Ch. 1 racial foundations

CHAPTER 1 – Racial Foundations

Las Razas y la Cultura (The Races and the Culture), Jorge Gonzalez Camarena, 1964

“The Indian stands in the same relation to modernity as she did to Spain – willing to marry, to breed, to disappear in order to ensure her inclusion in time; refusing to absent herself from the future. The Indian has chosen to survive, to consort with the living, to live in the city, to crawl on her hands and knees, if need be, to Mexico City or L.A. I take it as an Indian achievement that I am alive, that I am Catholic, that I speak English, that I am an American. My life began, it did not end, in the sixteenth century.”

This map of Mesoamerica breaks the region down into culture areas.

Where is Aztlan? No one really knows – for the Mexica, who took on the additional identity of the ‘people of Aztlan,’ once they had migrated to the Central Plateau where the Valley of Mexico was located, Aztlan was back behind them, to the north, on this map probably somewhere between the word ‘MESOAMERICA’ and the word ‘MEXICO.’ For Mexican-Americans, Aztlan was located somewhere slightly north of MESOAMERICA, somewhere in what is now the American Southwest: southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

For everyone, then and now, Aztlan may have been nothing more than an idea, a state of mind.

Indian culture areas of northern Nueva Espana

Hohokam community, AZ

Gila Cliff Dwellings, Mogollon, NM

Canyon de Chelly, Anasazi, AZ

Mesa Verde, Anasazi, CO

Spain Prior to the Voyage of Christopher Columbus

Menchaca’s text is frustratingly thin on imagery in general, and maps in particular. I’ve included these four maps to help give you a sense of the Iberian Peninsula’s history from the 8th to the 15th centuries. On page 40 of the text, she begins a discuss-ion of the process whereby the area that it today Spain and Portugal were largelyconquered by North

African Muslims. The previous map shows the furthest extent of Moorish (Muslim) conquest, up to about 1000 AD, with the green area being referred to as the Caliphate of Cordova. The map to the left shows the latter period of the Reconquista, during which time the Iberians, in a process that moved from north to south, slowly but surely took back areas of their kingdoms. In this process of reconquest, which came to an end in 1492 prior to the virst voyage of Christopher Columbus, the modern nations of Spain and Portugal were established.

One of the reasons that the Reconquista is important to take into consideration when discussing the the Spanish colonization of the New World and the subsequent conquest of the Aztec Empire, is that it helps to explain, in part, why the Spanish warriors were so determined to defeat the Indians, and not just in Mexico but throughout Spanish America. Great promises had been made by the Iberian leaders to the warriors who fought for them: You have only to defeat the Moorish infidels and you will be greatly rewarded – lands, peasants to work them, great wealth, a noble title, and glory shall all be yours! This promise was made in hundreds of years prior to 1492, and it was repeated and reiterated over the course of many centuries; there were, literally, men

hundreds of years prior to 1492, and it was repeated and reiterated over the course of many centuries; there were, literally, men whose great, great, great, great, great (getting the idea?) grandfathers had first heard this promise, and they had instilled a feverish belief in it in their sons, and so their sons, and so their sons, and so their sons (get it?), and then, when it was all over, that great, big, fat, long-promised and long-dreamed about reward…came to nothing.

You see many kingdoms in Spain here, at the end of the Reconquista, but within a very short time they would all be unified into one political entity, under one king.

Yup. True story. They got gypped, jammed, robbed, and by whom? By the same one-percenters that got everything back then – the monarchy, the nobility, and the Catholic Church. All the lands, hard-working

peasants, money, glory, etc, was in the hands of the men who were already wealthy and powerful in one way or another, and the guys who had fought and sweated and bled and sacrificed for it got...nothing.

Now what came of this? You MIGHT think they revolted, rose up against those weasels that had cheated them, but no, they couldn;t do that – they were good Catholics, let us say HARDCORE Catholics, Catholics who had fought, as Catholics, for all of their lives, and their male ancestors for all of THEIR lives, to get rid of

the Moors and regain their kingdoms in the name of God and the Catholic Church. So however angry they were when told that this was God’s plan, and etc, by Holy Mother Church? Well, they just had to grit their

teeth and put up with it.

But when opportunity presented itself in the form of the New World...when Columbus, and then other sea captains, came back, with stories, of all of the promise and possiblity of the New World – the promise and

possiblity of yes, you guessed it: land, and peasants (well, Indians) to work it; and wealth to flow from that; and maybe a noble titled if one were successful enough; and the glory that would accompnay all of this...do

you think they wavered? Do you think they were fearful? Do you think that they were going to let ANYTHING stand between them and all of the everything they had been promised, even if they had to coross

an ocean to a strange new world to get it? Trust me – they did not hesitate, not for one minute.

West African trade routes in the 15th century

The number of African slaves brought to Mexico is a matter of some conjecture, but the generally agreed-upon figure is appr. 200,000. When you look at the map to the right, you see specific numbers established for many regions of the Western world, but not for Mexico. The reason for this is because Mexico was almost entirely a secondary destination, and not a main entry point for slave traders. The great majority of African slaves that arrived in Mexico came from one of the Caribbean islands, and as a

result of this being a “secondary trade,” the importance of thorough keeping of records was minimized. As a result, historians have had to employ a variety of painstaking methods to arrive at any sort of figure, consulting less-trustworthy sources of information such as journals, diaries, Church records, newspapers (such as they were), and often working backward from census numbers recorded at various points in colonial Mexican history. The end result of all of this is, as I said earlier, imperfect, but it is the best that we have at the moment.