After Columbus showed that you could get somewhere by sailing across the Atlantic (1492-1493) and Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope all the way to India (1497-1498), it was clear that European sailing technology was ready to go anywhere in the world. In 1493, Spain and Portugal got Pope Alexander VI to literally divide the world between them, a settlement adjusted slightly in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. This basically gave the Western Hemisphere to Spain and the Eastern to Portugal. For the next century, this is pretty much how things operated, and both Spanish and Portuguese denied that other European powers had the right to have ships in "their" waters. The English, French, Dutch, etc. ran of the risk of being treated like pirates, even when they weren't.
In the present time, when "enlightened" opinion has turned liberal guilt into leftist self-hatred, with hatred spilling over for America, Christianity, Israel, most other religion (except ʾIslām and maybe Buddhism, as long as it has been properly denatured), and the West, the "Age of Discovery" comes in for its share of vitriol. We are told, after all, that you cannot "discover" a place that is already inhabited, as were the Americas and most other places touched by European explorers. However, if the inhabitants don't know where they are, you can discover them. They are, in a sense, lost. And none of the inhabitants of the Americans or the Pacific Islands had any idea of the form of planet Earth or its geography. The Greeks had uniquely determined that the Earth was round, and that it was a finite body floating in space, with a rough idea of the arrangement of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Not even the science of India and China had gotten that all worked out.
So when Columbus set sail to the West, he was acting on a supposition originally expressed by Aristotle, with confidence that Asia could be reached across the Atlantic. As it happened, the Greeks had also determined the size of the Earth to some accuracy, which would have put Asia out of reach of the provisions stocked by Columbus. He might have starved in mid-ocean. His own confidence was based on a revised size the Earth, from Arab philosophers, who thought it much smaller. Unfortunately, the Arabs were wrong, and the Greeks right, but, fortunately, no one anticipated that there were whole unknown continents right where Asia was supposed to be. The Vikings, who had gotten to Newfoundland, if not to Maine, didn't really know where they were either.
Columbus himself died before getting this all figured out. When it was, Magellan ambitiously realized the original project, although the Pacific Ocean still seemed a lot larger than it was supposed to be, and personally he only made it as far as the Philippines. It is perhaps not so remarkable, in the expanse of the Ocean, that no islands in Polynesia or Micronesia were spotted in the crossing. When his crew returned to Portugal in 1522, they were puzzled that their reckoning of time was off by a day. There was not yet an International Date Line to correct their error. That very error, however, proved in its own way that the Earth is round.
There is no minimizing or disparaging these achievements, whose very conception was beyond the reckoning of all the native inhabitants of those lands from the Bahamas West to the Philippines. It even occasioned some sober reflection and adjustment in India and China.
The attack now on Christopher Columbus in particular focuses on his practice of enslaving and otherwise mistreating the Indians. However, there really was nothing that Columbus did that the "Native Americans" weren't already doing to each other. There is nothing admirable about that now, but the Leftist picture that Columbus and Spain destroyed an Eden of peaceful and happy natives is nonsense. War, slavery, rape, torture, and cannibalism were standard operating procedure among "indigenous peoples."
Part of the fight now against truth is to say that all this terminology -- "war, slavery, torture," etc. -- is part of "European-derived concepts" and thus inapplicable to the institutions or practices in the New World. The language must be "decolonized." So "human sacrifice" becomes "ceremonial deaths," which defuses the horror quite nicely -- as though people were dying from slip and fall injuries, instead of having their hearts cut out. Sophistry never had it so good. If we just didn't have those images of flayed sacrificial victims. We also see this in apologetics for slavery in Islām, which, we are told, actually was caring and mild, compared to what Europeans did, since they were mean. Same thing with slavery among "Native Americans."
Nevertheless, when Columbus sent Indian slaves back to Spain to be sold, Queen Isabella overruled the practice, freed or redeemed the Indians, and sent them home, forbidding future such enslavement -- except of those like the cannibalistic Caribs. And activists sometimes misrepresent Columbus when they have him talking about slaves, when he actually used the term "servants" (servidores), not "slaves" (esclavos). But this kind of dishonesty is not unusual in such "scholarship."
In fact, current accounts of Spanish practices in the New World sound like modern additions to the "Black Legend," la leyenda negra española, the Protestant propaganda of the 16th and 17th centuries about the evils of Spanish and Catholic rule. The "Black Legend" in its own terms may be attacked by scholars as "Hispanophobia" and added, as anti-Latino (or "anti-Latinx") racism, to the list of political crimes compiled by the modern Academy. But these accusations can be dismissed in light of the urgent need now to add the modern crimes of Imperialism, Colonialism, and Racism to the content of the original, merely anti-Catholic "Black Legend."
Reading a lot of recent historians, one might think that Rudyard Kipling had invaded Mexico, or that Montezuma was hurriedly consulting his copy of Lenin's Imperialism [1917]. The anachronism, and self-righteous "virtue signalling," is palpable. We know that Marxists have actuallly ghost-written modern testimonials of the "indigenous." This was the case with I, Rigoberta Menchú [1983], the "autobiography" an Guatamalan Indian women, which was ghost-written by a (Venezuelan born) French communist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, "director of the Maison de l'Amerique Latine in Paris and of the Institut Cultural Franηais in Seville." None of the intentions of such people are salutary.
That Old World diseases devastated many of those newly discovered populations may now be attributed to the malignant evil of Columbus and all European explorers. But any contact, of any kind, would have done the same thing. New World populations simply did not have immunity to Old World diseases, and nobody had any idea how devastating that could be. The diseases made their way to Peru before the Incas even knew about the Spanish.
But the Old World had not been immune from such effects. Somehow the Black Death, which followed the Mongols, and which wiped out about half the population of Europe, does not occasion quite the same kind of indignation and self-righteousness. Racist and, yes, imperialist Mongols. That tells the tale. You never get a break when self-hatred is involved. Meanwhile, no one asks the Mongols, or for that matter the conquering Arabs, to apologize. They're all rather proud of it.
Representative of the kind of venom we see is a book, Unsettling Truths: the Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah [IVP Books, 2019]. Since the "Unsettling Truths" begin with "You cannot discover lands already inhabited," we have a clue what kind of "truths" these are going to be. The idea of the "doctrine of discovery" is explained as, "In the fifteenth century, official church edicts gave Christian explorers the right to claim territories they 'discovered'." This is certainly a reference to the Treaty of Tordesillas, without the specificity that the "official church" meant the Catholic Church, while "Christian explorers" only meant the Spanish and the Portuguese.
But who cares about the Spanish and the Portuguese when the United States is the real enemy and the real target? The "Black Legend" doesn't do ideologues any good unless America can be "blackened" by it. So we go directly from the universal authority claimed by the But since the Ottoman Sulṭān and Caliph, and the Emperors of China and Japan, claimed authority comparable to that of the Popes, but did not have fleets acknowledging their authority ranging around the world, an issue like "white supremacy" wouldn't have meant much to them.
The Chinese almost had their own Age of Exploration, as Admiral Hé sailed to Indonesia, India, Arabia, and Africa; but this was cut short by Chinese xenophobia. The "isolationist" Court faction didn't want any contact, of any kind, with foreigners. And, as we know, "isolationists" are the worst kinds of racists, Neanderthal troglodites, and sexists. The most intriguing thing about this period, however, may be the discovery of what looks like a Chinese anchor off Southern California. The records of Admiral Hé were later destroyed, and so we might wonder if a record of New World voyages also was destroyed.
Today, however, we do see Chinese "Han Supremacy" operating in the colonization, slave labor, torture, and genocide of the Tibetans and Uighurs. This is rarely noticed by the Left, which regards criticism of Communist China as "racism" -- but who nevertheless are despised by the Chinese as Instead, the authors, Charles and Rah, in their bizarre, trendy self-hatred, want America discredited at its roots. And there is no blanket delegitmization as thorough as telling everyone that they don't have a right to be where they are -- which actually would seem to include at least part of the heritage of a "Mark Charles," and all of that of a "Soong-chan Rah," whose name looks Korean to me -- and his school, the Christian North Park University in Chicago, is likely on "unceded" indigenous lands. While Rah is actually a professor of "Evangelism," this book seems to betray a replacement of religious purposes with radical political ones, as is characteristic of leftist religious activists.
I might direct them to the Turkish conquest and colonization of Anatolia, But we might wonder about some other things. What do the Hopi really think about the late arrivals, the migrants, probably not before about 1500, the Navajo, surrounding and hemming them in on their isolated Mesas? What right do the Navajo have to that land? Inquiring minds want to know. Unlike the Spanish, they hadn't even been given the land by the Pope.
They had, however, been given the land, the Dinétah, by their own gods, the Diyin Dine'é or "Holy People," whose creation and people were autochthonous, not migratory -- and this is in the "Fourth World" of the Navajo universe, the "White World," which obviously reflects "white supremacy." Those Navajo. Racist and colonialist Navajo.
At the same time, the Aztecs, the Mexica, remembered that they themselves were migrants. When they arrived in the Valley of Mexico, after some conflict with the locals, they found an island to settle in Lake Texcoco, perhaps in 1325. An omen appeared: An eagle, perched on a cactus, had caught a snake. Much as Brigham Young announced, "This is the place," coming down to the site of Salt Lake City, this was the sign foretold by the god Huitzilopochtli. Images of the eagle and snake continue to be used in the arms and flag of Mexico, reminding us that the Aztecs did not claim to be autochthonous. Since the regime of the Aztecs was not loved by their neighbors, this bears remembering.
Curiously, a similar omen of an eagle and snake was observed at the founding of Constantinople.
The Navajo Conception of Hózhǫ́The Dehumanizing Legacy of Anti-Colonialism
Popes to: "This was institutionalized as an implicit national framework that justifies American triumphalism, white supremacy, and ongoing injustices." A nice leap there from Alexander VI to, I suppose, George Washington.
And, let me guess, "ongoing injustices" is going to mean, say, captialism? And, again, "white supremacy" is going to mean, say, capitalism? -- and also, we learn now, the rigors of mathematics? At the same time, Americans of Asian derivation or ancestry, who may work hard following a Confucian cultural ethic, are themselves thereby "white supremacists." So, Charles and Rah are simply more of the communist liars and ignorant fools who now infest American universities like
rats in the subway.
.
culminating in "ethnic cleansing" of Greeks after World War I, not to mention the Armenian genocide during it. And the Turks are still at it against the Kurds, who aren't even Christians.
With their own similar creation stories, many Native Americans resent the claim of anthropologists that they migrated from Asia thousands of years ago. Racist anthropologists.
| Portuguese Possessions |
|---|
|
| Captains-major of Macao | |
|---|---|
| Francisco Martins | 1557-1558 |
| Lionel de Sousa | 1558-1559 |
| Rui Barreto | 1559-1560 |
| Manuel de Mendonça | 1560-1561 |
| Fernão de Sousa | 1561-1562 |
| Pero Barreto Rolim | 1562-1563 |
| Diogo Pereira | 1563-1565 |
| João Pedro Pereira | 1565-1566 |
| Simão de Mendonça | 1566-1567, 1574-1575 |
| Tristão Vaz da Veiga | 1567-1568, 1571-1572 |
| António de Sousa | 1568-1569 |
| Manuel Travassos | 1569-1571 |
| João de Almeida | 1572-1573, 1582-1583 |
| António de Vilhena | 1573-1574 |
| Vasco Pereira | 1575-1576 |
| Domingos Monteiro | 1576-1579, 1586-1587, 1592-1593 |
| Lionel Brito | 1579-1570 |
| Miguel da Gama | 1580-1581 |
| Inácio de Lima | 1581-1582 |
| Aires Gonçalves de Miranda | 1583-1585 |
| Francisco Pais | 1585-1586 |
| Jerónimo Pereira | 1587-1589 |
| -- | 1589-1590 |
| Anrique da Costa | 1590-1591 |
| Roque de Melo Pereira | 1591-1592 |
| Gaspar Pinto da Rocha | 1593-1594 |
| -- | 1594-1595 |
| Manuel de Miranda | 1595-1596 |
| Rui Mendes de Figuieredo | 1596-1597 |
| -- | 1597-1598 |
| Nunho de Mendonça | 1598-1599 |
| Paulo de Portugal | 1599-1603 |
| Gonçalo Rodrigues de Sousa | 1603-1604 |
| João Caiado de Gambôa | 1604-1605 |
| Diogo de Vasconcelos de Meneses | 1605-1607 |
| André Pessôa | 1607-1609 |
| -- | 1609-1611 |
| Pedro Martin Gaio | 1611-1612 |
| Miguel de Sousa Pimentel | 1612-1614 |
| João Serrão da Cunha | 1614-1615 |
| Martim da Cunha | 1615-1616 |
| Francisco Lopes Carrasco | 1616-1617 |
| Lopo Sarmento de Carvalho | 1617-1618, 1621-1622 |
| António de Oliveira de Morias | 1618-1619 |
| Jerónimo de Macedo de Carvalho | 1619-1620 |
| Governors of Macao | |
| Francisco Mascarenhas | 1623-1626 |
| Filipe Lôbo | 1626-1629 |
| Jerónimo da Silveira | 1630-1631 |
| Manuel da Câmara de Noronha | 1631-1636 |
| Domingos da Câmara de Noronha | 1636-1638 |
| Sebastião Lôbo da Silveira | 1638-1644 |
| Luís de Carvalho de Sousa | 1645-1646 |
| Diogo Coutinho Doçem | 1646 |
| João Pereira | 1647-1650 |
| João de Sousa Pereira | 1650-1654 |
| Manuel Tavares Bocarro | 1654-1664 |
| Manuel Coelho da Silva | 1664-1666 |
| Álvaro da Silva | 1667-1670 |
| Manuel Borges da Silva | 1670-1672 |
| António Barbosa Lôbo | 1672-1677 |
| António de Castro Sande | 1678-1679 |
| Luís de Melo Sampaio | 1679-1682 |
| Belchior do Amaral de Meneses | 1682-1685 |
| António de Mesquita Pimentel | 1685-1688 |
| André Coelho Vieira | 1688-1691 |
| Francisco da Costa | 1691-1693 |
| António da Silva e Melo | 1693-1694 |
| Gil Vaz Lôbo Freire | 1694-1697 |
| Cosme Rodrigues de Carvalho e Sousa | 1697-1697 |
| Chamber Senate | 1697-1698 |
| Pedro Vaz de Sequeira | 1698-1700, 1702-1703 |
| Diogo de Melo Sampaio | 1700-1702 |
| José da Gama Machado | 1703-1706 |
| Diogo do Pinho Teixeira | 1706-1710 |
| Francisco de Melo e Castro | 1710-1711 |
| António de Sequeira de Noronha | 1711-1714 |
| Francisco de Alarcão de Souto-Maior | 1714-1718 |
| António de Albuquerque Coelho | 1718-1719 |
| António da Silva Telo e Meneses | 1719-1722 |
| Cristóvão de Severim Manuel | 1722-1724 |
| António Carneiro de Alcáçova | 1724-1727 |
| António Moniz Barreto | 1727-1732 |
| António do Amaral Meneses | 1732-1735 |
| João do Casal | 1735 |
| Cosme Damião Pinto Pereira | 1735-1738, 1743-1747 |
| Manuel Pereira Coutinho | 1738-1743 |
| António José Teles de Meneses | 1747-1749 |
| João Manuel de Melo | 1749-1752 |
| Rodrigo de Castro | 1752-1755, 1770-1771 |
| Francisco António Pereira Coutinho | 1755-1758 |
| Diogo Pereira | 1758-1761 |
| António de Mendonça Corte-Real | 1761-1764 |
| José PlÁcido de Matos Saraiva | 1764-1767 |
| Diogo Fernandes Salema e Saldanha | 1767-1770, 1771-1777 |
| Alexandre da Silva Pedrosa Guimarães | 1777-1778 |
| João Vicente da Silveira e Meneses | 1778-1780 |
| António José da Costa | 1780-1781 |
| Francisco de Castro | 1781-1783 |
| Bernardo Aleixo de Lemos e Faria | 1783-1788, 1806-1808, 1810-1814 |
| Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Corte-Real | 1788-1789 |
| Lázaro da Silva Ferreira | 1789-1790 |
| Vasco Luís Carneiro de Sousa e Faro | 1790-1793 |
| José Manuel Pinto | 1793-1797, 1800-1803 |
| Cristóvão Pereira de Castro | 1797-1800 |
| Caetano de Sousa Pereira | 1803-1806 |
| British Occupation | |
| William O'Brien Drury | 1808 |
| Lucas José de Alvarenga | 1808-1810, 1814-1817 |
| José Onório de Castro e Albuquerque | 1817-1822 |
| Paulino da Silva Barbosa | 1822-1823 |
| Government Council, 1822-1825 | |
| Joaquim Mourão Garcês Palha | 1825-1827 |
| Government Council, 1827-1830 | |
| João Cabral de Estefique | 1830-1833 |
| Bernardo José de Sousa Soares de Andrea | 1833-1837 |
| Adrião Acácio da Silveira Pinto | 1837-1843 |
| José Gregório Pegado | 1843-1846 |
| João Maria Ferreira do Amaral | 1846-1849 |
| Government Council, 1849-1850 | |
| Pedro Alexandrino da Cunha | 1850-1850 |
| Government Council, 1850-1851 | |
| Francisco António Gonçalves Cardoso | 1851-1851 |
| Isidoro Francisco Guimarães | 1851-1863 |
| José Rodrigues Coelho do Amaral | 1863-1866 |
| José Maria da Ponte e Horta | 1866-1868 |
| António Sérgio de Sousa | 1868-1872 |
| Januário Correia de Almeida | 1872-1874 |
| José Maria Lôbo de Ávila | 1874-1876 |
| Carlos Eugénio Correia da Silva | 1876-1879 |
| Joaquim José da Graça | 1879-1883 |
| Tomás de Sousa Rósa | 1883-1886 |
| Firmino José da Costa | 1886-1888 |
| Francisco Teixeira da Silva | 1889-1890 |
| Custódio Miguel de Borja | 1890-1894 |
| José Maria de Sousa Horta e Costa | 1894-1897, 1900-1902 |
| Eduardo Augusto Rodrigues Galhardo | 1897-1900 |
| Arnaldo de Novaes Guedes Rebelo | 1902-1903 |
| Martinho Pinto de Quierós Montenegro | 1904-1907 |
| Pedro de Azevedo Coutinho | 1907-1908 |
| José Augusto Alves Roçadas | 1908-1909 |
| Eduardo Augusto Marquês | 1909-1910 |
| Álvaro de Melo Machado | 1910-1912 |
| Aníbal Augusto Sanches de Miranda | 1912-1914 |
| José Carlos da Maia | 1914-1916 |
| Manuel Ferreira da Rocha | 1916-1917 |
| Fernando Augusto Vieira de Matos | 1917 |
| Artur Tamagnini de Sousa Barbosa | 1918-1919, 1926-1930, 1937-1940 |
| Henrique Monteiro Correia da Silva | 1919-1922 |
| Luís Antonio de Magalhães Correia | acting, 1922-1923 |
| Rodrigo José Rodrigues | 1923-1924 |
| Joaquim Augusto dos Santos | acting, 1924-1925 |
| Manuel Firmino de Almeida Maia Magalhães | 1925-1926 |
| Hugo Carvalho Lacerda Castelo Branco | acting, 1926-1926 |
| João Pereira de Magalhães | acting, 1930-1931, 1931-1932 |
| Joaquim Anselmo da Mata e Oliveira | 1931-1931 |
| António José Bernardes de Miranda | 1932-1935 |
| João Pereira Barbosa | 1935-1936 |
| António Joaquim Ferreira da Silva Jϊnior | 1936-1937 |
| José Rodrigues Moutinho | acting, 1940 |
| Gabriel Maurício Teixeira | 1940-1946 |
| Albano Rodrigues de Oliveira | 1947-1951 |
| Joaquim Marquês Esparteiro | 1951-1957 |
| Pedro Correia Barros | 1957-1958 |
| Manuel Peixoto Nunes | 1958-1959 |
| Jaime Silvério Marques | 1959-1962 |
| António Adriano Faria Lopes dos Santos | 1962-1966 |
| José Manuel de Sousa e Faria Nobre de Carvalho | 1966-1974 |
| José Garcia Leandro | 1974-1979 |
| Melo Egídio | 1979-1981 |
| José Carlos Moreira Campos | acting, 1981 |
| Vasco Almeida e Costa | 1981-1986 |
| Joaquim Pinto Machado | 1986-1987 |
| Carlos Melancia | 1987-1990 |
| Francisco Murteira Nabo | acting, 1990-1991 |
| Vasco Rocha Vieira | 1991-1999 |
| 20 December 1999, Returned to China | |
Ironically, a British foothold in India began with the dowry of Catharine of Braganza, daughter of James IV, when she was betrothed to Charles II of England in 1661 -- Bombay, which soon became the base of British trade in India.
Portuguese Eastern Hemisphere holdings then remained more or less static until the overthrow of the Fascist government inspired Portugal to shed its possessions in 1975. Exceptions to that were Goa and the other two Portuguese cities in India, which the Republic of India took by force in 1961, and Macao, which the Chinese had Portugal administer until 1999.
Otherwise, the greatest Portuguse colonial possession was actually in the Western Hemisphere, namely Brazil, which became independent in its own unique way. The heir to the throne of Portugal itself followed the precedent of the other newly independent South American countries, and made himself Emperor of Brazil in 1822. Even today, Brazil is the largest Portuguese speaking country in the world. The Portuguese heritage in India is still conspicuous in the Portuguese names (e.g. D'Souza) of many Indian Catholics.
