ESSENTIALIST STEREOTYPES IN TEXTBOOKS
ON HISPANIC STUDIES
Ali Shehzad Zaidi
State University of New York at Canton
ABSTRACT
This essay examines essentialist representation of Hispanic peoples and cultures
in three textbooks, Spanish for Secondary Schools (1961), Mi Historia Universal
(1978), and Civilización y Cultura (1993). Those textbooks tend to portray
Hispanics as one-dimensional characters that are defined by their essences
rather than by their historical and sociological context. The stereotypes found in
the textbooks tend to naturalize privilege, perpetuate economic inequalities, and
conceal the exploitative aims of imperialism. These stereotypes are less prevalent
now thanks in part to the contributions of postcolonial theorists such as Edward
Said.
REFLEXIVE STATEMENT
This essay was born out of my pedagogical frustration first as a bilingual
education teacher in New York City and later as a graduate instructor at the
University of Rochester. While working for the Board of Education, I could only
use officially approved Spanish language textbooks on Latin America. In one
textbook, the references to indigenous cultures consisted mostly of the names of
battles and dates of conquest. Later, at the University of Rochester as a graduate
instructor, I was disappointed by the stereotypes and meaningless
generalizations present in Civilización y cultura, the textbook that was assigned
to all graduate instructors teaching intermediate Spanish. After reading Edward
Said’s Orientalism, I understood the ideological character of the stereotypes
contained in the textbook and how they rationalized exclusionary social policies
both in Latin America and the United States.
HUMANITY & SOCIETY, 2010, VOL. 34 (May: 157-168)
158 HUMANITY & SOCIETY
P
rior to the work of Edward Said and other postcolonial theorists, crude
stereotypes commonly pervaded pedagogical materials on language and
culture. These stereotypes exemplify the essentialist thinking that endowed
various ethnicities with certain inherent and set characteristics, and which
typically represented Hispanic cultures as inert or as mere nullities. This essay
examines three textbooks on Hispanic studies that tend to naturalize privilege,
perpetuate economic inequalities, and conceal the exploitative aims of
imperialism, thereby forming a part of a long discursive tradition concerning the
Americas.
In 1935, the New York State Chamber of Commerce commissioned a study
that reached rather sweeping conclusions based on the reactions of Puerto Rican
children to psychological tests in English. The study, anticipating an influx of
Puerto Rican immigrants who reproduce with “jungle fecundity,” concludes:
The evidence indicates that the majority of Puerto Rican
children here are so low in intelligence that they require
education of a simplified, manual sort, preferably industrial,
for they cannot adjust in a school system emphasizing the three
R’s. Puerto Ricans are adding greatly to the already
tremendous problem of intellectually subnormal school
retardates of alien parentage, whence are recruited most
delinquents and criminals. Indeed the majority of the Puerto
Rican children examined betray a family mentality which
should not be permitted admission here, further to deteriorate
standards already so seriously impaired by mass immigration
of the lowest levels of populations of many nations. Most
Puerto Rican children here cannot be assimilated in the
existing type of civilization and they are helping to turn the
tide back to a lower stage of progress (Pedraza 1996-97: 75).
Notably, the authors of the report deem Puerto Ricans as aliens even though
they had been granted US citizenship in 1917 under the Jones-Shafroth Act. This
unwillingness to understand Puerto Rican children and to respect their culture
caused lasting harm. In 1963, according to a report of the Puerto Rican
Community Development Project, Puerto Ricans earned 7.4 percent of
vocational high school diplomas, but only 1.6 percent of the academic diplomas
whose holders were entitled go to college (Rodriguez-Morazzani 1996-97: 62).
At the time, Puerto Ricans were seen as destined for menial jobs or jail, and racist
generalizations of Hispanics were common in pedagogical texts. A case in point
is Spanish for Secondary Schools (1961), a syllabus that was compiled by a
committee of teachers from New York State under the guidance of consultants
from Cornell University and the University of Buffalo.
