The Other West: Latin America from Invasion to Globalization

INTRODUCTION

Latin America in World History

This book aims to highlight the role, past and present, of Latin American countries in world history. I believe that historical analysis can lead to insights useful in understanding how, when, and why Latin American regions participated in various worldwide events and the role that each played in the vast network of collaborative relationships and institutions, formal and informal, that exists both on the Latin American subcontinent and between it and the rest of the world.

History helps us to understand past and current events by identifying the forces that either stimulated or hindered the role of various countries in global change; historical analysis forces us to go beyond the narrative of facts and events to uncover the ideological bias in different interpretations of such events. Once history has been freed of the restriction imposed by the social sciences to study only the past, the voices of the world—and of the American subcontinent in particular, whose voice has been muffled in recent decades by the rhetoric of exoticism, oral history, and memory—will emerge (Mazlish in Mazlish and Buultjens 1993: 113–20).

The recurring patterns of Latin America’s participation in world history illuminate its relationship with the rest of the world. Focus on these interconnections reveals the processes of cooperation and give and take, forming a picture of national and international events that situates the subcontinent within the world system.

Here I will sketch the gradual evolution of these forms of cooperation, conflict, and mediation with the other regions of the world. In the conclusion I will identify the historical patterns of Latin America’s participation in the world system. This book is neither a historical synthesis nor a history by area or subject. Its approach rests on the premise that Latin America has an integral role in world history, and that therefore its evolution is best understood by comparing and contrasting it with the world at large.

THE ENGINES OF WORLD HISTORY

I consider the economic, social, political, juridical, and cultural interconnections between Latin America and the rest of the world the engines that have driven various forms of participation, continually reorienting and shaping them to historical circumstances. I have traced five centuries of these unfolding interconnections and in the process identified their changing patterns that led over time to new, reciprocal relationships.

Some of these interconnections are formal, some informal. The formal connections involve institutions, such as the administrative bodies of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies in the colonial age or, later, of the sovereign Latin American nations, as mandated by their nineteenth-century constitutions, both monarchic and republican. Informal interconnections tend to be the organic responses of local subjects, shaped by the unique history of each area or reactions to institutional vacuums, especially in the law. The latter connections were especially strong in periods of change, such as during the wars of independence (1808–25) or the revolutions of Mexico (1911–17) and Bolivia (1952–56). Everyday life saw a constant interplay of institutional solutions—juridical ones in particular—with local customs and common law, with a view to generating or widening consensus and mitigating conflict. Making this thicket of relationships still more complex was the constant adaptation of norms and practices to old and new patterns of reciprocity and associationism—for example, brotherhoods and mutual aid societies—that are still strong in Latin America, especially in rural areas.

Starting in the sixteenth century, interconnections gradually developed both among the Latin American settlements and with communities in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Studying each historical period highlights the growth and increasing complexity of these interconnections—which took on a dynamic, fluid quality—while also allowing us to compare local contexts to international ones.

Exploring these international relations and evaluating their reach, permeability, boundaries, and critical nodes is one way of overcoming a narrow approach that is popular in studies of Latin America, one that puts too much emphasis on national conditioning factors. This type of nation-centered analysis and its variants, in regard to both the subcontinent and elsewhere, overlook the commonality of interests and issues that binds people all over the earth and the parallel, simultaneous, or converging features of historical processes. This serious flaw also mars the study of specific Latin American communities because it omits factors that have identified Ibero-America historically. Those who try to identify a shared past by arguing that the history of a country must be sought in the influence of religion, a common language, or the proximity to an indigenous culture forget that the building blocks of any shared history are found in the interplay among subjects of diverse nationalities and the network of relations that they manage to build between them.

Of course, this does not mean that a history shared by many states and nations develops in the same way for all or leads to a common destiny. By shared history I simply mean that in any given epoch, different countries react to similar challenges—be they ecological, economic, social, political, cultural, or technological—by drawing on experiences that are known or that recur everywhere. These shared experiences enable communication, building social patterns and relations within nations and among them.

With these premises in mind, I approach the history of Latin American society from a differentiated, not unitary, perspective, seeing it as both a society open to the world and part of a shared hemisphere. By identifying the communication channels that crisscross Latin America and the common histories that unite it, we are able to reconstruct its history from the double perspective of the hemisphere and the world.

