Gratitude 141

Rising above trauma is essential for getting on with life.  It isn't easy and there are going to be those who will be more successful than others.  Overcoming trauma is going to be even more complicated for the collective than for the individual, especially because within the collective will be persons who are more successful than others, moreover, the quality of success is going to be determined by the environment they are living in.  Throughout Latin America there are nations very unequal to each other in many details: the quality of democracy (given that it already exists), the absence of corruption, respect for the rule of law, the economy, respect for human rights, the state of the natural environment, the lack of crime, and violence, the state of public health, opportunities for advanced education, and social and economic equality.

Chile, despite its cruel and bloody legacy from the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, now enjoys a very high quality of life, as well as an extremely robust economy, as do Uruguay and Argentina. Those nations suffered tremendously because of the devastations from the military through the seventies and eighties, the governments and their militaries murdered tens of thousands of their own citizens and drove into exile many more, for example, with Chile, more than two hundred thousand of their own citizens.

There is great hope that the people of Colombia can finally move forward with their process of reconciliation.  Venezuela has become a madhouse until the controversies brought on by Nicolas Maduro can be resolved and that something resembling true democracy can return to that country.  I an under the impression that other countries have struggled tremendously under tremendous oppression and exploitation since the Conquistadores five hundred years ago.

The violence that has rocked for many years Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has its origins in some of the recent problems caused by the narco-traffickers, moreover the civil wars where they have their roots.  But the legacy of inequality and exploitation and violence have been the ingredients of the founding of such countries, to which are owed the consequences of the Spanish conquest.

What I want to understand is this: why the violence?  Why such violence and barbarism to carry out the will of the nations throughout the history of our sad and broken world?  Only in the last seventy years, following the most brutal war of our entire human history are we finally talking seriously about peace, of how to bring about nonviolent measures in our international and interpersonal relations,  I want to know why we have been so slow to learn such essential lessons to our human survival.

Concerning those who overcome trauma, there are those who are very strong and very capable of surviving almost anything and such individuals are going to be greatly needed if we want to move forward as a society.  Even the strongest among us are going to need therapeutic interventions.  It is only too easy for the strongest survivors to inflict on other vulnerable parties the same kind of cruel treatment that others inflicted on them.  Only through education, through coming to know our history very well and our own guilt as well as our own capacity for being cruel are we going to avoid repeating the madness of our history, and then we can move forward to create a new world.

Gratitude 140

Here I would like to write a bit about the Black Legend, or "la leyenda negra" that the Spanish traditionally invoke whenever they feel subjected to criticism for the atrocities they committed during the Inquisition and the Conquest of Mexico and Peru.  Many in both Mama Espana and in her offspring cultures of Latin America tend to invoke, whenever these things are mentioned, "La leyenda negra!"  In the sixteenth century, it is believed, other countries such as England, France and the Netherlands, were assumed to have an irrational and all-consuming hatred and envy towards the Spanish.  So, they invented and crafted lies and exaggerations only to discredit Spain.  This argument tends to get raised even to this very day.

I have read a little bit about the Black Legend.  I can understand that any nation accused of the kinds of barbarities that Spain is alleged to have committed against both its own people as well as the natives of Latin America would tend to feel a little bit defensive.  Really, thousands burned at the stake in Spain, and almost as many in Mexico, not to mention the thousands, millions of Aztecs and others systematically slaughtered or killed from imported epidemics and the survivors raped and enslaved.   To have to live down that kind of reputation!  What a cross to bear!

England and France both had their share of strategic and diplomatic rivalries with Spain.  However, the other player in perpetrating the myth of the Black Legend, the Netherlands, was actually overrun and occupied by the Spanish and they would especially have a legitimate stake in wanting to expose the atrocities.

I do not, personally, believe the myth of "La Leyenda Negra."  Yes, other countries were every bit as brutal and barbaric in their practices during war and peacetime as Spain.  England alone has had a lot to answer for, for the genocides committed against the aboriginal peoples of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and also South Africa, where the Dutch were also pretty bad, if not even worse than the English.

Here is where I tend to part company with Spain.  In the eponymously named countries we have and are still witnessing extensive public programs of truth and reconciliation.  Much has been confessed and admitted of atrocities on both sides, but particularly of the occupying colonial powers against the indigenous peoples of the lands they were colonizing.  This has been, so far, an imperfect process, and not everyone is happy, but it is better than nothing and this is likely to continue for generations to come.

So far there has been no indication of Spain participating in such a process, nor of her offspring governments and societies in the various countries where Spanish is the official language.  To this day, the Black Legend is likely being invoked as a form of denial, an abnegation of responsibility.  To me it doesn't really matter whether only thirty-seven people were burned at the stake in Mexico or thirty-seven hundred.  The fact that violence, poverty, corruption and social inequality continue to this day there and in so many other Latin American countries is in itself the most damning circumstantial evidence that these nations have been traumatized and that the Spanish Crown and its lackeys were very able and adept victimizers.

I have already written in these pages that Spain, following eight centuries of foreign occupation by the Moors, was going to feel very much like a victim.  Just as some of the Jews, when they settled in Israel after the Shoah, became themselves victimizers against the Palestinian Arabs, so had the Spanish carried their stigma as historical victims to the New World where they savagely acted out their grief and rage on the hapless indigenous peoples and African slaves.  Yes, greed for gold and resources and their zeal to spread Spanish and Catholic civilization were the main motivators but I cannot help but suspect that underneath it all they were really themselves traumatized and hurt children viciously acting out their own injury and outrage on vulnerable others.  Ironic, given that the Moors had been far gentler in their treatment of the Spanish Catholics than the Spanish Catholics have been of the peoples of Mexico and Central and South America.

Impunity creates a very short memory.  Had the Germans not accepted full responsibility for causing the Second World War as well as their horrendous genocide against European Jewry, as well as against other vulnerable human targets, who knows what kind of condition Germany and the German people would be in today.  Yes, the younger generations have put the Holocaust behind them and are getting on with things.  But I also cannot help but wonder if the current strength and prosperity of the German nation and its liberal and social-democratic institutions is at least partly attributable to the fact that they owned up, confessed, repented and made reparations for what they did.  (full disclosure here, half my DNA is German)

Time will tell if something similar might happen in Spain, concerning the Basque region or in various Latin American countries concerning the historic trauma the ruling (and Spanish) classes have visited upon their most vulnerable people.  I suspect that the Black Legend is going to go on being used as a smoke screen, just as I believe that a succession of men and women of integrity on both Hispanic sides of the Atlantic are going to refuse to accept this historic lie and will rise up and demand that the truth be told.

Gratitude 139

I think that I have already mentioned that I am reading a book about the history of Mexico, in Spanish.  This is quite interesting on a few levels.  It's giving me lots of information, for one thing, as well as giving me a good daily Spanish workout.  Because the author is quite conservative and served many years in the Mexican military it is also helping me read between the lines.  This fellow definitely does not question popular assumptions and seems even quite intent on reinforcing some of them

Such as, this bit I'm reading about the education of savages.  Please note that I am writing these words in the purest irony.  The Mexica, just one generation following conquest, were already being brainwashed and indoctrinated by the Franciscans and Jesuits.  Likely not such a bad thing, if you were a young student in Spain.  But these were children of the Aztecs, Zapotecs, Purepeche and others.  A highly advanced civilization with notable achievements in astronomy, agronomy and social organization had just been toppled and humiliated, and now most of their citizens were dead from imported diseases and mistreatment.  None of these children and youths were going to be educated in their culture, much less their own language.  They were being taught reading, writing and religion.

They were not being taught to read in their own language, Nahuatl, nor would any effort be made to create for this language a written form for some time to come.  They were being taught to read Spanish in Roman alphabet letters.  Likewise, they were not being taught to read about their own history and culture, but about Mama Espana and why she was the best Mama on the block.  As for religion, well, after all that human sacrifice they were going to be taught how to be good faithful Catholics.  Since the Inquisition was just being imported to Mexico around that time there was likely  compulsory attendance of a couple of public burnings at the stake thrown in just to teach them to stay in line.

Here in Canada we had the residential schools for native children, where basically the same crimes were perpetrated, only we didn't really kill them, just sought to kill the Indian in the child.

In Canadian Indian residential schools, the children had almost all been forcefully taken from their families, were forbidden to practice their spirituality or speak their language and basically were forced to morph into good, submissive little white girls and boys, while being beaten, raped, and otherwise humiliated by the priests and nuns into whose care they were given.  The particularly painful irony is that this was happening four hundred years following the Spanish conquest of the Mexica.  It was as if not one single thing had been learned even with all the accumulated knowledge, wisdom and education between the Spanish Middle Ages and the Twentieth Century in enlightened and progressive Canada.

In Canada we are going through a messy and very necessary process of reconciliation with our first nations people.  The Anglican and United Churches and the Government of Canada have been particularly active in offering official apologies and opening the forum for respectful dialogue.  A lot of anger, grief and bitterness is being vented, of course, and we are nowhere near finished with this particularly painful and difficult process.  We have barely started.