ALI SHEHZAD ZAIDI 159
Spanish for Secondary Schools exudes an air of expertise that can be detected
in such examples of crass essentialism as: “The Latin American considers his
home his sanctuary. He is devoted to his family and considers that his first duty
is to protect his home life against intrusion” (Cadoux 1961: 143). This passage
seems to imply that there are places in the world where homes are not sanctuaries
and where home intruders are actually welcome. The syllabus ignores vast
cultural, racial, and linguistic differences among Hispanic groups in order to
subsume them into a homogenous collective of Latin Americans. The syllabus
also represents cultural identity in Latin America as static, even though identity,
as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano observes, “is no museum piece sitting
stock-still in a display case, but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the
contradictions of everyday life” (1988: 125).
Here is another cultural gem from the syllabus: “Because of his keen sense of
personal pride, the Latin American does not take adverse criticism objectively.
His sensitivity to criticism may lead him to become angry, bitter and revengeful”
(Cadoux 1961: 142). By implicitly situating resentment in the genetic makeup or
geography of the peoples of Latin America, the syllabus conceals such historical
causes for resentment as the U. S. military occupations of Nicaragua, the
Dominican Republic, and Haiti in the early twentieth century, and the CIAorchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala
in 1954.
The authors of Spanish for Secondary Schools neglect to mention the
linguistic diversity of Spain with its many speakers of gallego, Basque, and
Catalan. The textbook posits a distinct Spanish national character: “The Spaniard
is primarily a man of feeling, rather than of action, foresight or method. His
overvaluation of the individual diminishes his sense of solidarity with the larger
community” (Cadoux 1961: 139). The authors fail to consider that if the people
of Spain seemed somewhat lacking in expressions of solidarity in 1961, then
perhaps the repressive Franco dictatorship, which by then had already ruled
Spain for three decades, might have been at least partly to blame.
The authors further identify impatience as a facet of this innate Spanish
individualism: “The Spaniard is impatient in the handling of details for the
accomplishment of daily routines and long-range projects. This lack of patience
accounts in part for Spain’s lack of progress in science” (Cadoux 1961: 140).
Spain’s shortcomings in science, then, appear to arise out of the peculiarities of
the Spanish psyche rather than from historical factors such as the expulsion of
the Moors and Jews from Spain, or the role of the Inquisition in stifling inquiry.
The innate impatience of Spaniards, it seems, does not extend to art and
literature, unless one believes that Cervantes wrote Don Quijote in a feverish
night of creation or that Picasso resorted to cubism out of laziness and a desire
to save time.
160 HUMANITY & SOCIETY
It is not as though the authors of Spanish for Secondary Schools were unaware
of the shortcomings of their approach to culture. Although they would have us
believe that nature rather than history determines cultural identity, the authors
nonetheless acknowledge that “generalizations regarding the characteristics of
any national group will, of necessity, be limited and faulty” and they offer their
syllabus with reservations “because of the differences in the character of the
Spanish people in different parts of Spain and because of the dual nature of the
Spanish character as a whole” (Cadoux 1961: 139). Despite this caveat, the
authors proceed to make a series of generalizations that now seem hopelessly
dated.
The authors of Spanish for Secondary Schools write in an old, discursive
tradition about the Americas. This tradition is exemplified by this quote from
American journalist Richard Harding Davis: “The Central American citizen is no
more fit for a republican form of government than he is for an arctic expedition”
(Black 1988: 115).1 Davis speaks the language of power, which postulates
violence, corruption, and dictatorship as endemic to Central America, and which
ignores native voices. In his Nobel Prize address, Gabriel García Márquez
lamented the predicament of invisibility bestowed on Latin America, stating that
“the interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to
make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary” (Galeano 1988:
262).
