the attitude, the theatricality. All of it looking for its source in popular energy. High society went down to the slum areas. Goya gave his definite icon to this epoch, with his two big Duchess of Alba's portraits.

Melchor Gaspar de Jovellanos’ worthy, almost republican face, painted by Goya, could be compared to the most famous one of the Whims: the dreams of the reason produces monsters. The man's essential portrait of reason, seated next to his worktable, paper in one hand, head resting on the other, becomes the whim of the sleeping reason, freeing monsters as much from the psyche as from the world.

TOWARD INDEPENDENCE MULTIPLE MASKS AND TURBID WATERS

In 1810, the year of the revolutionary invasion, 18 million people lived under Spanish Government, between California and Cabo de Hornos. Eight million were natives, aborigines of the New World. Only one million were pure blacks, brought from Africa as result of slave traffic. Only four million were Caucasian, includying Spanish from Spain and Criollos, this is, European descendents born in the New World. The Criollos were mostly of Spanish ascendancy, but some had French, German or Irish names - O'Higgins, O'Reilly -, but criollos were more than peninsular Spaniyards nine to one. In turn, all white Spanish Americans were a minority compared to indigenous, black and mixed racial individuals. Between these, maybe the more original and dynamic of all racial groups, added five million people in 1810. It was a mixture of everybody else, classified according to byzantine and often insulting nomenclatures:

“Mestizos” were born from spaniyard and indigenous. “mulattos” ( this racially offensive name was derived from mule ), from white and black, “zambos” from indigenous and black, “tercerones”, from mulatto and white, “cuarterones” from terceron and white, while terceron and mulatto gave the category of “tentenelaires” and the union of “cuarteron”and black produced “saltapatras”.

The two memorable facts, however, are that Criollos were majority compared to Spaniyards, but they were minority compared to the majority of color. Both facts would determine the nature of Spanish-American independence. Criollos possessed an intense conscience of domestic society; however, they played second to the peninsular Spaniyards in consideration, privileges, access to riches, access to civil service and to political decisions.

THE JESUITS' EXPULSION

The external and sensational event that precipitate the increasing sentiment of identity all along Spanish America was the transcendental monarchical decision to expell Jesuits from Spain and its colonies.

Even more important was the fact that they identify with the cause of Americanism. They took revenge on the Spanish crown writing national stories of the colonies. The Chilean Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina wrote (from Rome and in Italian) his “National and Civil History of Chile”, while the Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero wrote (also from Rome and in Italian) his Ancient Mexican History.

And in Mexico, the editor Antonio de Alzate started his Gaceta's publication in 1788. In it, he promised that he would write about the men that had illustrated “our Spanish-American nation”. The Mexican nation, Alzate wrote, possessed its own culture, its own past and its own traditions, and these were as Indian as European.

THE CREOLE NATION

In Mexico, in Caracas or in Buenos Aires, Criollos could complain that each time they payed more taxes, without receiving adequate political representation or access to civil service. Although the favorable measures to free trade taken by the Bourbon monarchy increased the Criollo appetite to sell more directly to other parts of the world, the fact remains that they also opened Spanish-American economies to international competition.

Who would buy ponchos or spurs manufactured in Argentina, if they could acquire them, cheaper, better and faster, importing them from England? In turn, this situation provoked a new problem, to know if mercantile interests of Spanish America were going to sacrifice internal production to international competition, or if regional production should be protected against such a competition.

NEWS OF THE WORLD

Three important events would affect Spanish America at the same time. Those events were North American Independence, French Revolution and Napoleonic Spanish invasion.

During the first years of the North American Republic, that also were the final years of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, Spanish-American admiration of North American Revolution was immense. However, the bigger ideological inspiration came from the French philosophers of the Illustration. Their big general ideas fulfilled a deep need, although sometimes unconscious, of new Spanish-American intelligence. Lawyers, bureaucrats, priests, teachers, students, and novice men of science, all of them needed a secular new version of the universe different to the one that in such a dogmatic way was imposed by the Catholic Scholasticism of the past. Instead of Tomas of Aquino, Tomas Paine and Tomas Jefferson; Instead of San Agustín and the church calendar, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, (especially Juan Jacobo Rousseau, the Citizen of Geneva, and his unforgettable call: “Man is born free, but everywhere he finds himself chained”). Rousseau is perhaps the writer that bigger influence has exercised on the history, sensibility, and Literature of Spanish America.

