Heritage II

Issues in Cultural Interactions: Latin America

Remains of the San Ignacio Mini Jesuit Mission built in 1695 in Argentina. By 1733 there were 3,300 Guaraní Indian inhabitants at the mission.

Photo by Jeffrey Roberg and Penny Seymoure, Summer 2003

HERITAGE II TEXTS

• Heritage Guide: An Odyssey in Learning, 2007-2008 (Online)
• Heritage Reader, 2007-2008
• M. Leon-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (history)
• A. Crosby, The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians (history)
• R. Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (autobiography)
• Pablo Neruda, Memoirs (autobiography), Excerpts
• D. Hacker, A Writer's Reference. Fifth Edition.

Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand your own. I am also convinced that all one ever gets from studying a foreign culture is token understanding. The ultimate reason for such study is to learn how one's system works.

(Edward Hill)

In Heritage I, you examined what a community is and how an individual accommodates the strictures of living within a community. Now in Heritage II, you will focus on the complexity of cross-cultural interactions. Heritage II focuses on encounters between individuals and communities from different cultures, in particular Asian and Latin American cultures. Examining what it means to have a cultural legacy--a heritage--within a complex global community, students are challenged to make intellectual and personal sense of one or more cultures beyond the Western world. Students in Heritage II will explore the following questions: How do you fit into the world? What is culture? What are the "stumbling blocks" to understanding people from other cultures? What does it mean to be a global citizen? In particular, the course fosters global thinking, problem solving, understanding, and communication by engaging questions of individuality and community, tradition and innovation, status quo and change, rationality and spirituality, and conflict and cooperation. Your sustained encounter with Latin American societies this term will further your awareness of your own cultural identity, values, and assumptions. As always, the process of inquiry demands that you once again question who you are, your role in a community, and what happens when you encounter others whose views are different. To that end, you will be reading selections from Leon-Portilla's The Broken Spears, Crosby's The Columbian Voyages, Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú, and Neruda's Memoirs.

"The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world,
and become one's key to the experience of others."

(James Baldwin)

The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico

"Ten years before the Spaniards first came here, a bad omen appeared in the sky. It was like a flaming ear of corn, or a fiery signal, or the blaze of daybreak; it seemed to bleed fire, drop by drop, like a wound in the sky....The people clapped their hands against their mouths; they were amazed and frightened, and asked themselves what it could mean."

(The Broken Spears, p. 4)

All societies have cultural practices and beliefs that teach their people values and how to view certain events. Miguel Leon-Portilla provides an historical account of what happens when the values and desires of two societies collide.

The Broken Spears offers a perspective of the Aztec defeat by the Spaniards. Traditionally, history has been written by the victors. The Spaniards conquered the New World, therefore they decided how to record the incidents for posterity. This book offers indigenous accounts of the events leading to the fall of the Aztecs. Leon-Portilla provides different versions of how events played out and the role of various indigenous peoples who participated in the battles against the Spaniards and their allies.

At the center of the Aztec Empire was the city of Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City). The Mexicanos gained their strength by conquering neighboring Indian tribes, using them as slaves and for human sacrifice. The arrival of the Spaniards challenged the belief system and religious traditions of the Aztecs. Due to his beliefs, the Aztec leader Motecuhzoma was unable to grasp the danger that the Spaniards represented to the Aztecs.

In Leon-Portilla's account, we see not only the conflict itself, but the beliefs and conditions that contributed to its inevitability, as well as the wide-ranging and enduring results of this cultural encounter.

Consider the following questions as you read The Broken Spears:

• What ominous portents signal the return of Quetzalcoatl and how did these omens lead to the Aztecs misunderstanding the intent of the Spaniards?
• What role do historical events play in a people's view of themselves and others?
• How was the meeting between the Aztecs and the Spaniards more than simply "a meeting between two expanding nations"? (xxxiii)
• How did the Aztec conception of warfare lead to their downfall? What can we learn from this for war in the 21st century?
• How can you relate the letters in Chapter 16 to the Declaration of Independence?
• What responsibility does a society have to respect other cultures when it tries to spread its own values and beliefs?

"We have come to your house in Mexico as friends. There is nothing to fear."
Cortes said this to Motecuhzoma, King of the Aztecs,
shortly before Motecuhzoma was taken prisoner by the Spaniards.
(The Broken Spears, p. 65)

The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians

"Wherever the European has trod,' wrote Darwin after his circumnavigation
of the globe on the Beagle, 'death seems to pursue the aboriginal.'"
(The Columbian Voyages, p. 9)

Prior to the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the Americas, Alfred W. Crosby revisited the meaning of 1492 to the native inhabitants of the Americas. This essay from the American Historical Association explores the discovery of the Americas by comparing two distinct interpretations: the classic and bardic versus a modern analytic interpretation.

The classic or bardic interpretation is the one that most of us grew up with. In this interpretation, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492 and discovered the Americas. After the discovery, the "New World" was conquered and divided by the Europeans, but rarely did this interpretation include a discussion of the effects of the arrival of the Europeans on the native inhabitants. Crosby tells us that this view is understandable given the methods that historians were using, and the types of questions that they were asking at the time. Historians were more focused on "heroes" rather than "societies".