Mi Historia Universal, which was first published in 1962, epitomizes the
essential invisibility of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in pedagogical
texts. This social studies textbook authored by two well-known Venezuelan
professors was assigned to a bilingual education class that I taught in a public
junior high school during the late eighties.2 The textbook seems expressly
designed to induce terminal boredom in students. It encourages rote
memorization and does not enable students to make meaningful sense of the past.
The epigram from Cicero which precedes the title page of this textbook seems
especially malapropos given the extraordinary success of the authors in
annihilating curiosity: “History is a witness to the ages, the light of truth, the vital
life of memory, the teacher of life, and the herald of antiquity” (Bártoli and
Martínez 1978: 3).3
The chapter on the conquest of the Americas consists of a dreary and
interminable recitation of the names of Spanish conquistadores along with an
anachronistic list of the regions that they conquered. This extended excerpt from
the fourth edition of Mi Historia Universal (1978) conveys its tedium:
Mexico was conquered by Hernán Cortez in 1519 after a great
struggle against the natives. Central America was conquered
from two expedition sites, one from Panama and the other
ALI SHEHZAD ZAIDI 161
from Mexico. In 1560, after several expeditions, Juan
Cervellón and Juan Estrada Rávago began the veritable
conquest of Costa Rica, which was continued by Juan Vázquez
Coronado, who founded the city of Cartago in 1564. Nicaragua
was conquered by Francisco Hernández de Cordoba, who
founded the cities of Granada, León, and Nueva Segovia.
Honduras was conquered by Gil González Dávila and
Hernandez de Cordoba. Guatemala was discovered and
conquered by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524. El Salvador was
discovered by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524. In 1528 the city of
San Salvador was founded, which was attributed to Jorge
Alvarado. Nueva Granada was conquered by Alonso de Ojeda,
Rodrigo de Bastidas and Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada.
Venezuela was conquered by Juan de Ampíes, Ambrosio
Alfínger, Nicolas Federman, Juan Pérez de Tolosa, Juan de
Villegas, Francisco Fajardo, Juan Rodriguez Suárez, Diego de
Losada, Diego de Ordaz, Antonio de Berrio and Diego de
Serpa (Bártoli and Martínez 1978: 226).4
The textbook proceeds in this vein to describe the conquests of territories
designated as Peru, Quito, Río de la Plata, Brazil, North America, and Canada,
all which seemingly already existed as geographical entities at the time of their
conquest. On the anachronistic map that accompanies this chapter, Panama,
which did not become a republic until 1903, borders, not Colombia but “Nueva
Granada,” which might refer to the virreinato or Spanish colony by that name,
which existed from 1717 to 1819, or perhaps to a republic by that name which
existed for a few years during the mid-nineteenth century.
The chapter is mostly a long roster of conquistadores and conquered
territories. There is no mention of the vanquished civilizations or the violence
that accompanied the conquest of the Americas, which is described as “a true
epic” (“una verdadera epopeya”; Bártoli and Martínez 1978: 225). The single
reference to natives in México (“los naturales”), which appears in the previous
passage cited above, reveals nothing about them. Although the chapter notes in
passing that slavery was a form of social organization in the Spanish colonies, it
fails to mention which peoples were enslaved, how they were enslaved, or who
enslaved them. To represent indigenous civilizations as essential ciphers is to
abet their disappearance. It was as if the vast territories of the Americas were
devoid of inhabitants and were simply stages on which conquistadores could
strike majestic poses. The chapter contains about a dozen illustrations and a
poem by José Santos Chocano, titled “Los Conquistadores,” which is devoted to
their marvelous apotheosis:
162 HUMANITY & SOCIETY
Pizarro, he with the raised brow.
Cortez, he with the wavy hair.
Alvarado passes by on his restless steed;
Valdivia leads his by the reins.
Who is he? And who is that other one?
They fight on without end,
like all those who share the glow
of the conquerors of life.