I am waiting to see Latin American countries, with the Catholic Church at the helm, open a similar process of reconciliation and public repentance over their treatment of their own aboriginal peoples.  This could be a rather more complicated process, given that some ninety percent of Latinos, except perhaps in predominantly white Argentina and Uruguay, have mixed racial ancestry, mostly European and Indigenous with some African and Asian, and for this reason a lot more of the trauma has been historically and culturally absorbed by the majority.  Still, the classic Spanish arrogance and pride that refuses to accept responsibility, refuses to apologize, refuses to admit to wrongdoing and error, is going to have to be reckoned with.  Only when the wounds are brought out into the open in an atmosphere of respect and mutual acceptance will healing begin and then the collective trauma that is the Latino inheritance can really begin to heal.

Gratitude 138

I am also grateful for the gift of repentance.  This is not easy to come by.  I am not sure about other faiths but it is a central tenant to being a Christian.  Repentance comes from acknowledging that we have done wrong, have wronged others, have wronged ourselves, have gone in the wrong direction.  It isn't so much an act of lamentation and grief so much as an intentional turning our lives around, changing direction, choosing the good, the right way.  It means that we want to have good and transparent relations with God, with our neighbour (even the person sharing your bus seat is your neighbour), our dear ones and with the world, which includes strangers on the street, people in other countries, and the natural environment of our Mama Tierra, or Mother Earth.

Whenever others have somehow suffered due to our actions or neglect there remains an imbalance in the relationship until repentance is expressed and enacted.  It isn't simply incumbent upon the injured party to forgive (this is still part of the equation), but equally so that the offender recognize and acknowledge their wrongdoing, admit this to the hurt party, express sorrow and regret, and do everything in their power to make reparation.

This is equally so between nations as between individuals, between employers and employees as between occupying powers and indigenous peoples.  These things do not happen very often.  There was a time, till very recently in our human history, that these things never happened at all.   Indeed, the Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge the genocide their troops committed against the Armenian people in 1917; the Japanese government still refuses to accept responsibility for the rape of Nanking, the bombing of Pearl Harbour and the vicious assaults against the Korean Comfort Women: the American government still refuses to apologize for dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki;  The Spanish government still has not apologized for the havoc they wreaked on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, nor have any of the Latin American governments.

There is a process of reconciliation taking place between FARC and the Colombian government and people.  This is a first step.  I am not sure about other countries.  There was also a public apology to the victims of Agosto Pinochet's dictatorship by former Chilean president Patricio Alwyn.  Another first of many steps that need to be taken to ensure the healing of nations.

“ 'Apologies cannot completely remove or undo the pain or loss suffered by survivors and victims’ families, but they can be a meaningful way of recognizing the dignity of victims and an important step for a society trying to build peace,” says Ruben Carranza, director of ICTJ’s Reparative Justice program...'

The Spanish Conquistadores were not given to making apology.  They were on the side of the Spanish Crown and Holy Mother Church, therefore, how could they possibly do wrong, though we know now that with such thinking, how could they not possibly do wrong?  The Spanish, following more than seven years of Moorish occupation truly saw themselves as victims, and after driving the Muslims out of their part of Europe they still saw themselves as victims thus incarnating the wrongs inflicted on them for almost eight hundred years by the occupying North Africans, in order to inflict far worse upon the hapless indigenous peoples of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America. 

Even now continues the legacy of impunity as social and economic inequality ensures that the indigenous peoples of the Americas (Canada has nothing to crow about here!) remain at the very bottom of the social hierarchies in these countries, as well as a good number of the Mestizaje.  This legacy of arrogant pride dehumanizes both victim and victimizer and no real healing can begin, nor any movement of significant social justice in any of these countries until public acts of reconciliation and healing are enacted. 

Continued impunity only repeatedly retraumatizes the already traumatized, while leaving the offenders locked inside their harm-inducing arrogance which they simply continue to perpetuate against the vulnerable.  I believe that it is highly possible that some moral and spiritual leaders and mentors could arise in some Latin American countries with the prophetic voice of Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi in order to truly break and heal this vicious cycle of violence in much of Latin America.  This not only could happen.  It needs to happen.  Soon.

Gratitude 137

I am particularly grateful, Gentle Reader, for the separation of church and state.  Here in lovely, liberal, somewhat socially democratic Canada, we have this blessing.  There is no national religion in this country (outside of, ugh!, hockey)  No one gets their head chopped off, nor burned at the stake, nor their beating heart carved out of their still breathing chest, for not attending services, and can write or say anything they want about any faith or god they want and still know they can wake up breathing in their own bed the next morning.

We really don't know how good we have it in the Twenty-First Century, regardless of the huge risks of climate change from global warming, the Great Deplorable in the Oval Office (that name will no longer be seen on these pages!), or the huge privileges and advantages that our children have at their fingertips, regardless of our disproportionate fears that they'll be abducted in the night.  The nightmare that has been unfolding in the Middle East, thanks to the various, increasingly gruesome, Islamic fundamentalist groups, is but a faint historical belch of the cruel reality that everyone had to live under in Mexico and in Spain during the sixteenth century.

The very notion of freedom of religion, or of a secular state, would not even be conceived for another two hundred years.  In the meantime, before Cortes brought his stinking unwashed thugs over the Ocean Blue (oh, that was Columbus.  Well, same diff') you had no choice but obey and revere the priest chieftains of  Tenochtitlan and honour the blood-thirsty gods, or you too would be dragged up the temple stairs.

As brutal, greedy and bloodthirsty were the Spanish Crown, they weren't stupid.  They knew that if they were to successfully convert the heathen savages (who in most ways kicked their Spanish ass for civilization and culture) to the Holy Catholic Faith then they would have to do better than the thugs and corrupt priests they were bringing with them to the New World.  So, they sent the best their church could offer: humble, pious and caring Franciscan Friars, followed by Jesuits, combining their skills of compassion and education with a finesse that successfully won over many of the indigenous people of Mexico.  Throw into the pot that they were already a conquered people, vulnerable, and therefore malleable, and Bob's yer uncle!

It worked, but those pesky Jesuits with their sharp minds and talent for questioning authority really became a fly in the ointment to the Crown.  So, late in the sixteenth century, they exported to the Mexica the Spanish Inquisition and bring on the big human barbecue!  I am currently reading la historia de Mexico (History of Mexico) by Fernando Orozco Linares who claims that the barbarities of the Inquisition on both sides of the Atlantic have been greatly exaggerated by British and French writers because of their hatred of the Spanish, and that in Mexico anyway, only thirty-seven persons were burned at the stake.  Well, that would be thirty-seven too many.  Besides which, given that the author likely had a very conservative bent, having served much of his adult life in the Mexican military, why would he want to be confused by unpalatable facts?  Better to demonize the naysayers, shoot the messenger as it were, than to face and own up to the atrocities that your country has perpetuated.  It is also my understanding that penitent introspection is not an inherent Hispanic quality.  There is no record, to my knowledge, of any official apologies or acknowledgements of wrongdoing being publicly declared, neither by Spain nor by Spanish Latin American governments, to address and initiate a painful process of reconciliation with the indigenous peoples of their countries whom they have historically slaughtered, raped, exploited and oppressed.

I see this as a critical step towards bringing healing to the Collective Trauma of Latin America.  But first, the descendants of the people who unleashed the genocide are going to have some explaining to do!

Gratitude 136

I'm thinking of First World Problems, after a brief exchange I had with another customer at our friendly neighbourhood Shopper's Drug Mart.  I was trying to get to the milk, but there was another customer in my way, thanks to a huge display of useless consumer junk on sale in the middle of the aisle.  This is a tactic that stores often use for moving stock, but what it really does is move the shopper, as far away as possible.  Instead of attracting me to want to buy any of the useless garbage they're trying to shill, I just get angry, annoyed, ignore it, and maybe even complain to staff and management.  Today, I simply mentioned to the other shopper and, I believe, his wife, that it's not his fault (he was apologizing for getting in my way), but the store is to blame for their tendency of putting crap in our way.  As his wife and I got carping together about the inconvenience I suddenly smiled and said, Hey, this is a First World Problem, which means that if this is bugging me then I must have it pretty good.  She smiled and agreed that this went for her too.  Well, it was nice having a chat and sharing a joke with a couple of friendly strangers.  Also nice being reminded of how good I have it.

Reading up on the history of Latin America simply reinforces to me how good we have things here in Canada in 2017.  On the other hand, the Third World Reality is beginning to cast it's fetid dark grey shadow.  Income equality is at its worst ever and homelessness has become a national crisis.  These are not classic First World Problems.  On the other hand, I enjoy the convenience of living in subsidized housing which pays more than half my rent, making it possible for me to remain in the city of my birth, one of the most expensive for housing in world.   I also really acknowledge my good fortune, given that the waitlists for low income shopping are now for ten years.

Even with my crappy low pay I still enjoy a decent if modest standard of living.  Even at my very poorest (and I still live below the poverty line) I have never in my life had to stand in line at a food bank or soup kitchen.  I am also phenomenally good at budgeting, but I also believe that as I have trusted my life to God that he has also provided for all my needs, especially when I've found myself in very desperate straits.  I can still afford to travel and have already concretized my plans for my fifth visit to Costa Rica in March.  This shouldn't be able to happen for someone earning my low income.  But somehow, I'm still able to do it.  I don't quite get it either, Gentle Reader, but wow! an I grateful!

Not bad, eh?