Although not the first or the most important of the possessions of Portugal or Spain, Macao does end up being, not only the longest lasting, but the last of them all, missing the 21st century by a few days. Macao acquired a claim to fame before it was even properly founded, since St. Francis Xavier died nearby in 1552, after carrying his Jesuit mission all the way to Japan. His reportedly incorruptible body, however, was transported back to Goa, where it remains -- and is displayed periodically.
After Napoleon occupied Portugal itself in 1807, there was a brief British occupation of Macao (1808); but then the Portuguese government itself relocated to Brazil, as an ally of Britain, so no durable British presence resulted. In World War II, the Japanese completely surrounded Macao, and their troops entered the city several times; but since Portugal not only was neutral in the War but was under a Fascist dictatorship friendly to Germany, Japan had good reason to avoid any more aggressive actions.
With the establishment of democracy in 1974, Portugal intended to divest itself of all its colonies. Curiously, the Chinese didn't exactly want Macao back. Like Hong Kong, the colony was a Chinese window on the larger world and a good source of foreign currency. In 1979, there was an agreement that Macao was simply a Chinese territory administered by Portugal. Then in 1987 it was agreed that the Portuguese would leave in 1999, two years after Hong Kong would revert to China. By then, China had opened itself directly to the larger world, embraced (some kind of) capitalism, and no longer needed the colonial intermediaries. So at long last the day of European colonies in East Asia passed.
Portuguese trade with China had one curious and durable result, contributing the word for a fruit, the sweet orange, to many languages. This is discussed, appropriately, under the Princes of Orange.
The list of Governors of Macao is from a page at the World Statesmen site.
| Spanish Possessions |
|---|
|
The Spanish Conquistadores, fresh from the Reconquista in Spain itself, not only conquered many new lands, they were in the unique position to overthrow a couple of entire civilizations, those of the Aztecs (the Mexica) in Mexico and of the Incas in Peru. That someone would deliberately do this now seems unbelievably criminal and horrifying. There are some things to keep in mind about it, however.
The Spanish of the 16th century are now nearly as remote and exotic as the Aztecs and Incas themselves. Conquering Granada and converting the Moors was of a piece with conquering America and converting the Indians. That there was moral objection and dissent over this in Spain itself, and in the Church, does give us some hint of the values of liberal modernity, but the entire terms of the debate were still foreign.
To the Spanish ariving in Mexico, the religion and the culture there were works of the Devil. The Aztec priesthood, without exception, was massacred, for this tatooed and bloody hierarchy consisted of conscious agents of Satan. And, to tell the truth, even now one might wonder, given the practices of Aztec religion, whose daily sacrament was human sacrifice, and whose priests often dressed in the flayed skins of victims. What was normal and customary in Aztec religion now would only be represented in the most disturbing of horror films, as acts perpetrated by maniacs or, indeed, by those in the supernatural grip of evil.
Nor was this all simply accepted in the context of Mexico itself. The Aztecs were not loved, and their "empire" was a collection of subjugated tributary states, much of whose tribute was human. Several of them went over to the Spanish and provided essential aid in the overthrow of the Aztecs -- most significantly the Tlaxcalans, whose good services were rewarded by the entire tribe being made hidalgos, i.e. nobility, in the Spanish system, with self-government.
With two close allies, Texcoco and Tlacopan, Aztec Tenochtitlán ruled something much more like the Athenian "empire" of the League of Delos than a unified imperial state. And, as with the League of Delos, Cortés was able to lure away both Aztec enemies and allies into joining his own army against the hated Mexica.
| Aztec Tlatoani | |
|---|---|
| Acamapichtli | c.1372- c.1391 |
| Huitzilihuitl | c.1391- c.1416 |
| Chimalpopoca | c.1416- 1427 |
| Itzcóatl | 1427-1440 |
| Moctezuma I | 1440-1469 |
| Axayacoatl | 1469-1481 |
| Tizoc | 1481-1486 |
| Ahuitzotl | 1486-1502 |
| Moctezuma II | 1502-1519 |
| Cuitlahuac | 1519-1520 |
| Cuauhtémoc | 1520-1521, d.1525 |
| Spanish Conquest, 1521 | |
The Aztec leader, the Tlatoani, which means something like "Speaker," was an elected and very nearly secular, mutatis mutandis, official. The list of the traditional Tlatoani is given here. Unlike the Aztec state, the domain of the Incas was a tightly centralized monarchy, with a divine and hereditary ruler, the Inca. Moctezuma (or Montezuma) II, vividly remembered afterwards, was killed by a mob of his own people, who were furious at his inability to resist the Spanish (although sometimes it is claimed that the Spanish had killed him). But the whole Aztec Nation was unable to resist the Spanish.
Indeed, Moctezuma's problem was that, as Cortés advanced, over months, into the interior of Mexico, the Aztec leader was kept well informed about the weapons and behavior of the Spanish. He knew that resisting them would be a hopeless business. However, after his death, resistence it would be. On June 30, 1520, the people of Tenochtitlán drove the Spanish out of the city, with great loss of life. Cortés was away at the time, dealing with his own problems with the Spanish government.
Regrouping and preparing for conquest took until the following May, while smallpox struck the Aztecs, carrying away Cuitlahuac, Moctezuma's successor. The assault on Tenochtitlán then took four months, and it wasn't until August 13 that Cuauhtémoc, the new Tlatoani, surrendered. Thousands or even hundreds of thousands had been killed; and the Aztecs fought with the disadvantage that individual (Homeric) prowess continued to be valued over coordinated attack, and warriors still tried to capture enemies for sacrifice, rather than killing them outright. This exposed the distracted warriors to simple slaughter by the Spanish -- whose own Indian allies, however, also wanted to capture Aztecs for their own sacrifices and cannibalism.
It was a battle like Stalingrad, street by street and block by block. Since the Aztecs used the canals -- Tenochtitlán, like Venice, was built on islands, many artificial, in Lake Texcoco -- to mount attacks, Cortés ordered that they be filled in with rubble from each demolished neighborhood. The defenders could often clear them during the night, the way the defenders of Constantinople would repair the great walls.
Nevertheless, the resistance was ground down, and Spanish fury only increased, as they could actually see captured Spaniards (abut 500 of them) sacrificed on the Aztec pyramids. Since the captured city was then all but destroyed, Cortés decided to complete the destruction. The canals were filled in again and the character of the city was erased. Eventually, all of Lake Texcoco disappeared. Cuauhtémoc was later executed, in the treacherous manner often characteristic of the Spaniards.
Besides the incommensurable moral paradigms at the time, the Aztecs and the Incas were in an extraordinarily vulnerable position. For all the centuries that civilizations had existed in Central and South America, they were still neolithic cultures. In their isolation they had progressed at a very slow rate technologically.
| The Incas | |
|---|---|
| Manco Capac I | c.1200 |
| Sinchi Roca | |
| Lloque Yupanqui | |
| Mayta Capac | |
| Capac Yupanqui | |
| Inca Roca | |
| Yahuar Huacac | |
| Viracocha | |
| Pachacuti Yupanqui | 1438-1471 |
| Topa Yupanqui | 1471-1493 |
| Huayna Capac | 1493-1525 |
| Dies of measles or smallpox | |
| Huáscar | 1525-1532 |
| Civil war | |
| Atahuallpa | 1525-1533 |
| Spanish Conquest, 1533 | |
| Manco Capac II | 1533-1544 |
| Sayri Tupac | 1544-1561 |
| Titu Cusi | 1560-1571 |
| Tupac Amaru I | 1571 |
| Tupac Amaru II | rebellion, 1780-1781 |
The Aztecs fought, not with swords, but with clubs studded with obsidian blades. These could inflict nasty injuries, but they simply broke on Spanish armor; and Spanish swords could cut through the padded protection used by Mexican warriors.
With no draft or pack animals, except the llama in the Andes, neither culture had the wheel (except, curiously, on toys). Deficient in livestock, such as sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, or cattle, some argue that cannibalism in Meso-America was a compensation for this lack of protein sources. Victor Davis Hansen mentions that the adopted Nahuatl word for "chicken," caxtil, was also their new word for "Castile" -- so Cortés had come from "the land of the chickens" [The End of Everything, Basic Books, 2024, p.238].
Similarly, the sine qua non of the Old World civilizations, writing, didn't even exist among the Incas, and was still a very imperfect instrument in Central America. Only now, indeed, is the writing of the Mayans becoming better understood, but its level of development never got much beyond what the Egyptians had in the Archaic Period.
After the Maya mysteriously abandoned their cities, no further progress in writing was made at all, and the system the Aztecs inherited was less sophisticated. We only know as much as we do about the history of the Aztecs and Incas because of the living memories that could be recorded after the arrival of the Spanish -- though, of course, the many Maya and Aztec codices burned by the Spanish would have been a help.
| Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru, 1846, John Everett Millais (18291896), Victoria and Albert Museum |
|---|
For all the hopelessness of the encounters, what would one not give to have been with Cortés when he first entered the Valley of Mexico and saw the extraordinary sights there? Later, there would be much fiction and romance about "lost" civilizations, but this was the real thing, an entire world hidden from Ptolemy, Marco Polo, and Admiral He alike. And so, naturally, the Spanish destroyed it, usually with a treachery and ruthlessness nearly as appalling as the practices of Aztec religion.
Indeed, while the Spanish can be reproached (anachronistically) for practices like torture and slavery, there was no disagreement about these from Native Americans, anywhere, who freely engaged in both themselves. The woman, La Malinche (originally Malintzin, then Marina), who was the translator and then mistress of Cortés, had been sold into slavery by her own mother and was among a group of women gifted to the Spanish. Her status only improved when it was realized she spoke both the Aztec Nahuatl and Maya. Until she learned Spanish, translations were awkwardly conducted through a Spaniard who had been a slave among the Maya and knew their language.
La Malinche had five children with Cortés, one of whom, Martin Cortes "el Mestizo," joined the Court of King Philip II, was made a marquis, and was endowed with lands in Mexico, which he returned to govern.
Moctezuma had been made hostage by Cortés, and Pizarro began his encounter with the Incas by treacherously seizing the Inca Atahuallpa, who had arrived without military preparations, despite leaving a large army nearby. Unlike Moctezuma, Atahuallpa did not have any intelligence about the Spanish and so had no clue about their weapons, intentions, or behavior. He was totally surprised and blind-sided and could not imagine that the few Spaniards posed any real threat.
Nevertheless, the Spanish had, after a fashion, already arrived, since their diseases had spread ahead of them. The Inca Huayna Capac had already died of one of them -- a mysterious business until later. While Moctezuma died after being stoned and shot by his own people, Atahuallpa was held to ransom by Pizarro, and then murdered when the ransom was paid -- and the sacred virgins of the Inca all raped.
After the debacle with Moctezuma, and needing to fight their way out of Tenochtitlán, Cortés and his men, as we've seen, with their many Indian allies, attacked and destroyed the Aztec state. With the Incas, the centralized state was decapitated with the murder of Atahuallpa. At first, the Spanish hoped that a puppet Inca, converted to Christianity, would be a good means of Spanish rule. But the chosen instrument, Manco Capac II, soon rebelled, and resistance continued for many years, until the last of the imperial family was hunted down, captured, and killed in 1571. Thus, where Mexico had been conquered with fierce street fighting in one city, Peru became a matter of extended guerrilla warfare over decades in and out of precipitous mountains, valleys, and jungles. The result was the same; and the last Inca, Túpac Amaru, a nephew of Atahuallpa, was excuted according to the fraudulent conceits used by the Spanish.
This all leaves a curious heritage. Few Mexicans or Peruvians want to adopt Nahuatl or Quechua as their language, or revive the old religions, but the manner in which the Spanish language and the Catholic religion arrived and were imposed still can rankle. Indeed, the remaining Marxist ideology of revolution in Mexico (and elsewhere) has tended to focus on the poverty and plight of unassimilated Indians. Sadly, since the solution offered for their plight is collectivism and command economics (i.e. the paradigm of Cuba), they can be sure of remaining in poverty.
Ironically, the imperial language of the former Spanish colonies is promoted in the United States, without irony, as the medium of the downtrodden; and activists demand, in that language, Spanish, that "Europeans" leave, presumably so that the oppressed can enjoys the benefits of the cellphones and refrigerators that grow naturally on the land, ripe for the harvest. Karl Marx himself was not so stupid as to subscribe to the sort of Cargo Cult economics we find among the radicals. Yet, as in the United States, people vote for the mirage of "socialism," and then they end up with poverty and tyranny in a communist police state, as in Venezuela.
Both the Aztecs and the Incas were heirs to much older civilizations, which are largely known only from archaeology. In South America there was no written language at all, not even by the time of the Incas. In Central America, there was indeed a written language, originated by perhaps the greatest civilization of the Americas, that of the Maya.
Spanish possessions endured rather better through the 17th and 18th centuries than the Portuguese did. The annual voyages of the treasure fleets from Vera Cruz to Spain and from Acapulco to the Philippines were the lifeblood of Spanish finances and the perennial temptation of enemies and pirates. They also established the silver Spanish dollar not only as the common currency of trade in the New World (adopted by the young United States), but in the Far East as well. Both the Japanese Yen and Chinese Yuán were originally versions of the Mexican dollars brought to the Philippines.
| Governors (Captains General) of Cuba, in Havana | |
|---|---|
| Diego Velázquez | Deputy, 1510-1524 |
| Juan Altamirano | Deputy, 1524-1525 |
| Gonzalo de Guzmán | Deputy, 1525-1528 |
| Juan de Vadillo | Deputy, 1528-1531 |
| Manuel de Rojas | Deputy, 1531-1535 |
| 1535-1537 | |
| Hernando de Soto | 1537-1542 |
| Juanes de Avila | interim, 1543-1546 |
| Antonio de Chaves | 1547-1548 |
| Gonzalo Pérez de Angulo | 1548-1553 |
| Carasa | 1553-1555 |
| Diego de Mazariegos | 1555-1564 |
| García Osorio | 1564-1567 |
| Pedro Menéndez de Avilés | 1567-1574 |
| Gabriel de Montalvo | 1574-1577 |
| Francisco Carreño | 1577-1579 |
| Gaspar de Torres | 1579-1580 |
| Gabriel de Luján | 1580-1588 |
| Juan de Tejada | 1588-1593 |
| Juan Maldonado Barnuevo | 1593-1600 |
| Pedro de Valdés | 1600-1608 |
| Gaspar Ruiz de Pereda | 1608-1616 |
| Sancho de Alquiza | 1616-1619 |
| Jerónimo de Quero | interim, 1619-1620, military |
| Diego de Vallejo | interim, 1619-1620, civil |
| Francisco de Venegas | 1620-1624 |
| Juan de Esquivel Saavedra | interim, 1624-1626 |
| Cristóbal de Aranda | |
| Damián Velázquez de Contreras | |
| Juan Alonso Fernández | |
| Lorenzo de Cabrera y Corbera | 1626-1630 |
| Juan Bitrián de Beamonte y Navarra | 1630-1634 |
| Francisco de Riaño y Gamboa | 1634-1639 |
| Alvaro de Luna Sarmiento | 1639-1647 |
| Diego de Villalba y Toledo | 1647-1653 |
| Francisco Jelder | 1653-1654 |
| Juan de Montaño Blázquez | 1654-1657 |
| Juan de Salamanca | 1657-1662 |
| Rodrigo Flores de Aldana | 1662-1663 |
| Francisco de Avila Orejón y Gastón | 1663-1670 |
| Francisco Rodríguez de Ledesma | 1670-1680 |
| Luis Fern ndez de Córdova | 1680-1685 |
| Diego Antonio de Viana Hinojosa | 1685-1689 |
| Severino Manzaneda Salinas y Rozas | interim, 1689-1694 |
| Diego de Córdova Lasso de la Vega, Marquis of the Bao del Maestre | 1694-1702 |
| Pedro Benítez de Lugo | 1702 |
| Luis Chacón | interim, 1702-1706, 1706-1708 military |
| Nicolás Chirino | interim, 1702-1706, 1706-1708 civil |
| Pedro Alvarez Villarín | 1706 |
| Laureano de Torres y Ayala, Marquis of Casatorre | 1708-1711, 1713-1716 |
| Luis Chacón and Pablo Cavero | 1711-1713 |
| Vicente de Raja | 1716-1717 |
| Gómez de Maraver | interim?, 1717-1718 |
| Gregorio Guazo y Calderón | 1718-1724 |
| Dioniso Martínez de la Vega | 1724-1734 |
| Juan Francisco Güemes Orcasitas | 1734-1746 |
| Juan Antonio Tineo y Fuertes | 1746 |
| Diego Peñalosa | interim, 1746-1747 |
| Francisco Cagijal de la Vega | 1747-1760 |
| Pedro de Alonso | 1760-1761 |
| Juan de Prado Portocarrero | 1761-1762 |
| Ambrosio de Funes Villalpando, Count of Ricla | 1763-1765 |
| Diego Antonio Manrique | 1765 |
| Pascual Jiménez de Cisneros | 1765-1766 |
| Antonio María Bucarelli y Ursúa | 1766-1771 |
| Felipe Fondesviela, Marquis of la Torre | 1771-1777 |
| Diego José Navarro García Valdés | 1777-1781 |
| Juan Manuel de Cajigal | 1782-1783 |
| Luis de Urizaga | 1783-1785 |
| José de Gálvez, Count of Gálvez | 1785 |
| Bernardo de Troncoso | 1785 |
| José de Ezpeleta y Galdeano | 1785-1788 |
| Domingo Cabello | 1788-1790 |
| Luis de las Casas | 1790-1796 |
| Juan Procopio Basecourt, Count of Santa Clara | 1796-1799 |
| Salvador de Muro y Salazar, Marquis of Someruelos | 1799-1812 |
| Juan Ruiz de Apodaca | 1812-1816 |
| José Cienfuegos Jovellanos | 1816-1819 |
| Juan Manuel de Cajigal | 1819-1821 |
| Nicolás Mahy | 1821-1822 |
| Sebastián Kindelán | interim, 1822-1823 |
| Francisco Dionisio Vives | 1823-1832 |
| Mariano Ricafort | 1832-1834 |
| Miguel Tacón Rosique | 1834-1837 |
| Joaquín Ezpeleta | 1834-1840 |
| [?] Príncipe de Anglona | 1840-1841 |
| Jerónimo Valdés | 1841-1843 |
| Francisco Javier Ulloa | 1843 |
| Leopoldo O'Donell | 1843-1848 |
| Federico Roncali, Count of Alcoy | 1848-1850 |
| José Gutiérrez de la Concha, Marquis of La Habana | 1850-1852, 1874-1875 |
| Valentín Cañedo | 1852-1853 |
| Juan de la Pezuela | 1853-1854 |
| José Gerónimo de la Concha | 1854-1859 |
| Francisco Serrano | 1859-1862 |
| Domingo Dulce | 1862-1866, 1869 |
| Francisco Lersundi | 1866, 1867-1869 |
| Joaquín Manzano | 1866-1867 |
| Blas de Villate, Count of Valmaseda | 1867, 1870-1872, 1875-1876 |
| Antonio Caballero de Rodas | 1869-1870 |
| Francisco de Ceballos | interim, 1872-1873 |
| Cándido Pieltain | 1873 |
| Joaquín Jovellar | 1873 |
| Arsenio Martínez Campos | 1876-1879, 1895-1896 |
| Ramón Blanco | 1879-1881, 1897-1898 |
| Luis de Prendergast | 1881-1885 |
| Ramón Fajardo | 1885-1887 |
| Slavery Abolished, 1886 | |
| Sabas Marín | 1887-1889, 1896 |
| Manuel Salamanca | 1889-1890 |
| Chinchilla | 1890 |
| Camilo Polavieja | 1890-1892 |
| Emilio Callejas | 1892-1895 |
| Valeriano Weiler y Nicolau | 1896-1897 |
| Spanish-American War, 1898; American Occupation, 1898-1902 | |
| Republic of Cuba | |
| Tomαs Estrada Palma | President, 1902-1906 |
| American Occupation, 1902-1909 | |
| William Howard Taft | Governor, 1906 |
| Charles Edward Magoon | 1906-1909 |
| Josι Miguel Gσmez | President, 1909-1913 |
| Mario Garcνa Menocal | 1913-1921 |
| Alfredo Zayas y Alfonso | 1921-1925 |
| Gerardo Machado | 1925-1933, deposed |
| Alberto Herrera y Franchi | Provisional President, 1933 |
| Carlos Manuel de Cιspedes y Quesada | Provisional, 1933 |
| Ramσn Grau | 1933-1934 |
| Carlos Hevia | Provisional, 1934 |
| Manuel Mαrquez Sterling | Provisional, 1934 |
| Carlos Mendieta | Provisional, 1934-1935 |
| Josι Agripino Barnet | Provisional, 1935-1936 |
| Miguel Mariano Gσmez | 1936 |
| Federico Laredo Brϊ | 1936-1940 |
| Fulgencio Batista | 1940-1944 |
| Ramσn Grau | 1940-1948 |
| Carlos Prνo Socarrαs | 1948-1952 |
| Fulgencio Batista | 1952-1959 |
| Anselmo Alliegro y Milα | Provisional, 1959 |
| Carlos Manuel Piedra | Provisional, 1959 |
| Manuel Urrutia Lleσ | 1959 |
Dictatorship, 1959-present | |
| Osvaldo Dorticσs Torrado | 1959-1976 |
| Fidel Castro | 1976-2008 |
| Raϊl Castro | 2008-2018 |
| Miguel Dνaz-Canel | 2018-present |
What followed was a kind of love-hate relationship between Cuba and the United States. Cuba today represents the relationship as pure hate, with the country suffering under the most durable dictator of the 20th century, Fidel Castro. After being one of the most prosperous countries in Latin Ameria in the 1950's, Cuba now has been reduced to a per capita annual gross domestic product (GDP), adjusted for purchasing power, of $1700, only 5% of that of the United States [The Economist Pocket World in Figures, 2003 edition, Profile Books, 2002]. This is better than most Sub-Saharan African counties, where Tanzania, for instance, only has 1.5% of GDP of the United States ($520), but it is at the bottom of the list for Latin American states. It barely beats out Haiti ($1470). Meanwhile, Mexico has an adjusted per capita GDP of $8,790, 25.8% of the United States. Cubans have told foreign reporters that just to make a living, everything they do breaks the law.