Covered in gold, the hilt of the sword;
armor covered in glitter;
full of sun, the shining helmet:
they pass by tremulous with light,
as if embroidered in colors
on the fine tapestries of Damascus.
(Bártoli and Martínez 1978: 226)5
To read textbooks like Spanish for Secondary Schools and Mi Historia
Universal today is to sense how much our intellectual and pedagogical landscape
has changed, thanks in part to Edward Said. In his landmark study Orientalism,
Said expresses his debt to Michel Foucault for his notion of discourse (Said
1994: 3). The false objectivity claimed by Orientalist discourses resembles the
seemingly detached, professional tone in the clinical analysis of sex that Foucault
describes in the History of Sexuality. Neither Said nor Foucault purport to reveal
the truth about the Orient or about sex, but rather they demonstrate how
dominative discourse conditions our view of those subjects.
According to Foucault, to understand how power conditions sex, one must
recognize who is allowed to speak, the way in which sex is put into discourse,
and the manner in which the mechanisms of the discourse remain concealed
(Foucault 1990: 11, 86). There is a similar concealment in the mythic discourse
of Orientalism, which as Said notes, has a “chronic tendency to deny, suppress,
or distort the cultural context of… systems of thought in order to maintain the
fiction of its scholarly disinterest” (Said 1994: 321, 345). Said cites Antonio
Gramsci’s observation that critical elaboration must begin with seeing oneself as
the result of a historical process (Said 1994: 25).
Orientalist texts, according to Said,
create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear
to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a
tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose
material presence or weight, not the originality of a given
author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it
(Said 1994: 94).
ALI SHEHZAD ZAIDI 163
The same sort of discursive tradition restricted discussion about sex, for as
Foucault points out, “the learned discourse on sex that was pronounced in the
nineteenth century was imbued with age-old delusions, but also with systematic
blindnesses: a refusal to see and to understand” (Foucault 1990: 55).
In dominative discourses on sex and on the Orient, people are frozen in time
rather than seen as participating in a dynamic process of realization (Said 1994:
321). Foucault notes a similar stasis in the clinicalization of sex, which casts
people as sexual types that suffer from perversions to be studied and treated. The
experts fail to see, or refuse to acknowledge, sexual characteristics as latent in
individuals who vary from one psychological moment to the next. A similar
falsification takes place in Orientalism, which as Said tells us,
approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human
reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this
suggests both an enduring Western essence, which observes
the Orient from afar and from, so to speak, above. The false
position hides historical change. Even more important… it
hides the interests of the Orientalist (Said 1994: 333).
To illustrate the static cultural reality that Orientalism depicts, Said quotes the
following opinion of Lord Cromer, who served as the English representative in
Egypt from 1882 to 1902:
Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into
untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental
mind. The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact
are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he
may not have studied logic; he is by nature skeptical and
requires proof before he can accept the truth of any
proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of
mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like
his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His
reasoning is of the most slipshod description (Said 1994: 38).
This kind of dehumanizing imagery, Said tells us, serves to justify the right “not
only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it” and pervades the cinema,
which relegates Arabs to such roles as “slave trader, camel driver, money
changer, colorful scoundrel” (Said 1994: 108, 287).
The insights of Said and Foucault profoundly influenced textual
representations of marginalized peoples. The years immediately before and after
the 1992 Columbus Quincentenary witnessed critical reexaminations of longheld assumptions. Eduardo Galeano eloquently speaks of peoples
164 HUMANITY & SOCIETY
Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers (Galeano 1991: 73).
During the nineties, social scientists continued to examine essentialist thinking
that buttressed privilege. Thomas C. Patterson observes that
dominant groups tend to homogenize other classes and
communities, stressing only a single dimension of their
substance. In the process, the civilized impoverish their own
understanding of these other groups and obscure their own
affinity with them. Ultimately, this fuels their fear of these
groups, from whom they seize goods and labor (Patterson
1987: 87-88).
