Yesteryear's Genocides, Today's Societies

Genocide. Mass murders, greed, robbery, systematic rape. Slavery, destruction of the environment, annihilation of cultural heritage. Nobody could deny that all this happened in America after the Spanish landing. Spaniards did so in the same way that Portuguese, English, French, Dutch did, and all European people who travelled across the ocean from the 16^th century in order to find fortune at any rate. And neither can it be denied that all those atrocities happened on a much larger scale and with even more repulsive methods, during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, throughout North and South  America, within sovereign countries, or at least not linked to the European controlling power.

         I’m reading in the Time magazine that many cities in the United States are embracing the trend of replacing the federal holiday on October 12, Columbus Day, by similar wording to ‘Indigenous People’s Day’. The city of Berkeley was the first one, in the symbolic date of 1992, and in the next years other cities have done so: Seattle and Portland, Ore., Minneapolis and St Paul, Minn., Olympia, Wash. or Albuquerque, NM. And now it’s Denver, Co., where oddly enough who proclaimed before the crowd the new designation for the public holiday, deleting the English name of Columbus, was a councilman named Paul López.

http://time.com/4071362/indigenous-peoples-day-denver/

        

         There are some states that don’t recognized the public holiday, like South Dakota, Alaska or Hawaii. Since 2009 neither does California, since the Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger eliminated this holiday as part of a budget-cutting measure, even though many counties continue to observe it. Actually, the US Congress established Columbus Day as an official public day, in 1968, under the influence of Catholic American Italian lobbies, and that’s why in New York City this is the great Italian holiday of the year, whose parade draws a million people, according to LA Times, what takes part in the debate like all the local press.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-columbus-day-why-do-we-still-celebrate-20151012-htmlstory.html

         Nothing to do with Spain, then. Nothing about claiming the intercontinental feat of yesteryear's Spaniards, who went out to the sea with reckless and adventurous spirit to open the way to the New World in the Old Europe eyes. Not at all. Spain is a bit-part player, perharps a nation of brutal people who came in by boat and used to kill and rape at all times. And very few of Americans know that more than half of the current country’s territory belonged at any time to the Kingdom of Spain, or the fact that the first currency what was used in the US was the Spanish dollar, what bore the emblem of Castile. Furthermore, many Spaniards remained, indeed, not just in the names of several cities but in the own blood of many current America’s inhabitants.

         Spain is this very same kingdom that did not yet exist by the time Columbus embarked, and where population had for sharing not more than famine and misery, and it was the place where these supposedly criminals and genocides came out, the ones that the current American political correctness disparaged. Eduardo Galeano explained in The Open Veins of Latin America something that even many Spaniards know: in detailing the cycle of silver, what started in mining Potosí, in current Bolivia, Galeano warns very graphically that ‘Spain owned the cow, but others drank the milk’.

         On the pithead of that silver mine died around eight million people, sentenced by the greed of Spanish and Creole foremen. But in Spain, the exploitation of those territories meant paradoxically its own ruin: ‘The kingdom’s creditors, mostly foreigners, systematically emptied the strongroom of Seville’s Casa de Contratación, which was supposed to guard, under three keys in three different hands, the treasure flowing from Latin America. The Crown was mortgaged. It owed nearly all of the silver shipments, before they arrive, to German, Genoese, Flemish, and Spanish bankers’, Galeano explains. The same happened in other mines, in Huancavelica, in Guanajuato, in Zacatecas. Spain was an Empire with feet of clay what, because of its rulers’ delusions, devastated a continent and bled through European wars and degraded itself and got poor for centuries. And we all, somewhat, are victims of those episodes. History must be seen with some perspective.

And it’s worth remembering that they were also Spaniards, inheritors of Columbus and his foolish undertaking, so many good men who wanted to know the values of other cultures, who constituted the bedrock of a common mestizo society among peoples from both sides, most typically running risks against solid power structures. Was not Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who opened the way to the Pacific Ocean? It was also from Spain Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who not just learnt the Nahuatl language but he devoted several years to write comprehensive works compiling the indigenous people’s history in Mexico before the conquest.

And Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, who, besides transcribing the Columbus diaries, was the first to denounce the atrocities committed against the indigenous people, contributing they were considered as “humans”. A Spaniard from the island of Majorca was Fray Junípero Serra, founder of the Franciscan Missions that are in the origin of the current State of California. And poet Bernardo de Balbuena, who started a tradition of wonderful in literature that, centuries later, because of the influence of writers from many diverse and related places, transformed our language forever.

         There is no lack of people who denigrate the historical figure of Columbus, here and there, those who are ready to call genocides to the Spaniards who were born 500 years after that Meeting of Two Worlds that changed the development of history of humanity. Having completely forgotten that, for good or for evil, far from identity purity, America and Europe are nowadays what they are because of their mutual interaction for centuries. And denying where we come from is also denying what we really are.