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.
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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.
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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.
“You look like an Indian” or “You smell like a black,” say some mothers in countries with a large Indian or black presence when their children don’t want to take a bath. Yet the chroniclers of the Conquest noted the Spaniards’ astonishment at the frequency with which Indians bathed. It was Indians, and later African slaves, who had the courtesy to pass their hygienic habits on to other Americans from Canada to Chile.
The Christian faith distrusted bathing, suspecting it of being a sin because it felt so good. In Spain during the Inquisition, frequent bathers, accused of Moslem heresy, could end up burned at the stake. In Spain today, someone is a real Arab if he vacations at Marbella on the Costa del Sol, but a poor Arab is just a Moor, perhaps “a stinking Moor.” Anyone who has visited the Alhambra, that festival of water in Granada, knows Islam has been a culture of water since way back when Christians wouldn’t touch it except to drink. In reality, showers became popular in Europe quite recently, more or less at the same time as television.
They say Indians are supposed to be cowards and blacks easily frightened, but they’ve always been good cannon fodder in wars of conquest, wars of independence, civil wars, and border wars in Latin America. The Spanish used Indian soldiers to massacre Indians during the Conquest. The nineteenth-century wars of independence were a hecatomb for Argentine blacks, who were always sent to the front lines. In the war against Paraguay, the bodies of black Brazilians littered the battlefields. Indians were the troops Peru and Bolivia used in the war against Chile. “That abject and degraded race,” as Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma called them, were sent to the slaughterhouse as the officers fled shouting “Long live the fatherland!” More recently, it was Indians who died in the war between Ecuador and Peru and Indian soldiers who destroyed Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands. For their mestizo officers each crime was a grisly rite meant to exorcise half their blood.
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The Goddess
On the night celebrating Iemanyá, the entire coast is a feast. Bahía, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and other shores celebrate the goddess of the sea. Crowds turn the beach into a sea of candles and the waters into a garden of flowers and perfumes, necklaces, cakes, candies, and other trifles and treats she may fancy.
Then the worshipers make a wish:
The map of buried treasure,
The key to forbidden love,
The return of the lost,
The resurrection of the dead.
The worshipers ask and their wishes come true. Perhaps the miracle lasts no longer than it takes to utter the words that name it, but in that fleeting moment when the impossible happens, the worshipers shine with their own light, luminous in the dark.
Once the waves have carried away their offerings, the worshipers retreat, their eyes on the horizon, so as not to turn their backs on the goddess. And very slowly they return to the city.
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The same people who claim blacks are lazy also say admiringly, “He works like a black.” They say, “Whites run, blacks flee.” The white who runs was robbed; the black who flees is a thief. Even Martín Fierro, the character from the Argentine literary classic, who best embodies all poor and persecuted gauchos, thinks blacks are thieves created by the Devil to the disgrace of hell. Indians, too: “The Indian is Indian and will not try/To change his ways so forlorn/An Indian thief he was first born/And like an Indian thief he will die.” Black thief, Indian thief: the I-don’t-understand-you tradition insists that thieves be the ones who are robbed the most.
Since the days of conquest and slavery, Indians and blacks have been robbed of their hands and their lands, their labor and their wealth—their words and memory as well. In the Rio de la Plata, “quilombo” now means brothel, chaos, disorder, confusion, but this Bantu word really meant training camp. In Brazil, quilombos were the sanctuaries founded in the jungle by fugitive slaves, some of which lasted a long time. The free kingdom of Palmares in the hinterlands of Alagoas lasted an entire century, resisting more than thirty military expeditions by the armies of Holland and Portugal. The true history of the conquest and colonization of America is a story of unceasing dignity. There was not a day without rebellion. Yet official history has erased every one of those uprisings with the disdain reserved for ill-mannered servants. After all, when blacks and Indians refused to accept slavery or forced labor as their fate, they were trying to subvert the organizing principles of the universe. Between the amoeba and God, universal order was founded on a long chain of successive subordinations: like the planets that orbit the sun, serfs revolved around their lords. Social inequality and racial discrimination are still an integral part of the harmony of the cosmos, and not only in the Americas. As Italian politician Pietro Ingrao noted in 1995: “I have a Philippine maid at home. It’s so strange. It’s hard for me to imagine a Philippine family that would have a white maid in their home.”
