Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America (4th Edition) PDF

 Born –in– Blood & Fire 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 1 13/06/16 10:49 AM  books by john charles chasteen: Getting High: Marijuana through...

 Born –in– Blood & Fire 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 1 13/06/16 10:49 AM  books by john charles chasteen: Getting High: Marijuana through the Ages Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for In­d e­pen­d ence Heroes on H ­ orse­back: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Pop­u­lar Dance Translations by John Charles Chasteen: The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil by Joaquim Machado de Assis Juan Moreira: True Crime in Ninteenth-Century Argentina by Eduardo Gutiérrez The Contemporary History of Latin America by Tulio Halperín Donghi The Lettered City by Angel Rama The Mystery of Samba: Pop­u­lar Music and National Identity in Brazil by Hermano Vianna Santa: A Novel of Mexico City by Federico Gamboa 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 2 13/06/16 10:49 AM  Born –in– Blood & Fire Fourth Edition A C onc i se H i s t ory of L at i n A m e r ica John Charles Chasteen Universit y of North Carolina At C h a p e l H i l l B W. W. Nort on & C om pa n y New York London 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 3 13/06/16 10:49 AM  W. W. Norton & Company has been in­de­pen­dent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures deliv- ered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper ­Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By midcentury, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program—­trade books and college texts—­were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—­with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each year—­W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing h ­ ouse owned wholly by its employees. Copyright © 2016, 2011, 2006, 2001 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Editor: Jon Durbin Editorial Assistant: Travis Carr Project Editor: Caitlin Moran Production Manager: Eric Pier-Hocking Media Editor: Laura Wilk Assistant Editor, Media: Chris Hillyer Design Director: Jillian Burr Marketing Manager: Sarah England Photo Editor: Trish Marx Permissions Manager: Megan Schindel Composition: Graphic World Manufacturing: R. R. Donnelley—Crawfordsville Maps: Mapping Specialists Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chasteen, John Charles, 1955- author. Title: Born in blood and fire : a concise history of Latin America / John Charles Chasteen. Description: Fourth edition. | New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016014210 | ISBN 9780393283051 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Latin America--History. Classification: LCC F1410.C4397 2016 | DDC 980--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016014210 ISBN 978-0-393-28305-1 (pbk.) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London WIT 3QT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 4 13/06/16 10:49 AM  To my grandchildren, Maya and Sam Ackerman, now discovering their own Latin American roots 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 5 13/06/16 10:49 AM  CONTENTS Maps... ix Acknowledgments... xi Time Line... xii 1 welcome to latin america... 1 Not Your Father’s Version... 4 Old Thinking on Latin America... 11 2 Encounter... 17 Patterns of Indigenous Life... 18 Origins of a Crusading Mentality... 22 The Brazilian Counterexample... 29 Africa and the Slave Trade... 34 The Fall of the Aztec and Inca Empires... 38 The Birth of Spanish America... 43 Countercurrents: Friar Bartolomé de las Casas... 50 3 Colonial Crucible... 55 Colonial Economics... 56 A Power Called Hegemony... 62 A Process Called Transculturation... 68 The Fringes of Colonization... 75 Late Colonial Transformations... 82 Countercurrents: Colonial Rebellions... 91 4 In­de­pen­dence... 95 Revolution and War in Eu­rope... 97 The Spanish ­A merican Rebellions Begin, 1810–­15... 101 The Patriots’ Winning Strategy: Nativism... 107 Patriot Victories in Spanish America, 1815–­25... 112 Unfinished Revolutions... 115 Countercurrents: The Gaze of Outsiders... 122 VI 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 6 13/06/16 10:49 AM  Contents 5 Postcolonial Blues... 127 Liberal Disappointment... 128 Patronage Politics and Caudillo Leadership... 132 Brazil’s Different Path... 139 Continuities in Daily Life... 143 Countercurrents: The Power of Outsiders... 156 6 PROGRESS... 161 Mexico’s Liberal Reform... 165 Other Countries Join the Liberal Trend... 171 The Limits of Progress for Women... 174 Models of Progress... 178 Countercurrents: International Wars... 189 A Tour of Latin America... M-2 7 NEO­CO­LO­NIAL­ISM... 193 The Great Export Boom... 194 Authoritarian Rule: Oligarchies and Dictatorships... 206 Links with the Outside World... 213 Countercurrents: New Immigration to Latin America... 227 8 NATIONALISM... 233 Nationalists Take Power... 239 ISI and Activist Governments of the 1930s... 249 Countercurrents: Populist Leaders of the Twentieth Century... 263 9 REVOLUTION... 267 Post–World War II Pop­u­lism... 269 Onset of the Cold War... 275 The Cuban Revolution... 282 Countercurrents: Liberation Theology... 293 VII 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 7 13/06/16 10:49 AM  Contents 10 REACTION... 297 National Security Doctrine... 298 Military Rule... 303 Dictatorship Almost Everywhere... 309 The Last Cold War Battles: Central America... 314 Countercurrents: La Violencia, Pablo Escobar, and Colombia’s Long Torment... 324 11 NEOLIBERALISM AND BEYOND... 329 Glossary... A1 Further Acknowledgments... A25 Index... A27 VIII 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 8 13/06/16 10:49 AM  MAPS Modern Latin America... 13 African and Iberian Background... 27 Indigenous Groups and Iberian Invasions... 37 Original Areas of Colonization, 1500–­1700... 60 Colonial Administrative Divisions... 83 Campaigns of In­de­pen­dence Wars... 114 New Nations of Latin America, 1811–­39... 141 Mexico and the US Border before 1848... 156 Liberals vs. Conservatives at Midcentury... 166 Paraguay in Two Wars... 189 Chilean Gains in the War of the Pacific... 191 Neo­co­lo­nial Export Products... 204 Neo­co­lo­nial Investments and Interventions... 217 Latin America in the Cold War... 310 Central America in the 1980s... 315 Neoliberal Economies... 333 IX 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 9 13/06/16 10:49 AM 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 10 13/06/16 10:49 AM  Acknowledgments At least one hundred of my students at the University of North Caro- lina read this book before it was published. To them, my grateful ac­know­ledg­ment. Their enthusiasm encouraged me to keep it infor- mal, vivid, and short. “I feel like this book wants me to understand it,” said one of them. When the first edition appeared, several professors and gradu- ate students helpfully set me straight on factual errors. Much appreci- ated! I also got, and still get, e‑mails from undergraduate readers who write just to say “I like your book.” Thanks for those e‑mails. It’s really your book. And I can’t believe this is the fourth edition of it! The recent past has shifted in my rearview mirror. Thanks to Phillip Berryman for helping me appreciate just how much has changed since I first traveled to Mexico over forty years ago. XI 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 11 13/06/16 10:49 AM  Time Line Mexico Brazil Argentina Encounter The fully sedentary The semisedentary The nonsedentary, Mexicas, who built the Tupi people of the plains-­dwelling 14 92–1600 Aztec Empire, ­were Brazilian forests ­were Pampas people ­were conquered and their destroyed and their eventually wiped out. empire was taken over labor replaced by Afri- Much later, ­Eu­ro­pe­an by the Spaniards, but can slaves whom the immigrants took their Mexican blood still runs Portuguese brought to place on the land. in Mexican veins. grow sugarcane. Colonial Because of its dense Profitable sugar planta- Most of Argentina indigenous population tions made the north- remained on the fringe Crucible and its rich silver mines, eastern coast a core of Spanish coloniza- 1 6 0 0 –­1 8 1 0 Mexico (or much of it) area of Portuguese tion until 1776, when became a core area of colonization, but much Buenos Aires became Spanish colonization. of Brazil remained a the capital of a new poorer fringe. Spanish viceroyalty. Independence The large peasant The Portuguese royal Without massive popu- uprisings led by Hidalgo family’s presence kept lations of oppressed 1810–1825 and Morelos frightened Brazil relatively quiet indigenous people or Mexican Creoles into a as war raged else- slaves to fear, Buenos conservative stance on where. Prince Pedro Aires Creoles quickly in­de­pen­dence, which declared Brazilian embraced the May they embraced only in in­de­pen­dence himself Revolution (1810). 