Despite this miserable record of poverty, Castro was still nevetheless the darling of international "progressives," and was regularly visited by fawning celebrities, such as, in 2002, Steven Spielberg -- the sort of people who wouldn't give the time of day to the despised former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet.
The modern Left has different ways of rationalizing this love affair. Since the promise of Communism to produce wealth has failed, this now can be interpreted as a virtue and Cuban poverty (except for Castro's own comfortable lifestyle, of course) construed as a noble ecotopia -- i.e. an ecological utopia. This is, indeed, the most progressive approach, since enlightened leftist opinion now regards the abundance of commercial cultures, and the consumer choice of market democracies, as the Rape of the Planet [note].
Since most people don't buy the idea that poverty is good and that we should go back to living at a neolithic, or paleolithic, level of culture (not for the elite, of course), it always helps to have another rationalization ready. Thus, the American economic boycott of Cuba can be blamed for its poverty. There are two problems with that explanation. One is that it doesn't follow from Castro's own ideology. Communist and "progressive" economics have long recommended economic self-sufficiency and autarchy.
The Communists simply don't know why trade is necessary, and now would tend to regard it as an evil, not just because it will be based on market prices, which are evils in themselves, but because, like Plato, it is seen as the engine of "unnecessary desires," which stimulate overconsumption and so the Rape of the Planet -- not something that came from Marx himself, of course, who thought that Capitalism inhibited consumption.
The other problem with blaming the boycott is that the United States is the only major country boycotting Cuba. If Americans want Cuban cigars, all they have to do is drive to Canada or Mexico.
The United States has a very large economy, 31% of world GDP, but that leaves 69% of the world economy, including Europe and Japan, to help out Cuba. It doesn't help for one simple reason: Cuba is a Communist country. There is no private property and most productive economic acitivities are illegal. Since leftist opinion still doesn't understand what was wrong with Communism, it still can't accept that Cuba's problems are self-inflicted, or Fidel-inflicted.
Modern leftists hold to a sort of Cargo Cult notion of economics, that wealth consists of "resources," which need to be divided up in equal shares for all (or not divided up at all, since they shouldn't be used, since this results in the Rape of the Planet).
| Viceroys of New Spain, Nueva España | |
|---|---|
| Hernán Cortés | 1519-1524 |
| Alonso de Estrada | co-governor, 1524-1526 |
| Rodrigo de Albornoz | co-governor, 1524-1526 |
| Alonso de Zuazo | co-governor, 1524-1526 |
| Luis Ponce de León | 1526 |
| Marcos de Aguilar | 1526-1527 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Nuño de Guzmán | 1528-1530 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal | 1530-1535 |
| Antonio de Mendoza | Viceroy, 1535-1550 |
| Luis de Velasco y Alarcón | 1550-1564 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under the licenciate Francisco de Ceynos | 1564-1566 |
| Gastón de Peralta, Marquis of Falces and of Peralta, Count of Santisteban de Larín | 1566-1567 |
| Luis Carrillo and Alonso Muñoz | interim, 1567-1568 |
| Martín Enríquez de Almansa | 1568-1580 |
| Lorenzo Suárez de Mendoza, Count of La Coruña | 1580-1583 |
| Pedro Moya de Contreras | interim, 1584-1585 |
| Álvaro Manrique de Zúñiga, Marquis of Villamanrique | 1585-1590 |
| Luis de Velasco y de Castilla | 1590-1595, 1607-1611 |
| Gaspar de Zúñiga y Acevedo, Count of Monterrey, Señor of Viedma and of Ulloa | 1595-1603 |
| Juan Manuel de Mendoza y Luna, Marquis of Montes Claros | 1603-1607 |
| Francisco García Guerra | interim, 1611-1612 |
| Diego Fernández de Córdoba y Melgarejo de las Roelas, Marquis of Guadalcázar | 1612-1621 |
| Diego Pimentel y Enríquez de Guzmán | 1621-1624 |
| Rodrigo Pacheco y Osorio, Marquis of Cerralbo | 1624-1635 |
| Lope Díez de Aux y Armendáriz, Marquis of Cadereyta | 1635-1640 |
| Diego López Pacheco Cabrera y Bobadilla, Grande de España | 1640-1642 |
| Juan de Palafox y Mendoza | interim, 1642 |
| García Sarmiento de Sotomayor y Enríquez de Luna, Count of Salvatierra | 1642-1648 |
| Marcos Torres y Rueda | interim, 1648-1649 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Matías de Peralta | 1649-1650 |
| Luis Enríquez de Guzmán, Count of Alba de Liste and of Villaflor | 1650-1653 |
| Francisco Fernández de la Cueva y Enríquez, Duke of Alburquerque | 1653-1660, 1702-1711 |
| Juan de la Cerda de la Lama y de la Cueva de Leiva, Marquis of Ladrada | 1660-1664 |
| Diego Osorio de Escobar y Lamas | interim, 1664 |
| Antonio Sebastián de Toledo Molina y Salazar, Marquis of Mancera | 1664-1673 |
| Pedro Nuño Colón de Portugal, Duke of Veragua | 1673 |
| Payo Enríquez de Rivera | interim, 1673-1680 |
| Tomás Antonio de la Cerda y Aragón, Count of Paredes, Marquis of La Laguna | 1680-1686 |
| Melchor Portocarrero y Lasso de la Vega, Count of Monclova | 1686-1688 |
| Gaspar de la Cerda Sandoval Silva y Mendoza, Count of Galve | 1688-1696 |
| Juan de Ortega y Montañés | interim, 1696 |
| José Sarmiento y Valladares | 1696-1701 |
| Fernando de Láncaster Noroña y Silva, Duke of Linares | 1711-1716 |
| Baltasar de Zúñiga y Guzmán, Duke of Arión | 1716-1722 |
| Juan de Acuña y Bejarano, Marquis of Casa Fuerte | 1722-1734 |
| Juan Antonio de Vizarrón y Eguiarrieta | interim, 1734-1740 |
| Pedro de Castro Figueroa y Salazar, Duke of the Conquista | 1740-1741 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Pedro Malo de Villavicencio | 1741-1742 |
| Pedro Cebrián y Agustín, Count of Fuenclara | 1742-1746 |
| Juan Francisco de Güemes y Horcasitas Gordón Sáenz de Villamolinedo | 1746-1755 |
| Agustín de Ahumada y Villalón, Marquis of las Amarillas | 1755-1760 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Francisco Cagigal de la Vega | 1760 |
| Joaquín de Monserrat y Ciurana, Marquis of Cruïlles | 1760-1766 |
| Carlos Francisco de Croix, Marquis of Croix | 1766-1771 |
| Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa | 1771-1779 |
| Martín Díaz de Mayorga | interim, 1779-1783 |
| Matías de Gálvez | interim, then full, 1783-1784 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Eusebio Beleño | 1784-1785 |
| Bernardo de Gálvez, Clunt of Gálvez | 1785-1786 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Eusebio beleño | 1786-1787 |
| Alonso Núñez de Haro y Peralta | interim, 1787 |
| Manuel Antonio Flórez Martínez de Angulo Maldonado y Bodquín | 1787-1789 |
| Juan Vicente Güemes Pacheco de Padilla y Horcasitas, Count of Revilladiego | 1789-1794 |
| Miguel de la Grúa Talamanca, Marquis of Branciforte | 1794-1798 |
| Miguel José de Azana | 1798-1800 |
| Félix Berenguer de Marquina y Fitz-Gerald | 1800-1803 |
| José Joaquín Vicente de Iturrigaray | 1803-1808 |
| Pedro de Garibay | interim, 1808-1809 |
| Francisco Javier Lizana y Beaumont | 1809-1810 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under the licenciate Pedro Catani | 1810 |
| Francisco Javier Venegas de Saavedra | 1810-1813 |
| Félix María Calleja del Rey | 1813-1816 |
| Juan José Ruiz de Apodaca | 1816-1821 |
| Pedro Francisco Novella | interim, 1821 |
| Juan O'Donojú y O'Rian | 1821 |
| Independence of Mexico, 1821 | |
| First Mexican Empire, 18211823; First Regency Council, 1821-1822; Second Regency Council, 1822 |
|
| Augustin I | Emperor, 1822-1823 |
| Provisional Government 18231824; First Republic, 1823-1853 | |
| Guadalupe Victoria | President, 1824-1829 |
| Vicente Guerrero | 1829 |
| Josι Marνa Bocanegra | 1829 |
| Pedro Vιlez | 1829 |
| Anastasio Bustamante | 1830-1832 |
| Melchor Mϊzquiz | 1832 |
| Manuel Gσmez Pedraza | 1832-1833 |
| Valentνn Gσmez Farνas | rotating, 1833-1834 |
| Antonio Lσpez de Santa Anna | rotating, 1833-1835 |
| Texas War of Independence, 1835-1836 | |
| Miguel Barragαn | 1835-1836 |
| Josι Justo Corro | 1836-1837 |
| Anastasio Bustamante | 1837-1839 |
| Nicolαs Bravo | 1839 |
| Anastasio Bustamante | 1839-1841 |
| Francisco Javier Echeverrνa | 1841 |
| Antonio Lσpez de Santa Anna | 1841-1842 |
| Nicolαs Bravo | 1842-1843 |
| Antonio Lσpez de Santa Anna | 1843 |
| Valentνn Canalizo | 1843-1844 |
| Antonio Lσpez de Santa Anna | 1844 |
| Josι Joaquνn de Herrera | 1844 |
| Valentνn Canalizo | 1844 |
| Josι Joaquνn de Herrera | 1844-1845 |
| Mariano Paredes | 1845-1846 |
| Nicolαs Bravo | 1846 |
| Josι Mariano Salas | 1846 |
| Valentνn Gσmez Farνas | 1846-1847 |
| Mexican-American War, 1846-1848 | |
| Antonio Lσpez de Santa Anna | 1847 |
| Pedro Marνa de Anaya | 1847 |
| Antonio Lσpez de Santa Anna | 1847 |
| Manuel de la Peρa y Peρa | 1847 |
| Pedro Marνa de Anaya | 1847-1848 |
| Manuel de la Peρa y Peρa | 1948 |
| Josι Joaquνn de Herrera | 1848-1851 |
| Mariano Arista | 1851-1853 |
| Juan Bautista Ceballos | 1853 |
| Manuel Marνa Lombardini | 1853 |
| Antonio Lσpez de Santa Anna | 1853-1855 |
| Martνn Carrera | 1855 |
| Rσmulo Dνaz de la Vega | 1855 |
| Juan Αlvarez | 1855 |
| Ignacio Comonfort | 1855-1857 |
| Benito Juαrez | 1857-1863 |
| First Civil War, 1858-1861; Second Mexican Empire, 18631867 | |
| Maximilian | Emperor, 1864-1867 |
| Second Republic, 1867-1916 | |
| Benito Juαrez | 1867-1872 |
| Sebastiαn Lerdo de Tejada | 1872-1876 |
| Josι Marνa Iglesias | 1876 |
| Porfirio Dνaz | 1876 |
| Juan Nepomuceno Mιndez | 1876-1877 |
| Porfirio Dνaz | 1877-1880 |
| Manuel Gonzαlez Flores | 1880-1884 |
| Porfirio Dνaz | 1884-1911 |
| Second Civil War, 1911-1917 | |
| Francisco Leσn de la Barra | 1911 |
| Francisco I. Madero | 1911-1913 |
| Pedro Lascurαin | 1913 |
| Victoriano Huerta | 1913-1914 |
| Francisco S. Carvajal | 1914 |
| Third Republic, 1916-present | |
| Venustiano Carranza | 1914-1920 |
| Pancho Villa, raids Columbus, New Mexico; U.S. invasion of Mexico, 1916-1917 | |
| Adolfo de la Huerta | 1920 |
| Αlvaro Obregσn | 1920-1924 |
| Plutarco Elνas Calles | 1924-1928 |
| Emilio Portes Gil | 1928-1930 |
| Pascual Ortiz Rubio | 1930-1932 |
| Abelardo L. Rodrνguez | 1932-1934 |
| Lαzaro Cαrdenas del Rνo | 1934-1940 |
| Manuel Αvila Camacho | 1940-1946 |
| Miguel Alemαn Valdιs | 1946-1952 |
| Adolfo Ruiz Cortines | 1952-1958 |
| Adolfo Lσpez Mateos | 1958-1964 |
| Gustavo Dνaz Ordaz | 1964-1970 |
| Luis Echeverrνa | 1970-1976 |
| Josι Lσpez Portillo | 1976-1982 |
| Miguel de la Madrid | 1982-1988 |
| Carlos Salinas de Gortari | 1988-1994 |
| Ernesto Zedillo | 1994-2000 |
| Vicente Fox | 2000-2006 |
| Felipe Calderσn | 2006-2012 |
| Enrique Peρa Nieto | 2012-2018 |
| Andrιs Manuel Lσpez Obrador | 2018-present |
What emerges from all this confusion is simply the conviction that Castro must be a good guy and Cuba's poverty has got to be someone else's fault -- unless, of course, it is good in itself. The best of both worlds then would be to embrace both, that poverty is good and that it is the fault of the United States.
Unfortunately for fans of Castro, they may have helped elect George W. Bush President of the United States. In 1999 little Elián González, after his mother died at sea, fleeing Cuba, was brought ashore and placed with his relatives in Florida. However, in 2000, he was seized by Federal agents and sent back to his father in Cuba -- actually, of course, to slavery and brainwashing.
Cuban-Americans in Florida, a generation of refugees from Cuba, were (like any sensible people), outraged that the Clinton Administration and Attorney General Janet Reno would do something like that. In the close Presidential election of 2000, when the vote in Florida decided the outcome, it is doubtful that Democrat Al Gore received many Cuban votes.
Janet Reno then tried running for Governor of Florida and was easily defeated by George Bush's brother Jeb. George Bush carried Florida again in 2004 without difficulty. Those who have ever since bewailed Gore's loss of Florida in 2000 should congratulate themselves -- and they may just have Elián González to thank for it.
After the 2014 Congressional elections (when it would no longer hurt Democrats running for Congress), Barack Obama, proceeded to normalize U.S. relations with Cuba. This meant legitimizing the Castro regime, which has certainly been the heartfelt desire of the Left for years. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry justified this by saying that now American technology and aid can connect all Cubans to the Internet. They overlooked the problem that connecting to the Internet would land Cubans in jail.
The problem is not lack of technology, but lack of freedom. Since Obama and Kerry really cannot be ignorant of this, their whole pitch is a tissue of lies; and their whole initiative is exposed as no more than a payoff to their friends on the Left.
Indeed, this now exposes the real program of the Democratic Party as little more than to turn the United States into the equivalent of Cuba, i.e. an impoverished, totalitarian police state. Everything they do is directed to that end; and now they can openly pal around with the Castros, with Pope Francis joining in, to celebrate their victories over freedom, democracy, and capitalism.
New Spain begins with the Conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1519-1521. It is made a Viceroyalty in 1535, and so was promoted in status beyond the earlier Spanish outposts of Hispañola and Cuba.
The Audiencia (or Audenica) was a governing court that consisted of judges, prosecutor, and other officials, under the Viceroy, a Captain General, or a President. Where "Government by the Audiencia" is indicated, it is under a President who is not a formally appointed Viceroy or governor. Government by the Audiencia in this way, or by acting or interim Viceroys is indicated where it occurs.
The racial hierarchy in Spanish America is noteworthy. At the top are European born Spaniards, the "peninsulars," gachupines (now generally used derogatorily). Next come pure blooded Spaniards who nevertheless have been born in America. These are the criollos. This can be translated "Creoles"; but that is a little bit misleading. Creoles in French colonies could be of mixed blood, but in Spanish America those would be mestizos, not criollos. Mestizos were then a major cut in social status below both the peninsulas and criollos -- although intermarriage was approved in 1514, the rights of mestizos were officially curtailed in 1549 and 1576. Below them all, of course, were pure Indians and African slaves. Mixed marriages with Africans produced mulatos (from mulo, "mule"), a word simply borrowed into English with the same sense ("mulattoes"). Runaway slaves became cimarrones.
New Spain included all Spanish America north of Panama, but it broke up when Mexico became independent. That began with the revolt of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810. Independence was achieved by Augustín de Itúrbide in 1821. Itúrbide ruled as Emperor for a couple of years and then was overthrown. A Republic was declared in 1824, although its history would be marked by several episodes of dictatorship.
At independence, the population of New Spain was 1,230,000 peninsulars and creoles, 1,860,000 mestizos, and 3,700,00 Indians.
Mexico, with one of the wealthiest and largest economies in Latin American, with reasonable (but not great) growth and economic freedom, nevertheless must endure comparisons, with only 25% of income purchasing power parity, with its gigantic neighbor, the United States. Those benefiting the least from Mexico's economy often cross the border, illegally, into the United States. While many political interests in the United States favor this immigration, rendering the major parties both unable to really do anything about it, either to legalize or prevent it, a political preference for legality is rarely stated in the proper terms of free trade and free immigration.
Instead the dynamic created is a grave danger to American politics. This is true for at least three reasons: (1) the Democratic Party wishes to maintain or legalize the illegal immigration to curry favor with a Hispanic ethnic constituency both to inflate the population of already Democratic electoral districts, giving them greater representation for smaller numbers of actual voters, or to actually steal elections through fraudulently registering illegal voters. The election laws are now loose enough that this is quite possible, and may have just occurred on a large scale in the election of the Governor of the State of Washington in 2004.
Since Democratic policies are statist and socialist, ideas otherwise being discredited in American politics, this is all a dangerous tendency. (2) Hispanic immigrants have often been politicized in their own homelands, whether in Mexico or Central America, with leftist and communist indoctrination (Cubans, of course, are immune to this).
| Viceroys of Perú | |
|---|---|
| Francisco Pizarro | governor and captain general of Nueva Castilla, 1533-1541 |
| Diego de Almagro "el mozo" | self-proclaimed governor, 1541-1542 |
| Cristóbal Vaca de Castro | governor of Perú, 1542-1544 |
| Blasco Núñez de Vela | Viceroy, 1544-1546 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Diego Cepeda | 1544 |
| Gonzalo Pizarro | nominated, 1544-1548 |
| Pedro de la Gasca | President, nominated, 1546-1550 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1550-1551 |
| Antonio de Mendoza | 1551-1552 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1552-1556 |
| Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza y Fernández de Bobadilla, Marquis of Cañete | 1556-1561 |
| Diego López de Zúñiga y Velasco, Count of Nieva | 1561-1564 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1564 |
| Lope García de Castro | interim, 1564-1569 |
| Francisco de Toledo | 1569-1581 |
| Martín Enríquez de Almansa | 1581-1583 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1583-1585 |
| Fernando Torres Portugal y Mesía, Count of Villa don Pardo | 1585-1590 |
| Andrés García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, Marquis of Cañete | 1590-1596 |
| Luis de Velasco | 1596-1604 |
| Gaspar de Zúñiga Acevedo y Fonseca, Count of Monterrey | 1604-1606 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1606-1607 |
| Juan Manuel de Mendoza y Luna, Marquis of Montes Claros | 1607-1615 |
| Francisco de Borja y Aragón, Count of Mayalde y de Ficalho | 1615-1621 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Juan Jiménez de Montalvo | 1621-1622 |
| Diego Fern ndez de Córdoba y Melgarejo de las Roelas, Marquis of Guadalcázar | 1622-1629 |
| Luis Fernández de Cabrera Bobadilla de la Cerda, Count of Chinchón | 1629-1639 |
| Pedro de Toledo y Leyva, Marquis of Mancera | 1639-1648 |
| García Sarmiento de Sotomayor y Enríquez de Luna, Count of Salvatierra | 1648-1655 |
| Luis Enríquez de Guzmán, Count of Alba de Liste, Grande de España | 1655-1661 |
| Diego de Benavides y de la Cueva, Count of Santiesteban del Puerto | 1661-1666 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Bernardo Iturrizarra | 1666-1667 |
| Pedro Antonio Fernández de Castro Andrade y Portugal, Duke of Taurizano | 1667-1672 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1672-1674 |
| Baltasar de la Cueva y Enríquez | 1674-1678 |
| Melchor de Liñán y Cisneros | interim, 1678-1681 |
| Melchor de Navarra y Rocafull, Duke of la Palata | 1681-1689 |
| Melchor Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, Count of la Monclova | 1689-1705 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1705-1707 |
| Manuel de Sentmenat-Oms de Santa Pau, Marquis of Castell-Dos-Rius | 1707-1710 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1710 |
| Diego Ladrón de Guevara | interim, 1710-1716 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1716 |
| Diego Morcillo y Rubio de Auñón | interim, 1716; 1720-1724 |
| Carmine Nicola Caracciolo, Prince of Santo Buono | 1716-1720 |
| José de Armendáriz, Marquis of Castelfuerte | 1724-1736 |
| José Antonio de Mendoza Caamaño y Sotomayor, Marquis of Villagarcía | 1736-1745 |
| José Antonio Manso de Velasco y Sánchez Samaniego, Count of Superunda | 1745-1761 |
| Felipe Manuel Cayetano Amat y Junyent Planella y Vergós | 1761-1776 |
| Manuel de Guiror y Portal de Huarte, Count of Guiror | 1776-1780 |
| Agustín de Jáuregui y Aldecoa | interim, 1780-1784 |
| Francisco Teodoro de Croix, Count of Croix | 1784-1790 |
| Francisco Gil de Taboada Lemos y Villamarín | 1790-1796 |
| Ambrosio O'Higgins, Marquis of Osorno | 1796-1801 |
| Gabriel de Avilés y del Fierro, Marquis of Avilés | 1801-1806 |
| José Fernando de Abascal y Sousa, Marquis of la Concordia | 1806-1816 |
| Joaquín de la Pezuela Griñán y Sánchez Muñoz de Velasco, Marquis of Viluma | 1816-1821 |
| José de la Serna y Martínez de Hinojosa | 1821-1824 |
| Independence of Chile, 1818; Independence of Peru, 1820-1824 | |
| the Presidents and dictators of Peru should continue here, but there are just too many of them, with many overthrown in less than a year. What it was like can be seen in the lists for Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina. | |
Why anyone would flee the poverty and corruption of Mexico and then want to turn their refuge into Mexico is perplexing, but then the people involved in such a movement exhibit irrationality to high degree -- not to mention a lunatic fringe leftism that passes over into the kind of fascism and racism that, as leftists, they love to accuse their opponents (i.e. mainstream American politicians and citizens) of practicing. In the contemporary world, when the lunatic fringe left has allied itself with Islamic terrorism, this is a dangerous development indeed. Although their rhetoric is emerging in Democratic Party politics, what such people and their allies really want is violence, war, and slaughter, i.e. Marxist revolution -- nothing short of that, indeed, is liable to detach the Southwest from the United States. There is little that is honest or revealing said about this in American politics or the news media.
