The Children of Columbus

From violent conquest to common culture

Mario Vargas Llosa from the January 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Llosa, my mother's last name, made its way to America in the 17th century, about 100 years after my father's. Llosa was a military bureaucrat. He came from Santillana del Mar in Spain, a spotless little town in the mountains of the Bay of Biscay, and settled in a city in the south of Peru where I was born. He left many descendants who stuck stubbornly to the native soil: priests, nuns, judges, professors, poets, a few madmen, and a couple of military officers.

My grandparents knew every detail of the trials and tribulations of the Llosa family. It was a sheer delight to hear them tell so many tales and anecdotes during my childhood. I remember one story about a young officer, a hero of the war with Chile. And another about an inventor whose experiments caused floods, unintended demolitions of buildings, and the bankruptcy of a company that took his inventions seriously. There was also one about a young woman who was going to enter a cloister when she met and fell in love with Dunquer Lavalle, a composer with whom she led a bohemian life which ended in tragedy.

But the anecdote that fired my imagination and kept me up at night is one I made my grandparents repeat over and over again. It was the story of a relative who told his wife and children he was stepping out for a moment before lunch to buy a newspaper in the arcades of the Plaza de Armas, the town center. They did not hear from him again for 25 years, when they received a letter from France announcing his death. "Why did he go to Paris?" I used to ask my grandmother. "Why else? To become corrupt!" That was, I believe, the origin of my fascination with French culture.

My story, I am sure, is not unusual. South Americans tend to have Spanish, Portuguese, or British ancestors. Many have ancestors stemming from more recent European migrations from Italy, France, Ireland, Germany, Central Europe, and elsewhere. For 500 years the Indians, the Europeans, and the Africans (who arrived in America with the Spanish conquistadors) have mixed to such an extent that most individuals have ancestors of different origins. I hope that this process, mestizaje, as we call it in Spanish, continues. Mestizaje has been faster in countries such as Paraguay and Mexico and slower in Peru and Bolivia. It has been extremely slow in the United States and Canada. But it has been taking place throughout the continent. In South America, it has been so systematic that all European families who have settled in America have some Indian or African background by the second or third generation. Mestizaje works both ways. It would probably be impossible to find "pure Indians," if it makes sense to use the expression at all, because one would need to search for them like a needle in a haystack in the roughest and most remote areas of the Andes, or in the jungles of Central and South America. They exist, but they are a very small minority.

One must understand mestizaje in a literal sense, of course, but it is also a psychological and a cultural fact. Let me illustrate the point with an example. There is a way of being Spanish, open and direct, which any Peruvian or Mexican would find disturbing, even offensive. Where a Spaniard may say "no" we are likely to say "yes...but." We speak in diminutives to dilute conviction. When we express ourselves, we take for granted that the best way to get from point A to point B is not a direct line, but a curve, or better yet, a spiral. We believe we are being thoughtless or impolite when we do not color our statements with doubts, when we do not express ourselves with a measure of restraint. Whether we are Indian, white, black, mulatto, or mestizo, when we Peruvians or Mexicans speak, we are enacting the rituals, the scrupulous and indirect forms of interaction of the Incas, Aztecs, and other pre-Columbian cultures.

But the Indians have also adopted many customs and beliefs that the Europeans brought to America. From social organization to music and dances, from festivals to religions, most practices--and even the native languages--have been profoundly affected by institutions and behaviors brought to America from Europe. Obviously, our population is not a homogeneous one, but mestizaje is irreversible. And because it represents the essence of modern culture, any attempt to slow it down is as useless as it is senseless.

Racists often attempt to cover up this reality. And racism is a human stupidity from which, I am sad to say, neither Anglo nor Latin America--nor any other part of the world--can be exonerated. Prejudice against the Indian, the black, and the Asian is expressed in a thousand ways, some blatant, some subtle, some crafty. One of its expressions is the quiet contempt for the mestizo condition. Since economic powers tend to be concentrated in the white minorities, and there are proportionally far too many Indians and African Americans in the most exploited and discriminated sectors of society, it has been commonplace to perceive racism strictly in terms of the rich discriminating against the poor. But this perception is inaccurate because racism, like mestizaje, can work both ways.

