The Mixed Breed (El Mestizaje)
From the beginning, from the discovery to the
conquest, it was the Castilian and British, or Latins and Saxons, to include the Portuguese on one
hand and the Hollander on the other, who completed the task of
initiating a new period of history conquering and populating the new
hemisphere. Although they might only see themselves as colonizers,
transplanters of culture, in reality they were establishing the foundation of a
phase of general and definitive transformation. The so-called Latins,
possessors of genius and daring, took possession of the best regions, the ones
thought to be the richest, and the English, then, had to be content with what
was left to them by people more competent. Neither Spain or Portugal
allowed the Saxon near their domains, war aside, not even to take part in
commerce. The Latin predominance was unquestionable in the initial
years. No one could have suspected at the time of the papal decision,
Alexander VI, 1494, which divided the New World between Portugal and Spain,
that centuries later, it no longer would be a Portuguese nor Spanish New World,
but rather English. No one would have imagined that the humble colonists
of the Hudson and the Delaware, peaceful and industrious, would gradually take
over step by step, the better and greater extensions of the land, till the
Republic was formed that today constitutes one of the major empires in History.
The struggle of Latinity against Saxonism has come to be, continues to be in
our time, a clash of institutions, objectives, and ideals. Crisis of a
secular struggle which began with the disastrous destruction of the Invincible
Armada was aggravated by the defeat at Trafalgar. But since then the site
of the conflict began to shift and moves to the new continent, where it had yet
fatal episodes. The defeats at Santiago de Cuba, Cavite and Manila are
distant but logical echoes of the Invincible Armada and Trafalgar
catastrophes. And the conflict is now totally established in the New
World. In History, the centuries are often as days; there is nothing
strange to our inability to live down the defeat. Our discouragement
crosses epochs, we continue to lose, not only geographic sovereignty, but also
the power of our morale. Far from feeling united facing the disaster, our
will is scattered toward small and useless ends. The defeat has confused our
values and concepts; the diplomacy of the victors deceives us after defeating
us; commerce wins us over with its small advantages. Stripped of our
former greatness, we are proud of a patriotism exclusively national, and don't
even notice the dangers that threaten our race as a whole. We deny one
another. The defeat has degraded us to the point, that, unaware, we aid
and abet the goals of our political enemies, beating us one by one, offering
particular advantages to each of our brothers, while another is sacrificed in
its vital interests. They've not only defeated us in combat , they are winning
ideologically as well. The major battle was lost the day each Iberian
republic ventured an independent life, a life
detached from his brothers, arranging treaties and receiving false benefits,
without attention to the interest in common to the race. The creators of
our nationalism were, unwittingly, the best allies of the Saxon, our rival for
possession of the continent. The display of our twenty flags in the Unión
Panamericana de Washington we should view as a joke played by our very able
enemies. Nevertheless, we boast, each of us, of our humble cloth that
says vain illusion, and not even blush at evidence of our discord in front of a
strong North American Union. We fail to see the contrast between the
Saxon unity and the anarchy and solitude of the Ibero-American coat of arms.
Not even the unity of the five Central American states has been possible,
because a stranger has not given consent, and because we lack the true
patriotism to sacrifice the present for the future. A shortage of
creative thought and an excessive criticizing zeal, that of course we borrowed
from other cultures, takes us to futile discussions, in which the community of
our aspiration is negated as soon as it is affirmed; but we don't notice that
when the time for action comes, in spite of all the doubts of learned Englishmen,
the English seek the alliance of his brothers in America and Australia, and
then the Yankee feels as English as the Englishman in England. We will
not gain stature while the Spaniard of America does not feel as Spanish as the
sons of Spain. Which does not keep us form being different each time it
is necessary, but without straying from the highest mission of the
community. Thus, we must proceed if we are to prevent the triumph of
Saxon culture in America without opposition. Its useless to imagine other
solutions. Civilization cannot be improvised or truncated, nor can it be
made to start from the paper of a political constitution; it always derives
from a long, from a secular preparation and depuration of elements that are
transmitted and are combined from the beginnings of History. That is why
it is so awkward to mark the beginning of our patriotism with the "cry of
independence" made by father Hidalgo, or with the conspiracy of Quito; or
with the exploits of Bolivar, so if not rooted in Cuauhtémoc and in Atahualpa
it will not have support, and at the same time it is necessary to take it back
to its Hispanic fountainhead and educate it in the lessons we should derive
from the defeats, that are ours as well, the defeats of the Invincible Armada
and Trafalgar. If our patriotism does not identify with the diverse
stages of the old Latin and Saxon conflict, we will never see it overcome the
image of a regionalism without universal courage and we will see it fatally
degenerate into a narrow and provincial shortsightedness and in impotent
inertia of a mollusk attached to its rock. To avoid the occasion to
disown the motherland itself it is necessary that we live according to the
highest interest of the race, even when it is not yet the highest of humanity.
