A Living Legacy of Colonialism
By Victor Martinez
The concept of historical continuity and its’ relation to the native peoples of the Americas’ reveals an interesting relationship between the two. Natives of the continent have, for the most part, been physically and mentally displaced from the world they knew. Thousands of years of civilization and history were eclipsed in a relative blink of an eye after the landing of Columbus. A new culture, political structure, language, social hierarchy, and set of borders replaced all existing ones. This drastic change formed new regional and cultural identifications as well. Mexico was created out of an amalgamation of nations and cultures. In the midst of this change, survived subtle links to the past. The new paradigms attempted to disassociate themselves from the influence of the past through blood and fire. Neither genocide, torture, indoctrination, economics, social classes or laws could erase what already existed in the Americas’. To this very day, Mexican culture is a hybrid of native and European culture, and it continues to develop and evolve. This development is not divorced of the history it was meant to eclipse. Instead, the people and culture branch out in new directions, while at the base lies history, as the roots and an influence upon the direction traveled.
History is a subject that plays a significant role in defining humanity. History “suggests the possibility of better understanding ourselves in the present, by understanding the forces, choices, and circumstances that brought us to our current situation” (Little, 2007, p. 1). This suggests that history is a driving force behind the developments in human agency. This presents the question of the more influential factor in social development. One can argue that there is an innate human quality that guides history rather than history being a driving force behind human actions. Given the dramatic paradigm shifts that have taken place in the past couple hundred years, there is enough evidence available to prove that material conditions are significantly influenced by history. The position in which lesser developed nations find themselves today is a good example. Both Africa and Latin America were home to thriving nations with rich culture and significant advances in science, math, architecture and social structures. Today the populations of those regions are among the most impoverished in the world and are relatively underdeveloped. The idea that there is something in the nature of the people who inhabit those regions that fostered those conditions is easily debunked with an analysis of underdevelopment in the respective regions. A historical analysis contextualizes these conditions with a legacy of colonization and continued exploitation by external forces. Karl Marx suggests that culture is shaped by economic and material conditions and has no autonomous tendency to it. This ensures that the result of the struggle will be “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the development of all” (Marx, 1848, p.104).
Natives that originate from what is commonly referred to as, “Latin America” are especially afflicted in the sense of their material conditions. Since the invasion of the Europeans, we have lost land, culture, and identity. Most of us refer to ourselves as “Hispanics” or “Latino.” These terms elucidate the influence of the colonial period on our understanding of ourselves. Hispanic refers to the area of the Iberian Peninsula that the Romans referred to as Hispania and whose European inhabitants would later name Spain. The cultural appropriation is the result of times toll on our collective memory, colonization, cultural colonization, and the fact that over 500 years of occupation have led to the near extermination of the native population as well as the gradual interbreeding of natives and immigrants. This has created new generations of “Raza” who have lost their patrimony and adopted a foreign sense of identity created to subjugate them and relegate them to the lower rungs of a new caste system. Not only have we accepted our displacement but we have adopted the idea of being alien. Natives to the continent are restricted from migrating through their ancestral land despite the hardships imposed on certain regions by a system of exploitation that was also born of an imported and forcefully imposed system. Today Mexico is ravaged by a drug trade in which prices are artificially high because of western legislation. The Mexican economy suffers from hyperinflation exacerbated by policies of western banking institutions while raza makes up the largest growing demographic in the worlds largest prison population, housed in the USA.
The IMF, World Bank, NAFTA, the drug war, and militarization of our lands are all products of our historical exploitation at the hands of the European invaders. U.S. foreign policy has replaced European monarchies and merchants. Spain invested into its’ own decline by spending the wealth accumulated in the Americas’ on British industrialized products. English Foreign Secretary, George Canning, said of Spain’s’ loss in the Americas’ “The deed is done, the nail is driven, Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our affairs sadly, she is English” (Galeano, 1971). The theft of African labor and American resources indirectly helped fuel England’s rise to power, which later spawned the largest empire known in the history of humanity. From thirteen colonies spawned what would become a global empire who oversees a system made to legitimize and perfect the theft that has existed for hundreds of years. A cosmetic change from chattel slavery to the prison industrial complex, or from colonialism to neocolonialism, cannot hide the rotten foundation from which it originates.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language” (Marx,1852)
References
Galeano, E.H., (1971) Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, p.173.
Little, D. (2007) Philosophy of History, p.1.
Marx, K., Engels, F. (1848) The Communist Manifesto, p.104.
Marx, K., (1852) 18th Brumaire of Louis Bona