I read about the horrendous sufferings of the indigenous people of the Americas (the very few who survived the epidemics and the genocidal slaughter from the Spanish, British, French and Portuguese.)  I think of the centuries of serfdom and slavery, especially of African people.  I think of the absolute oppression that people survived under while coping with the murderous tyrants of the imported Spanish aristocracy.  I think of twelve to sixteen hour work days in unsafe mines, underneath the blistering sun in the fields, or the domestic servitude in the palaces and haciendas of the arrogant and pitiless Spanish overlords.  I think of the religious abuse from the vast majority of priests who were nothing but shills for the Spanish Crown.

Life has improved for many in Latin America, but not as much as it has for those of us in North America.  Many still suffer from poverty and subsistence living.  There is still tremendous social and economic inequality.  And here, in dear smug little Canada, are incubating similar conditions of human rights violations and chronic disempowerment, largely thanks to global capitalism, that none of us ever expected to land on our cold and beautiful shores.

Gratitude 135

I am thinking of how for three hundred years, at least, the Spanish colonies of Latin America were cruelly exploited for their natural resources.  All the gold and other metals and resources went to stuff the coffers of Spain and later to fuel the Industrial Revolution in Northern Europe.  The indigenous people of Latin America and the Mestizaje got nothing in return.  The late Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, knew what he was doing when he titled his famous book "The Open Veins of Latin America" (Las Venas Abiertas de Latina America)

This also highlights how easily I personally identify with the historical plight of Latin America.  When my mother was dying my father asked me to especially give emotional support to my brother.  My brother was a wealthy and highly successful radio broadcaster with a wife, a kid, and tons of social status.  He didn't like me.  I was, as I am now, poor, and barely scraping by.  He never lifted so much as a finger to offer me support when I've been in need and his unearned scorn and hatred has likely scarred me for life.  Yet, for all their contempt of me, both my father and brother acknowledged and admired my spiritual gifts, my compassion and my willingness as the only practicing Christian in the family to offer whatever love and support I could to those family members who despised me.  My brother was by far Father's favourite.  Not one bit of concern was expressed about how I might be getting by, or how I might be suffering while waiting for Mother to die.  They didn't care about me.  I only existed for them according to my utility and usefulness.   The day that Mom died, only I and my aunt were with her.  My brother was vacationing in Mexico with his wife.  He did have the decency to fly back immediately once I'd had his employers contact him for me. 

The following day, I visited with him and my father in my brother's home where we remembered Mom together for an hour or two.  Then, I needed to get away, so I left graciously and spent the next few days resting and sleeping a lot, given how exhausted I was from taking care of her while she was dying.  Days later on the phone my brother yelled and railed at me for not staying longer, for not liking him or my father.  He didn't seem to get it when I tried to explain to him that the real fact of the matter is that they did not and never did happen to like me.  We haven't seen each other in nearly twenty years and my father has been dead for almost a decade.  I do not miss either of them.

Yes, I appreciate from an intestinal level the huge injustice that was inflicted by Mama Espana on the poor indigenous, slaves and mestizos of Latin America.

It was all about making Spain, and especially Europe, wealthy and powerful.  The human rights, the very humanity of the poor native people of the Americas mattered not even shit to them.  Their humanity interested them not one bit.  They existed only for their usefulness, to be of service.  This also highlights the sorry legacy of feudalism that clung so tightly to the developing countries of Latin America and how this horrible and sordid mentality still survives in the still hierarchical social class structure there.  And of how this ridiculous illusion of social and genetic superiority still completely blinds the ruling classes in Latin America from both, the humanity of the so-called lower orders, and their own humanity, what little they might still have.

Gratitude 134

I am also grateful for my wealth of books in two languages.  I likely have already written this in a previous post, but I am repeating it here because this is relevant to my research on Latin America and Collective Trauma.  While mentally preparing for this project over the past two years I have often thought, long and hard, about sources.  Where to find appropriate books, articles, studies, people full of knowledge and experience and wisdom I could talk to.  I am pleased to write here that I have had only to search through my wealth of some five hundred books or so, half in Spanish, and Oh Lordy!  What I have found!

On the bus I am reading a book in Spanish about Mexican history.  This does for me triple duty: I have something interesting to read on interminable bus rides, I get to practice my Spanish this way, and I become educated about Mexican history.  And because I do this in transit, think of the benefits of all this great time management!  I also am reading, usually in the bathroom, a similar book in Spanish on the history of Spain.  There are two other books handy by Colombian authors: one a biography of Tomas Mosquero, a prominent president of Colombia during the nineteenth century, the other a long novel about the civil war with FARC.  Both books are in Spanish.

Last night I was searching through my library for at least one novel by Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, as I have discovered that well-written literary fiction by Latin American authors provides an indispensable window onto the Latino reality and the many of the roots, causes and effects of collective trauma.  My bookshelves contain many other such books.

While searching for one of the Llosa novels I found another unexpected gem.  A very ample textbook, university edition, of Latin American history, published in 1996.  It might be twenty years out of date, but that still gives me a good four hundred eighty years to play with, instead of five hundred.

In the meantime, my friend in Costa Rica sent me the online edition of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's contemporary classic "Las Venas Abiertas de Latinoamerica", in Spanish, of course.  The title in English would be the Open Veins of Latin America.  It is about the centuries of oppression, exploitation and colonial greed that have done much to shape the nations and cultures of Latin America.

I am also relying extensively on the internet.  Wikepedia provides me with information as I try to read and research one country at a time.  I am currently on Paraguay.  Writing these recent blogposts has also been for me, Gentle Reader, a most invaluable form for getting more insight into what I already know about the subject and, better still, how much I am still learning and needing to learn.

I am going to be very busy and for a very long time.

Gratitude 133

I suppose some of you, Gentle Reader, must intermittently wonder just why I seem so fixated on Latin America, especially in the whole area of collective trauma.  I have to admit that I have come across a lot of this developing field of interest rather blindly.  It all began when I was a boy of fourteen.  I had a brother (still living, I think) who was probably the coolest dude in the suburb where we grew up, older than me by three years.  We did not get along and have been mutually estranged for many years.  However, because he was so cool, as well as being my older sibling, I had what for him anyway, was a very annoying tendency of wanting to emulate him.  This could stretch only so far, given that we had markedly different personalities and interests.  But, so it goes.

After my brother endured one year of French in grade eight he got the brilliant idea of dropping it for Spanish in grade nine.  Three years later, I did the same thing, but I think more because of the horrible woman who was teaching French in grade eight.  She was very young, in her twenties, with a very thick French-Canadian accent and a face like a stuck-up prizefighter.  She favoured very short miniskirts and, had she worn a paper bag over her head, might easily have provided fantasy material for quite a lot of pubescent boys.  By the time June rolled around I had already had quite enough of that nasty woman so, like my super-cool big brother, I switched to Spanish in grade nine, not because he did, but because the option was there.

I did well in Spanish through grade eleven, forgot a lot of it, but still remembered some basic grammar and vocabulary.  I also think that it might have been actually my grade three teacher who really got the Spanish ball rolling.  I believe she was Mexican and she took great pleasure in teaching us Spanish words and phrases.  I quite enjoyed it.  My mother, not so much, and I suspect that she phoned in a complaint to the principal, which is the only reason I believe that our teacher suddenly stopped encouraging us to learn Spanish.  She was quite an eccentric piece of work by the way, and delighted in trying to convince us that she was a witch, lived in a treehouse and was one hundred fifty years old.

Of course, my interest in Spanish revived during my first trip to Costa Rica in 1994.  When, in 1997, that complete stranger gave me a Spanish-English dictionary (not knowing that I would ever be needing one) I felt fairly certain that this was the direction that God was sending me in.  Three years later, applying myself to meticulous study and self-education and conversation practice with others, I already began to pick up an impressive early fluency in the language.  Then, I was working again and doing well in PTSD recovery and before I knew it had decent housing and money in the bank.  A few years later, in 2008, I returned to Costa Rica.  The following year I spent a month in Mexico City, followed by another six weeks the next year in Costa Rica again.  Then I began to visit Mexico again, followed by Bogota, Colombia in 2015 and 2016 where I first became aware of the phenomena of collective trauma from fifty years of civil war with the FARC, the drug-traffickers, the government troops and paramilitaries. 

A friend has told me that in many ways I have a Latino personality, I who am four generations Canadian, of German and Scottish extraction, having grown up speaking only English, and not a drop of Latin blood in my veins.  If I am like the Latinos then it is with the Mestizaje that I identify.   I've never had much in the way of contact with indigenous, nor with white Latinos.  I find interesting too that generally I like Latin Americans, but not the Spanish, whom I have always found to be arrogant, judgmental and unreliable.

I am beginning to believe that my experiences of trauma, resulting illness and recovery have parallels with the ontological Latino historical experience.  Latino culture is an interesting concoction, an olla podrida, if you will, of centuries of Spanish and African influence along with millennia of the indigenous presence.  The culture of Latin America, and the real Latinos, the Mestizaje, were all forged out of trauma, from the ravages of conquest, slaughter, rape, epidemics,slavery and cultural obliteration.  As people of trauma the Latinos opted to rise above it, forming and forging a culture of joy and celebration, a searing love of life and a mocking of death as shown every year in the Mexican Day of the Dead.  In my small way, this has been also my experience.  A survivor of abuse and trauma I entered my recovery learning the Spanish language, not the Spanish of Spain the oppressor, but of Mexico, Central and South America, the lands of the oppressed.  I attended in those days many Flamenco performances, not to celebrate Spanish culture but to absorb the resistance of rage, joy and celebration of the  Gypsies of Spain as they coped with and raised the middle finger to their Spanish overlords.