It is clear that the heart only agrees with a complete internationalism; but in
today's world circumstances, internationalism would serve to complete the
triumph of stronger nations; it would only serve the goals of the
English. The Russians themselves with their two hundred million
population, have had to postpone their theoretic internationalism, to devote
themselves to the support of oppressed nationalities such as India and
Egypt. And at the same time reinforced their own nationalism as a safe
guard to a disintegration that could only benefit the big imperialist
states. It would be infantile, then, for weak states like ours to
renounce all that is truly theirs, in the name of purposes that could not
become a reality. The state of civilization today still imposes
patriotism as a need to defend material and moral interests, but it is
indispensable that patriotism pursue great and transcendental aims.
Its mission was truncated in a certain sense with Independence, and now we must
return it to its historic universal destiny.
The first stage of the profound conflict was decided in Europe and it was ours
to lose. Then when all advantages were on our side in the New World, now
that Spain had dominated America, the Napoleonic stupidity was the cause for
Louisiana to be handed over to the English on the other side of the ocean, to
the Yankees, which decided in favor of the Saxon the fate of the New
World. The "war genius' couldn't see beyond the miserable frontier
disputes between the petty states of Europe and wasn't aware that the cause of
Latinity, which he claimed to represent, became a failure the very day he
proclaimed his Empire by the mere fact that destinies in common were entrusted
to an incompetent bungler. On the other hand, European prejudice obscured
the fact that in America already laid out, with universal characteristics, was
the conflict that Napoleon was unable to conceive in all its
transcendency. The Napoleonic stupidity was unable to suspect that it was
in the New World where the destinies of European races would be decided, and
that by destroying in a most irresponsible manner the power of France in
America, he also weakened the Spaniards; he betrayed us, he put us at the mercy
of the common enemy. Without Napoleon the United States would not have
become a world empire, and Louisiana, still French, would have to be part of
the Latin American Confederation. Trafalgar then would be
disregarded. None of this was even thought of because the destiny of the race
was in the hands of a fool; because Caesarism is the lash of the Latin race.
Napoleon's betrayal of the world wide destiny of France also mortally wounded
the Spanish Empire of America at its most vulnerable time. The English
speaking people seized Louisiana without a struggle, saving their resources for
a now easy conquest of Texas and California. Without the Mississippi
base, the English, who are also called Yankees just for variety, would not have
gained possession of the Pacific, they would not be today the masters of the
continent, they would have remained, in a sort, a Holland transplanted in
America, and the New World would be Spanish and French. Bonaparte made it
Saxon.
It is clear that not just the external causes, treaties, war and politics
resolved the destiny of the states. The Napoleons are a mere outer sign
of vanities and corruptions. The decadence of customs, the loss of public
liberties and ignorance in general seem to paralyze the energy of an entire
race at determined epoch.
The Spaniards went to the New World with determination left over from the
successful Reconquista. The free men who were named Cortez,
Pizarro, Alvarado and Belalcázar were not Caesars nor lackeys, but great
captains that to a destructive impetus added a creative genius. Following
a victory they sketched a map of the new cities and redacted the statutes of
their founding. Later, at the time of bitter disputes with the Metropoli
(Madrid) they new how to retaliate insult for insult, as Pizarro did in a
famous trial. All of them felt to be equals before the king, as the Cid
had felt as the great writer of the Golden Age, as all free men feel in the
great epochs.
But as the conquest came to completion, all of the new organization kept
falling into the hands of courtiers and favorites of the king. Men
incapable of, not to mention, conquering, but not even able to defend what
others conquered with talent and daring. Degenerate courtiers, able to
oppress and humble the natives, but submissive to the royal power, they and
their masters did nothing but ruin the work of Spanish genius in America.
The prodigious work initiated by the ironlike conquistadors and completed by
the wise and self-sacrificing missionaries was gradually nullified. A
series of foreign monarchs so justly painted by Velázquez and Goya, keeping
company with dwarfs, buffoons and courtiers completed the disaster of the
colonial administration. The mania for imitating the Roman Empire, that
has caused so much damage equally in Spain, Italy and France; militarism and
absolutism, brought the decadence in the same epoch in which rivals,
strengthened by virtue, grew and expanded in liberty.
Together with material strength they developed a practical ingenuity, the
intuition of success. The first colonizers of New England and Virginia
left England but only to grow better and become stronger. The political
separation has never been between them an obstacle to agreement and unity when
a matter of common ethnic mission arises. The emancipation, instead of
debilitating the race, branched it, multiplied it, overflowed it powerful on
top of the world, from an impressive nucleus of one of the great empires of all
time, and since then, what the island Englishman doesn't conquer, the
Englishman of the new continent takes and keeps.