Perhaps Voltaire would have modified his shout “Ecrazes L'infamme”, “Crush the Church”, if he would have known that Candido would travel from Spain to America inside a ciborium and that the deepest transformation of the proprietary regimen seen in Europe would soon happen. Four million new voters received the right to vote, one hundred thousand judges were elect, along with twelve thousand civil magistrates, between 1789 and 1790. The feudal system, nobility and hereditary faults experienced from father to son, were abolish. Common tribunals for the entire population substituted special tribunals for nobility. Church was destituted of her riches and the French nation was formed, as sales taxes and barriers to domestic commerce were abolished.

Napoleón demonstrated what a bourgeoisie's man could obtain by means of force, will, or intelligence: absolutely everything. Napoleón I ordered the creation of the first pavements and firefighters’ first station in Paris; he even inaugurated the first postal service in Egypt. Young Criollo men saw themselves in this model and dreamt that everything was possible. It would be enough to promulgate a new illustrated legislation to change the face of Spanish America.

Could we also expel the colonial power? Would we substitute a monarchy with a republic? Could we be modern, independent nations, trading with all, publishing it, reading and talking with freedom, liberated forever from the vigilance of Inquisition?

Clergymen, tradespeople, intellectuals, army officers: the decision to act came unitedly in front of the extraordinary events that were happening, and in order to make a choice between continuation of loyalty towards Spain, provisional independence until Napoleon be cast away and Fernando VII restituted or, finally, the radical and definite separation from The Spanish crown. The prosperities of Independence attracted masses and his main characters, masked men, initiated it.

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM:SIMON BOLIVAR AND JOSEPH OF ST. MARTIN

Like the Venezuelan novelist Arturo Uslar Pietri wrote, we in Spanish America are all tricultural, through our black or Indian nursemaids. Even if we are pure white, also we are black and Indian and participate of the European world. Triculturalism is not a racial issue. Rather culture imposes itself to racism.

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

Bolivar accepted the offer, and land was promise through vouchers once the war was won. In the end, infantries were unable to claim their lands; while leaders acquired enormous extensions.

Bolívar “The Liberator” dreamt not only of independence of Spanish America, but of it’s unity. He saw our countries like a miniature human race, a microcosm: we are not European; we are not Indian, but half specie between aborigins and spaniyards.

THE BELL OF THE ANDES

The Argentine Revolution suppressed tributes, distributed land, offered education and equality. Illiterate people, ignorant of the Castilian tongue, did not understand these measures.

ST. MARTIN AND BOLIVAR

Perhaps they knew Jefferson's letter to Lafayette in 1817, in which Virginia’s Democrat considered, “our brothers to the south are not prepared for independence.” “Ignorance and prejudice are not good bases for self government in Latin America,” Jefferson concluded “they are incapable of governing themselves”.

From his agonizing bed in Santa Marta, some weeks later, Bolivar pronounced his own epitaph: “The Americas are ungovernable for us. That who serves a revolution labors in the sea”

Were they not ready to carry the load of self-determination? Even San Martín, according to the English commander William Bowles, would deplore “the dangerous revolutionary disposition of the inferior classes: their lack of education and information in general is so big”.

THE TYRANTS' TIME

In order to survive and expand toward the Pampa, the proprietary system in Argentina demanded something that, after all, had been fundamental in the beginning of the revolution of independence: free trade, freedom to import European and North American manufactured goods, and making it easy to interchange them for Argentine wheat, wool, hides and meat exports.

VIRGINAL OR PROMISCUOUS

A law, known as the Black Decree, in Mexico, became for Maximiliano when he signed it in October 2, 1865, his own death sentence.