J. M. Blaut shows how stereotypes (such as the belief that Africans are
congenitally better suited than Europeans to labor under the hot sun) serve to
rationalize theft and slavery (Blaut 1993: 70).
Notwithstanding the postcolonial scholarship cited above, Civilización y
cultura is one textbook that points to the survival of willful non-understanding,
to judge from certain passages in its fifth edition (1993).6 Its authors largely
ignore the history of the conquest of the Americas, stating that “the presence of
the Indians provided the colonists with sufficient manual labor. The Indians
already had a tradition of turning over most of their products to their chiefs, so it
was easy for them to substitute one master for another” (Copeland 1993: 81).7
The authors naturalize the theft of the resources and lands of native peoples
whose nature it was to turn over willingly the fruit of their labor to their masters.
They conceal the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples, to which chroniclers
such as Bartolomé de las Casas bore witness. They ignore the numerous Indian
revolts against Spanish rule, such as the one led by Tupac Amaru II in the Andes
during the late eighteenth century.
Despite the fact that only about three percent of Latin Americans speak an
indigenous language, the authors of Civilización y cultura present the tenuous
survival of a few indigenous languages and cultures, and their failure to
assimilate into mainstream societies, as a problem:
The Indians of the New World contributed the potato (the
Incas), chocolate and the tomato (the Aztecs) and corn (the
Mayans) to the world’s stock of edibles, besides other useful or
artistic things. Nonetheless, the Indian represents, in some
ALI SHEHZAD ZAIDI 165
Hispano-American countries, the most serious social and
economic problem. In Mexico, Central America and the
Andean countries there are still Indians who do not speak
Spanish. (Copeland 1993: 22).8
Indians appear to be a problem because of who they are. The real problem,
however, is how the experts perceive, or fail to perceive, indigenous civilizations
and their spiritual universes. The authors of Civilización y Cultura cite, for
instance, Diego de Landa, bishop of Yucatán during the late 1500s, as an
authority on Mayan culture: “Bishop Diego de Landa, who investigated Mayan
culture in the seventeenth century, tells us that the Mayans felt great sadness in
the face of death. They lamented death loudly, attributing it to the Devil or the
god of evil” (Copeland 1993: 71).9 This sort of meaningless generalization adds
little to our understanding of Mayan culture.
The authors ignore the fact that Bishop Landa, that elucidator of Mayan
mysteries, was responsible for the destruction of most of the Mayan codices, the
hieroglyphic rolls written on bark, thereby erasing almost all the written memory
of Mayan culture. The most spectacular instance of destruction occurred in 1562,
when the bishop ordered more than five thousand religious images and at least
twenty-seven codices to be burned in a bonfire. Thanks to this suppression of
knowledge, the manuscripts of only three codices survive, along with the
fragments of a fourth. Thus, Mayan culture came to be known in Europe mostly
through the writings of Diego de Landa himself. The textbook ignores the cruelty
of this “expert” on Mayan culture. Although these practices were no longer
sanctioned by the Church, the bishop held an inquisition in which Mayans were
hoisted in the air and tortured.
The authors of Civilización y Cultura frame indigenous cultures through such
leading questions as “How should the modern world judge ancient cultures when
human sacrifice was practiced among them?” (Copeland 1993: 17).10 They
deprive people of historical context as in this summation of the Puerto Rican
experience in the United States:
Their experience in this country has not been a very good one.
Puerto Ricans are probably among the poorest groups in the
nation. They are typically from the tropical countryside of the
island and when they come to the urban, industrialized, and
cold north, they end up disoriented. They do not have the
necessary aptitudes or abilities to find good jobs and they are
resigned to menial jobs. Nevertheless, there must be a
powerful attraction for them since they are the group of
Hispanics who can easily return to their land if they so wish.
