"The Encounter of Two Worlds a New Culture is Born"
by Samantha Ray
October 1992

     “Let us try for a mornent to imagine,” wrote one of the many historians about the discovery of our continent, “the astonishment of the inhabitants of a small island called Guanahaní (later San Salvador) one morning, five hundred years ago, when they beheld three shapes out there in the water, three immense hulks, out of which issued several strange beings who seemed human only in their eyes and movements, of light complexion, their faces covered with hair, and their bodies attired with fabrics of diverse pattern and color.” As they had never conceived the existence of such people, it was natural enough that, in 1492, the natives of the Caribbean fancied Christopher Columbus and his Spanish soldiers had descended from the sky. The white men, on the other hand, were aware that beings of different racial characteristics existed. Indeed, they had expected to find people of dark skins and black hair, and, thinking, or at least hoping, that they were in the East Indies, the Spanish subsequently referred to the natives as lndians. In spite of the natural beauty of the islands and the naked innocence of their handsome natives, the discoverers’ joy was restrained, for they found little sign of the precious metals, valuable spices, and other wealth they had sought, and no indication of the civilized and exotic kingdoms of the Orient they had anticipated.

     When the inhabitants of Guanahaní saw the Spanish vessels, in Mexico reigned Moctezurna, who would not face them until several years later. Moctezuma reigned with great authority and popularity for many years. His deep knowledge of Mexican history and his respect for tradition were factors in his successful rule and in the collapse of the Aztec state as well. According to his biographers, Moctezuma lived in the shadow of historical inevitability. Sometime, he knew, the great Quetzalcóatl (the deity “Plumed Serpent”) would return, as he had promised, to take back his rightful throne.

     Just when Moctezuma learned about the presence of white men in the New World is not entrely clear. It is quite possible that word of the Spanish, who had been in the Caribbean for several years, drifted to the mainland. Perhaps he was not yet unduly concerned. The island now called Cuba lay near, but it was not part of the Aztec world. Moctezuma was informed by his agents that the Spanish had landed on the Yucatán Península in 1517, just 25 years after Columbus set foot in Guanahaní, and that others the following year were making their way up the Gulf coast lndians reported seeing “towers or small mountains floating on the waves of the sea.” Meanwhile, strange phenomena, construed by the emperor's priests as evil portents, had occurred. Lightning, unaccompanied by thunder, like a blow from the sun, damaged a temple. A strange bird was found with a mirror in its head”, in which Moctezuma saw a host of foreign warriors. In 1517 a comet appeared “like a flaming ear of corn; it seemed to bleed fire, drop by drop, like a wound in the sky.” These and other unexplained signs heightened general anxiety. Then, in the spring of 1519 (the Aztec year of Ce Acatl), the emperor was filled with apprehension when a courier arrived bearing ominous paintings. They depicted the encampment on Aztec shores of bearded white men with crosses.

     The encounter of two worlds, who first met each other in the island of Guanahaní, had taken place and it was to change the face of the continent forever.

     Two worlds faced each other. After destruction, blood, illness, defeats and triumphs on both sides, those two worlds started to merge.

     Hundreds of books have been written about the conquest of the now called Latin America has Spanish blood. This erotic conquest was as important as the other two.

     The sixteenth century, the century of conquest, was the period when the face of this continent was redesigned. The military conquest, the spiritual conquest and the erotic conquest, integral part of the same process, laid down the general lines which would conform the new continent.

     Thus a third culture was born: neither Pre-Colombian, nor Spanish, is nowadays a marvellous mixture which shows, in each Latin American country, its distinct personality in every aspect of the whole scope of human life, from the food eaten, to the ideas and ideals.