A hemisphere-centered history can illuminate the meaning, the how and the when of Latin Americans’ efforts to push beyond their natural frontiers, their local or national habitat, to make contact with other areas of the subcontinent. A global perspective sheds light on the how, the when, and the why of relations between the subcontinent and the rest of the world. For example, in addition to the slave trade and the triangular commerce with Europe, the connection between America and Africa generated a rich history of cultural, social, and racial intermixing (Thornton 1998: 129–269). Similarly, a historical approach would look at present-day Latin American emigration as the result of many factors: the globalization process and the general rise in poverty; a new pluralism; and the complex interconnections that developed among the subcontinent, Europe, and North America enabling immigrants to hold dual citizenship (Gungwie in Mazlish and Buultjens 1993: 131–51).

By looking at Latin America in its global dimension, we vindicate the centrality of individuals as actors inside their community and recognize the importance of their actions. This view goes beyond a world-system interpretation such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974–89), which focuses on the structures underlying human action and, like all structuralisms, assigns too little freedom to the individual or to family units, neglecting people’s natural, creative propensity to identify the connections that best suit them. A world-system approach underestimates a collectivity’s potential to develop its capabilities and local resources.

The structuralists accord too much weight to the geographic and economic elements of the world order. Wallerstein, in particular, links the ability of a community to expand internationally to its being dominated by a highly structured system, one that exerts its own power of coercion over the earth. In such a system the position of each society, nation, social class, or individual, and its potential for evolution, is determined by the role that each plays in the international division of labor—a division begun under sixteenth-century capitalism. Inevitably, the resulting stratified international system rests on inequality and asymmetry and tends to be unmoved by history’s doings.

According to Wallerstein, this world system forces its order on regions and countries: it selects a few to be exclusive system centers, granting only partial benefits to semiperipheral areas and allowing the peripheries (which constitute the great majority) to suffer. The unbending, one-dimensional, repetitive nature of the world system causes regions and countries to stagnate, their fate enforced by an abstract reality that resists any autonomous decisions by individuals or groups.

From this reading of history, an ad hoc variant developed for Latin America: the dependency theory, which argues that since the subcontinent’s participation in world dynamics is passive, it never could, cannot now, nor will perhaps ever be able to affect the world’s destiny. In sum, in the past five hundred years the regions of the so-called Third World have played, at best, the role of subaltern, living on the margins of history or, rather, on the margins of the great history of industrialized nations (Frank 1967).

To redeem those instances when the subaltern Latin American countries acted decisively to change their own history requires a new, careful reading of the interconnections that bind human collectivities. Only in that way will it be possible to understand how some subjects creatively strengthen their presence in the international system, exploiting advantages and minimizing negatives. In their everyday life these individuals and groups appear to be neither subordinated nor overwhelmed by weighty structures or external conditioning. In his novel The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil gave one interpretation of this mode of perception when he wrote, If there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility . . . [which] could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be as actually happening, as coming to be (pt. 1, §4).

If we accept the premise that historical subjects exercise their free will and, by acting, transform reality, we must recognize this power in each human being, each collectivity, no matter how subaltern or marginal they might be considered. The old traditional/modern or developed/underdeveloped dichotomies prevent us from grasping the meaning and complexity of the transformations experienced by human societies in the past five millennia. If we break free of these dichotomies, we see that, as Jack Goldstone suggests, throughout history, all societies have experienced periods of efflorescence, as well as extensive growth, stagnation, and crises (2002: 333–34).

The focus on interconnections and patterns of communication between the various regions of the world brings to light a fact that is incontrovertible, no matter how strongly the structuralists deny or dismiss it: all Latin American areas and their historical subjects can, without exception, act intelligently at all levels—local, national, and international; when they feel blocked or held back, historical subjects act as free riders, at the edge of norms and institutions (North 1981: 45–58). Dealing in contraband, for example, was a widespread Latin American reaction to the commercial monopoly enforced by the Iberian crown during the colonial era. Another typical free rider reaction was that of the laborers who, exploited by large estates or mines, left their villages to build new settlements and livelihoods in the wilderness. From this perspective the flourishing of international nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International may be seen as a reaction of private citizens, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, to the human, civil, and political rights violations perpetrated by authoritarian governments.