1821. in 1822. Postcolonial The national govern- The stormy reign of The conservative ment was frequently Pedro I (1822–­31) was dictator Rosas Blues over­thrown as liberals followed by the even dominated ­Buenos 1 8 2 5 –­1 8 5 0 and conservatives stormier Regency Aires (and therefore, struggled for control. (1831–­40). But the much of Argentina) for The career of the Brazilian Empire most of these years, caudillo Santa Anna gained stability in exiling the liberal represents the turmoil. the 1840s as coffee ­oppo­sition. exports ­rose. Progress The great liberal Reform Pedro II (1840–­89) Liberals took over of the 1850s provoked cautiously promoted after the fall of Rosas 1850–1880 the conservatives liberal-­style progress (1852), but not until the to support a foreign while maintaining a 1860s did they manage prince, Maximilian. The strongly hierarchical to unite all Argentina liberals, led by Juárez, system. Brazil ended under one national emerged triumphant by slavery only in 1888. government. the late 1860s. XII 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 12 13/06/16 10:49 AM  Time Line Mexico Brazil Argentina Ne o c o l o n i a l i s m The dictatorship of Brazil’s First Republic Buenos Aires and Porfirio Díaz, called the (1889–­1930) was a the surrounding 1880–1930 Porfiriato (1876–­1911), highly decentral- areas underwent embodied neo­co­lo­ ized oligarchy built, an agricultural and nial­ism in Mexico. Díaz above all, on coffee immigration boom invited international exports. The leading of vast proportions. investment and used coffee-­growing state, Various regional it to consolidate the São Paulo, became oligarchies ruled until Mexican state. dominant. the election of 1916. N at ion a lism The Mexican Revolution Getúlio Vargas, presi- Argentina’s Radical led Latin America’s dent 1930–­35, defined Party was driven by the 1910–1945 nationalist trend in Brazilian nationalism ballot box. It displaced 1910. The presidency in this period. In 1937, the landowning of Lázaro Cárdenas Vargas dissolved oligarchy but remained (1934–­40) marked Congress and formed mired in traditional the high point of its the authoritarian patronage politics. accomplishments. Estado Novo. Re v o l u t i o n Mexico’s revolution Pop­u­lism and the Juan and Evita Perón became more conserva- electoral clout of (1946–­55) made the 1945–1960 tive and institutionalized or­ga­nized labor (led working class a leading (in the PRI) even as radi- first by Vargas, then force in Argentine cal change accelerated by his heirs) energized politics. Perón’s elsewhere. Brazilian politics after followers remained loyal World War II. long after his exile. Re a c t i o n Overall, the PRI used its The Brazilian military Taking control in revolutionary imagery overthrew the populist 1966, the Argentine 1960–1990 to absorb challenges president Goulart in military won its “dirty from the left—­except 1964 and ruled for war” against Peronist when it used bullets, as twenty years in the guerrillas but bowed in the 1968 Tlatelolco name of efficiency and out in 1983 after massacre. anticommunism. losing to Britain in the Falklands war. N E OLIB E RALISM The post–Cold War The Workers’ Party, of Peronist politics and PRI shed much of its the orthodox left but neoliberal economics AND B E Y OND nationalist heritage to also indirectly heir to dominated Argentina 1990–2 015 embrace neoliberalism, Vargas, showed the in a period of steadily fending off new world that Brazil is a declining living challenges from both serious country. standards. left and right. XIII 01_BBF_28305_fm_i-xiii.indd 13 13/06/16 10:49 AM  Pablo. Pablo was a little boy who lived at a Colombian boarding­house in 1978, when I lived there, too. On hot afternoons, Pablo sometimes took a bath in the back patio of the ­house, the patio de ropas, where several women washed the boarders’ clothes by hand. Until I so rudely interrupted him, he was singing on this par­tic­u­lar afternoon, as happy as any little boy anywhere, despite the modest character of our dollar-­a‑day accommodations. Snapshot taken by the author at the age of twenty-­two. 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 2 13/06/16 10:49 AM  1 welcome to latin america L atin America was born in blood and fire, in conquest and slavery. It is conquest and its sequel, slavery, that created the central conflict of Latin American history. So that is where any history of the region must begin. On the other hand, conquest and slavery is old news, and partly, well, it’s “history.” The Latin America of 2016 is no longer your father’s version. Still, conquest and colonization form the unified starting place of a single story, told here with illustrative examples from many coun- tries. We need a single story line, because rapid panoramas of twenty national histories would merely produce dizziness. And, before begin- ning the story, we must set the stage in a number of ways. We need to ask, first of all, whether so many countries can really share a single history. At first blush, one might doubt it. Consider everything that story will have to encompass. Consider the contrasts and paradoxes of contemporary Latin America. 1 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 1 13/06/16 10:49 AM  C h a p t e r 1 | W E L C O M E T O L AT I N A M ER I C A Latin America is the “global south,” still struggling to attain the standard of living of Europe or the United States. It has deep roots in indigenous cultures. Most of the world’s indigenous Americans, by far, live south of the Rio Grande. Yet Latin America is also the West, a place where more than nine out of ten people speak a European language and practice a European religion. Most of the world’s Roman Catholics are Latin Americans, which has much to do with the first non-European pope, chosen in 2013, being Argentine. Some Latin Americans still grow corn and beans on small plots hidden among banana trees and dwell in earthen-floored houses with sagging red-tile roofs. International travelers who jet in and out of sprawling Latin American metropolises rarely see them. You have to go to the countryside, with its awful roads. Most Latin Americans these days live in noisy, restless cities, some of them postmodern megacities. Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Mexico City have far out- stripped the ten-million mark. Rio de Janeiro, Lima, and Bogotá are not far behind. Next, consider the contrasts among countries. Brazil is a be- hemoth, occupying half the South American continent, its population surging beyond 200 million. Mexico follows at around 120 million. Thanks partly to their burgeoning internal markets, both countries’ economies have even spawned their own multinational corporations. Colombia, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela constitute a second rank, with populations between 30 and 50 million. Chile’s population of 17 million carries disproportionate economic weight because of its high standard of living. The remaining, roughly one quarter, of Latin Americans, live in a dozen sovereign nations, most with populations under 10 million. In sum, the major Latin American countries are global players (though nothing like China or India), while many oth- ers are ministates with a single city of consequence and two or three main highways. Latin American climates and landscapes vary more than you may realize. Most of Latin America lies in the tropics, with no well-defined spring, summer, fall, and winter. Many read- ers of the global north will envision beaches replete with palms. Latin America’s coastal lowlands do often match that description, 2 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 2 13/06/16 10:49 AM  C h a p t e r 1 | W E L C O M E T O L AT I N A M ER I C A but this tourist’s eye view is misleading overall. Tropical high- lands cooled by their altitude, often semiarid, have played a larger role in Latin American history. Mexico City stands above seven thousand feet; Bogotá above eight thousand. Latin American moun- tains are the world’s most densely populated for historical reasons. Meanwhile, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay—sometimes called the “Southern Cone” of South America—lie mostly or entirely outside the tropics, with climates similar to parts of the United States. The continent’s craggy southern tip