On the other hand, we Spaniards, by blood or by culture, at the moment of
emancipation we begin to renounce our traditions; we break with the past and
needed the one that renounced his blood saying it would have been better had
the conquerors of our regions been English. Treasonable words that are
excused by the act that breeds tyranny, and by the blindness brought by the
defeat. But to lose in this manner the historic feeling of a race is like
an absurdity, it's the same as disclaiming strong and wise fathers, when it is
we ourselves, not they, who are responsible for the decadence.
In every way, the "dispanishizing" sermons and the correlative
"anglosizing," ably propagated by the English themselves, perverted
our judgment from the start; made us forget that in the grievances of Trafalgar
we also have a part. The insertion of English officers into the General
Staffs of the warriors for Independence it would have ended in our dishonor,
were it not for the ancient, haughty blood that came to life in the face of
insult and punished the pirates from England each time they came near bent on
plunder. The ancestral rebelliousness knew to respond with cannon salvos
the same in Buenos Aires as in Veracruz, in Havana, or in Campeche and Panamá,
each time the English corsair, disguised as a pirate to elude the
responsibilities of failure, attacked, confident of gaining, if he was
victorious, a place of honor in the British nobility.
In spite of this firm cohesion before the enemy invader, our war of
independence became diminished by provincialism and by the absence of
transcendental plans. The race that had dreamed with the world empire,
the supposed descendents of Roman glory, fell to the puerile satisfaction of
creating tiny nations and petty sovereignties, encouraged by souls that saw a
wall in every mountain range and not the summit. Our emancipators dreamed
Balkan glories, with the distinguished exception of Bolivar, Sucre and Petition
el Negro, and half a dozen others, at most. But the others, obsessed by
the local concept and entangled in a confused pseudo revolutionary phraseology,
only kept busy belittling a conflict that could have been the start of the awakening
of a continent. Divide, shatter the dream of a great Latin power, that
seemed to be the purpose of certain practical ignorant men that collaborated in
the Independence, and within that movement deserve a place of honor, but they
didn't know, they didn't even want to listen to the touch of genius warnings of
Bolivar.
Of course in all social processes one must bear in mind the profound,
inevitable causes, that determine a given moment. Our geography for
example, was and continues to be an obstacle to our unity; but if we are to
overcome it, it will be necessary that we get our spirits in harmony, purging
ideas and pointing out precise directions. As long as concepts are not
corrected, it will not be possible to work on the physical means in such a way
that we make it serve our purposes.
In Mexico, for example, except for Mina, hardly anyone gave a thought to the
interests of the continent; worst yet, the indigenous patriotism showed,
throughout a century, that we won our independence from Spain thanks to the
indomitable valor of our soldiers, and almost no mention is made of the Cortes
de Cádiz, or the uprising against Napoleon, that electrifies the race, nor the
triumphs and martyrdom of our brother states on the continent. This sin,
in common with each of our motherland, is the result of epochs in which history
is written to flatter the despots. Then the chauvinists are content with
presenting their heroes as units of a continental movement, and presents them
as being autonomous, unaware that proceeding in this manner belittles them
instead of magnifying them.
These aberrations are also explained because the indigenous elements had not
yet merged, it has not fused totally even today, with the Spanish blood; but
this discord is more apparent than real. Talk to the most exalted
Indianist of the advisability of adapting to the Latinity and he will not
oppose the least objection; tell him that our culture is Spanish and at once he
will raise objections. The trace of spilled blood subsists; accursed
traces that the centuries do not erase, but that the common danger should
annul. And their is no other recourse. The selfsame poor Indians
are Hispanicized, are Latinized, as the environment is Latinized. Say
what you will, the American Indians, the celebrated atlantes from whom the
Indians derive, fell asleep thousands of years ago never to awaken. In
history there is not return, because all of it is transformation and
newness. No race returns; each one establishes their mission, completes
it and departs. This verity is the rule of biblical times as well as
ours; all ancient historians have formulated the theory. The days of the
pure whites, the winners of today, are numbered as were those of their antecedents.
On fulfillment of their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have
placed, unwittingly, the foundations of a new age, a period of fusion and
merging of all peoples. The Indian has no other door to the future than
the door of modern culture, nor any other path than the path already cleared by
the Latin civilization. Also the white must lay down his arrogance, and
will search for progress and subsequent redemption in the soul of his brothers
of the other castes, and he will be indistinguishable and he will improve in
each of the superior varieties of the species, in each one of the new forms of
beings that change in many ways the revelation and make more powerful the
genius--human creative inspiration.
No comments:
Post a Comment