These lists of Viceroys, with some other governors of Spanish America, were sent to me by Daniel Ruiz-Castillo Galán. I have reproduced the Viceroys of the four Viceroyalties and the Governors of Cuba (since they start early and last all the way to 1898). Mr. Ruiz-Castillo Galán lists his sources as Crónica de América, Guillem Burrel y Floriá (director) [Plaza & Janés Editores, SA (1990), Barcelona, pp. 702-717] and Los virreyes españoles en América; Relación de virreinatos y biografía de los virreyes españoles en América, José Montoro [Editorial Mitre, SA (?), Barcelona]. I have left out some detail from Mr. Ruiz-Castillo Galán's information, like Viceroys who declined the office or died before taking it up.
Spanish Peru was established with the Conquest of the Incas by Francisco Pizarro. It initially consisted of all Spanish territories in South America, except for parts of Venezuela, which belonged to New Spain. Peru became a Viceroyalty (the second) in 1543. New Granada (1739) and the Río de la Plata (1776) were later detached from it.
Independence began when José de San Martín defeated the Spanish at the battle of Chacabuco in 1817. Chile then became independent under Bernardo O'Higgins in 1818. San Martín captured Lima in 1821. The Viceroy was finally defeated by Antonio José de Sucre at the battle of Ayacucho in 1824.
At independence, the population of Peru and Chile consisted of 465,000 persons of European blood (peninsulars and creoles), 853,000 mestizos, and 1,030,000 Indians.
The Economist of December 14th-20th 2002 reported that the economy of Peru had grown by 7.3% from a year earlier, with 1.5% inflation. This was the best economic performance in Latin America. If all that Peru did was follow the advice of their brilliant home grown economist, Hernando de Soto (cf. The Other Path, the Economic Answer to Terrorism, Basic Books, 1989), the future would have been secure. Of course, whether such advice would continue to be followed depended on other political factors. Chile had been on a similar track, but it only showed 1.8% growth, with 3.0% inflation, a performance not markedly superior to several other Latin American countries.
In 2003, The Economist of July 26th-August 1st now reports Peru with only 1.8% growth from a year ago, and 2.2% inflation. Things thus seem to have begun to go wrong, with even a revival of the Maoist terrorists of the Sendaro Luminoso, the "Shining Path." I await Professor de Soto's report on what the problems have been. Meanwhile, Chile is reported to have 3.8% growth and 3.6% inflation, a more promising performance.
| Viceroys of New Granada, Nueva Granada | |
|---|---|
| Government by the Audiencia | 1550-1564 |
| Antonio Díaz Venero de Leiva | captain general, 1564-1574 |
| Gedeón de Hinojosa | 1574 |
| Francisco Briceño | 1574-1575 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1575-1577 |
| Lope Díez Aux de Armendáriz | 1578-1580 |
| Juan Bautista Monzón | interim? 1580-1582 |
| Juan Prieto de Orellana | 1582-1585 |
| Guillén Chaparro | interim? 1585-1590 |
| Antonio González | 1590-1597 |
| Francisco de Sande | 1597-1602 |
| Government by the Audiencia, under Nuño Núñez de Villavicencio | 1603-1605 |
| Juan de Borja | 1605-1628 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1628-1630 |
| Sancho Girón, Marquis of Sofraga | 1630-1637 |
| Martín de Saavedra y Guzmán | 1637-1644 |
| Juan Fernández de Córdoba y Coalla, Marquis of Miranda de Auta | 1645-1653 |
| Dionisio Pérez Manrique, Marquis of Santiago | 1654-1659, 1660-1662 |
| Juan Cornejo | 1659-1660 |
| Diego Egües Beaumont | 1662-1664 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1664-1666 |
| Diego del Corro y Carrascal | 1666-1667 |
| Diego de Villalba y Toledo | 1667-1671 |
| Melchor de Liñán y Cisneros | interim? 1671-1674 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1674-1678 |
| Francisco del Castillo y Concha | 1678-1685 |
| Sebastián de Velasco | 1685-1686 |
| Giláde Cabrera y Dávalos | 1686-1703 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1703-1708 |
| Diego de Córdoba y Lasso de la Vega | 1708-1711 |
| Francisco Cossío y Otero | interim? 1711 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1711-1713 |
| Francisco de Meneses de Saravia y Bravo | 1713-1715 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1715-1717 |
| Nicolás Infante de Venegas | interim? 1717 |
| Francisco del Rincón | interim? 1717-1718 |
| Antonio de la Pedroza y Guerrero | 1718-1719 |
| Jorge de Villalonga | Viceroy, 1719-1723, Governor, 1723-1724 |
| Antonio Manso y Maldonado | 1724-1731 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1731-1733 |
| Rafael de Eslava | 1733-1737 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1737-1738 |
| Antonio González Manrique | 1738 |
| Government by the Audiencia | 1738-1739 |
| Francisco Gonz lez Manrique | 1739-1740 |
| Sebastián de Eslava Alzaga Berrio y Eguiarreta | Viceroy, 1740-1749 |
| Juan Alfonso Pizarro, Marquis of Villar | 1749-1753 |
| José Manuel de Solís y Folch de Cardona | 1753-1761 |
| Pedro Messía de la Cerda, Marquis of la Vega de Armijo | 1761-1772 |
| Manuel de Guirior y Portal de Huarte | 1772-1775 |
| Manuel Antonio Flórez Martínez de Angulo Maldonado y Bodquín | 1776-1782 |
| Juan de Torresar y Díaz Pimienta | interim, 1782 |
| Juan Francisco Gutiérrez de Piñeres | interim, military and the Audiencia, 1782 |
| Antonio Caballero y Góngora | interim, then confirmed, 1782-1789 |
| Francisco Gil de Taboada Lemos y Villamarín | 1789 |
| José de Ezpeleta y Galdeano Dicastrillo y Prado, Señor de Beire | 1789-1797 |
| Pedro de Mendinueta y Muzquiz | 1797-1803 |
| Antonio Amar y Borbón Arguedas y Vallejo de Santa Cruz | 1803-1810 |
| United Provinces of New Granada, 1810-1816 | |
| Benito Pérez de Valdelomar | capital in Panama, 1810-1812 |
| Francisco Montalvo | capitan general, in Santa Marta and Cartagena, 1812-1818 |
| Juan de Sámano | 1818-1819 |
| Juan de la Cruz Mourgeón | capitan general, 1820-1822 |
| Independence of Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador as Gran Columbia, 1819, 1823 | |
| Simσn Bolνvar | 1813-1819, President, 1819-1930 |
| Domingo Caycedo | 1830, 1831 |
| Joaquνn Mosquera | 1830, 1831 |
| Rafael Urdaneta | 1830-1831 |
| Republic of Venezuela, 1811, 1830 | |
| Josι Antonio Pαez | 1830-1835 |
| Andrιs Narvarte | 1835 |
| Josι Marνa Vargas | 1835 |
| Josι Marνa Carreρo | 1835 |
| Josι Marνa Vargas | 1835-1836 |
| Andrιs Narvarte | 1836-1837 |
| Josι Marνa Carreρo | 1837 |
| Carlos Soublette | 1837-1839 |
| Josι Antonio Pαez | 1839-1843 |
| Carlos Soublette | 1843-1847 |
| Josι Tadeo Monagas | 1847-1851 |
| Josι Gregorio Monagas | 1851-1855 |
| Josι Tadeo Monagas | 1855-1858 |
| Pedro Gual Escandσn | 1858 |
| Juliαn Castro | 1858-1859 |
| Pedro Gual Escandσn | 1859 |
| Manuel Felipe de Tovar | 1859-1861 |
| Pedro Gual Escandσn | 1861 |
| Josι Antonio Pαez | 1861-1863 |
| Juan Crisσstomo Falcσn | 1863-1868 |
| Manuel Ezequiel Bruzual | 1868 |
| Guillermo Tell Villegas | 1868-1869 |
| Josι Ruperto Monagas | 1869-1870 |
| Guillermo Tell Villegas | 1870 |
| Antonio Guzmαn Blanco | 1870-1877 |
| Francisco Linares Alcαntara | 1877-1878 |
| Josι Gregorio Valera | 1878-1879 |
| Antonio Guzmαn Blanco | 1879-1884 |
| Joaquνn Sinforiano de Jesϊs Crespo | 1884-1886 |
| Antonio Guzmαn Blanco | 1886-1887 |
| Hermσgenes Lσpez | 1887-1888 |
| Juan Pablo Rojas Paϊl | 1888-1890 |
| Raimundo Andueza Palacio | 1890-1892 |
| Guillermo Tell Villegas | 1892 |
| Guillermo Tell Villegas Pulido | 1892 |
| Joaquνn Sinforiano de Jesϊs Crespo | 1892-1898 |
| Ignacio Andrade | 1898-1899 |
| Cipriano Castro Ruiz | 1899-1908 |
| Juan Vicente Gσmez | 1908-1913 |
| Josι Gil Fortoul | 1913-1914 |
| Victorino Mαrquez Bustillos | 1914-1922 |
| Juan Vicente Gσmez | 1922-1929 |
| Juan Bautista Pιrez | 1929-1934 |
| Juan Vicente Gσmez | 1931-1935 |
| Eleazar Lσpez Contreras | 1935-1941 |
| Isaνas Medina Angarita | 1941-1945 |
| Rσmulo Ernesto Betancourt Bello | 1945-1948 |
| Rσmulo Gallegos Freire | 1948 |
| Carlos Delgado Chalbaud | 1948-1950 |
| Germαn Suαrez Flamerich | 1950-1952 |
| Marcos Pιrez Jimιnez | 1952-1958 |
| Wolfgang Larrazαbal | 1958 |
| Edgar Sanabria | 1958-1959 |
| Rσmulo Ernesto Betancourt Bello | 1959-1964 |
| Raϊl Leoni Otero | 1964-1969 |
| Rafael Caldera Rodrνguez | 1969-1974 |
| Carlos Andrιs Pιrez Rodrνguez | 1974-1979 |
| Luis Herrera Campins | 1979-1984 |
| Jaime Lusinchi | 1984-1989 |
| Carlos Andrιs Pιrez Rodrνguez | 1989-1993 |
| Octavio Lepage Barreto | 1993 |
| Ramσn Josι Velαsquez | 1993-1994 |
| Rafael Caldera Rodrνguez | 1994-1999 |
| 1999-2013 | |
| Nicolαs Maduro | 2013-present |
New Granda, previously part of Peru, was permanently made a Viceroyalty, the third, in 1740, consisting of what now are Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador. Simón Bolívar ended Spanish rule in 1823, and a Republic of Gran Colombia was established. Venezuela and Ecuador separated in 1830. Panama became independent in 1903 with the help of the United States, and at the price of ceding the Canal Zone for the United States to build and run the Panama Canal, which was opened in 1914.
The population at independence of Colombia and Venezuela was 642,000 peninsulars and creoles, 1,256,000 mestizos, and 720,000 Indians.
The Economist of December 14th-20th 2002 reported that the economy of Venezuela had shrunk by 5.5% from a year earlier, with 30.7% inflation. This was pretty bad, and was the characteristic effect of the actions of the Castroite President Hugo Chávez. At the time, as it happened, the opposition, which had tried overthrowing Chávez and, in lieu of a coup, had been calling for early elections, had been trying to maintain a general strike with constant demonstrations. It remained to be seen how this was all going to play out. In 2003, The Economist of July 26th-August 1st, reported that the Venezuelan economy shrank by 29% from the previous year, with 34.2% inflation. Chávez has ridden out the general strike and has begun to assassinate opponents. A Castroite Venezuela will have more money, from oil revenues, to favor the politically reliable than Cuba does; but Chávez is also apparently appointing politically reliable people to run the oil industry, and they don't know what they are doing. Thus, oil production is down, and since Chávez is favoring Cuba with some of the production, the pie is going to get smaller and smaller for the impoverished Venezuelans who foolishly provide Chávez with such mass support as he commands. Where things are headed is indicated by the waves of worshipful political pilgrims from the diehard anti-globalization Left who are beginning to journey thither (making Venezuela the "new Nicaragua"). Perhaps South Americans should be warned that such people worship the virtuous poverty ("ecotopia") achieved by Castro in Cuba. Do Venezuelans really want prostitution to be one of their principal cash industries, as in Cuba?
By 2005, the Venezuelan economy has rebounded, but inflation remains very high and Chávez's love affair with Castro continues. This particular tragedy thus may take some time yet to resolve itself.
| Viceroys of the Río de la Plata | |
|---|---|
| Pedro de Mendoza | captain general, 1534-1537 |
| Juan de Ayolas | 1537-1539 |
| Domingo Martínez de Irala | 1539-1541, 1544-1556 |
| Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca | 1541-1544 |
| Gonzalo de Mendoza | 1556-1558 |
| Francisco Ortiz de Vergara | 1558-1569 |
| Juan Ortiz de Zárate | 1569-1576 |
| Juan de Garay | Deputy, 1576-1587? |
| Juan Torres de Vera y Aragón | 1577-1591, effective from 1587 |
| Hernando Arias de Saavedra | 1601-1609, 1614-1618 |
| Diego de Góngora | 1618-1623 |
| Francisco de Céspedes | 1623-1631 |
| Pedro Esteban Dávila | 1631-1637 |
| Mendo de la Cueva y Benavídez | 1637-1641 |
| Andrés de Sandoval | interim, 1641 |
| Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera | 1641-1645 |
| Jacinto Lariz | 1645-1653 |
| Pedro Baigorri Ruiz | 1653-1660 |
| Alonso Mercado y Villacorta | 1660-1663 |
| Juan Martínez de Salazar | 1663-1674 |
| Andrés de Robles | 1674-1678 |
| José de Garro | 1678-1682 |
| José de Herrera y Sotomayor | 1682-1691 |
| Agustín de Robles | 1691-1698 |
| Manuel de Prado y Maldonado | 1698-1701 |
| Antonio Juan de Valdés e Inclán | 1701-1707 |
| Manuel de Velasco y Tejada | 1708 |
| Juan José de Mutiloa | interim? |
| Alonso de Arce y Soria | 1714 |
| José Bermúdez de Castro | interim, 1714-1715 |
| Baltasar García Ros | 1715-1717 |
| Bruno de Zavala | 1717-1734 |
| Miguel de Salcedo y Sierraalta | 1734-1742 |
| Domingo Ortiz de Rozas | 1742-1745 |
| José de Andonaegui | 1745-1756 |
| Pedro Antonio de Ceballos Cortés y Calderón | 1756-1766, Viceroy, 1777-1778 |
| Francisco de Paula Bucarelli y Ursúa | 1766-1770 |
| Juan José de Vértiz y Salcedo | 1770-1777, Viceroy, 1778-1784 |
| Nicol s del Campo Maestre Cuesta de Saavedra, Marquis of Loreto | 1784-1789 |
| Nicolás Antonio de Arredondo | 1789-1795 |
| Pedro Melo de Portugal y Villena | 1795-1797 |
| Antonio Olaguer y Feliú | interim, 1797-1799 |
| Gabriel de Avilés y Fierro, Marquis of Avilés | 1799-1801 |
| Joaquín del Pino y Rozas | 1801-1805 |
| Rafael de Sobremonte | intermim, then confirmed, 1805-1807 |
| Santiago de Liniers y de Bremond | interim, then cponfirmed, 1807-1809 |
| Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros | 1809-1810 |
| Francisco Javier de Elío y Olóndriz | 1811 |
| Gaspar Vigodet | capitan general, 1811-1814 |
| Independence of United Provinces, 1810-1816; separation from Argentina of Paraguay, 1814, Bolivia, 1825, and Uruguay, 1828 | |
| Republic of Argentina | |
| Cornelio Saavedra | Junta President, 1810-1811 |
| Domingo Matheu | 1811 |
| First Triumvirate, 1811-1812; Second Triumvirate, 1812-1814 | |
| Gervasio Antonio de Posadas | Director, 1814-1815 |
| Carlos Marνa de Alvear | 1815 |
| Josι Rondeau | Appointed, 1815 |
| Ignacio Αlvarez Thomas | Acting, 1815-1816 |
| Antonio Gonzαlez de Balcarce | Interim, 1816 |
| Juan Martνn de Pueyrredσn | 1816-1819 |
| Josι Rondeau | 1818-1820 |
| Juan Pedro Aguirre | 1820 |
| No Central Government, 1820-1826 | |
| Bernardino Rivadavia | President, 1826-1827 |
| Vicente Lσpez y Planes | 1827 |
| Manuel Dorrego | Governor in Buenos Aires, 1827-1828 |
| Juan Lavalle | 1828-1829 |
| Juan Josι Viamonte | 1829 |
| Juan Manuel de Rosas | 1829-1832 |
| Juan Ramσn Balcarce | 1832-1833 |
| Juan Josι Viamonte | 1833-1834 |
| Manuel Vicente Maza | 1834-1835 |
| Juan Manuel de Rosas | 1835-1852 |
| Justo Josι de Urquiza | 1852-1854, President 1854-1860 |
| Santiago Derqui | 1860-1861 |
| Juan Esteban Pedernera | 1861 |
| Bartolomι Mitre | 1861-1868 |
| Domingo Faustino Sarmiento | 1868-1874 |
| Nicolαs Avellaneda | 1874-1880 |
| Julio Argentino Roca | 1880-1886 |
| Miguel Juαrez Celman | 1886-1890 |
| Carlos Pellegrini | 1890-1892 |
| Luis Sαenz Peρa | 1892-1895 |
| Josι Evaristo Uriburu | 1895-1898 |
| Julio Argentino Roca | 1898-1904 |
| Manuel Quintana | 1904-1906 |
| Josι Figueroa Alcorta | 1906-1910 |
| Roque Sαenz Peρa | 1910-1914 |
| Victorino de la Plaza | 1914-1916 |
| Hipσlito Yrigoyen | 1916-1922 |
| Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear | 1922-1928 |
| Hipσlito Yrigoyen | 1928-1930 |
| Josι Fιlix Uriburu | 1930-1932 |
| Agustνn Pedro Justo | 1932-1938 |
| Roberto Marνa Ortiz | 1938-1942 |
| Ramσn Castillo | 1942-1943 |
| Arturo Rawson | Coup, 1943 |
| Pedro Pablo Ramνrez | Coup, 1943-1944 |
| Edelmiro Juliαn Farrell | Coup, 1944-1946 |
| Juan Domingo Perσn | 1946-1955 |
| Eduardo Lonardi | Coup, 1955 |
| Pedro Eugenio Aramburu | Coup, 1955-1958 |
| Arturo Frondizi | 1958-1962 |
| Josι Marνa Guido | 1962-1963 |
| Arturo Umberto Illia | 1963-1968 |
| Juan Carlos Onganνa | Coup, 1966-1970 |
| Roberto M. Levingston | Coup, 1970-1971 |
| Alejandro A. Lanusse | 1971-1973 |
| Hιctor Josι Cαmpora | 1973 |
| Raϊl Alberto Lastiri | 1973 |
| Juan Domingo Perσn | 1973-1974, died |
| Isabel Martνnez de Perσn | 1974-1976 |
| Jorge Rafael Videla | Coup, 1976-1981 |
| Roberto Eduardo Viola | Junta, 1981 |
| Leopoldo Galtieri | Coup, 1981-1982 |
| Falklands War, 1982 | |
| Reynaldo Bignone | Coup, 1982-1983 |
| Raϊl Alfonsνn | 1983-1989 |
| Carlos Menem | 1989-1999 |
| Fernando de la Rϊa | 1999-2001 |
| Adolfo Rodrνguez Saα | 2001 |
| Eduardo Duhalde | 2001-2003 |
| Nιstor Kirchner | 2003-2007 |
| Cristina Fernαndez de Kirchner | 2007-2015 |
| Mauricio Macri | 2015-2019 |
| Alberto Fernαndez | 2019-2023 |
| Javier Milei | 2023-present |
Early in 2006 Chávez has made friends with Iran and has apparently turned against the Jews. There may not be a lot of Jews in Venezuela, but they are being harassed, verbally and legally. The Anti-Semitism of Islamic Fascism was already obvious, but Chávez seems to have decided that it is all of a piece with the international anti-imperialist (i.e. anti-American) movement. Meanwhile, a Chávez protégé, Evo Morales, leader of a coca growers union, has been elected President of Boliva. It is hard not to smile at his intention to protect coca, the source of cocaine, from the eradication that drug warriors desire. This will get their goat. On the other hand, his muddled leftism -- he praised Che and denounced "neo-liberalism" in his inaugural address -- may produce many years of pointless misery for Bolivia.
