[print edition page 104]
as the most bizarre. All of this, partly true, waxing in the pens of writers, came to produce indelible impressions in Europe. But, how differently were these same things seen in those lands!
The Spanish conquest in America reduced the Indians to such a state of slavery that each white man considered himself to have the right to be served by the indigenous, without the indigenous having either courage to object or even the capacity to assert any right. Those who escaped the effects of the first slaughters were distributed among the conquistadors. In the beginning, there were only masters and servants. The authorities did not govern by laws, of which there were none, but rather in the name of the king. Later they were given those ordinances that they called the Laws of the Indies, which had as their goal moderating the tyranny of the descendants of the conquistadors and of the chieftains who left Spain to govern those lands. But inasmuch as the only ones who had those laws or royal decrees were those who were to execute them, in reality there did not exist anything but the will of the captains general, viceroys, or governors. Distributions of territories were in part converted into encomiendas, which had as its final result the payment of an annual tribute to the holders of the encomiendas, who were like the borough mongers in England. Later the kings reduced these privileged ones to receiving from the royal treasury the amount equal to the annual yield of the tributes they collected from the Indians who were their share in the original distributions, eliminating, in this way, much ill treatment produced by the method of collecting it, an abuse that later was adopted by the subdelegates and chief magistrates charged with collecting levies from the Indians, who were obligated to deliver them in kind, that is to say, in ordinary fabrics of cotton that their women wore or in other similar manufactured goods.
The Indians had their special laws, their judges, their attorneys and defense counsels that the government named for them because, legally, they were considered minors. The state of brutishness in which it kept them made them, in effect, unfit to demand any kind of rights or to enter into important contracts, which assumed the need for some complex ideas. Those who have tried to defend the policy of the Spanish government with respect to its colonies have cited the existence of this Code of the Indies that seems to have been formed as a bastion of protection on behalf of the Indians. But those who examine the questions
[print edition page 105]
from a philosophical point of view have considered this institute only as a system of slavery established on seemingly indestructible bases, and from whose effects those governments will continue to suffer for some centuries. In effect, those laws are nothing but a prescribed method of domination over the Indians. They take for granted, in the monarchs that issued them, rights over the goods and lives of the conquered ones, and consequently any act that was not absolutely an oppression was deemed in them a favor, a benefit from the legislator. There were laws that determined the weight with which they could be burdened, the distances they could go, what they had to be paid, etc. etc. So as to maintain this systematic order of oppression, it was necessary that the oppressed were never able to enter, so to speak, into the rational world, into the moral sphere in which other men live. In the majority of the provinces, they did not know, nor do they yet know, any language but their own, which is generally different from the others. The language (without excepting Mexican, which some novelists have pompously praised) is impoverished and lacks words to express abstract ideas. The speeches historians or poets imagine to have come from the mouths of the Jicotencales, Magiscatzines, and Colocolos are no more genuine than those that Homer, Virgil, and Livy attribute to the Agamemnons, Turnuses, or Scaevolas. Those Indian chiefs were as, or perhaps more barbarous than these Greek and Roman heroes, and their language could not lend itself to the beautiful oratories that a long sequence of centuries of civilization and regular governments assume.
It is certain that Spanish America before the conquest was more populated than today and that the Indians under their national governments began to develop some ideas. They had confused notions regarding the immortality of the soul, they had made a small number of observations, although highly imperfect, regarding the course of the stars, they were not completely lacking in the art of working metal. But such knowledge remained in its cradle, and now it is known how many centuries are necessary for peoples to attain the level of perfection that would allow them to deserve the title of civilized. The conquest destroyed entirely this movement that began to give flight to the spirit of invention among those indigenous peoples. A new worship as well as an unknown government substituted the bloody superstitions of Huitzilipoxtli and the patriarchal regimes of the Guatimocines and Moctezumas. The images of the saints and gods of the Roman Catholics were put in places that
[print edition page 106]
had previously been occupied by the horrible idols of the Aztecs; and the defenders of the conquistadors will not be able to deny, even if it is painful to admit it, that the Indians also had their martyrs, sacrificed because of the religious zeal of the Roman priests, because of the tenacious adherence of many of them to their ancient worship. But eventually force and terror triumphed over fanaticism for a religion that had against it the horrific dogma of demanding human victims. On the other hand, the Indians encountered much more perfect images than their monstrous idols, and the change was not very difficult, moving to our saints the ceremonies and tributes that they made to their gods. The assistance of miracles came about, and a multitude of celestial apparitions came in support of the new worship, because of which the astonished Indians could not but believe that their gods, along with their monarchs and rulers, had been defeated in a just war.
Missionaries dedicated themselves and, with the aid of troops, made wondrous conversions. The religious constructed their convents in high places like forts and gave those buildings all the solidity necessary to resist in case of attack. Very rare are the temples and houses of the clergymen that do not suggest the reasons that led the founders to make them works of fortification. They were together in them during the night, and by day they occupied themselves with gathering the Indians into settlements. It is clear that their sermons and preachings were not at first able to have any effect, because as they did not have the gift of languages, it was not easy to make their listeners understand dogmas, mysteries, and doctrines that assume many preliminary lessons. Catechisms and small books of rules were created in the languages of the land, not so the Indians could read them, because they didn’t know how, but rather to repeat them in the pulpits and to make the people memorize them. There is not a single version of the sacred books in any language of the land; there is not a basic book that contains the fundamentals of the faith. But how could these works exist for the Indians, when their conquerors themselves could not read them? What I want to show by this is that the religion was not taught to those men, nor did they become convinced of its divine origin through proofs or reasoning; the entire foundation of their faith was the word of their missionaries, and the reasons for their belief, the bayonets of their conquerors. The Inquisition could not understand the motives of the Indians. Such was the Indians’ state of degradation and so strong the idea that was held regarding their incapacity,
[print edition page 107]
that never could they be persuaded that an Indian was able to be the creator of some heresy, or even be the stubborn sectarian of any doctrine whatsoever. This exception came to be a protection, as a concession in favor of the Indians, owing to the judgment that had been formed of their stupidity.
Besides the tribute that the Indians paid to the royal treasury, or to their encomenderos, other ecclesiastical contributions with the name of obvenciones were created. They were exempted from the tithe and the parochial fees because their exploiters had carefully calculated that a man who possesses nothing, nor has more needs than the basics, could pay little of the tithe. The calculation was very correct, because in effect the Indians did not have territorial properties, or any kind of industry, generally speaking. They lived and live in huts covered with thatch or palm fronds, whose size is generally from fifteen to sixteen feet in length, by ten or twelve in width, oval in form. There, of course, are gathered the children, the domestic animals, and an altar on which are the saints or household gods. In the middle is a