Once we recognize each person’s potential to act in concert with others and to react to the challenges of her or his national or international context, we must also recognize his or her potential to transform the environment. Therefore, each human being and each collectivity possesses the knowledge and social capital needed to achieve national or international change, as well as to curb, disable, or mitigate processes of change (Clark 1997: 16–32).

Human collectivities react differently to challenges, in ways that reflect their unique heritage: some countries, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, or modern China, ride the waves of change. Others are reluctant or do not act fast enough to use change for their benefit, such as the Latin American countries still shackled to the statist-nationalist model. Yet in the early nineteenth century the opposite was true: the Latin American countries embraced the new constitutionalism, a republican form of government, liberalism, and the free market and intuitively understood the potential of international diplomacy, whereas Japan, China, and other Asian countries were reluctant to change.

The unequal and different participation of each country in the international scene continuously affects world history; the process is not linear, since a country’s participation is neither constant nor progressive. Each country’s own history conditions its form of international participation, its stability, and its specific and general results. Therefore, world history moves asyntonically: nations and regions follow the world’s trends only when they so choose. It is true, in any case, that the great powers were not always the same countries. In the seventeenth century Spain was preeminent; in the eighteenth century, the Netherlands; and in the nineteenth, Great Britain. After reaching the apex of their power, nations start to lose ground, opening up space for new leaders (Kennedy 1987: 536–40). Predictions for the year 2050 see Brazil, Mexico, and China as the leading countries.

Nor must lesser countries always fill a subordinate role. For example, Great Britain was a minor country for most of the modern age, from 1500 until 1800, when it became the world leader. Similarly, in the late Middle Ages the Italian city-states began to wane, leaving the stage to what would become the great sixteenth-century empires (Spain and Portugal); in turn, these lost power when the nation-states began to emerge. The Americas went through analogous changes: from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the leading dominions were the viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru; in the nineteenth century the leaders were Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. From the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, especially beginning with the First World War, the United States would become the great international power, only to begin a decline at the turn of the twenty-first century.

THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM: RELATIVE AUTONOMY

AND FORMS OF COOPERATION

The first step to a better understanding of the world-system’s changing geometry is to acknowledge the mechanism of interconnections between the different countries and regions of the world. In order to transcend the stereotypes and the deterministic analysis imposed by structuralism, we must recognize that historical processes are flexible, spontaneous, and unpredictable, and that collective action generates a multitude of mechanisms for interconnection, both material and immaterial.

Such interconnections may be temporary or durable. To give an example of the first, both the Vikings and the Chinese set foot on American soil long before the Europeans, yet the Vikings failed to establish stable, long-lasting settlements on the shores of New England, and the Chinese failed to leave their mark on the American Pacific Coast at that time. The Europeans, on the other hand, though they came later, left an indelible imprint. It would seem, therefore, that world history retains the memory of, and favors, those ties that give rise to lasting, mutually beneficial interactions that in turn generate new connections.

The different ways in which the world has been represented are visible clues to the benefits produced by long-term cooperation between historical subjects. On the world map of Blaeu’s Atlas Major, published in Amsterdam in 1662, the four known continents—Europe, Asia, America, and Africa—have identical proportions; none dominates for the simple reason that the divine principle governs them all from above, organizing the world and ensuring the cooperation of its different parts. Almost a century later, in 1753, a fresco on the ceiling of Ca’ Rezzonico, the palace of a leading Venice merchant, also represented the four continents as equal in size and equidistant from the center, where the Deity, the supreme power that organizes the world’s orderly cohabitation, dwells. Again, a balanced, orderly view of the world prevailed.

But in Trieste, a Mediterranean port city open to the world, we find a secularized version of the universal organizing principle: the Four Continents Fountain (1751–54). This monument, located in the city’s main square—the center of its mercantile activity—features four statues, each representing a continent. The statues pour their waters into the main basin, an act that symbolizes cooperation and the common destiny of the continents. Also portrayed are the forms of this international exchange: each statue is decorated with an abundance of ships, nautical instruments, rigging, bales of cotton, and sacks of grain—the fruits and symbols of commerce, which organizes their exchange. At the center of the fountain rises the statue of Fame, a symbol of unity and the ultimate reference point for all the ties that bind human communities. In this allegory Fame and Commerce allude to a plurality of wills, both individual and collective, engaged in dialogue and participating in world affairs without renouncing their local and national specificities.