Thus, it is noteworthy that the impotent ideologues of American universities, who give legitimacy to this kind of thing, cause real harm in the world, however meaningless (or not, unfortunately) their rants in the United States itself.
As of 2013, Chávez managed to survive politically, at great cost to Venezuela, but the Fates have had different ideas. It then appeared that the man would die of cancer. For a while, it looked like he had beaten it, thanks to Spanish doctors flown into Cuba, but all the might of Cuban medicine has apparently availed him not. What will come of Venezuela in the aftermath was anyone's guess.
The high drama and tragedy of the Chávez regime also had its farcical moments. The Venezuelan actress, María Conchita Alonso (b.1957), was an outspoken critic of Chávez and has vainly tried to alert Americans to the program of the Democrats in taking the United States down the same socialist and fascist road. In December 2011, she encountered actor Sean Penn at Los Angeles International Airport. Penn, a faithful Red Diaper Baby, has disgraced himself with public support and friendship for Chávez. Penn's roots and preference became clear when he said that critics should not be allowed to tell "lies" about Chávez. Uncle Joe Stalin would have been proud. Alonso told Penn that he was a communist, and he responded that she was a "pig." Perhaps he was flustered and forgot that the expression is "capitalist running dog."
The chosen successor of Chávez, Nicolαs Maduro, continued to ruin the economy and steal elections. Millions have now fled the country, and those remaining have slowly starved, after eating all the pets and zoo animals in the country -- and as the government prevents humanitarian food shipments from entering the country. The murder rate is one of the highest in the world, which we expect in a regime (like San Francisco) where political crimes are more important than actual crime. But Madura has bought off the army, which has been purged and controlled with help from Cuba. Indeed, a film crew from an American Spanish language network, not in the least sympathetic to the United States in most respects, was briefly arrested by Maduro and, after returning to the States, reported that everyone around him spoke with Cuba accents -- not something that most other reporters on American television are liable to notice.
Demonstrations and sanctions against Maduro, and most nations recognizing an opposition leader (a socialist himself) as the legitimate interim-president, have failed to oust him. A brief hope that the army would depose him has now faded.
Meanwhile, we need to keep a list of the useful idiot "celebrities" who continue to support the regime. I have noted Sean Penn, one of the worst. But of equally durable disgrace is Danny Glover. When the staff was ejected from the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, some sympathizing Sandinista supporters took over, surrounded by actual Venezuelan exile protestors. Jesse Jackson took food into the embassy, claiming that the protestors wanted to "starve out" the Sandinistas. So why did they let him in? Equally shameful in support of Maduro have been Jamie Foxx, Lukas Haas, Oliver Stone, and, of course, the execrable Michael Moore. "Democratic socialist" (i.e. communist) Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders, who had previously said that the "American Dream" was more likely to be realized in Venezuela than in the United States, has pulled back on his support for Maduro, but he neither calls him a "dictator" nor supports his overthrow. The regime is officially supported by Cuba, Russia, China, Iran, and, sadly, Pope Francis -- adding to the accumulating evident of his poor judgment and twisted values. John Paul II must be rolling over in his tomb, over the company Francis now keeps.
The population at independence of the Río de la Plata was 320,000 peninsulars and creoles, 742,000 mestizos, and 1,200,000 Indians. Later, in Argentina the local Indians were virtually exterminated. With the Indians gone and a large European immigrant population, Argentina for long seemed hardly like a South American country at all, and it was widely expected to compete economically with European countries. These expectations went very bad under the dictatorship of Juan Perón (1945-1955 and 1973-1974). Fascist politics and socialist economics spelled the end of both political freedom and economic growth. Perón was overthrown in 1955, but what Argentina had lost was simply never made good. Perón's return in 1973 was a bit of desperate nostalgia. Meanwhile, the rot of leftist politics provoked responses of military dictatorship and repression even in what had hitherto been the model democracy of Uraguay. In 2002, with the Argentine economy collapsing again, many descendants of the European immigrants were beginning to plan to return to their ancestral Italy, etc.
What went wrong with the Argentine economy is of serious interest. When the Argentine currency was pegged to the dollar, this was regarded as evidence of serious liberalization and responsibility in the economy. Unfortunately, such a policy means that the country loses control over inflation and deflation, since the money supply can only be manipulated to maintain the peg, not to maintain price stablity. At the same time, no control was exercised over public spending, which requires inflationary money creation, even as the central bank must withdraw money to maintain the peg. These contradictory pressures could not be juggled indefinitely, but the response of the government simply made things worse, by prohibiting bank withdrawls and such measures as to destroy the value of savings and of any confidence that people might have had in the economic system. With a Castroite radical now as President of Venezuela, a similarly radical leftist (at least in rhetoric) in Brazil, and the pseudo- "liberalization" discredited in Argentina, it looks like we may be headed for more miserable experiments in socialism and dictatorship in South America.
The Economist of December 14th-20th 2002 reported that the Argentine economy had shrunk by 13.6% from a year earlier, with 40.5% inflation. Pretty bad. Now in 2003, however, The Economist of July 26th-August 1st, reports that the economy has grown by 5.1% from a year ago, with 10.2% inflation. This looks much better, and 5.1% growth is excellent for the area, or for anywhere. This is encouraging, but I understand that the institutional arrangements are still adverse to entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, this is better news than from the continuing train wreck in Venezuela.
As of 2013, the President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, riding the tide of anti-liberal fascism that has been plaguing even the United States, has been nationalizing companies and otherwise thumbing her nose at the European and other creditors that have been keeping the Argentine economy afloat. The economic doldrums of the American and much of the European economy, leaves Argentine, like the Southern tier of Europe (from Spain to Greece), in yet worse shape. It is a time when elites seem to have learned only stupidity from the examples of history. Certainly, Say's Law might as well be a kind of Occult Scripture, known only to some hidden ranks of unfortunately ineffective Illuminati.
The election of the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis I in 2013 was a matter of considerable interest. However, Francis seems to have absorbed and retained all the evil anti-capitalist and fascist ideas of Peronism, which he has been expressing freely, to the delight of the enemies of freedom worldwide. While Francis thinks that these ideas are for the benefit of the poor, he apparently has been paying no attention to their actual effects in Argentina. But ignoring outcomes and clinging to exploded but fanatical ideology is characteristic of the modern political Left.
In 2023 the majority of the people of Argentina seems to have finally had enough. They went way off the rails and elected a self-professed anarcho-capitalist libertarian, Javier Milei. He has not been a politician but has been a public showman for quite a while, waving an anarcho-capitalist flag, explaining that the yellow part is for gold, since such libertarians are gold bugs and don't believe in paper currency. Milei's proposal for Argentina's inflation, however, is to adopt the U.S. dollar, which I suppose may be the next best thing to gold, despite America's own inflation problem.
Milei is the first person like this ever to be elected to a significant national office, as far as I can tell, anywhere in the world. Argentina certainly needs radical therapy. Whether Milei can really deliver is a good question. He may turn out just to be a crackpot, with no idea how to run a government. Indeed, he doesn't believe in government. So we must hope he has some kind of pragmatic streak that can adapt to the circumstances that face him.
Another positive for Milei is that he is openly pro-Israel, at a time when there is a need for it, in the face of all the Neo-Nazi ideology that has exploded after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Terrorists from Gaza. All the anti-Semitism that we have seen building at Amerian univeristies for years, cultivated by the Post-Modern Left, is now exposed to the public, especially in disruptive demonstrations, vandalism, and violence. This is not surprising. When "Pro-Palestinian" Left condemns Israel as a "colonialist settler state," anyone familiar with the ideology knows that the supreme "colonialist settler state," the "Great Satan" to Israel's "Little Satan," is the United States. Anti-Zionism is a small thing besides anti-Americanism.
The Maya and the Kings of Tikal
Spanish and Mexican Governors of Texas (1691-1836)
California, Governors of California (1769-present)
Sam Houston, Presidents & Governors of Texas (1836-present)
The first time I saw a version of this astounding nonsense was in a column in the Los Angeles Times on March 29, 1992. This was one of a regular feature, a "Column Left," written by Robert W. Benson (d.2011), a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, titled "An Island on the Way to Ecotopia : On human rights, Cubas record compares well to Mexico and others":
At the time, I was not aware that there could be such utter fools at American law schools. But it is actually not at all unusual. This man could look first hand at the poverty, misery, and tyranny of Communist Cuba and see something rather wonderful. We see him praising subsistence agriculture as desirable -- I guess this means that even tobacco will not be a "cash crop for export." No more Cuban cigars.
Since Communist regimes know how to tell "useful idiot" tourists what they want to hear, we might wonder if there really is this efficient recycling of restaurant waste; and Cuba was unlikely to obtain all its electricity from windmills and "cow-dung slurries." Nobody has been able to do that, even in 2024 -- as old windmills and solar panels are beginning to wear out and become toxic waste. Benson probably knew already, and didn't need to be told, how great the Soviet medical system of Cuba is, or how widespread literacy is -- as it was already in Cuba.
Since Cuba actually obtains most of its electricity from oil fired power plants, built by the Soviet Union, Cubans have been experiencing power outages recently. In 2024, there have been blackouts in February, March, and October, with a nationwide blackout from October 18th to 22nd. These have resulted from lack of oil, since sympathic Russian and Venezuelan suppliers have their own problems, and because the aging Soviet power plants are wearing out and spare parts are no longer available.
We also must consider that Communist regimes are simply incompetent, since there is always corruption and people are hired for political reasons and not because they know what they are doing. This has crippled the oil industry in Venezuela, is causing frequently blackouts in South Africa (and, well, California), and is a dynamic that is beginning to affect American companies that have buckled under to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DIE) ideology. Thus, a corporation like Disney Studios has suffered massive losses because political considerations in hiring and in its movies have overridden competent production and oversight.
Some people I knew in Austin, Texas, in the late 1970's went on their own political tourism, like Robert W. Benson, to Cuba. When they came back, I thought that the most interesting exchange in their coversation was when one fellow mentioned finding the Red Light District in Havana. One of the women then indignantly asserted, "There is no Red Light District in Havana!" This was a clash, of course, between her pure, blind ideology and the testimony of what someone had seen first hand. In fact, Cuba (like Thailand) makes a lot of foreign currency off of sexual tourism. I doubt that Robert W. Benson would have tolerated the very thought of it either. Prostitution under Communism! Impossible!
But Robert W. Benson's folly is not just a joke. This poverty and misery is the future that the Ruling Class wants for all of us, with the roadway clearly laid out in the "Great Reset" planned by the James Bond super-villains in the "World Economic Forum" at Davos, Switzerland -- led by Nazi-diaper-baby Klaus Schwab (b.1938). "Communism," "Fascism," it doesn't make a lot of difference what we call it.
Meanwhile, if Benson thinks that "On human rights, Cubas record compares well to Mexico and others," then he obviously doesn't know the difference between a Leftist government slowly being taken over by the Drug Cartels, like Mexico, and a totalitarian police state, like Cuba. But that is the future the Ruling Class wants for us also, and Benson did live long enough to see how Hugo Chávez could introduce such a government into what had been Venezuelan democracy -- surrounded by Cuban advisors.
Robert W. Benson is gone, but the poison of his ignorance and stupidity lives, eating at the heart of America and every other democracy. "Higher Education" is already pretty much lost to it, now with the added spice of the anti-Semitism of Jihadi Terrorist sympathizers and enablers -- all called "democracy" by the Democrats.
The Marxist-Leninist Theory of History These represent the "Pillars of Hercules," the mountains that the Greeks thought of as flanking the Strait of Gibraltar (Latin Fretum Herculeum, "Herculean Strait"). The mountain on the north side was called Κάλπη, Kálpē (Latin Calpe), on the south side Ἀβύλη, Abýlē (Latin Abyla). The idea was that these were originally either adjacent or connected by a ridge, closing the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. Hercules either pushed the mountains apart or broke through the ridge, opening the Strait. The Phoenicians certainly got to the Strait before the Greeks, and the story of a hero creating the channel may be a Phoenician one, with the god Melqart as the agent.Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Possessions, Note;
Cuban Ecotopia TyrannyThere is an island in the Caribbean where at certain moments you feel that you are wandering through the pages of Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbachs novel about an environmental and egalitarian utopia. There are few cars and no smog. There are no graffiti, no commercial billboards and signs. The streets are cleaned, trash is picked up. Everything is recycled, nothing wasted: The truck that delivers a box of fruit and vegetables to the hotel restaurant takes away a box of banana peels and vegetable trimmings from the day before. Some communities get electricity from windmills and cow-dung slurries that generate combustible methane. Small dairy herds have been established and new fields planted to make the island self-sufficient in agriculture and break its dependence on cash crops for export.
The Pillars of Hercules
The arms of Spain, which have sometimes appeared on the flag of Spain, are supported by pillars on each side, the left one wrapped in a banner inscribed "PLVS," the right one wrapped in a banner inscribed "VLTRA."
| Gibraltar captured from Spain by Anglo-Dutch force, 4 August 1704 | |
|---|---|
| Governors of Gilbraltar, held for Archduke Charles | |
| Sir George Rooke | 1704 |
| Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt | 1704 |
| Henry Nugent, Count of Valdesoto | 1704 |
| John Shrimpton | 1704-1707 |
| Roger Elliott | 1707-1711 |
| Thomas Stanwix | 1711-1713 |
| Ceded to Britain, 1713 | |
| Thomas Stanwix | 1713 |
| The Earl of Portmore | 1713-1720 |
| Richard Kane | 1720-1727 |
| Jasper Clayton | 1727-1730 |
| Joseph Sabine | 1730-1739 |
| Francis Columbine | 1739-1740 |
| William Hargrave | 1740-1749 |
| Humphrey Bland | 1749-1754 |
| Thomas Fowke | 1754-1756 |
| Lord Tyrawley | 1756-1757 |
| The Earl of Home | 1757-1761 |
| John Toovey | acting, 1761 |
| John Parslow | acting, 1761 |
| Edward Cornwallis | 1761-1776 |
| John Irwin | acting, 1765-1767 |
| Robert Boyd | acting, 1776-1777 |
| George Augustus Eliott | 1777-1787 |
| Lord Heathfield | 1787-1790 |
| Sir Robert Boyd | acting, 1790 |
| 1790-1794 | |
| Henry Clinton | 17941795 |
| Charles Rainsford | 1794-1795 |
| Charles O'Hara | 1795-1802 |
| Charles Barnett | 1802 |
| The Duke of Kent | 1802-1820 |
| Sir Thomas Trigge | acting, 1803-1804 |
| Henry Edward Fox | acting, 1804-1806 |
| James Drummond | acting, 1806 |
| Sir Hew Dalrymple | acting, 1806-1808 |
| James Drummond | acting, 1808-1809 |
| Sir John Francis Cradock | acting, 1809 |
| John Smith | acting, 1809 |
| Alex McKenzie Fraser | acting, 1809 |
| Colin Campbell | acting, 1809-1814 |
| Sir George Don | acting, 1814-1821 |
| The Earl of Chatham | 1820-1835 |
| Sir George Don | acting, 1825-1830 |
| Crown Colony | |
| Sir George Don | acting, 1830-1831 |
| Sir William Houston | acting, 1831-1835 |
| Sir Alexander Woodford | 1835-1842 |
| Sir Robert Thomas Wilson | 1842-1848 |
| Sir Robert William Gardiner | 1848-1855 |
| Sir James Fergusson | 1855-1859 |
| Sir William Codrington | 1859-1865 |
| Sir Richard Airey | 1865-1870 |
| Sir William Williams | 1870-1876 |
| Lord Napier of Magdala | 1876-1883 |
| Sir John Miller Adye | 1883-1886 |
| Sir Arthur Hardinge | 1886-1890 |
| Sir Leicester Smyth | 1890-1891 |
| H.R.L. Newdigate | acting, 1891 |
| Sir Lothian Nicholson | 1891-1893 |
| G.J. Smart | acting, 1893 |
| Sir Robert Biddulph | 1893-1900 |
| Sir George Stuart White | 1900-1905 |
| Sir Frederick Forestier-Walker | 1905-1910 |
| Sir Archibald Hunter | 1910-1913 |
| Sir Herbert Miles | 1913-1918 |
| Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien | 1918-1923 |
| Sir Charles Monro | 1923-1928 |
| Sir Alexander Godley | 1928-1933 |
| Sir Charles Harington Harington | 1933-1938 |
| Sir Edmund Ironside | 1938-1939 |
| Sir Clive Gerard Liddell | 1939-1941 |
| The Viscount Gort | 1941-1942 |
| Sir Noel Mason-Macfarlane | 1942-1944 |
| Sir Ralph Eastwood | 1944-1947 |
| Sir Kenneth Arthur Noel Anderson | 1947-1952 |
| Sir Gordon MacMillan | 1952-1955 |
| Sir Harold Redman | 1955-1958 |
| Sir Charles Keightley | 1958-1962 |
| Sir Alfred Ward | 1962-1965 |
| Sir Gerald Lathbury | 1965-1969 |
| Sir Varyl Begg | 1969-1973 |
| Sir John Grandy | 1973-1978 |
| Sir William Jackson | 1978-1981 |
| British Dependent Territory | |
| Sir William Jackson | 1981-1982 |
| Sir David Williams | 1982-1985 |
| Sir Peter Terry | 1985-1989 |
| Sir Derek Reffell | 1989-1993 |
| Sir John Chapple | 1993-1995 |
| Sir Hugo White | 1995-1997 |
| Sir Richard Luce | 1997-2000 |
| David Durie | 2000-2002 |
| British Overseas Territory | |
| Sir David Durie | 2002-2003 |
| David Blunt | acting, 2003 |
| Sir Francis Richards | 2003-2006 |
| Philip Barton | acting, 2006 |
| Sir Robert Fulton | 2006-2009 |
| Leslie Pallett | acting, 2009 |
| Sir Adrian Johns | 2009-2013 |
| Sir James Dutton | 2013-2015 |
| Alison MacMillan | Acting, 2015-2016 |
| Lt. General Ed Davis | 2016-2020 |
| Nick Pyle, OBE | Acting, 2020 |
| Sir David Steel | 2020 |
The idea that the Strait of Gibraltar got opened up at some time turns out to be true. The tectonic plates of Europe and Africa have pushed up against each other and pulled apart at different geological times. When they have pushed together, the Mediterranean basin, which geologically as well as geographically separates the continents, i.e. it is oceanic crust, has become separated from the oceans and has even dried up into a salt desert. The salt deposits are still at the bottom of the Sea.
When the plates pulled apart, the crust thinned and the connecting ridge at Gibraltar dropped. At some point, the Atlantic found a way to break through, filling up the Mediterrean basin in a great waterfall that could have lasted for a century. This happened more than once and must have been among the more spectacular events of geological history.
Much the same thing seems to have happened with the Black Sea, where the Bosporus closed and opened, perhaps more than once, just like the Strait of Gilbraltar. There is speculation that a flooding of the Black Sea happened recently enough that its human memory transmuted into Noah's Flood.
I had always assumed that the famous view of the Rock as shown in this painting was from the South-East, approaching the Strait. However, it is actually from the North, coming down the coast. This is also evident in the photograph below.
Mount Calpe (which I've also seen called "Capi") is certainly to be identified with the Rock of Gibraltar, which is a limestone mass, 1408 feet high, covering about two square miles. It is a feature of considerable majesty, presenting both a symbol and the substance of great strength. Gibraltar gets its modern name as a result of the Islāmic Conquest of Spain. The forces of the Omayyad Caliph al-Wālid, commanded by Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, landed in 711 at the mountain that henceforce was known by the commander's name, the
, Jabal Ṭāriq, "Mountain of Ṭāriq." Gibraltar is today a British possession.
The Rock was captured by British and Dutch forces, under the command of Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, on 4 August 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession. Until the end of the War, it was held in the name of the Archduke Charles, the Pretender to Spain, who in 1711 became the Emperor Charles VI -- which is why Prince George was in command and is listed as one of the first Governors of Gibraltar. Once Charles was Emperor, however, even his allies did not want to see him unite the thrones of Spain and Austria, as Charles V had done. Britain reconsidered its war aims and, with some duplicity, made a separate Peace with France and Spain. Under the terms of this Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Gibraltar was ceded to Britain in perpetuity.
One of the British admirals leading the capture of Gibraltar had the extraordinary name of "Clowdisley Shovell." Shovell did not live to see the end of the war. On October 22, 1707 (on the Julian calendar), Shovell's fleet ran aground in the fog on the Scilly Islands. Four of five ships were lost. A story is told that Shovell himself was one of only two men from the four ships who reached shore alive, but he was then murdered by a local woman, combing the beach, who wanted his ring. This supposedly became known in a deathbed confession years later, when the woman produced the ring as evidence.
There is reason, however, to doubt this story, since the ring never did reappear. There is also a story that right before the disaster Shovell had a sailor hanged who breached discipline by daring to suggest that the navigators had made a mistake about their location and that the fleet was in danger of grounding in the Scillies! However, there is apparently no contemporary evidence for this story, which appeared later in suspiciously different versions.
I do know that there is a pub called "The Ship and Shovell" near Charing Cross Station in London (1-3 Craven Passage, Charing Cross, WC2N 5PH). I have eaten lunch there.
Gibraltar was besieged by Spain from 1779 to 1783, during the American Revolutionary War, but it held out. This is now called the "Great Siege," reminiscent of the Great Sieges of Malta, one of which also had the British defending. At this time galleries were excavated in the Rock so that guns could be placed at elevation firing north to the Spanish lines. This was done successfully and now the "Great Siege Tunnels" are a tourist attraction. Below we see "The Siege and Relief of Gibraltar, 13 September 1782," by John Singleton Copley (1738-1815).