Out of great darkness, death, sorrow and rage, the Latino people have risen in joy, resistance and celebration.  Who hasn't been entranced and inebriated by the sounds of Latin music and the vibrant and bold colours of the art of the Spanish New World?  My own art and painting has often been compared with the painting styles of Latin America.

I am fused with Latin America.  Having never had a solid cultural identity of my own (my parents did absolutely nothing to inculcate me into the cultures of our Scottish-German heritage) and feeling Canadian merely by courtesy of having been born and raised in this country, I have gone through life as a blank canvas and now the vibrant cultures of Mexico, Central America, Colombia and Peru and the wonderful friends I know from those countries, have been painting me with their bold and living colours.

Latin America is still and likely will be always recovering from the ravages of its traumatic past.  Many of the countries are still fraught with incredible poverty, social inequality and violence.  The quality of life is also rapidly improving for many Latin Americans as democratic political and social institutions become more strongly imbedded and abided.  Even so, I have seen my own quality of life improve exponentially.  I am still poor, but better off than I've ever been.  I don't always feel strong, but like my Latino brothers and sisters I am lurching forward.  Individually, of course I can't paint everyone in those countries with the same brush.  Many enjoy a quality of life and mental and emotional wellness such as I could only dream of enjoying.  Others are trapped in cycles of poverty, crime, trauma, and violence. 

Still, the incredibly rich and diverse Latino cultures, and the strength of character and integrity that has risen in the people from the ashes of conquest, war and trauma, is making of the Latin countries what I believe is going to become a formidable global force, not in the military sense, but culturally, economically, politically and spiritually.   Even with the horrible developments in Venezuela and Mexico and the poverty and violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and other and similar problems in other countries, I look at Costa Rica where the military was abolished in 1948, at Uruguay, where democratic and human rights are enviably honoured and celebrated, in Chile where they have bounced back from the Pinochet nightmare and Colombia where reconciliation has now been ratified, concluding fifty years of violence and terror.

Recovery is never going to be an even or linear process.  But together we struggle forward, celebrating our small victories and recovering from our many falls.

Gratitude 132

How about a little Spanish lesson, by way of describing the outcome and emergence of Latino cultures.  Spanish is a very rigidly structured language, as are the Romance or Latin-sourced languages.  Gender is important in Spanish.  Muchacho, for example, is a word for boy.  The feminine, muchacha, means girl.  If you have a group of boys, then hay un grupo de muchachos.  For a group of girls you would say, hay un grupo de muchachas.  However, add one boy to the group of girls, and this simply doesn't often occur in the strict gender binary of social interactions between the genders, and you would say hay un grupo de muchachos, which is to say that the masculine form always takes dominance in Spanish.    Even with ten girls and one boy you would either say un grupo de diez muchachas y un muchacho, or you would say once muchachos, or eleven boys, even though ten of those boys are actually girls.

In Spanish there are three forms of address, usted, tu and vos, but to keep it simple we'll leave out the vos.  Usted is formal, tu is familiar.  When you are speaking to strangers, older people, employers, teachers or people who have the power to hurt you, it is customary to address them as "usted."  Friends, peers and family members are generally addressed in the familiar, "tu".  In many countries this rule is becoming more flexible and it is increasingly common to address almost everyone in the familiar, except for very traditional abuelitas, or grandmothers, who would be likely to do you severe damage with their canes were you to call them anything but usted.

There are also traditional honorifics: senor, senora, or don or dona (pronounced donya).  These still occur, especially the senor and senora.  Don and dona are considered more quaint and are sometimes used playfully between friends. (My Peruvian friend and I often refer to each other as Don Jorge and Don Aaron, for example).

Spanish is a language of class, caste and hierarchy and the adoption of the language of Cervantes in Latin America has likely had considerable influence on the way the culture developed.  Remember, as I have written elsewhere, traditional Latino culture, like its Spanish antecedent, has always been hierarchical, everyone knowing their place, everyone knowing whom to refer to as usted and tu and taking great care to not confuse one for the other, on pain of receiving a good beating for any misstep.

Now, the strict hierarchy has survived relatively intact in Latin American countries.  But it is foundering and fading fast.  The influence of American pop culture has been particularly strong, for example in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Colombia.  The growing and emerging middle class has also influenced this relaxation of social boundaries, as well as a growing awareness and acceptance of the influence of the outside world.  In my own experience, I often don't know what to call the person that I meet for the first time, whether to call them usted or tu, since I could be called either one, by anyone I meet there, regardless of age difference or perceived class difference.  So, I always err on the side of caution and begin with usted, regardless of what they call me.  If I am given tu a minimum of three times in a row by the same person, then I will switch to tu.  I think that for this reason, I seem to always get along well with almost everyone I meet in Latin America.

This is turning out to be an interesting dance of cultural influences and I'm looking forward to seeing how this further develops as the traditional Hispanic cultures continue to merge and adapt to the influences of globalization.

Gratitude 131

So let's imagine that even though the Spanish invaders and occupiers of the New World were incurably violent douchebags that there might have been also a few authentic Christian souls from      that country.  Perhaps even among the sad and sorry products of the Inquisition there might have been one or two real people of Christ, though I still have my doubts.  But let's try to imagine anyway, Gentle Reader, perhaps a church that was not merely the depraved, comprised and degraded shell of Spanish and European Catholic Christendom.  Perhaps we could envision even a handful of people who really knew their Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ; people who eschewed the use of violence; Christians moved by love, compassion and gentleness; people who reflected the love and beauty of God in every facet of their lives; individuals who would never dream of forced conversions, of burning heretics at the cross (clearly a Freudian slip, Gentle Reader.  Of course, I meant to write "stake", but so it goes, eh?) nor of mistreating others, nor of taking up the sword; people whose every act was an act of mercy and compassion, who were moved by the sufferings of others and took extreme care to not add to their sufferings but to tend to their wounds in a totally respectful manner.

They would have been the very sort of Christians who all would have been rounded up by the Spanish Inquisition and burned publicly as heretics because such Christians would not have been viewed as faithful Catholics but as heretical protestant scum.

But let us enjoy a suspension of disbelief, shall we?  Let us imagine a boatload of real Christians, not in any way connected with the Spanish Crown and certainly not with the deplorable heretical Catholic Church.  They likely would not have had friends among the Conquistadores, who likely would have taken every possible measure to resist, oppose and undermine those Christians.  On their own those Christians would have met with the Aztecs and the priests and would have made an effort to learn their Nahuatl language.  The Mexica would have found those people particularly strange but likely more the fulfilment of prophesy than their bloodthirsty compatriots.   There was that ancient prophecy of Quetzalcoatl returning in a boat full of white men with beards.  Had they been so received, these imaginary Christians, who only knows what might have happened?  Perhaps they would all have been taken prisoner and sacrificed to their sun god.  Or maybe just some of them. 

It might have taken a few successful boatloads of Christian missionaries to have survived the sacrificial knife and to have really made an impact on the Aztecs.  Given the history of the Church and the blood of the martyrs being its seed, I would guess that a lot of Christian blood would have already flowed down those temple steps.

But something else would have happened.  While being well aware of the Christians' horror and opposition to human sacrifice, the Aztecs would also have been tremendously moved by the power of their love, such as they had never experienced nor imagined or thought of in their own spiritual practices.  The Christians would also have been apt and able defenders against the ravages of the Conquistadores, not taking violent but passive resistant action.  It is even likely that some of the Spanish Conquistadores might have been won over by the love of God and the power of the Holy Spirit working through the missionaries.

It is anyone's guess just how things would have developed from there.  Perhaps nothing would have really changed.  The Mexica would still barely hobble through the conquest and resulting oppression by the Spanish.  They still would have died from imported disease, they still would have been impoverished, and many would also have persisted in practicing their religion, even committing human sacrifice, regardless the abundant evidence that the earth would still go on turning, the sun would continue shining and the rain would not stop falling.

Gratitude 130

I sometimes wonder how Latin America would look now had things been done differently five hundred years ago.  It is really difficult to imagine this because that was such a different time, when people thought differently and viewed the world through very different lenses.  We had nothing of the social democracy or the lovely liberalism we all now take for granted.  Human rights did not exist in those days.  Everything and everyone existed but at the behest and pleasure of the Monarch and Holy Church.  Society, as I've already mentioned, was strictly hierarchical.  If you were poor you simply worked hard, went hungry, got sick and died very young.  No one would so much as blink an eye over the death of a pauper.

The church interpreted a deeply flawed, corrupted and horribly degraded version of the Christian faith.  Jesus of course took a back seat to his mother in the worship and ritual of the church.  Christ was accessible only through the good will of the priests as negotiated through the Blessed Sacrament, which not even the people were allowed to partake of.  Only through the agency of the priests as controlled by the bishops and the pope could the people partake of the faith through baptism, confession and the Blessed Sacrament.  Otherwise they were destined for the eternal torments of hell.

Spain was, in effect, a theocracy, completely controlled by Mother Church.  The church must have souls to feed its maw and foreign gold to fatten its coffers.  The church reigned victorious, having tossed out the Muslim Moors and the Jews, anyone who would not consent to forced conversion, and even the Conversos (converted Jews) or the  Moriscos (converted Muslims) weren't free from persecution and arbitrary death.