The symbolism of these conceptions of the world emphasizes competition and cooperation, the exchange between human communities within and between continents. These elements form the context in which world history develops, a history that can never be reduced to a mere aggregate of national histories.

A world-historical perspective explains the causes and patterns of development of each region and country relative to the others. For example, the causes and circumstances that led China and Europe down diverging paths in the eighteenth century shed light on their different places in contemporary world history (Pomeranz 2000; Manning et al. 2002). Today it is clear why Europe, not China, became the wealthiest region in the world. The reasons were not just economic but political, for a comparison of their development in the eighteenth century shows that China was ruled mostly as an empire, whereas Europe was organized into several nation-states that occupied a compact territory. These factors led the European states to compete and exchange experiences (Vries 2002). Thus, a world-historical perspective leads not only beyond the narrow paths traced by the distinct national histories but also beyond the notion of a preeminence of Europe, fraught with Eurocentric claims about the universality of its culture.

To insist on the importance of cooperation between the regions and countries of the world is not to dismiss the impact of conflict, war, disputes, delay, and progress, for these too further establish the organic nature of the interaction between domestic purpose and global scope. Focus on interaction, as the very subject of world history, acknowledges the importance of relations between states but frames them in a broader perspective that restores the role of each national, regional, and local player on the world stage, be these players immigrants, multinational corporations, banks and financial systems, humanitarian associations, or nongovernmental organizations. World history is neither simply an extension of the history of international relations nor a new label to be pasted on the old universal history. World history has its own unique dimension, rooted in the idea that the national and the international spheres have only relative degrees of autonomy and thus are forced to live together, a condition that promotes mutual cooperation.

At what point in time, then, do we start investigating the relative autonomy of the international dimension? Certainly from the time that the balance of power among nations (the founding principle of international cohabitation) was first affirmed at the Congress of Westphalia (1645) and in the subsequent treaties of Utrecht, Rastaf, and Baden (1713–14), when the need to carve out a system to prevent one power from dominating the others became paramount. The concept of the balance of power among nations gained momentum concurrent with the new concept of the law of nations, which distinguished between natural law (that common to all peoples) and laws that govern relations between human communities. The law of nations trumps international law as well as the idea of Christian unity inherited from the Middle Ages. With its power to regulate the actions of political entities and, more generally, the actions of sovereign states, the new concept of international law promoted the resolution of interstate conflict while strengthening the relative autonomy of the international sphere.

This process by which the international sphere gradually acquired autonomy accelerated in the nineteenth century with the rise of the new American and European states and in the twentieth with the creation of the new African, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern nations. The birth of multilateral diplomacy, which became more visible as international organizations expanded, has reinforced and continues to reinforce the autonomy of the international order. The new global economy further consolidates this autonomy by incorporating informal institutions, such as business communities and capital markets, with formal ones such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the World Trade Organization.

The relative autonomy of the international dimension results from the interaction of many human activities—political and diplomatic, cultural and economic. A network of codified and uncodified rules is built that governs cooperation between nations, and between them and international organizations, and helps resolve interstate conflicts. Thus this stronger, more autonomous, international dimension is the outcome of a historical process driven by the will of individuals to express themselves collectively and thereby promote regular interaction between the national and the international spheres.

The first scholar to introduce the concept of an international system arising from the multiple interactions between national and international spheres was Karl Polanyi (1944), by all accounts one of the founders of the world-historical school. Polanyi’s work lays bare the insufficiency of either a purely economic or cultural interpretation of world history. Like the world system, an economic approach leads to a deterministic, reductive vision of the international system. Similarly, culturalism, or postmodernism, offers an ultimately superficial interpretation. By insisting on perceptions, representations, and imagination, it overlooks the fact that, like all human manifestations, historical phenomena have their own intrinsic historicity, one distinct from all possible representations, however related to them.