The last great strategic role of Gibraltar was in World War II, when the Strait was guarded with increasing effectiveness against the transit of German submarines. We see a fictionalized example of this in the 1981 movie Das Boot, when the submarine is almost sunk trying to pass by Gibraltar. To entice Spain into World War II, Hitler told Francisco Franco that German troops would take Gibraltar and then turn it over to Spain. Franco, advised by Hitler's own envoy, Admiral Canaris, that Germany would probably lose the War, declined to get involved.
The identification of Mount Abyla is less certain. This is either Mount Acha (or Hacho), just east of Ceuta, or the Jabal Mūsā (Apes' Hill or Sierra Zimiera), west of Ceuta. Ceuta itself is today a Spanish possession, which Morocco would like to recover, just as Spain would like to recover Gibraltar. Mūsā,
, is Arabic for Moses, but it also was the name of Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr, who effected the Islāmic conquest of Morocco.
Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād was Mūsā's freedman and lieutenant. Ṭāriq's successes in Spain exceeded his orders, and Mūsā, jealous and angry, hurried after him with his army. Ṭāriq was rebuked and Mūsā completed the conquest of Spain. As it happened, by doing this Mūsā himself had left his post without the permission of the Caliph, and he was recalled to Damascus. Mūsā and Ṭāriq arrived there early in 715, laden with the spoil of Spain and accompanied by captured Visigoth nobility. Ṭāriq made sure that he was not overlooked by the Caliph. Unfortunately for Mūsā, although his insubordination was forgiven by al-Wālid, the Caliph now died, and Mūsā was not forgiven by the new Caliph, Sulaymān, who had instructed Mūsā to delay his arrival in Damascus until after the Succession. Mūsā was dismissed and disgraced, and his son 'Abdul-'Azīz, left as Governor of Spain, was executed.
The name of Jabal Mūsā,
, thus may reflect the judgment of the Arabs that this was Mount Abyla, and it was named (not, to be sure, by Sulaymān) as a companion to the Jabal Ṭāriq, with both commemorating the two conquerors of Spain and Morocco.
Ne plus ultra (often rendered non plus ultra) was the Latin motto for the Pillars of Hercules: "No more beyond." The Ocean beyond was thought to be so vast as to be practically infinite -- or actually infinite, before the Greeks understood that the Earth was round. Either way, no ship would be able to make it across and around the world to Asia.
Even with a finite Earth, the distance was too great on the basis of an estimate of the size of the earth by Eratosthenes (d.196/195 BC) at 250,000 stadia in circumference. Depending on which stadium Eratosthenes was using, this either made the Earth about 20% too large or very nearly the accurate value (40,000 km). In the Middle Ages, however, an Arab attempt to measure a degree of latitude produced a much smaller value, small enough that Christopher Columbus figured that it had become possible, with current sailing technology, to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to Japan. With the patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492 this is what he did, arriving, however, after the expected passage, not in Japan, but in the Bahamas.
The modern representation of the Pillars of Hercules is the doing of the Emperor Charles V, who was also King Charles (Carlos) I of Spain. In line with his titles, the right pillar is topped by a Royal Crown,
the left by the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire.
After the Conquests of Mexico (1521) and Peru (1533) effected during his reign, Charles could hardly overlook the fact that there was plenty beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The motto on the Pillars is thus no longer ne plus ultra but now PLUS ULTRA, "More Beyond." What had been an empty window to the Classical world was now an open door to the Modern.
While other major European colonial powers, Portugal, the Netherlands, England, and France fronted directly on the Atlantic, Spain, although with its own Atlantic coast, derived its seapower principally from Aragón, which had been a maritime power in the Mediterranean since the 13th century, when King James I conquered Majorca (1231) and Peter III acquired Sicily (1282). Since the previous European maritime powers had been Italian states, like Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, Spain embodies the transition from ancient Mediterranean power to modern Atlantic power. The Mediterranean soon became a backwater; and Cadiz, the most remote Phoenician colony of Gades, became Spain's own Atlantic entrepôt -- unfortunately for Spain largely to receive the treasure fleets from the New World, not to be a source of commerce and manufacture like the ports of later Atlantic powers.
Above right I have been showing the list of British Governors of Gibraltar. This has been going on for 300 years now. Spain has always wanted Gibraltar back, and sometimes has been, at least, nasty about it. Gibraltarians have voted in 1967 and 2002 to reject both Spanish sovereignty and a sort of British-Spanish condominium. In 1969 Francisco Franco retaliated by closing the border, which was not fully reopened until 1985. Now Spain has begun claiming that Gibraltar possesses no territorial waters and that all the sea around is Spanish. This will probably end up adjudicated by the European Union. Meanwhile, the Rock has become a popular vacation destination. I picked up a map at a Gibraltar tourism office in London.
Above is a photograph of part of the American Great White Fleet in Gibraltar Harbor in 1909, after sailing most of the way around the world. The white hulls of the American ships are in stark contrast to the dark colors of the British. The southern section of the breakwater in the background orients us in relation to the map of Gibraltar above. At this point, naval fleets are still mostly Pre-Dreadnoughts,
which gives the scene here a sort of Jurassic Park feel in comparison to what would become familar in World War I and II.
Below is the companion photograph of Russian ships at Gibraltar at the same time in 1909. See discussion at the link.
Debate continues about this. One favored explanation, suspiciously similar to cautions in our own time, is that the population overburdened the ecology of the land (because of the wicked greed and negligence of the people, as this is often construed, at least for modern society, if not for the Maya), and agriculture suddenly and catastrophically failed. More recently, the suggestion is that there was simply a rare but devastating drought -- or not so rare, since it can have been part of what is now called the "Dark Ages Cooling," a manifestation of a regular, 1500-year cycle of climatic change in Earth history, between the "Roman Warming" and "Mediaeval Warming." Thus, the Maya were victims of "climate change," where this had nothing to do with fossil fuels or SUV's.
The Maya and
the Kings of Tikal and PalenqueThe Maya have been called the Greeks of the New World, not just for their own achievements but apparently in contrast to the subsequently more Roman-like, i.e. imperial, Toltecs and Aztecs in Mexico. The Maya, like the Greeks, were divided into rival city states. Unlike the Greeks, the Maya were not conquered by the subsequent states. Instead, the Mayan civilization of the Classic Period (250-909 AD), in the south of the Yucatan (largely now in Guatemala), mysteriously collapsed.
| Kings of Tikal | ||
|---|---|---|
| Founder | Yax Ehb' Xook | c.90 AD |
| Foliated Jaguar | ? | |
| 10th? | Animal Headress | ? |
| c.250, drought | ||
| 11th | Siyaj Chan K'awiil | c.307 |
| 12th? | Lady Unen B'ahlam | c.317 |
| 13th | K'inich Muwaan Jol | d.359 |
| 14th | Chak Tok Ich'aak I | 360-378 |
| Yax Nuun Ayiin I | 379-404? | |
| Toltec Conquest? | ||
| 16th | Siyaj Chan K'awiil II | 411-456 |
| 17th | K'an Chitam | 458-486? |
| 18th | Chak Tok Ich'aak II | c.486-508 |
| Lady of Tikal | 511-c.527 | |
| 19th | Kaloomte' B'alam | c.511-c.527 |
| 20th? | Bird Claw | ? |
| Eruption of Ilopango Volcano, cooling in Romania, 536 | ||
| 21st | Wak Chan Ka'awiil | 537-562 |
| First TikalCalakmul War, 537572; Tikal sacked by Calakmul, 562 | ||
| Sky Witness | Calakmul, 561-572 | |
| Yax Yopaat | 572-579 | |
| Scroll Serpent | 579-611+ | |
| 22nd | Animal Skull | c.593-628 |
| 23rd/ 24th | K'inich Muwaan Jol II | c.628-650 |
| Second TikalCalakmul War, Tikal "Pyrrhic" victory, 648695 | ||
| 25th | Nuun Ujol Chaak | c.650-679 |
| 26th | Jasaw Chan K'awiil I | 682-734 |
| Third TikalCalakmul War, Tikal Victory, 720744 | ||
| 27th | Yik'in chan K'awiil | 734-c.766 |
| 750, beginning of Dark Ages Cooling drought | ||
| c.766-768 | ||
| 29th | Yax Nuun Ayiin II | 768-c.794 |
| 30th? | Nuun Ujol K'inich | c.800? |
| 31st? | Dark Sun | c.810 |
| 810, driest drought year | ||
| Jewel K'awiil | c.849 | |
| 860, driest drought year | ||
| Jasaw Chan K'awiil II | c.869 | |
| 910, driest drought year | ||
Where a great American river is in an arid environment, as with the Colorado, it cuts down through a hard plateau and does not spread out on a floodplain like the Old World rivers. There is thus little room for the deposit of sediment or for extensive agriculture. The flourishing of the Anasazi in that environment, although with impressive architecture, achieved neither literacy nor durable urban development in the original environment.
American civilizations began elsewhere. Although the Mayan cities were in jungle ("rain forest"), there is actually a lengthy dry season; and when the rain fails altogether, there is no other source of water. Not even wells were helpful, since water drained deep down through limestone formations. The Maya were careful about drainage and about storing rainwater in cisterns, and natural cavities (the cenotes) led down to pottable ground water; but extended drought, and a falling water table, would put them in a grave situation. It may have. Unlike what we see in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, the urban civilization was long gone by the time the Spanish arrived. The eerie abandoned cities of the central Yucatan were only rediscovered by travelers in the 18th and 19th century.
The tables here display the rulers of two of the principal Mayan cities of the Classic Period, Tikal and Palenque. Tikal is now in Guatemala, and Palenque west of the base of the Yucatan in Mexico. Unlike the flat expanse of the Yucatan, Palenque is in a hilly area, and it actually derived water from streams coming down from nearby hills, which it controlled with canals and underground channels.
The king list for Tikal is taken from the Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens by Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube [Thames & Hudson, 2000, pp.24-53], updated with some extra material from Wikipedia. This is the longest known sequence of Mayan kings, covering nearly the whole of the Classic Period. One of the titles of a king was his number in the succession, but I have given it only when Martin and Grube do (with Wikipedia additions), perhaps because it is not attested for them all. Eight early kings are unaccounted for. We do not enter the full light of history, therefore, until the beginning of the 4th century, in the days of Constantine. This list for Palenque, much shorter, is simply taken from Wikpedia.
A curiosity of the list for Tikal is that in 379 there seems to have been a foreign conquest. This was at the time of the flourishing of the great city of Teotihuacán in Central Mexico, a city whose power is demonstrated not only in its unique, enormous pyramids but by its lack of fortifications. These people seem to have had nothing to fear. Previously, historians have called the people of Teotihuacán the "Toltecs"; but specialists now disfavor this application of the term and believe that the Toltec culture occurred later and at a different location. However, "Toltec" is an Aztec term, as is "Teotihuacán" itself, and it was used to refer indiscriminately to all the ancient builders of Mexico. Thus, to now begin worrying about who were the "real" Toltecs is a little silly; and without the term, the people of Teotihuacán can only, awkwardly, be called "the people of Teotihuacán." Regardless, there now seems to be Central Mexican influence in Tikal, including the adoption of the Teotihuacánian god, Quetzalcoatl, the "Feathered Serpent" -- a name that we also know, of course, from the Aztecs (in Nahuatl).
| Kings of Palenque | |
|---|---|
| K'uk' Bahlam I | 431c.435 AD |
| "Casper" | 435c.487 |
| B'utz Aj Sak Chiik | 487c.501 |
| Ahkal Mo' Nahb I | 501524 |
| K'an Joy Chitam I | 529565 |
| Ahkal Mo' Nahb II | 565570 |
| Kan Bahlam I | 572583 |
| Yohl Ik'nal | 583604 |
| Palenque sacked by Calakmul, 599 | |
| Ajen Yohl Mat | 605612 |
| Palenque sacked by Calakmul, 611 | |
| Sak K'uk' | 612615 |
| Extinction of male line, Regent for her son | |
| K'inich Janaab Pakal I | 615683 |
| K'inich Kan Bahlam II | 684702 |
| K'inich K'an Joy Chitam II | 702711 |
| Palenque sacked by Toniná, King captured, 711; Interregnum | |
| K'inich Ahkal Mo' Nahb III | 721c.736 |
| K'inich Janaab Pakal II | c.742 |
| K'inich Kan Bahlam III | c.751 |
| K'inich K'uk' Bahlam II | 764c.783 |
| Janaab Pakal III | 799? |
Like Chinese characters, the Mayan phonetic elements were included as part of the glyphs; but, like Egyptian but unlike Chinese writing, the phonetic elements ("phonetic complements" in Egyptian) can fully represent pronunciation, instead of just provide clues, as in Chinese characters. As in Cuneiform or in the syllabic Minoan and Mycenaean scripts, some conventions were necessary in the use of syllabic elements (as, for instance, where a syllable ends in a consonant). It has been a matter of dispute, perhaps recently resolved, which of the modern Mayan languages is the most closely related to the ancient written language.
Palenque looks somewhat different from other Mayan cities. There is relief in the landscape; and, where the center of most Mayan cities is given over to temples, Palenque features a large royal palace, with a unique multi-storied tower. Also, some of the pyramids include dramatic tombs of Kings and Queens. The prominance of Queens is noteworthy. After war had wiped out the male heirs of the ruling dynasty, Queen Sak K'uk' took over as Regent for her son, Janaab Pakal I, until his majority, and, apparently, beyond -- as he would then become the most successful and long lived of all Palenque Kings.
But war continued to be a problem for Palenque, which suffered several terrible defeats from cities to the east. It only seems to have recovered poorly from the sack and occupation of 711, to then suffer from the same climate problems as Tikal.
After the abandonment of the cities of the southern Yucatan, Mayan civilization continues in somewhat diminished form during the Postclassic Period (909-1697) in the north at Chichen Itza and then at Mayapan until 1441. Not long before the arrival of the Spanish. For a while, the Spanish didn't even notice the Maya, but they began the conquest of the Mayan region in 1524. The Yucatan was not easily subdued. The last organized, resisting polity in the southern Yucatan, Noj Peten (or Taysal), in Lake Peten-Itza, was not taken until 1697. Even now, the religious practice of the Maya, although outwardly orthodox Catholicism, includes many features derived from traditional Mayan religion.
Probably the most remarkable feature of Mayan civilization is its mathematics and astronomy. Uniquely in the world, the Maya counted to the base twenty -- vigesimal counting. They were the only people outside of India to independently originate counting with zero. They devoted more attention to time and to the calendar than any other ancient people. Their "Long Count" chronology is the only absolute count of days from an ancient benchmark until the introduction of Julian Day Numbers. The Long Count is organized in cycles, but these are mostly to the base twenty and so do not differ much from simply giving the absolute number.
| The Long Count | |
|---|---|
| Alautun | 23,040,000,000 days |
| Kinchiltun | 1,152,000,000 days |
| Kalabtun | 57,600,000 |
| Piktun | 2,880,000 |
| Bak'tun | 144,000 days |
| K'atun | 7,200 days |
| Tun | 360 days |
| Winal | 20 days |
| K'in | 1 day |
It is sometimes said that the Maya conceived the largest units of time in world history. Well, their compatriots in zero, in India, developed very large cycles also. The Life of Brahmā, although there are different versions, can be as large as 309 trillion years. This is right up there with the extraordinary Mayan temporal vistas.
What is uncertain in this is the actual date of the benchmark and so the correlation to other calendars. Generally accepted now is the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson (GMT) correlation, where the zero day benchmark is Julian Day (JD) 584,283. There remains some uncertainty about this, however, and Martin and Grube prefer a GMT+2 date, JD 584,285. They give the example (p.13) of a stela with the Long Count date 9.10.16.8.14 (five places descending from the Bak'tun down to the individual day, the K'in). This gives a Long Count of 1,373,934 days. Added to the GMT+2 benchmark, that is JD 1,958,219, or 24 April 649 AD, on the Julian Calendar. The GMT benchmark itself (JD 584,283), which the Maya could have literally written 0.0.0.0.0 (no reactionary ordinalists here [note]), corresponds to 6 September 3114, on the Julian Calendar. This is marvelously close to the beginning of the I Dynasty of Egypt, which may comfort the kind of people who think that the civilization of the Americas comes from Egypt. However, if the Egyptians (or any other Old World civilization) had developed anything like the Long Count, ancient chronology would not involve the kind of speculation and frustration that it does. We do not get an absolute chronology for the Old World until Claudius Ptolemy uses the Babylonian Era of Nabonassar with the Egyptian 365 day year and compiles the Canon of Kings. If the Maya could only have passed along their sytem to other civilizations, it would have solved many historical headaches. Unfortunately, the only other civilization that benefited from Mayan influence, in Mexico, didn't bother with the Long Count.
| 18 Months of the Haab Year | |
|---|---|
| 0-19 | Pohp |
| 0-19 | Wo |
| 0-19 | Sip |
| 0-19 | Sotz' |
| 0-19 | Sek |
| 0-19 | Xul |
| 0-19 | Yaxk'in |
| 0-19 | Mol |
| 0-19 | Ch'en |
| 0-19 | Yax |
| 0-19 | Zak |
| 0-19 | Keh |
| 0-19 | Mak |
| 0-19 | K'ank'in |
| 0-19 | Muwan |
| 0-19 | Pax |
| 0-19 | K'ayab |
| 0-19 | Kumk'u |
| 0-4 | Wayeb |
The Haab year, although based on the solar year, is not divided into months reflecting the moon. Instead, the Maya had 18 months of 20 days each (with the five day intercalation), obviously based on the preference to counting by 20's. What this then looked like is the modern Bahāʾi calendar, which has 19 months of 19 days, based simply on a preference for the number 19. Since 192 is 361, a four or five day intercalation is used to match the Julian calendar.
The Egyptian calendar laps the year in 1460 Julian years (365.25 days) or 1461 Egyptian years. This gets called the "Sothic Cycle," after "Sothis," the Greek version of the Egyptian name for the star Sirius, whose appearance in the morning sky (the heliacal rising) marked the astronomical beginning of the Egyptian year. The date of the Sothic rising changed over the centuries and is substantially different at different latitudes, but a starting point is the statement of the Roman author Censorinus that the Sothic rising and Egyptian New Year corresponded in 139 AD. This would have been on (Julian) July 20. Simply subtracting 1460 moves us back one cycle to 1322 BC and two cycles to 2782 BC. According to Alan Gardiner (Egypt of the Pharaohs, Oxford, 1966, p.65) the former can be astronomically corrected to 1317 and the latter to 2773. One puts us in the reign of Haremhab, while the other puts us back in the II Dynasty, when we might imagine the calendar was actually formulated. We have some indication in the reign of Seti I that the Egyptians were aware that a cycle had been completed (a "Renewal of Births" era).
| 20 Named Days of the Tzolk'in | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Mayan | Mexican | ||
| 1 | Imix | Alligator | |
| 2 | Ik' | Wind | |
| 3 | Ak'bal | House | |
| 4 | K'an | Lizard | |
| 5 | Chikchan | Serpent | |
| 6 | Kimi | Death | |
| 7 | Manik' | Deer | |
| 8 | Lamat | Rabbit | |
| 9 | Muluk | Water | |
| 10 | Ok | Dog | |
| 11 | Chuwen | Monkey | |
| 12 | Eb | Grass | |
| 13 | Ben | Reed | |
| 1 | Ix | Jaguar | |
| 2 | Men | Eagle | |
| 3 | Kib | Vulture | |
| 4 | Kaban | Movement | |
| 5 | Etz'nab | Flint | |
| 6 | Kawak | Rain | |
| 7 | Ahaw | Flower | |
I do occasionally come across people saying that the Maya did correct their calendar, but the Mayan year actually could not have been modified as easily as Julius Caesar did the Egyptian year (adding a leap day), because the Haab meshed with the Tsolk'in to produce a larger cycle. After 52 Haab years (or 73 Tsolk'in), 18,980 days, the two cycles commensurate. Mathematically, the factors 73, 13, 5, & 4 are involved. The table below shows how the factors multiply together for the Haab and Tsolk'in years. Mostly, people are not going to be aware that 365 = 73 x 5. What the Egyptians did was to have 12 months of 30 days each (approximating the lunar month), plus five intercalary days at the end. The Maya had 18 months of 20 days each, with five intercalary days at the end. While the Egyptians seem to have had a bit of a holiday on the five days, in the Americas they were regarded as dreadfully unlucky. The Aztecs put out their cooking fires and huddled for the five days until the proper (human) sacrifices initiated the New Year.
The Tsolk'in year was reckoned in an extraordinary fashion. It consisted of a cycle of 13 numbered days and 20 named days. These passed in sequence independent of each other. There was nothing like a "month." Thus, the year begins on 1 Imix, but then we get 2 Ik', and then 3 Ak'bal. After 13 days, we are up to 1 Ix, and then 2 Men. Since 13 and 20 have no common factors, we don't get back to 1 Imix for 13 x 20 = 260 days. This sort of device is what we see in the Chinese calendar in the 60 year cycle of the 12 Earthly Branches and the 10 Celestial Stems. The Chinese, however, did this with years, while the Maya did it with days.
The name days of the Tsolk'in in the table at right are supplemented with the glyphs and meanings derived from the Codex Borgia, which is a ritual text rescued (or looted) from Mexico, at one time the possession of a Borgia cardinal, and now held by the Vatican Library. The identification of the glyphs is taken from the Dover edition of the Codex as restored by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers, with commentary by Bruce E. Byland [1993, p.xviii]. It is not even clear if this is an Aztec text or belonged to another Mexican people. There are certainly no Mayan glyphs in it. But the calendar cycles were the common heritage of Central American civilization. The images here are from the original Codex, not of the handsome restorations done by Díaz and Rodgers. I have, however, tidied them up a little.