In the meantime, in Mexico, other tribes were cowed and subdued by the legendarily cruel and harsh Mexica, or Aztecs, who demanded as tribute human sacrifices, gained either through nonviolent means or through acts of war.  It is said that tens of thousands were killed every year on the altar of the sun god, their beating hearts torn out of their still living bodies that were then carelessly thrown down the pyramid stairs.

Like the Spanish, the Aztecs had a theocratic and strictly hierarchical society, ruled without mercy by priests and monarchs.  Everyone knew their place.  Your only right was your obligation to serve monarch and priest, even if that meant ending your shortened life on the altar on top of the pyramid.

Human sacrifice was particularly problematic to the Aztec religion.  It was completely institutionalized as a way of repaying the gods for sacrificing themselves repeatedly in order to ensure the survival of the human race.  So their gods demanded this, otherwise the cosmos would shut down and it's schnitzel of you, Tootsie.

In tomorrow's post  I am going to hypothesize about how things could have turned out different.  Stay tuned, Gentle Reader.

Gratitude 129

I am intrigued by the whole power dynamic contained in the occurrences between the Spanish and the Mexica and the role of power in creating trauma, individual and collective.  These were two powerful empires, the Spanish and the Mexica, and each was the dominant force in their respective parts of the world.  In Spain, Queen Isabel and King Fernando had just driven the last Muslims out of Spain and forced conversion to the Catholic faith on all the remaining Jews (and there were also still some Muslims still hanging around, also converted by force), many of whom died anyway in the Inquisition  Spain was now a fully Catholic country, unified and speaking one language, Castilian, or modern Spanish.

The Aztecs were now fully in control of their region of Mexico, having defeated and subjugated neighbouring tribes while remaining in a state of perpetual warfare with others, all of whom kept them in a steady supply of sacrificial victims.  They were feared, respected and hated throughout the region.  They also excelled in building beautiful, well-ordered and clean cities with magnificent temples and palaces and gardens.  Lacking a written language, metal, and the use of the wheel, their accomplishments were still so impressive that even the invading Spanish, having all those advantages but no matching achievements, were left amazed and envious.

Two proud and arrogant nations facing each other.  One the invader, the other the soon-to-be-conquered-and-usurped.  Only the superior military power of the Spanish gave them the advantage, though they believed that God was helping them.  This is, for people who live in the twenty-first century, of course, hard to swallow, and given what they had done to the faith of Jesus Christ it is really hard to imagine God giving them any kind of preferential treatment.  I don't imagine that he would have cared much about the Aztecs' stake in the game either, given their propensity for human sacrifice.

In order to appreciate the use and abuse of power in all our human endeavours it might be helpful to recall that most of our history as humans has been brutal, violent, ugly and full of hate and terror.  The lovely material wealth and comfort, social democracy and liberal values of freedom, equality and human rights that we now take for granted simply didn't exist, not until this past generation or two since the end of the Second World War.  The Spanish won the greater part of the Iberian Peninsula through harsh and hardly-fought campaigns of warfare.  Preceding them would be millennia of violent armed conflict as tribes and nations, including the Romans, the Goths and the Visigoths and others each swept into the Iberian Peninsula and wreaked havoc, death and bloodshed, mostly on the innocent.

By the same token, so the various tribes of Mexico fought, slaughtered and murdered one another all in the quest for land, territory and power.  Life was hard and very short.  There were then, as now, no guarantees in life, no justice and precious little hope.  It is hard for those of us who fret and stress over first world problems to even imagine what it must have been like: that life was always a matter of survival.  That if you and your family could live to see another day then you were doing okay.

Threats on one's survival and safety were not taken lightly.  Any land or territory that was gained was a rare treasure to be held, cherished and defended to the death.  The veil between life and death was very fragile and flimsy and conflict between nations, tribes and armies was the constant norm.  Death and killing were taken as ordinary daily occurrences.  Everyone must have lived in a state of low-level and chronic trauma, but didn't have the luxury to pause in the middle of sowing the crops or reaping the harvest or labouring in the shop to even take stock of their inner lives, much less seek psychological help, and even less, to reasonably expect that such help would even be available or conceivable five hundred years ago.

As a collective humanity, we have collectively staggered forward, often gone into retreat, hobbled by this collective trauma from the abuses of power that have historically stripped us of our most naked humanity, and only by seeking those quiet places, and heeding the voices of the prophets we would prefer to behead, burn at the stake or lock in mental hospital quiet rooms, are we able to hear that still quiet inner whisper, that voice of the divine, that gentle persistent voice of God telling us that we are more than this, and that we can even now crawl over to the waters of healing.

Gratitude 128

I don't understand greed.  I know what it is: it is the compulsive desire to have more than you need.  But what causes greed?  Since we are still touching on gratitude in this series, perhaps we'll think about where greed and gratitude intersect, or fail to.  Greed, or the compulsion to have and to horde seem to come from a fear of want.  Even if you have everything you need, there is still the thrill of having more, to make yourself rich beyond measure, rich beyond telling, rich beyond logic.  Greed particularly goes nuts when we already have everything we need, have no reasonable fear of future lack, and still want to have, to possess and to cherish as our very own....Precious! as Gollum would say.  Greed is the dumbass reflexive motion that gapes from the empty soul, swallowing everything that it can suck into its maw, giving nothing in exchange.

The Spanish were not motivated by virtue, nor the desire of converting heathen souls to the True Catholic Faith when they sent their thugs to the New World.  They wanted gold.  They wanted silver, spices, exotic things.  They wanted plunder.  Spain was not poor.  Spain wanted to be rich.  Catholic Spain, representing one of the most venal popes during one of the most corrupt eras of the church.

The Aztecs seemed almost plated in gold.  Robbing them would make Spain rich.  Impoverishing them would give Spain the advantage.  Mama Spain defrauding and stealing everything she could from her wayward heathen children, then hanging, shooting, burning or hacking them to death.  Mommie Dearest on steroids making Grendel's mother look like Mother Theresa.

I think that greed becomes inevitable when we are clearly not grateful for what we have already.  We come to believe that we are entitled to more, to better.  We are not satisfied because we do not appreciate.  We do not appreciate because we do not think that we are the recipients of already such great blessing.  We  don`t appreciate and we don`t share because we are selfish and egotistical.

I cannot believe that any of those Spanish Catholics really knew God.  They didn't appear to be grateful.  They simply wanted more and more.  Gold and spices.  It absolutely baffles me that they knew absolutely nothing about their relationship with God as that of the recipient to the giver.  They didn't appear to know how dependent they were on his goodness, as well as knowing absolute nothing about the care that he already had for them as well as for all people.

They didn't understand that less is more, nor the poverty of being too rich.  They didn't appear to even know that the soul starves and perishes from having too much.  There likely were still authentic saints in the church doing what they could to remind them, but any prophetic voice was likely to end up screaming its final agony at the stake while the flames did their work.

Essentially, greed is the vile and bitter fruit of the lack of love.  These people did not know God as love and they themselves did not love.  So they had no gratitude and their soul was consumed by greed and off they went to kill all the heathen who wouldn't consent to being baptised into Holy Mother Church, whose vaults and new altars in the New World became coated in the very gold they stole from the Aztecs.

Gratitude 127

In order to comprehend the Spanish conquest and takeover of the southern half of the Americas it could be helpful to consider the key role that violence has played throughout human history.  There have always been wars and conflict and, pacifist that I am, I am resigned to accepting the likelihood that violence is always going to be part of the human story.  Violence appears to have always been the preferred method of transaction in our undertakings.  Really, peace and diplomacy have only come to flourish in recent times, and likely because never in our history has war become such a dangerous and utterly pyrrhic undertaking.  On the grander scale, anyway.

Still, ISIS chops off heads and NATO forces drop bombs on ISIS.  North Korea tests a nuclear weapon and everyone wants to negotiate while anxiously wringing their hands because we all know that the fallout from invading North Korea would be exponentially deadlier than not taking military action.

"Ah, the simple lives of heroes; the twisted lives of saints," as Leonard Cohen wrote in "Priests."  During the Spanish conquest of Latin America it was very simple to live like a hero: ride around on your charger slaying dragons and anyone else who got in your way.  That was the very simple message that brainwashed the young Spanish men of the sixteenth century.  Might makes right.  Keep your sword sharp and use it on anyone who pisses you off.  What could be simpler?  And it has been a time-tested formula.  This is exactly how disputes were settled since before our ancestors emerged out of Africa.

With violence, you don't have to dialogue.  You can just set in, kill and destroy, then collect the booty afterward.  None of this sissy-sissy kindness and mercy and treating others with courtesy.  No, just go out there and chop off a few heads, enslave the surviving men and rape their wives.  Cover it with a nice shiny patina of a very false Christianity and there you have it, instant conquest and so the Spanish empire came to thrive.  Of course, the Aztecs were no more virtuous themselves, with their institutionalized practice of human sacrifice and their own history of wholesale slaughter and enslavement of neighbouring tribes and nations.

That is the way things have always been done.  Violence perpetuating yet more violence across the ages until neither humankind nor the earth can sustain it any longer and we are all suddenly teetering over a chasm of unprecedented wholesale destruction. 