is a land of glaciers and Antarctic influences. Socially, Latin America is a place of extreme inequalities. Enor- mous disparities of wealth and well-being exist within countries and between them. Today many Latin Americans live and work in cir- cumstances not so different from those of middle-class people in the United States. But many, more than those who seem middle-class by international norms, still inhabit hovels and endure a poverty and deprivation rare in the developed world. The Southern Cone countries have long stood respectably high in global rankings of social develop- ment, and most Latin American countries now hold middling rank, globally, in a combined measure of people’s education, life expectancy, and buying power. The small countries of Central America (notably excepting Costa Rica) are worse off, as are those with large and his- torically oppressed populations of indigenous people, like Guatemala and Bolivia. Latin America is probably the most racially diverse of world regions, fed from the gene pools of Europe, Africa, and indigenous America. All three elements are present in every country, and the pos- sible configurations vary kaleidoscopically. Guatemala and Bolivia, along with Peru and Ecuador, are characterized by large populations of indigenous people who continue to speak native languages such as Quechua or Aymara, live more or less separately from Spanish speak- ers, and follow distinctive customs in clothing and food. African genes are a predominant element of the mix in Brazil and on the shores of the Caribbean. Latin America was the main destination of the mil- lions of people enslaved and taken out of Africa between 1500 and 1850. Whereas the United States received about 523,000 enslaved 3 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 3 13/06/16 10:49 AM  C h a p t e r 1 | W E L C O M E T O L AT I N A M ER I C A immigrants, Cuba alone got more, Brazil at least 3.5 million. In addition, there are places in Latin America where people look notably European, particularly where large numbers of Italian immigrants were added to the population around 1900, such as in Argentina and Uruguay. Probably most Latin Americans consider themselves to some degree “of mixed race,” or mestizo, a key concept in Latin American history. Returning to our initial question, then, do these twenty coun- tries in their startling variety really have a single history? No, in the sense that a single story cannot encompass their diversity. Yes, in the sense that all have much in common. They experienced a similar process of conquest and colonization. They became independent more or less the same way, mostly at the same time. They then struggled with similar problems in similar ways. Looking back after two centu- ries of independence, one sees that similar trends have washed over the entire region, giving Latin American history a well-defined ebb and flow. Not Your Father’s Version Lately, it’s been more flow than ebb. Enormous changes have come to Latin America in the forty years since I traveled there for the first time, at the height of the Cold War. Yes, youngsters, that was before the Internet! Telephones and postal services worked poorly or not at all in many countries of Latin America. It was impossible to stay connected to the United States on a daily basis. One experienced total immersion. There was a hint of timelessness, too—even still the occasional burro or ox-cart to glimpse from the window of a cross-country bus. Few rural dwellings had electricity or running water. The countryside seemed a feudal zone, dominated by large landowners who were rarely to be found on their rural estates because they lived in the cities. The poor people who did live in the countryside were amazingly isolated, although fairly well fed compared to the urban poor. I remember stay- ing a few nights in a house that stood on an Andean mountainside, 4 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 4 13/06/16 10:49 AM  N o t Y o u r F a t h e r ’ s V e r s ion a ten- or fifteen-minute climb from the road, impassible by any sort of vehicle. The family who lived up there reckoned the hour by the sun and the passage of two or three buses a day visible on the road that threaded a yawning chasm, far below. An unimaginable variety of fruit grew around them, but any kind of store was half a day away. Rural-urban migrants had been flowing into Latin American cities for decades before my arrival, although the only accompanying construction boom had been the improvised housing that the migrants built for themselves. At the height of the Cold War, Latin American cityscapes still mostly resembled the 1940s or 1950s. There were no malls, or practically none, and few major infrastructural projects in the cities. There were few US brand-name consumer goods for sale be- cause high import tariffs made them too expensive for almost anyone. The idea was to protect and encourage local industries. There was already a rising tide of Asian imports, although not yet from China, which has become so suddenly a player in Latin America. Cold War China was Mao’s China, where people wore only blue and rode only bicycles and factories were a thing of the future. Latin America’s high protective tariffs meant that imported blenders, televisions, and audio tape players had to be smuggled in, or sold in a variety of “free trade” venues created by various governments of the region in recognition of the inevitable. Before the era of inexpensive Asian manufactures, the clothing of Latin America’s destitute millions was put together by hand and often seemed about to come apart at the seams like the first pants that I had made in Colombia by a tailor who worked sitting in the doorway of his shop, the size of a large closet. The streets of cities were not studded with US fast-food fran- chises, as now, nor did they overflow yet with cars, which were too expensive for most people to own. Thus there was no need, yet, to create laws keeping cars (with odd numbered plates, for example) off the road on certain days or hours, as many Latin American cities do today for sheer lack of street space. Diesel-belching buses, yes, however— lots of those. Innovative bus rapid transit systems with dedicated high-speed lanes, such as the one first created in Curitiba, Brazil (and now re-created in a series of major Latin American cities) remained on the drawing board. There were a few supermarkets in 5 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 5 13/06/16 10:49 AM  C h a p t e r 1 | W E L C O M E T O L AT I N A M ER I C A the richest parts of town, but most people did not buy food in super- markets. Instead, there was a complex of open markets for produce and commodities and neighborhood stores and bakeries for daily sta- ples. In sum, Latin America’s middle classes were smaller and much less Americanized than today. Strong trading blocs like NAFTA and Mercosur were decades away. Nobody had a cell phone until the 1990s, and many people had no telephone at all. Then cell phone use rocketed in Latin American cities, precisely because landlines had always been scarce. At least in Colombia, where I first rented a place, you had a telephone in your house, or you didn’t, period. Forget about getting one if you didn’t, because state-run telephone companies rarely added lines. Houses were rented, bought, and sold with existing lines. A house with a tele- phone brought a better price, obviously. Before the era of plastic digi- tal watches, a wristwatch of any kind was a prestige item in Latin America. People sometimes wore watches that didn’t keep time, just to maintain their image. Few urban people seemed to possess a credit card, wear seat belts, have insurance coverage, or fuss over their diet except to worry about their weight if they were women. No one had heard of multiculturalism or of threats to the rain forest. Sociology was for revolutionaries, and psychology was for the insane. Remittances from people working in the United States were not a yet major source of income in the region. Mexican immigration to the United States was growing, but not yet a flood, and Central American immigration had hardly begun. Large cities were well- known hotspots, but, overall, street crime was moderate by compari- son with recent decades. Yes, those were the good old days—for me, anyway. I noticed, by the way people treated me, that I had become better looking. At greetings, I learned to embrace my buddies and shake hands with their girlfriends. The relationships between men and women seemed to me very old-fashioned and stylized. My first Spanish-language flir- tations were supervised by