Based on these reflections, I have organized this book in five chapters that describe the changing patterns of cooperation and conflict between the Latin American regions and the world. In each chapter I illustrate the connections that made possible the convergences or divergences of the American and the European worlds, in an effort to reconstruct their underlying logic. In the final chapter I present the salient features of Latin American participation in the international system. I have drawn on historical studies as well as the social sciences, since by its very nature world history requires a multidisciplinary approach.

The first chapter, Entry, considers the discovery and conquest of Latin America and the Caribbean—the American subcontinent—and, in particular, the types of organizations that arose in the New World from the clash and the meeting of two communities—Iberian and American Indian—with vastly different heritages. Traditional histories view the conquest, from 1492 to 1570, as a first phase, followed by a long colonization phase extending from 1570 to independence. I adopt a different time frame, treating the conquest (1492–1570) and the first colonization period (1570–1630) together, precisely to highlight how interethnic cooperation promoted the earliest patterns of the subcontinent’s participation in international historical processes.

Analyzing these two periods together sheds proper light on the process that introduced the Latin American regions into the world scene. It shows how natives and American Spaniards drew on European resources to conquer the adverse conditions they faced in the first half of the sixteenth century—the demographic catastrophe foremost among them. As a result, in the period from 1600 to 1630 the New World began to take shape in ways that were different from how the cities of Spain and Portugal or the native Indian tribal and state organizations evolved.

The entry of Latin America in world history was achieved by reworking, on American soil, Iberian and Indian traditions, creating a new form of interethnic cohabitation—one that was not, however, free of conflict. Local and regional individuals and entities helped set in motion the interactive processes that connected them with the international subjects of the time, such as Iberian and other merchants, officials from the Iberian Peninsula, the Catholic Church, the Iberian monarchies, and the royal institutions.

Chapter 2, The Ibero-American World, describes the gradual building of the New World from about 1630 to about 1750. In this period the many connections active inside and outside the subcontinent were consolidated, defined, and redefined. Marked by a new mode of participation by the subcontinent in world events, the connections between the various Ibero-American components multiplied and grew in complexity as a result of mixed-race unions; at the same time contacts between Americans and Iberians and other communities expanded and intensified.

Chapter 2 offers a picture of the dynamism and creativity typical of the Ibero-American world, too often wrongly described as static. In this period individuals worked out complex strategies to overcome the colonial restrictions and expand their autonomy, successfully exploiting to their own advantage the loyalty that bound them to the monarchs and the Catholic Church.

Exploring the connections between the subcontinent and the world brings into focus the importance of the political decisions that Iberians and Ibero-Americans made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The forms of self-government developed by the Indians and the settlers shed precious light on the local mechanisms devised to counter the absolutist tendencies of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies.

Chapters 2 and 3 treat the relative autonomy of the Latin American colonies and their formal and informal links to Europe. Here I argue that both Americans and non-Americans used their ability, knowledge, and available resources to creatively adapt to the opportunities and risks that characterized their relationship with Spain, Portugal, and the rest of Europe. Had this not been the case, it would be impossible to understand the historical process that, from about 1750 to 1830, made the subcontinent part of the international order. In fact, the European order restored at the Congress of Vienna (1814) had to take into account the new sovereign states born of the revolutions in England’s American colonies and in Latin America.

In chapter 3, Revival, I analyze the decisions of the Latin American world to join the international system and the forms of that participation. I also reiterate the need to overcome a national history approach that presents the different countries as victims of constant external threats. The real problem lies in showing how the new nations, which insisted that they were sovereign states entitled to formal diplomatic treatment, tried to establish new relations with the European states and the United States.

Chapter 4, The Euro-American World, covers the internationalization process that took place from the 1850s to about the 1930s. It looks in particular at how the subcontinent reacted to the challenges that arose in that period: a transformed international trade, the second industrial revolution, the new European and U.S. colonialism, and the need to bolster the defense of their national borders. Exploiting the potential benefits of the new order, Latin American countries also gradually developed policies to contain the negative fallout from their international relations.

In this analysis of Euro-American relations, the nation-state becomes central, especially its ability to project itself onto the world stage as an international player. I also explore how the various governments tried to control their territory and the measures they took to promote the assimilation of their many ethnic and racial groups into a community founded on common interests, one that could give rise to a nation-state with an international presence. In this sense the history of the Latin American countries is like that of other nations in the same period that launched themselves on the international scene, initiating a process fraught with new risks and challenges, not just for individuals and entities but also for governments.