Violence in the takeover of the New World, in the takeover of anywhere at any time in our sad, tragic and ugly history, has always been inevitable.  It can't really be said that no one knew better.  Simply they didn't care to because violence was the way that things had always been done.  When Christianity lost its spiritual authority and became a quasi-political force, no one even thought of going the way of Christ.  Martyrdom was back then, or it was inflicted from outside.  But to eschew violence altogether and to take the blows and abuse instead of dishing them out?  Like Jesus?  Like his Holy Apostles? 

Between the two parties, the Spanish and the Aztecs, even if the Aztecs were the more brutal with their practice of human sacrifice, it is this blogger's opinion that the Spanish still carry the greater burden of guilt.  They not only forcibly took over and robbed  and slaughtered and disempowered the native people of Latin America, but claiming to be Christians, boasting of being Christ and his Holy Church's representatives, they ignored completely the most essential commands of divine and Christian love by making themselves even more reprehensible and bloodthirsty than the very people they were presuming to civilize and win over to the Holy Catholic Faith.

Gratitude 126

I don't know why I am still on this Gratitude series, especially given that I'm writing more about Latin America, but in many ways this is still laced with Gratitude:  for the countries of Latin America, for the people and what they have survived, endured and overcome; for the pleasure of knowing some of these people as friends; and also Gratitude for the many doors that learning the Spanish language has opened to me.

I am thinking today about poverty in Latin America, a historical and very chronic problem still in many countries: notably in Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala and still in much of Mexico and Venezuela.  The economic inequality in these countries has been part and parcel with the traditional social inequality imported by Mama Espana, but also a defining feature in many of the aboriginal cultures.

There is something hugely destructive about this kind of social hierarchy, which unfortunately has been with us since our ancestors transitioned from hunter gatherers to farmers.  Spain remained very close to the Roman social model and this remained unchanged through the Middle Ages.  Even though Spain, like the rest of Europe, experienced a Renaissance, in many ways, thanks to the Church, their thinking remained for many centuries more stuck in the Middle Ages.  The king and queen dominated their lords and courtiers who with the priests dominated the serfs, vassals and burghers who dominated the workers and farmers who dominated the slaves and outcasts.  In Mexico the Aztecs and in Peru the Inca had their own social hierarchy: priests, chiefs, workers and slaves.

There was no real Enlightenment.  There was no understanding or concept of basic human rights.  If anyone was spoken to about equality they would have either looked at you like you were a witch or a heretic or they would have laughed in your face.  There was no hope for mobility, there was no flexibility.  Small wonder that miscegenation was punished and any offspring of racially mixed unions were treated like refuse and garbage.

Life in those times was very difficult and for most a constant struggle.  Education and literacy were far from universal.  And the church had completely defaulted on its most elemental responsibilities: to communicate effectively to people the love of God and that God is love, not to mention the necessity and importance that we love one another.  I believe that it is this complete lack of love, from our lack of contact with God, that has precipitated in this kind of rigid hierarchy and inequality.  This inability or refusal to recognize our own face in the face of the other and the divine presence in all.

Where there is real love there is no lack because everything is shared.  Where there is love there is no violence because we take time and care to understand and know one another, especially the other.  Where there is love there is no trauma because everyone can grow and flourish with the sense that we are all valued and cared for.

So much of our human history has been so void of this beautiful reality that sometimes I find it sickening.  I am also often saddened that civilization is always  gauged by language, writing, art, science, culture and advanced military technology, but absolute nothing is given or said about whether those people really loved one another and loved the stranger they encountered.

Can this ever happen?  I really don't know.  Is it worth striving for?  Well, hasn't it always?

Gratitude 125

Reading about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and the way Cortes and his lackeys portrayed the Catholic Christian faith one would be surprised that more people haven't left Christianity and that, in the degraded form of the Spanish Inquisition, that it would not have taken hold in the New World at all.  These people were Christian in name only and it was a particularly degraded and corrupted form of Christianity they were embracing and promulgating.  There was absolutely nothing in their behaviour that even suggested Jesus Christ and quite a lot that seemed to have come straight from the Pit of Hell, as we used to say in the Jesus' People.

Anyone who gives a thorough and unbiased reading of the Christian Gospels, allowing for a suspension of disbelief in case they don't happen to believe in miracles or exorcisms, will see a powerful and consistent message of social justice, mercy, love, integrity, peace, and the search for truth in all things.  How did those wretched Jew and Muslim hating, witch and heretic burning and pagan slaughtering murderers ever get carte blanche from God's ostensible representative on earth, the Pope, to be entrusted as stewards of the religion of Jesus Christ?  Keep in mind that many of the popes of the day, especially Alexander VI, were themselves some of the most venal and corrupt subhuman slime that ever crept along the surface of the earth.

But what happened to this most sublimely beautiful of all religions that it be rendered into something so impotent and so ugly?

There are many answers, but the first that stands out to me is that none of these people had ever had any real encounter with the experience and truth of the Gospel.  They likely had never experienced the presence or blessing of the Holy Spirit.  Moreover, they were so brainwashed by the lies and half-truths with which the popes and priests had completely distorted and undermined the message of Christianity, that they simply could not see any contradiction between their alleged obligation to shoot, burn, hang or hack to death anyone who got in their way, and the Son of God who himself was tortured and executed by Roman soldiers very much like themselves.

So the Conquistadores and the useless priests they brought with them would proclaim to the native people in the Caribbean and in Mexico in Spanish, a language they could not possibly understand, that the land they had enjoyed as their very own for thousands of years was now being taken over by a foreign power in the name of a deity they simply could not relate to.  The survivors, in the spirit of the conquered, consented to being baptised and converted to a faith they could not possibly comprehend and so Mama Espana working in concert with Papa Iglesia (father church) could spread their corrupted filth of pious lies that only mocked and made a complete travesty of the Gospel of love they claimed to own.

Had the Spanish really known the Gospel of Love as demonstrated throughout by the life, sufferings, death and resurrection of their Lord, I wonder how things might have been different?  Would they have even bothered sailing over to the Americas, given that they were driven largely by greed and a lust for land and power?  Perhaps, had these people been truly and authentically Christian, which is to say, humble persons of peace, love and integrity, they might have made this venture anyway as missionaries.  Surely they would have been horrified by the bloody practices of human sacrifice they would have encountered, as well as the constant internecine warfare practiced with great gusto by the various native tribes and nations among each other, but with none of the hypocritical bleating of equally violent priests and Conquistadores, given the equally bloody and horrendous human sacrifice of innocent lives being burnt at the stake back home in Mama Espana.

Perhaps Montezuma and his cohorts would have received them graciously.  Or maybe they themselves would have been dragged up the temple steps to be offered as food for their gods?  But I think that in time something peaceful and equitable might have been achieved, with mutual respect, and even if the peoples of the New World didn't abandon their religion for the Christian faith perhaps the example, prayers and friendship of the visitors would eventually have dissuaded them from their more barbaric practices.  Perhaps even a very different kind of New World might have evolved, integrating the best from both cultures.  But because they were all given to violence and blood-letting, Spanish and Indigenous, it is unlikely that we will ever know what might have happened instead.

What we have now instead is a collection of some twenty countries or so, bonded together by many cultural similarities and with varying approaches and experiences of their indigenous presence.  We also have some twenty countries or so, in many ways historically hobbled by social inequality, economic injustice, racism and the remnants of one of the most rigid hierarchical caste systems outside of India.  We also have some twenty countries full of proud and resilient people who to this day strive bravely in the face of all odds to do and be their best and to celebrate their rich and beautiful cultures in the midst of a growingly complex and uncertain world.

Gratitude 124

I would like to begin this blogpost with a correction or two for certain assumptions I have been making about the early history of Mexico and Latin America.  I have put forth a blanket assumption that Cortes and his goons were all likely illiterate.  Not true.  Cortes was well-educated and frequently was employed as a kind of free-lance secretary.  I cannot speak for members of his crew.  I would still assume that even if they were functionally literate they weren't likely great readers.

I have also assumed that none of the sexual contact between Spanish men and indigenous women was consensual.  Perhaps some of it was, within the social norms of Spanish and indigenous societies of the day.  But if there was consent on the part of the women it was very limited within the questionable norms of the times.  Perhaps some, maybe even many, of the women were quite willing to be traded off in marriage, and perhaps even were willing, even enthusiastic sexual partners to their husbands.  But this all happened within the context of conquest.  They were the new overlords.  How could they possibly be refused?  How could consent possibly exist without social equality?

So, whether wives were given in marriage or whether they were violently raped, they still had little choice in the matter.  It was still, without doubt, collective rape and with such an inauspicious beginning to the Mexican people how could anything really healthy result?

Of course, the sexism and patriarchy continue in Mexico, no matter what advances in feminism have been made in other parts of the world, or even in Mexico City, always the progressive outlier in that country where gay marriage was legalized just four years after it was legally recognized here in dear, progressive Canada. 

Here is the reply I wrote on a conversation forum, Quora, to a comment from a Mexican reader.  He was remarking on how Mexicans perceive other Spanish speaking countries.  I got a little annoyed that he remarked on how beautiful the women are in Colombia in Venezuela, really betraying the kind of heterosexist, homophobic and chauvinistic sexism that is still so strongly featured in Latin American males:

"When I read comments about “beautiful women” I can’t help but read sexism into the comment.  It’s sad that so few straight men feel safe about commenting on beauty without having to specify gender.  It’s perfectly okay to say great-looking, or beautiful men as well as women (I find Colombians in  general, regardless of gender, to be incredibly good-looking people), and no one is going to think you’re gay, and even if you were gay (and you probably aren’t) what difference would it make, because really it doesn’t matter."