That is to say that however poor their conditions in New York
may be, they must have been worse on the island (Copeland
1993: 176).11
166 HUMANITY & SOCIETY
Puerto Ricans, in this passage, appear to subsist in U.S. cities in somewhat of a
daze. In a manner reminiscent of the 1935 Chamber of Commerce report on
Puerto Rican children, the authors of this textbook conceal the economic and
political forces that displaced jíbaros, Puerto Rican peasants, from their small
farms, where they used to grow pineapple and coffee, to the sugar mills and
factories and then to the United States.
Within a decade after the occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898, U. S.
corporations already owned more than three quarters of the farmland on the
island. During the nineteen thirties, with male workers beginning to unionize, the
U. S. government sought to reduce labor costs in Puerto Rico by displacing
women from the home into the factory. The colonial government initiated a
program that sterilized more than a third of the women in Puerto Rico over the
course of four decades (García 1982). Shortly after the Second World War, the
U. S. government took over most of the island of Vieques, displacing most of the
inhabitants in order to set up a naval base and target practice range.12 For several
decades in the late twentieth century, tax-exempt pharmaceutical and
petrochemical industries contaminated the island’s environment as
unemployment rose. To this date, Puerto Ricans living on the island cannot vote
in federal elections and lack voting representatives in the U. S. Congress.
And yet to read Civilización y Cultura, one would think that
underdevelopment, poverty, and crime result from congenital defects in Puerto
Ricans rather than from colonization and globalization. Throughout Latin
America, governments privatize public utilities and slash subsidies for health
care and education. Free trade agreements heighten labor repression and
accelerate environmental destruction. The misery of the working poor serves to
maximize corporate profits.
To truly experience other cultures, we must relegate to the past the
pseudoscientific categorization that Arkady Averchenko satirizes:
The History of the Midianites is lost in the darkness of the ages
and is not known. Nonetheless, scientists distinguish three
separate periods in it: the first about which nothing is known;
the second about which one can say the same; and the third,
which followed the first two (Weidemann 1977: 243).
Thanks to the endeavours of critics such as Said, textbooks now rarely portray
Hispanics as one-dimensional character types that are defined by their essences
rather than by historical and sociological context. As a result, we are better able
to perceive cultures that, though endangered, are nonetheless capable of renewal.
ALI SHEHZAD ZAIDI 167
ENDNOTES
1In 1898, two years after Harding wrote those words, the United States seized Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. William Randolph Hearst used
his newspaper empire to promote a false case for that war by falsely blaming Spain for an
accidental internal explosion on the USS Maine. In 1903, the United States sent warships
to wrest Panama from Colombia, auguring the construction of the Panama Canal.
2All textbooks used in public schools had to be on a list of textbooks approved for use by
the New York City Board of Education.
3“La Historia es testigo de las edades, luz de la verdad, vida de la memoria, maestro de
la vida y heraldo de la antigüedad.” The translation of this passage and all others in this
essay are my own.
4“México fue conquistado por Hernán Cortés en 1519 después de una tremenda lucha con
los naturales. Centroamérica fue conquistada a través de dos centros expedicionarios. El
que partía de Panamá y el de México. En 1560, después de varias expediciones, Juan
Cervellón y Juan Estrada Rávago, inician la verdadera conquista de Costa Rica. La
continuó Juan Vázquez Coronado, quien fundó la ciudad de Cartago en 1564. Nicaragua
fue conquistada por Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, quien fundó las ciudades de
Granada, León y Nueva Segovia. Honduras fue conquistada por Gil González Dávila y
Hernández de Córdoba. Guatemala fue descubierta y conquistada por Pedro de Alvarado
en 1524. El Salvador fue descubierto por Pedro de Alvarado en 1524. En 1528 fue fundada
la ciudad de San Salvador. Se atribuye su fundación a Jorge Alvarado. La Nueva Granada
fue conquistada por Alonso de Ojeda, Rodrigo de Bastidas y Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada.
