Discovery, Conquest, or Encounter? What to Do with October 12th?
Undoubtedly, we must recognize the fact that a dreamer and cunning merchant from Genoa reached a territory in America that was completely unknown to Europe through his own skills, maybe by accident, but more surely by intent. This was the result of creativity, innovation, bravery, greediness, or ambition, or perhaps pure madness. We cannot take away that from Christopher Columbus.
Because Columbus did not “discover” our continent, but merely got here, the problem is how we frame this event. Furthermore, according to his diaries, he never knew this was a “new” continent. At his deathbed, he was convinced that Cuba was Cipango, and he had a hard time making sense of the fact that on his fourth and last voyage, he was unable to go west to China (because of Central America). So, he did not discover a continent; he just dared to think differently and find the means to achieve a daring task.
Furthermore, what today we call America (after Italian cartographer Amerigo Vespucci) and what the people at the time called Abya Yala or Turtle Island, was not a continent waiting to be discovered. It was not new, and it needed nothing more than what it had. Empires were already in the making: the Mexica and Inca empires were, as the Carolingian empire, invading people and gaining territories with murder, violence, and domination. The fact that they imposed their power with terror over thousands and thousands of people should make us understand why these people owe them no allegiance. Under that reign of terror, people would easily change alliances if they believed the new ally would treat them better. So, we need to rethink who was the traitor at the time of the European conquest: the terrible empire or the frail tribe.
Discovery is a big word for what Columbus did. Although I will feel comfortable using it to describe the work of Ferdinand Magellan, for example, a true explorer of the Southern end, I do not think it is good to describe the process that took place between 1492 and 1521 — and later.
Conquest is exactly what happened, because in 1519, a convoy of soldiers (not merchants) came to conquer the territory, kill the children, rape the women, enslave the men, and take territory that was not for them to claim — using as an excuse that these people would benefit from their Christian religion. If they did not surrender their (communal) property, lives, bodies, industry, government, and culture, they would go to a hell they never knew existed. And amid the translation confusion, the one who held the gun and killed more rapidly and massively was the one who imposed silence.
Conquest is a fitting word because the native people were conquered physically, ideologically, and politically — not without resistance, because imagining the indigenous as docile is a disservice to them and to us. They always gave a fight, as did the African Americans in the English colonies, but they were unable to get the guns.
When I was a student in Mexico, we celebrated Columbus Day by singing songs about the three boats that came to America and the king and queen who supported them. But as a teenager, with the rise of the Zapatista movement and the centering of the indigenous reality in the public sphere, there was a shift and we began to throw tomatoes at the rotonda or monuments of Colon.
In Mexico, the day is called "Day of the Race" and "Day of the Encounter of the Two Worlds." One name evokes the rape of women by Spanish men who gave birth to a new race, the Bronze race or miscegenated people (mestizos); the other name omits the aftermath of the encounter, that is, the war, massacres, and genocide.
In Spain, it is the "National Day" and also "Día de la Hispanidad" (or Day of the Hispanicity), which is franker in acknowledging the day in which a rising empire imposed its language, religion, and culture across the Atlantic as definitory of its own identity.
In the United States, I see a tension in the choice of terms to use. Celebrating or atoning? The choice truly depends on the culture of the people who speak.
October 12 has to be the day in which we see our belly button, our native people, our land, and we practice a bit of decolonialism, maybe by thinking that not all that was and is European is better than the American, maybe by always comparing our timeline (Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic) with their timeline (Ancient era, Medieval era, and Renaissance), maybe by learning that all that makes Europe — the Italian tomato, the Spanish tortilla, the French fries, the German Kartoffelkloesse, and all that amazing Swiss chocolate — all of that would not exist without America’s tomatoes, potatoes, and cocoa.
Maybe it is time to be truly Pan-American and celebrate the day that an astray Italian came and marveled, as many others after him did, at the wonders of our land and of our people.
Elena Deanda, Ph.D. (she, her/s, ella), is an associate professor of Spanish at Washington College, where she is also the director of the Black Studies Program. She is president of the Ibero-American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, MLA delegate of the 18th and 19th Spanish and Iberian Forum, and guest co-editor of the Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies 48.2 (2022).
Common Sense for the Eastern Shore