By contrast, the modern analytic interpretation by Historians owes much to the appropriation of methods from Anthropology, Archeology, Biology, Demographics, and the Social Sciences, among others. These fields, with their emphases, presented Historians with different questions to explore regarding the effect of Columbus and the Europeans on the "New World". Crosby offers a particularly interesting analysis of the effects of disease on the native Amerindian inhabitants and the role that sickness played in the defeat of the local inhabitants. As pointed out in primary sources found in The Broken Spears, Columbus and the Spaniards, and later other European colonizers, brought germs such as smallpox and measles that sickened or killed thousands of the Amerindian populations that came into contact with the "visitors".

Consider the following questions as you read The Columbian Voyages:

• How can the type of questions you ask change the focus of your research?
• How can health play a role in the collective strength of a people?
• What role does history play in the belief systems of a people?

"The decisive advantage of the human invaders was not their plants or animals - and certainly not their muskets and rifles, which Amerindians eventually obtained in quantity - but their diseases."
(The Columbian Voyages, p. 8)

I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

"My mother used to say that through her life, through her living testimony, she tried to tell women that they too had to participate, so that when the repression comes and with it a lot of suffering, it's not only the men who suffer. Women must join the struggle in their own way."

(I, Rigoberta Menchú. An Indian Woman in Guatemala, p. 196)

Rigoberta Menchú Tum (1959-) was born in Guatemala and belongs to the indigenous community of the Maya-Quiché. In her testimonial book, she recounts her young life as a child Indian migrant farm worker, and eventually as a labor organizer. In telling her story, Menchú elaborates on rural Indian life, her family's daily struggle to preserve the traditions and culture of their ancestors, and her integration of the teachings of the ancient Popul Vuh and the modern Catholic Church as her moral compass. She describes the poverty, discrimination, exploitation, and brutality that her people suffered at the hands of the light-skinned landowners, the ladinos, and the right-wing soldiers. Her parents and brother, she claims in her book, were killed by paramilitaries during the years of the civil war in Guatemala.

In 1992 Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of the indigenous people."

In recent years Menchú's book has been the subject of great controversy. A professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College reported that the key events detailed in her testimonial did not take place and that indeed Menchú lied in several instances. Defending herself against these accusations and trying to preserve the validity of her testimony, Menchú replied: "what has happened to me, has happened to many other people: my story is the story of all poor Guatemalans."

Warning: Menchú'swork includes graphic descriptions of torture and murder.

Consider the following questions as you read I, Rigoberta Menchú:

• Menchú discusses her dislike of ladinos and ladino culture. While the differences between Menchú's culture and ladino culture are numerous, what similarities between the two cultures does Menchú begin to understand as she moves closer to the ladino world?
• In her book, Menchú describes two major barriers that keep Indians suppressed: land ownership and language. What are the histories of these root causes, how are they interconnected, and what forces perpetuate them?
• Menchú is a devout Catholic, a catechist from the age of twelve. How does she resolve and adjust her life as a dedicated Christian, to coalesce with her belief in the teachings of the non-Christian Popul Vuh?
• According to the accusations against Menchú, she did not witness some of the torture and brutality her people suffered at the hands of the right-wing soldiers. Do these assertions discount some or all of the validity of her testimony?

Memoirs

"I don't believe, then, that my poetry during this period reflected anything
but the loneliness of an outsider transplanted to a violent, alien world."
(Memoirs, p. 84)

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet and a Nobel Prize winner for Literature. In his Memoirs he shares his life story about growing up as a young writer in a rural part of Chile, and later as a young adult in the city. He transformed his experiences with love, nature, and politics into poetry. His Memoirs demonstrate that Neruda had a full life which included traveling to foreign countries as consul for Chile, as well as being exiled for supporting socialist ideas and the communist Soviet Union. After becoming a published and internationally renowned poet, Neruda turned to politics to help the workers and the poor of Chile. He provides an interesting perspective for the many revolutions that took place in Latin America after World War II. Neruda lived through the military coup d'etat lead by General Augusto Pinochet that brought down the socialist government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Neruda died two weeks later.

Neruda writes not as an historian, but as a poet who lived his words. He is challenging, forthright, poetic and generous. His Memoirs convey a story about all those he encountered on his path throughout his life and the Cold War. Neruda uses a series of vignettes and short stories to tell of his romantic, social, and political relationships with the people and places he influenced and was influenced by throughout his life.

• How and why does Neruda turn into a "rebel" (as a universitystudent) and how are those early rebellions reflected all through his life?
• How did the Spanish Civil War influence Neruda's politicalperspective and contribute to his allegiance to socialism and communism?
• How does Pablo Neruda honor the mestizo heritage of the Chilean people, their daily life, hardships and joys in his Memoirs?
• What does Neruda mean by finding a voice? Have you found your voice? Does a nation have a cultural voice?
• How did "culture shock" affect Neruda's memories of his experiences living abroad?