On his office on wheels, Juárez became the incarnation of Indigenous fatality, Roman legality and Hispanic stoicism. He wanted to turn Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín's dreams into reality: strong institutions, not strong men; and civil Government's supremacy, in which no one is on top of the law.

RECONSTRUCTED REPUBLICS, CULTURES ON HOLD

IN 1867, Benito Juárez entered Mexico City in his hour of triumph and restored the liberal republic. Would the laws of reform, civil government, democracy, separation of powers, independent journalism, and cost-reducing free enterprise, defeat the heavy tradition of indigenous autocracy, colonial and Spanish government and republican tyranny?

THE CULTURE OF INDEPENDENCE

Culturally, independent Spanish America turned its back on her Indian and black inheritance, judging both barbarian. On the other hand, Spanish tradition divided us dramatically.

The Spanish-American elites refused Spanish tradition, giving his reasons, noisily, in one discourse after another. Spanish-American liberals were big admirers of the United States at the beginning of our long, tortuous, and inevitable relation. North American democracy and its modernizing vitality, politic institutions and impetuses were applauded. For the same reasons, Latin American conservatives opposed the United States. For them, the worst sins against the conservative creed were democracy, capitalism, protestantism, religious tolerance and free exam.

Repudiating Spain meant accepting France as freedom's new temple, good taste, romanticism and everything good of this world. Typically, another Chilean historian, Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, wrote from the French capital in 1853: “They were in Paris the capital of the world, humanity's heart, the universe as miniature”.

The bad thing of this admiration for Europe, indicated the Chilean writer Claudio Veliz in his book “Centralist Tradition of Latin America”, was that it did not extend itself to the European way of production, but only to the European way of consumption.

The upper classes of Latin America emulated the European sensibility in their way of spending, dressing, and living; in style, architecture, and literature, as well as in his social, political, and economical systems. What they did not imitate were the European systems of production, because that would have meant changing the systems of Latin America.

Latin America, including Brazil, took advantage of worldwide expansion of capitalism in the XIXth century, supplying it with raw materials, but without providing ourselves with capital for investment and saving.

Our economic life's accent was set in foreign trade. This was a need determined by factors totally alien to Latin American initiatives: the fast economic development of Western Europe and the United States in all areas, including the ones belonging to population, industrialization, commerce, education, urban growth, politic institutions, transportation and commerce, and by the absence of internal market that dangerously continues to this date.

By the end of the XIXth century, life expectancy in most part of Latin America was inferior to 27 years; in some regions, 98 % of the population were illiterate; and over half of the population was rural, the majority living in abysmal poverty conditions.

In spite of our commerce with Europe and the fact that we gave them their most popular desserts: chocolate, coffee, sugar, fruit and tobacco; Alfonso Reyes's sentence, in this sense, keeps on being exact: Latin America gets always late to civilization's banquet.

If we are now free from the factors than chained us to that vicious circle, why can't we be avant-garde?

In reality, the first relatively modern nation of Latin America seems to be Chile. One of the first marks of modernity for our pubescent republics was the appearing of a literature of independence, made of novels and poetry, but also of journalism and history.

CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM

The alternative culture of Indians and blacks was seen like an obstacle to progress by liberal elites of the XIXth century, who had an ideology they considered scientific. Such ideology was an adaptation of Auguste Comte's positivist philosophy, according to which human history developes in predictable stages. It was enough for a Latin American nation to discover in which stage of development it was, in order to enter scientifically in the ecumenical motion toward progress. The motto of this philosophy, order and progress, inspired all modernizing governments of the Latin American XIXth century. As proof of the influence exercised by Comte, it was imprint in the Brazilian national flag.

It is interesting, in this frame of civilization and barbarism, the paper that natives of the XIXth century in America and Jews of the XXth century played.