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Hell
In colonial times, Palenque was a sanctuary of freedom deep in the jungle, a refuge for fugitive black slaves from Cartagena de Indias and the plantations of the Colombian coast.
Years have gone by, centuries, and Palenque survives. The people of Palenque continue to believe that the earth, their earth, is a body made of fields, jungles, wind, people, that it breathes through trees and cries through streams. They continue to believe that those who have enjoyed life will be rewarded in paradise and those who haven’t will burn in hell, in the eternal fire reserved for the cold women and men who disobeyed the sacred voices that command us to live life with pleasure and passion.
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Thinkers capable of elevating the prejudices of the ruling class to the category of science have never been lacking, but in nineteenth-century Europe they were particularly bountiful. The philosoph
er Auguste Comte, a founder of modern sociology, believed in the superiority of the white race and the perpetual childhood of women. Like nearly all his colleagues, Comte harbored no doubts about one essential principle: white men are the most fit to rule over those condemned to the lower rungs of the social ladder.
Cesare Lombroso turned racism into criminology. To demonstrate the innate dangerousness of “primitive savages,” this Italian professor, who happened to be Jewish, developed a method quite similar to the one Hitler would use half a century later to justify anti-Semitism. According to Lombroso, criminals are born criminals and the animal features that give them away are the very same ones that black Africans and American Indians inherited from the Mongoloid race. Murderers have high cheekbones, frizzy black hair, sparse beards, large incisors. Robbers have flat noses; rapists, swollen lips and eyelids. Like savages, criminals do not blush, which allows them to lie shamelessly. Women do blush, though Lombroso discovered that “even women considered normal have some criminal features.” Revolutionaries, too: “I have never seen an anarchist with a symmetrical face.”
Herbert Spencer attributed to the empire of reason inequalities that today spring from the law of the market. Though a century has passed, some of his truths sound rather modern, well suited to our neoliberal days. According to Spencer the state ought to remain on the margins and not interfere with the processes of “natural selection” that give power to the strongest and best-endowed. Social welfare only adds to the herd of lazy bums, and public education sows discontent. The state ought to stick to instructing “inferior races” in manual trades and keeping them away from alcohol.
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Heroes and Villains
Inside some athletes lives a crowd. In the forties, when blacks couldn’t even share a cemetery with whites in the United States, Jackie Robinson was a baseball star. Millions of oppressed blacks found dignity through this athlete who shone like no one else in an exclusively white sport. Fans threw insults and peanuts at him; players spat on him; death threats welcomed him home.
In 1996, while the world was busy acclaiming Nelson Mandela and his long struggle against racism, the athlete Josia Thugwane became the first black South African to win an Olympic medal. Over the past few years, it has become normal for Olympic medals to end up in the hands of Kenyans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Burundis, or South Africans. Tiger Woods, the Mozart of golf, is a star in a rich white sport, and for years now basketball and boxing have been dominated by blacks. Blacks and mulattos are the players who give soccer most of its joy and beauty.
In racism’s doublespeak, it is perfectly acceptable to applaud successful blacks and damn the rest. At the World Cup won by France in 1998, nearly all the players in blue who started each match to the tune of the “Marseillaise” were immigrants. A poll taken during the Cup confirmed that four of every ten people in France harbor racial prejudice, but every Frenchman celebrated that triumph as if those blacks and Arabs were the sons of Joan of Arc.
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As when the police conduct a search, racism finds whatever it has planted. Until the early years of the twentieth century, weighing brains was a common way of measuring intelligence. This scientific method, which gave rise to obscene exhibitions of encephalitic matter, demonstrated that Indians, blacks, and women had rather light brains. Gabriel René Moreno, the great intellectual of nineteenth-century Bolivia, proved, scale in hand, that Indian and mestizo brains weighed five to ten ounces less than white brains. The weight of the brain has about as much to do with intelligence as the size of the penis does with sexual ability—in other words, none. But scientists tracked down famous brains, undaunted by disconcerting results. The brain of Anatole France, for example, weighed half as much as Ivan Turgenev’s, even though their literary merits were considered more or less the same.