dutiful younger sisters who were assigned to surveil me constantly. Fortunately, they could be bought off with money to go get a Popsicle, or better yet, go see a movie. In Mexico, at least, girls still did a lot of courting at the evening paseo, when 6 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 6 13/06/16 10:49 AM  N o t Y o u r F a t h e r ’ s V e r s ion people walked in circles around the town plaza, half in one direction and half in the other, occasionally switching, so that everyone eventu- ally saw everyone. Daytime park benches were full of teenagers kiss- ing because young people didn’t have cars. (Wait. Maybe that hasn’t changed.) The evening meeting place, on the other hand, was at the girl’s house, under the watchful eye of her family, not inside but at the doorway, or even—although this was pretty old-fashioned even then— at the window, he outside, she inside, separated by wrought-iron bars. Companionate marriage (focused on the personal compatibility of the couple) was far from unknown, but didn’t seem to prosper. Male in- fidelity was the rule, rather than the exception. I’m not so sure how much has changed, in that regard. But clearly, these days middle- class women are much more likely to hold a job and middle-class husbands are more likely to accept, at least in principle, that they ought to share household duties. Many thought patterns were quite conservative. People rarely went to mass, but their Catholicism was automatic and unquestion- able. Young people of a respectable family did not cohabit before marriage. The ubiquitous public presence of Catholic religious de- votion had yet to be challenged by growing numbers of evangelical Christians. Perfectly ordinary middle-class people had live-in maids who earned an unbelievable pittance, inhabited tiny windowless cubicles at night, and were treated, whether cruelly or kindly, as a different category of human being. Often they came from the country, where, it was believed, people were more honest and hardworking. Urban middle-class families with provincial roots might bring trust- worthy servants with them to the city. City girls, even very poor ones, were unlikely to stay long as live-in maids, simply because they had more alternatives, so savvy housewives with means preferred to hire country girls who didn’t know their way around. Eventually, though, even the country girls found something less humiliating to do than being a servant. The muchacha (of any age) has walked out again, a perennial problem for the ama de casa! Only a tiny minority attended universities, and most who did studied to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, or architects. As students, they did not take part-time jobs waiting tables, for example, even if 7 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 7 13/06/16 10:49 AM  C h a p t e r 1 | W E L C O M E T O L AT I N A M ER I C A they needed the money. Class consciousness. Some were born to serve, apparently, others to be served. During the 1980s and afterward, those who were born to be served moved increasingly into high-rise apart- ment buildings or strongly enclosed apartment complexes with armed guards at the gate, an ugly reality that is likely to shock anyone who has never experienced it. At least, I would like to think so. This is the aspect of Latin America that most disturbed me personally, and it hasn’t gone away. Still today, the expanding middle classes of Latin America are trying to raise perfect children in a defensive crouch. Although indica- tors of social well-being are improving, Latin America’s distribution of wealth remains among the most unequal in the world. What nobody expects these days, however, is a revolution, and that’s precisely what was expected of the Latin America I encountered in the 1970s. Revolutionary organizations spray-painted slogans on every available urban surface, featuring the Communist Party’s hammer and sickle, the iconic visage of Che Guevara, and an alphabet soup of acronyms representing worker federations, guerilla armies, and student organizations. Walls sprouted jagged crowns of broken glass embedded in concrete, as families with something to defend fortified themselves against the urban poor. A “population explosion,” as they named it, was under way when I got to Latin America. Latin American women had high fertility rates, and twentieth-century improvements in public health were lengthening life expectancies. Demographers read the tea leaves and foretold disaster. Hunger and deprivation on a vast scale seemed the inevitable result. The threat of impending social cataclysm hovered over everything. No one suspected that the women’s interest in having lots of children would drop so precipitously as their horizons expanded in the cities. But that was happening by the 1980s, and today Latin America’s population is graying faster than it is growing. The future has a way of not turning out the way you expect. During the Cold War, when the Soviet Union rivaled the United States militarily, Latin America became a sort of battleground or geopo- litical chessboard. Marxist guerrillas and nationalist regimes squared off against their own armed forces, which were allied with the US military. That story will be told in detail toward the end of the book. 8 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 8 13/06/16 10:49 AM  N o t Y o u r F a t h e r ’ s V e r s ion Suffice it to say, for now, that since the Cold War the region has seen sustained economic growth and political stability. But current free- market growth seems to make the rich richer, the middle class more middle class, and the poor comparatively poorer. In Latin America, where the idea of a middle-class majority is not a reality but, rather, a fond aspiration for the future, that kind of growth can produce more losers than winners. Winners and losers. Rich and poor. Conquerors and conquered. Masters and slaves. That is the old, old conflict at the heart of Latin American history. Aspects of it go right back to 1492. Europeans no longer ride on the backs of indigenous porters, as they once did in Colombia, or in sedan chairs carried by African slaves, as in Brazil. But everywhere in Latin America, wealthier people still have lighter skin and poorer people still have darker skin. The descen- dants of the Spanish, the Portuguese, and later European immigrants to Latin America still hold power, and the people who descend from slaves and subjugated “Indians” still serve them. Half a millennium later, this is clearly the enduring legacy, rippling across the centuries, of the fact that African, European, and indigenous American people did not come together on neutral terms, like various pedestrians arriving simultaneously at a bus stop. On the contrary, they have a history. To understand Latin America, you’ve got to understand that history. That’s what this whole book is about. Here it is in a nutshell: In the 1550s, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers imposed their language, their religion, and their social in- stitutions on indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans, people who labored for them in the mines and fields and who served them, too, at table and in bed. After three centuries of this, things began to change (at least partly) when Latin American countries became indepen- dent. Independence created a string of the world’s first constitutional republics in the 1820s. Henceforth Latin American nations were to rule themselves. Rule of the people, by the people, for the people. Sound familiar? That was the plan, anyway. For most of two centuries, it didn’t work very well, partly because of the weight of Latin America’s conflictive history. Two political ideologies took center stage. The first was classical liberalism. You may need to acquire a new understanding of liberalism here. Notice that in Latin America 9 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 9 13/06/16 10:49 AM  C h a p t e r 1 | W E L C O M E T O L AT I N A M ER I C A liberalism does not refer to the special concern for the welfare of disadvantaged people, as it does in the twenty-first-century United States. Instead, liberalism means limited government and economic laissez-faire. This is a larger, more historical, more international use of the word liberalism, referring, in short, to the core principles of the US Constitution—a complex of values and practices that developed in the 1600s and 1700s, largely in France and England. Some call it “classical” liberalism. Liberal ideology favored progress over tradi- tion, reason over faith, universal over local values, and the free mar- ket over