And racism has worked both ways in Latin America, especially among intellectuals. In the 1920s there was, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, a polemic throughout Spanish America between "Indianists" and "Europeanists." It was a sorry example of reciprocal racism.

In the heat of the polemic, a distinguished Peruvian historian called for the destruction of all churches and paintings of the Spanish colonial period because he claimed they were foreign to the American reality. With this logic, he would have also called for the banning of the Spanish language with which he made his proposal. Or, for that matter, the English and Portuguese languages as well. And why not other objects and customs that were not around before the arrival of the Europeans, such as the wheel, writing, the horse, Christianity, and so on and so forth? To be consistent, he would have also called for the re-establishment of human sacrifice and of the Aztec rite whereby an emperor was buried with all of his advisers, his many wives, and his concubines.

Those who express dismay about the crimes and cruelties of the conquistadors against the Incas and Aztecs have good reason to feel solidarity with peoples who suffered in the past. They should, however, be equally outraged about the crimes and cruelties of Incas and Aztecs against the thousands of peoples they subjugated. But they are not. Academics have been itemizing every single crime committed by Europeans with remarkable meticulousness, but they have not shed a single tear for the thousands, for the hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions of Indian men and women who were sacrificed in wars of conquest and in Inca, Maya, Aztec, Chicha, or Tolteca ceremonies re-sembling human barbecues. And yet I am sure that, at least in theory, they would agree that one cannot be selective about moral outrage. Cruelty must be condemned wherever we find it, and it is not fair to elicit sympathy for the victims of a subjugated culture while forgetting the cruelty for which it was also responsible.

I am not arguing against those who wish to remember the arrival of the Spaniards as a bloody period of history in which countless and inexcusable brutalities were committed. I do object, however, to the jump many have made from moral outrage about historical events to the utopian assumption, which sometimes becomes an explicit claim, that we must somehow re-establish
pre-Columbian civilizations as the Europeans found them, as though it were possible to defy the course of history. It is a proposal that leads invariably to actions that make us recoil with horror, such as the atrocities of the Shining Path movement in Peru. I also find it unrealistic to forget that all Americans in the north and in the south, regardless of their color and origins, are products of this saga and its aftermath, for better or for worse.

However, I believe mostly for the better--because those hard, greedy, and sometimes fanatical men brought along to America not only a hunger for wealth, and the unforgiving cross, but also a culture that has been ours ever since. A culture that makes us heirs of Cervantes and of Shakespeare and Adam Smith no more and no less than an inhabitant of Madrid or London. A culture that introduced to human civilization those codes of politics and morality that allow us to condemn powerful nations that abuse the weak, to reject imperialism and colonialism, to stand up for human rights wherever they are violated. The first culture in human history to recognize the rights of our contemporaries and even the rights of our remote ancestors.

The ancient Americans would not have understood how someone could question the right of conquest. They would have found it difficult to figure out why men and women criticize their own nation and express solidarity with its victims in the manner of the great Bartolomé de las Casas, the priest who denounced Spanish brutalities against the Indians in the name of a universal morality superior to the interests of any individual, government, state, or nation.

Liberty, I believe, is the greatest contribution of the culture that created the sovereign individual, the owner of rights that other individuals and the state must respect at all times. The culture that gives liberty an unprecedented and primary role in all realms of life has attained its leading role in science and technology, and has produced an abundance of wealth. Liberty, as historian Fernand Braudel has shown, is the driving force of economic and technological progress. The political expression of this culture is liberal democracy, the system which has prevailed over totalitarianism in a decisive way and which is slowly spreading its benefits throughout the world. With a few pathetic exceptions, democracy is today the system that Latin American nations have made their own.

To revive the absurd polemic between "Indianists" and "Europeanists" as happened during the Quincentenary commemoration is to set up a smoke-screen of pseudo-problems in front of problems that are truly pressing. I am referring not to the cruelties the native populations suffered 500 years ago but to the misery they continue to suffer today, when America is made up of independent republics. It is incumbent upon us to assume responsibility for the discrimination that exists today against cultural and ethnic minorities. This is not an historical debate, but a highly topical issue which will shape our future.