Chapter 5, Westernization, retraces the path that led to the definitive Westernization of Latin America. The interpretive approaches and findings of various disciplines contribute to the formation of several reliable theories about a historical process that began almost a century ago and has not yet run its course. This chapter focuses on some important trends first identified in the 1930s, such as the strengthening of the nation-state as a result of its increased capacity to block negative international factors. This pitting of the nation-state against the international sphere would have severe repercussions for domestic and international peace.

Since the 1970s a trend has emerged with a multiplicity of new players on the national and world scene who, regardless of their national origin, influence transnational decisions. Networks linking national and international realities have developed through financial brokering, the growth of nongovernmental organizations, and stronger international public opinion. In large measure this process is one outcome of immigration and new forms of communication, as well as of the no global movements, whose proponents claim the autonomy of their respective countries of origin.

Much of the last chapter analyzes Latin America’s participation in the globalization process—not an easy task, given the widely divergent points of view held by supporters of globalization and its critics. Attempting to overcome this rift, I ask whether globalization should indeed be treated as a resurgence of the internationalization process that was blocked—or interrupted—by the chaos of two world wars, or whether it constitutes a new mode of entry into the world system for Latin America.

In the conclusion I discuss Latin America’s insertion into world history, which was characterized by the interaction of communities on the subcontinent with communities in the rest of the world, relationships that multiplied and differentiated over time. Thus, the internationalization of the Latin American areas grew from the determination of individuals to reinforce their actions by assimilating and developing a rich variety of material and cultural resources.

ONE

Entry

America’s entry into the Western world is the result of a process whose first phase, from the discovery by Christopher Columbus in 1492 to about 1570, when much of the continent had been transformed into an Iberian territory, entailed the violent destruction of the many native American civilizations and peoples. A longer view, however—from the discovery through the first colonization in the early seventeenth century—shows that precisely because the Amerindian populations declined so rapidly, both natives and Iberians were practically forced to build novel forms of cooperation. As the conquistadors were conquered by a plurality of Amerindian forms, the conquered Amerindians began a process of creative reconstruction that would slowly bring them culturally closer to the Iberians.

In describing how Latin America became Westernized, starting with its discovery by Europe, it is important to note the twofold process of an initial collision between Iberians and Indians in the sixteenth century followed by the cooperation that would define the central phase of colonization, from about 1630 to about 1750. Still, even the collision phase saw trial and experimentation as both groups could not change their historical and cultural reference points quickly enough to accommodate their new reality, one whose outcome was still uncertain, since in the early sixteenth century Iberians and American Indians were only potentially conquerors (conquistadores) and conquered.

Although today we regard Europe and the Americas as groups of nations that also have a continental history, not only geographically but especially culturally, throughout the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries Amerindians and Iberians had essentially a local vision of their history and culture that offered no framework for interpreting their new experiences. During the phases of clash and cooperation that marked the entry of the Latin American territories into Western history, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Amerindians gradually began to perceive the links between the different areas of the New World and between the New World and the Iberian regions from which the conquistadors had come. Because the European invasion was not simply a matter of arms but also entailed the use of cultural and organizational resources by both parties, I will begin by reviewing the situations of both groups at the time of the conquest, trying to identify what connections might have existed between those who would become the conquered and the conquerors.

Because spontaneity is a distinctive trait of conflict and cooperation alike, annexing the Americas to the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies was no simple undertaking, and its success was in no way inevitable. In fact, in the period from about 1570 to 1600, a number of contrasting trends emerged: the feudal conquistadors and their offspring existed side by side with Iberian-type municipal councils; the latter enjoyed royal privileges and thus came into conflict both with the seigniorial expectations of the conquistadors and with the monarchy. At the same time the native Indian structures continued to fill an important role in many colonized areas, and the perseverance of the native lords and the native Indian nobility helped to mitigate the millennialist longing for a return to a pre-Hispanic life that would otherwise have led the natives to revolt.