government control. In principle, at least, liberals espoused equality of citizenship over entrenched privilege and lauded repre- sentative democracy over all other forms of government. Both 1776 and 1789 (marking the American and French revolutions) are land- mark dates in world liberalism. Latin American liberals have gener- ally been friends of the United States and of international capitalism. Today’s neoliberals, discussed in the last chapter, are a case in point. Neoliberals want Latin America to get with the (globalization) program. Latin American liberals have almost always been oriented toward European or US models, and that goes double for today’s neo- liberals. Overall, the European and US experience with liberalism has produced prosperity. The liberal state, and its economic adjunct, free-market capitalism, currently constitute the “universal” model for modernity in the global West. Latin America’s actual experience with liberalism and capitalism, on the other hand, has been mixed, as we will see. Unfettered economic laissez-faire has rarely produced durable, equitable prosperity in Latin American countries. Rather, it has tended to further empower and benefit people already at the top of these starkly stratified societies. Sometimes it has created nightmare scenarios. The second emerging political ideology, liberalism’s great chal- lenger in Latin America, was nationalism. Here is another big histori- cal idea to fine-tune in your thinking, especially if you tend to regard nationalism simply as a threat to free trade. Over the last two centu- ries, the surface of the entire globe has been converted from kingdoms and empires into sovereign nations, a breathtaking transformation. Nationalism is thus a major theme in modern world history, some- times destructive, sometimes constructive. In a nutshell, nationalism 10 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 10 13/06/16 10:49 AM  O l d T h in k in g on L a t in Am e r ic a is the idea that everyone ought to be part of a nation, and that nations should rule themselves. The last part makes nationalism the basic ideology of decolonization around the world. The first part, about everyone belonging, links ruling elites to the people they rule and also links the ruled to each other. The stronger those links are, the stronger the nation. Nationalism is neither right nor left on the po- litical spectrum. In Latin America, nation building has been a long- term project carried out, over the entire nineteenth century, in artistic circles, government ministries, and eventually, public schools. In the twentieth century, nationalism has rallied the masses and challenged liberal values like free trade. Nationalists want Latin America to follow a different drummer. Resisting outside control and influence has always been one of their strongest impulses. Nationalists counter the appeal of universal models of modernity with an appeal to national uniqueness and authenticity. They think in terms of a “national family,” which must take care of its own, especially its weaker members. Some Latin American nationalists are conservatives who value local traditions, most especially religious ones. Today, however, most Latin American nationalists are socialists or social democrats who stand to the left of liberals on the political spec- trum. Today, nationalism challenges liberalism from the left in country after country. Most countries of Latin America have nationalist presi- dents supported by those who have benefited least from globalization. Liberalism and nationalism have alternated in ascendancy, overall, for a century, and their rivalry isn’t over yet. Latin American history involves much more than politics and economics, however. Latin American history also involves rich culture and fascinating peo- ple, not to mention considerable blood and fire. Before we begin our story, however, there is a final consideration. Old Thinking on L atin A merica Latin America today requires new thinking, but there’s plenty of old thinking still around. This concise history is for US readers who are encountering Latin American history for the first time. Such readers 11 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 11 13/06/16 10:49 AM  C h a p t e r 1 | W E L C O M E T O L AT I N A M ER I C A need an acquaintance with old thinking on Latin America, because examples of it float freely in our popular culture and continue to influ- ence our ideas. A thumbnail summary will serve the purpose. Latin American history, in the traditional US view, has long been a story of failure. Until roughly the 1930s, the interpreters of Latin America focused largely on race and culture, considering the Latin American varieties defective goods. “Hot-blooded Latins” with too much “nonwhite blood,” according to this out-moded idea, simply lacked the self-discipline and the brains to make stable, prosperous, democratic societies. As Catholics, they lacked a “Protestant work ethic” (to make work not just a necessity, but a virtue), and their tropical climates further discouraged economic activity with debilitat- ing heat and too many sensuous satisfactions—such as papayas and passion fruit—quite literally growing on trees. In this version, Latin American history was racially, culturally, and environmentally “deter- mined” and more or less inescapably so. Between 1940 and 1960, World War II and its intellectual aftershocks put that sort of determinism out of style. US historians of Latin America replaced the former villains of the region’s history (those pesky indigenous and African genes) with new bad guys: back- ward mentalities and traditional social structures that would have to be “modernized” so that Latin America could advance along the de- velopmental trail blazed by other countries. While the modernization theory was an advance over racial and environmental determinism, it maintained existing stereotypes. Greedy landowners and backward rulers took over from congenital laziness and tropical heat as explana- tions for Latin American problems. Those explanations continued to focus the onus of responsibility on Latin America itself. During the 1960s, however, historians of Latin America be- came convinced that earlier interpretations of regional problems were a convenient way to blame the victim. European colonialism and outside intervention and the struggle of oppressed people to rise up against their oppressors—here, they thought, were the true explana- tions of current political turmoil. The triumphant Cuban Revolution set the tone for 1960s interpretations of Latin America. Historians theorized that Latin America’s historically subordinate position in the 12 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 12 13/06/16 10:49 AM  O l d T h in k in g on L a t in Am e r ic a MODERN LATIN AMERICA HAITI MEXICO Havana DOMINICAN BELIZE REPUBLIC Mexico City CUBA HONDURAS PUERTO RICO GUATEMALA JAMAICA Santo Guatemala City Tegucigalpa Domingo San Salvador Managua EL SALVADOR NICARAGUA Caracas GUYANA Panama SURINAME San José VENEZUELA COSTA RICA City FRENCH PANAMA Bogotá GUIANA COLOMBIA Quito. ECUADOR zon R Ama Recife PERU BRAZIL Lima Salvador Cuzco (Bahia) La Paz Brasília BOLIVIA Rio de PARAGUAY Janeiro São Paulo CHILE Asunción Santiago Buenos URUGUAY Aires Montevideo ARGENTINA WWN79-01 M1.1 Modern Latin America Second proof 13 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 13 13/06/16 10:49 AM  C h a p t e r 1 | W E L C O M E T O L AT I N A M ER I C A global economy explained its failure to “modernize.” Latin American countries occupied permanently peripheral positions vis-à-vis indus- trial and financial centers in Europe and the United States. The rec- ommended solution, at a time when Marxism remained intellectually influential, was revolution at home and withdrawal from the global capitalist system. Dependency theory, as it was called, held sway through the 1970s and 1980s, but ran out of steam after the Cold War. Today, the old certainties are all gone. Dependency theory still offers valid insights, but it has come to seem old-fashioned. Now it’s revolution that has gone out of style, as Latin America’s capitalist economies and liberal democracies seem to be working better, overall, than ever before. In the United States, interest in Latin America now focuses on matters that preoccupy us at home. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, both the humanities and the social sciences have given new prominence to the ways in which race, class, gender, and national identities are “constructed” in people’s minds. As US citizens explore new ways of thinking about their own society, they find valu- able comparative perspectives in Latin America. Therefore, US stud- ies of Latin American history often have a cultural emphasis today. In the pages ahead, watch for new concepts. They are just as valuable to your understanding as new facts. Now let’s go back five hundred years to begin our story. 14 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 14 13/06/16 10:49 AM  Chapter review Key terms and vocabulary liberalism, p.9 nationalism, p.10 Study Questions 1. Can you describe contrasts among various Latin American countries? 2. How is it possible to combine them in a single historical narrative? 3. What kinds of changes have characterized the region in recent decades? 4. How has thinking on Latin America evolved in the United States? 15 02_BBF_28305_ch01_xiv-015.indd 15 13/06/16 10:49 AM  COLUMBUS AND CABRAL established Spanish and Portuguese claims to much of the New World. This early engraving by Theodor de Bry shows how these momentous encounters were pictured in Europe, where the nakedness of the indigenous people attracted great interest, suggesting comparisons with the biblical Garden of Eden. The Granger Collection, New York. 1400s 1492–1500 1500–20 1520s–30s 1548 Aztec and Inca Columbus and Slave trade Defeat of the Royal Empires rise Cabral voyages under way Aztecs and government Incas established in Brazil 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 16 13/06/16 10:50 AM  2 Encounter I ndigenous peoples inhabited almost every inch of the Americas when the Eu­ro­pe­ans and Africans arrived. Deserts and forests ­were less densely populated than fertile valleys, but no part of the continent lacked people who lived off the land and considered themselves part of it. The Encounter between native Americans and Eu­ro­pe­ans constitutes a defining moment in world history. Neither the Eu­ro­pe­ans’ “Old World” nor the “New World,” as they called the Americas, would ever be the same afterward. For Latin America, con- quest and colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese created pat- terns of social domination that became eternal givens, like the deep and lasting marks of an original sin.* The Iberian invaders of America ­were personally no more sin- ful than most. They came to America seeking success in the terms *In Christian belief, Adam and Eve committed the original sin in the Garden of Eden, and all their descendants later inherited that sin. 17 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 17 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Chapter 2 | Encounter dictated by their society: riches, the privilege of being served by oth- ers, and a claim to religious righ­teousness. It makes little sense for us to judge their moral quality as human beings because they merely lived the logic of the world as they understood it, just as we do. The original sin lay in the logic, justified in religious terms, that assumed a right to conquer and colonize. One way or another, the Eu­ro­pe­an logic of conquest and colonization soured the Encounter everywhere from Mexico to Argentina. The basic scenario varied according to the natural environment and the indigenous peoples’ way of life when the Eu­ro­pe­an invaders arrived. Patterns of Indigenous Life The indigenous peoples of the Americas had adapted themselves to the land in many ways. Some were nonsedentary, an adaptation to food-scarce envi- ronments, such as those of northern Mexico. Nonsedentary people led a mobile existence as hunters and gatherers, and movement kept their groups small and their social organization simple. Often they roamed open plains. The early Spanish explorer memorably sur- named Cabeza de Vaca described nonsedentary people who lived in Texas and across northern Mexico, mostly in family groups, gather- ing annually to enjoy particularly abundant resources, such as the ripening of natural cactus groves. Plains occupy a wide swath of the interior of South America, then inhabited by tribes of hunters and gatherers. Not forests, neither were these exactly grasslands at the time of the Encounter. Instead, they bristled with various kinds of scrub that, as in the northeastern Brazilian area called the sertão, might be thorny and drop their leaves in the dry season. The Pampas peoples who gave their name to the Argentine grasslands were also nonsedentary. Other indigenous Americans ­ were forest dwellers. Hunting was important to them, too, but the abundant rainfall characterizing most forest environments allowed them to depend on agriculture in 18 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 18 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Pat terns of Indigenous Life a way that the nonsedentary people could not, and so forest peoples ­were often semisedentary. Their agricultural practices ­were adapted to thin tropical soils. Thin soils? Yes: The exuberant vegetation of tropical forests produces a misleading impression. Outsiders think of these forests as “jungles,” a word that suggests overpowering, unstop- pable fertility. Thus a 1949 geography text* speaks of “the relentless fecundity and savagery of the jungle.” In fact, the breathtaking vital- ity of tropical forests resides not in the soil, but in living things, such as insects, trees, and the various tree-­dwelling epiphytes that have no roots in the ground. Particularly in the great rain forest of the Amazon basin, the soils are of marginal fertility. Once cleared for agriculture, tropical forest soils produce disappointing yields after only a few years. Therefore, forest-­dwelling indigenous peoples prac- ticed “shifting cultivation,” sometimes called “slash and burn” because of the way they cleared their garden plots. Semisedentary people built villages but moved them frequently, allowing old garden plots to be reabsorbed into the forest and opening new ones elsewhere. Shifting cultivation was thus a successful adaptation to one of the world’s most challenging natural environments. Semisedentary societies, like the forest-­dwelling Tupi, the best-­known indigenous people of Brazilian history, or­ga­nized themselves by tribes and by gender roles, but not by social class. Nor did they build empires. Finally, some indigenous people w ­ ere fully sedentary. Perma- nent settlement, usually on high plateaus rather than in forests, made their societies more complex, and some constructed great empires, especially the fabled Aztec, Inca, and Maya empires. Not all sedentaries had empires, however. What all had in common were stationary, permanently sustainable forms of agriculture. ­ For example, the capital of the Aztec Empire—­more populous than Madrid or Lisbon—­was fed by quite an ingenious method. Tenoch- titlan was surrounded by lake waters on all sides, and in these waters the inhabitants of the city constructed garden platforms *William Lytle Schurz, Latin America: A Descriptive Survey (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1949), 28. 19 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 19 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Chapter 2 | Encounter called chinampas. Alluvial deposits periodically renewed their fertility. The builders of the Inca Empire had their own elaborate form of sustainable agriculture involving terraced slopes, irrigation, and the use of nitrate-­rich bird droppings, called guano, for fertil- izer. A permanent agricultural base allowed the growth of larger, denser conglomerations of people, the construction of cities, greater labor specialization—­all sorts of things. Not all w­ ere good things. Whereas the non- or semisedentary people tended toward fairly egalitarian societies, in which outstanding individuals became lead- ers thanks to their personal qualities, fully sedentary groups ­were strongly stratified by class. Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas all had heredi- tary nobilities that specialized in war. Note that the names Aztec and Inca refer to empires and not, strictly speaking, to their inhabitants at all. The rulers of the Aztec Empire ­were a people called the Mexicas, who gave their name to Mexico. The warlike Mexicas ­were relative newcomers to the fertile valley where they built their amazing city, Tenochtitlan, in the shadow of great volcanoes, but they inherited a civilization that had developed in Mexico’s central highlands over a thousand years. For example, the gargantuan Pyramid of the Sun, the largest pyra- mid on earth, was built long before the Mexicas arrived. In the early 1400s, the Mexicas ­were only one among many groups who spoke Nahuatl, the common language of city-­states in the region. But they conquered much of central Mexico during the next one hundred years. Tenochtitlan, the imperial capital, was a vast and teeming complex of towers, palaces, and pyramids that, according to the flabbergasted Spanish adventurer Bernal Díaz, rose like a mirage from the waters of the surrounding lake, linked to the shore by a series of perfectly straight and level causeways. “We ­were astonished and said these things appeared enchantments from a book of chivalry,” wrote Díaz, describing the Spaniards’ first sight of Tenochtitlan. From an imposing capital city in a high Andean valley far to the south, the even larger Inca Empire had grown just as rapidly and recently as had the Aztec Empire. The Inca capital was called 20 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 20 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Pat terns of Indigenous Life The Gre at Temple of Te nochtitlan. The site of human sacrifice was part of a walled ceremonial complex, 300 meters square, at the heart of the Aztec capital, later the location of the cathedral of Mexico City. The Granger Collection, New York. 21 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 21 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Chapter 2 | Encounter Cuzco, meaning “the navel of the universe.” Today one speaks of “the Incas,” but the name Inca actually referred only to the em- peror and his empire. Ethnically, the people of Cuzco ­were Quechua speakers, and they, too, drew on a long history of previous cultural evolution in the Andes. Cuzco’s architectural marvels—earthquake-­ resistant masonry walls with interlocking stones—­were an old trick among Andean builders. Heirs to ancient civilizations, the Aztec and Inca empires ­were newer and more fragile than they appeared. The Mayas ­were less imperially inclined. Beginning much earlier than Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, various Maya city-­states with impos- ing ceremonial centers held sway in Central America: Tikal, Copán, Tulum, Uxmal. In cultural attainments, such as art, architecture, and astronomy, the Mayas ­were second to none in America. But the Mayas did not create an empire to rival the Inca or Aztec empires. And since the high point of the Maya Empire, if such a term really applies, was many centuries before the Eu­ro­pe­ans arrived, it plays little part in our story. At the moment of the Encounter, then, most of Latin Amer- ica was inhabited by nonsedentary or semisedentary people, such as the Pampas of Argentina and the Tupis of Brazil. Today, few of their descendants remain. Instead, the large indigenous populations of Latin America descend from the sedentary farmers, many of whom lived under Aztec, Maya, or Inca rule until the Eu­ro­pe­ans arrived. Why did they survive when the others perished? The answer is com- plex, but it explains much about Latin America. It requires, first, some background about Spain and Portugal, joined under the geo­graph­i­cal name Iberia. Origins of a Crusading Mentalit y In the 1490s, when Eu­ro­pe­ans clambered out of their cramped sail- ing vessels to face indigenous Americans for the first time, the great- est question was how each would react to the other. This was truly a cultural encounter, a clash of values and attitudes. The Spanish and 22 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 22 13/06/16 10:50 AM  O r i g i n s o f a C r u s a d i n g M e n t a li t y MAYAN CULTURAL ATTAINMENTS are second to none in the Americas—including sophisticated mathematics, expressive sculpture and graphic art, and an evolving form of writ- ing, called glyphs, some of which are visible at top right. Alexandra Draghici/istockphoto.com. Portuguese outlook, along with their crusader rhetoric, had been shaped by the history of the Iberian Peninsula. Iberia is a rugged, mountainous land. Parts of it are as green as Ireland (very green, indeed), but most of it is dry. On pictures taken from space, southern Spain appears the same color as nearby north- ern Africa. Historically, Iberia had been a bridge between Eu­rope and Africa, and the narrow Strait of Gibraltar separating the two con- tinents had often been crossed, in both directions, by migrants and invaders. In the year 711, Muslims from northern Africa, called Moors, began to cross heading north and seized most of the peninsula from its 23 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 23 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Chapter 2 | Encounter INCA STONEWORK. In the former Inca capital, Cuzco, Peru, the Spaniards incorporated these earthquake-resistant foundations into their own buildings. © Jeremy Horner/Corbis. 24 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 24 13/06/16 10:50 AM  O r i g i n s o f a C r u s a d i n g M e n t a li t y Christian kings (whose pre­de­ces­sors, generations earlier, had taken it from the Romans, who, in turn, had seized it from the Carthaginians, and so on). For most of the next eight hundred years, Iberia contained multiethnic societies that intermingled but also fought one another. Both activities left their mark. Along with the practical skills of the Islamic world, the Moors brought with them the learning of the Greeks and Romans, well pre- served in the Middle East during Eu­rope’s Dark Ages. Christians who lived under Moorish rule or who traded with Moorish neighbors from the remaining Christian kingdoms learned a healthy respect for the cultural achievements of Islam. The Moors ­were better physi- cians, better engineers, and better farmers than the Iberian Chris- tians, whose languages gradually filled with Arabic words for new crops (such as basil, artichokes, and almonds), new pro­cesses and substances (such as distillation and alcohol), new furnishings (such as carpeting), and new sciences (such as algebra and chemistry)—­ eventually totaling about a quarter of all modern Spanish and Portuguese words. Although speakers of Arabic, the Moors ­ were darker than Arabs. Shakespeare’s “black” character Othello, for example, is a Moor. So the Christians of Iberia had long exposure to a sophisticated and powerful people who did not look Eu­ro­pe­an. In addition, on the eve of the Encounter, Iberia had one of the largest Jewish minorities in Eu­rope, and Lisbon and Seville ­were already home to thousands of enslaved Africans. Not sympathetic to cultural and racial difference, the Iberians w­ ere nevertheless well acquainted with it. Spanish and Portuguese attitudes toward other people ranged from scorn to grudging admiration to sexual curiosity—­dusky Moorish maidens figure erotically in Iberian folktales. The reign of Alfonso the Wise (1252–­84), a noted lawgiver, represents a high point in this tense, multicultural Iberian world. In the end, however, the peninsula’s eight hundred years of multicultural experience dissolved in an intolerant drive for religious purity. The Christian reconquest of Iberia powerfully shaped the institutions and mentality of the Spanish and Portuguese. Iberian Christians believed that they had found the tomb of San- tiago, Saint James the Apostle, in the remote northwestern corner 25 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 25 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Chapter 2 | Encounter of the peninsula never conquered by the Moors. The Moor-­slaying Santiago, pictured as a sword-­swinging knight, became the patron saint of reconquest, and his tomb in Santiago de Compostela be- came Eu­rope’s greatest shrine. Reconquest brought the repeated challenges of annexing new territory and subjugating infidel populations. As they pushed the Moors south toward Africa over thirty generations, the reconquering Christians founded new ur- ban centers as bastions of their advancing territorial claims, and individual warlords took responsibility for Christianizing groups of defeated Moors, receiving tribute and ser­vice from them in return. The same challenges and the same procedures would be repeated in America. Another effect of the reconquest was to perpetuate the knightly renown and influence of the Christian nobility. For this reason, the values of the nobles (fighting prowess, leisure, display of wealth) lost ground only slowly to the values of the commercial middle class (moneymaking, industry, thrift). In addition, the re- quirements of warfare led to a concentration of po­liti­cal power to facilitate decisive, unified command. Two of the peninsula’s many small Christian kingdoms gradually emerged as leaders of the re- conquest. The most important by far was centrally located Castile, whose dominions eventually engulfed much of Iberia and, when united with the kingdoms of Aragon, León, and Navarre, laid the po­liti­cal