Propaganda against Indians was the counterpoint of a fervent desire of bringing white European immigrants to Latin America in the XIXth Century. Also to show an image of the Indians as murderers and thieves. “To govern is to populate”, wrote the Argentine journalist and educator Juan Bautista Alberdi. However, before, apparently, it was necessary to depopulate. In 1879, an army commanded by General Julio Roca came out of Buenos Aires with the mission of exterminating all Indians in the territories of south Argentina. The indigenous lands of sheepherding were necessary for civilization; that is, for European immigrants. General Roca with great success, two times, developed a so-called Desert's Campaign, rewarded with the presidency of Argentina.

At Chile, the Spaniyards never conquered independent ferocious Araucanian people. Finally, the rifle and the locomotive conquered it. In 1880, a military campaign reduced them to live in reservations. In Mexico, Porfirio Díaz proclaimed his dictatorship as scientific and inspired by positivism. Díaz, who was a man of indigenous zapoteca background, directed savage campaigns against the indigenous population of the Northern Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua attached to their ancestral lands. Díaz wanted to give these territories to new Mexican landowners faithful to him, notably the Limantour family, and to North American companies such as the Richardson Construction Company of Los Angeles and the Wheeler Land Company of Phoenix, Arizona.

He provoked Tomochic's rebellion in Chihuahua and, in the war against the Yaqui and the Mayo Indians; their chiefs were taken to high sea in a battleship, chained, and thrown to the Pacific Ocean. The chiefs of the yaqui rebellion were murdered, and half their population, 30 000 people, were deported and sent in an atrocious long walk to Yucatán, where men were separated from their women, while they were forced to marry Chinese workers and forget their families and indigenous traditions.

Where did barbarism originated? The city or the fields? The ideology of progress was jumping all the obstacles. Indians were sacrificeable. In addition, the conquest was not obviously finished.

LAND AND FREEDOM

STORM ON MEXICO

Too slow to satisfy his friends and too weak for his enemies, Madero was weakened by a plot organized by the army, landowners and North American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. In the most delicate moment of the uprising in Mexico City, another military commander designated by Madero, General Victoriano Huerta, betrayed him, backed up by ambassador Wilson, who named himself judge for the so called “immature Mexicans” and the “emotional Latin race”. More than the inefficient Madero, President Taft's administration feared the popular chiefs, Villa and Zapata, who were firm in their requirements of redistributing land and exercising self-government for agrarian communities.

They returned to their agrarian world, distributing lands, establishing schools, proposing an alternative model of development. And in fact, during an incredible year (1914-1915), Emiliano Zapata and the town of Morelos governed themselves without intervention of the center, creating one of the most viable societies, unseen in Latin America. According to the will of the villages, community or individual property was distributed. Reconstructed Agriculture was increased notably. Zapata and his companions were villagers, farm workers and sharecroppers; their authority came from local councils and rested on the fidelity of laws they were taking upon themselves to turn into reality. That was the base of what we call reliable politics. In his history of the Zapatista movement, John Womack notices that “significantly, Zapata never organized a national police; the council boards of the villages took upon themselves to apply the laws on a flexible way”. The warlords were prohibited to intervening in the towns matters, and when Zapata himself had to face local conflicts, he always limited his action to back up the decisions that the village inhabitants had taken on their own account.

Far from settling down in resignation, they demonstrated than an agrarian culture could escape to fatalism and acquire a civil and economic, human and functional organization, on local bases. They proved that Mexicans could govern themselves democratically and, these moral values of the zapatista system however were exactly the ones that condemned it to death; the morelense arcadia went just opposite to the national design. In fact, the vision of the Mexican Nation-State presupposed the disappearance of the provincial peculiarities in favor of the bigger national enterprisse. Little Morelos should be sacrificed to great Mexico, the expeditious, responsible, unprincipled and centralized force that was taking form with Carranza and his ambitious deputies Obregón and Calles.

A CULTURAL REVOLUTION

THE IMMIGRANT'S FACE

These women and men's faces no longer were masks; they were women’s faces that abandoned their villages to go after their men in trains and on foot. They were the threatening faces crossed by scars of the warriors having breakfast in Sanborns. They were the faces of children born between battles, far from their villages. True citizens of the revolution and of a new nation that had learned, in the civil war, to embody the totality of its past, indigenous and Spanish, mixed racial, catholic and liberal, traditional and modernizing, old and new, patient and rebellious, but deeply rooted at land and in its culture.