This is of course from the sad legacy of the totally toxic approach to sex that the Catholic Spanish brought to the New World and it festers still, especially in the minds of Mexican and other Latino males.  It is also a lingering holdout of the subjugation and exploitation of women.  I might add here that Mexican women have much bigger balls than the men do and that any Mexican woman could easily kick a Mexican man's ass all the way to Argentina.  The men are incurable momma's boys and the women undoubtedly had to become strong while coping with all the machismo and other idiocy that the men cop in order to remind themselves that they have a penis.

Gratitude 123

I am grateful for the many Latinos that I know, have known, and whose friendship I still enjoy.  Generally I have found Latin Americans to be warm, friendly, caring, courteous, humorous and positive.  There are variations of course, and I have known a few miserable Latinos, but the majority I have found to be very enjoyable.  I like them way better than the Spanish, whom I generally find to be thin-skinned, unreliable, selfish, arrogant and able to laugh at everyone except their own precious selves.  Which also suggests to me that not that much has changed really in five hundred years.

Courteous, kind and co-operative behaviour are traditionally recognized as signs of weakness.  Yes, I know, here in dear, kind and co-operative Canada where I was born, raised, still live, and where likely I'll die, these are hugely admired traits, in fact, these are the characteristics that define all that is best in Canadians.  My overwhelming negative experience of Spanish nationals in relation to my generally positive interactions with Latinos could also suggest that living in a prolonged socially oppressed reality over several centuries helped make Latin Americans in every way the moral superiors over their Spanish overlords. 

There is something about strength, or power, as we popular understand these concepts, that dehumanizes even more the oppressor than the oppressed.  Indeed, those who experience and live under oppression have to acquire qualities of friendliness and cooperativeness if only to cope, if only to last and survive one more day under the heel of their overlords.

When the Spanish and Aztec cultures first encountered each other, it was one stratified hierarchy meeting another.  Everything was socially vertical.  The kings and priests oppressed the aristocracy and military which oppressed the common people who oppressed the slaves and outcasts.  Those class structures were rigid, inflexible and brittle.  They also defined the development of the Latino character and I think also informed the collective experience of trauma.  My limited experience of the white Mexicans, the descendants of the ruling class would be roughly parallel to my impressions of the Spanish.  They are generally arrogant, spoiled little narcissists, pseudo-European racists with a huge sense of entitlement.  All the other Mexicans I have encountered I have found to be generally very kind and warm.  And caring.

I take exception with the Mexican character only in this detail: they are so averse to conflict and confrontation that they have raised passive-aggressive behaviour to a national virtue.  I have been lied to, stood up by, and studiously ignored by more Mexicans than I would care to number.  As I said, they hate and fear conflict.  It is too dangerous.  It is too ingrained in their national collective unconscious that to rock the boat is to court danger and to be hurt or even slaughtered by your social betters.

By the same token, as one can see from the current and recent drug wars, their capacity for cruelty and atrocity seems to be without parallel, except perhaps in Colombia, or Chile, or Argentina, or Uruguay, Peru, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala...

This to me is one of many examples of what I mean by collective trauma, especially in the Latin American character.

Gratitude 122

I am going to begin this post with the lyrics to the 1972 song by British progressive rock band Procul Harum, "Conquistador"

Here is the YouTube link, Gentle Reader, as I think you should hear it while reading this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW2KN7Tz89s

"Conquistador"

Conquistador your stallion stands in need of company
And like some angel's haloed brow
You reek of purity
I see your armour-plated breast has long since lost its sheen
And in your death mask face
There are no signs which can be seen
And though I hoped for something to find
I could see no maze to unwind
Conquistador a vulture sits upon your silver shield
And in your rusty scabbard now
The sand has taken seed
And though your jewel-encrusted blade has not been plundered still
The sea has washed across your face
And taken of its fill
And though I hoped for something to find
I could see no maze to unwind
Conquistador there is no time
I must pay my respect
And though I came to jeer at you
I leave now with regret
And as the gloom begins to fall
I see there is no aureole
And though you came with sword held high
You did not conquer, only die
And though I hoped for something to find
I could see no maze to unwind

Now, Gentle Reader, while you are reading and, hopefully, listening to this, let us imagine why these lyrics were written.  They could refer to a hero, a teacher, a mentor, perhaps even a lover; but clearly this is an anthem of disillusionment, disappointment and cynicism.  The hero has shown his true colours, he is but a weak and very ordinary human.  He has lived up to, neither his promise, nor to any of the lofty hopes that were projected onto him. 

Now, let us return to the original conquistadores.  Not a rock band, but the band of adventurous young men in search of gold, blood, heroism and immortality, all crowded together on the little ship ailing from Spain to the coast of Mexico in 1519.  Let us try to imagine life for them on the open sea, for who knows how many weeks.  They left Spain in February and arrived in March in Mexico.  They probably came mostly from reasonably prosperous, lower-caste aristocratic families.  They nurtured and were nurtured on myths and illusions of knighthood and heroism.   For mentors and role models they must have celebrated the crusading nights of the Middle Ages and knighthood and its twisted and unhealthy representation of masculinity.  They harboured images of nobility, honour and purity.  These were likely mostly very young men or boys, late teens and early twenties.

They likely harboured a deep devotion to the Virgin and the Holy Catholic Church.  They must have honoured and endorsed in full the sadistic cruelties of the Inquisition, and were all united in their hatred of Jews and Muslims.  They might have been, at best, marginally literate, but I would doubt that any of them ever read so much as one page in their still brief short little lives.

Since the Spanish in those days had an aversion toward soap and water they must all have stank to high heaven.  One could imagine that only the strongest ocean breeze could make life on the boat tolerable to the nostrils.

These callow, idealistic, greedy and lust-driven youths helped unleash onto the Mexica, or Aztecs, one long collective nightmare.  They would, of course, have been horrified by all the human sacrifices, giving not one single thought to a single burnt heretic, witch or Jew screaming in agony as the flames did their work, and there is absolutely no doubt that all of those men must have each seen at least one public execution or auto de fe in Mama Espana (Mother Spain).  To their surprise, they were received by the native people as gods, as the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy of a visitation from the gods.   These heroes and gods carried in their own stinking and unwashed bodies such diseases as the peoples of the Americas had no built-in immunity and within less than a generation more than sixty percent of them were dead by imported disease alone.

As faithful Catholics they wanted to honour Holy Church and convert the heathen to their degraded form of Christianity.  As wannabe knights they saw no contradiction between following the Prince of Peace, the Lamb of God who commanded his disciples to not lift their hand nor any weapon in their own self-defence, and taking up sword and musket and slaughtering without mercy the heathen Aztec.  If they embraced chastity, this courtesy was reserved only to high-born Spanish women.  These men likely all lost their virginity to their favourite prostitutes in Spain, then went on to dehumanize and regard as whores the women of the Mexica.

So, the first ancestors of modern Mexico were conceived inside indigenous wombs of disempowered Mexica women violated by rape.

Gratitude 121

I am grateful for this blog.  It allows me to write things down before my head can explode.  I also don't have to be an expert at what I'm writing about.  Simply another journeyer through life asking questions. 

In my current series of posts about Latin America, Gentle Reader, I am hoping that I do not come across as authoritative on all matters Latino.  To anyone who actually knows about these things, they are going to be well aware of my ignorance.  I only wish that more of my Gentle Readers would take advantage of the comments section on this blog and please share with the rest of us your insights and wisdom.  Questions, too, but don't expect me to answer them with any skill.

So, as I am reading and studying more about Latin America and the collective trauma that plagues many of the wonderful people who live in these countries, I could best call my essays a process of asking questions.  There isn't a lot that I know about those countries or their history, but I am writing anyway in order to put forth the questions.  This, I believe, is key to the whole process of learning.

I am writing today about hierarchy.  Both cultures, the Spanish and indigenous had this in common, along with the brutal atrocities practiced in their respective religions.  They were both hierarchical societies, with class structures so rigid and unyielding as to be more like caste systems.

At the very top of the social pyramids were the ruling classes and the priests.  Then there were the various levels of aristocracy.  At the very bottom languished the slaves and prisoners.  Everyone else occupied the middle rungs, though the vast majority always seemed to hover near the bottom.  Upward mobility was unknown, unheard of and inconceivable.  It was a concept for treason.  The rulers were at the top by divine fiat.  Everyone stayed within their particular rigid category because that was the will of God and the gods.  Education, especially for the Spanish, was limited to the upper echelons.  The Aztecs, unlike the Maya, were universally unlettered as they did not have a written language.  The Spanish would never have looked kindly on a literate and well-educated peasantry.

You always had to know your place in society, or you could be writing your epitaph.  If you were gifted above and beyond your station in life, you especially had to keep quiet and invisible.  You would otherwise end up getting burnt at the stake or getting your heart cut out of you while you were still breathing and conscious.

In the case of the Spanish, the greed and avarice of the ruling and mercantile classes made Latin America a perpetually open jugular vein as they parasitically sucked all the wealth out of the lands of conquest, leaving nothing for the indigenous population nor their Mestizo offspring.  This has been especially true for Mexico.  Of course, upward mobility has increased exponentially and the Mestizaje has become the true people of Mexico, as in many other Latin American countries.  There remains an almost pure Caucasian elite, redolent with old money, and still lamely boasting of the near total absence of indigenous blood flowing in their blue little veins.