Thus the royal officials did not find the West Indies easy to manage, either politically or economically. During the invasion and the early phase of colonization, the Europeans established new modes of interaction to ensure that the New World would continue to remain part of the Iberian monarchies.

THE INVASION

The American Indians

Before the Spanish and Portuguese invaded and conquered the Americas, the various native societies had a history of almost forty thousand years, starting with the migration of Asiatic peoples who had reached the continent by crossing the Bering Strait as well as those who had come by sea from Oceania. As the continent that was the last to know the presence of humans, and the only one whose cultures evolved without any contact with Europe or Asia until the arrival of Europeans in 1492, America (or the Americas, since they are technically two continents on one landmass) is unique.

Throughout its prehistory America was marked by the presence of highly diverse populations with different cultures that had little communication; there was also little exchange between the north, center, and south. This diversity is not a negligible factor: because of it, the Europeans, starting with Christopher Columbus, were able to invade the continent between 1492 and 1570. It is important to remember the great differences in language, environment, economy, culture, and even organization of the native peoples, lest we forget that the so-called Indian identity was an Iberian construct that lumped together and unified the highly heterogeneous native populations.

These groups included nomadic, seminomadic, and sedentary populations. One feature that distinguished the various Indian societies was the cultivation of plants and the domestication of a few animals. From about 5,000 to 3,000 B.C. the Americas underwent a neolithic revolution similar to that which occurred on other continents; as a result some societies moved to an agricultural phase and developed specific practices of diet and culture that still partly exist today in Latin America. The cultivation of maize, potato, cassava, chili pepper, quinoa, beans, pumpkin, and avocado, as well as the domestication of the dog, turkey, llama, and guinea pig, characterized Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America); cassava and sweet potato, the Caribbean, or the Tropics; and potatoes and the llama, the Andes (from Ecuador to northern Argentina).

The advent of agriculture was not only a material event but a cultural one. It led to the transition from roving hunter-gatherer groups of no more than 150 to 200 individuals, following a leader and a shaman, to tribal organizations of gatherer-hunters who farmed, had a stable base—the village, which was also their ceremonial center—and developed a complex political and religious structure. This transformation took at least two millennia, with the transition from farming tribes to settled farmers occurring about 3000 to 2500 B.C. Starting in about 200 B.C., the great Aztec, Maya, Chibcha, and Inca civilizations arose from these seigniories (city-states ruled by a monarch or lord), or princedoms.

This anthropological sketch shows that all native Indian organizations, from the hunter-gatherer clans to the more culturally evolved societies, were extremely complex and dynamic and that the evolution experienced by only some of them was not due to greater skills or mental capabilities. Like the transformations in ancient European societies, this evolution grew out of choices dictated by opportunity and need. These choices are expressed, for example, in the language of each culture, since language reflects the system of categories and the structure that the human builds in relation to objects and beings. It follows that no language is elementary because, as Jacques Soustelle paradoxically comments, of the American Indians I met, the less civilized, the more complex they are (Soustelle 1967).

Although they were equally endowed with the potential to evolve, not all Amerindian societies made the transition from clans to tribal organizations and from tribes to states. The Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations became great not just because of the opportunities afforded by demographic growth, technological advances (irrigation, roads, silos, etc.), bartering of goods, or the need to manage resources but also through the development of a collective imagination, as evidenced in the calendar and the elaborate religious and political hierarchies. All this led to the birth of complex state organizations ruled from architecturally sophisticated cities, still visible in the ruins of Teotihuacán, Chichén Itzá, Tikal, and Cuzco.

A clearer idea of the cultural diversity that existed when the Europeans arrived on the American scene emerges by correlating the (estimated) population of the different regions and the prevailing type of organization. Although the available information is fragmentary, it is possible to estimate that at the end of the fifteenth century half of the natives lived in complex state organizations and about three-fourths had lived through the neolithic revolution. Before the arrival of Europeans, America was already a complex and dynamic world; the idea that it was static took hold after the conquest for political and ideological reasons (just as ideological is the current idea that, unlike those of Europe, native American societies were harmonious and egalitarian).

Precisely because they were dynamic, both clan-based and state-based organizations had to forge systems of social discipline, a clue to the high degree of tension and conflict that marked all American Indian societies. Hunter-gatherer clans were organized around the extended family, with matrilocal