Resistance

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Illustration of the Popul Vuh by Diego Riveria

Remember us after we are gone. Don’t forget us. Conjure up our faces and our words. Our image will be as a tear in the hearts of those who want to remember us.

Sacred Mayan Prayer

Popul Vuh

The invasion of this hemisphere was not a single event or a series of events of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The invasion and destruction have been constant for five hundred years. Christopher Columbus, Hernando Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, Pedro Alvarado, the Puritans, and other invaders instituted economic and political structures whose legacies still destroy land and people today.

Where once fleets of Spanish galleons transgressed seas loaded with armored soldiers carrying arquebuses and cannon, now U.S. Marines, rapid deployment forces, and CIA covert activities trespass across borders in order to carry out the will of the powerful. Where once the settlers came with horses and dynamite ripping out trees for plantations and roads for gold mines, now multinationals come to the Amazon rainforest with bulldozers and dynamite to clear away ancient trees for huge livestock plantations and roads for gold miners. Where once French, English, and Spanish traders carried human beings into labor slavery, now multinational traders carry factories to Mexico and Central America, delivering workers into virtual wage salary. Where once the invaders came with the requerimiento signed by Pope and King giving the native people an ultimatum: submit or be destroyed; now world lending institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank come armed with new requirements: submit your economic system to suit the world’s dominant countries or you will receive no new loans and your ravished economies will be destroyed. These new requirements sound much like the old patterns of extracting wealth: institute lower wages, increase exports, import technology and expertise from Europe and the United States, and then pay back the loans at exorbitant rates of interest.

Christopher Columbus planted the first sugar cane, instituting both forced labor to work the huge plantations and an export-based economy that made huge profits for a few white Europeans. Today cane cutters in the Dominican Republic and coffee pickers in Central American receive starvation wages while a few wealthy landowners and huge multinational corporations control the land and reap the profits. All of this is the legacy of invasion.

The first invaders said they were bringing God and civilization. In fact, what they brought was feudalism, deadly microbes, slavery, and lust for wealth. Within five hundred years the invaders annihilated whole tribes, killed millions of Africans, destroyed communal lands, eradicated whole species of plant and animal life, and melted sacred art and religious symbols into bullion. They ripped open the veins of Latin America, extracting blood from its people and gold and silver from its mountains.

Yet if invasion has been constant, the resistance to that invasion has also been ceaseless. From the shores of Africa to the Caribbean islands, from the Andean mountains and Guatemalan highlands to the Western plains, people have refused to submit to injustice and have struggled to preserve their culture and dignity. At times it was individual resistance—a runaway slave, a refusal to name co-conspirators, a revival of an outlawed cultural ritual. At other times it was highly organized resistance involving tens of thousands of people, such as the struggle for the independence of Haiti, Pontiac’s Confederacy, the Araucanian resistance, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. More often than not, however, it was episodic and decentralized. Individuals or small bands of rebels decided to strike for freedom, or peasants organized to reclaim their land. From the first slave ships where Africans mutinied to capture the ship to tin miners striking in Bolivia and university students protesting in Mexico City, every generation since 1492 has resisted the invasion.

It would be impossible to document every act of resistance. For one thing, much of that record has been lost, since history is most often written by the conquerors. White Europeans have, for the most part, written the history of this hemisphere. The words of U.S. history texts used in schools show the perspective. As one textbook summarizes: Columbus’s voyage in search of a western route to Asia ended the isolation of American cultures and brought two worlds together.” Those are clearly not the words of an indigenous survivor of the decimation wrought by the European invaders.

http://www.fiu.edu/~northupl/populvuh.html

The selections in this chapter follow major periods or patterns of resistance.

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