A century ago in Paris, Alfred Binet invented the first IQ test, with the laudable objective of identifying children who needed more help from their teachers. The inventor was the first to say that this instrument was of no use in measuring intelligence, which cannot be measured, and should not be used to disqualify anyone from anything. But by 1913, U.S. officials were already using the Binet test at the very gates of New York, right near the Statue of Liberty, on recently arrived Jewish, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian immigrants. They found that eight out of every ten immigrants had the minds of children. Three years later, Bolivian authorities put the test to work in the public schools of Potosí: eight out of every ten children there were abnormal. And ever since, racial and social prejudice has relied on the scientific aura of intellectual coefficients, treating people as if they were numbers. In 1994, The Bell Curve was a spectacular best-seller in the United States. Written by two university professors, it proclaimed unabashedly what many thought but didn’t dare say above a whisper: that blacks and poor people have lower IQs than whites and the rich thanks to their genetic makeup. To waste money on education and social assistance for them would be like throwing water into the sea. The poor, especially those with black skin, are donkeys, and not because they’re poor. Rather they’re poor because they’re donkeys.
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Names
The marathon runner Doroteo Guamuch, a Quiché Indian, was the greatest athlete in Guatemalan history. Since he was the pride and glory of his country, he had to change his Mayan name and call himself Mateo Flores.
In homage to his feats, the country’s largest soccer stadium was named Mateo Flores while the man himself earned his living as a caddy, carrying clubs and collecting balls and tips at the Mayan Golf Club.
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Racism only acknowledges evidence that supports its own prejudices. African art has been a primordial source of inspiration for, and often the object of blatant plagiarism by, the most famous painters and sculptors of the twentieth century. And where would we be without the music that came out of Africa to spawn new magic in Brazil, the United States, and the Caribbean? African rhythms saved the world from dying of boredom or sorrow. Nevertheless, to Jorge Luis Borges, Arnold Toynbee, and many other worthy modern intellectuals, the cultural sterility of blacks was self-evident.
In the Americas, our culture is the daughter of several mothers. Our multiple identity gains its creative vitality from the fertile contradiction of its parts. But we have been trained not to see ourselves, not to see the full splendor of the human condition in all its glory. The Americas are sick with racism, blind in both eyes from North to South. Latin Americans of my generation were educated by Hollywood. Indians were guys with long faces wearing feathers and war paint, seasick from riding in circles. Of Africa all we knew was what we learned from Professor Tarzan, the invention of a novelist who never set foot on that continent.
Non-European cultures are not seen as cultures but as catch basins of ignorance, useful at best for proving the impotence of inferior races, or attracting tourists, or giving holiday parties a decorative touch. But in the real garden of mestizo culture, indigenous and African roots flower with as much potency as their European counterparts. Their bountiful fruits can be plainly seen not only in high art but in arts scorned as handicrafts and in religions dismissed as superstition. Those roots, ignored but not ignorant, feed the daily lives of people of flesh and blood even if some don’t realize it or would rather not see it. They are alive in the languages that reveal who we are by what we say and what we keep silent, in our ways of eating and preparing what we eat, in the melodies that make us dance, the games that make us play, and the thousand and one secret or shared ceremonies that help us live.
For centuries the divinities that came from the American past and the coasts of Africa were outlawed and lived in hiding. Although they are still disdained today, many believing whites and mestizos pay them homage or acknowledge them and ask their favors. In the Andean countries, it’s not only Indians who tilt their glasses and allow the first swallow to spill so that Pachamama, goddess of the earth, may drink. On the islands of the Caribbean and the Atlantic coasts of South Ame
rica, it’s no longer only blacks who offer flowers and treats to Iemanyá, goddess of the sea. The days are over when Indian and black gods had to dress up as Christian saints in order to exist. Still, they remain objects of scorn by official culture. In our alienated societies, trained for centuries to spit in the mirror, it isn’t easy to accept that religions which originated in the Americas or came on slave ships from Africa are as worthy of respect as Christianity. Not more, but not a bit less. Religions? Those superstitions? Those pagan exaltations of nature, those dangerous celebrations of human passion? Picturesque, maybe even pleasant, but deep down what are they? Just expressions of ignorance and backwardness.
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Justice
In 1997, an expensive new car with official plates traveled at a normal speed down a São Paulo avenue. Three men rode inside. At a corner they were stopped by a policeman who made them get out and stand against the car, hands in the air, for over an hour while he asked them again and again where they had stolen the car.
The three men were black. One of them, Edivaldo Brito, was the head of the São Paulo Justice Department. For Brito this was nothing new. In less than a year it had already happened five times.
The policeman who stopped them was also black.