This conflictive nation discovered all the strata of her rich culture, fought hand- in-hand with all the inherited contradictions and showed the appearing of a new Spanish-American society, only modern if it was first able to take conscience of her, without excluding any aspect of its culture.

The measure of our modernity was soon the distance between our political fragmentation and our cultural unity.

LATIN AMERICA

THE START OF THE CULTURAL HISPANIC INVASION OF THE UNITED STATES

In the “fresco” painted by artist José Cle Orozco in Pomona College, California, Prometeo's figure symbolizes humanity's tragic vision, originated in the classical antiquity, the Mediterranean, the Mare Nostrum.

In another great Orozco's mural, the one located at the Baker Library in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; Quetzalcoatl's myth, the feathered snake, gives a face to Prometeo's Mediterranean myth.

In Orozco, the two worlds, Old and New, European and American, melt into the heat of the flame, in the agitation of the ocean and in the aerial and transparent solitude of the mountain. Elements get in touch universally; they meet and hug each other. Orozco's art reiterates the conviction that few cultures of the world possess the continuity of the culture created in Indo afroiberoamerica. This is, precisely, the reason why the deficiency of a comparable continuity in the political and economic life wounds us so deeply.

Culture is the answer to the challenges of existence. It includes ways of being, thinking, dressing, eating, loving, furnishing, singing, fighting and sounding. A cultural fact symbolizes and combines a whole way of being. A paint, a poem, a movie, show how we are, what can we do, what is there yet to be done.

GOLIATH'S HEAD

In Argentina, exporting and importing activities multiplied, but the continuous exportation of raw materials and importation of manufactured goods and capital, made the country uncapable of unrolling its own industrial base.

This way, the cycle is renewed, fatal, and depressive. A new military coup unseats the civil weak government. Tyranny follows chaos, and chaos follows tyranny. Recoleta's cemetery is the symbol, as Tomas Eloy Martines has written, of a little necrophillic country. Perhaps the most important cadaver from Argentina is Argentina itself.

A CULTURAL ALEPH

These facts, more than ever, forced us to consider that we are related to a world of instantaneous communications and global integration, but with problems that, at times, dated from pre-conquest times. Our obligation became to organize our affairs. However, to understand ourselves we had to know ourselves, our culture, our past and traditions as sources of a new creation. Neither could we understand ourselves without the culture of the two big reflections and prolongations of ourselfes in Europe and the United States, Spain and the Hispanic communities of North America.

CONTEMPORARY SPAIN

Will it be permited to all the Spanish-speaking people to progress with a deep sense of tradition; live in a world of instantaneous communications and global economic integration, but without losing the sense of our own history and our own roots?

Gaudi's unfinished temple enables us to ask not only who we are but what are we becoming, which are our undone businesses, not only in Spain, but in all Spanish-speaking communities, the three Hispanic worlds of Spain, Spanish America and the United States of America.

HERE LIES HALF OF SPAIN

21 YEARS AFTER MEXICO

An equally weak republic followed the weak monarchy. However, this child republic managed to take the alphabet and dignity to millions of villagers. The very Lorca took his theatrical group, “La Barranca” (The Ravine), to visit the forgotten fields for the first time.

The republic gave modern legislation to Spain. Separate state from church, promulgated laws for divorce, installed secular education and gave laborers freedom to get organized.

Unamuno’s class in Salmanca was invaded by the brutal fascist general Millan Astray, who shouted: “!Death to intelligence!”, while Unamuno responded with dignity: “you will conquer but you will not convince ”. Few months later, the philosopher was dead, his heart broken by the calamity of the civil war. Dead was also Federico García Lorca, one of the first victims of the Fascist repression, coldly murdered in his native Granada by, as he foresaw it, civil guards.

Those that were expelled 500 years before, returned to fight for Spain. From now on, innocents would add themselves to the first victims of war.

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