Venezuela fue conquistada por Juan de Ampíes, Ambrosio Alfínger, Nicolás Federman, Juan
Pérez de Tolosa, Juan de Villegas, Francisco Fajardo, Juan Rodríguez Suárez, Diego de
Losada, Diego de Ordaz, Antonio de Berrio y Diego de Serpa.”
5Ese, Pizarro: el de la frente erguida
Ese, Cortés: el del cabello undoso
Pasa Alvarado en su corcel nervioso;
Valdivia lleva el suyo de la brida.
¿Y ese? ¿Y aquél? En púrpura encendida
envueltos van bregando sin reposo,
a manera del grupo luminoso
de los conquistadores de la vida.
Cuajado en oro, el puño del cuchillo;
la coraza, cubierta de fulgores;
pleno de sol, el reluciente casco:
pasando van con el temblor de un brillo,
cual si fuesen bordados en colores
sobre grandes tapices de Damasco.
6This textbook was assigned for all sections of intermediate Spanish at the University of
Rochester while I taught there as a graduate instructor from 1993 to 1996.
7“La presencia de los indios proveyó a los colonos de mano de obra en cantidad suficiente.
Los indios tenían una tradición ya establecida de entregar gran parte de sus productos a
sus jefes, así que fue fácil para ellos sustituir un amo por otro.”
8“Los indios del Nuevo Mundo contribuyeron la papa (los incas), el chocolate y el tomate
(los aztecas) y el maíz (los mayas) al surtido mundial de comestibles además de varias otras
168 HUMANITY & SOCIETY
cosas útiles o artísticas. Sin embargo, hoy el indio representa en algunos países
hispanoamericanos el problema social y económico de mayor gravedad. En México,
Centroamérica y los países andinos hay todavía indios que no hablan castellano.”
9“El Obispo Diego de Landa, que investigó la cultura maya en el siglo XVI, nos dice que
los mayas sentían gran tristeza ante la muerte. Se lamentaban ruidosamente y atribuían el
hecho al Diablo o al dios del mal.”
10“¿Cómo debe el mundo modern juzgar las culturas antiguas cuando se encuentran
prácticas como el sacrificio humano?”
11“Su experiencia en el país no ha sido muy buena. Probablemente constituyen uno de los
grupos más pobres de la nación. Frecuentemente son personas del campo tropical de la isla
y al encontrarse en el norte – urbano, industrializado y frío – se sienten bastante
desorientadas. No poseen las capacidades necesarias para encontrar buenos puestos y se
resignan a las tareas más básicas. Al fin, sin embargo, debe haber alguna atracción fuerte
porque de todos los grupos hispánicos en los Estados Unidos, éste es el único que puede
volver fácilmente a su tierra si lo quieren. Es decir que, por malas que sean sus condiciones
en Nueva York, habrán sido peores en la isla.”
12The U.S. Navy, which withdrew from Vieques in 2003, used munitions that contained
depleted uranium. The remaining inhabitants of Vieques suffer from cancer rates over thirty
percent higher than the rest of Puerto Rico.
REFERENCES
Bartoli, Humberto and J. M. Siso Martinez. 1978 (1962). Mi Historia Universal. México
D. F.: Editorial Trillas.
Black, George. 1988. The Good Neighbor. New York: Pantheon Books.
Blaut, J. M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World. New York: Guildford Press.
Cadoux, Remunda, Mary Grimes McGee, Frances McGillicuddy, John O’Hogan, and
Flora Rizzo. 1961. Spanish for Secondary Schools. Albany: New York State Education
Department, Bureau of Secondary Curriculum Development.
Copeland, John G., Ralph Kite, and Lynn Sandstedt. 1993. Civilización y cultura. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Foucault, Michel. 1990 (1978). The History of Sexuality. Vol. I. Tr. Robert Hurley. New
York: Vintage.
Galeano, Eduardo. 1991. The Book of Embraces. Tr. Cedric Belfrage. New York: W. W.
Norton.
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