FABLES, LABELS, AND SIMPLE UNABLES
In the Americas and Europe the police hunt stereotypes guilty of wearing an unconcealed face. Every nonwhite suspect confirms the rule written in invisible ink in the depths of our collective conscience: crime is black or brown, or at least yellow.
This demonization ignores history. Over the past five centuries, white crimes aren’t hard to find. No more than one-fifth of the world’s population in the Renaissance, whites already claimed to embody God’s will. In his name they exterminated untold millions of Indians in the Americas and abducted untold millions of blacks from Africa. White of skin were the kings, vampires, and flesh traders who founded hereditary slavery in the Americas and Africa, so that the children of slaves would be born slaves in the mines and on the plantations. White were the authors of the countless acts of barbarism that civilization committed over the centuries, imposing white imperial power on the four corners of the earth by blood and fire. White were the heads of state and the warrior chiefs who, with a hand from the Japanese, organized and executed two world wars in the twentieth century, killing sixty-four million people, most of them civilians. And white were those who planned and carried out the Holocaust against the Jews, Reds, Gypsies, and gays in the Nazi death camps.
The certainty that some are born to be free and others to be slaves has guided all empires since the world began. But it was with the Renaissance and the conquest of the Americas that racism became a system of moral absolution at the service of European gluttony. Since then, racism has ruled, dismissing majorities among the colonized and excluding minorities among the colonizers. In the colonial era racism was as essential as gunpowder, and in Rome pope after pope slandered God by attributing to him the order to loot and plunder.
In America a new vocabulary was invented to locate people on the social scale according to their degree of degradation by miscegenation. “Mulatto” was, and is, a mixture of white and black, an evident allusion to the mule, the sterile offspring of a male donkey and a mare. Other terms classified the thousand colors engendered by the successive embraces of Europeans, Americans, and Africans in the New World: English names like half-caste, quadroon, octoroon, mustee, sambo, griffe, or the Spanish castizo, cuarterón, quinterón, morisco, cholo, albino, lobo, zambaigo, cambujo, albarazado, barcino, coyote, chamiso, zambo, jíbaro, tresalbo, jarocho, lunarejo, and rayado. And there were Spanish names meaning “turn-back,” “there-you-stay,” “hang-in-the-air,” and “I-don’t-understand-you,” to baptize the fruits of these tropical salsas and to define greater or lesser degrees of hereditary damnation.
Identity
Where are my ancestors? Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material? My first American ancestor … was an Indian, an early Indian; your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan.
— Mark Twain, who was white, in the New York Times, December 26, 1881
Of all the names, “I-don’t-understand-you” is the most revealing. In the five centuries since the so-called discovery of America, we’ve had nothing but I-don’t-understand-yous. Christopher Columbus thought that the Indians were from India, that Cubans lived in China and Haitians in Japan. His brother Bartholomew burned six Indians alive when all they had done was bury Catholic medallions so the new gods would make their crops fertile. When the conquistadors arrived on the eastern coast of Mexico they asked, “What is this place?” The natives answered, “We don’t understand a thing,” which in the Mayan language sounded like “Yucatan,” and that is what the region has been called ever since. When the conquistadors reached the heart of South America they asked, “What is this lake?” The natives answered, “Water, sir?” which in the Guaraní language sounded like “Ypacaraí,” the name promptly conferred on the lake near Asunción, Paraguay. Indians were always beardless, but in his Dictionnaire universel of 1694 Antoine Furetière described them as “furry and covered with hair,” because the European iconographic tradition held that savages were always hairy like monkeys. In 1774, the priest charged with teaching catechism in the town of San Andrés Itzapa in Guatemala discovered that the Indians worshiped not the Virgin Mary but the serpent crushed under her foot, the serpent being a Mayan divinity. He also discovered that they venerated the cross because it was shaped like the sacred meeting of the rain and the earth. At the same time in the German city of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant, who had never been to America, declared that Indians were “incapable of civilization” and were destined to be exterminated. In fact, extermination was occurring, though it had little to do with their nature: not many Indians survived the harquebusades and cannonades, the attacks of virus and bacteria unknown in the Americas, and the endless days of forced labor in the fields and in the gold and silver mines. Many were condemned to the lash, the stake, or the gallows for the sin of idolatry. Those “incapable of civilization” lived in communion with nature and believed, like many of their descendants today, that the earth is sacred, as is all that walks on it or grows from it.
Century after century, the whites kept getting it wrong. At the end of the nineteenth century, the military campaigns to annihilate the Indians in southern Argentina were called “the conquest of the desert,” even though Patagonia was less deserted then than it is today. A few years ago the Argentine civil registry refused to accept indigenous names “because they are foreign.” Anthropologist Catalina Buliubasich discovered that the registry was giving undocumented Indians from highlands near Salta birth certificates on which their aboriginal names were exchanged for unforeign ones like Chevroleta, Ford, Twenty-Seven, Eight, and Thirteen. Some were even rebaptized Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the whole shebang, in homage to the founding father who felt nothing but disgust for the native population.
For the Course on Penal Law
In 1986, a Mexican congressman visited the jail in Cerro Hueco, in Chiapas. There he found a Tzotzil Indian who had slit his father’s throat and been sentenced to thirty years. But every day at noon, as the congressman discovered, the dead father brought tortillas and beans to his son in jail.
The Tzotzil prisoner had been interrogated and judged in Spanish, of which he understood little or nothing, and with the help of a good beating he confessed to something called parricide.
Today, Indians are considered deadwood in the economies that live off their hard labor, and a millstone for the plastic culture to which these countries aspire. In Guatemala, one of the few countries where Indians managed to recover from their demographic catastrophe, they suffer mistreatment as an excluded minority even though they are the majority. Mestizos and whites (or those who call themselves white) dress and live (or wish they could dress and live) Miami-style so that they won’t look like Indians, while thousands of foreigners make the pilgrimage to the market at Chichicastenango, a pillar of world beauty, to buy the marvels woven by indigenous artists. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who took power in 1954, dreamed of turning Guatemala into Disneyland. To save the Indians from ignorance and backwardness, the colonel proposed “awakening their aesthetic sense,” as an official pamphlet explained, “by teaching them weaving, embroidery, and other trades.” Death surprised him in the midst of this task.