What gets us up to something like the timespan of the Chinese cycle is the larger cycle, the Calendar Round, already mentioned. The Tsolk'in runs concurrently with the Haab and the pattern of days does not repeat for 52 Haab years.
| x 20d | x 13d | = 18,980d | |||
| x 5 | x 4 | x 13 | |||
| +5d | |||||
| 20d | x 18m | ||||
The extraordinary mechanism of the Calendar Round hardly compares to anything in Old World calendars. The only absolutely regular succession of days in a calendar cycle would be the Egyptian 365 day year or the 7 day week that now is common to the Jewish, Christian, and Islāmic calendars -- which otherwise have months and years of varying lengths. A little 7 day cycle, however, is not quite the same thing as a 18,980 day cycle. On the other hand, while the 7 day week may represent (roughly) a quarter of the lunar month, numbers preferred by the Maya -- 13, 18, 20 -- have no more than ritual, mystical, or abstract mathematical significance. Only the 365 day Haab has a natural reference. This all structures time minutely, but mainly for ritual reasons. But it is not from lack of Mayan interest in natural phenomena, since astronomical cycles of the Moon, Venus, etc. were otherwise carefully tracked. They were simply something extra.
Just as the green of Chinese East is associated with birth and growth, the red of Mayan East, as blood, has a similar association with life. And just as the white of Chinese West is associated with death and the decline of life in the autumn; the black of Mayan West is similarly associated with death. While the red of Chinese South signifies fire and light; the yellow of the Mayan South is the color of the Sun.
While some of these associations can be gleaned from Mayan inscriptions and usage, my impression is that no Mayan text lays out a systematic analysis and that some writers have let their imaginations take over, on analogy with the vast system of associations of the Chinese elements. A case in point may be the color for West, which several on-line sources I have seen say can be black or blue. However, according to my actual published Dictionary of Maya Hieroglyphs [John Montgomery, Hippocrene Books, 2002, 2006], Mayan writes the game glyph for both "green" and "blue" [p.286] and thus is in the same situation as Chinese, where Although it is somewhat muddled by this problem, a very intriguing possibility, which I cannot say whether it is attested in Mayan inscriptions or not, is that the colors of the cardinal directions just happen to correspond to the colors of varieties of corn. Indeed, even as "blue" corn is actually a color close to black, I took it to be black the first time I ever saw blue corn tortillas, at The Shed restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the late 1970's. Since then, although I still have not seen blue corn tortillas in a market in Los Angeles (although white and yellow are abundant), blue and red corn tortilla chips are widely available. At the same time, the green of the Mayan Center is the color of the leaves and shuck of corn plants, before they dry out. Green also suggests the World Tree, the Eliadean axis mundi, which figures in Mayan cosmology and is the center-post for the four directions. Even if the Maya did not make all these associations, they should have.
The Mayan cosmology of the directions bears some striking analogies, including the use of the same colors, to the associations that we find with the Chinese elements. Thus, just as the Chinese assign five colors, green (or blue), red, white, black, and yellow, to the four cardinal directions and the "center," the Maya seem to have done the same sort of thing -- except that green is the Center rather than the East; red is now East rather than South; white is North rather than West; black is West rather than North; and yellow is South rather than the Center.
means both colors also. On top of that, Reading the Maya Glyphs [Michael D. Coe & Mark van Stone, Thames & Hudson, 2001, 2005, 2011], which has a section on the directions and their colors [p.123], attests no ambiguity in the black associated with West [p.125], citing the glyphs identified as "black" in the Dictionary [p.88].
Copyright (c) 2003, 2006, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2021, 2022 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
| Spanish Governors of Nuevo Mexico | |
|---|---|
| Juan de Oñate | 15981608 |
| Cristóbal de Oñate (son) | 16081609 |
| Pedro de Peralta | 16101614 |
| Bernadino de Ceballos | 16141618 |
| Juan de Eulate | 16181625 |
| Felipe de Sotelo Osorio | 16251629 |
| Francisco Manuel de Silva Nieto | 16291632 |
| Francisco de la Mora Ceballos | 16321635 |
| Luis de Rosas | 1635-1641, assassinated |
| Juan Flores de Sierra y Valdés | 1641, died |
| Francisco Gomes | acting, 16411642 |
| Alonso de Pacheco de Herédia | 1643 |
| Fernando de Argüello | 16441647 |
| Luis de Guzmán y Figueroa | 16471649 |
| Hernando de Ugarte de la Concha | 16491652 |
| Juan de Samaniego y Xaca | 16521656 |
| Juan Manso de Contreras | 16561659 |
| Bernardo López de Mendizábal | 16591660 |
| Diego Dionisio de Peñalosa Brieceño y Berdugo | 16611664 |
| Tomé Dominguez de Mendoza | acting, 1664 |
| Juan Durán de Miranda | 16641665 |
| Fernando de Villanueva | 16651668 |
| Juan de Medrano y Mesía | 16681671 |
| Juan Durán de Miranda | 16711675 |
| Juan Francisco Treviño | 16751679 |
| Antonio de Otermin | 16791680, titular, 1680-1682 |
| Pueblo Revolt, 1680-1692 | |
| El Popé | Pueblo leader, 16801685 |
| Luis Tupatu | 16851692 |
| Domingo Gironza Petriz Cruzate | titlar, 16821686 |
| Pedro Reneros de Posada | titular, 16861688 |
| Domingo Gironza Petriz Cruzate | titular, 1688 |
| Diego de Vargas | titular, 16881692, effective, 16921696 |
| Pedro Rodríguez Cubero | 16961703 |
| Diego de Vargas | 17031704 |
| Juan Páez Hurtado | 17041705 |
| Francisco Cuervo y Valdés | provisional, 17051707 |
| Jose Chacón Medina Salazar y Villaseñor | 17071712 |
| Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollon | 17121715 |
| Felix Martínez | acting, 17151716 |
| Antonio Valverde y Cosío | acting, 1716 |
| Juan Páez Hurtado | acting, 17161717 |
| Antonio Valverde y Cosío | interim, 17181721 |
| Juan Estrada de Austria | 17211723 |
| Juan Domingo de Bustamente | 17231731 |
| Gervasio Cruzat y Gongora | 17311736 |
| Enrique de Olivade y Michelena | 17361738 |
| Gaspar Domingo de Mendoza | 17391743 |
| Joaquín Codallos | 17431749 |
| Tomás Vélez Cachupín | 17491754 |
| Francisco Antonio Marín del Valle | 17541760 |
| Domingo de Mendoza | acting, 1760 |
| Manuel Portilla Urrisola | 17601762 |
| Tomás Vélez Cachupín | 17621767 |
| Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta | 17671777 |
| Francisco Trevre | acting, 1777 |
| Juan Bautista de Anza | 17781788 |
| Fernando de la Concha | 17891794 |
| Fernando Chacón | 17941804 |
| Joaquín del Real Alencaster | 18041807 |
| Alberto Maynez | 18071808 |
| José Manrique | 18081814 |
| Alberto Maynez | 18141816 |
| Pedro María de Allande | 18161818 |
| Facundo Melgares | 18181822 |
| Mexican Governors of Nuevo Mexico | |
| Francisco Xavier Chávez | 1822-1823 |
| José Antonio Vizcarra | 1823-1824 |
| Bartolomé Baca | 1824-1825 |
| Antonio de Narbona | 1825 |
| José Antonio Vizcarra | 1825-1827 |
| Manuel Armijo | 1827-1829 |
| José Antonio Chávez | 1828-1831 |
| Santiago Abreu | 1831-1833 |
| Francisco Sarracino | 1833-1835 |
| Albino Pérez | 1835-1837 |
| Manuel Armijo | 1838-1844 |
| Mariano Martínez de Lejarza | 1844-1845 |
| Manuel Armijo | 1845-1846 |
| Juan Bautista Vigil y Alarid | 1846 |
| Governors of New Mexico Territory | |
| General Stephen Watts Kearny | Military, 1846 |
| Charles Bent | 1846-1847, killed |
| Taos Revolt, 1847 | |
| Colonel Sterling Price | Military, 1847-1850 |
| James S. Calhoun (Whig) | 1851-1852 |
| William Carr Lane (W) | 1852-1853 |
| David Meriwether (D) | 1853-1857 |
| Abraham Rencher (D) | 1857-1861 |
| Henry Connelly (R) | 1861-1866 |
| Robert Byington Mitchell (D) | 1866-1869 |
| William Anderson Pile (R) | 1869-1871 |
| Marsh Giddings (R) | 1871-1875 |
| Samuel Beach Axtell (R) | 1875-1878 |
| Lew Wallace (R) | 1878-1881 |
| Lionel Allen Sheldon (R) | 1881-1885 |
| Edmund G. Ross (D) | 1885-1889 |
| L. Bradford Prince (R) | 1889-1893 |
| William Taylor Thornton (D) | 1893-1897 |
| Miguel A. Otero (R) | 1897-1906 |
| Herbert James Hagerman (R) | 1906-1907 |
| George Curry (R) | 1907-1910 |
| William J. Mills (R) | 1910-1912 |
| Governors of New Mexico | |
| William C. McDonald (D) | 1912-1917 |
| Ezequiel C. de Baca (D) | 1917 |
| Washington E. Lindsey (R) | 1917-1919 |
| Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo (R) | 1919-1921 |
| Merritt C. Mechem (R) | 1921-1923 |
| James F. Hinkle (D) | 1923-1925 |
| Arthur T. Hannett (D) | 1925-1927 |
| Richard C. Dillon (R) | 1927-1931 |
| Arthur Seligman (D) | 1931-1933 |
| Andrew W. Hockenhull (D) | 1933-1935 |
| Clyde Tingley (D) | 1935-1939 |
| John E. Miles (D) | 1939-1943 |
| John J. Dempsey (D) | 1943-1947 |
| Thomas J. Mabry (D) | 1947-1951 |
| Edwin L. Mechem (R) | 1951-1955 |
| John F. Simms (D) | 1955-1957 |
| Edwin L. Mechem (R) | 1957-1959 |
| John Burroughs (D) | 1959-1961 |
| Edwin L. Mechem (R) | 1961-1962 |
| Tom Bolack (R) | 1962-1963 |
| Jack M. Campbell (D) | 1963-1967 |
| David F. Cargo (R) | 1967-1971 |
| Bruce King (D) | 1971-1975 |
| Jerry Apodaca (D) | 1975-1979 |
| Bruce King (D) | 1979-1983 |
| Toney Anaya (D) | 1983-1987 |
| Garrey Carruthers (R) | 1987-1991 |
| Bruce King (D) | 1991-1995 |
| Gary E. Johnson (R) | 1995-2003 |
| Bill Richardson (D) | 2003-2011 |
| Susana Martinez (R) | 2011-2019 |
| Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) | 2019-present |
New Mexico is the fifth largest State, after Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana. At 121,589 square miles, it is larger than the UK (94,525) and Italy (116,305) but smaller than Germany (137,846) and Spain (194,897). Of course, with a population less than two million, it is only the 36th largest State by that measure. There is a great deal of very empty land.
Some information about New Mexico first came to the Spanish when Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1488/92-1557/60), who was in New Mexico with the ill fated Narváez Expedition, 1527-1536, crossed the Rio Grande not far north of the later site of El Paso in 1536, not many years after Cortés had conquered Mexico itself. He heard about cities and gold to the north.
That led to the expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1540-1541. The Viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza (1535-1550), named the area in advance Nuevo Mexico, hoping that it would be as rich as Old Mexico. Coronado investigated the Pueblos and much of the area, all the way to the Grand Canyon, but there was no gold. The "Seven Cities of Cíbola" glowed golden in the sunlight, but this was no more than adobe brick. The expedition was thus considered a failure, and the Indians were, for the time being, left to their own devices.
The "adobe" of the Pueblos means mud brick. Discussed elsewhere, this word entered Spanish from in Arabic, meaning the same thing. But the word is not ultimately from Arabic, but from Coptic. There the word is
, "mud brick"; and, as we might expect, the Coptic word is ultimately from the Middle Egyptian word for mud brick,
, with a phonogram for db and an ideographic determinative for "brick." Adobes are still popular in New Mexico, and not just at the Pueblos. Expensive houses are built with them, with their thermal insulating properties appreciated in both summer and winter. This would be bad if New Mexico were earthquake country. Such building materials crumble in a good shake. Earthquakes are not unknown, but nowhere as common as in California, where the old Missions regularly endure considerable damage.
As of 1964, the surviving Pueblos, with their population and area, were:
Languages of the Pueblos fall into three groups: (1) the Tanoan, including Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa; (2) the Keres, and (3) Zuñi. These are unrelated to the nearby Athabaskan languages, like Navajo and Apache. The Pueblos are now thought to be the descendants of the Anasazi, the ancient people who built the cliff dwellings of the Southwest, including the vast ruins at Chaco Canyon. Although climate change is often blamed, why the cliff dwellers abandoned the mountains and moved down into the Rio Grande Valley remains mysterious.
In 1581 a mainly religious expedition arrived in New Mexico, led by a Franciscan monk, Augstín Rodríguez, and a soldier, Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado. Two monks were left as missionaries. A private rancher, Antonio de Espejo, organized an expedition to help the monks in 1582. On the way, he learned that the monks had been killed, but he visited the Pueblos anyway and then returned south. A more official incursion, on local initiative, was carried out by the Lieutenant Governor and Captain General of Nuevo Leon, Gaspar Castáño de Sosa, in 1590-1591. De Sosa's visit came to nothing, but plans were already in the works for an official Spanish occupation of the country.
So in 1598 Juan de Oñate occupied and annexed the Pueblos to Spain. The Acoma Pueblo, high on its mesa, held out the longest. To prevent a repeat of such resistance, Oñate cut off the right foot of every Acoma warrior. With memories of such a beginning, and after new (unmutilated) generations had grown up, Spanish rule suffered a dramatic reversal. In 1680 the Pueblos revolted and successfully expelled the Spaniards from New Mexico. Governor Antonio de Otermin narrowly missed being killed and had to evacuate the territory.
After 12 years of independence, the Pueblos were reconquered. In 1980, the Tricentential of the Pueblo Revolt was commemorated in New Mexico, where, of course, many of the Pueblos survive, now with a great deal of autonomy as Indian Reservations under Federal jurisdiction. Old memories die hard, as a statue of Oñate at San Juan was vandalized in 1997: its right foot was cut off. After a new foot was restored, it was painted red.
Now, in 2020, the statue of Oñate has been removed. Also, another statue of Oñate, only installed in Albuquerque in 2004, has also been removed -- after gunfire erupted as a mob tried to pull it down. This is part of the rage in 2020 to remove all monuments of offensive history from American public spaces. Oñate, of course, stands for colonialism, imperialism, and the oppression of Native Americans. In those terms, Juan de Oñate doesn't stand a chance. Perhaps it doesn't matter that he represents the entire Hispanic history and character of New Mexico -- something that has contributed the very name of the modern Pueblo Indians. Not everyone likes that; and for some it may be a tough choice between Native American heritage and Latino heritage. There is a lot of painful history there before the hated United States comes anywhere near.
Albuquerque was founded in 1707. Many have found the name of the town amusing, and some locals, feeling disdain for the megalopolis of New Mexico call it the "Big Turkey." Nevertheless, the city is moderate in size, in 2002 still only with a population of 463,874, up from 201,189 in 1962. And the strange name comes from the Duke of Alburquerque (now "Albuquerque"), Francisco Fernandez de la Cueva. This was not an uncommon name, as we see with António de Albuquerque Coelho, the Portuguese Governor of Macao, 1718-1719.
For all its relative local size, Albuquerque is smaller than El Paso (577,415), Tuscon (503,151), and, of course, Phoenix (1,371,960). Cities of comparable size are Atlanta (424,868) and New Orleans (473,681, before Katrina) -- and Albuquerque does not have the large suburbs that most of these other cities do have. Albuquerque was supposedly featured in a movie, Little Miss Sunshine (2006, for which Alan Arkin won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar), with a family driving from there to Los Angeles. It is a good movie. However, I have watched it carefully, and I do not think that a single second of the movie was shot in New Mexico. The scenes in "Albuquerque" look suspiciously like they are in Los Angeles, with the thick haze of LA smog in the background. They didn't even use stock footage establishing shots for Albuquerque.
There does seem to be some second unit work in Arizona, but I do not think that the actors ever left California. In the background of the first shots of them driving out of Albuquerque are the familiar forms of Vasquez Rocks, which are off California highway 14, north of Los Angeles -- a site famous for the Star Trek episode "Arena" [1967], where Captain Kirk fights a lizard-man, and then in the movie Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey [1991], where Bill and Ted are killed and meet Death, in a parody of The Seventh Seal [1957]
In 2008 we had another "Sunshine" movie, Sunshine Cleaning, which also features Alan Arkin, that is also supposed to set in Albuquerque. It looks like the entire movie actually was indeed shot in Albuquerque (though Santa Fe is mentioned in the credits also). There are no establishing shots, but the Sandias now and again are seen in the background. The sky, the clouds, the streets, the houses -- it all looks like New Mexico.
A movie that was shot entirely in New Mexico is Ron Howard's The Missing (2004), with Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett (produced by Brian Grazer). Since this is a Western, we don't get to see modern Albuquerque or Sante Fe, or much in the way of any other recognizable modern location.
Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), with David Bowie, was shot in New Mexico. One of the most remarkable locations, White Sands, was memorably featured in that movie as the alien planet homeland of Bowie. For that matter, we also have White Sands (1992), with Willem Dafoe, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Mickey Rourke, Samuel L. Jackson, and M. Emmet Walsh -- this also seems to have been shot entirely in New Mexico, including Santa Fe, ending at White Sands National Monument.
White Sands has a claim to association with the beginning of the Space Age. The White Sands Missile Range, which stretches north and south across the mountains and basins, encompassing White Sands National Monument, north nearly to US 380, is where captured German V-2 rockets were tested after the end of World War II. Eventually the higher profile testing moved elsewhere, but the Range remains active with weaponry. In 1975, I was stopped when the road between Las Cruces and Alamogordo was closed for a test. Even now, if the Space Shuttle can't land in Florida, and if it can't land at Edwards in California, White Sands is still the next backup. That hasn't happened yet, but it is there. At the north end of the range, by the Sierra Oscura, in the Jornada del Muerto, is Trinity Site, where the Nuclear Age certainly began, which is open to civilians twice a year.
Between the facilities at White Sands, the laboratories at Los Alamos (a continuing concern since the first atomic bombs were built there), and then places like Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico is said to have the highest number of Ph.D.'s per capita in the United States. This might surprise a lot of people casually driving across the State, thinking that all they were seeing was cowboys and Indians.
John Carpenter's Vampires (1998), with James Woods, Daniel Baldwin, and Sheryl Lee -- the evocative Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks, who appears entirely naked here, as we see -- also was shot in New Mexico.
Going back even further, we have some New Mexico scenes in Easy Rider (1969), where Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper would have been well advised to stay. We see the Taos Pueblo, and some scenery nearby, but then the set for the hippie commune they visit was built in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles -- the actual commune that it represents didn't allow its use for the movie. But the Santa Monica Mountains actually don't look like New Mexico. We also meet Jack Nicholson in the actual old jail of Taos. The exteriors of the jail are in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Nicholson toasts D.H. Lawrence -- Lawrence lived in Taos between, I believe, 1922 and 1925, and his ashes were interred there in 1935. C.G. Jung also visited New Mexico and wrote about it, fascinated, like many, by the Pueblo civilization.
The arrival of horses with the Spanish made possible the development of cultures that were more purely nomadic and devoted to hunting. The New Mexican Apache tribes took this up in a modest way, but the area would suffer principally from the perfection of steppe culture by the Comanches, who roamed the Southern Plains in Texas but raided in force well west of there. This ended up thwarting efforts of the Spaniards to build settlements east of the Rio Grande Valley. Those had to be abandoned under the ferocity of Comanche attacks. Today, impressive ruins are to be seen at Quarai, Abo, and Gran Quivira, which lie north and south of US60, southeast of Abluquerque. These places are now all part of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument.
The Territory of New Mexico was created in 1850. In the Compromise of 1850, Texas, which claimed the entire Rio Grande as its border, was given its western limits at the Rio Grande north to 32o N, and then east to 103o W (roughly, the survey of the 103o line was mishandled, and Texas received the benefit of the error, with the boundary about a half mile west of the 103rd meridian). The northern boundary of New Mexico at first was 37o N all the way west to California. This then included all of Arizona (with the Gadsden Purchase of 1853) and what would later (1866) be Clark County, Nevada. At the San Juan Mountains, however, the east end of the border jumped up to 38o N. The land between 37o N and 38o N was ceded to Colorado in 1861. Meanwhile, several proposals had been made about dividing the Territory in two, between a reduced New Mexico and "Arizona." At first it looked like the division would be between north and south, and during the the Civil War a Confederate "Arizona" in the south did exist. In 1863, however, an east/west division, as we see today, was effected. It is hard to write about New Mexico without including my own history with the place. Of the many spectacular sights in New Mexico, the Tularosa Basin is right up there, with the Sacramento Mountains to the east, and White Sands stretching up the valley to the west. At twelve years old, I found the whole place very magical. White Sands, indeed, holds up quite well in that respect. People see pictures of it and think it is snow. High on the face of the Sacramento Mountains are exposed rock strata from the Permian Period (marked as "P" and "Pz," for Paleozoic, on the geological map). These are formations that have risen to the surface, indeed above the surface, here. In West Texas they are deep underground. Indeed, they give the "Permian Basin" its name. This is not a geographic but a geological Basin (actually, three of them), and it contains much of the West Texas oil that has given that State part of its identity. Since I originally thought about going into Archaeology, thanks to my love of Egypt, I planned on attending the University of New Mexico, which is the hub for much of the archaeology of the Southwest.