basis for modern Spain. On the Atlantic coast, the king of Portugal led a parallel advance south and managed to maintain in­de­pen­dence from Spain. Portugal was the first to complete its reconquest, reaching the southern coast of Iberia in the mid-1200s. On the Spanish side, the Moorish kingdom of Granada held out for two more centuries before finally succumbing to Castilian military power in 1492. When Queen Isabel of Castile decided to promote the explo- rations of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s, she did so in hopes of enriching her kingdom, true enough. By sailing west, Columbus proposed to outflank a profitable Venetian-­Arab monopoly on trade routes to Asia. But we should not underestimate the religious mys- tique that also surrounded the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs. 26 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 26 13/06/16 10:50 AM  O r i g i n s o f a C r u s a d i n g M e n t a li t y FRANCE AFRICAN AND IBERIAN NAVARRE LEÓN BACKGROUND ARAGON n Atlantic Ocean ea UGAL CASTILE r an it er ed PORT a M Se Atlantic MOORISH DOMINIONS CHRISTIAN RECONQUEST Ocean OF IBERIA, C. 1200 Lisbon Madrid Seville Granada SAHARA DESERT Sla ves Timbuktu Ni ge rR WEST. Slav AFRICA es G o l d C oast Slaves Slaves ANGOLA Atlantic E QU Ocean BI AM OZ M MADAGASCAR Indian Slav Cape of Ocean es Good Hope 27 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 27 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Chapter 2 | Encounter Isabel was above all a Catholic monarch. Centuries of reconquest had created a true crusading mentality in Iberia, and the monarchies used this fervor to justify their increasingly absolute power. Moors who had accepted Christian rule, Jews whose families had lived in Iberia for close to a thousand years, and anyone suspected of religious infidel- ity found themselves objects of a purge. Moors and Jews ­were forced to convert or emigrate. In fact, in the very year of the surrender of Granada, Isabel expelled tens of thousands of people from Spain be- cause they refused to renounce the Jewish faith. And Moors and Jews who did convert remained subject to discrimination as “New Chris- tians.” The famous Spanish Inquisition was established to impose religious purity. During the 1500s, Catholics and Protestants began fighting bitterly in western Eu­rope, and the monarchs of a unified Spain led the Catholic side, pouring prodigious resources into the war effort. Recall that in 1588 the Spanish Armada attempted to invade Protestant En­gland. Overseas exploration also took on religious sig- nificance. The earlier Christian reconquest in Portugal allowed the Portuguese to extend their crusading activities into Africa ahead of Spain. As Portuguese ships edged down the coast of Africa during the 1400s, bringing back gold and slaves, they found religious jus- tification in tales of a lost Christian kingdom that supposedly lay beyond the Sahara, waiting to be re­united with the rest of Christen- dom. Isabel’s decision to fund the voyages of Columbus was Spain’s bid to catch up with Portugal. Thus the two Iberian monarchies, strengthened po­ liti­ cally by the reconquest, became the first in Eu­rope to sponsor major overseas exploration, and they arrived in the Western Hemi­sphere neck and neck. Although the Spanish-­ sponsored expedition of Columbus arrived in America first, the difference was less than a de­ cade. Let us start with the Portuguese, who had pioneered the naviga- tional skills and naval technology needed to get there. The Portu- guese colonization of Brazil exemplifies what happened when the Eu­ ro­ pe­ans encountered indigenous people who w ­ ere not fully sedentary. An initial look at Brazil will help us appreciate the 28 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 28 13/06/16 10:50 AM  T h e B r a z ili a n C o u n t e r e x a mpl e unique qualities of the very different, and far more famous, encounter of the Spanish with the fully sedentary peoples of indigenous Mexico and Peru. The Br azilian Counterex a mple The first Portuguese fleet arrived in Brazil in 1500. Like Colum- bus a few years earlier, the Portuguese commander Pedro Alvares Cabral was bound for India, but in contrast to Columbus, he actu- ally did get there. Cabral had no intention of sailing around the world. Instead, he was sailing from Portugal down the west coast of Africa and around its southern tip into the Indian Ocean. To catch the best winds, he had swung far out into the South Atlantic on his southward voyage—­so far out, in fact, that before turning back east he bumped into Brazil. Like Columbus, Cabral did not know exactly what he had found, but he knew that it was not India. After nam- ing Brazil the “Island of the True Cross,” Cabral hurried on to his original destination. Brazil seemed unimportant to the Portuguese at the time. Just a few years earlier, they had succeeded in establishing a prac- tical route to the fabled riches of South Asia—­which Columbus had failed to do. For the rest of the 1500s, the Portuguese concentrated on exploiting their early advantage in the Far Eastern trade. Por- tuguese outposts elsewhere reached from Africa to Arabia, India, Indonesia, China, and Japan. Portuguese ships returned to Eu­rope perilously overloaded with silks and porcelain, precious spices (pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon), and Persian ­horses, not to mention gold and silver. Monopoly access to these riches made Portugal, for a time, a major player in world history. Brazil offered nothing comparable to India in the eyes of Cabral or his chroni- cler, Pero Vaz de Caminha. Caminha’s curious description of what he saw on Brazilian shores presented a vision of a new Garden of Eden, paying par­tic­ul­ar attention to the fact that the indigenous people there wore no clothes: “They go around naked, without any 29 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 29 13/06/16 10:50 AM  Chapter 2 | Encounter covering at all. They worry no more about showing their private parts than their faces.” The Portuguese sailors plainly found indige- nous women attractive and inviting, but the only thing that seemed to have potential for sale in Eu­rope was a red dye made from the “brazilwood” tree. The name of this export product quickly replaced the origi- nal name of “Island of the True Cross,” just as economics upstaged religion, overall, in the colonization of Brazil and Spanish America. Still, religious ideas must not be discounted. “Fathers, pray that God make me chaste and zealous enough to expand our Faith throughout the world,” implored the young Portuguese prince Sebastian, with unquestionable sincerity, to his Jesuit tutors. Eu­ro­pe­ans of the 1500s believed in the teachings of their religion as a matter of course, and some Portuguese and Spanish men, especially those in holy orders such as the Jesuits, undertook quite perilous voyages around the world primarily to save souls. In sum, however, the vast majority of people had a mundane mix of motivations, and the lure of worldly success was constantly evident in their actions. The idea of spread- ing Christianity provided, above all, a compelling rationale for lay- ing claim to huge chunks of the “undiscovered” world. Consequently, religious ideas became particularly influential at the level of formal rationalization. Whenever the invaders of America had to explain and justify their actions, they invoked religious goals for reasons no more sinister than the common human wish to present oneself in the best light. Aside from their immortal souls, forest dwellers like the Tupi did not have very much that the Eu­ro­pe­ans wanted, so they ­were left more or less alone at first. Along the Brazilian coast, some mutually advantageous trade developed when Tupi men w ­ ere will- ing to fell the brazilwood and float the logs to trading stations in return for useful items such as steel axes. Occasionally, Portuguese castaways or exiles “went native,” to live among the indigenous people, and found a different kind of worldly success, becoming influential figures in their localities and, in a manner foreshad- owed by the chronicle of Pero Vaz de Caminha, fathering dozens 30 03_BBF_28305_ch02_016-053.indd 30 13/06/16 10:50 AM  T h e B r a z ili a n C o u n t e r e x a mpl e and dozens of children—­the beginnings of a pro­cess of racial mixing that has characterized the history of Brazil. The king of Portugal was too preoccupied with his Asian empire to think much about Brazil until the 1530s, when the appearance of French ships along the Brazilian coast made him fear for his claims there. To secure them, he finally