I believe the nations of Latin America are in many ways lurching forward, but the legacy of colonialism may always hang heavily like a stolen tombstone from around their necks.  The legacy of social and economic inequality and historically entrenched poverty is still a long way from being eradicated. 

On the other hand, these people remain among the world's most resilient, toughest, and joyous.  I am especially inspired by the Mexican Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) where everyone literally laughs death in the face, picnics and parties and gets drunk on the graves of their loved ones, and dance the night away, knowing full well that they could be next, yet not caring a broken tortilla.

Gratitude 120

I am not sure what would be the most reliable authoritative source of information documenting the life experiences of the first Mestizo children of Mexico.  I did get rather a harrowing report from a fictional source, the novel "Aztec Blood" by Garry Jennings.  It is set in early seventeenth century Mexico documenting the trials and tribulations of a Mestizo boy (mixed Spanish and Indigenous heritage) coming of age.  I read it last year in Spanish translation and if the author's research is reliable then it must have been absolute hell for those kids.  Still, I am equally aware of the need of fiction writers to play creatively with facts in order to develop their plot and characters.  There really is no reliable way of knowing just how horrible life might have been for the Mestizos, but I am inclined to assume that their chances in life would have been less than stellar. 

These were the children of rape.  Indigenous women were either forcibly taken or sold to the white invaders as slaves, or persuaded through who knows what kind of manipulation.  I would imagine that a lot of the children born of these unions had only their mothers to provide for them, though it is also conceivable that perhaps in a few cases their Spanish fathers took some interest in them and actually did try to support and educate them.  I don't imagine that this would have happened with any great frequency.  So, what did these indigenous single mothers, also blacklisted from their community, do to survive?   I would imagine that many were prostitutes or sex workers, perhaps subsistence farmers, or artisans.

I have not done enough research to be able to write much about this, but this much I know.  The children of these mixed unions were almost always the offspring of Spanish fathers and Indigenous mothers.  I understand that they were considered traitors by the Indigenous people and as less than human by the Spanish.  There was no place for them in either society.  Their native mothers had dishonoured the Aztec nation by lying with the enemy, the Spanish men.  No one considered that these women had little choice in the matter.  Remember, consent as we know it now, did not exist in sixteenth century Mexico.

Neither did social justice.  Racism and racialism were accepted as the normal lens through which to view our humanity, whether you lived in Spain or Mexico.  Those of other races were always looked on with disdain, hostility, suspicion and distrust.  Slavery, especially along racial categories, was accepted and practiced everywhere.  The sense of oppression and hopelessness that most people had to live with must have been monumental.  But it was all accepted as normal.  Society was strictly hierarchical and authoritarian.  You deferred to your betters.  No one even imagined that there might be equality across the barriers of class, caste and race.  You simply did not know you were oppressed:  you were permanently poor, uneducated, illiterate and suddenly an exile from the two founding cultures that would meld into the nation of your descendants. 

The Mestizos eventually would become the official people of Mexico and, post-Revolution, the word would be abandoned.  Meanwhile, for nearly four hundred years the people of mixed ancestry were oppressed, excluded, abused and treated like garbage.   I believe that this legacy of oppression and social exclusion has helped shape the collective identity of the Mexican people, as rather a shadow to their legendary pride, joy and exuberance.  I do not imagine that this collective trauma will be easily diagnosed, much less overcome.  Perhaps in future generations...

Gratitude 119

I am thinking right now of Malinche.  She was the indigenous mistress of Hernan Cortes, the conqueror of Mexico.  Octavio Paz, famed Mexican thinker, essayist and poet famously said that the Mexicans are all "hijos de la chingada, Malinche", or children of the fucked one, Malinche.  She was purchased as a slave by Cortes when she was a teenager from Tabasco in 1519.  She became his translator and his mistress and bore him two children, a son and a daughter, considered as the first Mestizos.  She was often considered a traitor to the indigenous people of Mexico, given the help that she gave to Cortes in his diplomatic and military campaigns.

I would propose a slightly different perspective.  Malinche was the most famous and high-profile victim of military rape in Mexico.  Marriages by Spanish and Aztecs alike in those days were very seldom seen as love-matches, but were official alliances between families.  The more prominent the family the more strategic and powerful the alliance.  She was not likely a willing partner to Cortes, at least not at first.  Let us be reminded that consent as we know it now, was a completely foreign concept then.

We could call Malinche the first casualty of rape between the Spanish and the Mejica.  I am quite sure that had they met on a dating site she probably would have deleted him.  Remember, there was absolutely nothing consensual in sex, nor was such a concept even imagined, especially in the aftermath of war.

By the same token, why would la Malinche, or any other self-respecting indigenous woman want to shag anything as disgusting and repulsive as a Spanish man?  The Spanish of the Sixteenth Century didn't bathe.  They hated soap and water.  They distrusted cleanliness.  It reminded them too much of the Muslim Moors whom they chased out of Spain, who were super-clean and way more civilized than the Catholic Castilians and they simply wanted nothing to do with soap and water.  It is reported that they even brushed their teeth with urine!  One might be inclined to wonder that maybe their revolting body odour might have been even more effective than their muskets and gunpowder for killing the Aztecs.

So, Malinche, like so many other native women, less than willing as they were slaves and booty of conquest, were expected to disrobe and lie expectantly for their new masters to mount and rape them.  Remember, this was not consensual sex.  All the poor girls could do was to lie there in  the dark, close their eyes and think of Montezuma! Besides the absolute humiliation and degradation of being less than willing sex-slaves, they had to endure the foul stench of their new masters as they assaulted them with their vile-smelling and unwashed garranchas (Mexican slang for erect penises).

So, this was the cradle of the Mexican people, the Mestizos who make up ninety percent of the population in modern day Mexico.  Children of rape from filthy invaders.  Not an auspicious beginning.  And, truth be told, I find them way nicer than the Spanish.

Gratitude 118

A Latin American friend of mine has just read one of my recent posts about the role of religion in the Spanish Conquest of Mexico and has reasonably suggested that the atrocities of the Spanish Catholics and the Aztec priests might have been somewhat exaggerated, especially when you consider the collateral damage and murder and pillage during the Second World War of the Twentieth Century, and in the so-called War on Terror in the Twenty-First.  Fair enough.

I replied that the level of brutality is indeed debatable and of course there are no reliable stats to tell us for sure.  That said, I would suggest that there were still sufficient atrocities taking place thanks to the Spanish Inquisition (one form of human sacrifice) and the ritual human sacrifices of the Aztecs to leave a lasting impact of trauma on the founding of that first nation of Latin America, New Spain, later Mexico. 

The Aztecs, as a conquered people, went through all the humiliations and endured all the suffering that happens anywhere in the world and in history because of war.  Their population is decimated from systematic slaughter and disease; women, and on occasion men, are raped and mistreated; prisoners are taken and tortured; children, along with women, suffer horrendously; almost nothing is said or documented about the disabled, the desperately poor, the socially marginalized.

It is those people I particularly want to write about and focus on in this whole study.  History, they say, is written by the victors, and often those victors are white Europeans or North Americans, and always they are men, always from privileged backgrounds.  You rarely if ever get a sense of what conquest and colonization must have been like, how it would have been experienced from the perspective and sufferings of a woman, of a very old person, a child, a homosexual, or someone afflicted by cerebral palsy. 

Why these people?  Because they are the first and most tragic victims of war and conquest.  They are the ones whose stories are almost never heard, read or written.   they are all but statistically invisible. And their experience will speak volumes of what a cruel species we really are and of how our inability to treat humanely the most vulnerable among us unleashes the most toxic domino effect that will echo and resound and afflict us in future generations until we have really come to reckon with our bestial human nature.

Why am I singling out Latin America, you ask?  I suppose I could come up with a whole variety of answers.  Primarily, my zeal for achieving full fluency in the Spanish language has opened quite a few doors to me.  I have been privileged with the friendship of many wonderful people from such diverse countries as Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, and Chile, to name but a few.  I have met and been befriended by the most incredible range of human beings, ages, stages of life, occupations, social class, personality.  Every one of these people in some way bear the stamp of the legacy of colonization.  I see and hear in them faint reflections, echoes and whispers of trauma.  Many of these are very successful and high-achieving adults, by the way.  There is nothing in their lives or personality that would even hint that they might be somehow designated as losers in life.  Still, there is a depth, a warmth, a complexity and a capacity for compassion and empathy that makes for a very unique and inebriating cocktail in the Latino personality.  I have also found these friendships, especially a couple in particular, to be particularly healing to me personally.

Of course this is also to be taken into consideration along with the shadow side of the Latino character: the incredible capacity for social injustice as manifested in some of the brutal dictatorships that have traumatized these countries, and the violence unleashed in such countries as Colombia during the fifty year civil war with the FARC, Peru while struggling and coping with the Sendero Luminoso, and Mexico with its current drug wars and a current body count that might already have reached or surpassed one hundred thousand murdered.

My other reason for singling out Latin America?  I believe that the Hispanic American cultures, with their wealth of spirituality synthesized from the best qualities of their Catholic and Indigenous spiritual heritage, along with how their character has been forged and developed through great suffering, hold some secrets, some vital keys to the healing of the nations and to our global and individual wounded and broken humanity.

I expect to be working on this project for many years to come!