I flew into Albuquerque for the Fall Semester of 1967. I got a taxi to my dorm, Oñate Hall, at UNM. The taxi driver, an Anglo, pronounced it "Onātee." The times I have been back, this building no longer seems to be used as a dormatory. But it was new and pleasant in 1967 -- though it is strange to remember features of life back then, such as no Area Codes or direct dial long distance: I had to call the operator to make a long distance call back to Los Angeles. Other features of the times were no co-ed dorms, and women's dorms that were locked at night, with women who stayed out required to sign out and report their locations. Now, with all this gone, we have instead the accusations of a "rape culture" at colleges, which usually involves drunken couplings in co-ed dorms.
In those days, there was a football field, Zimmerman stadium, in the middle of campus, next to the Student Union, with stadium seating on one side. None of it was closed off. I used to watch the sunset from the top, with Mt. Taylor in the distance. I didn't know that this marked one of the boundaries of the land of the Navajo. The sunset also illuminated the Sandia moumtains to the East, often with pink, orange, or yellow colors. Bobby Kennedy appeared there in 1968, soon before flying to Los Angeles to meet his fate. Later, the stadium was demolished and the space used for a new buildings.
It was a great year in Albuquerque, with my first experience of snow falls, but my interest drifted from archaeology to philosophy, and I transfered the following year to UCLA. The Albuquerque of 1967-1968 was considerably smaller than that of today, and I cannot even recognize the eastern edge of town from what it was like when I was at UNM. Although I did see Santa Fe that year, and walked around a great deal of Albuquerque, I actually didn't visit Old Town until years later. I would not return to New Mexico until 1975. As detailed elsewhere, this was on a drive from Los Angeles to Austin, by way of Las Vegas, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Alamogordo, and Carlsbad. I didn't realize at the time that one of my old friends from Beirut, Craig Nettleton, had moved from Minnesota and was living near Albuquerque. But I did have another aunt and uncle, Jeannie (my mother's sister) and Norman, who now were living near Alamogordo, actually in a mobile home on five acres of desert not far southeast of Tularosa. This was a great visit, although my first wife and I were having troubles both with our car and with our marriage. My uncle had one of the earliest hand held digital calculators. I couldn't wait to get one, but did wait a couple of years -- because of the expense. Now everyone takes this stuff for granted, and simple calculators are dirt cheap. We did some side trips, like to see where Billy the Kid shot his way out of the Lincoln County jail. Our last stop in New Mexico was Carlsbad. I still haven't been back to the Caverns again, though I've driven through the town several times since.
During the rest of the '70's, I began dropping in on Craig or my aunt and uncle, or both, while flying back and forth from Austin to LA. This began to involve various side trips, like fishing in the Jemez mountains, several visits to Santa Fe, almost getting arrested by the Santa Clara Pueblo Police, and getting picked up at El Paso in a light aircraft that my uncle had learned to fly.
Craig's Old Boy Net from Carlton College (in Northfield, Minnesota, where the James Gang made the mistake of trying to rob the bank) included the son of Oliver La Farge, author of the 1930 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Laughing Boy, an early informed and sympathetic portrayal of the Navajo. This meant some visits to the La Farge household in Santa Fe, something that would certainly qualify as the Old Santa Fe, at least in 20th century terms. It was all great stuff. But even more touring followed when I drove back out of Texas in June 1979, then back and forth again late in the year, and finally back from Austin in a new car in 1981, with another round trip that Fall.
My visit in 1981 involved another old friend from Beirut, Alan Campbell, of whom I already have a photo posted here from Palmyra, Syria. Alan had become a paramedic and was living in Cuba, New Mexico. When I arrived there with Craig and his wife, Alan just had a disturbing experience. He had participated in the reception of a patient at the hospital in Gallup, a man who had a high fever and soon died. It turned out that he suffered from pneumonic plague, which is both usually fatal and highly contagious. Alan was taking prophylactic antibiotics, in case he had gotten infected. On that happy note, we all went out to visit the ruins at Chaco Canyon, where signs warned that the prairie dogs in the area were carriers of bubonic plague (the precursor of the pneumonic variety). Fortunately, neither Alan nor any of the rest of us came down with any variety of plague.
The dangers of plague in the area ended up covered by author Tony Hillerman in his 1998 Navajo police mystery The First Eagle, with helpful information about bubonic and pneumonic plague and their vectors and symptoms. We also learn that public health researchers can be dangerous people capable of murder, which seems to contradict most crime statistics. Nevertheless, it nicely reminded me of my own brush with the phenomenon.
Since then I've been back to New Mexico six times. My second wife and I visited my aunt and uncle in the desert in 1989. In 1997 I flew back to Albuquerque to drive with Craig down to Trinity Site. In 2003, I drove through in a U-Haul truck taking a load of my possessions on the way to New Jersey. Laying over a day, Craig (again) and his wife drove me up to Santa Fe for lunch, unfortunately on a Sunday, when most of the restaurants are closed.
After my retirement, I've been back through the State three times, each time on the driving trips I've taken across country. In June 2009, I only laid over one night in Albuquerque with Craig, but then on the way back, I dropped in on some old friends from Austin who recently had moved to Dixon, just down the road from Taos. In June 2010, I was back for a longer stay, based in Albuquerque but with side trips to Santa Fe and Dixon. Lunch at the Shed, off the Plaza in Santa Fe, was the first meal I had had at one of the restaurants I knew from the 1970's since my wife and I were there in 1989. We had eaten at Josie's, which now seems to only do catering.
Besides friends and the land, I really miss, as with Austin, the food. I had never heard of blue corn tortillas before being served them (at the Shed) in Santa Fe. I thought they had burnt my enchilada. I bought a packet of them at a market before I flew back to Austin. I kept it in my freezer to show people that there were blue corn torillas. Today they are everywhere, if only as corn chips.
Now I hear that it is being considered whether to make "Red or Green?" the official "State Question," i.e. red or green salsa on one's food. And every year I anticipated the newest Tony Hillerman Navajo detective novel -- and of course am still devastated since his death in 2008. I first heard some details about Navajo religion in my Freshman Anthropology class at UNM, but now, perhaps with many people, most of what I know about the Navajo is from Tony Hillerman. Most of the Big Reservation, of course, is in Arizona, and I actually hadn't seen much of it -- not even Monument Valley, which turns up in countless John Ford Westerns, and in Easy Rider. Even in New Mexico, I was out to Chaco Canyon (with the nearby "Checkerboard" reservation) but had not otherwise been to the Navajo cities west and northwest of there. I only saw Shiprock from an airplane. So this was a deficiency in my experience of New Mexico -- now remedied in August 2012 with a long drive through the Big Reservation. This included lunch in the town of Shiprock, a stop at Four Corners, and a route down through Kayenta and Tuba City to Flagstaff. Monument Valley would have required a detour, which will have to wait. My final drive through New Mexico was with a truck again, in 2013, on a final move from Los Angeles to New Jersey. A brief layover in Albququerque involved a little eating, and then a final, early morning exit to the East, and a final view of the Sandias against the morning twilight. Above is the view of the Sandias from my hotel, the day before I left. While in Santa Fe in 2010, I bought Tyrannasaur Canyon [2005], by Douglas Preston, in a bookstore in the La Fonda Hotel. They seemed to feature books by New Mexico authors, or books involving New Mexico -- although much of the display was missing by 2012 because people now buy books from Amazon.com. Preston apparently has lived and travelled in the area a good deal. Since then, I've read several books by Preston and Lincoln Child that are set in New Mexico or nearby in the Southwest. Preston and Child often fictionize locations, or exaggerate distances, for dramatic effect; but sometimes the ficitonization strikes me as gratuitous or puzzling.
For instance, in Mount Dragon [1996], by Preston and Child, we have a description of Trinity Site:
"How can you tell?" Carson asked, looking around at the desert. The Sierra Oscura rose to the west: dry, barren desert mountains, run through with jagged sedimentary outcrops. It was a desolate place, but no more desolate than the rest of the Jornada.
Singer pointed to a rusted girder, twisting a few feet out of the ground. "That's what was left of the tower that held the original bomb. If you look carefully, you'll see that we're in a shallow depression scooped out by the blast. Over there -- " Singer pointed to a mound and some ruined bunkers "-- was one of the instrument observation posts." [Tom Doherty Associates Book, New York, p.103] Actually, Trinity Site has a fence around it, with a pyramidal monument at the center, and military roads all over the place. Nothing is left of the original tower. It was vaporized. The site map provided by the White Sands Missile Range does note a "Footing from 100-ft. Tower," so perhaps this is the "twisted girder"; but I don't remember seeing it. The reader may inspect the Panorama of Trinity Site for any conspicuous evidence of the structure. At the same time, if anything looks "scooped out" at the site, it is because the fused sand ("Trinitite") on the surface was all removed -- except in one small place, where it is protected by a low structure with windows, through which visitors can inspect it -- it is still radioactive. There are other structures and artifacts nearby, including the house where the final assembly of the bomb was done. And, of course, the Sierra Oscura rises to the east, not the west, as readers can tell from Preston and Child's own map [p.xiii].
What is going on here? If Preston and Child have never been to Trinity site, why have they not gotten some accurate information about it? These inaccuracies have nothing to do with the plot. Trinity Site is never visited again or even mentioned in the book. The whole business is completely gratuitous. And, of course, the whole area is the Military Reservation of the White Sands Missile Range, where random outsiders cannot just go driving around, or even get onto it, without attracting the attention of Military Police.
I can allow for some poetic license, such as forgetting the existence of the Military Reservation. But on page 409 our protagonists are "about forty-five miles north of Mount Dragon," but far from the end of the desert of the Jornada del Muerto. Yet according to Preston and Child's own map [p.xiii again], forty-five miles northwest from their fictional Mount Dragon would already put us in downtown Socorro. So this is a poetic license that isn't even made consistent in their own book.
In the gratuitious category we get something else. When our male protagonist Guy Carson meets his lab assistant Susanna Cabeza de Vaca, he assumes that she is from Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca takes strong exception to this:
Now, Preston and Child obviously know that there are old New Mexico families with Spanish surnames who take strong exception to being thought of as Mexicans. What is unbelievable here is that Carson, who is supposed to be a New Mexico native, would not know this. I knew it before I had been a student at UNM more than a couple of months. Now, Preston and Child want Carson and Cabeza de Vaca to get off on the wrong foot (in the love/hate motif of true love); but to do so in a way that relies on something that is unlikely to impossible is what Siskel and Ebert used to call an Unfortunately, Preston and Child seem to get their own facts wrong. I don't see any Cabeza de Vaca with Oñate's expedition in 1598. They are perhaps thinking of the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, whom we have seen above. We see this Cabeza de Vaca turn up elsewhere on this page, as a Viceroy of the Rio de la Plata (1541-1544). This is the same fellow. He was arrested and tried in Spain, although exonerated, for his conduct in the office. Nevertheless, that ended his career, and he died in Spain -- years before Oñate entered New Mexico.
I have otherwise not been able to find references to an "Alonso Cabeza de Vaca" -- although there was actually more than one "Alonso" in the expedition with Oñate. Indeed, considering what the politically correct now think of Oñate, perhaps Susanna would no longer want to be associated with him -- or the warriors of righteousness might view Susanna as herself suffering from an "original sin" of imperialism and colonialism. Political righteousness is a tough business.
It turns out that a tutor of the Emperor Charles V was a Luis Cabeza de Vaca (d.1510), a noted Humanist who, according to Charles' aunt, the Archduchess Margaret (1480-1530), showed him "how to behave, from which (given his age) he has profited greatly" [Emperor, A New Life of Charles V, by Geoffrey Parker, Yale, 2019, p.31]. This Cabeza de Vaca came nowhere near New Mexico.
Preston and Child do end up referring to something that I did not know. They have Carson ask Cabeza de Vaca where her name, "Head of Cow," came from. Of course, again, as a New Mexico native, Carson should already know about Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; but she tells him something more:
This is about the battle of The legend is that Martín Alhaja left a cow's head to mark a pass on the route to the battle. This may have been the Despeñaperros Pass, where the army is supposed to have been led by "a local shepherd." I don't know if that was Alhaja, or whether there are different stories involved here. In any case, soldier or shepherd, Alhaja was ennobled and given the name Cabeza de Vaca. So, despite the strange or gratuitous falsifications of Preston and Child's book, I'm thankful that they brought this detail about Cabeza de Vaca's name to my attention. I'm not a New Mexico native.
In 2023 Preston and Child have a new book, Dead Mountain, which continues earlier books featuring archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson. In the book, an ancient Indian burial is found in a cave in the Manzano Moutains, which are south of the Sandias on the east side of the Rio Grande Valley, south of Albuquerque. This is complicated by a couple of other, recent bodies also being in the cave, at least one of which is a murder victim. Since this is in a National Forest, that puts it under the jurisdiction of the FBI. The area is also within Torrance County, whose sheriff is a self-promoting jerk who wants to be part of the action. Thus, Nora Kelly is involved in the archaeology of the burials and Corrie Swanson is involved in the investigation of the modern bodies. If the burials can be associated with the nearby Isleta Pueblo, then they come under its jurisdiction and control.
The Torrance County sheriff insists on being involved at the site and even invites in the Press, including local televison stations, despite the cave not having yet been processed by the archaeologists or the FBI. He is put in his place and, naturally, conceives a grudge against all involved. This comes to a head when Nora Kelly determines that the burials are Isleta, and the Tribal Council asks her to immediately exhume all the remains and convey them to the Pueblo. Without permission from the FBI, the Forest Sevice, etc., this is cutting a few corners, but Kelly reflects that no relevant authorities are likely to challenge a fait accompli, as they do not.
Unfortuntely, the Sheriff has left a deputy at the cave, who calls in the Sheriff, who confronts the archaeology team, which includes a member of the Isleta Tribal Council. An altercation ensues, and the Sheriff ends up arresting Nora's brother, who was along to help out. Since the Sheriff seems more interested in the arrest than anything else, the burials are successfully recovered and conveyed to the Isleta Pueblo.
My problem with the story here is that the arrest of Nora's brother leads to a subplot that has nothing to do with the main story and could easily be left out without affecting what is otherwise the course of the book -- it looks like something just to pad the size of the book. And, to get the subplot, we need an "idiot plot device." Thus, first of all, we had already heard that, because of the previous intrusion of the Press, the FBI was going to put in place a large perimeter around the site.
However, when Nora and her team show up, there is no FBI in sight, and this means that there are no Federal authorities to confront the Sheriff and determine what the situation is. This allows the Sheriff, actually, to assault Nora and then claim, with the perjurous testimony of his deputy, that he didn't do it, and that Nora's brother assaulted him. So, in the first place, Preston and Child have forgotten their own information that the FBI will be controlling and monitoring the site.
More important, however, is the whole approach taken by Nora. She knows that, if the Sheriff is involved, there will be trouble. Yet she goes to the site with no one but her archaeological team and one Isleta Council Member, who is carrying an authorization letter. Since the Member is busy in the cave, he doesn't even see the confrontation with the Sheriff.
Instead, being on, in effect, official business of the Isleta Pueblo, Nora should have along a posse of Isleta Indians. Whatever the Sheriff thinks he's doing, this will be intimidating. More importantly, with the posse should be Officers of the Isleta Pueblo Tribal Police. They are there to enforce the order of the Isleta Pueblo Council. That would be more than just intimidating to the Sheriff. Tribal policemen are Federal Agents, since the Pueblo is under the direct authority of the Federal Government.
Preston and Child, however, never mention that there even is such a thing as the Isleta Pueblo Tribal Police Department (despite tout le monde knowing about the Navajo Tribal Police from the Tony Hillerman books); and they seem to think that one Council Member with a letter, who actuallly misses the action, will be enough to handle whatever inconveniences arise. We never hear anything about the Isleta Police in the whole book. This just seems nuts.
As a matter of fact, as we see from the map, adjacent parts of the Manzano Mountains are actually within the Reservation of the Isleta Pueblo. The Tribal Police would have as much business being there as the Sheriff of Torrance County. Preston and Child, of course, don't need to use realistic boundaries in the book: Kirtland Air Force Base, for instance, doesn't extend into the mountains; but it is rather import for the story that it does. That is excusable. It is even excusable to overlook the circumstance that the cave might actually be within the Isleta Reservation.
An "idiot plot device," however, isn't excusable. Even if it didn't occur to Nora Kelly to bring along some moral and legal support, the Pueblo Councilman, familiar with the personality of the Sheriff, and probably suspicious of white authority in general, would not overlook that precaution. If he is there to enforce the order of the Pueblo Council, he would have Officers to assist him and represent his authority.
Apart from all these issues, the Manzano Mountains now may be noteworthy because of the successful movie Oppenheimer [2023], where they form the background, standing in for the Sierra Oscura, to the movie's reconstruction of Trinity Site. This is in the desert east of the town of Belen, in the Rio Grande Valley -- as we see in the image above, a Google StreetView from a road at the outskirts of Belen, looking toward the Manzanos. Viewers of the movie will notice that the camera does not have shots facing west at its Trinity Site, where Belen might be in the background.
The list of governors here is from Wikipedia. Other information on New Mexico history, like the list of Pueblos, comes from the Historical Atlas of New Mexico, by Warren A. Beck and Ynez D. Haase [University of Oklahoma Press, 1969, 1985]. I don't know why a book like that doesn't bother giving a list of the governors, which would take no more than a page or two, but it doesn't. The Navajo Conception of Hózhǫ́
Spanish & Portuguese Colonial Possessions
Pueblo Popu-
lationArea,
acresAge,
yearsLan-
guageAcoma 1,674 248,000 1000 Keresan Cochiti 387 26,500 700 Keresan Isleta 1,974 210,450 400 Tiwa Jemez 1,076 87,000 400 Towa Laguna 2,956 412,000 265 Keresan Nambe 135 19,000 650 Tewa Picuris 100 15,000 760 Tiwa Pojoaque 41 12,000 -- Tewa Sandia 124 23,000 660 Tiwa San Felipe 1,060 49,000 250 Keresan San
Ildefonso224 26,000 660 Tewa San Juan, Ohkay Owingeh 690 13,000 660 Tewa Santa Ana 366 20,000 260 Keresan Santa Clara 535 46,000 600 Tewa Santo
Domingo1,938 67,000 260 Keresan Taos 896 47,000 260 Tiwa Tesuque 142 17,000 660 Tewa Zia 377 90,000 660 Keresan Zuñi 4,861 400,000 270 Zuñian
I do not believe that any of these other cities, however, has as spectacular a backdrop as does Albuquerque, with the 10,000 ft. Sandia Mountains rising precipitously to the east. I don't think I've seen any place that looks quite like that, in majesty and beauty. From a distance, the cliffs look vertical; but there are hiking trails -- I've been up one of them. Fortunately, at Sandia Crest, you can take the Tram back down.
The flag of the State of New Mexico, adopted in 1925, contains a sun symbol of the Zia Pueblo. While the Pueblos were agricultural communities, other Indians of New Mexico were mainly pastoral. These were the Mescalero Apache to the southeast, the Chirichahua Apache to the southwest, the Jicarilla Apache to the north, and the Navajo to the northwest.
Agriculture was not unknown to these groups, especially the Navajo, who farmed in the river canyons of the Colorado Plateau.
My association began in 1962, when I took my first airplane flight to El Paso, on the way to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo. This was my uncle Dan Hendrix, who was a test pilot for the F-102 at Holloman and later was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
They had traded in their previous mobile home for a double wide, nearly as big as a house. Later they would move into a real house in Alamogordo, but I never did get back to visit them there, before they moved all the way to Washington State. Our 1989 trip continued on to Santa Fe and finally to stay with Craig and his family in the new house he had built in the hills above I-40, east of the city.
Mount Dragon
After an hour of steady driving, Singer pulled the lead Hummer to a halt. "Ground zero," he said to Carson.
Meanwhile, Preston and Child never do explain what the Jornada del Muerto is all about. Why would anyone traverse a dangerous desert, the "Journey of the Dead," when they could just follow the Rio Grande River? Well, from the map, anyone can see that there is a bend in the River. The Jornada is a short cut. How dangerous a short cut it could be was learned at great cost by many travelers. Preston and Child can't really assume that everyone will know about the history of the route already, or why people should have chanced it, so they should have explained it.
"My family," de Vaca interrupted frostily, "came to America with Don Juan de Oñate. In fact Don Alonso Cabeza de Vaca and his wife almost died of thirst crossing this very desert. That was in 1598, which I'm sure was a lot earlier than when your redneck dustbowl family settled in the Bootheel. But I'm deeply touched you had Mexican friends growing up." [p.66]
"idiot plot device." If Carson was born and raised in New Mexico, he would have to be an idiot to assume that de Vaca was from Mexico -- especially with a surname famous from New Mexican history.
"If you knew your Spanish history," de Vaca said, "you'd know about the name. In 1212, a soldier in the Spanish army marked a pass with a cow skull, and led a Spanish army to victory over the Moors. That soldier was given a royal title and the right to use the name 'Cabeza de Vaca'." [p.245]
Las Navas de Tolosa on 16 July 1212, where an alliance of Spanish Christian Kingdoms broke the power of the Almohads and led to the complete Reconquest of Spain -- except for Granada (which fell in 1492). "Moors" is an ethnically meaningless term (Latin Mauri, "North Africans") that was used by Christians to refer to all Muslims, whether they were Berbers, Arabs, black Africans, or Spanish converts.
Dead Mountain
These stories have generally been in the Southwest, and particularly in New Mexico. The only real problem I had with the book was about something the late movie critics, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, used to call the "idiot plot device," which was something so senseless that it obviously existed in the story only to allow the plot to proceed in a certain way.
Copyright (c) 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved