Concerning Latin American Culture 9780231880169

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Concerning Latin ^American

Culture

Concerning Latin

American

Culture PAPERS WOODSTOCK,

READ

NEW

EDITED

BY

PUBLISHED COLUMBIA COMMITTEE ON

IN

YORK,

THE

INTERNATIONAL

BYRDCLIFFE, AUGUST,

CHARLES

NEW

UNIVERSITY OF

AT

C.

YORK

PRESS

UNITED

1939,

AND

GRIFFIN

• 19 4 0

• FOR

THE

STATES

INTELLECTUAL

OF

• BY NATIONAL AMERICA

COOPERATION

COPYRIGHT COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

1 9 JO PRESS, N E W

Foreign Agents: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, House, London, E.C. 4, England, AND B . B o m b a y , India; MARU/F.N COMPANY, Tori-Nichome, T o k y o ,

YORK

H u m p h r e y M i l f o r d , Amen I. Building, Nicol R o a d , LTD., 6 Nihonbashi, Japan

MANUFACTURED IN T H E UNITED STATES OF A M E R I C A

Introduction

C

U L T U R E is a word of varied meanings. It reaches all the way from the ivory tower of the recluse to the wide frontiers of all the arts and sciences. In the Byrdcliffe Afternoons we are free to range within this field wherever our interests carry us. T h e hospitality of Byrdcliffe has thrown open the doors to all the genuine manifestations of thought, not only in creative art but also in the expression and dissemination of ideas. These two fields complement each other because of the fundamental fact that the conditions under which we do our thinking determine to a large extent its character and direction. T h e conferences conducted by my colleague, Professor Martin Schütze, during July dealt mainly with the field of creative thinking. W e now turn to the other half of the problem, that of attempting to understand the drift and current of culture in the broader sense. T o Mrs. Whitehead and to her son, Mr. Peter Whitehead, we are indebted for the opportunity to meet here in a spot dedicated to the life of the spirit and the appreciation of things of beauty, both for those occasions when we would make our escape to a pleasant symposium of free intellectual intercourse and when we listen to those who speak with authority on things unfamiliar to us. It is now over thirty years ago that Mr. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead founded Byrdcliffe as a community center for arts, letters, and artistic handicraft. A student of Ruskin and Morris, and a devotee of Italian art, he found in the natural beauty of Woodstock Valley and its surrounding mountains a fitting setting for an American counterpart to the experience of his youth. Byrdcliffe thus became a pioneer in the movement which brought to Woodstock artists, musicians, and writers, who have car-

VI

INTRODUCTION

ried on the Byrdcliffe tradition for the most part independently of one another, but upon the whole creating a unique neighborhood. T h e Byrdcliffe Afternoons are something more than a revival of the initial spirit of Byrdcliffe. Begun in the summer of 1938, they have offered a program of conferences and discussions covering discursively many varied fields of intellectual and artistic interest. In 1939 the program was lengthened to cover the two months of J u l y and August. T h e conferences during J u l y were similar to those of 1938 and dealt with literature and various forms of art. T h e program for August opened a field that was entirely new for most of the audience, the culture of Latin America. It is this series which furnishes the text for the present volume. It would have been practically impossible for any single individual to have arranged so comprehensive a series as this without the support of an institution created for the purpose of maintaining and increasing our understanding of the cultural history and outlook of other nations. Fortunately, this is exactly the purpose for which the National Committee of the United States of America on Intellectual Cooperation was created. It is an unofficial, self-perpetuating academy, composed of some twenty-eight members, each of whom represents some one field of cultural interest. Its purpose is to enlarge our vision of the intellectual and artistic life by furthering intercourse among leaders in literature, arts, and sciences in other countries. Its method of operation is simple enough; for example, when a question comes up in the field of music, literature, art, or science, it is referred to that member or those members of the Committee within whose field of competence it lies. When the proposition is a large one, as for instance the question of copyright, a special committee is appointed to study the question or to solve it. Similar committees in other countries meet it halfway in all of these activities. T h e committee was created in response to a movement set

INTRODUCTION

vii

going in Europe at the close of the World War. Two Belgian intellectuals, Senator Lafontaine and Professor Otlet, came to the Peace Conference with the warning that a League of Nations would be a thing of national politics and self-interest so long as nations failed to understand one another's history, outlook, and aspiration. They succeeded, in spite of the opposition of the practical statesmen of the day, in forming an inconspicuous section of the League of Nations which bore the title "International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation." The English-speaking world was fearful that this effort to create an international academy would open the doors to theorists who would discredit the League, and succeeded in having the committee's program for the first ten years of its existence limited to such subjects as archeology, the arts, scholarship, and science. It now includes political theory as well, but has nothing whatever to do with politics. T h e American Committee was created in the first instance to serve as a national center to help find those institutions or individuals that might be interested in preserving the universality of culture at a time when nationalism is rampant. It is independent of the international committee and chooses for itself the things it wants to do. This series of lectures, for example, is wholly our own enterprise, and Geneva has not even been informed of it. Similar committees were set up in the Latin American countries and with them we correspond and cooperate. T h e president of one of them, that of Chile, is one of our guests. T h e present series of conferences directs our attention to those nations which share with us the heritage of European cultures in the New World. Broad as our survey is, however, it leaves untouched not only many of the countries to the south of us but also the richly varied life of Canada on the north. It is for many of us a pioneering effort to understand the things that mean most to those who look to Spain and Portugal as their motherlands, rather than to the countries of northern Europe. In this regard our series is but one phase

viii

INTRODUCTION

of a notable effort which is taking place in the United States today to make our relations with Latin America not a mere expression of diplomacy or business but to vitalize them through popular understanding. Last year our own government took cognizance of the need for this kind of work which our National Committee had been carrying on, and created in the State Department the Division of Cultural Relations. Although its work during its opening months has been mainly with Latin America, it is, as Dr. Cherrington tells us, an official recognition by our government of the world-wide need for preserving the universal outlook in all cultural matters. This is a new department of the Government of the United States. T h e r e are those who will have misgivings for fear the establishment of a Division of Cultural Relations may prove to be a disguise for diplomacy or even a step toward government control and censorship of free opinion. Fortunately every precaution has been taken to prevent this from happening. T h e State Department has made it clear that it does not propose to substitute itself for private and unofficial organs. Its purpose is rather to facilitate the growth and enlarge the opportunities for the action of private citizens or committees, such as this, sponsoring freely their programs. In short, the chief activities of intellectual cooperation will continue to be carried by private bodies, but the Government will offer freely aid and counsel. T h i s symbolic act of recognition of the legitimacy of the attempt to extend national cultures by reciprocal effort has been welcomed on all sides. When the Division was founded, the Secretary of State appointed as its chief one who from long experience knew just what was most needed at this time. Dr. Ben M. Cherrington was for many years the Director of the Institute of Social Studies, which, from its seat in Denver, Colorado, affected profoundly the interests of the people of the Rocky Mountain region, transforming a local and limited outlook to one of world perspective. Now he is engaged in the same kind of task on a national scale, having as his allies

INTRODUCTION

ix

bodies like the National Committee of the United States of American on Intellectual Cooperation, upon whose support in the furtherance of his great task he can count to the full. Dr. Cherrington sees the problems of the Division of Cultural Relations as they present themselves to the organizing executive. It was inevitable therefore that he should open the series of conferences with a reminder of our own interest in the problem of the Americas as a whole, leaving Dr. Richard F. Pattee, also of the Division of Cultural Relations, to carry us over the Caribbean Sea for a hurried survey of the varied history and social life of all the diverse peoples who, with the Mexicans, are our closest neighbors on the south. Dr. Pattee's brilliant and discriminating picture of the way in which neighboring states have been so differently affected by history and race, by Indian, Negro, and Spaniard, deals with elemental facts in an unforgettable way. From the Amazon Valley and the knotted ranges of the northern Andes to where the islands of the Antilles jot farthest eastward on the Spanish Main, lies a region of the Americas which holds an attraction for us which transcends its early history and romance. Dr. Pattee evokes to the full the magic of this attraction. But the full understanding of the interplay of the Old World and the New carries us back to Spain at the height of its great creative period in art and literature. The interpreter of the Spanish heritage of Latin America, Professor de los Rios, was formerly Minister of Education of the Spanish Republic and Spanish Ambassador to the United States. In two lectures he deals with the Spain that was left behind and the Spain that was brought overseas. Such a vast subject had to be treated in wide perspectives, but throughout the survey runs a unifying thought which gives to the tragic story of the present a note of unyielding faith in the ultimate triumph of the freedom of the human spirit. T h e contribution of Portugal and the social history of Brazil, the themes of Professor Freyre's chapter, form a strik-

X

INTRODUCTION

ing counterpart to those of Professor de los Rios. Of Brazil it might almost be said that we have only recently discovered how different it is from Spanish America. T h e mixture of races, begun centuries ago in Portugal itself and developed in Brazil as nowhere else in the Americas, has now begun to express itself in coherent artistic form. It is therefore b u t a short step from Professor Freyre's analysis of Brazilian life to the survey of Brazilian music by Professor Berrien. While this discussion does not limit itself to Brazil, it centers there, in the contributions of living composers, and so opens the door to a strange but rich development in music. By happy chance the lecture on Latin American Art, by Dr. Smith, took the same turn and concentrated primarily upon Brazil. In these three chapters Brazil is therefore brought into the picture more fully than has relatively been the case in most descriptions of Latin American culture. T h e third great element in Latin American cultural history is that furnished by the natives themselves. Professor Griffin's treatment of this is above all a reminder of the complexity of the problem, and of the great regional differences in the strength of aboriginal cultural influence, caused by the varying degrees of culture of the Indians when the E u r o p e a n came and the varying strength of European influences d u e to social and economic pressures. T h e study of native cultures is shown to be a field offering rich returns to the social scientist and one which is b o u n d to furnish a needed corrective to the facile generalizations of the earlier school of historians. Fortunately it is a field which is opening u p under the stimulus of investigators today. More general is the treatment of trends in Latin American literature by Mrs. J a m e s , of the Pan American Union. Against the historical background of changing ideals she draws attention to the interplay of realism in art and literature as a first strong effort at native expression in the post-war period. T h e thoughtful and keen analysis of trends in Latin

INTRODUCTION

xi

American education by Professor Labarca, of the University of Santiago, Chile, opens a practically new field to most readers in the United States. Not the least significant fact is the influence of men like Horace Mann and John Dewey, to mention only two of our educational leaders, upon the trend of education in Latin American countries. The differences in cultural background, however, are not lost sight of in this survey, nor the relative adaptation of methods to changing situations. Not the least interesting feature of this contribution is the fact that Professor Labarca herself is so closely associated with the study of education in the United States. T h e series of conferences had originally been planned so as to avoid dealing with Latin American culture country by country, it being intended to cover the field topically rather than geographically. This was all the more desirable because, by an unhappy chance, there was no one present to represent the civilization which centers in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Nevertheless, as has already been noted, Brazilian culture stands out father distinctly and that of Chile only less so. But Mexico, as the immediate neighbor of the United States, possesses an interest of its own. Therefore it was treated separately by Mr. Weyl, in a sketch of its social history which is as penetrating in its analysis as it is challenging in the lessons implicit in it. It would be hard to find anywhere a history more tragic than that which has there reached its culmination in our own day. T o those who may be tempted to criticize the effort to survey the social history and cultural outlook of Latin America in these few chapters, the answer is that the authors afford us a diversity of approach to the subject and a variety in their value judgments that can not fail to be stimulating. T h e participation of contributors who are natives or residents of long standing in Spain, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, as wrell as the United States is in itself no mean beginning in the effort to secure a broader appreciation of the history of culture in Latin America.

xii

I N T R O D U C T I O N

In the interest of u n i f o r m i t y in a series w h i c h

includes

c o n t r i b u t i o n s of a general and broad character as well as others m o r e specialized, it has been thought best to dispense with the p u b l i c a t i o n of the documentation that accompanied some of the manuscripts. T h e spoken word naturally loses s o m e t h i n g w h e n set forth in a record of this kind; but the texts h a v e been e d i t e d for publication by Professor Griffin w i t h d u e regard to the needs of the reader, to whose j u d g m e n t and interest it is n o w submitted. JAMES T .

Columbia February,

University 1940

SHOTWELL

Contents INTRODUCTION JAMES T . SHOTWELL Bryce

Professor

Columbia CULTURAL IN

of

the

University,

THE

History

New

RELATIONS

WESTERN

of

International

Relations,

York OF T H E

UNITED

STATES

WORLD

BEN M . CHERRINGTON Chief

of the

State,

Washington,

THE

Division

of

Cultural

Relations,

Department

of

D.C.

CROSSWAYS

OF

THE

AMERICAS

RICHARD F. PATTEE Division ton,

of Cultural

Relations,

Department

of State,

Washing-

D.C.

SPAIN

IN

THE

EPOCH

OF

AMERICAN

COLONIZA-

TION FERNANDO DE LOS RIOS Former

Ambassador

States; Professor THE

ACTION

of the Spanish

of Law, OF

University

SPAIN

IN

Republic of

to the

United

Madrid

AMERICA

FERNANDO DE LOS RIOS SOME OF

ASPECTS

OF

THE

PORTUGUESE

SOCIAL

DEVELOPMENT

AMERICA

GILBERTO FREYRE Professor

of History,

University

of Pernambuco,

Pernambuco,

Brazil THE

SIGNIFICANCE

TURE

IN

HISPANIC

OF

NATIVE

INDIAN

CUL-

AMERICA

CHARLES C . GRIFFIN Assistant sie,

N.Y.

Professor

of

History,

Vassar

College,

Poughkeep-

xiv

CONTENTS

MEXICO,

EUROPEAN

AND

NATIVE

124

NATHANIEL WEYL Woodstock, SOME

N.Y.

CONSIDERATIONS

PORARY

LATIN

REGARDING

AMERICAN

CONTEM-

MUSIC

151

WILLIAM BERRIEN Professor

of Portuguese

ern University, BRAZILIAN

Language

Evanston,

and Literature,

Northwest-

III.

ART

181

ROBERT C . SMITH Hispanic SPANISH

Foundation, AMERICAN

Library

of Congress,

LITERATURE

Washington, AND

D.C.

ART

197

CONCHA ROMERO JAMES Chief

of the Division

Pan American

Union,

EDUCATIONAL

of the Intellectual Washington,

DEVELOPMENT

Cooperation

of

the

D.C. IN

LATIN

AMER-

ICA

217

AMANDA LABARCA HUBERTSON Government of Chile,

Representative

Santiago

de

Chile

on the Council

of the

University

Concerning

Latin Jlmerican

Culture

Cultural

Relations

of the United

in the Western B E N M.

1

States

World

CHERRINGTON

AM GLAD to be present and to participate in the opening session of this series of lectures on Latin American culture, arranged through the helpful cooperation of the National Committee of the United States of America on Intellectual Cooperation. They are but one more evidence of the fact that the people of the Americas have begun on their own account and without urging from governments to know and understand one another; their history, their outlook on life, their ideals and aspirations, their finest creations of mind and spirit: these must be shared in common. On every hand, in the United States, is unmistakable evidence of the eager desire of our people for better knowledge and understanding of our neighbors to the South and a wish in turn to be known and understood by them. Anyone who has visited the other American countries recently will testify as to their readiness to share their cultural and intellectual attainments with us. In the United States active and effective societies, clubs, and organizations of every kind exist to promote cultural interchange and sympathetic understanding of the culture, history, and social institutions of other peoples. Colleges and universities have taken an active part in the movement. T h e work of many of these institutions has been worthy of the highest praise. Nevertheless, these institutions have been handicapped by the lack of an agency in our government to stimulate, coordinate, and facilitate their endeavors. T o meet this need the Division of Cultural Relations has been created in the Department of State. In the words of the departmental order of July

4

BEN

M.

CHERRINGTON

28, 1938, the Division of Cultural Relations was established to have "general charge of official international activities of this Department with respect to cultural relations, embracing the exchange of professors, teachers, and students; cooperation in the field of music, art, literature, and other intellectual and cultural attainments; the formulation and distribution of libraries of representative works of the United States and suitable translations thereof; the preparations for the management of the participation by this Government in international expositions in this field; supervision of participation by this Government in international radio broadcasts; encouragement of a closer relationship between unofficial organizations of this and of foreign governments engaged in cultural and intellectual activities; and, generally, the dissemination abroad of the representative intellectual and cultural works of the United States and the improvement and broadening of the scope of our cultural relations with other countries." T h e field of activities thus laid out for the Division is that of genuine cultural relations. It is not a "propaganda" agency, in the popular sense of the term, which carries with it implications of penetration, imposition, and unilateralism. If its endeavors are to be directed toward the development of a truer and more realistic understanding between the people of the United States and those of other nations, it is believed that such a goal can most surely be attained by a program which is definitely educational in character, and which emphasizes the essential reciprocity of cultural relations. A primary function of the Division will be to serve as a clearing house and coordinating agency for the activities of private agencies in the field of cultural relations. T h e efforts of the Division will have relation to nations in all parts of the world, but during the initial phase of its program particular attention will be accorded the other American republics. Among the projects to which the Division is giving immediate attention is the Convention for the Promotion of InterAmerican Cultural Relations, signed in Buenos Aires in 1936,

THE

UNITED

STATES

5

and calling for the annual exchange among the signatories of two graduate students or teachers and one professor. In addition to the United States, nine countries have ratified the instrument: Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. It is hoped that the establishment of these government exchanges may serve to stimulate the offering of additional scholarships and fellowships by universities and colleges in all sections of the United States. T h e Division is serving as a clearing center for activities of an international cultural or intellectual character, of various departments and agencies of the federal government. It will also offer every possible aid in behalf of the United States in the very important work of the Division of Intellectual Cooperation of the Pan American Union. In a democracy such as ours the initiative for cultural exchange quite properly resides with private agencies and institutions and, as already indicated, the major function of the Division of Cultural Relations will be to make the good offices of government available to private enterprise. In this connection, too, the Pan American Union has been most helpful, especially in the work of its Division of Intellectual Cooperation. T h e promotion of cultural relations with us is essentially a people's movement, and is mostly carried on by unofficial bodies. T h e y have this advantage, that they can move freely and without any preoccupations due to government policies. Among these organizations the Institute of International Education has long played a noticeable part in the furtherance of exchanges of professors and students between the United States and Latin America, and Dr. Duggan, its president, has won wide recognition as a statesman in education. T h e American Council of Learned Societies and other similar bodies are now exploring the field for further opportunities for intercourse in the arts and sciences. It is in this connection that the National Committee on Intellectual Coopera-

6

BEN

M.

CHERRINGTON

tion, under whose auspices we meet today, has played a most helpful role. These meetings which it has arranged therefore fit into a larger movement, the outlines of which are only now taking definite shape. In this movement, education inevitably will play a leading role. T h e teaching of languages, quite logically, should be the first subject for consideration. Our schools can well give Spanish an important place in the program of studies, for we must remember that Spanish is one of the most vigorous of living tongues, world-wide in its diffusion, tremendously vital in its capacity to expand, and the instrument of expression of more than twenty growing nations. Spanish and Spanish American thought, literature, and production contain a wealth of spiritual values which need to be tapped by the citizens of the United States. T h e fact may be emphasized at the same time that the teaching of the Portuguese language is a matter of great importance. For reasons which are difficult to discover, the Portuguese language has never received adequate attention in this country. Brazil constitutes geographically half of South America and with its forty million people is one of the most vital nations of the New World. Its language, Portuguese, is part and parcel of its cultural heritage. It is high time that due recognition be given in the United States to the importance of the Portuguese language, rich in literature, forceful, expressive, and adaptable, the instrument of thought of a remarkable people. We in the United States are largely unacquainted with the literature of our southern neighbors; their history, biography, fiction, and poetry remain to be opened to us. It is equally true that our literature is little known in the other American republics and that the widespread distribution of our better works would meet with a ready welcome in those countries. If books in English on the United States are scarce in their libraries, those which have been translated into Spanish or Portuguese are even more rare. T h e r e is, in fact, no adequate one-volume history of the United States available in either

THE

UNITED

STATES

7

language. T h e Director of the National Library at Bogotá, Colombia, when notified of his assignment to the embassy at Washington, sought to discover in his library a history of the United States in Spanish which would provide his wife with some information on this country. The only book available dealt with the seventeenth century. It is encouraging to note that the American Library Association has recently received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the promotion of library relations with the other American republics. Through an office to be established in Washington, studies of books and library conditions will be directed, which will serve as a basis for increasing the exchange of publications and developing library cooperation. Investigation most assuredly will disclose ways in which educators may participate effectively in this important matter of the exchange of literature. Educational and informative films, minimizing as they do the barrier of language differences, can be utilized as an agency for conveying understanding and appreciation of the representative cultures of the American peoples. Well-established national organizations, devoted to the production and distribution of educational and informative films, are now exploring the possibilities of exchange relationships, with a view to making available to local schools throughout our country motion pictures expressive of the thought and life of our neighbors, at the same time offering equivalent films of our life to them. Educators will certainly find effective instruments for promoting understanding in the fields of art and music. T h e art of the United States is known too little outside this country, while the artistic productions of other American nations reach the people of the United States only to a very limited degree. It should be possible to route exhibits of significant art achievements of our neighboring countries through our schools, colleges, and communities. Neither are we familiar with the music of the other Americas, nor they with ours, apart from modern dance music. Concerts by visiting mu-

8

BEN

M. C H E R R I N G T O N

sicians, the use of records of native folk music, visits by individual artists—such activities as these would contribute notably to international cultural understanding. W h a t we seek is to establish the conditions of friendly cooperation and peaceful existence in the Western Hemisphere. But we do not seek this for the Americas alone; to do so would be to mistake the nature of culture and destroy the thing we would create. For culture in its essence is cosmic; any attempt to confine it exclusively within national boundaries is to cut it off from the sustenance by which it lives. N o more is it possible to continentalize culture without stultifying it. We are striving to keep alive in the world the spirit of tolerance, selfrestraint, and justice, which alone can insure the freedom of men's minds and souls. It is a goal to whose attainment each of us will unreservedly dedicate himself, for the highest and best we know in civilization is at stake.

TTfie Crossways RICHARD

I

of the F.

Americas

PATTEE

T IS O B V I O U S that within the limitations of a single essay no adequate portrayal can be given of the past and present of the twenty Latin American nations. In the use of this broad and all-embracing term " L a t i n America," there is often little consciousness of the fact that each of the component parts of this larger unit are independent, vigorous nationalities, perfectly aware of their own individuality and quite disinclined to lose sight of this cultural and historical autonomy. Latin America is infinitely more complex than would appear at first glance. T h e superficial uniformity of a common history, related languages, and a spiritual tradition fundamentally alike, obscures the development of the century of independence, during which national lines have been deepened, a national consciousness intensified, and a cultural maturity attained. It would be hazardous to venture, in a brief discussion, an analysis of nationalities as widely divergent as the Cuban and the Argentine, the Mexican and the Brazilian. T h e r e are, of course, certain broad geographical groupings which safeguard the concept of unity and at the same time take cognizance of the differences which have been mentioned. T h e R i o de la Plata area, the Andean republics, and the Caribbean are geographically and socially logical subdivisions of Hispanic America. It shall be our purpose to examine certain aspects of what may be called civilization in the Caribbean, with reference to those peoples whose shores are washed by the Caribbean Sea. It would be unwise to assume that this geographical fact were in itself a sufficient force for unity. T h e Caribbean is an area

io

RICHARD

F.

PATTEE

of the most extraordinary variations and differentiations. T h e unity is basically geographical and physical. All of the countries of this region, the West Indies, northern South America, and Central America, belong to the area of America which may be designated as subtropical. T h i s condition influences to a very marked degree the economic development. All of the Caribbean countries form a part of the familiar pattern in the development of tropical agriculture. In addition to these geographical and economic factors, there is a varying degree of cultural unity or affinity. With one exception, the Latin peoples of the Caribbean are Spanish in speech, deriving their cultural inspiration from Spain. T h i s heritage has been radically modified, to be sure, through contacts with non-European races. T h e Negro in the West Indies and the Indian in Central America have influenced to a very considerable degree the character of Hispanic civilization in those areas. T h e Caribbean is the focus, as will be observed, of three races. T h a t this area bears a peculiar relation to the United States is unquestionable. Aside from geographical proximity, the history of the United States is full of incidents which demonstrate that the Caribbean area has always been a source of primary concern and interest to American statesmen and in American public opinion. It would be instructive to draw up a list of the historical occasions on which the United States has revealed a keen interest in the Caribbean. A few isolated examples will bear out the observation. T h e Ostend Manifesto of 1854 directed attention sharply to the very real appreciation of certain American interests in the possibilities of Cuba. T h e intensification of the campaign of the slaveholders brought Cuba increasingly to public attention. It is incorrect to assume that the Ten-Year War or the events immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities between Spain and the United States explain the deep-rooted preoccupation of this country for the development and future of Cuba. Perhaps no other territory, except contiguous Mexico, has played as important a role in the foreign relations of this country as

CROSSWAYS

OF

THE

AMERICAS

11

Cuba. T h e war against Spain was largely the outcome of many decades of a policy whose precise features are not even yet very clear. Throughout the nineteenth century Cuba had a place in the international thinking of the United States. With the advent of Cuban independence, Cuban-American relations became the dominant aspect of our interest in the Caribbean. T h e Dominican Republic has not remained outside the sphere of American interest. T h e ill-fated effort to bring about annexation during the administration of President Grant will remind us that this republic was the victim of internal dissatisfaction, leading to overtures abroad. T h e failure of the proposal that the Dominicans be incorporated into the United States did not diminish concern for the fate of that small republic. During the present century one of the focal spots in which armed and fiscal intervention has occurred has been the Dominican Republic. T h e events which transpired in this island republic are closely related to those in neighboring Haiti. Relations between the United States and Haiti began before the republic came into existence. Haitian Negroes under French commanders appeared before Savannah during the Revolutionary War. It is no exaggeration to assert that in a modest but real way Haiti contributed to the independence of the United States. During the period of storm and stress, when Haiti barely managed to maintain itself as an independent state, so beset was it by internal turmoil and external pressure, the United States remained aloof to this most interesting experiment in Negro self-government. It was after the outbreak of the World W a r that Haiti fell victim to the policy of intervention. In 1 9 1 5 American troops disembarked on its soil, to depart belatedly in 1934. T o turn to the northern coast of South America, American relations with Venezuela have been distinguished by interest in the difficulties in which that republic has found itself with various European states. T h e expression of vigorous concern

12

RICHARD

F.

PATTEE

on the part of this government toward the threats of conflict between Venezuela and Great Britain over the ill-defined Guiana boundary, and later over the possibility of German reprisals during the unfortunate crisis with that nation, will be recalled. Colombian-American relations at the turn of the century were aggravated by the Panama incident. T h e rancor produced by this affair, and the hostility and fear in Colombia of the United States, were the less laudable results of the negotiations for the construction of the Panama Canal. A strong resentment, which has required several decades to efface, was the immediate consequence of the diplomatic maneuvers preliminary to the establishment of the canal. Central America, where bananas and archeology vie in importance, has always engaged the deep interest of the United States. T h e struggle over the interoceanic canal, with the rival claims of Panama and Nicaragua, the development of the banana interests, the filibustering expeditions of unsavory personages such as William Walker—these are ties which for good or for ill exist between this country and the small republics of Central America. Intervention was extended to this area. T h e long occupation of Nicaragua recalls the campaign against Sandino and the fiscal reorganization of that state. In other words, there is reason for our interest in the Caribbean. It lies close to us; it is part of our history. It is dependent upon us in the economic sense. It would be unwise to dismiss this area, so variegated and yet so unified, as being merely a multitude of turbulent republics. T h e day of the romantic Spanish Main has fortunately long since passed. In this area are a dozen nationalities, each cognizant of its individuality, and seeking to work out its destiny. T h e i r history, culture, and aspirations are of interest to us. It is our purpose here to indicate the most salient features of the moving drama of the Caribbean. Dr. Philip Ainsworth Means has properly termed this region "the focus of envy." It was so during the colonial era; it has not ceased to be so since in-

CROSSWAYS

OF T H E

AMERICAS

13

dependence was won. Dutch, French, Spanish, and British met in conflict in this sea. Tiny islands and opulent colonies changed hands with vertiginous rapidity. Each European power had its stake in this area of the New World and vestiges of that dominion remain to this day. Dutch islands are to be found in the Lesser Antilles. Curaçao stands as a monument to the welter of races which the Netherlands have fused into a single colony. In Martinique and Guadeloupe the French flag still flies. In Jamaica and in many smaller islands British rule prevails. The Spaniards have gone, having left the last of their West Indian islands in 1899, but their influence has by no means passed. Spain has left what is perhaps more enduring than the actual rule of the British, French, or Dutch: their cultural tradition, the strength of their language, the vigor and tenacity of their civilization. T h e Caribbean area is the crossroads of America. La Habana is the point of contact for the islands, Panama for the mainland. Dr. Octavio Méndez Pereira, of the University of Panama, has called the isthmus the "gozne de dos continentes, puerta de América"—the hinge of two continents, the door of the Americas. The ease of approach, the facility of communication within the area, and the fact that the route of everyone who sought Mexico, the West Coast of South America, or the Mississippi basin passed through the Caribbean, have produced a cosmopolitan undertone. National consciousness is preponderant, to be sure, but underneath is a broader feeling of camaraderie among the most divergent peoples and races. In Curaçao all races and languages mingle. In Panama, the Barbadian Negro, the isthmian Spaniard, the Chinese, and the Hindu all have a share in the community. Every type of European civilization, enriched by the impact of the non-European, has left its mark. The Caribbean is kaleidoscopic, variegated—a veritable mosaic of peoples, ideas, and experiences. The history of the Caribbean reveals an extraordinary sweep. It is a region of contrasts and comparisons. The first

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colony in the New World was established in the Caribbean and the last colony held by Spain was in this area. Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico, separated by the narrow Mona Channel, represent the two extremes of the Spanish colonial epic in the New World—the alpha and the omega of this vast effort to create beyond the seas an empire which was to be a prolongation of the mother country. T h e institution of slavery was first introduced into America in the Caribbean. T h e arrival of slaves in Santo Domingo very early in the sixteenth century was the commencement of the long process which brought to the New World its large Negro population. Slavery became the basis of Caribbean economy. Slaves were first landed on the eastern extremity of the island of Haiti, and it was on the western end, by way of contrast, that their shackles were first thrown off. Close upon the heels of the French Revolution the Negroes of Haiti, incensed against the planters and the plantation system, vaguely stirred by the news from overseas of the Rights of Man, rose in revolt. For years the island was laid waste. Rochambeau, Leclerc, and others were sent out to suppress this uprising. T h e y failed. In 1804 the Republic of Haiti came into existence, the first Negro state in the New World, the first republic to be founded in this hemisphere after the United States. T h u s slavery first entered the New World via the Caribbean and in this same region the first effective blow was struck for its extinction. Curiously enough, though the first independent republic in Latin America was established in the Caribbean, so too was the last of this group of twenty republics. With their independence separated by ninety years, Haiti and Panama constitute the two extremities of Hispanic American political history. Both belong to the Caribbean. T h e first university in the New World was founded in Santo Domingo early in the sixteenth century, under the auspices of the Dominicans. Over four hundred years later the newest institution of higher learning in the Spanish-speaking world, that of Panama, was brought into being. Here again we observe the striking sweep

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of the history of this region. It is an area distinguished by great events and significant movements. The Caribbean was the seat of the first and the last great revolt against Spain. When Francisco de Miranda sought to arouse his fellow Venezuelans against Spanish rule, he sowed the seed which was to grow and mature in emancipation. From 1810, when the cabildo of Caracas took the first steps toward separation, until the Cubans raised the standard of revolt in the last half of the nineteenth century, the Caribbean was the center of emancipation. Independence began and ended there. It was from the Caribbean island of Jamaica that Simón Bolívar, in exile, addressed himself to posterity in the Carta de Jamaica, in which he so effectively summarized his concept of the role and future of Hispanic America. The great line of liberators which included Miranda, Bolivar, Sucre, Flores, and Santander did not become extinct. In Caribbean America this same line culminated in Calixto García, Antonio Maceo, both Cubans, and Máximo Gómez, the daring Dominican who made Cuba's cause his own and won renown in its service. T h e Caribbean has played a crucial role in the history of Hispanic America. Events which have echoed throughout the length and breadth of the continent have had their origin in this region. Often the Caribbean was the spot where the first spark was struck, kindling the Hispanic American world far and wide. T h e evolution of the West Indies has sometimes been called the anarchy of the tropics. This anarchy is not that of confusion, disorder, or destruction, but rather that of indeterminate periods, overlapping epochs, and inarticulate movements. There is an element of anarchy in the violent contrasts of political and social life. Men of the highest intellectual caliber alternate in the presidency with illiterates, as in the case of the refined and cultivated Alexandre Pétion, of Haiti, and Soulouque. The nobility of certain leaders contrasts markedly with the venality and crassness of others, as

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in the case of Duarte, Mella, and Sánchez, the Dominican liberators, in contrast with Santana and Heureux. T h e r e is a curious lack of harmony or coordination between the political evolution and the intellectual development of many of the countries. T h e Dominican littérateur, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, has commented on the prodigious literary production of Santo Domingo, in contrast with the archaic and often rudimentary quality of its political life. It may, perhaps, be a repetition of the history of the Italian city-states, torn by revolution and warfare, and at the same time productive of an art and a literature of the highest order. It would, perhaps, be appropriate to examine rapidly the essential characteristics of the several nations which compose the Caribbean. Indicating the outstanding features of each nationality we may well begin with the outer edge of this sea, the island of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is the eternal colony. Founded as such by Spain, it has never known any other status. Established originally as a center of colonization, this island became in due time a way station to other colonies. Unfortunate in its geography, Puerto Rico has suffered the overshadowing influence of larger and more important enterprises. Neighboring Santo Domingo was the administrative center of the Spanish West Indian possessions. Cuba and the coast of Tierra Firme were more important economically. Puerto Rico vegetated as a secondary possession, prized largely because of its convenience on the way to more significant regions. T h e transition to American rule meant no violent political uprooting. Washington was substituted for Madrid. T h e temper and mentality of the people continued to be colonial, with the aggravating factor that instead of a racial and cultural affinity between metropolis and colony friction grew out of the impact of Spanish and Anglo-American civilizations. Politically a colony, economically depressed, the cultural factor has often been overlooked. Colonialism is often much more than a form of government. It is an attitude of mind, a spirit, a viewpoint, and a way of living. Dependence

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is likely to breed immaturity, insufficiency, inability to deal effectively with problems of politics and economics. T h e r e is a fatalism and a mental lassitude which may be attributed in part to the condition of perpetual tutelage in which the island has found itself. Some have called this a "colonial mentality." Others prefer to believe it the result of isolation, of the absence of contacts or factors of a material character. It is a matter of fact, however, that Puerto Rico occupies a distinctly ambiguous position. Its people are Latin Americans, born and bred in the Spanish way of life, strongly addicted to the language and the culture inherited from Spain. T h e r e is an interesting contrast in the fact that the centers of cultural and political gravity are not the same. Whether a people can attain spiritual prosperity and cultural maturity, while torn between two extremes, is a question of the greatest importance. Puerto Rico is the outpost of the United States in the Caribbean, the point of most intimate contact with the peoples of Hispanic America. It is the only region under the jurisdiction of the United States which is inhabited solely by Latin Americans. It thus presents a problem of peculiar difficulty, defying easy analysis, fraught with contradictions and exceptions, the solution of which is of vast moment, both to this country and Hispanic America. Close by is the Dominican Republic, occupying two-thirds of the island of Haiti and separated from the republic of that name by an artificial boundary. T h e story of the Dominican Republic is one of turbulence, dictatorship, and of heroic effort to preserve Spanish civilization, against the tremendously absorbing force of the African. T h e struggle of many decades against Haiti produced an indelible impression on the Dominican mind. Negro blood filtered in, Negro influence became very marked. In spite of twenty-two years of Haitian domination, the Dominicans resisted absorption and the Spanish tradition prevailed. Cuba has been spoken of as one of the most heroic, generous, and original of the Caribbean countries. Cuba has been

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one of the first Spanish-speaking countries to proclaim the validity of the mixed race as a basis of its national evolution. Its history is full of heroism and abnegation. Ceaseless war during the best part of the nineteenth century, economic misery followed by spurts of prosperity, have played their part in the formation of the Cuban national consciousness. García Calderón, the brilliant Peruvian essayist, has summarized the story of Cuba in the last century in the following terms: " W e see generals of thirty, poetical swordsmen, divided between their battles and their verses; irreducible guerrillas, orators full of tropical eloquence; passionate pilgrims who wander through America proclaiming the miseries of Spanish rule." This was the Cuba of the nineteenth century, poor, miserable, ambitious and courageous. T h e epic of its independence is one of surpassing grandeur and moving pathos. T h e audacity, dauntless courage, and dogged persistence of the Cuban mambises is a page of unforgettable sublimity in the history of Caribbean America. In passing to the continent of South America, two Caribbean nations need be mentioned: Venezuela and Colombia. T h e first is a vast area, stretching back into the interior of the continent. A land of immense llanos, or rolling plains, and the great Orinoco River, the organized life of Venezuela is conducted in a narrow strip along the coast. T h e Venezuela observable on the map and the Venezuela which works, develops, and carries on the activity of a civilized community are two different things. T h e r e is a remarkable disproportion between the total area and that which is actually utilized for the national life. Venezuela of more recent years has been a strange combination of political and economic vicissitudes. T h e regime of the late Juan Vicente Gómez, patriarchal, and favored by the productivity of the rich oil wells, was an anachronism in the modern world. T h e history of the republic has been that of a succession of extraordinary personages. José Páez, the llanero, was responsible for the establishment of Venezuela. T h e separate existence of this republic was the

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consequence of the breakdown of the ideal of Simón Bolívar that Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela should constitute a single state. Páez, unlettered and insubordinate, broke the link with C o l o m b i a in 1830. Since then the country has known dictator after dictator, some more cultivated than others, some rough and untutored, typical caudillos of the nineteenth century. Páez, the Monagas, C i p r i a n o Castro, G ó m e z — s u c h are some of the outstanding names that adorn the annals of Venezuelan history. T h e republic was in many respects the feudal manor of a small n u m b e r of great families. It was the birthplace of the greatest South American liberators, Bolivar and Sucre, and at the same time was the land of the most consistent tradition of dictatorship—a curious paradox exemplif y i n g the historical contradiction of so many of these lands of the Caribbean. It has been said that the three regions which formerly constituted Greater Colombia are possessed of well-defined characteristics: Venezuela has been called a barracks, a land of soldiery, unbridled military passion, and audacious and courageous army chieftains; Colombia, a land of universities, of rhetoric, poetry, and the cultivation of the arts; Ecuador, a convent, a land of mysticism, of austerity, and of conventual retirement. T h o u g h merely generalizations not to be accepted literally, the designations are suggestive of the spirit which preponderates in these states. T h e second great South American republic bordering on the Caribbean is Colombia. T h i s republic is Caribbean only in part. Its capital lies far inland, high up in the Andes, remote from contact with the sea. Subtropical C o l o m b i a is in a different world from Bogotá. Cartagena, historic, hoary with tradition and legend, and Barranquilla, a bustling commercial port, constitute Caribbean Colombia, tropical in atmosphere and in background. T h e first fifty years of the existence of independent C o l o m b i a was a period of chaos and strife. W i t h liberals against conservatives, clericals against anticlericals, civil wars were frequent and violent. A l l this has passed. T h e culture of the republic, expressed originally in

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thought and letters, has been translated into civic action. Today Colombia has overcome the initial period of turmoil, and maturity has brought political stability and a high sense of civic responsibility. Panama was once part of Colombia. Until 1903 the isthmus was a department of Panama, remote from Bogotá, to be sure, and not always content with the management of things by the central government. T h e isthmus had languished during the nineteenth century. Colombia was unwieldy, huge in proportions, and Panama was merely one and not the closest of the many departments. Discontent of the Panamanians through the greater part of the century, culminated in their independence in 1903. T h e events of November of that year are too well known to need repeating. T h e r e is still much confusion as to the actual responsibility for the separation of Panama from Colombia and for the establishment of the republic. Suffice it to say that Panama deemed it inevitable, a natural step in the development of the idea of the interoceanic canal. T h e youngest republic in America was born, a nationality created around an idea—the piercing of the narrow belt of land separating the Caribbean from the Pacific Ocean. T h e Panamanian people constitute an agglomeration of stocks and races. Old Panama is typical of the strong Hispanic background. New Panama is a composite of Negroes brought from all parts of the West Indies, Orientals, Hindus, and Jews. All of these peoples have found the isthmus a meeting place. T h i s great crossroads of the Caribbean and South America is remarkable for its cosmopolitan quality and universal atmosphere, caused by the mingling of these many races and nationalities. It is a community which lives on commerce, drawing its lifeblood from the Panama Canal. Central America is a unity artificially broken. T h e idea of a confederation has never been entirely abandoned. T h e r e are Central American leaders of thought who deem the breaking up of the region into the five republics a great disaster.

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A Nicaraguan, Dr. Salvador Mendieta, has devoted a lifetime to propaganda for the unionist cause. In spite of the ties of colonial days and the sentiment of solidarity existing today, friction persists and clashes have been frequent. T h e differences between these republics are quite .evident to the observing eye. Costa Rica and Salvador, lands where Spanish blood is to be found in the greatest proportion, are distinct from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, where the indigenous population is important. El Salvador is the most densely populated, the most industrialized, and the most active of the five economically. Costa Rica is European, the Indian constituting only an occasional element in the total population. Honduras and Nicaragua, victims of much internal convulsion, are less privileged economically. Guatemala, an appendage of Mexico in a sense, is extremely original in its art, folklore, and rich Indian tradition. Most of the Caribbean countries, with the exception of Colombia and Venezuela, are small in area and limited in economic resources. T h e social pattern prevailing today is in large measure the outcome of the economic order which developed during the colonial period and which has been perpetuated since independence. Economically these countries may be called colonial. The term implies not inferiority, but a high degree of dependence on outside conditions. Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Guatemala cannot evolve an independent economy, as they are strictly limited to dependence on one or more basic products. This singlecrop economy, with all of the dangers inherent in it, was bound up with a slave economy, the effects of which, even after abolition, have not entirely disappeared. Obviously the influence of this type of economic organization has penetrated every phase of the national life. Independence of action is curtailed; dependence on world markets is increased; and even intellectual and artistic life must depend in considerable measure on the condition of the sugar or coffee market. Quotas and other restrictions strike deeply into the

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vital life of these nations. In many cases the evils of absenteeism have become manifest. The case of Haiti is perhaps the most singular. This little republic has succeeded in maintaining what may be termed a precapitalistic order, in which the small landowner has retained control of his little parcel of land. For this reason the Haitian peasant, although sunk in poverty, has been able to resist in part the inevitable depression resulting from a fluctuating coffee market, the principal source of governmental revenue. T h e racial pattern of the Caribbean, as has been suggested, is wide and varied. Cuba is the typical melting pot, the crucible of a mixed race, where white and black are working out a common destiny. Reference has been made to the fact that in this vital process Cuba has made a significant contribution to the experience of mankind in the Western Hemisphere. Cuba has witnessed during the past ten years a veritable renaissance of the study and investigation of the Negro. Dr. Fernando Ortiz, the great Cuban student of the Negro, has affirmed that the Cuban Negro is the equivalent of the Indian elsewhere. The black man is an integral, component part of the social structure of Cuba. Economically he is indispensable, socially he is a reality, culturally he is a promise. The recognition of this fact is of far-reaching spiritual significance. Cuba is the home of a vigorous literature, especially in poetry, inspired by the Negro theme. Cuban Negro and mulatto writers, Guillen, Ballagas, and many others have contributed verse that is strikingly original. The poesia afro-cubana is a genre in itself and has exercised its influence in the Dominican Republic and in Puerto Rico. The Club Atenas and the Sociedad de Estudios Afro-Cubanos are institutions devoted to the search for the cultural expression of both Negro and white. This effort is inspired by the conviction that the genuine Cuban must be the product of the spiritual and physical amalgamation of the two races. Cuba is the melting pot, but Haiti is the embodiment of the Negro's hopes and failures in a society of his own creation.

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It has often been stated that Haiti is an immense laboratory of sociological experimentation. Here the Negro is to be found in an atmosphere for which he is largely responsible. It must be added, however, that the creation of this black republic and its maintenance during 135 years have been almost exclusively the result of the energy and ingenuity of the Haitian himself. No aid came from abroad during the first hundred years of independence. Instead of being given a helping hand, Haiti was the victim of studied indifference or thinly veiled contempt on the part of the other powers. T h e r e is poignant tragedy in the slow and tedious process of building this black state. In 1804 Haiti began with nothing. An illiterate, grossly uninstructed army and peasantry, leaders who were themselves the product of no other school than the battlefield, a total absence of experience, guidance, or even sympathy—under these handicaps the Haitian people began the laborious ascent to the ranks of civilized and organized nations. It has been a long and often devious task. T h e r e has been disorder, chaos, and revolution. Presidents have been killed, mob rule has prevailed, and revolts have been put down mercilessly. T h e story of Haiti is tumultuous and agonizing in its frequent retardations. There has been an enduring faith, however, which has carried the little republic through its crises. Haiti is French, black, and independent, original, and unique, an experiment without counterpart in the New World. In Haiti it is essential that the Negro race gain that self-assurance which is so important for its salvation. If the West Indies have accepted, for better or for worse, the challenge of racial mixture and miscegenation, the same cannot be said of many of the Central American states. T h e Indian tends to be the alien, the onlooker, even the intruder. Guatemala and Nicaragua are primarily Spanish republics, within which the Indian labors. There is, of course, an Indianist sentiment, a feeling that all is not perfect when a vast portion of the population exists without the pale of

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organized society. Nevertheless, the contrast is strong with the West Indies, where amalgamation is the purpose and mainspring of the national life. T h e Caribbean contains two great racial basins: the West Indies, where Negro and white meet and mingle; and the Central American area, where Indian and white meet, mingle, and forswear the consequences. Negroes predominate in Haiti, are a vital element in the Dominican Republic and Cuba, constitute a portion of the population on the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, swell in number once more in Panama, and dwindle to a barely perceptible number in Central America. Negroes end in Costa Rica and Indians begin. T h e hinterland, from Venezuela to Mexico, is the Indian's territory. T h e whole gamut of racial, social, and cultural impacts and interchanges is to be found in Caribbean America. Close to the United States, split up into a large number of independent units, the Caribbean is a fascinating and challenging area, rich in its heritage, fluid in its evolution, and promising in the unforeseeable consequences of its peculiar geography, economy, and social organization.

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HE G E O G R A P H I C A L situation of Spain at the extreme west of the Mediterranean Sea and the extreme south of Europe has determined, at least in a certain measure, her historical fate. She was the last refuge for the migratory groups that came from the East across the sea, because beyond Spain began the mare incognitum, the non plus ultra. For the migration that came from the north, Spain was the end of the continent, the last step on the way, or the hospice in which forces were repaired before jumping into mysterious Africa. All through ancient times Spain received and absorbed Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and Visigoths. And if the thesis of the great Belgian historian, Pirenne, be accepted, the dawn of the Middle Ages occurred in Spain, when, with the Mussulman invasion in the eighth century, the unity of the Mediterranean Sea was broken. Hence followed new routes, new commercial usages, new methods of living. Moslems and Christians lived in Spain for seven centuries, and not only lived but lived together. There appeared as a consequence the social classes of the mozárabes—Christians living under Mussulman rule, and the mudejares—Moors living under Christian rule. During these seven centuries there were epochs of struggle and intolerance and marvelous periods of understanding and cooperation. T o stress the latter, we have only to remember how in the thirteenth century the three cults—Christian, Moorish, and Mosaic—were celebrated in the same temple, the mosque of Santa Maria la Blanca in Toledo.

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B u t politically Spain was divided into many states, more or less sovereign, more or less tributary one to the other, according to the social and military power of each and the specific circumstances. T h r e e eras of special relevance stand out in the struggle between Christians and Moors in Spain: ( 1 ) T h e first of these is represented by the eleventh century, in which Castile, the central Castile, took the political leadership of Spain under Alphonso V I , when he conquered T o l e d o a n d declared himself Imperator totius Hispaniae, with the agreement or silence of the other kings and counts. (2) T h e second era occurred in the thirteenth century, when Ferdinand I I I conquered C ó r d o b a , Seville, and Cádiz, that is, most of the territory occupied by the Moslems, and unified forever the kingdoms of Castile and L e ó n . (3) T h e third era, 1474, dates f r o m the political unity of Aragón and Castile under the r u l e of Queen Isabella and K i n g Ferdinand. T h i s latter amalgamation represents practically the unity of Spain, because little N a v a r r e to the north and the declining kingdom of G r a n a d a to the south were the only states outside the power of the Catholic Kings. T h e biological process of two thousand years d u r i n g which so many races and cultures have broadcast their seed over the fields of Spain, has contributed to accentuate and enrich the original personality of that country. Neither before nor after the tenth century did the Moslems enjoy a cultural flowering comparable to that of the caliphate of Córdoba in that century, which resulted f r o m the m i x t u r e with the native race and the native culture. Everyone knows that the Moslems arrived in Spain without women and that their preference for b e a u t i f u l and blonde Gallegas led to the occupation of the throne of Córdoba by caliphs with blue eyes and fair hair. T h e cultural life of T o l e d o d u r i n g the thirteenth century, distinguished by the school of translators f o u n d e d by Alphonso X , would not have been possible without the cooperation, direct or indirect, of H e b r e w and A r a b scholars; and although the fourteenth century represents the apogee of oriental influence in Castile, it

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was in the fifteenth century that the masterpiece of Maimonides, the Côrdoban Hebrew of the twelfth century, the Guide of the Misled, was translated into Spanish and published. A n d in the thirteenth century the school of translators of Toledo, in which Arabs, Jews, Africans, and Frenchmen cooperated with the learned men of Castile, published translations in Latin and Castilian of books of mathematics, physics, astronomy, and chemistry. In the thirteenth century likewise—in 1 2 1 5 , to be exact— the University of Salamanca was created, and in 1255 it received the highest privilege of that epoch: the ius ubique docendi, that is, eligibility of those holding degrees conferred by it to teach in all the universities of Europe. As a consequence of the decline of medical teaching in Salerno, in Italy, that discipline was cultivated very extensively in Spain, among the Arabs in Andalusia and in Salamanca. We think that the latter university was the first to establish a chair of music. Yet Salamanca had so wide a conception of the curriculum that in the fourteenth century twenty-six chairs of learning existed for instruction in canon and civil law, theology, medicine, logic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean, Latin, Greek, astrology, music, and rhetoric. T h e upper classes of Spain became familiar with the classics; and in the fifteenth century the humanist groups of the country were strengthened by some Italian humanists. T h e students' cosmopolitan life made communication easy between Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca, the four greatest centers of culture then existing in Europe. As a consequence of these factors—the cosmopolitan life of the students and the spread of the classics among those in high social circles—a cultural movement of enormous value developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Politically and socially, a state of chaos arose from various factors: the discord among the nobles; the rebellion of the high dignitaries of the church against the king; the plotting of the cities to defend their rights, usurped by the landlords; and the constant quarrels of the bourgeoisie because of the

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privileges acquired by the nobles, profiting by the physical and mental weakness of Henry IV of Castile. In the tenth century the ecclesiastical and temporal landlords had began a struggle to obtain the privilege of exemption from taxation. They were successtul. Many vestiges of feudalism survived; although personal servitude disappeared in Castile, as shown by the Ordenamiento de Valladolid («325) and the Ordenamiento of Alcalá (1348), it continued in Aragón; nor was there personal liberty, real and effective, even juridically, in any part of the country. As a class, the nobility made firm their position through the institution of the mayorazgo, that is, the right to bind the inheritance of certain patrimonies permanently in primogeniture within a family. That institution was inaugurated in Spain in the thirteenth century and adopted afterwards by several other European countries. T h e aristocracy reinforced its position still further through the inherited character of titles and the continual sale to rich men of villas and towns of the monarch, together with almost all the rights pertaining to royalty. T h e golden epoch of Spain was not the period beginning in 1501 and ending in 1 6 2 1 , as the English historian R. Trevor Davies maintains in his book, The Golden Century of Spain; even less was it the era that began in 1555 with Philip II, as is implicitly asserted by Ludwig Pfandl, in his stimulating Kultur und Sitte in Spanien. As a matter of fact, if we desire not to separate the epoch of political mastery from the cultural period in which the influence of Spain prevailed in Europe, we must correct not only these dates but also those given by the French historian Henri Hauser, in his valuable work, La Predominance espagnole, 1559-1660. These dates have a purely external significance; they do not connote for European history the beginning of that period in which Spain was able to modify all the factors of power in Europe. There is no option, in my judgment: the date should be 1474. Since that year Castile and Aragón have remained united, giving an opportunity to the Catholic Kings to build one of the three

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first modern states and to start the long-breathing historical r u n of Spain. T h e Spanish state from 1474 until 1659 (Treaty of the Pyrenees) had as the keystone of its policy " a c t i o n " and " w i l l . " A n d so tense was that will that from Castile this slogan arose: " W h o loses the morning, loses the afternoon; w h o loses youthfulness, loses life." T h e dynamic ideal of the Renaissance and the political and juridical tool with which to accomplish that ideal, with the high ambitions latent in the soul of that epoch, was ready: the Spanish state. N o b o d y can be surprised at the admiration of Machiavelli for Ferdinand V. H e r e Machiavelli really met an artist in politics, the artist that in his patriotic dream he envisioned in vain for Italy. B u t how was the Spanish state created? W h a t were its characteristics? W h a t was the internal attitude adopted by Spanish society toward the new ways opened to it? T h e clasiical idea, expressed for the first time by T h u c y d i d e s is that only when one succeeds in guaranteeing life through an organization independent of the individual, can one say that the nucleus of a state exists. T h i s idea has always been the primary social impulse favoring the foundation of political institutions. T h e rivalries and quarrels a m o n g the nobles of Spain had produced an active social decomposition, which, after 1466, the Hermandades de Castilla (Fraternities of Castile) were intended to correct. T h e initiator of that work was D o n Alfonso de Quintanilla, and his goal was achieved by the Catholic Kings: to make effective within the realm the supreme power and the supreme jurisdiction. T h e Fraternities of Castile gave the kings an instrument of jurisdictional action with which not only to clean the roads of thieves and criminals, but with w h i c h to struggle against the lords of the manor, invested with civil and criminal jurisdiction within their estates. T h e early years of struggle, before the power of the nobility was curbed, were very hard, but the kings succeeded, and in 1488 the Hermandad extended its jurisdictional power over all Spain, becoming therewith the base of

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the centralization of the Spanish state power in the monarchs. T h e central organ for the coordination of the activities of the state existed, but it was necessary to rejuvenate it. T h i s was accomplished in the Cortes of Toledo, 1480, when the Council of Castile (Consejo de Castilla), the central organ of our state, was divided into five sections: those of diplomacy, interior questions of general administration, finance, hermandades (fraternities), and affairs concerning Aragón, Valencia, Catalonia, and Sicily. But much more important than the exterior modification was the complete change of the social elements that composed and led the reformed council. T h e Catholic Kings put the nobles out of the council and substituted lawyers educated in the Romanist conception of law, favorable to the princely authority, and anxious to curb the power of the undisciplined aristocracy. Henceforth the council, once composed of military leaders and nobles, became civil and bourgeois, active and youthful. T h e impulse to struggle against every independent traditional power incited the kings to abrogate many municipal charters and to appoint royal representatives for the councils of the towns. Both ideas, that of eliminating the nobility from the direction of the state, and that of subjugating every autonomous or semi-autonomous center of municipal life, were not only accepted but even accentuated throughout the sixteenth century. They began to weaken only at the end of that century and the beginning of the next, when the absolutist monarchy started to totter with Philip I I I . T h e letter of Cardinal Cisneros to the preceptor of Charles V urged the young prince "not to introduce the nobles into the councils because they are not fair allies of royalty." What the king should get from the subjects he aids is "love, fear, and help." T h e incidents of the struggle between Charles I (the Hapsburg Charles V) and the people, a struggle full of significance because it represents the last act of the drama between vested privileges of a more or less medieval character and the modern absolutist state, cannot be described in a single lecture. At

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that time there was room only for the idea, so beloved of the lawyers of the thirteenth century and renovated in the sixteenth mainly by Machiavelli, of imperium and unity. Henceforth the new state, in the three countries creating it, France, England, and Spain, was to be based not on the relations between man and man as in the Middle Ages, but on the idea of sovereign nations. Henceforth the vernacular languages were to acquire preeminence in cultural life, as the spiritual instruments through which to express intimate emotions and desires. From England to Germany and from France to Spain or Italy or Bohemia men contributed to this same phenomenon: the exaltation of the autochthonous languages. In those days something was said in France that we would read today with fear. Henri IV said, " J e veux bien que toute la langue allemande soit à l'Allemagne, mais j'entends que toute la française soit à moi." Language was one of the bases of the new conception of the fatherland, and we find proof of that in the Gramática Castellana, published by Antonio de Nebrija in 1492, the first grammar of a romance language in the world; in the preface of his work Nebrija speaks of language as the perfect instrument of empire. I do not think that the assertion of Spengler, "With Philip II began the Weltpolitik," is quite exact. I believe that really that policy began with Charles V. Perhaps there was in his conception a romantic element, and a last ambition for a Christian federation of people, apparently related to the Middle Ages, but in fact quite modern and very expressive of the intimate desire of the distinguished Spanish thinkers who surrounded him. Unfortunately Charles I was defeated in his greater spiritual ambitions, but his purposes had a universal dimension, and were not the result of a fugacious love but, on the contrary, constituted the star that guided all his life. If we consider the technical aspect of the new state, the associated administrative organs, and the continuity of actions and aims of these organs, Philip II, of course, will have a first place in the history of politics. He began to work in the

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Council of Castile, in the absence of his father, when he was sixteen years old. Charles I wrote instructions for his son in the same spirit and with the same purpose that Cisneros had written for him. And every day, after the meeting with his counselors, his son wrote him reports full of acute observations, even about the imminent ruin of the Spanish economy. He worked patiently, without interruption, for forty-four years on perfecting the machinery of the state. He controlled thoroughly the slightest action of every authority in every dependency of the vast monarchy. So extraordinary was the organic structure of the state created by the Catholic Kings and administratively perfected by Philip II that many years after his death, after the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, when the political creative impulse, the national élan was exhausted, Spain still remained a commanding figure. She kept the vastest empire of the world, and according to the historians Saint-Leger and Sagnac, " T h e ceremonial of the court of Madrid was admired in all the courts of Europe. English, French, and Italians followed the Spanish fashions, read, translated, and imitated the Spanish poets, dramatists, and romancers." The same sort of persistence that we have observed concerning the administration can be discovered in the economic policy of Spain at that epoch. According to the Libros de Repartimentos, books in which note of every family in every village is taken—because there were no exceptions to the voluntary gifts accorded by the Cortes—the population of Spain in 1594 was 8,206,797. Unfortunately there exists no census of the population of Spain immediately before the discovery of America. The census of 1594 represents the population of Spain after a century of constant warfare in every corner of the world, and after an untiring effort at colonization. With the exception of France, with 16,000,000 inhabitants, all the other countries of Europe had populations very much smaller than that of Spain. England, including Wales, had not much more than 4,000,000, according to

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the most conservative estimates; and all together the countries of Germany at this epoch accounted, according to Schmollers, for no more than 15,000,000. The largest city of Spain was Seville, with 133,930 inhabitants; Madrid had 35,700, and London 40,000. Only Paris and Naples had slightly more than 200,000 residents each. Spain was a country that exported raw materials—wool, iron, wines, hides, olive oil, fresh fruit, and silk cloth, and imported all sorts of cloth of wool and linen and almost every industrial product. After the time of Isabella and Ferdinand, importers were obliged to pay very high duties, with the idea of organizing a self sufficient economy; but even Isabella hesitated on one point vital to the agrarian economy, the struggle between agriculture and cattle-raising, at last favoring the latter. Charles I tried in vain to harmonize the impulse of the Spaniards towards autarchy with protection to the goods of Flanders and the Netherlands. From 1506 to 1558 the former tendencies prevailed, and the memorandum books of the Cortes expressed constantly the same petitions on the part of the representatives of villas and towns. Even in 1548, at the Cortes of Valladolid (petition 214), the opportunities opened to agriculture by the new markets of America were put in jeopardy. The crisis of prices impelled people to demand the prohibition of exportation, chiefly of foodstuffs. The Pragmáticas of 1558 are the most important documents of the epoch in this respect: of these one reinforces the protectionist tendencies and one attempts to create industries in order to make unnecessary the introduction of many articles. "People import," said Petition 125 of the Cortes de Valladolid, 1558, "glasses, toys, knives, and cards as if we were Indians." (Perhaps this expression was used here for the first time in Spain.) But the crisis of prices that began to convulse Europe at the birth of capitalism started a political reaction in Spain, as a result of the arrival of gold and silver from America; a reaction that has proved decisive in our economic history—putting obstacles in the way of exportation and

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closing as much as possible the commercial monopoly within our empire. T h e value of the rations of a sailor mounted from 1505 to 1592 approximately 429 percent, but the pay mounted only between 300 and 330 percent. During the same period, prices in England increased from 1 1 3 to 248 and salaries from 92 to 1 1 3 percent. T h e level of living was lowered somewhat in Spain. It dropped much more in France and England, inaugurating a new period of astonishing contrast between riches and misery. A new epoch with new social classes was implied in the new economic phenomenon. Unfortunately for Spain, the continuity of the mercantilist policy was unbroken, and Philip II, and later Philip I I I and Philip IV, followed it with a tenacity that hastened the ruin of the realm. Philip II could have modified such a policy, but he never struggled with the masses of Spain but only with minorities. He accentuated the errors of our agrarian economy and of our industrial life: the first, by favoring the cattle raiser without discrimination; and the second, by a tax policy that eliminated industry, and by the creation of a commercial economy or an economy of intermediaries. Consequently Spain began to live on its own productions and on the customs duties paid on the articles that we imported and exported. T h e debt, when Philip II died, absorbed 66 or 67 percent of the ordinary income of the state; and at that time the instruments of the new economy, the big commercial companies and the banks, were in the hands of foreigners, Flemish or Genoese, who had rented the quicksilver mines of Almadén. Of course there must exist some social and perhaps psychological explanation of the incapacity of Spaniards for economic tasks; and, although the theme is very complicated, I desire to assert, in passing, that Spain has really never proved to be an able country in economic matters, and that as a social reflex of the low valuation of economic activities in Spain, it is worth while to stress the fact that industrial and commercial occupations were considered unworthy of a noble gentleman. Although the Royal Pragmatic of 1682 declared

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that " i t does not contradict the quality of nobles to have or to h a v e had factories for m a k i n g gold a n d silver cloth, silk, wool, or l i n e n , " it was not until March, 1 7 8 3 , that we find a royal declaration against the idea of vilification of many arts a n d crafts. T h e nobles lived on the income that they received f r o m their estates. A l t h o u g h the royal power increased, we should not forget that E u r o p e , especially continental E u r o p e , still lived under the seignorial social regime. Citizenship in the m o d e r n form, that is, an exclusive subordination to the state a n d the public corporation, was something nonexistent in E u r o p e at that time. O n the contrary, the seignorial regime compelled submission to the landlords. E v e n several centuries later, in the nineteenth century, in G e r m a n y , Austria, Russia, and several other less important nations, the liquidation of the surviving remnants of the seignorial epoch continued. T h e r e was no slavery in S p a i n in the epoch of which w e are speaking, except for Mussulman and N e g r o prisoners of war. T h e r e were no serfs in the strictest sense except in Aragon, w h e r e the landed proprietors held the civil and criminal jurisdiction, with right of l i f e and death over their vassals. T h a t was the general rule in Europe; a n d perhaps E n g l a n d and Castile were the first to abolish these rights. H o w e v e r , the struggle in Castile was very bitter and, although the king intended to help the peasants with the royal provisions of 1 5 7 7 - 7 8 , their situation was often very miserable. T h e y consituted the social opposition to the nobility and they were sometimes able to organize, with the help of the church, a real w a r against the nobles. A t the end of the eighteenth century, according to the estimates of the official census of C o u n t Floridablanca, in a total of 20,894 towns, cities, villus, and localities, only 6,522 were under the f u l l jurisdiction of the kings. T h e world has forgotten, because of a very insufficient historical education, that the effective general extension of civil liberties is very recent. T h e great economic compensation f o r the peasants and

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day workers was communal ownership, the ownership of collective utilization by the residents of towns, villas, and so forth. In all, 12,525 towns, villas and hamlets had the benefit of the multiple form of public ownership then existing. All of these were well organized and the social result can be appreciated when we read in the work of one of the most intelligent travelers who crossed Spain in the sixteenth century, Lucius Marineo Sylvio, that he did not meet a single beggar on the road. Unfortunately the situation changed completely in the second half of the sixteenth and in the course of the seventeenth century. T h e situation was modified by three factors: (1) the depression of prices in agriculture, compared with prices in industry; (2) the constant warfare; (3) the discovery of America, with its magic attraction. But we must now inquire what the attitude of Spain was, of the state as well as of society, in the vast zone of the spiritual life. If the decisive characteristics of the Renaissance are the discovery of the outer world and the discovery of man, as the great historians Michelet and Burckhardt have asserted and proved, we must see in what measure Spain has contributed to both characteristics. I shall reserve the answer to the first question for my next lecture, but today I must say briefly something about the second. T h e spiritual understanding of the man of today is especially well-adapted to the comprehension of the Spain of the sixteenth century. What for four centuries has been the convergent point of attack against Spain, constitutes today the keystone of the regimes of some of those people whose heralds were the gathered forces that poured over Spain, all throughout the past four hundred years, all sorts of vituperations and accusations. T h e Spanish state tried to organize, from 1481 to 1598, into a certain type of totalitarian state, and in some measure was defeated. T h e central force dominating the will of Spain was a transcendent idea and ideal, a religious conception of life incarnate in the Catholic Church. Young men as well as older men should meditate about the historical con-

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sequences that that aspiration has had in Spain. Those who aspired to unify the consciousness of Spain by force have divided it to this day. Since then Spanish history has been a drama of universal dimension: the drama of spiritual liberty. In the year 1483 the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition was created, with the previous sanction of Pope Sixtus IV. In the desire of the Spanish kings to obtain a plenitude of imperium, they created the Inquisition. Through it the church became an instrument subordinated to the state, because its affairs escaped even the jurisdiction of the Pope, and the power of the state was extended to the inner life. The Spanish persecution of the Jews, until that time neither stronger nor weaker than in other countries, began to acquire a new character when Ferdinand and Isabella conceived of making Spain a homogeneous nation by the unification of the faith. Supported by a popular impulse, although aided neither by the nobility nor by what we call today intellectual minorities, the sovereigns expelled the Jews in 1492. As for the Moors who had remained in the territory after the conquest of Granada, the Cortes and the nobles, for economic reasons, defended them. On November 24, 1525, the sovereigns offered them the alternative of conversion to Catholicism or expulsion. Finally, in 1609 the rulers decided on expulsion. How full of suggestions, capable of contemporary application are the purposes of the Spanish state of that epoch! But the movement initiated in Spain encountered enormous opposition in the interior of the nation. The tendency of Charles I to maintain the unity of Christianity, his indirect agreement with Melanchthon concerning the thesis written in the Diet of Augsburg, the search for a point of concordance in Ratisbon in 1541 between Protestant and Catholic theology, even the eclectic solution tried in the Interim, 1548, and, in contrast, Charles' decided opposition to the attitudes of the reformers hostile to the church itself, illuminate the panorama of Reformation and Counter Reformation. The

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dichotomies that divided the latter movement can be thus expressed: Authority Tradition Substantial Community Spirit Salvation by Good Works

Liberty Progress Individuality Reason Salvation by Faith

Charles I wanted to save the unity of Christendom, but that aim was defeated. He saw with intuition the profundity of the tragedy inherent in the destruction of the compromise represented by Christianity: the vital compromise between paganism and the diversity of ascetic forces represented by the Hellenic and the Hebrew-Christian traditions. T o break that unity would mean to wage war. Consequently events defeated him, and his personal dream, the peace of Christendom, became impossible. T h e history of the religious movement in Spain since the Catholic Kings has not yet been written. T h e amplitude of the reform of the national church by Cisneros at the end of the fifteenth century has not been sufficiently considered. Recently an exhaustive research on Erasmism in the Spain of Charles I has been published (Erasme et I'Espagne, by Marcel Bataillon, Paris, 1937). But even now many scholars do not know that Erasmism represented in Spain a real civil war; they do not know that from the Emperor to the General Inquisitor there were Erasmists, and that the translation of the Enchiridion constituted a success without precedent. T h e Archbishop of Toledo, confessor of Charles I, the secretary of the Emperor, and the most distinguished scholars found in Erasmus the immanent sense of religion, the idea of interiorization so congenial to Spanish stoicism. Proof of that national characteristic was the strong stream of religious life represented by the Alumbrados, Iluminados—the enlightened or illuminated—in Avila, Salamanca, Guadalajara, Al-

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calá de Henares, Toledo, Extremadura, and Seville. Against them rushed the Inquisition with the edict of September. 1525. This edict contained forty-eight propositions that the Inquisition considered heretical, and thus far it remains unpublished, in the Archivo Histórico Nacional. These groups, persecuted and annihilated, gave the Inquisition an opportunity for the persecution of the Erasmists, even in the person of Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo. How profound were the influences of the Erasmists in the evolution of Spanish mysticism? Listen to what the French scholar, Baruzi, said, in his marvelous book about St. John of the Cross. Jean de la Croix ne sufre ni à une analyse introspectitve, ni à une critique externe. Mais, comme d'autre part il se refugit en une contemplation générale et obscure, il se trouve conduit aux confins de l'illuminisme. . . . Non seulement Jean de la Croix n'a pas ignoré l'intime pensée des Alumbrados mais il a reconnu en lui peut-etre bien des états qu'eussent livré à l'illuminisme un esprit moins fermé. It is difficult for the historian to find in modern history any page of facts so stimulating as those that registered events in England when Philip II arrived there to marry Mary Tudor. In some towns the authorities and the people wanted to feast him, but he said, " I am not going to a festival but to a crusade." In effect, his intimate aspiration was to conquer England, through the love of Mary Tudor, for the church; because he, Philip II, considered the Counter Reformation as an objective of state policy, himself as its herald, and Spain as the people elected to accomplish the victory of the truth. The initial triumph was evident. England declared officially in Parliament her return to the bosom of the Roman Church, but the imprudence of Mary Tudor renewed the legislation against heretics. The beautiful and accomplished Lady Jane Grey was beheaded and four bishops died in the fire. Muir was right: that was the sanctification of the Protestant cause in England. Philip II tried to restrain Mary, Archbishop

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Carranza made his voice heard in favor of tolerance, but all in vain. Anglicanism, the national conception of religion, had won. Sometimes the idea that Philip II had of himself, of his cause, of his historical role, and the differentiation between the church in her acts and the church as she should be, drove him so far that the Pope published against him an excommunication in words as strong as these: Philip, of Austria, son of the Iniquity . . . following in the steps of his father competes with and tries to surpass him in infamous actions. T h e army of the Duke of Alba was before the doors of Rome because the Flemish and the Spanish theologians said to Philip that one must discriminate between "His Holiness" and the chief of the pontifical state. T h e struggle against the Protestant movement was really initiated in 1558. T h e activity of the Inquisition was reinforced by the Pragmatic of September 7, 1558, establishing the policing of the bookstores, the publication of the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559, and the Pragmatic of November 2, 1559, which forbade Spanish students to study in foreign universities except in Naples, Rome, the College of Bologna, and Coimbra. I call attention to the following facts in order to show the situation in other lands. Henry V I I I (1526), published a list of prohibited books. T h e Emperor Ferdinand I issued a decree on April 1, 1548, giving students two months in which to return to the universities of the Empire, Vienna, Freiburg, or Ingolstadt. In 1677, in the district of Ingolstadt, students who went to study in some other university were officially denied the right to be appointed to a place in the administration. A similar ruling existed in Frankfurt and Königsberg. But in the Spain of the sixteenth century the idea of purity of faith drove the Inquisition to take another step. As a result of the constant pressure against the so-called Judaisantes, converted Jews to whom was attributed the secret practice of

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their former faith, and against the Moriscos, of whom the same was said, and finally as a consequence of the impossibility of preventing heresy, it was proposed to attempt homogeneity, the full unification of the country, through the purity of Christian blood. The myth of the blood! How close to our own day! But that position was adverse to the Spanish tradition and to the public attitude of the church. The Spanish tradition, from Alphonso X to John II, had considered converts entitled to full rights; and Pope Nicholas II, in the Bull of 1449, considered any legislation limiting the rights of converts anti-Christian, because baptism represented regeneration, rebirth. T h e impulse against converts, like the impulse against Jews, Erasmists, and Moriscos, came from below, from the popular classes, excited and stimulated not by the whole but by a part of the church. In 1481, and I cite this as an instance, the guild of stonecutters resolved not to teach the craft to converts. The Catholic Kings tried to force the Pope to the thesis that they sustained, but Innocent V I I I evaded the question and entrusted it to the bishops and archbishops. The polemic became very bitter in Spain; the church was divided; the words of Saint Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians (111:27) a n d declaration of the Fourth Evangel (111:5) were to be the basis for those who believed in the primacy of the spirit over the flesh. The struggle acquired at times the character of a contest between Rome and the king, the latter depriving converts of every public office. In the Universities of Salamanca, Valladolid, and Toledo degrees might not be conferred on Jewish converts or on the sons and grandsons of persons punished by the Inquisition; but the University of Alcalá remained silent about this. Paul III, in 1535 and 1537, warned the church in Spain not to consider the stigma of Jewish or Moorish blood, but the combat continued among the chapters (cabildos) of the cathedrals. Melchor Cano spoke, too, against the stigma of blood. At the end of the sixteenth century it was agreed to limit the research of purity of blood to a century. The "cives pleni" juries, accord-

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ing to law, should be of pure Christian blood; but in practice time removed that condition, at least in many offices. Can Spain—devoted to the cause of religion, obsessed with the idea of saving souls, Spain, sword of the Counter Reformation, Spain, polarized to a transcendent finality that she honored as the supreme goal, as the ragione di stato— rightly be detached as the symbol of intolerance? I think that our historical documentaion and the experience of today oblige us to judge historical phenomena with more attentiveness. With the sixteenth century a new economy and a new conception of life began; most of Europe took new economic direction and adopted the new rationalist method exalted by one branch of Renaissance thought. Only two countries, Spain and the City of Geneva, accepted religion as the absolutely necessary background of individual and community; in both the consequence was the same: there was no place for the dissident. Even if we analyze the Protestant principle "cuius regio eius religio," we see that tolerance was very far from being accepted. T h e nucleus representing the ideal of tolerance at that epoch was gathered in Basle around Castellio, "chased by Calvin from Geneva, around Carlstadt, expelled by Luther from Germany, Bernardino Ochino, whom the Roman Inquisition had hunted out of Italy; Laelius Iocinus and Caelius Secundus Curio; and under the mask of an assumed name the Anabaptist David Torris, who had been outlawed in the Low Countries." Sebastian Castellio's Manifesto on Behalf of Toleration was written as a reaction against the horrible burning of the Spaniard Servetus, in Geneva. T h e principle of tolerance has been elaborated by thinkers like Castellio, Milton, and Locke, but the Spanish minorities have defended it since the sixteenth century against any sort of tyranny, with pen, words, and blood. Of course what in Geneva became transitory when Calvin died, the StateChurch in Spain retained because the religious ideal continued to activate the state. T h e canons of the Council of T r e n t not only had a dogmatic value for Catholics as indi-

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viduals but, according to the decision of Spanish royalty, for Spain as a unity: T h e canons of the Council of Trent became the law of the land. Consequently the pressure of the state against society continued, but the brave voice of the Spanish minorities, stronger than the flames, was constantly heard. " L a supplice de Servet est une date capitale dans le développement de l'idée de tolerance." Tragic fate of Spain! With her help or against her, but always with her active presence, the spiritual structure of the New World has been built. Now I must try to outline the cultural life of Spain during the centuries to which I have referred in this lecture. Instead of risking an analysis that would require space and time, which I lack, I shall try to give you an interpretation. T h i s was the epoch of the expansion of the Castilian language; it was the period of the bilingual writers in Portugal, where the Condestable Dom Pedro wrote in Castilian many of his philosophical and moral books; it was the period of the famous poet Gil Vicente; it was the climaxing period of the private foundations of colleges and universities. It was then that the University of Alcalá was founded by Cisneros (1508), with forty-two chairs; it was then that several distinguished ladies, like Beatrix Galindo, Dr. Lucia de Medrano, Dr. Lucia Siges, and her sister Dr. Angela, gave lectures in the University of Salamanca. T h e great Spanish literary movement—that had previously produced two of the world's great books, expressive of a native genius scarcely touched by the influence of Greece and Rome: El Conde Lucanor and El libro de buen amor-—acquired universal dimensions through La Celestina by Rojas, Los nombres de Cristo by Fray Luis de León, El Quixote by Cervantes, and the works of Góngora, Tirso, Lope, Calderón, Quevedo, and Gracián. Spanish literature and the symbols, ideas, and psychological conceptions of the caballero (gentleman) became the axis of European thought. In the symbols created by Spanish literature lie a Weltanschauung, that is, a philosophical conception of individual and universe, of religion and reason. In Amadis,

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the most beautiful book of the Spanish literature of chivalry, the power of the individual will is not only exalted but sublimated. It was the spirit of the Renaissance, which reached its full stature in the symbol of Don Quixote, perhaps the most profound symbol in literary history. Of course we can find in Spain philosophers like the Luis Vives, Sánchez, or Fox Morcillo, but when the meager personal library of Spinoza was inventoried, it was found to include the complete works of Góngora, Quevedo, and Gracián, the greatest Baroque poet and the greatest essayists that Spain had produced. Gracián exercised a powerful influence on La Rochefoucauld and on the essayists and moralists of France. Gracián's Oráculo Manual was translated into German by Schopenhauer; it was this same philosopher who said, in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, that he knew only three great allegorical books: the Criticón by Baltazar Gracián, Don Quixote, and Gulliver in Lilliput. Schopenhauer also asserted in one of his letters to Kiel in 1832: " M y favorite writer is this philosopher Gracián. I have read all his books. His Criticón seems to me one of the best books in the world." Spaniards as an artistic people, have expressed their Weltanschauung not directly in works of philosophy but through literature. In Don Quixote, in Tirso's El condenado por desconfiado, or in the Autos Sacramentales of Calderón the history of the way selected by Spain to express its conception of life can be discovered. From the sixteenth century the Romanticism of the nineteenth rediscovered Cervantes, whom the Romantics called the "hero of words and symbols." When the Germans discovered Spanish literature in the eighteenth century, people began to study the Spanish language. T h e y went to Spain, and Herder, Schiller, and Goethe offered profound analyses of the Spanish contribution to culture. T h e famous Friedrich Schlegel found in Cervantes the link between Homer and Goethe. T h e enthusiasm of Goethe for Don Quixote was expressed in his letters. We know the answer of the Academy of Berlin to the famous article of Mas-

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son against Spain, in the Encyclopedia in 1782. T h e reply of Dennina, read in the Berlin Academy, 1786, after explaining the services of Spain in mathematics, physics, jurisprudence, and medicine, after asserting that she had done more than France, ended with these words, perhaps excessive, " L a France doit plus a l'Espagne, que les autres pays ne doivent a la France." If one desires to write the history of Spain objectively and not in the partisan mood that has frequently inspired it as an exteriorization of the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism, nor with the spirit of bitterness that Spain aroused as the hegemonic master of the world at the time of those religious struggles, then it will be necessary to rectify some judgments concerning Spanish culture which have been circulated without sufficient knowledge of the subject. Dennina was right, and every day new proof of his accurate estimate is found. Spain has cooperated in the advancement of every science—in mathematics as well as in botany, in medicine as well as in cartography, in the discovery of new routes of the ocean as well as new trends of education. I desire to illustrate the latter assertion by one example: the discovery in 1550 of the method of teaching the deaf-mute, by Pedro Ponce, founder of a school to which Pablo Bonet, author of Redución de las letras, arte de enseñar a hablar a los mudos (1620), translated in all languages, belonged. Sir Kenelm Digby accompanied the Prince of Wales to Spain in 1622, studied the book, and informed the Royal Academy of London of it, upon his return. Navigators and cartographers were educated in the "House of Bargaining" of Seville (Casa de Contratación) from 1503, first under the direction of Americo Vespucci and J u a n Díaz de Sol is, and later under many others like Alonso de Santa Cruz; learning everything about the new maritime instruments, studying charts, and applying geodesic methods. Alonso de Santa Cruz called attention to some magnetic variations and Martín Cortés published in 1551 a book which was immediately translated into English, in

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w h i c h he e x p o u n d e d the theory of the magnetic pole. Andrés del R i o , L o p e de Velasco, G e r ó n i m o Muros, García de Céspedes, and several others made contributions to astronomy, and w h e n Copernicus published his book his theory was accepted (1545) and studied in Salamanca. García de Céspedes, one of the most prominent among the cosmographers and astronomers of Spain at that time, published a defense of the theory of Copernicus. I quote from von H u m b o l d t : " I n no epoch since the foundation of society have ideas concerning the external w o r l d and space relations been so suddenly and marvellously enlarged as in the works of Acosta and Oviedo." It is impossible to speak about Spanish culture and to be silent about what Spain signifies in the history of the arts, because Spain is one of the richest countries, not only in popular arts w h i c h have spread through the world, but in sculpture, architecture, music, and painting. Modern painting attains its first moment of plenitude with El Greco, thanks to the expressiveness of his style and to the astonishing inner life of his figures. Between him and Goya, the genius of impressionism and dynamism, stretches all the marvelous period w h i c h embraces Velásquez, C l a u d i o Coello, Ribera, and Zurbarán, M u r i l l o , and Alonso Cano, with works of eternal splendor. It is the epoch of polychromatic imagery in Spain, something new in the history of art because of the method used. T h a t art was presented by Berrugete, Becerra, and Pedro de M e n a y Mora, with a pathetic accent on figures, figures lacerated by pain. Spanish religious music created a school whose principal exponents are Cristóbal Morales, Francisco Guerrero, Antonio Cabezón, and T o m á s Luis de Victoria; they were the pioneers of the new music and even today, w h e n we hear some of Victoria's sweet and colorful compositions, we feel the truth of the sentiments he desired to express. T h e r e is no artistic expression of the spiritual attitude of Spain comparable to the monastery of the Escorial. It means for the Spanish spirit what Kant's Critique of Pure Reason means for German thought. T h e austere and baroque

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conception of the Spanish Counter Reformation is there, in the pure line, in the naked wall of granite, and in the extreme rigidity, the latent drama, and the imposing grandeur of the building, which was the culmination of the work of the greatest Spanish architect, Herrera. Spain is not a country which favors the middle way; she has always sent all her spirit in the direction to which emotion and passion impel her. She was Quixotic before Don Quixote. T h e Jesuit Company was created with the same single-minded intensity. It was the armed arm of the Spanish Church-State, the state that adopted for itself the aim of salvation by unity of faith. T h i s chivalric conception can even be found in the books of mystics. Some of these works were given titles of books of chivalry in the divine way. Spanish mysticism has opened new outlets to religious emotion, and in Osuna as well as in Saint Teresa, in St. J o h n of the Cross as well as in Miguel de Molinos, there are so many implicit routes for believers, philosophers, and merely religious persons, that one must agree in a sentiment of gratitude because they have extended our knowledge of the inner, spiritual world. That the theologians and jurists of Spain— Victoria, Vázquez, and Suárez because of their idea of an international community, were the pioneers of a new era is realized among scholars in every country. If we analyze the radical impulse of Spanish culture as a whole, we discover a point of convergence: the spirit—either individual or collective—at any rate, Spirit! T h e characteristics of Spanish culture, however, lie in the emphasis that Spain put on the problems of individuality and religious community: on salvation, on the analysis of the inner world, and on the dogmatic conception of " G o d as the Reason for the State" (Calderón's " A Dios por razón de Estado"). Spain has lived since the fifteenth century in intimate tragedy. In the soul of Spain, as well as in the soul of the Spaniard, the dualism represented by the hunger for the absolute and the shock of this against the relative lives per-

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manently. T h e faith of Spaniards in intentional emotions has converted Spain into a people who symbolize what Pascal has called "logic du cœur." Consequently, eternal source of Romanticism, a people neither gay nor sad, but serious and stoic, Spain lived obsessed with the idea of personal dignity and an ambition for infinity.

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T H O U G H E V E R Y D A Y we advance another step in our knowledge of the sixteenth century, that very advance discloses to us the magnitude of the political, economic, scientific, social, and religious transformations suffered by Europe at that time and inclines us to recognize our insufficient knowledge of the documents which concern the deep changes in individual and social life during that decisive period. Often when I visited the Archive of the Indies in Seville, where more than 32,000 big bundles of documents preserve firsthand information about the action of Spain in America (and that archive, while the most important, is not the only one in Spain where valuable records of our actions on this continent are kept), I have thought about the enormous difficulties of historical judgment. Every serious approach to our documents has opened a new way for research and has rectified previous conclusions. For the last thirty years historical research in the Spanish American colonial period has been so serious and so intensive that our perspective has completely changed, because knowledge of the evolution of the fundamental social, economic, and political institutions is greatly improved. T h r e e groups of historians besides the Spaniards have cooperated chiefly in the research and the revision of the conclusions: first, North American historians, like Haring, Klein, Hamilton, Merriman and Hanke; among the North-American historians I must stress in this respect the school of historians of California from Bernard Moses to Bolton and the wonderful group of their pupils. T h e second group are the historians of

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Mexico from Alamán to Orozco and Zavala. T h i r d , is the splendid school of historians of South America—Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, whose principal leaders are Roberto Levillier and Ricardo Levene. Most of the new historians have paid special attention to economic and social life. I desire to express to all of them my gratitude as a scholar and as a Spaniard. In 1492 a displacement of the center of gravity of world economic life began. T h e Mediterranean Sea and the Hanseatic League in the Baltic began to lose importance. Genoa and Venice, Valencia and Barcelona, the largest commercial harbors in the Mediterranean, began to decline. Meanwhile Seville, Cádiz, Lisbon, Antwerp, and Amsterdam took the leadership in the new routes opened on the ocean through the discoveries of the navigators. Spain came to America and prepared, chiefly in Santo Domingo and Cuba, expeditions to the continent. T h a n k s to constant pressure, the territory she dominated was extended f r o m the extreme south of the continent to approximately the 43d parallel in the north. At the center of North America the irregular line formed by the Spanish infiltration is almost impossible to draw before making a study of the geographical toponymy of America and of the state archives of the United States. T h e expansion of Spain both north and south in the interior of the American Continent acquired special importance in the following years: 1513, the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Vasco Núñez de Balboa; 1519, the conquest of Mexico; 1533» the discovery of Lower California by H u r t a d o de Mendoza. Meanwhile De Soto and Pineda discovered the Mississippi. In 1540 Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado left Compostela, Mexico, and extended the dominion of Spain over New Mexico, Arizona, and part of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, that is, much of a vast region now within the United States. T h e years 1531-35 represent the incorporation of Peru;

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1534-38, the Plata Valley (Argentina); 1540-41, the dominion of Chile. Sixty years sufficed to impose Spanish rule from the extreme south to the 43d degree of north latitude. In Florida, Louisiana (often disputed between France and Spain), Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California it is easier to study the influence of Spain than in Colorado, Oregon, and Nevada. In the latter states you will find above the 36th parallel the Spanish city Las Vegas, and above the 41st parallel, San Jacinto. In Oregon, cities with Spanish names have been found, although we do not yet know whether these were Spanish colonial settlements or not; such are Bonanza, Estacada, or Aurora; and in Colorado, northwest of Denver, is Fort Vasques, the most advanced point of the Spanish penetration. In South and Central America, with the exception of Brazil and some little settlements of England and France of slight territorial importance, all the surface was ruled by the crown of Castile. What did Spain do during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in that vast territory? T h e action of Spain in America cannot be understood unless we distinguish between Spanish state and Spanish society, the first representing in America the eagerness to realize an ideal; the supreme and highest moral aims of the Spanish nation at that time; the second representing rather ambitions of an acquisitive character. Between the two elements there was a struggle that even accentuated in America our peninsular dualism, our tragic opposition of ideals and interests. T h e misinterpretation of the Spanish effort in America is due to an insufficient analysis of these factors. In 1927 we said in the Bureau des Études Internationales in Geneva " T h e colonial policy of Spain in America is represented for some people by what was said in the royal decrees; for others by the conduct of adelantados and encomenderos. Only a few, and among them some American historians, for instance Bourne and Bernard Moses, see clearly in our colonial policy two Spanish forces working in antagonistic directions, the official state and the elements supporting it, and the free forces of the social life."

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T h e program of the state forces consisted in a ius naturale conception that they decided to translate into reality, but the social forces were eager not only to keep in A m e r i c a the social regime existing in Spain and Europe, but to reinforce this, profiting by the weakness of the American natives. Spain came to America integrally. She gave America as m u c h as she had: political institutions, social and economic organization, cultural foundations, arts, religion. She came with her Weltanschauung and even with her internal drama, because as a people, as a nation, she did not show reserve in her actions, but exerted her full personality in each of her actions. If you should ask me how Spain transferred to America her b e i n g and her culture, my answer should be preceded by some special assertions that may guide me and orient you in the explanation of so vast a subject. First: the g u i d i n g idea of the Spanish state d u r i n g the conquest and colonization was a religious one. T h e accent of Spanish culture was put, without doubt, on what has been called knowledge of salvation. Second: the supreme organ with which Spain tried to mold the new countries was, consequently, the church. T h i r d : the church acted in direct subordination to the state, not to Rome. Fourth: cultural life was transferred to America but could not be so intense as it was at that time in Spain. Fifth: political and social institutions, although it was intended to purify them and put them in harmony with the new demands of the new ius naturale, represent an echo of Spanish institutions, of Spanish dualism. Sixth: the acquisitive impulses of individuals in America became stronger than in Spain. T h e regime of capitulations, because of its contractual nature, debilitated the direct action of the state and contributed to the exaltation of acquisitiveness.

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Spain was impelled to two kinds of militant action at that momentous period of her history: the one militarist the other spiritual, both combative and eager to conquer; in the former the purposes to conquer power, territory, and riches prevailed; in the latter the prime aim was to win adherence to Christianity. There was an interweaving between the two, a mutual aid that engendered phenomena of social symbiosis of great juridical and political importance. A realization of that permanent interrelation between two organisms, each of which depended for its existence on absorbing a part of the vital juice of the other, is quite fundamental for the understanding of Spanish colonization. The will to power and the will to imperium, in the double dimension so loved by the Renaissance, material and spiritual, reached through Spain its apex. The conquistadores represent the most outstanding example of the will to power known at that tumultuous epoch of renascence. In that period of exaltation of individuals, of unlimited faith in the value of every human action, the appetite for power and glory is embodied in the conquistadores. Perhaps a comparable display of will has never been made in history. Thus we have the words of Nietzsche: "Spain, Spain is a people that has wanted too much," and he knew the essence of the will! The efficiency and elasticity of the individual will and the collective will of Spain then acquired proportions never before revealed; human limitations appeared to be overcome. We can criticize, of course, the content of the will of the conquistadores. Criticism can be justified. Cruelty, covetousness, and fanaticism can be attributed to them, but what is beyond dispute is the incredible firmness and recklessness with which they undertook the most audacious feats. Abandoned in a milieu unknown, savage, and often horribly hostile, they looked dauntlessly at the eyes of the Sphinx, at the silent horizon of the future. Instead of intimidation they felt

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the attraction of the mystery, consequently they went ahead, because they had a blind faith in the value of their force of will, of the "eroici furori" that they incarnated and of the transcendent mission which, sometimes unconsciously, they felt that they were performing. Indeed, the conquistadores were not the only type chararacteristic of the Spanish faith in the creative capacity of the will; there were also the misionero, the encomendero, the juez (judge), thegobernador, the Virrey (Vice-Roy). In each of these can be discovered one emotional intention, one predominant purpose in the service of which they put forth an effort— mainly during the sixteenth century—that always astonishes and often deserves to be admired. A way to throw light on many empirical aspects of the colonization is found in the investigation of the juridical relations between the organizers of expeditions and the crown. According to this criterion one may distinguish: (A) Expeditions organized directly by the state and economically supported by it. Examples of these are some of Columbus' expeditions, that of Pedrarias d'Avila, the missions, and the voyage of Magellan. (B) Expeditions organized either by the state, or by the enterprise of individuals or partnership groups, and jointly supported, giving origin to the capitulaciones or contracts of remuneration to the conquerors and investors as reward for the risk of their investment and the service fulfilled. Examples of these can be found in most of Columbus' expeditions and several that followed. (C) Expeditions authorized by the crown but militarily organized and economically supported exclusively by private enterprise. In these cases the rights, privileges, and benefices reserved as reward to each participant were fixed in the "capitulations." T h i s type of expedition was the most frequent, it was the one used by Cortés for the conquest of Mexico, and after the Ordenanzas de nuevos descubrimientos y poblaciones of 1579, was the only kind authorized. T h e contractual regime

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of the "capitulation" exerted outstanding influence on the modalities of colonization, on the distribution of land, and also on the rapacious attitude of those who became members of the expeditions as soldiers of fortune, mainly stimulated by the eagerness for riches. In the social unrest that characterized groups so recruited, as well as in the further role played by the profiteers of the conquest, lies the articulation of the ruling social classes. B u t the vastness of the theme scarcely permits my offering it for your reflection. A f t e r 1495, when the Catholic Kings learned of the existence of new masses of men ignorant of everything Christian, they began to emphasize the duty of converting the Indians to Christianity. T h a t was the reason they deprived of the right to migrate to America "those whose Catholic faith is suspected and who may be sons or grandsons of those condemned by the Inquisition," in order to maintain quite unpolluted the religious seed poured out on the virgin fields of America. T h e r e f o r e the first act of the captains when they discovered or conquered new territory was to proclaim to "Indians or inhabitants, that they, the captains, have been sent to teach them good customs, to dissuade them from such vices as the practice of eating h u m a n flesh, and to instruct them in the holy faith and preach it to them for their salvation." T h a t was or speech to be also the thesis of the famous requerimiento read to the Indians immediately after reaching or conquering a territory. T h e s e were also the reasons that impelled the Assembly of Burgos to ask itself, "what is our legitimate title in a juridical sense to stay in America?" T h e answer of Palacios Rubios, De Insulis Oceanis, is the official report to the assembly. Palacios R u b i o s made a marvelous juridical analysis of the question. H e refuted the theory of the justification of the Spanish title by the pagan or infidel character of the Indians. "If we make war," he said, "because they are infidels, then they can defend themselves, and their war will be just, but ours will be unjust . . ." and he arrived at the conclusion

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that the only title of Spain was a spiritual title given by His Holiness. Precisely that unequivocal title, based on an unequivocal mission, inspired the doctrine of Victoria in his De Indis (lectures delivered in Salamanca, 1539) according to which there were religious titles and lay titles, the former based on the right to evangelize, the latter justified by humanitarian reasons ("propter bona et utilitatem eorum, et non tantum ad questum Hispanorum"). Consequently Victoria's doctrine justified the stay of Spain in America only insofar as she accomplished this central finality of her titles. Victoria's conception is essentially the same as the present conception of the mandate in the League of Nations. The same idea is latent in the words of Vasco de Quiroga in 1555: " T h e Church orders us to win over faithful brothers . . . on this consideration our princes have and possess this land, and to interpret their possession in any other way is blindness of heart." T h e spiritual aim was accomplished in some measure through the church and by the state. The great contention between both was decided favorably to the state. Although the crown did not succeed in its supreme ambition—that is, to get the character of vicem legati in the Americas, as it had in the monarchy of Sicily since the eleventh century Monarchia Sicula—it obtained the "patronate," according to which, practically, the ecclesiastical power of the Spanish crown was so unlimited that nobody could appeal its decisions. The nationalistic mind of the crown was quite transparent. Of course some incidents, even some exceptions to this rule, do not modify the general orientation, and the decisive proof of that can be found in the brief of Pope Paul III on June 19, 1538, which revoked "all other briefs or bulls issued before in prejudice of the power of the Emperor Charles V as King of Spain and which might disturb the good government of the Indies." All the members of the church did not indeed cooperate in the accomplishment of the desired end with the necessary

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fidelity nor were they the only elements through which Spain transferred her cultural and economic life to America. One may even stress the defection of some religious orders which became as favorable to socially concupiscent elements as the most covetous adventurers. One may denounce hundreds of priests who were blind to their duties, but all that cannot modify the conclusion. T h e Spanish settlements, the Spanish penetration in America, and its modalities can be explained only when we realize that the religious aim of the state had the church as a permanent instrument. T h e evangelical effort of a large minority of the Spanish church at that epoch was an effort without precedent in our history. T h e heroic serenity with which Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits traversed the most dangerous wildernesses in America, the remarkable combination in the missionary of severity towards himself and human comprehension towards the natives, the unselfishness with which the missionaries proceeded in most cases, risking life constantly and suffering all sorts of privations, their abnegation, and the fertile imagination shown by the means used to obtain the voluntary adherence of hundreds of tribes scattered all over a new continent to a superior conception of life and a new religion, make that period for those religious orders the Golden Age of the Spanish church. T h e first question concerning the Indians was only the point of departure for many other problems: the key question was whether the Indians should be considered human beings; whether they had capacity to live according to the Christian conception. It is difficult to summarize in a few minutes the results of an investigation of many years in archives and among almost unknown authors of that epoch. How many questions for sociologists and historians this problem arouses! Not only Fray Bartolomé of Las Casas defended the cause of the incontrovertible human nature in the Indians. Many other Spaniards defended the same cause, if not with the same passion and tenacity, with more equanimity and efficiency.

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A m o n g them are Montesinos, M i n a y a , Fr. J u a n de Zumárraga, Vasco de Quiroga, Francisco de Victoria, and a legion of u n k n o w n missionaries of spiritual culture, whose words have not been well interpreted. Recently I read the manuscript of a young scholar w h o translated the Spanish expression (so usual in the sixteenth century as well as in the twentieth) "gentes apartados de razón" as "people w h o are f a r f r o m being rational creatures," without knowing that yesterday as today "estar en razón" means for a Spaniard " t o be r i g h t . " Reason in this case is not equivalent to a rational capacity but means " r i g h t attitude." I offer that as an e x a m p l e of the technical difficulties that historians find in the interpretation of texts on which problems as delicate as this one depend. D e Las Casas took u p the defense of the Indians and he def e n d e d them like a good strategist, attacking those w h o m he considered the enemies of the Indians. His book Brevísima relación de la destrucción de Indias (Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies), published in 1 5 5 2 , had enormous reverberations in E u r o p e , and was used as a weapon of combat against Spain. T h a t is the reason that even the title was translated in these ways: Bartolomé de Las Casas: The Tears of the Indians, being a true account of the cruel massacres and slaughters of about twenty millions of innocent people, L o n d o n , 1 5 5 6 . Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols perpetrées Occidentales, Anvers, [1579]. Den Spiegelwande

spanische Tyrannies,

e's Indes

Amsterdam, 1609.

A l l of this proves how strong the polemic was in E u r o p e at that time, for religious and political reasons, and, consequently, how cautious we should be today when we start the analysis of these problems. I n 1 5 1 2 Ferdinand V called an assembly in Burgos to resolve the problem of the attitude Spain should adopt toward

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the Indians. T h e assembly recognized the liberty of the Indians, their right to be treated in a humane way, b u t compelled them to submit to a very firm jurisdiction. T h a t was the base of the Burgos L a w of 1 5 1 2 , supplemented in 1 5 1 5 . In the Laws of Burgos the codicil of the testament of Isabella in favor of the Indians was taken implicitly into account. In these laws the creation of pueblos with churches in which to teach religion and to celebrate mass was encouraged. Inhabitants were ordered not to commit acts of violence against the Indians, but to treat them with humanity, to choose the ablest as future teachers, to require them to make auricular confession, to baptize them eight days after birth, to send a graduate, Hernán Juárez, to teach Latin to the sons of the caciques; not to use the Indians as carriers if there are beasts of burden, not to make them work in the gold mines more than five months without giving them forty days of rest, to make it possible for them to work on their lands, to give each Indian mine worker a pound of flour daily except on feast days, when he must receive fish; not to make Indian women work after the fourth month of their pregnancy but to use them exclusively for domestic tasks; neither to beat the Indians nor to put them in jail, but to take them before the visitador for judgment. T h e proportion of Indians that each cacique could use for domestic services was determined. It was decided to give encomiendas to the visitadores as a compensation. These visitadores, said the Laws of Burgos, should be elected by the admiral and royal officers from among the most pious men. T h e Indians were compelled to work f o r nine months in the service of the Spaniards and for the other three either on their own land or on that of the Spaniards f o r a salary. Finally, the Indians were to be compelled to wear clothes. Before explaining some concrete facts and institutions like the repartimiento and the encomienda so closely connected with our present explanation, let me glance at the mission as one of the most interesting political and social experiments on

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the American soil. Over these institutions, too, the polemical wave of the eighteenth century and the critical wind of European anticlericalism has passed. T h e invectives provoked the apology, and once the storm passed it left us many documents but only a few accurate and valuable books. T h e defenders of the Indians, priests and religious orders, aided by a very distinguished number of high authorities, organized social institutions of a theocratic character in which they aspired to offer not only an example of the social order that they defended but of a type of society capable of defending Indians from every abuse. T h e missions extended from South to North America, from the Plata River to Florida, New Mexico, and California; from Peru to Mexico, from Colombia to Paraguay and Argentina. T h e development was divided into three periods: (1) Sixteenth century, culminating in the mission of Vasco de Quiroga in Pdtzcuaro (2) Seventeenth century, the climax attained in the missions of the Jesuits among the Guarani Indians of Paraguay (3) Eighteenth century, with the missions of Fray Junipero Serra in California T h e first period of the missions took place after 1 5 1 6 , probable date of the publication of the Utopia of Thomas More, and before 1602, when Campanella's Civitas Solis appeared in print. T h e same idealistic stimulus that spurred these thinkers to publish their books instigated Spaniards to found the missions. It gave rise to efforts to restore society to its Christian bases, adopting as supreme guide the norms of natural rights. What in More and Campanella were dreams, in the Spanish monks were actions, and actions that they did not consider as social experiments, but that they performed convinced of their absolute value. T h e y sought a social order without "social sin," and in order to achieve that, like Campanella rather than More, they entrusted direction not to the philosopher, as in Plato, but to the priest, converted practically into supreme magistrate. They founded citizenship on

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active work for the community and made the basis of economic organization a public and functional conception of that economy. T h e books of M o r e and Campanella were not capricious fanciful inventions. N o r did the foundations of the Spaniards flourish by hazard. In both are exemplified the specific consequences of the moral and religious eagerness which pushed that epoch towards the re-Christianization of society and the interiorization of Christ as the ideal in individual and collective life. Spain, a people of action and, according to Campanella, predestined by prophecy and astrology, felt itself magnetized by that ideal. O n l y in Spain, besides the religiousCatholic impulse, two other confluent factors appeared, the rebirth of natural right and the historical aspiration, soon accomplished, of a militant Church. T h e missions then came to life as the result of the religious ideal that had existed since the beginning of Spanish colonization. T h e D o m i n i c a n Pedro de Córdoba, hostile to the Laws of Burgos because, although the laws modified the regime of the encomiendas they did not suppress it, expressed to Ferdinand V his adverse judgment. T h e king answered him: " T a k e upon yourself then, Father, the charge of remedying them; you will do me a great service therein." Henceforth Pedro de C ó r d o b a became the propagandist in the N e w W o r l d for the plan of the mission. He, together with several Dominican brethren in Mexico, obtained title to land near C u m a n á , Venezuela. Montesinos, Las Casas, Quiroga were won over to the idea of Córdoba. T h e failure of the mission, as well as that of several others, did not disappoint them. In 1537 Las Casas, in order to demonstrate that men were to be brought to Christianity by persuasion, determined to make the attempt in the Guatemalan province of T e z u l u t l a n , where there were very fierce people. Las Casas sent there Fray Luis Cáncer and soon the province became an absolutely new one. T w o conditions had been made by Las Casas: not to give the Indians to the encomenderos, and not to permit for five years

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the Spanish laity, except the governor, to have access to the province. T h e Spanish missions, guided by religious aims, were organized internally as a theocratic unity under the authority of priests or monks. O n e unpublished document called them "frontiers against paganism" (fronteras de la gentilidad). T h e missionaries worked with the regularity of religious men dedicated to their work, on the land, the preparation of meals, and their prayers. Most of their life was taken up by collective action organized according to detailed rules. Every mission had agricultural, industrial, and primary schools. A n d besides teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, there were music, songs, dances, and religious ceremonies. T h e land was divided, in almost every mission and every epoch of the missions, into public lands worked by the residents for the profit of the community and public land distributed among individual heads of families for the production of what each family needed. T h e crops from lands of the first category sustained churches, hospitals, hospices, the aged, widows, and orphans. W h a t the community did not produce was acquired. O n the land distributed among the heads of families work was imperative in order to produce what was necessary to cover the home needs. Of course the vigilance of the public authorities made it compulsory for each one to work for himself and for the community. T h e r e were also common lands for communal cattle. T h e interchange of food products for industrial commodities was made through the public organization of the mission in which there was no place for individual and autonomous commercial activity. In order to avoid the infiltration of the predatory life as a result of contact with the Spaniards, the missions were made quite close social units, conventional units, somewhat like social islands, in which every contact with the exterior world was carefully prevented. H o w can that attitude be explained? W h a t sort of implicit judgments are latent in the noble credulity with which these men, chiefly Dominicans, Jesuits, and

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Franciscans, b u i l t up this mission life? W h e n we read attentively the apologetic Historia de las Indias of Las Casas and take note of the qualities attributed by him to the Indians, the conclusion is this one: the Indians possessed every natural virtue; their psychological nature represented complete goodness. T h e catharsis that produced the conversion of Las Casas in 1514 induced him to consider the Indians as men deprived of the gratia, men who do not know the truth, the evangel. Consequently, he did not consider some of the acts of the Indians as sins, but only a result of their ignorance of the divine truth. T o give them opportunities to know that truth was the only mission of the white man. T h i s theological interpretation of the duty of white men was also that of another man, not as well known, although very superior both as a man and as a thinker to Las Casas: Vasco de Quiroga. I desire to stress the work accomplished by this man because in the history of the missions I do not think that there is any other work so full of social suggestion, and so expressive of the noble ambitions inspiring the missions. Vasco de Quiroga arrived in M e x i c o in 1530 as oidor (judge) and became Bishop of M i c h o a c i n . Europe, thought Vasco de Quiroga, had fallen into sin, and " w e must," he said, "raise the life of the Indians to a level of virtue and humanity superior to that of the European." W h a t to do? H e read the Saturnalia of Lucian and the Utopia of T h o m a s More. In the first he found an evocation of the Golden Age, with w h i c h he compared the life of the Indians. In the second he saw the pattern of education, the ideal organization for "communities of innocents" as he repeatedly called the Indians. In a letter to the Council of the Indies, dated 1531, he proposed to organize the life of the Indians into pueblos in which, "working the land and living from their own work, they may carry on an orderly life with saints and gods and Catholic statutes." In 1535 he wrote, " T h o m a s More, author w h o m we shall not despise, composed the republic from which I de-

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duced my own." We see that the goal of Vasco de Quiroga was the organization of a perfect and simple society through which to restore the lost purity of the primitive church. Vasco de Quiroga founded in the marvelous quiet of Pitzcuaro the hospital of Santa Fe. T h i s hospital was also a home for children, a school, and a lodging for a community that aspired to live a Christian life of perfection. Altogether there were at some times 30,000 Indians. T h e statute held that the land of every hospital should remain under communal ownership, but every family should have for its complementary needs a fruit garden, with flowers and vegetables. Nobody could sell the land, because if one sold it, "it would be impossible to keep for a long time the existing hospitality . . . because everyone would try to appropriate as much as possible without regard for his fellows, as is done usually. Because of our sins we despise what belongs to the commonwealth, which is the patrimony of the poor." Vasco de Quiroga organized the family under the authority of the eldest grandfather. Between the urban and the rural population he established a constant exchange, consequently everyone had to learn agriculture and a craft. T h e children, after school hours, went to the country to work one or two hours at something amusing for them, and what they produced was distributed among the children according to the age, work, and industriousness of each. In every country house there lived from four to six families who raised cattle and poultry. Every two years they could return to the city and live there the same length of time. T h e city and the country, the men of the city and the farmers, worked together during the harvest period. . . . " I t is my purpose," said Vasco de Quiroga, "to put the Indians in condition to bear a life of work without the idleness that engenders so many risks, so many infamies. I wish," he continued, "that you should live like brothers in Jesus Christ in the bonds of peace and charity." He recommended simplicity in dress. He established the sixhour day, and communal dinners every feast day. He incor-

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porated the women into the work of the group, teaching them special crafts, which included weaving cloth of wool, linen, silk, and cotton. All the popular industrial arts that you find today from New Mexico to Paraguay, from Pátzcuaro to the interior of Peru or Argentina, have had the same origin: either the art schools of the missions, or the private transmission of the craft by the hundreds and hundreds of humble Spanish artists who began to come to America after the second voyage of Columbus. But why did the missions decline and disappear? The idea of the missions was as artificial as it was noble. It was impossible to maintain them in isolation, nor was it possible to suppress every sort of human impulse of avidity and polemic. The mission represented a static unity, but it was not a living social center, able to adapt itself to the constant variability of life. It was a city-convent, without place for the initiative of the individual man, without place for adventure. From within and without—except in Paraguay—came adverse factors and in the course of the eighteenth century the missions dissolved themselves, but before dying, they flourished, thanks to the marvelous spirit of Fray Junipero Serra in California. T h e missions were born as a religious aspiration and a protest against the covetousness of the conquistadores, against the exploitation of the Indians and against the encomiendas, though they were a specific and conventual form of encomiendas. What was the encomienda? This word appeared in a legal document of Spain in the fourteenth century (Ordenamiento de Alcalá) as a sort of señorío (seigneury), that is, a semi-feudal estate. After 1495 struggles began between the crown and the conquistadores, between the latter and some religious men, between certain officers who desired to cooperate with the king and many others who aspired to force the Indians to work for the benefit of the Spaniards. All through this struggle the social pressure in favor of forced work and in favor of slavery must have been very strong, be-

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cause we see even the most enthusiastic elements favorable to the Indians reduced to silence by superior orders: for instance the Dominican Montesinos. T h e idea of Columbus of establishing, as the Portugese did, a regular slave trade, was not accepted. T h e sale of a group of Indian slaves in Xerez de la Frontera in 1499 was not accepted by the crown, and the Indians were declared free. However, several decrees prove that the will of the kings was not firm, and they vacillated. We must not forget that the slavery of prisoners of war was more or less generally admitted in Europe. But the encomiendas really began with the instructions to Fray Nicolas Ovando who arrived in L a Española (Santo Domingo) in 1499. As an answer to the orders of Ovando which compelled them to work but paid them a salary the Indians refused to till even their own lands. T h e problem for the crown was very momentous—either to abandon the Caribbean Sea (at that time the Indies) or to find an efficient formula to save the situation. T h e next step of the crown (1503) was the decision to force the Indians to live together with the Spaniards in the cities, authorizing them to build buildings and to work the land and the mines, but always as free men. T h e distribution of men and land initiated by Bobadilla before Ovando now became general. It is worth while to say some words about the process of the encomiendas. First: the encomiendas were born in the Caribbean Islands as a result of the hostility of the population, the resistance to work, the avidity of the conquerors, and the political and religious necessity for the crown not to abandon the Indies. Second: on the continent the encomiendas were less harsh in Nueva España and Peru because of the traditional submission of the natives to the caciques. T h i r d : In regions like Venezuela and R i o de la Plata they never achieved the submission of the Indians, who lived in an attitude of rebellion or scattered through the country. Although there were climatical and geographic differences among the natives, legislation was quite uniform.

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W h e n land and men were distributed among conquerors and officers of the crown, the epoch of the greatest abuse began and the struggle for ideals was initiated. Sometimes the crown failed. Sometimes it spoke an elevated language. Sometimes, as for instance in 1511, the Dominican Montesinos led in the church a magnificent attack against the encomenderos, but against this thesis Fray Bernadino de Mesa raised his voice in an effort to justify several sorts of servitude. T h e Laws of Burgos were the first official answer to the question, but instead of appeasing people's minds, they became the point of departure for a polemic even more bitter than before. It was the glorious epoch of Las Casas: full of passion, without restraint in his vituperation, and sometimes even exceeding the limits of truth; nevertheless he played the moral role of an advocate of the most distinguished elements of Spain. T h e refutation of Aristotle's theory of slavery became the central point of the polemic. Cisneros helped him in moderation, and he seemed to convince Charles V in favor of the Indians. T h i s is the origin of the C é d u l a of 1523. Charles declared the Indians citizens of Castile and forbade making them slaves (1526) even if they were prisoners of war. T h e encomenderos and officers of the crown were threatened with seizure of their property if they contravened these prescriptions. However, the power of the king, his moral authority and his mandate were not obeyed. T h e struggle continued between the king, assisted by Las Casas and many other individuals and groups on the one side, and the colonists on the other. A n example of the bitterness of the polemic is the case of Fray Alonso de Soria, expelled from the pulpit in Chile in 1533 because he spoke against the slavery of the Indians. T h e laws of 1542 stated that the encomenderos, beneficiaries of an encomienda, could not demand personal services of the Indians but only a tribute. T h r o u g h these laws Charles V intended to suppress the encomiendas, but a rebellion was plotted, and unfortunately Charles V was defeated. A t the assembly of jurists and theologians in Val-

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ladolid in 1550 the struggle between Ginés de Sepúlveda, Aristotelian, and Las Casas, T h o m i s t , initiated a period of mitigation of the conditions of life in the encomiendas. T h e y disappeared completely in 1720. T h e tutelary ideal that inspired the encomiendas and some of the social and cultural consequences of this institution are beginning to be stressed. Recently an Argentinian historian, Enrique de Gandia, published a book with new documentation, Francisco de A Ifaro y la condición social de los indios, Rio de la Plata, Tucumán, Paraguay y Perú, siglos XVI y XVII (Buenos Aires 1939), about the encomiendas, which he considers centers of indigenous Spanish civilization because in the encomienda, the savages, he maintains, became civilized Indians; they learned Castilian, and religion; they wore clothes, established families, tilled the land, received needed medicine and care, and in many sections they could neither be obliged to work excessively nor to work in the pueblo of the encomienda more than two days a week. Sr. Gandia, w h o has accumulated unpublished documents, arrives at a conclusion which, although not new, is vigorously stressed and which requires wide and patient research before it can be accepted without reservation. T h e conclusion is that the encomienda was superior culturally to the mission, and the rivalry between encomenderos and missionaries was aroused by the missionaries because of the proselytism of the latter and their desire to be u n i q u e rulers of colonial life. I do not dare to assert that the thesis of Sr. Gandia is true, yet, every day new shades of the institution of the encomienda are discovered proving that there was a translation, sometimes imperfect, sometimes perfected, of the social regime then flourishing in many countries of Europe and in Spain, mainly in Aragón. O u t of that institution and of others of a complementary and juridical nature came the economic and social structure of Hispano-America. T h e entailment of the encomiendas, the transference to America of the Spanish mayorazgo, that is,

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the vesting of a certain mass of ownership in the primogeniture of every generation in order to perpetuate the social power and the prestige of a family and lineage, all these, united with the territorial extension of the encomiendas, have given Hispano-America the social structure of an agrarian country, with landlords and day laborers. With some exceptions, due to geographical and climatic factors, that was the structure of the economic society of Hispano-America at the decline of our splendor in the seventeenth century; it continued during the eve of emancipation, and, with some slight modification due to immigration, it is so today. Something more must be added in this respect. One of the characteristics of the agrarian constitution of Spain at that epoch was the joining of a collective economy with an individual economy. Most of the people had communal ownership in virtue of residence in the village or city. That was transferred to America. Insistently from 1516, in the "Cedularies" and the stipulations or conditions imposed before conceding permission to conquer or to found a settlement, the crown speaks of the need to reserve in every pueblo a certain part of the land for common ownership and utilization. On many occasions the crown said that this should be 10 percent of the land of the district. Spain created a complete governmental organization in America. We may think that it was too strong, too interventionist, but the reproach cannot be made that she was unable to organize an administrative system. On January 20, 1503, Spain founded in Seville the "Casa de Contratación de Indias" administrative organ so well studied and utilized later by England. Through this institution Spain organized the commercial monopoly of America, thus initiating, according to economic historians, what was later to be called mercantilism. In 1 5 1 1 the Consejo de Indias, a political, administrative, and technical body, was created in Madrid and entrusted with the supreme direction of American affairs. The highest func-

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tions of government were delegated in America to viceroys, captains-general, governors, and courts of justice. Really the most important organs of Spain in America for ruling the continent were the viceroys and the audiencias (supreme courts). Every penetration into new lands gave an opportunity to create a new province. T h e birth of New Spain (Mexico) created a place for a viceroy. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Veragua formed after 1508 the territory of Castilla del Oro. T h e r e were also Guatemala, Peru, Nueva Granada (Colombia) and others. In 1776 there were Viceroys of Mexico, Nueva Granada, Peru, and La Plata; Captains-general of Guatemala, Venezuela, Chile, and Cuba; nine audiencias (supreme courts), thirty governors, four archbishops, twentyfour bishops, and three hundred and sixty monasteries. But the social background of the colony lay in the very democratic municipal councils, inheriting the best part of Spain, with its municipal tradition, with the cabildo abierto or general assembly of residents. Many documents—for instance, the stipulations of Alonso Velles de Mendoza, February 19, 1602—declared flatly, "that the city could select for itself the mayor and council and many other officials." T h e reason for that is that the discovery of America was for Spain the occasion for the transfusion of her blood and her soul to America, her good and bad qualities, her cultural and material heritage. In 1574 the Spanish cosmographer J u a n López de Velasco made an official report which, according to the American historian, Bourne, was not equaled until the work of the Englishman Chalmers in 1 7 1 5 . López de Velasco, who had traveled for several years through America in order to take his census, gives us the figure of 160,000 Spaniards at that epoch, distributed in 200 cities founded by the Spaniards. Among those 160,000 Spaniards there were 4,000 encomenderos and the rest were settlers, miners, merchants, and soldiers. T h e r e were 6,000,000 Indians gathered in cities, villas, and towns submitting to the Spanish norm, the European norm. T h e greatest attraction was centered in Mexico City

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and Lima. Mexico City had in 1574 15,000 Spaniards. Meanwhile in 1698, more than one century later, there were in New York, 1,800 persons of European extraction, in Virginia in 1671 there were 40,000 and in Maryland 20,000. In 1690, according to Chalmers, there were altogether 200,000 white men in the English colonies. It is impossible to describe here the sufferings the Spaniards underwent in order to accomplish that heroic effort. I have not time. I hope to do that some day. Now in order to illustrate my assertion of the transfusion of Spain into America I desire to call your attention to some symbolic facts. You find the names of Spanish cities from New Mexico to the south of Argentina. You will find repeated the name of the city of Santa Fe (Holy Faith) in almost every country. Santa Fe was the city near Granada founded by the Catholic Kings when they prepared the assault against Granada, and the synonymous towns were founded in memoriam. You will find in your beautiful California the name of the most splendid mountain range of Southern Spain, Sierra Nevada, the snow mountain. Even the name of California you can find in the Spanish chivalric poem, Las Sergas de Esplandián, published in Seville in 1510, that is, fourteen years before Cortés spoke of it and twenty-five years before he visited the lower peninsula. In stanza 157 the poem says, "Know that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California, very near the terrestrial paradise." I suppose that the discoverers, astonished by the beauty and fertility of the country, applied to it the chimeric name created by the poet's combination of classical words. Spain brought all its products. After the second voyage of Columbus there came animals, cereals, fruits, vegetables, flowers. How many surprises there are in the chronicles, the reports of that epoch! In 1493 we brought the first horse to Santo Domingo. De Soto and Ponce de León brought horses to Florida. Then came asses and mules, beasts of burden. The Spaniards brought bulls, oxen, sheep, goats and domestic

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pigs; they brought to America rabbits and domestic dogs. I suppose that it was Doña Inez de Muños, the first lady who came to America (1535), who brought the first tame cat. T h e y brought wheat to America; the famous geographer Humboldt consecrated several pages to the history of that transfer. T h e y also brought barley. Among fruits they brought oranges, limes, citrons, peaches, apricots, figs, quinces, mulberries (and silkworms), cherries, dates, pomegranates, apples, pears, plums, and melons. T h e first slip of a vine was taken to Lima by Hernando de Montenegro in 1 5 5 1 , the olive tree to Peru by Antonio de Rivero in 1560, the sugar cane by Pedro de Atiensa to Santo Domingo, and from Santo Domingo to Mexico and Peru. Bananas were brought to Santo Domingo in 1 5 1 6 and soon transplanted to the continent. T h e Spaniards brought every sort of vegetables: lettuce, cabbages, radishes, onions, parsley, turnips, carrots, eggplant, endives, spinach, peas, beans, and lentils. Garcilaso, the Peruvian captain and writer, described how his father gathered his brothers-in-arms in order to feast on the first three asparagus raised in Peru. When the first rose flourished in Peru, there was a celebration in honor of Saint Rose of Lima, that being the origin of her cult; finally they brought the carnation too. What about culture? T h e Spanish culture was transferred to America from the base to the top through the missions, encomiendas, municipal councils, religious orders, churches, and direct organs of the state. T h e primary school then existent in Europe (do not forget that the official public school created by the state was an affair of the last part of the eighteenth century) was spread mainly by the missions, encomiendas, and municipal councils, in most of which there existed a primary school in which one learned reading, writing, arithmetic, and music. One aspect of the teaching in these primary institutions was the instruction in crafts. Spain sent skilled workers into every field of agriculture and artistic life: silver and gold filigree, the art of making woolen blankets of vivid colors, work in copper and iron, dishes and trays

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of wood, marvelous lace work, silk lace, the art of engraving and painting leather; in a word, all that Spain had, without keeping anything from America, because it, also, was considered to be spiritually Spain. And today you can find the traces of that artistic teaching from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the south of Argentina: in the ceramics, in the sarape or in the poncho, in the wooden dishes of strong colors of Michoacin, or in the elaborate silver or golden earrings. T h e love of music and the Indians' ability as craftsmen made possible the fabrication of flutes, violins, and all sorts of musical instruments, which spread over all Hispano-America the liking for singing choruses and municipal orchestras. Higher education was initiated in a quarter of Mexico City, Tlatelolco, on January 6, 1536. T h e name of the college was Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco and it was dedicated to the teaching of the Indians. Besides the primary school, the curriculum included reading, writing, Latin grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, music, and medicine. Among the professors there were distinguished young men, educated in Paris, like Fray J u a n de Gaona, and figures of the standing of Fray Bernadino de Sahagun, the author of the Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, thanks to whom accounts of most of the traditions, habits, and customs of the Mexicans at the time of the Conquest have come down to us. T h a t college has played an enormous social role because in it were educated governors, mayors, and teachers for the Indians as well as for the Spaniards and criollos (descendents of Spaniards). In 1537 the College of Santiago was founded, and in 1563 that of Todos los Santos. After 1539 there were colleges for Spanish and Indian young ladies. In Lima the College of San Carlos was established in 1582, and the College of Santa Maria del Socorro for destitute young girls began to function in 1562. T h e first university in America was created in Santo Domingo in 1538, but the two principal centers of higher culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the universities of Mexico City and Lima. Although the foundation

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of the former was ordered in 1 5 5 1 , teaching was not begun until January 25, 1553; the date of the Royal cédula of the latter (1549 or 1 5 5 1 ) is disputed. It was first placed under the auspices of Dominican Friars and in 1575 became the state university. In the city of Santiago (Guatemala), in Guatemala City, in Santiago de Chile, in Comazagua (Honduras), in León in Nicaragua, in Quito, in the province of Tucumán (Argentina), there were founded all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, educational institutions that can be called not universities but rather centers of initiation into the higher culture. In Ecuador the University of San Gregorio was founded in 1586. In 1598 a royal and pontifical university was created in Cuzco, and in 1623 Santa Fe de Bogotá. Theology, philosophy, Latin, and natural science were carefully studied in most of these universities, especially in those of Mexico and Peru. Doctor Frías de Albornoz, pupil of Diego de Covarrubias, one of the most outstanding figures not only of Spain but of all Europe, went to teach in the University of Mexico. T h e result of these efforts was the formation of a distinguished social group, able to write even in Latin, familiar with the classics and with geography and natural history. T h e cultural penetration of Spain in America was aided by a policy constantly favorable to the marriage of Spaniards and Indians. T h i s policy was not only authorized by kings but was stimulated by them from the beginning. Consequently, through the Indians and half-breeds (mestizos) the cultural efforts of Spain were instilled into the lowest social strata. In some places, like Peru where the influence of Spanish aristocrats was very strong and prejudice deep, the right of the Indian students to become pupils of the university was disputed, but the question was settled by a resolution dated March 12, 1697, considering the Indians of pure blood. Of course, these social hindrances of Peru did not exist in Mexico and most of the other countries of Hispano-America. T h e church cooperated in the overcoming of these prejudices not

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only with her daily actions but with the resolutions of her councils in Lima, Mexico, and Bogotá. T h e printing press was introduced in Mexico about 1538 or 1539, in Guatemala in 1567, in Peru between 1572 and 1583, in Paraguay in 1693; and in the eighteenth century it spread widely through Hispano-America. T h e list of books printed in Mexico during the sixteenth century is still being extended every day through new and fruitful research studies of Pimentel, Icazbalceta, and P. Cuevas, but it would be sufficient to remember, besides those already mentioned, the history of Bernadino de Sahagún, with hundreds of illustrations in color, the grammars, and vocabularies of the languages of the native peoples of Mexico: Aztecs, Tarascans, Mixtees, Zapotees; catechisms, books of asceticism, and so forth. Consequently, in Mexico as well as in Peru, there flourished generations of theologians, jurists, naturalists, poets, and artists giving to the society of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an astonishing dignity in the intellectual and moral sense. T w o restrictions, in Hispano-America as in Spain, hampered cultural life: the Inquisition and the printing law. T h e Inquisition initiated its activities in Mexico in 1522 with an indictment for concubinage, but the Court of the Inquisition was fully formalized in 1569. Before that date, in 1539, a famous trial of an Indian cacique of Texcoco, executed following sentence by the Inquisition, aroused a great storm in Spain, attracting to the Inquisitor of Mexico the reproaches of the Inquisitor General Cardinal of Toledo, and paving the way for the decree of 1 5 7 5 forbidding the indictment of the Indians for questions of faith. T h e Inquisition concentrated its attention on three groups of persons: blasphemers, Protestants, and judaizantes (persons to whom the secret practices of Hebrew rites were attributed). T h e persecution of the last two was incomparably milder in America than in Spain, and many groups of French, Belgians, English, Portuguese,

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and persons from many other countries succeeded in arriving at these shores with a completely different Weltanschauung than that prevailing among Spaniards. A proof of the relative mildness of the Inquisition here in America, compared of course with its temper in Spain, is sufficiently revealed by these figures: during the sixteenth century in the viceroyalty of New Spain, 17 were sentenced to die; and 43 from 1522 to 1820, date of the Independence. T h e copyright law for Hispano-America and the legislation concerning commerce in books were very embarrassing for authors and printers: for the former because of a previous censorship and possible responsibilities as a result of the ideas stated; for the latter because of expense and of obstacles to the diffusion of books. After 1480, date of a liberal decree, according to books the right of free entry into Spain, we come upon the Resolution of 1502, very restrictive in matters of permission for printing and entrance of books and the Pragmatics of 1554 and 1558, even more inflexible and suspicious. T h e last date is a turning point in the persecutory attitude of the state in Spain. T h e first law regulating the printing of books in America was passed on December 2 1 , 1560. According to this, it was forbidden to publish anything concerning the Indies without previous authorization of the Council of the Indies in Madrid, or to print papers or books without license. Nevertheless, the cultural eagerness was so keen that these obstacles and another, even more serious, the high price of paper, were surmounted. Many books were published, quantities of others were imported, and fine public and private libraries were formed in Mexico, Lima, and Bogotá. Among the books received in America were not only Spanish books, but the best books then published in Europe, as has been revealed recently by Professor Green of Philadelphia. It will be easy to enrich this knowledge by studying the papers of the Casa de Contratación where a detailed list of the books sent to America in each expedition was made. Even if the legislation cannot be called truly liberal, nevertheless a

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comparative analysis of the copyright legislation applied by France to her colonies in America makes Spain's seem advanced and progressive, because the French required all who would become printers or booksellers to secure the direct authorization of the king, besides maintaining the most severe censorship for manuscripts. All America is a testimony to the Spanish impulse for building in that epoch. Cities, imposing monuments of engineering, and art proclaims the fertility of creative eagerness. T h e two oldest cities in the United States, Saint Augustine in Florida and Santa Fe in New Mexico, were built by the Spaniards, and the obsession to build with a view to eternity gave to their monuments in Mexico or Peru, in Santo Domingo or Quito, in Bogotá or Puerto Rico or Córdoba, a sense of immortality. From the very beginning mural painting flourished in Mexico, the plateresque style decorated the façades of cathedrals and churches all over Hispano-America, and the rich tropical flora were married to the lines of Spanish architecture. Even the Gothic and mudejar appeared in the new continent, the former in a church of Puerto Rico and the latter in several churches of Mexico and the Convent of San Francisco in Quito. In the sumptuous "City of Kings" (Lima) the fusion of Spanish Renaissance style with the motifs of Inca decoration attained the maximum splendor as did the religious sculpture in Quito. T h e American historican, Edward G. Bourne, wrote: "What Rome did for Spain, Spain in turn did for Spanish America." T h e soul of Spain, the inner vibration of her spirit, is present in the streets, in the style of the houses, in the balconies, in the conception of family life, in the attitude of the women of Bogotá or Córdoba, Mexico or Lima, Santiago de Chile or Havana, Quito, T u c u m á n or Santo Domingo. Spain founded on this continent a society with a spiritual, introversive conception of culture, a society in which the static and conservative forces prevailed over the dynamic social elements, yet it was a restless society and one with a soul full of sensibility and

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hungry for perfection that had not yet found its own authentic way. However, Spain could say "Aedificabo!" T h i n k i n g often during these sad months of that thirst for eternity that has characterized Spain, reflecting on the perennial fate that Don Quixote, symbol of our soul, has attributed to himself, I find many reasons to fortify my faith. On the historical horizon of Spain I discover the stars that have always guided her best sons, the stars that put us on the road that leads towards the ideal of a New Jerusalem, the city of justice attained by a process of voluntary agreement.

Some .Aspects of the Social of 'Portuguese GILBERTO

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its literary qualities. T h e Portuguese soon became adepts in that kind of literature—the historical narrative, the almost scientific description of exotic peoples and exotic plants, animals, drugs. T w o other masters of this type of writing should be mentioned: Garcia da Orta, who wrote of the simples and drugs of India; and Gabriel Soares, who wrote of the Indians, plants, and animals of Brazil. T h e European maritime enterprises in American waters d u r i n g the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were also the result of scientific studies by Portuguese. Columbus married the daughter of Bartholomew Perestrello, the captain-donatary of Porto Santo, of the Madeira group, one of the outposts of the Portuguese in the Atlantic, and "his mother-in-law placed her husband's charts and papers at his disposal." T h e discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese was likewise the result of scientific work which had been carried on in Portugal since the fifteenth century. T h e r e was in Portugal, as I have said, a group of cosmographers and geographers whose research made it possible for navigators to discover new oceans and new lands. One of these men of science was Dr. Pedro Nunes. In Portugal there existed at this time one of the most complex and cosmopolitan cultures ever known in Europe—a culture enriched by contributions from the Arabs, from the Moors, and from the Sephardic Jews. T h e r e had been in Portugal a vigorous medieval and post-medieval literature, with Fernâo Lopes, who owes nothing to Froissart as a master of historical narrative; the beginning of peninsular lyrical poetry was in Portugal; and the pioneer of the peninsular novel was a Portuguese. In this connection I might add that it is impossible to separate entirely the cultural history of Portugal from that of other groups whose combination of special cultural developments constitute the Peninsular or Hispanic—not Spanish—culture as a whole. For after all, as Angel Ganivet remarked, Portugal separated from Spain, not because the two were too different, b u t because they were too similar. However, since their separation, their differ-

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ences have grown; and from the beginning Portugal has been more cosmopolitan and "oceanic," Spain more Mediterranean. It is amusing to one who knows the history of such a culture to hear some of the present-day propagandists of the G e r m a n expansion in southern Brazil say that the Germans cannot submit to the Luso-Brazilian or the Hispano-Brazilian culture because it is inferior. T h e fact is that it is a much older culture than the German culture, and that it was enriched by the Arabs and the Sephardic Jews as was no other culture in medieval or modern Europe. Such contributions it added to its R o m a n elements, the Portuguese probably being the modern European tongue closest to the Latin, with the single exception of the Italian. A n d all those valuable cultural elements were taken to Brazil by the Portuguese settlers in that part of America. A c c o r d i n g to Payne, in his History of Colonization, the Portuguese were the first European people since antiquity to establish a colony in the strictest sense of the term, selling what they possessed in the homeland and transporting themselves and their families to the new abode. N o t only did they transport themselves and their families to Brazil; they also introduced their most precious cultural values. T h e first Portuguese settlers in A m e r i c a were face to face with nature in an aspect "far from hospitable to the creations of civilized man." It is amazing that they were able to establish the sugar-cane industry in a virgin region like Brazil, having against them both Indians and tropical forest. B u t in a few years, large houses of stone—almost medieval castles— were being b u i l t near the tropical forests, as residences for the patriarchal families. W i t h these houses chapels were constructed for Catholic worship and schools where the children of the colonists were taught Latin and rhetoric. In a few years poems and grammars were being written in tropical Brazil by the Portuguese and the sons of the P o r t u g u e s e — b y Catholic missionaries, by aristocratic sugar planters, by scholarly Sephardic Jews.

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In 1535 scions of some of the best families of P o r t u g a l — such as the A l b u q u e r q u e s , the Mellos, the Mouras—began to find their way into Brazil; and the Portuguese sugar planters of the northeast of Brazil began to develop, through intense inbreeding, into one of the most powerful and creative agrarian aristocracies of the N e w W o r l d . T h a t intense inbreeding d i d not prevent gentlemen from other parts of Europe from establishing themselves in Brazil, through marriage into the Portuguese families. Early in the sixteenth century Filippo Cavalcanti, for instance, went from Florence to Portugal and from Portugal to Brazil, where he became the founder of an important family. Cavalcanti had come from that Italy which had produced the Divina Commedia; his ancestor G u i d o had been a close friend of Dante, and appears, as is well known, in Dante's masterpiece. Cavalcanti took with him from Italy to early Brazil some of the graces of the Florentine spirit and culture, just as the A l b u q u e r q u e s took with them the old Portuguese taste for poetry, the typical Portuguese poetry of Camoes. Jorge de A l b u q u e r q u e , a military captain of Pern a m b u c o in the first half of the sixteenth century, encouraged the writing of poetry and the establishment of a theater in Portuguese Brazil. It is obvious that an agrarian aristocracy formed the backbone of the colony, not only from an economic but also from a cultural point of view. From its very beginning, the history of Portuguese America is not only economic history—the history of sugar in A m e r i c a — b u t intellectual history as well. Very soon a poem was written in Brazil, and Portuguese culture in America had begun. From all this it can be seen how complex was the personality of a typical Portuguese colonist in the sixteenth century. Such a pioneer was like a Spaniard, without his militant orthodoxy; like an Englishman, without his Puritan contours. H e was daring, persistent, efficient; but seldom handicapped by inflexible principles, and thus more plastic than the Spaniard or the Englishman. H e was, from the beginning, more cosmopolitan. From the first he made himself notable for a

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certain power of adaptation and assimilation which set him apart from other Europeans of his time. T h e type of stone house that he developed in Brazil was a combination of the manor house of Portugal and certain Arabic and Asiatic elements which he had acquired in the north of Africa, in China, in India, and in Japan. T h i s explains why the Portuguese-American plantation system of agriculture, with its vast sugar estates worked by slave labor—first Indian and later African, when the Indian labor proved inadequate—was so successful as the instrument through which agrarian civilization was established in tropical America. T h a t strong house, almost like a castle—known as the "great house"—in which the owner led a patriarchal and in many respects a self-sufficient existence, came to symbolize not only an economic but a social and cultural system. It served not only as the residence of the plantation owner, but as fortress, school, guest house, church, hospital, bank, and even harem. For though there was intense aristocratic inbreeding among those families of good Portuguese origin that had established themselves in Brazil, and though the purity of ladies and girls was highly idealized, race mixture went on freely from the beginning, through irregular relations of Europeans with Indian and African women, leading to the formation and the development of new ethnic combinations in Brazil. Through sexual irregularities the best Portuguese blood mixed with the best Indian blood and the best African blood brought to America. One should remember that, probably owing to their intimate contact with the Moors, the Portuguese were from the beginning admirers of dark women. Girls, some of them probably blonde, were sent to Brazil from Portugal—sometimes by the Queen of Portugal herself—to marry Portuguese gentlemen established there as planters. These girls were sent to Brazil, not so much for the sake of race purity as to preserve the social rank and the aristocratic status of the planters. But personally many of those gentlemen preferred Indian

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and even Negro and mulatto girls. Jeronymus de Albuquerque, for instance, married a Mello, the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman, whom the Queen of Portugal had sent to Brazil especially to marry him; but for years he had as the flower of his plantation harem an Indian girl, the daughter of a brave Indian chief. By that Indian beauty he had many children, and almost 400 years later a descendant of Albuquerque and his Indian girl became the first cardinal in Latin America. Some planters were careful in their importation of slaves from Africa to arrange that pretty girls should come. Those sexual preoccupations were unworthy of Christian monogamic gentlemen; they show how much the Portuguese had come under the influence of the polygamous Arabs and the Moors. But one should not forget that those same sexual preoccupations led to the formation of a mixed race, as we have seen. Slaves from African groups far advanced in their culture, like the Mohammedan Negroes who knew how to read and write in Arabic, were imported to Brazil. And sexual selection had something to do with the importation of Africans from so fine a stock. These are subjects that are being studied by the younger Brazilian and Portuguese historians. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries students neglected such aspects of history for the political and military phases. Research in the field of social history, including what the French call histoire intime, is a very recent activity in Brazil and one that has met with many and serious difficulties. In Protestant countries, such as the Anglo-American colonies, the social historian has for his use a very valuable body of material that is seldom to be found in early colonial Brazil— diaries and autobiographies written by men and by women, full of significant information about the social life of their time. Your old Puritans wrote many diaries, in the writing of which they took deep satisfaction. Loaded down with the burden of their own sins, the writing of a diary was for them what confession is for a Catholic. And here we have an im-

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portant difference between the English who colonized New England and the Portuguese who colonized Nova Lusitania, or New Portugal: the Puritans, as good and earnest Protestants, wrote numerous diaries and confidential letters describing their childhood, their domestic troubles, and their intimate problems; the Catholic settlers of Brazil, who were sincerely religious, had the same troubles and problems but, unfortunately for the social historian, they did not put them on paper—they merely told the priest or the friar, their confessor, about them. Fortunately for the social historian—who is apt to become, through professional perversion, terrifically sadistic in his attitudes—there was in early colonial Brazil another source of information. Beginning in the sixteenth century, agents of the Holy Inquisition collected a vast amount of information on the domestic life, the heresies, the sexual irregularities of the colonists, their superstitions, their family life, the relations of husbands with wives, of men with their mothers-inlaw, of masters with their servants, of whites with Indians and with Africans. T h e fact is that the officers of the Inquisition who were sent to Brazil to collect such data were more powerful than the confessors themselves. And these confessions of sins were put on paper, just as the Puritan confessions, or diaries, were. But these confessions are not so numerous as the so-called "denunciations," that is, secret or confidential information about men or women suspected of heresy, of crime, or of grave offenses against the Catholic view of sexual morality— information given to agents of the Inquisition by neighbors, relatives, or servants of the person whose religious beliefs or private life and morals were not considered regular nor orthodox. Some of the data collected by the agents of the Inquisition among the early colonists of Bahia and Pernambuco have been recently published, in limited editions. Other documents of the same type remain unpublished in Portuguese

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archives. T h o s e Inquisition papers provide excellent material for the social historian, and through them it is possible for a modern student of early colonial society in Brazil to understand some of the most intimate problems of social relations in that period. Even problems of economic relations are brought to light in those papers in a very illuminating way, as, for instance, the relations of sugar-cane planters—who were the feudal lords of colonial Brazil in Pernambuco and B a h i a — w i t h merchants or traders. Since most of the traders engaged in the importation of slaves and in the exportation of sugar were Sephardic Jews outwardly professing Christianity — o r chrislaos novos—they were the subject of careful investigation by the agents of the Inquisition. It is clear from such investigations that some of the most aristocratic sugar-cane planters of Brazil at the end of the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century were in a permanent state of debt; also that they had to pay a high rate of interest on the money that was lent them by the " N e w Christians." Many concrete details concerning the economic relations of the landowners and slaveholders with the town merchants and the money lenders project new light on those social and political antagonisms that soon developed in colonial Brazil between the aristocrats of the sugar-cane plantations, the "senhores de engenho," and the town people. So deep became such antagonisms that they expressed themselves in a civil war—planters against merchants—in early colonial Brazil. T h r o u g h the Inquisition papers the student of social history can trace some of the most important causes of that civil war. T h e Inquisition papers have also proved valuable to the student of early Portuguese literary and intellectual activities in Brazil. R e a d i n g them, I was able to find some years ago that the author of the first poem written in Brazil was not a good and devout Catholic but a N e w Christian, probably a scholarly Sephardic Jew, disguised as a Catholic. T h i s fact is the basis for a better interpretation of that sixteenth century poem and for a better understanding of its social significance.

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It shows also that the best intellectual Jewish culture—that of the Sephardim—began very early to contribute to the development of literary activity in Brazil. Speaking of Sephardic Jews, I should like to point out that modern social historians of Brazil have developed an intense curiosity as to Jewish cultural and social activities in colonial Brazil and consider the manuscripts kept in the Portuguese Israelite Congregation of Amsterdam to be a wealth of valuable material that should be carefully studied by Brazilian scholars. Manuscripts in the Dutch archives, some of them dealing with aspects of Brazilian social life in the seventeenth century, have been copied, and some of them have been translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil. This is not the case with regard to those manuscripts kept in the Portuguese Jewish Congregation of Amsterdam. Recently, however, a friend of mine, during his stay in Holland as secretary to the Brazilian legation in T h e Hague, was able to secure a copy of a poem written in Pernambuco by Rabbi Aboab da Fonseca in the archaic Sephardic Portuguese of the seventeenth century—a poem that describes social conditions in that part of Brazil during the Dutch occupation of part of the country, from 1624 to 1654. Family archives and private collections of papers, as well as bookkeeping material belonging to some of the old and important sugar-cane plantations of colonial Brazil, have been neglected until recently by Brazilian historians and Brazilians in general, with the exception of genealogical notes having a direct appeal to vanity or family pride. It was not until the 1920's and especially the 1930's that a systematic search began in Brazil for that kind of material, as well as for family papers such as wills, inventories, and land grants kept in notaries' public offices, and also for papers of social interest kept in the archives of old churches and monasteries. Such material was almost entirely overlooked by the older historians with one important exception, that of former President Washington Luis, who was interested in the colonial history of the state of

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Sao Paulo. As mayor of the capital of that state and later as governor of the state, probably following the suggestion of a distinguished Brazilian historian, Senhor Affonso d'E. T a u nay, he ordered the official publication of a large number of land grants (datas de terra or sesmarios), wills, and inventories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. T h a t publication makes the study and interpretation of Brazilian colonial society in that region a much easier task than a corresponding study, of the period from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, in other regions of Brazil, such as the typical plantation areas of R i o de Janeiro, Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranhao. It was in the northeast of Brazil that the plantation system was most highly developed along semifeudal lines and with a peculiar social structure. Pernambuco became the outstanding expression of this society, and became the most characteristic sub-area in the entire system of Portuguese colonial expansion in Asia, Africa, or America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Every planter became an autocrat in his own engenho, or sugar-cane plantation and mill, and the most important planters soon became the masters of the government, with the governors, sent there by the King of Portugal, doing what they wanted them to do. T h e y were the only members of the colonial senate, the militia officers, or colonial captains. In 1666 the sugar-cane planters of Pernambuco went so far as to expel a governor sent by the King of Portugal. His Majesty appointed a new governor, one whose interests were those of the leaders of that powerful agricultural system. It is evident that the private papers of these aristocratic families who had the government in their hands have great interest, not only for the student of Brazilian social history but for the student of political and general history as well. Official and bureaucratic papers tell an incomplete and sometimes false story: one needs to know private documents to interpret these official papers adequately. That explains why

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modern Brazilian historians have been so earnest and so active in their search for private papers in family and church archives. T h o u g h such historians have come too late, they have been able to find some valuable material. T h e y have come too late because some of the most important family and church archives of the plantation area have already been destroyed. T h e climate there is not favorable to the preservation of old papers. Also since the end of the nineteenth century, which marks the shifting of economic and political power from Pernambuco and Bahia and the old sugar-cane region to Rio, Sao Paulo, Minas Geraes, and R i o Grande do Sul, the old plantation area has gone into rapid social decay. Besides this, we have had in Brazil periods when an almost systematic destruction of archives has taken place, as, for instance, soon after the abolition of slavery, when a brilliant demagogue then in power as national secretary of the treasury —Senhor R u y Barbosa—suggested that the best way of celebrating the end of slave labor in Brazil and the beginning of a new era in Brazilian life would be to burn and destroy all papers connected with slavery and with the slaves. T h i s was done in the case of some of the public and private archives, especially in those public archives under direct control of the Ministry of the Treasury, with the result that it is today extremely difficult to find documents about the importation and distribution of slaves and concerning their African origin. These documents were kept in the archives of the customhouses and in other public archives of the colony and later of the empire. Despite all these difficulties—created by an unfavorable climate and by social and political changes—some valuable material has recently been found in Brazil by students of social history. Theirs has not been an easy task, for it is not always that old families and the keepers of old church or monastery papers have been willing to place at the disposal of possibly

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indiscreet social historians their private papers, even though these papers are more than one century and sometimes two or three centuries old. If you will pardon me for introducing a personal note, I shall tell you that I have had some interesting experiences in connection with research in private and church archives in Brazil. I remember that once, in central Brazil, I was allowed to see the ancient private papers of an important family of that region. Suddenly I found a paper that was very confidential. Evidently it had not been seen for generations in that family, or the present generation would have kept it from me or have destroyed it. It was a frank, honest confession regarding the genealogy of the family, written by an old member of it. Of course I never used the paper and I feel today that I know a secret that probably nobody else in Brazil knows. I never used it in a direct or concrete way; but in an abstract manner it has been valuable to me in my attempt to establish, by the use of less confidental evidence, what seems to me an important general fact or characteristic of the social history of certain Brazilian regions during the colonial period. I know that such confidential material as some of the private papers I have found in family archives do not satisfy the canons of that modern type of historical research which pretends to be strictly scientific and to document its evidence so clearly that it can be checked by other investigators. Nevertheless, these papers have been valuable to investigators in leading them to bolder use and interpretation of less confidential evidence. I should like to tell you of another of my experiences in dealing with private or ecclesiastical archives. Through the reading of charters of some of the old irmandades, or religious brotherhoods of Brazil, it became evident to me that it would be possible to use that much neglected material to establish the relation between the social status of a person in colonial Brazil and the brotherhood to which he belonged. Not only that: it became clear to me also that through such material

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one could study the relation between class privileges and race privileges in colonial Brazil, since the charters of some of the most aristocratic brotherhoods, such as that of the Most Holy Sacrament, or Santissimo Sacramento, made admission to the brotherhood contingent upon a person's ability to prove that for four generations his ancestors had been free from Jewish, Moorish, or Negro blood. In 1932 I was fortunate in locating, through the information of a priest—a good friend of mine— the old archive of a religious association of laymen, the Third Order of St. Francis, in a certain Brazilian town. This contained material that went as far back as the second half of the sixteenth century. In that archive, valuable information regarding the histoire intime of the region is kept: reasons for admitting members of local families into the brotherhoods; reasons for refusing admittance to others; punishments inflicted on certain brothers for sexual and other offenses committed; information regarding race and social antecedents of various members of the community. Unfortunately for me, since at that time I had already published a document that was not considered favorable to the reputation of another religious order, I was denied the privilege of studying and copying those papers. But I would like to point out that from other religious brotherhoods and from some of the old monasteries and churches of Brazil I have met with intelligent understanding and valuable cooperation in my attempts to find documents of interest to the social history of Brazil, especially as it related to class and race privileges during the colonial period. The social history of Portuguese America is closely related to the history of such institutions as the brotherhoods, the third orders, and convents and retreats for females. There were brotherhoods, as I have said, where only whites were admitted; or where, once admitted, one became white for all social purposes. Membership in one of those brotherhoods was like bearing one of the colonial titles of officer or captaingeneral of militia; even if one had a drop of Negro blood, he

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became white. T h e English traveler Henry Koster, whose book contains one of the best descriptions of colonial society in northern Brazil, tells us that he once met a captain of militia who was also the owner of a sugar-cane plantation, and who did not impress him as being entirely white, as most of the plantation owners in that region obviously were. He asked someone, "Is Captain So-and-So colored?" And he received this answer, " H e was. But now he is a Capitáo-Mor." T h e aristocratic and exclusive religious brotherhoods of colonial Brazil had almost the same power as the king, when he appointed colored men to the position of captains of his militia in Brazil—that of turning colored families into white. T h a t was not frequent, but it took place more than once. T h e door or gate leading into the religious brotherhoods of the type of the Santissimo Sacramento was, like that of Heaven, narrow; but sometimes it opened to sinners. There were also brotherhoods of mulattoes, closed to the blacks. And there were brotherhoods of free blacks, closed to mulattoes and to whites, with the exception of the position of treasurer, which was to be given, according to a requirement of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, to white men socially prominent. According to a paper that I found among the manuscripts belonging to an old brotherhood of free blacks, the white treasurers were not always honest in their handling of the funds of some of the Negroes' religious associations. Therefore these associations asked from the king the privilege of having their own treasurers and were finally successful in obtaining that right. Taken as a whole, those brotherhoods of colonial Brazil— some of whites, some of mulattoes, some of blacks, some composed almost exclusively of aristocratic planters, some of travelers or professional men, some having as members only men born in Portugal, others of Brazilians exclusively or of men born in Brazil—were among the most important institutions in Portuguese America. Much of the work that was done by the government or by the church authorities in Spanish

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America was done in Brazil by those religious brotherhoods: that is, by private enterprise and not by official initiative; by laymen, and not by bishops nor by the clergy. T h e fact that the religious brotherhoods had so great a development in Brazilian colonial society is very significant; it is one of the evidences of the fact that private enterprise, more than official initiative, was responsible for the social development of the country. A member of a religious brotherhood in colonial Brazil was entitled to support in sickness or in poverty and old age, to a funeral free from expense, to a tomb in the interior of a church or a monastery, to masses for his departed soul. Many wealthy planters or rich merchants at their death left large sums or a considerable part of their property to their brotherhoods, with the condition that masses be said for their souls, burdened by many sins. This explains why some of the colonial brotherhoods were able to found fine hospitals for the sick, to build magnificent churches and orphanages and retreats for women. These so-called retreats of various types were characteristic of social conditions that prevailed in Brazil during the three centuries under Portuguese and Spanish rule. T h e r e were retreats for rich girls, where the inmates were educated and taught how to prepare sweets, preserves, and liqueurs from tropical fruits, how to embroider and make lace, and how to pray. T h e r e were also retreats for female orphans, who were kept by the nuns until the girls were suitably married. On a particular day—that of the visitation of St. Elizabeth—the orphan girls were allowed to receive vistors. Tradesmen and others came to select wives for themselves. There were also retreats where husbands placed their wives with whom they had reason, or thought they had reason, to be dissatisfied. T h i s leads us to an aspect of the Brazilian past that only recently has been taken seriously by historians—the position of women in colonial society. T h o u g h Brazil had in the sixteenth century a woman, Dona

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Brites de Albuquerque, as the head of the government of one of the most important provinces, the so-called Nova Lusitania, the part played by women in colonial society has been almost entirely neglected by conventional historians of Brazil. Recent studies by social historians have shown how important was the contribution of women to the early social development of the country. Not only the contribution of Portuguese women, who had the care of the domestic slaves and the supervision of a number of domestic activities, industries, and arts on the big plantations, but also the contribution of Indian women and African women. T h r o u g h the Indian women a number of elements or values were assimilated by the Portuguese from the indigenous culture. Some of the early colonists married Indian women and learned from them a number of valuable things, such as the use of native herbs for medicine or for culinary purposes, the technique of preparing manioc flour, and some of the elementary agricultural practices of the Indians. Much of the agricultural work among the Brazilian Indians, like most other sedentary activities, was performed by the women. Indian women found it easier to adapt themselves to the Portuguese plantation system than the men, to whom any sedentary life or labor was repulsive. T h a t was one of the reasons why Negro slaves had to be imported by the Portuguese from Africa, to work in the sugar-cane plantations. Both the men and women imported from Africa as slaves to work on these plantations became, in many ways, an active creative element in that social system and contributed to the development of a new culture and a new type of human society in Portuguese America. With the slaves, a number of vegetables, fruit trees, and plants, such as okra, the mango tree, and—according to good, though not sufficient evidence—the cocoanut tree, were imported by the Portuguese to America from Africa and Asia. Since the early colonial era a complex cuisine has developed in the sugarcane plantation region of Brazil, with Indian, Portuguese, and African elements contributing, and also with a few Asi-

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atic additions, for the contact of colonial Brazil with India and even with C h i n a was close. Porcelain and some types of furniture, silks, parasols, and fans seem to have been introduced not only into Europe but among the aristocrats of Brazil by Portuguese merchants. T h e development of the new and complex cuisine in Brazil began and continued d u r i n g the colonial period, under the supervision of the Portuguese women, though the importance of Negro women as cooks became greater every day, until in some sub-areas of the plantation r e g i o n — B a h i a , for instance — t h e regional dishes became more African than Indian or European. T h i s is another aspect of Brazilian social history that is being taken into account by social historians w h o are trained in social anthropology. Such a study was considered unworthy of serious scholars by conventional historians of the nineteenth century, and even at the beginning of the twentieth. As in other fields, it is not easy to collect data on the historical development of the characteristic cuisine in Brazil. For its development was also the result of private and religious activities, and some of the old families and convents guarded their recipes for soups, fried chicken, lobster, cakes, and sweets as if they were Masonic secrets. Some of the old recipes are lost; others have been collected and some of these have been and are being published. T h e position of women under this patriarchal regime was one of subordination to men, although the women had considerable authority over their children and over a large n u m b e r of domestic slaves, an authority that some of the ladies exercised with a little sadism. As life in the large sugar-cane plantations was in many respects a self-sufficient one, the senhora directed a number of domestic industrial activities: the preparation of preserves, liqueurs and wines of tropical fruits, and the making of cloth, soap, and candles. Under the direction of their senhoras, or mistresses, some slave girls became real artists or technicians in some of these activities. T h e senhoras of the large and prosperous sugar-cane planta-

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tions had been famous since the sixteenth century for their dresses, their fine silks, their jewels—at first imported f r o m the Orient, a n d later f r o m Brazil's own gold a n d diamond fields. Even d u r i n g the sixteenth century they p u t rouge on their faces. W e are told by a contemporary of these elegant dames that "they arrayed themselves with such beautiful a n d gorgeous r a i m e n t that they refused to content themselves with taffetas, velvets, and silks, b u t used only the finest cloth and the richest brocades, and so many were the pearls a n d precious stones that they wore, that they appeared to have fallen in a shower on their heads and throats." T h e y wore their best dresses and jewels to mass or to church festivals. Some of them had many jewels and could not wear nor display all of them. T h e proper thing to do when such was the case was for the rich lady to go to church, followed by her most b e a u t i f u l slave girls wearing the silks and jewels that she could not wear herself. W e have here a good example, as it has been suggested to me, of what T h o r s t e i n Veblen, the economist, called "conspicuous waste," since a planter's wealth was normally displayed t h r o u g h his wife and her slave girls, a n d in some cases through his m u l a t t o mistresses, and also, when the planter had grown old a n d more devoted to religion a n d the church than to worldly affairs, through the gold ornaments that he would buy for his favorite image of O u r Lady or of some saint in his private chapel or a near-by monastery. Modern students of social history have found in private and ecclesiastical archives a n u m b e r of interesting documents illustrating that type of "conspicuous waste" by which aristocratic sugar-cane planters of colonial Brazil made known to everybody else how wealthy and prosperous they were. T h e colonial Brazilian girl married extremely young. In old documents, we find girls of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen marrying men of thirty, forty, fifty years of age. In the biography of Padre José de Anchieta, a great missionary of sixteenth-century Brazil, written in the seventeenth century by one of his devoted disciples, we are told of a miracle An-

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chieta p e r f o r m e d — t h a t of finding a husband for an old maid whose parents, very good Christians, felt terribly unhappy over the idea of having an old-maid daughter. T h a t old maid was eighteen or twenty years old; it was almost impossible to find a husband for so old a woman. T h e good priest, through his supernatural powers, was able to marry her to an excellent man. She had many children and her parents were very happy. O f course, marriages were arranged in truly patriarchal manner, by the parents and sometimes even by the grandparents. A t forty the colonial lady was an old woman. She had had many children, the average number being ten. T h e death rate among women seems to have been much higher than among the men. Infant mortality was also very high. W o m e n in colonial Brazil were treated by their husbands in an almost oriental or Moorish way. T h e same thing was true of Portugal, where the Moorish influence was so great, especially u p o n domestic architecture and domestic manners. Modern social historians have adduced some convincing evidence for the close connection between the type of domestic patriarchal architecture that developed in Portuguese America and the patriarchal regime so characteristic of its society. W i t h this relation in view, a number of old designs and house plans have been carefully studied, for there seems to have been an intimate relation between the location of rooms for girls and ladies in the center of the house, camarinhas with no windows, and doors opening only to other rooms; also between the relatively slight use of glass in the windows of colonial houses, the type of Moorish or T u r k i s h balconies of those houses, and the fact that women in Brazil, just as women among the Moors and the T u r k s , were really house prisoners—all chances for a flirtation were denied them. Ladies were seldom to be seen by strangers. T h e plantation " b i g houses" of Brazil were famous for their hospitality and it was the senhora who was responsible for that fine hospitality; but strangers never saw her. Ladies were seen only in church or

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at church festivals. T h e r e were four or five big church festivals during the year in colonial Brazil, when women were allowed to dance—sometimes in the interior of churches. We have evidences of this; the Catholic colonial churches of Brazil preceded American Protestant churches as centers of social life. T h e fact that colonial Brazilians danced in the interior of their churches amazed many non-Portuguese Europeans, who criticized this so sharply that in the nineteenth century this custom disappeared, although as late as the i8go's, when Brazil was no longer a colony but an empire, a French traveler criticized elegant young girls of R i o de Janeiro for eating ice cream and flirting with young men, in the interior of a church. As for engaging in a little flirtation, the severe Frenchman should have been more sympathetic—that was one of the very rare opportunities they had to flirt. Those church festivals were almost family affairs. Girls danced with their cousins and very often they married these cousins. Inbreeding was, as I have said before, one of the characteristics of the Brazilian colonial aristocracy. One of the reasons for this was that class prejudice, more than race prejudice, was the basis of family pride in Brazil at that time. So severe was this segregation of women in Brazilian colonial society that as late as 1757, at a ball given by the governor of R i o de Janeiro to French naval officers, there was not a single woman present, only four men dressed as women to dance with these foreign officers. On the rare occasions when they went out, Brazilian colonial ladies dressed very elaborately, but at home they wore very few clothes and no shoes, only sandals. T h e y sat on carpets, more often than on chairs. In all this, we have a few more instances showing the persistence of Moorish influence on Brazilian domestic life. We find also that the Brazilian or Luso-Brazilian ideal of feminine beauty during the colonial era was a Moorish ideal—women should be fat. " G o r d a e bonita," said the Portuguese, and their Brazilian descendants as well, to characterize a really pretty woman, as has been observed by more than one

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foreign traveler. W e find, too, that many cakes and sweets made according to old Moorish recipes were eaten by Portuguese and later by Brazilian women. A c c o r d i n g to authors of serious books of travel in colonial B r a z i l — a n d I am one of those w h o consider such books, when written by honest G e r m a n scientists like Spix and Martius or by honest British merchants like Henry Koster, an excellent source of i n f o r m a t i o n — t h e Brazilian girls of the colonial era were extremely pretty and attractive at thirteen or fourteen, but fell off soon after marriage, growing too fat and too pale. It seems that even as girls they had bad teeth, probably on account of their deficient and ill-balanced diet. It seems also that their voices were disagreeable. A n English traveler gives the following explanation of their disagreeable voices: "she acq u i r e d the Brazilian lady's tone of v o i c e — a high s c r e a m — from scolding her mother's black maids and footmen." Some travelers wrote that Brazilian colonial w o m e n were lazy. Certain ladies probably were, and did nothing more than eat sweets and grow fat to please their husbands. B u t apparently the typical Brazilian lady of those days was active and economically productive. T h e r e was a large g r o u p of slaves under her direction and, as we have seen, a n u m b e r of activities in the patriarchal economy depended on her. T h e s e colonial w o m e n were probably more cruel in their treatment of slaves than the men were. Perhaps some of them were not well treated by their husbands; their bad treatment of the slaves was a kind of revenge and compensation. T h e r e are records of crimes committed by ladies in Brazil against beautiful mulatto girls of w h o m they were jealous. It is recorded of one lady in Bahia that she ordered a N e g r o to take out the eyes of a pretty and fascinating quadroon slave girl with w h o m the senhor was in love. M o r e than one lady is said to have had the perfect white teeth of beautiful mulatto slave girls, of w h o m they were jealous, broken or taken out. T h e r e was sexual rivalry between ladies and slave girls, though we find numerous cases in which ladies were so kind as to take good care of the

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illegitimate children of their husbands. Some of the illegitimate children, some of them colored, were sent to schools and even to universities in Europe. One of them became one of the greatest poets and scholars in the Brazil of the first half of the nineteenth century. Another became one of the most distinguished newspaper men of that century. T h e first regular newspaper in Brazil appeared in 1808, in Rio, soon after the arrival of the Portuguese prince regent, later to become King J o h n VI. It was the Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, soon followed by the Idade de Ouro do Brasil, published in Bahia, and by other dailies and periodicals. Colonial newspapers and those published during the first years of the empire in Brazil, when that country, though technically independent, remained a semicolony of England, are a valuable source of information concerning social life; extensive use of them has been made by modern Brazilian historians. Advertisements in these old newspapers are particularly interesting, those of slaves imported from Africa, for instance, have been studied from the point of view of anthropology, with extremely happy results. Through these advertisements, historians have established the existence in Brazil of diseases that specialists had always stated to have been nonexistent in that country. Through these advertisements it has likewise been possible to discover the origin of groups of slaves sold in certain years in Bahia, Rio, or Pernambuco. Of special interest for students of social history is a section of old Brazilian newspapers known as "Noticias particulares," or "Correspondencia"—private news. Some of these items are really of an extremely private character and deal with family matters or personal disputes. For instance, this one, which attracted the attention of Walsh, an Englishman who was in Brazil in the early nineteenth century: " A person is informed that if he does not bring back the books he borrowed from So and So, his name will be made public." Another person is told that "his stagnant water is very offensive and if he does not throw it out a neighbour will come and spill it in his parlour,"

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Even women, probably of the gay type, appear in those newspapers signing "private news." One of them inserted a notice that: " T h e senhor who was in the house of Luiza da Concei^ao, and who requested from that senhora some paper to write on and having finished his letter took from her drawer four milreis in gold, a banknote for eight milreis, a pair of silk stockings, is requested to restore the articles, if he does not wish to see his name in public. T h e same favor is requested from the gentleman who carried away her fan, otherwise his name shall also appear." Names of debtors were often printed in newspapers. An extremely interesting list of debtors was once published by a tailor of Recife, and in that list were some of the most important names of colonial Brazil. A French tailor did the same, to a very distinguished and proud Brazilian gentleman. T h e result was that the poor tailor was murdered by one of the Negro slaves of that senhor. It seems that one way in which colonial aristocrats displayed their social importance was by having a considerable number of suits of clothes, changing these two or three times a day. As a result, many of these gentlemen were habitually in debt. It was difficult for tailors to prosper; one can see that clearly through the "private news" in Brazilian newspapers of the period. T h e display of fine dressing, so characteristic of colonial days in the sugar-cane plantation area—the oldest and most refined section of the country—was imitated, sometimes in a very grotesque way, by the nouveaux riches of the mining region in the eighteenth century. There the rich and powerful, not having in the eighteenth century the aristocratic background of the sugar-cane planters of Bahia and other parts of Brazil, became "arrogant and reckless, spending lavishly in ostentation." T o receive Count de Assumar, the new governor of Minas Geraes, a prominent resident of the mining region in the first half of the eighteenth century, "who had started life in Portugal as a bartender, during the first day of the governor's visit, doubtlessly to impress him, changed his suit three

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times and appeared that night in still another suit, all of them, to be sure, of fine materials, but so badly fitted that they seemed rags." T h i s bit of information on society in Brazil after the gold rush of the eighteenth century appears in an official letter written by C o u n t de Assumar from Brazil to Portugal. O n l y a few of these governors' letters have been published; the one I have just mentioned and many others are to be found in manuscript in Portuguese archives. T h e y are excellent source material for the social historian. T h e colonial period was an important phase in the social development of Brazil. O n the large sugar-cane plantations, and later in the mining fields, the coffee plantations, and the towns of colonial Brazil, race m i x t u r e went on freely through irregular sexual relations, and European culture came into close contact with Indian and A f r i c a n cultures. T h i s was especially true of the plantation area, under the stimulus of patriarchal economic needs and social solidarity. Brazilian music began there, as did Brazilian domestic architecture and the Brazilian cuisine. T h e r e also the Portuguese language acq u i r e d its best Brazilian flavor. Sugar planters were among the first to write poems in Brazil, the first to care about literature, the first to write semi-ethnological treatises on Brazilian Indians and African slaves in Brazil, the first to compile dictionaries of the Portuguese language as affected by Brazilian conditions. Leisure made intellectual and artistic activities possible for them. Later on mulattoes and mamelucos, some of them the illegitimate children of wealthy planters, educated by these planters almost as if they were legitimate, became musicians, poets, painters, lawyers, and doctors, a n d — t h r o u g h their Indian and A f r i c a n cultural heritage, combined with their European academic training—began to give new expression to the old Portuguese culture carried to Brazil in the early sixteenth century. Race mixture and the blending of cultures, though begun in a society aristocratic in its structure, became processes of democratization of that same society. T h a t process is going on.

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Race mixture continues in Brazil, especially among the laboring classes and the petite bourgeoisie, but reaching through its most suave forms the middle class also and even the old Brazilian aristocracy. Spanish and Italian immigrants are participating in it and contributing to the development of new ethnic and cultural combinations in Brazil, though the essential or fundamental cultural traits remain Portuguese, and consequently Hispanic.

T^he Significance

of J\[ative Indian

in J~fispanic CHARLES

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Culture

America GRIFFIN

H E M O S T significant single fact about the culture of Hispanic America is that it is Hispanic: that it is the result of that momentous flowering of physical and spiritual energy that reached its climax in the Iberian Peninsula in the era of the great discoveries. T h e force of that expansive movement was one of the great factors in modern history and its consequences are immeasurable, but it must not blind us to the presence of other influences. W e in the United States are well accustomed to regard civilization in America as the product of Old World traditions and inheritances and the New W o r l d environment. T h e immensity and variety of the land and its products and the social consequences of pioneer life in such an environment are recognized as having largely determined our history. O n e of these environmental factors, however, which does not loom very large in the cultural history of the United States plays a greater part in that of Hispanic America. I refer to the native races. Much as the Indians contributed to the adaptation of Europeans to life in the North American area by teaching the use of corn, tobacco, and other plants, by serving as the tutors of pioneer hunters, trappers, and scouts in the task of learning how to move, eat, fight, dress in the American wilderness, and much as the whole course of the settlement of our country has been affected, both by the assistance and by the resistance of the natives, their influence is almost entirely of the past. T h e nature of native economic life in this area which precluded a dense population, the individual and

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group attitudes which accompanied a hunting civilization, together with the hostile and exclusive racial attitudes of the dominant Anglo-Saxon settlers and the extent of later European immigration all contributed to a rapid decline of native influence. T h e industrialization of the United States has moved us still further in the same direction by weakening the earlier pattern of rural life, in which Indian influences had some part. How about the situation in Hispanic America? If we regard only the very broadest outline of the picture we are justified in saying that native influence has been greater there than in Anglo-Saxon America (for want of a better term). If we look a little more closely, however, any apparent uniformity disappears and we find that there is as much difference between the various regions of Latin America in this respect as there is between some of these regions and the United States. Obviously, then, the present situation is not to be explained by the culture of the European colonists or conquerors alone, but is equally affected by the economic and social character of the aborigines, which varied from region to region, and by the distribution and size of the white population. Let us, then, attempt an analysis of these principal factors as they operated in Hispanic America, considering first the nature of Indian culture and the distribution of Indian population throughout the continent, next the impact of Spanish culture on the natives in the era of the conquest, and finally the variations that have come into the picture since the end of the colonial period. If we survey the state of civilization in America on the eve of the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries from a geographical point of view and construct a map in which cultural attainments correspond to contour lines on a physiographic map, it is possible to perceive a certain order and regularity in the resulting picture. Disregarding for the moment other factors and considering only the economic side of Indian culture,

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with which, of course, other important aspects of life are intimately connected, it is possible to think of four main areas: the area of a hunter's civilization of a nomadic character; the area of a mixed hunting and agricultural life, with restricted migration; the area of settled agricultural life in permanent towns and villages; and finally an area where the development of higher civilization and larger political organizations made possible a more complex economic life in which, though agriculture was the basic pursuit, the variety of economic activity was much greater. Geographically the area of nomadic hunting life was located in the extreme north and south. In South America it included Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, the Argentine and Uruguyan plains; in the northern continent, the vast expanse north of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, most of California, the Rocky Mountain area and most of the Great Plains, though that is less certain, east to the Mississippi. East of that river the purely hunting civilization was limited to the area north of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence valley. T h e second, or mixed hunting and agricultural area included all of the eastern United States and the St. Lawrence valley in Canada. In South America it covered the greater part of Brazil and stretched north to the Caribbean coast and the West Indies. T h e third area, that of settled agriculture, lay principally along the mountain backbone of America, in the valleys and plateaus of the cordillera from New Mexico to southern Peru. T h e fourth and final region was not a continuous one but consisted of two main centers: one in southern Mexico and northern Central America and another in South America from Colombia to Peru. Any student of the American Indian will at once see that this geographical classification must not be regarded as rigid. T h e r e were enormous differences between tribes like those of the Iroquois confederacy, the Cherokees and the Creeks of the southeastern United States, with semipermanent towns and villages and a considerable agriculture, and the more

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primitive Arawak and T u p i of northeastern South America and Central Brazil. T h e Indians of Patagonia, too, though hunters like those of our own Great Plains, were far lower in the development of other aspects of culture—the arts, religious cults, social organization. It must also be kept in mind that there were numerous local variations from the typical within these main regional divisions. T i m e forbids any attempt to describe even in general terms the culture of the first two groups mentioned; furthermore, from the point of view of Hispanic American civilization, the last two groups are the most important. Stretching along the highlands of Middle and South America from Mexico to northern Argentina, with only a few minor interruptions, we see at the time of the Conquest a long narrow area within which the inhabitants had achieved a stage of culture marked by settled village and town life. T h i s was based on regular agriculture, some development of building construction beyond the rude huts or tents of more primitive peoples, and a tendency toward political organization more extensive and different in character from the tribal units of society that existed everywhere in America. Within this area there were variations of culture, but in all cases the traits mentioned above were present. Narrowing our view further, we see two more limited areas, one in northern Central America and southern Mexico and the other comprising what is now Peru and Ecuador, in which civilization had risen to still higher levels. In each of these centers what for want of a better word we may call an empire had developed, in which the cultures of a number of older, more geographically limited centers had fused to a certain extent. In Mexico we find the Aztec civilization, with its characteristic warlike religion and pantheon of gods, its calendrical system and methods of writing derived from the earlier Maya culture, its monumental architecture and sculpture derived, with local variations, from the same source, and its own orig-

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inal political system based on a confederation of three allied cities governing a vast circle of conquered communities and maintaining its power by terror and an elaborate system of tributary exactions. In the southern continent we find the much more extended domain of the Incas. Like the Aztecs, their civilization consisted of the fusion of a n u m b e r of earlier cultures, including those of the coastal cities of Peru and the still mysterious Tiahuanaco civilization centering in the high Andean plateau. Inferior to the middle American culture in monumental architecture and sculpture, mathematics and astronomy and the art of writing, they were equal or superior in engineering (building of roads, bridges, and fortifications), in the ceramic arts, the making of elaborate textiles, and above all in the characteristic complex social and political organization by means of which the ruling Inca class b o u n d together in a strictly regimented benevolent despotism the diverse peoples of their enormous empire. If we are to consider the later importance of these stages of aboriginal American culture, it may be that the most valid distinction is not that between such highly advanced groups as the Aztecs or Mayas or Incas and their less advanced neighbors, b u t rather that obtaining between settled agriculture, with sedentary town and village life, and a pattern of existence in which agriculture was merely supplementary to hunting and limited migration from place to place was customary. T h r o u g h o u t history the difference between nomad and farmer has been a tremendous one; there is hardly an aspect of human life—law, military methods, religion, morals, or art—that is not vitally involved in it. On the other hand, the distinction between a people with an elaborate system of architecture, complex political structure, and some knowledge of mathematics and writing and one without these arts, has perhaps been less important unless such an advance goes beyond the stage to which these skills had been developed in America. It was only among the higher social strata that most

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of these characteristics could be said to reside and, after the conflict of native culture with the incoming surge of European influence, it was precisely these higher manifestations of culture which were unable to withstand the shock, while simpler basic traits persisted. Beyond the area of settled agricultural life Indian population was necessarily very sparse. Here, wherever the white man came, there was a gradual removal and eventual extermination of the Indian and only a slight interchange of cultural traits between the two races, chiefly those which have to do with methods of hunting and fighting. T h u s it is to be noted that beyond the region of settled agriculture Hispanic American colonial society found great difficulty in establishing itself. Where the native population was entirely nomadic, as in the R i v e r Plate and on our own western plains, Spain never succeeded in overcoming the Indian hostility. T h e empire was able to maintain only a thin line of military occupation, in collaboration with the frontier missions. T h e missions never managed to control all the population of the regions in which they were established and, though highly successful in establishing a way of life essentially European, they were so entirely dependent on rigidly enforced submission to the absolute power of the religious orders that much of their work was undone as soon as the friars were withdrawn. T h e subsequent development of culture in such areas as northern Mexico and Argentina has not come about through the assimilation of these nomad Indians as groups, but by driving out the native units and exterminating or scattering them. Later culture in regions of sparse native population was created by the gradual influx from other parts of America or from Europe of mestizo and white population, and the establishment of an essentially Spanish civilization, modified by New World conditions but owing little more to the older Indian culture than we owe in most parts of this country. In regions where the natives were partly agricultural, as in

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the West Indies, Brazil, and the coast of the Caribbean, the pattern of civilization was also different from that in the completely sedentary areas. It was here that the Indian populations, after conquest, failed to survive, and depopulation and the unsatisfactory character of native forced labor led in the colonial period to the establishment of Negro slavery and the plantation system. As a result, it is the African rather than the native American strain that has been most important here. Within the area of settled agricultural life, which, incidentally, lay entirely within the range of Spanish colonial effort, native population was much more dense; the natives did not retreat before invasion, but remained as a lower and conquered class in colonial society. Not only did they transmit more of their own culture to the invading whites, but they were also much more influenced by their new masters. T h e natives adopted not only new domestic animals, new food plants, new tools and implements, but their religion was vastly modified. At the same time, since they became an oppressed working class exploited by an alien people, their social solidarity was concentrated in an effort of defense and, though they lost their leaders and the flower of their native culture was destroyed, their basic feeling of loyalty to the blood group—clan, tribe, or ayllu as it was called in Andean South America—was increased. Because they were subject groups, certain traits appeared among the Indians wherever they were thus exploited. T h e largest number of Spaniards in America were concen trated in those areas of highest native cultures in Mexico and Peru. This was natural because of the attraction exercised by the splendor of the great cities and the spectacular wealth of the ruling elements and the priesthood of the Inca and Aztec empires. Though the first conquerors were impressed not only by the wealth but also by the skill in arts and crafts of the people they conquered, they endeavored from the very beginning to destroy and root out everything relating to the

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religious cults of the Indians. In the less advanced regions, where religion lacked the elaborate organization, personnel, and temple structures of the higher centers, the eradication of native religion was a difficult process, never complete. In places like M e x i c o City and Cuzco, the chief city of the Incas, the destruction of the temples and images and the rapid elimination of the organized p r i e s t h o o d — w i t h its schools that served as transmitters of tradition and of the more elaborate and advanced aspects of religion, learning, and a r t — w a s a comparatively easy matter. W i t h the suppression of these elements as a result of the combined religious zeal and cupidity of the conquerors, the surviving masses of the population soon approximated in culture those peoples which before the conquest had not reached the level of Inca or Aztec. It is a much simpler thing to destroy the superstructure of a culture than to dig u p its roots. It is always the official religion, the literature, the science, and the traditional learning of a people that suffer more change from conquest or invasion than the folk mores, the habits and techniques related to the daily life of the masses. It would be a mistake, however, to think of the culture of the natives of Hispanic America in the colonial period as having been uniform, except for the distinction mentioned above between agricultural and nonagricultural regions. Another distinction is equally important. Because the Spanish settlement of America was, except in marginal areas, a conquest rather than a process of settlement as in British North America, and because the conquerors naturally assumed the position of a ruling class depending on the Indians for all manual labor, the distribution of the white population throughout Spanish America was very uneven. T h e need for defense in the early days, together with the tradition of urban community life which was so strong in the Spanish fatherland, led to the concentration of white population in cities and towns. Hundreds of these, large and small, sprang u p in the century after the Conquest, and their growth was further

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stimulated by the multiplication of royal officials and of religious foundations in the New World. T h e result was the creation, in these cities and towns, of nuclei of Spanish culture, but slightly influenced by the culture of native people. T h e rural countryside tended to remain much as it had been before the Conquest. Thus, not because of any lack of civilizing purpose on the part of the Spaniards but because of the very nature of their own culture, Spanish influence was unevenly distributed between town and country. Outside of the towns, where a genuinely Spanish life existed, which molded the lives of natives exposed to it, the civilizing influence of Spain was exercised by three institutions: the political machinery of the empire; the Catholic Church; and the encomienda system, under which Spanish landowners were granted the right to exploit the labor of Indians, assuming in return the obligation to facilitate the work of conversion among them. Of these three forces the church was by far the most important. Spanish priests and monks, and later mestizo priests as well, were in closer contact with remote native communities than any other European group. Everywhere that Spanish rule extended, churches sprang up, and outwardly, at least, the Indians were converted to Catholic Christianity. Though the extent of the conversion may be open to controversy, the rites and ceremonies of the church, the outward observance of the faith, became general throughout the empire wherever Indians lived in settled communities. T h e church also was the most effective influence in bringing to the natives Europeon technical improvements of material life in agriculture, the crafts, and in manner of living. The encomienda system, except as it facilitated the work of the church, was limited as a civilizing influence. T h e encomendero often spent a good part of his time in some provincial town or in one of the colonial capitals, far from the natives who worked on his estates. Even when he was in residence, his principal tie with the natives was his insistence on his right to their labor. The Indians on an encomienda lived

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in a less close relation to their masters than the slaves on a West Indian, Brazilian, or North American plantation, which, after all, was a social as well as an economic unit. Instead of huddling around the mansion of the landholder, the Indians lived in their own villages, often at some distance from it. T h e actual supervision of their labor was left largely to their own cacique, or headman, often the descendant of some preConquest chief, utilized by the Spaniards rather than suppressed because it was found that Indians would work under such control better than under the direct orders of Europeans. T h e influence of the Spanish bureaucracy was very similar to that of the encomienda. O w i n g to the long-drawn-out controversy over the humanitarian aspect of the encomienda and because the absolute Spanish state feared too independent an aristocracy in the colonies, the granting of Indians to private individuals was never general. Many Indians were not subjected to private masters but to royal officials called corregidores, given authority to maintain order among the natives and to see to the payment of the tribute tax exacted of all Indian subjects of the crown. T h e s e officials exploited the people under their control in very much the same way that the private landholders did. T r a n s m i t t i n g perhaps even less of European culture, they were more destructive of native ways, because, lacking lands of their own on which the labor of the Indians could be regularly used, they tended to rent out the natives to people at a distance, thus breaking u p community life and separating clans and families. T h e supply of forced labor for the mines in Peru was administered by these men and was perhaps one of the most destructive aspects of Spanish rule. From these notions about the way Spanish and native cultures interacted in the colonial period, we may now proceed to sketch the state of affairs on the eve of the revolutionary movement in the early nineteenth century. O n the northern and southern borders of the Spanish empire, on the Argentine plains and on the Great Plains of western North America,

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fierce tribes of unsubjected raiders still lived. T h e y had acquired from the Europeans the use of the horse, iron tools and weapons, a taste for hard liquor, and very little else. Along these frontiers, and here and there on the interior jungle borders to the eastward of the Spanish area, were scattered communities of Indians under mission control. Under a combination of religious influence and Spanish military force, they were made to live a life which was entirely distinct from their natural one and artificially more Europeanized in the use of tools and processes than that of most Indians within the frontiers. In central Chile and most of present-day Argentina to the south, in the eastward extension of Spanish rule in Venezuela, and again in the northern part of Mexico, we find a relatively sparse Indian population that is rivaled if not surpassed in numbers and importance by mestizo groups which form the laboring population. These were regions in which the aborigines had either been decimated by wars with the whites, had moved away rather than submit to exploitation, or had been replaced because they had died out under exploitation by Indians of mixed blood brought in from other regions. It was this mestizo element, most closely associated with the whites and less rooted in the soil, that proved easiest to bring in to supply the labor market wherever Negro slavery did not prove a more profitable system. T h u s the gaucho of Argentina and Chile, the vaquero and the miner of northern Mexico, and the llaneros of northern Venezuela, were largely mestizo. As such, they transmitted very little of the old native culture, though they inherited many of the physical and perhaps some of the psychological characteristics of the pre-Conquest native peoples. T h e i r culture, so far as it differed from that of the Spanish ruling class in these regions, was very largely the result of local economic and geographical factors. T h e i r language was Spanish, modified by a liberal sprinkling of native terms, especially for objects of daily use, plants, and animals. Occupation, dress, dwelling, and food were determined by

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local conditions. T h e sod house of the gaucho, roofed with reeds from the pampas esteros, or marshes, the almost unrelieved diet of meat of the llanero, his implements and tools of bone, sinew, and rawhide were determined by the environment. Mestizo culture was to a large extent new, removed from the direct inheritance of either natives or Spaniards, picking and choosing elements from each according to their adaptability to the environment. Of the two inheritances, however, the Spanish was by far the more important. Spanish upper-class bosses and landlords were in constant contact with these people. T h e church worked among them, while all contact with the older ways had been cut off by geographical transplantation and the break-up of older social units. As its members became small landholders, this class merged imperceptibly at the top into the Creole Spanish class, or lived in towns as artisans, or in other subordinate offices including positions in the church. T h e greater part of the Indians of the mountainous area stretching from Mexico to Peru still lived in their original small tribal units along the chain of the cordillera, their labor exploited by the Spaniards, their religion Catholic Christianity, modified by survivals of native nature worship and magic. Here the native languages, of which Nahuatl in the Valley of Mexico and Quechua in Peru were among the most important, had survived, though many Indians became bilingual. T h e government of the Indian villages, though under the superior control of Spaniards, was in the hands of Indians whose right to office was handed down from pre-Conquest days. Costume remained much what it had been in earlier times, though materials and designs often degenerated and were sometimes replaced by European substitutes. Artifacts such as cooking utensils, agricultural tools, and so forth, still followed native patterns but, except where poverty prevented, iron replaced stone. T h o u g h vague traditions of former greatness were handed down verbally, in strange intermixture with Christian myths and stories, contact with the older higher

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culture was gone. A faint memory of Inca rule led to the continued veneration of the name among Peruvian Indians and made possible the survival, during a long part of the colonial period, of a fitful maintenance of state in remote places by descendants of the fallen dynasty. In Central America and Mexico the gulf separating the Indians from their own past was even greater. We must not neglect in this enumeration the influence of native culture on the Spaniards themselves. Despite the unifying influence of the church and the elaborate bureaucracy and despite the effort of the state to maintain Spanish ways in all their purity in the New World, the environment had its inexorable modifying influence. We need not here consider the changes that occurred in creole ways because of economic and physical geography, and may limit ourselves to influences exerted by the human environment in the New World. It is right to emphasize at the outset the fact that the influence of native Indian culture on the Spanish colonists was not of essential importance. Creole society was Spanish society with modifications, and the modifications resulting from contact with Indians were peripheral rather than central. A considerable number of native words became imbedded in the Spanish language, but these additions seem to have been hardly more important than more recent variations in Spanish American language, traceable to the use of European tongues by immigrants and to the importation of English words connected with sports and mechanics. A considerable number of creole Spaniards, who lived in regions where the Indian population spoke a native language, were bilingual. This was true especially in Paraguay, where the use of the Guarani language was almost universal, and in rural Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Mexico to a lesser extent. Certain food and drink habits that became current among Creoles were borrowed from the Indians. T h e use of yerba mate began in southern South America. Chocolate was orig-

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inally a Mexican concoction and every region retained some of its native cookery. T h e fact that natives and mestizos were almost exclusively the artisans of colonial Spanish America meant that the Creoles used metal ornaments, pottery, and articles of wood and leather in which native design and workmanship persisted to a certain extent. I know of no way to weigh exactly the influence of such matters. T h e y were sufficient, together with the different physical environment, to produce a gradual divergence between peninsular Spaniards and Creoles, but this divergence would have appeared slight to an unprejudiced observer. Differences in custom as great as these could be found in Spain itself, with its great wealth of local dialects and regional cultural distinctions. Once the colonists had begun to fight for national independence, they tended to exaggerate rather than to minimize their differences from the mother country, and it is at this point that we notice a tendency to exalt the Indian as a part of the feeling of Americanism. T h e r e was a tendency to look back to the period of glory of the ancient Peruvian and Mexican empires. Reformers and political leaders spoke of the cruelties of Spaniards to the natives during the Conquest, quite unmindful of the fact that they were attacking their own ancestors. Francisco de Miranda, in working out a model constitution for a future South American state, made use of titles derived from ancient South American tradition. Revolutionary secret societies received the names of Indian heroes of legend. Chileans appropriated as a source of national pride the story of the fierce resistance of the Araucan Indians to Spanish rule. Strangely enough, these attitudes were usually not felt to be inconsistent with the continuation of exploitation and ill treatment of native races. It seems to have been a device for working up public resentment against Spain, akin to the effort to acquire self-confidence by asserting the

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grandeur and glory of of the American scene, the magnificence of its mountains, the extent of its plains and deserts, and the majestic size of its rivers, in contradistinction to the small scale of natural phenomena in Europe. On the whole, the achievement of political independence from Spain did not strengthen the influence of native culture. Exploitation of the native races continued, in somewhat different form, under the new republican laws and institutions. Though Spanish cultural influence was interrupted for a generation and never regained its former strength, it was replaced by a much greater contact with other nations—England, France, and later Italy, Germany, and the United States. T h e nineteenth century was in general a period during which the Indian was looked down upon, even more than before. T h e romantic notion of the noble savage had scant influence in America, except in literature. Both North and South Americans knew too much about the natives to accept uncritically the views of Rousseau and Chateaubriand. After the midcentury, too, the upper classes in Latin America were much influenced by French positivism. T h e worship of progress, science, and efficiency, and the tendency to look on Europe as the ideal, led these people to regard the Indian as a drag on their civilization, an element to be remolded, if not destroyed, in the interest of true cultural advancement. This is the attitude which prevailed in Mexico under the Diaz regime. It was a cultural rather than a racial antagonism, for many of the people who held these views were mestizos and some of them almost pure-blooded Indians. What of the Indians during the first century of independence in continental Hispanic America? T h e more rapid growth of the mestizo than the pure Indian element almost everywhere tended to weaken the old ways. In certain countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, southern Brazil, and Chile, this strain was supplemented by a large infusion of new European stock. T h e effect of this was to weaken still further any distinctions lingering from the colonial period between

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the rural mestizo and the more European population of the towns. In regions of almost solid Indian population such as southern Mexico, Guatemala, rural Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, this was a period during which the old native groups, village and clan, were under constant attack. As it was a period of militarism and civil wars, after the long-continued violence of the wars of independence, native Indians were often forced into armies and divorced from their own folk ways until many of them approximated mestizo groups in culture, even though they might be pure Indian in race. T h i s was a period in which the communal use of the land by native villages, which had persisted in the less accessible and less fertile regions not appropriated in colonial times, suffered a check as such holdings were acquired by corporations and individuals interested in the newer and more capitalistic land exploitation. Such exploitation had come in with the increase of foreign trade, the need to secure greater and greater exports with which to pay for the flow of European luxuries and the new mechanical appliances to which the Creoles had become accustomed. T h e opening of new copper and tin mines, and the stimulus offered by new technical processes to the older mines of the precious metals, led to further attacks on native ways. Natives were induced by fair means or by foul to serve as laborers in these modern industrial enterprises, in which the cash nexus and the adherence to the routine of the machine and of business took the place of the older pattern of life. T h o u g h the process was never complete, it was a period of the peonization of the Indian. At the opening of the twentieth century, therefore, one might say that native culture had reached its lowest ebb. In large parts of Hispanic America there were no longer any purely Indian social groups. Where these remained, as in the countries stretching from Peru to Mexico, they had become more impoverished and diseased, less able to carry forward traditional customs and techniques than ever before. T h e y

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had expended so much of their energy in the century-long passive resistance to change, had become so turned inward as a result of their efforts to retain their identity, that they seemed to have little capacity to exert an outward-going influence on the culture of the countries in which they formed so large a part of the population. T h i s condition still prevails, but the attitude of the ruling class in these countries of Indian population (or at least of a part of that class) has changed considerably. This is due, in part, to the great progress in American archeology and anthropology during the past generation, which has brought to light and publicized some of the remarkable contributions of ancient American civilization. T h e tendency toward less rigid esthetic canons in the appreciation of art has led also to recognition of merit in folk arts and primitive art. T h e dignity ascribed by socialism to the working class, as one which has a mission of prime importance, has had some influence, while trends in international affairs since 1904 have weakened the prestige of Europe and of the white race. T h e contemporary intensification of nationalism in Latin America cannot develop without finding some way to bring the masses into participation in the national spirit. For all these reasons and many more of a local and temporary character, the Indian and his culture have begun to come into their own. T h i s tendency seems to begin with a preoccupation in literature with the Indian, and contemporary Latin America offers many examples of this in poetry, essays, and the novel. T h e problem cannot be said to have been fully envisaged, for it is often treated merely as a biological matter of race difference. Still less have any adequate solutions been reached, but there is a trend toward recognizing value in Indian ways, toward thinking out ways in which these can be utilized and brought into harmony with the national cultures of primary European basis. It cannot be too strongly emphasized, however, that Indians as distinct social groups have practically disappeared in many republics and in others are of only local im-

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portance. Primarily it is in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia that the Indian problem is at the forefront of social consciousness. W e are now, perhaps, in a position to look back at some of the outstanding aspects of this process of cultural interaction which we have been considering. I think it will have become evident to you all that it has not been a story of steady, constant development in the direction of an integrated culture, borrowing the best of both native and European ways. On the contrary, it has been very uneven. Spain in its heroic age set on foot the agencies which began the process of amalgamation, but in spite of its efforts there came to be a deadlock. Except in the sparsely settled mestizo areas, what developed was an unstable equilibrium in which two very different civilizations were held together by the bonds of the church, the state, and the land and labor system. T h e greatest part of Spain's influence on the natives had been spent by the end of the sixteenth century. After that there was only the gradual, slow extension of the geographical frontier in the north and the far south. What can be said to have led to this arrest of cultural amalgamation? T h e lack of a sufficient number of Spanish settlers was one cause; the enormous geographical barriers which led to regional isolation were another. Perhaps more than anything else it was the racial and class antagonisms that arose out of a system of excessive exploitation of Indian labor. T h e task of the church, the most effective force in bridging this gap, was too much for it. T h e friends and the detractors of the R o m a n Church vary as to the depth of its influence, and any objective effort to answer the question must take cognizance of its complexity. Along with humane and beneficent missionaries and churchmen, there were many who exploited the natives as heartlessly as any layman. And though the church exercised enormous influence everywhere, it was often through fear as well as through love or charity. We need not go into the controversy as to whether the

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Christianity of the converts was genuine. T h a t it differed obviously from European Catholicism in many of its rites and ceremonies and that many Indian Christians had ideas about heaven and hell, God and the saints, that were far removed from that of their religious instructors we cannot doubt. It is questionable, however, whether such differences can be said to be essential. In no European Catholic country are the masses free from superstititions and views that might be considered heretical if formally advanced. Christmas itself is grafted upon a pagan custom. Is it any less so than a Mexican carnival, enlivened by music and dancing borrowed from pre-Christian times? Since the colonial period, and principally in the last two generations, the greatest influence on the Indian has been the industrial revolution. T h r o u g h improved means of communication and increasing cheapness and accessibility of the products of modern industry, such things as the sewing machine, the gasoline engine, the paved road, the railroad, and the airplane have reached remote areas, profoundly changing Indian populations comparatively little affected by the Spanish Conquest. T h e decline of native costume and the spread of Spanish speech among purely Indian groups are symptoms of this change. It is to be noted, however, that these influences, though they break down native particularism, fail to go all the way in assimilating such groups into the culture of the mestizos and the whites. On the contrary, they have tended to produce in the predominantly Indian countries large groups of people who participate neither in the old folk ways nor in any of the spiritual or creative aspects of creole culture. It is the task of the present generation to overcome this situation. If we look at the contemporary scene, what cultural values can we see that the Indians can contribute? They now possess little of a positive, communicable character. If their standard of living can be raised by agrarian reform, sanitation, more equitable taxation, and a broadly conceived edu-

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cational program, however, they will become less of an obstacle in the development of more homogeneous cultures in their several countries. T h e i r ancient culture, however, though it is frequently overestimated for political purposes, contains enough of interest (especially in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia) to furnish the stimulus for a revival of the arts that can play a large part in bringing together the European-Hispanic element, which is now rediscovering it and the Indians whose ancestors first developed it. Through long and difficult centuries many Indian groups have retained some of that heritage: folk music, the dance, skilled handicrafts, design, and above all a less purely individualistic attitude toward life than that of the society in which they have been submerged. It is not unreasonable to expect that they will play an increasing part in the search for a juster social order.

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E X I C O ' S history and her contemporary culture pattern result in large measure from the fact that hers is a mestizo civilization—one born out of intermittent conflict and readjustment between two races which differ markedly in their economic organization, social mores, and religious beliefs. I do not mean to imply that there are inherent psychological and mental differences between the various races, since there is no valid scientific evidence for or against this assumption. Still less do I wish to assume certain eternal psychic and social behavior patterns for the Spaniard and the Indian and to discuss these supposed patterns as if the economic and social conditions of conquest and European domination had played no part in their formation. T h e significance of the sharp racial cleavage in Mexican history appears to be that it prevented or deferred the fusion of widely separated cultures; it hindered national unification and accentuated regional autonomy; and finally, it served to stress class differences. T h e servile race was definitely set apart from its rulers. Occupational and class differences slowly hardened into a hierarchy of castes. O n e of the differences between the development of Angloand Hispanic America derives from the fact that the English colonists encountered sparse, nomadic Indian populations in the regions they coveted, whereas the conquerors of the Andean regions found highly advanced, sedentary Indo-American civilizations. T h e British colonists exterminated the Indians i I am indebted to Oxford University Press for permitting the use of material from The Reconquest of Mexico, by Nathaniel Weyl and Sylvia Weyl.

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or else drove them into the wilderness. Absence of a conquered race resulted in a scarcity of labor which stimulated the development of small farms. T h e existence of the colonial frontier, as T u r n e r has shown, continuously broke d o w n the influence of penal and indentured immigration on the formation of rigid castes. T h e s e factors tended to create the preconditions for democracy. T h e Indian population of the Americas was concentrated on the high plateaus and slopes of the Pacific cordilleras, with its two most important foci in Peru and Mexico. Even the Mayan civilization, which seems the most glaring exception to this generalization, reached its first great peak in the Guatemalan uplands, and migrated to the limestone plains of Yucatán only as a result of vast climatic changes. Accordingly, the relationship of conquering to conquered peoples assumed a different historic cast in the various regions of Ibero-America. T h e Brazilian settlers, for example, were not able to rely for the manual labor of the colony on the dispersed and primitive Indian tribes which they subjugated. T h e sugar industry of Brazil developed on the basis of the African slave trade. T h e omnipresent scarcity of labor, accentuated by the Minas Geraes gold discoveries, created the pioneering movement of the Sao Paulo bandeirantes, groups which entered the wildernesses of the hinterland to capture Indians for forced labor. Similarly, the contrast between the democratic, racially uniform, small peasant republic of Costa Rica and the autocratic, hacienda economy of Guatemala, where the Mayan Indians are unemancipated plantation peons, doubtless has its origin in the antipathy of the original Indian populations for the tropical lowlands. T h e development of M e x i c o displayed a regional pattern closely related to the distribution of the Indian peoples. Such factors as the availability of salt influenced the dispersion and population growth of the various tribes, as Mendizabal has shown. T h e difficulties of coping with the problems of desert agriculture barred an advanced civilization on

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the northern plains of Mexico. T h e diseases, plagues, pests, and hurricanes of the tropics discouraged all efforts to erect permanent Indian federations. T h e central plateau region of Mexico, stretching southward to the state of Oaxaca and westward into Michoacán, formed the greatest Indian civilization u n i t in North America. Here soils were fertile, climate was salubrious, and dense populations could sustain themselves. Advanced civilizations such as those of the Aztecs, Tarascans, Tlaxcalans, Mixtees, and Zapotees, flourished in this temperate climate. T h e second great cultural area was the Yucatán peninsula, which enjoyed regular irrigation water as a result of the existence of large underground storage basins, or cenotes, which the Mayas tapped for their agriculture. It was on the central Mexican plateau and in Yucatán that the Spanish encomienda struck its firmest roots. T h e Indian villages were divided among Spanish grantees of the crown and, while the monarchy retained all sovereign rights, the system was in essence feudal. W i t h the development of silver and gold mines on the northern rim of the vast Mexican plateau and in the state of Guerrero, there was an inevitable shift of population and a change in its status. Entire Indian villages were impressed for hard labor in the mines, and their communal lands were expropriated and added to the feudal encomiendas. In the north, the encomienda and the latifund i u m were unable to achieve the same importance as on the plateau, because the Indians of this zone were warlike, nomadic peoples who retreated into the desert as the whites advanced. T h u s the Yaquis of Sonora have resisted Spanish and Mexican domination intermittently for four hundred years. Whenever their rich valley lands were seized, the Yaquis erased the thin demarcation line between their maize agriculture and their earlier pastoral habits and moved into semidesert regions. As a result, their tribal ways are unshaken and their villages are still b o u n d in the strait-jacket of a backward, but unique, culture. It has been argued that the birth of the 1910 Mexican R e v o l u t i o n in these northern states

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reflected the instability of the hacienda, coupled with the individualistic frontier psychology of a region where labor was scarce in relation to land. Other Indian groups had already been driven from the fertile lands, at the time of the Spanish Conquest, by the outward pressure of more vigorous, civilized, and warlike Indian nations. T h e Otomis, for example, were never brought wholly within the ambit of the colonial economy, because the encomienda could not profitably be introduced in the high, waterless lands they inhabited. T h e Lacandones and Coras, living in jagged coastal regions, broken by towering sierra, never graduated from the hunting and pastoral stages, remained nomadic groups, and have been untouched by the last millennium of civilization. T h u s the Mexican Indian is not a single sociological entity. Enormous diversification in Indian cultures existed at the time of Hernando Cortés. How could the bow-and-arrow hunters of the Pacific coast lands be compared with the Mayas, who built the architectural miracles of Guatemala and Yucatán and estimated the length of the solar year more accurately than did Renaissance Europe? The Spanish domination could not obliterate this cultural heterogeneity. T h e rugged, broken terrain of Mexico precluded complete conquest, and the most backward and isolated Indian groups escaped the putatively civilizing process of encomienda bondage. Spain, however, imposed a leveling process. T h e Indian priesthood was decimated by the Conquerors on the theory that it alone could provide the leadership for popular revolt. In many regions of Mexico, idealistic Catholic friars intervened to stay the hand of the Conquistadores and to save the subjugated races from physical annihilation. Scholarly clerics, such as Bishop Diego de Landa, devoted years to mastering the Indian tongues, in the conviction that missionaries who were ignorant of the language and customs of the people would never convert them to the new faith. T h e impetus of this scholarship, however, was an intolerant iconoclasm and

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a fierce zeal to proselytize. T h e Bishop of Yucatán ordered the magnificent stone friezes of the Mayan temples smashed; he consigned the historic records of the priesthood to the fire; and his destruction of the native culture was so fervent and thoroughgoing that, as he blandly admits, many of his Indian neophytes became apostate, and "possessed by the Devil, hanged themselves out of sadness." Immediately after the Conquest, the sons of the Indian sacerdotes became great historians of their epoch and formulated the voluminous reports which an inquisitive Spanish monarchy exacted from the unlettered men who had won it an empire. In Vasco de Quiroga's College of St. Nicholas, the sons of Tarascan nobles, whose fathers Ñuño de Guzmán had exterminated, "became prodigious Latinists and recited the Iliad in its original tongue." T h i s condition was, however, exceptional and ephemeral. T h e Indian cultural aristocracy was either extinguished or relegated to a position of intermediary between the communities of serfs and their European overlords. T h e missionary friars of the epoch of the Conquest were superseded by churchmen who came to the New World for less exalted reasons, and even Hernando Cortés lived long enough to decry ecclesiastical corruption and ostentation. As the church became the greatest landlord of the colony, it acquired a vested interest in the system of compulsory Indian labor and the caste divisions which reinforced it. T h e most vital aspect of the Indian tradition was its primitive communal organization. Morgan's classic description of the gens society of the Aztec Federation has been reinforced by Bandelier's detailed and scholarly studies. However, later investigators, such as McBride, question the validity of this portrait of a primitive agrarian communal society, and suggest that the original equalitarian structure of the Aztec economy was being transformed into a hereditary feudal monarchy under the impetus of Aztec expansion, the growth of the metropolis of Tenochtitlán, and its increasing dependence

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on tribute from subjugated tribes. Be this as it may, there is little doubt that the peripheral Indian civilizations and the Mayan cities were still in their primitive communal state. " T h e Indians have the good custom of aiding one another in all their labor," wrote Bishop de Landa concerning the Mayas. " T h e lands today are in common, and he who occupies them first, possesses them." The Tarascans of Michoacán, according to Vasco de Quiroga's report to the Council of the Indies in 1533, "own things as one another, and these men of nature do not have and never had king nor master over them, nor hereditary successor, but . . . choose him by election . . . and there are not true slaves or serfs among them, but only servants . . . on a footing of equality with their masters." T h e Utopian thought of Bacon and More was an intellectual expression of that outward expansion of all frontiers which marked the age of discovery and conquest. This Utopian tradition, which, in the words of Silvio A. Zavala, contained "the germs of the doctrine of the good savage that was to receive its ultimate articulation in Rousseau," was a critique both of feudal society in process of disintegration and of the emerging commercial capitalism of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It was a moral indictment, resting primarily on the discrepancy between society as it was and the communism of the first Christians. If the discovery of the New World had given this tradition its original impetus, the social theories of the Utopians in turn reacted on the objectives and policies of the clergy. Among the friars and churchmen who came to Mexico were children of the Renaissance who sought to use Nueva España as the smelter for a just and ordered society. Such men as Bishop Quiroga compared the New World to the golden age of Lucían, which had degenerated among the Christian nations of Europe into "one of iron and steel and worse." Insisting that the laws of Europe should not be applied to Indian populations which were uncorrupted by "malice" and "cupidity,"

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Vasco de Quiroga established for the Indians of Michoacán huge hospices which were organized according to the precepts of Sir Thomas More's Utopian communism. T h e communal organization of the Indian civilizations, however, had rested on the foundation of a subsistence maize agriculture and the essentially atomic economic structure which it imposed. T h u s the more intricate technological pattern which the Spaniards introduced tended to sweep it away. Spain brought about an agricultural revolution in the Americas because it not only introduced new crops, domestic animals, and fruits, but also imported two revolutionary, labor-saving devices—the wheel and the beast of burden. T h e diversification of agriculture and the impetus given to mining by the mercantilist theories of the peninsula helped shatter the old order. While the communal lands of the Indian villages were theoretically protected by the Spanish monarchy, the greed of the encomenderos for more acres and the necessity of creating a servile labor force devoid of every vestige of economic independence led to their progressive absorption into the feudal estates. In an effort to subject the rebellious Indians to police control and to facilitate the collection of tribute, the indigenous populations were marshaled into newly established towns. T h i s upset the precarious balance of a primitive agriculture, which at best yielded only scanty surpluses. T h e entire history of Indian migrations in Mexico should have warned the Spaniards that an agriculture which had been itinerant because of the poverty of the land could not be chained to specific zones without a progressive depletion of the natural riches of the soil. T h u s in Yucatán, according to Hector Pérez Martínez, the establishment of the Spanish towns was "one of the causes of the recurrent famines which took place . . . during the period of Spanish domination." Another consequence of this policy was the unchecked spread of epidemics so that 2,000,000 Indians, it is calculated, were afflicted by the plague between 1573 and 1577. While I realize that all early population estimates contain wide mar-

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gins of error, it is interesting to note that C. A. Nieve's careful computation showed 9,120,000 persons in Mexico at the dawn of the colonial era ( 1 5 2 1 ) , while at its close (1808) Baron Alexander von Humboldt gave Mexico only 6,500,000 inhabitants. T h e perseverance of the Indian mores was due in the main to the protracted resistance of crown and clergy to the suicidal policy of the encomenderos. T h e monarchy had a permanent stake in the exploitation of the colony and was naturally adverse to dissipating its human capital. T h i s long-range view was, however, inacceptable to the hidalgos who came to Nueva España, either as encomenderos or government officials, to amass huge fortunes in the briefest possible time and then return to the peninsula to enjoy them. In his Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España, the ecclesiastical writer, Fray T o r i b i o de Benavente Motolinía, argued for reconciliation between clergy and encomendero. "If we (the priests) did not defend the Indians," he urged, "you (the Spaniards) would have no one to serve you. If we favor them it is to conserve them, so that you may have servants." T h e policy of the friars was at first to segregate the Indian population from the whites and to place the former under direct ecclesiastical control. In Yucatán, the visitador, Tomás López, prevented the intermingling of conquered and victor races, subordinated the Indian chieftains to the clerical authorities, appointed advisers to the village councils, and prevented the Mayans either from leaving their villages, even temporarily, or from communicating with any whites except their encomenderos and the Churchmen. T h e effect of this segregation policy was to protect the people against the worst excesses of the Spanish landlords. T h u s the contemporary Mayan chronicle, Ah Nakuk Pech, praises Tomás López because he "stopped the Spaniards from burning us and stopped the dogs from biting us." Another Indian chronicle, the Chilam Balam, was less enthusiastic. "Only during the mad times with the mad priests was it that sorrow entered into us,

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that Christianity came to us," its anonymous author laments. " T h i s was the beginning of the tribute, the beginning of beggary, . . . the beginning of battles with firearms, the beginning of the despoilment of all, the beginning of indentured slavery." T h e entente cordiale between church and landlord became more evident as the spiritual authorities gradually acquired half the real estate of Mexico. The monastic orders waxed fat in the new colony; they became recipients of huge endowments from those encomenderos whose savagery Las Casas had excoriated. T h e terrible famine in Yucatán in the middle of the sixteenth century "probably had no other cause," Ancona assures us, "than the great quantities of corn exported by the encomenderos and perhaps also by the friars." Two decades after the Conquest the Queen of Spain complained of "the excessive charges" which the clergy enacted for "burials, masses, nuptial masses, marriages, and all other things related to holy worship," and ordered, as a remedy, that these fees be reduced to only three times "the schedule practiced in the Archbishopric of Seville." This abuse, however, was not rectified, and three centuries later the British chargé d'affaires, H. G. Ward, computed that Indians had to pay more than half their yearly income as marriage fees, a circumstance which in his opinion explained the ubiquity of "sexual immorality." In 1649 Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, of Puebla, complained to Pope Innocent X that the Jesuits "own the best haciendas, and just two of their seminaries today possess 300,000 sheep with many head of larger cattle. And while all the rest of the orders and the cathedrals own between them only three sugar mills, the Society of Jesus has six of the best, and, most Holy Father, such a mill may be worth a million and a half pesos." Toward the close of the eighteenth century over half the houses of Mexico City were owned by the church, while the Carmelites had haciendas that stretched from Mexico City to Tampico. This opulence had been attained in many ways. When heretics were condemned

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by the Inquisition, their property was confiscated by the church, and the auto-de-fe of 1649 alone yielded three million pesos. A devout Catholic, Madame Calderón de la Barca, describes "the magnificence of jewels and crimson velvet and silver and g o l d " d u r i n g a Palm Sunday service, so that "the whole cathedral presented the appearance of a forest of palm trees . . . and under each tree a half-naked Indian, his rags clinging together with a wonderful pertinacity." N o t long after the Conquest racial segregation invaded religion. T h e Indian or mestizo baby was often baptized in a different church from the white child; g r o w i n g to manhood, he was married in a special church; and on his death, was buried in a separate cemetery. T h e class differences between the Indians, Negroes, mestizos, and whites were emphasized by distinctive garments and social prerogatives, as well as by the reservation of the most important administrative posts in the colony for men born in Spain and the exclusion of nonwhites from all but the most menial occupations. Even in the artisan guilds, racial discrimination was the rule and men of N e g r o or Indian blood were not permitted to become master workmen. T h i s policy of political, social, and economic discrimination against colored peoples was, however, far less ubiquitous and oppressive in Nueva España than in the British West Indies, just as the Portuguese attitude toward the Indians and Negro slaves of Brazil was more lenient than that of Holland. T h e colonial history of the Americas has, in fact, tended to show that the Catholic colonizing countries were far readier to recognize the claims of the colored races to equality than were the corresponding Protestant nations. In the factories of M e x i c o C i t y — o n e of which was large enough to employ three thousand w o r k e r s — t h e lot of the laborers was miserable. H u m b o l d t thus describes w o r k i n g conditions at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Free men, Indians and men of color are thrown together like galley slaves whom the authorities distribute among the factories to make them work. They are half-naked, dejected, and covered

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with rags and deformities. Every shop appears like a dark prison; the doors, which are double, are always closed, and the workers are not permitted to go home; those that are married may only see their families on Sundays. All are implacably punished if they commit the least offense against the discipline established in the factory. T h e culture of Nueva España was essentially the prerogative of "the men who can reason," as the whites dubbed themselves. T h e Churrigueresque cathedral façades and the splendid manor houses of the colony were evidences of a conspicuous consumption made possible by the unalleviated labor of Indian, Negro and mestizo pariahs. Spanish domination (and its heritage in the Mexico of Iturbide, Santa Ana, and Porfirio Díaz) effectively denied the Indians the status of free human beings. T h e Indian thus became an active and articulate part of the Mexican nation only to the extent that this oligarchic order was destroyed and only in the process of destruction. Compare the wars of independence in South America and in Mexico. T h e insurgent leaders south of Panama were creole gentlemen such as Miranda, Bolivar, and San Martin. These men had been touched by the spark of the European Enlightenment and the ideals of England and Revolutionary France. T h e abuses against which they struck were primarily political, rather than social. T h e leaders of South American independence assailed Spain's discrimination against American-born white settlers, but were mute concerning the plight of the Indians. By contrast, the leaders of Mexico's revolutionary struggle were two parish priests, Hidalgo and Morelos; their captains were Indian and mestizo warriors, such as Vicente Guerrero; their armies were the awakened peons of the latifundia. José María Morelos y Pavón was a military genius with continental perspectives. His devotion to democracy was so great that he lost his cause rather than disobey the inept orders of his revolutionary congress, reaping the death penalty from the Inquisition for espousing "the mani-

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fest heresy of the people's sovereignty." Morelos canceled all caste distinctions in the areas his armies ruled and substituted for the manifold racial gradations of Hispano-American society the uniform designation of "American." He abolished slavery, the tribute, the whipping of Indians, and racial discrimination in government and ecclesiastical office. T h e Indian character of the revolutionary war was illustrated by Morelos' orders to his army commanders. He emphasized that "all the rich, nobles and high officials, whether creóles or Spaniards . . . must be considered as enemies of the nation and addicts of the party of tyranny." T h e properties of this class were to be confiscated in their entirety, half the proceeds to be distributed among the poor of the region, and the rest devoted to the support of the army. All large haciendas were to be distributed among the peasants, for "the positive benefit of agriculture consists in that many dedicate themselves individually to the tilling of small parcels which they can cultivate with their own labor and industry." T h e Indian's blind hatred of the hacienda system and his inability to distinguish between modern agricultural methods and the serfdom and oppression which had accompanied them led Morelos to destroy the tobacco fields, the sugar mills, and, in short, every vestige of the more advanced Spanish agriculture. Similarly, the Mayan peasant armies of Yucatán, during the sanguinary War of the Castes (1846-61), laid waste the latifundia and returned, after victory, to the forests, to cultivate their maize patches in the manner of their ancestors. N o clearer demonstration that the Indians had gained none of the benefits of the Spanish technological contribution is needed than their instinctive will to annihilate all that had been introduced from Spain since the Conquest. T h u s the conventional picture of the Mexican Indian as a passive beast of burden does not gibe with historical facts. T h e three centuries of Spanish domination were punctuated by important serf revolts, and hostilities between Indians and whites were incessant. T h e Mexican War of Independence

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was not an opéra bouffé affair, with epauleted and gallant generals, but a protracted and desperate struggle in which mass armies participated and hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives. Under the Mexican Republic there were revolts such as that of the Mayans, in which the untrained Indian hordes seized four-fifths of the peninsula of Yucatán and carried on a struggle for fifteen years. In the course of this purely regional struggle, one-half the population of the states of Yucatán and Campeche was exterminated. These Indian rebellions were invariably directed against the exaction of onerous tribute, the absorption of the communal lands of the villages, and the bondage of the hacienda. When Mexico finally achieved her independence, it was won through the disloyalty of a Royalist officer, rather than through the struggles of the people. The whites retained undisputed economic and political power, and the realities of Indian servitude remained. The next generation saw an era of barracks revolts, essentially meaningless struggles between Federalists and Centralists, turbulence and treachery. A corrupt military caste controlled the nation's affairs; its rapacity served to drain the treasury, while its incessant recourse to rebellion was a constant reminder to civilian politicians that they must pay the blackmail of the army budget. One of the greatest tragedies of the reform period was that Mexico's Indian president, Benito Juárez, unintentionally struck a terrible blow at the vestiges of the Indian communal land system. Imbued with the prevalent theories of economic liberalism, he sought to establish an agrarian middle class by transforming the commons into small Indian peasant properties. This ill-advised reform was met by stubborn resistance. Furthermore, speculators and land companies acquired the Indians' parcels by fraud or coercion. During the thirty-oddyear dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the process of erasing the communal pattern was completed. In payment for their labor, land companies were granted one-third the areas they surveyed, and 29 individuals or companies acquired 43,000,000

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acres of land in return for a nominal payment to the treasury. T h e abuses of the Porfirian epoch are too well known to require reiteration. Juárez had stressed his Indian origin, made pathetic beginnings in popular education which the exigencies of two civil wars aborted, and recognized that: " T h e man who cannot supply his family with food views the education of his sons, not only as something remote, but as a positive impediment to his struggle for existence. . . . If that man had a few conveniences, if he could squeeze the least profit from his toil, he would from that day on be eager to educate his children and provide them with a solid instruction." Diaz and his advisers, on the other hand, had given the wealth of the country to foreign concessionaires and land companies, had eagerly sought European immigration, and had viewed the Indian as human dross, fitted only for manual labor. Bribery and terrorism were used to maintain order; the alienation of the Indian landholdings was completed by coercive measures, and incipient strikes of textile workers and miners were brutally repressed. When the Yaquis were driven from their lands, they revolted, and were deported by the Diaz authorities to the sweltering Yucatán peninsula, to work and die on the henequen plantations. T h e culture of the metropolis and the provincial cities was an irrelevant echo of nineteenthcentury France. Positivism was the official philosophy; later, it was to be Bergsonian idealism. T h e frock-coated culture of the capital was the prerogative of its leisure class. Belletristic, imitative, and remote from the problems of the people, it stood as a symbol of the complete divorce between the two formative racial strands of the Mexican nation. T h e Revolution of 1 9 1 0 is the most important line of demarcation in the history of the Mexican Republic. It overthrew, once and for all, the caste system and its vestiges. T h e Indians emerged from the years of revolutionary chaos as part of the Mexican nation, a component part which could neither be snubbed nor ignored. Mexico learned to pride herself, not on her fraction of white blood, but on her character as a

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mestizo people—a product of race mixture. T h e second important phase of the continuing Mexican Revolution is that it reaffirms the Indian communal pattern of life and has welded it into the social and economic structure of the nation. T h e ejidos, or communal lands of the villages, are being restored. T h e program of the present Mexican government is to destroy the hacienda utterly and to transform rural Mexico into a combination of small farms and large, collectively organized agricultural units. T h e political and economic democracy of the civilization Cortés discovered and destroyed is being recreated, after four centuries of oligarchy. Finally, the revolution emphasizes education of the peasantry and, in particular, of the Indian masses. T h i s new Mexican education is based on the project method, used to inculcate a cooperative and socialist mentality. T h e rural school teacher is drawing the Indian communities into the Mexican nation. Let us now pause for a brief survey of the status of the Mexican Indian groups at present. During his 1933 presidential campaign, General Cárdenas found "peasants and Indians who cannot even afford a few yards of cloth with which to cover their flesh." He spoke of "great centers of Indian population which do not speak our language and, due to their scant knowledge of agricultural technique, destroy the forests. A large number of these Indians are dominated by the vice of alcohol and stupefied by fanaticism." T h e presidential candidate found that these submerged population groups were insulated, by poverty, superstition, and their obsolescent tribal cultures, from the influences of industrial civilization. Inadequate land resources and incompetent methods of cultivation combined to create the pattern of disease, drunkenness, ignorance, and tribal isolation which characterized the indigenous regions. Cárdenas stated bluntly that the Indians were the forgotten men of the Mexican Revolution. T h e key to the rehabilitation of the indigenous groups, he asserted, was the integral expropriation of hacienda and plantation land, the cooperative organization

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of Indian production, and a combined educational and health program that would revolutionize the living conditions of the backward zones. It seemed essential that the traditional divorce between the Indians and the federal government be terminated. Cárdenas declared that "the doors of the National Palace are always open to the workers and peasants." He built "houses of the Indians" to provide free lodgings for the barefooted peasant delegations that were continually traveling to the national and state capitals with petitions and grievances. Immediately after his inauguration as president, Cárdenas ordered the federal telegraphic agency to transmit all messages of complaint from the public to him free of charge. Time and time again he intervened to unite the peasants, rural workers, and indigenous communities in regional and national organizations which were able to negotiate directly with the government. Impatient of bureaucratic procedures and suspicious of timeserving and venal officials, Cárdenas has spent approximately half his presidential period in trips to the remote villages and peasant communities of Mexico. These trips serve to establish a close and permanent liaison between the people and their government. They acquaint the president with the diverse problems and wants of the various Indian areas. Where the communications system is rudimentary, the regional cultural patterns are heterogeneous. Since the barriers of poverty and dialect are immense, this direct approach to the administrative problem appears inevitable. The absence of national integration is symbolized by the fact that some two million Mexicans rely primarily on tribal languages which antedate Columbus. These two millions are, almost of necessity, illiterate, and their native tongues are utterly inadequate for the expression of modern ideas. Thus the Yaquis of Sonora have never mastered the Arabic number system. In the course of their trade with the mestizo grain buyers, they have been compelled to invent an original but cumbersome counting notation, which is as great an impedi-

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ment to the four fundamental operations of arithmetic as the Greek number system. Indian production activity is technologically static and utterly routinized. Man's control over environment is at a minimum, and the transition from abundance to poverty is the result of the vagaries of weather and the obscure cycles of blight and insect pest. T h e Indian population of Mexico consists, in the main, of three overlapping groups: ejidatarios, hacienda peons, and independent craftsmen. Generally, the land resources at the Indian's disposal are so meager and his knowledge of agriculture is so rudimentary that he is obliged to supplement field labor with cottage industry. T h e prevalence of handicrafts in rural Mexico is also attributable to the fact that an ineptly conducted agriculture precludes the purchase of the machine-made goods which the peasantry needs, thus compelling the inhabitants of the various indigenous zones to cling to their tradition of economic self-sufficiency. Studies by the Mexican sociologist Manuel Gamio have demonstrated that the bulk of the Indian's artifacts are of local origin and that a large number of them have remained virtually unchanged, with respect to design and structure, from the pre-Cortesian period. T h e tiger masks of Guerrero, the crimson and black sarapes of Oaxaca, the ixtle fajas of the north central plateau, and the ornamental gourds of the Tehuantepec Isthmus are among the products of this tradition-bound artisanship. T h e factory of the Indian weaver or potter is his hut; the motive power is muscular energy applied to a home-made loom or wheel. T h e absence of electricity in the overwhelming majority of the Indian villages determines the length of the working day, which is from dawn to dusk. In so far as handicraft production is devoted to filling the needs of the surrounding peasant areas, wages are held close to the subsistence level by the poverty of the Indian peasants and the existence of large reservoirs of semi-employed persons in the rural regions. In portions of the state of Guerrero, the peasants earn as little as

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twenty-five centavos a day. Their wives make rebozos, or shawls, receiving twelve centavos apiece for them. The palmweaving industry of the Oaxaca Indians is likewise a byproduct of agricultural distress. T h e Indian peon generally earns about seventy-five centavos a day, while the ejidatario, or artisan, may receive as much as a peso. The per-capita value of food consumption of fifteen Indian groups studied by the Autonomous Department of Indian Affairs in May, 1938, varied from one and one-third to ten United States cents. Of the three-cent food outlay of the Zapotees, two-thirds is devoted to tortillas (a corn-meal preparation), while the remaining penny is divided among beans, coffee, chile, corn cakes, and salt. By contrast, the Yaquis, who have become relatively prosperous since the Cárdenas government restored their village lands, eat three meals a day and enjoy the luxury of beef, dried meats, and rice. Mendieta y Núñez points out that the Indian works just long enough to satisfy his most elementary needs—food, clothing, and strong liquor. If he is fortunate enough to earn a surplus, he will generally invest it in a tiny land parcel or else in cattle. "Among the Coras, Huicholes and Tarahumaras, the standard of value is not money, but cattle." The Indian's attitude is one of fatalism and despair, the product of immemorial poverty and oppression. Hundreds of rural schoolteachers' reports testify to the sadness of his desolate villages, his moroseness, and his profound distrust of strangers. There are a few primitive Indian groups in Mexico, such as the arrow-making Chamulas and the Seris, who devour raw meat and wear human skin for adornment, but they are exceptional. The Mexican Indian is sedentary, or, at worst, quasi-itinerant. His economy is the tradition-bound maize agriculture of his forefathers, coupled with handicraft industries which supply his most pressing wants. He clears the land by burning off its brush cover, and still plants in many areas with a fire-hardened stick or a wooden plow. The health conditions of the Indian communities are ap-

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palling. In 1936 the Mexican death rate was 22.4 per thousand, or twice that of the United States, and the Indian death rate was undoubtedly much higher. Gastro-intestinal diseases account for one-fifth of all Mexican mortality. T h e population is debilitated by diseases springing from malnutrition and unsanitary drinking water, by malaria, and by venereal ailments. T h e peasants of the central plateau are cotton-clad and often barefoot. As a result, the Mexican death rate from diseases of the respiratory system is seven times higher than that of the United States. Leprosy is prevalent in several zones, and the majority of its victims have not even been segregated, let alone treated. Whole villages are blind as a result of onchocercosis, and the mal de pinto is a tradition of Guerrero. If the Mexican is fortunate with respect to heart diseases and cancer, the explanation is that his life expectancy is too brief to expose him to their maximum impact. T h e causes of Mexican ill health are well known. T o eradicate them would require a total reorganization of the nation's economy; a gigantic educational campaign, which would have to break down the walls of suspicion, ignorance, and set tribal mores; and the expenditure of millions of dollars to create an adequate public-health and hospitalization service. T h e chief causal factor is poverty. T h e average peasant earns less than a peso a day. At least 70 percent of the Mexican population is condemned to subsist on an insufficient and illbalanced diet, to wear clothing which provides inadequate protection against the cold, and to occupy hovels which are overcrowded, unsanitary, and foci for the dissemination of contagious disease. T h e thatched roofs of the tropical jacals play host to dozens of different varieties of pernicious insect pests. T h e adobe huts of the plateau dwellers are windowless and shut out the sunlight. T h e bare feet of the tropical Indians are pierced by insect parasites. T h e Mexican peasant, Eyler Simpson stated, "does not get enough to eat and what he does eat is badly balanced." Manuel Mesa, Director of the National Bank of Agricultural

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Credit, claims that the peasants "lack the health and physical energy necessary for efficient work." The Mexican Indian's diet is based on maize and brown beans. Chili is introduced to stimulate the digestive juices, but it has a caustic effect on the stomach and intestines. T h e universal beverage is pulque, a fermented product of the maguey, or century plant, which is generally produced under the most appallingly unhygenic conditions. This beverage, according to Dr. Ernest Gruening, "continues its fermentation within the gastro intestinal tract of the consumer, causing the putrefaction of its contents. . . . Pulque is in varying degrees a bacterial culture. It may transmit almost every microbic disease known to man." The almost ubiquitous lack of sanitary drinking water has stimulated the pulque habit. Otomi peasants, with whom I talked in 1936, admitted that they consumed as much as seven quarts daily. The Mexican Indian baby is given the same lethal diet as his parents. In some regions, infants are weaned with a cloth dipped in corn whiskey. "Generally the meal is prepared only with reference to the needs of the adults," writes a Morelos rural missionary, "letting the children eat the same food: tortillas, Mexican beans, and black coffee, for neither milk nor fruit is available." Another teacher reports from Bimbaleto, in Zacatecas, that 90 percent of the children die of intestinal ailments. "Witchcraft flourishes side by side with Catholic fanaticism; the people are superstitious, and practically all the men suffer from venereal disease." Hampered as it is by slender budgetary resources, the Cárdenas government is none the less making a vast effort to revolutionize the health conditions of the peasant and Indian groups. Young medical students are being sent to selected rural areas which lack doctors. They are obliged to spend five months in these regions, to make a survey of local health needs, to prepare a program of action for the communities, and to lead a campaign for improved hygiene before receiving their degree from the Medical Faculty of the National University. As it will be decades before Mexico's 80,000 villages

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have medical service, the young doctors are instructed to cooperate with the native curers, learning their herbal remedies and instructing them, in return, in the rudiments of health work and midwifery. About half of the 300 doctors sent out every year to these rural communities remain and develop a practice. Popular campaigns to encourage sports, a national drive against alcoholism and malaria, and the vaccination of a million Mexicans every year form part of the governmental health program. T h e collective farms have been encouraged to establish socialized medical systems, on a combination subsidy and quota payment plan. New hospitals, sanitaria, and field dispensaries are being erected in the oil fields, La Laguna, and Nueva Italia. T h e increasing size of the agricultural production unit is simplifying the problem of ascertaining the nature of regional needs and providing health service. Alcoholism is general among the Indian groups. It is generated by poverty, lack of adequate drinking water, absence of recreation facilities, and the despondent attitude of the people. " T h e big holidays sometimes last for a week," a Oaxaca school teacher reported. " T h e saloons are full, the streets are crowded with Indians, lying in a drunken stupor, others wander with slow and uncertain step toward oblivion. When the fiesta is over, the poor Indians go back to their villages, penniless and empty-handed." T h e Cárdenas educational program is an effort to change the mental habits which make this sort of life possible. T h e agrarian reform seeks to eradicate its economic causes. T h e present educational emphasis is on teaching the Indians in their own dialects and in terms of their tribal traditions. T h e policy of tilting against the windmills of "superstition and fanaticism," which brought the entire rural educational program close to debacle, has been abandoned. Thirty-three Centers of Indian Education, aided by 600 teachers of Indian origin, are seeking to inculcate a cooperative mentality in terms of regional mores. Future Indian leaders

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are drawn f r o m the youths, and a special effort is made to win the approbation of the Indian mothers, whose traditional role is to transmit the tribal heritage. T h e Indian school of action not only teaches improved agricultural methods and introduces new crafts and light industries, but it seeks to preserve the d y i n g indigenous c u l t u r e — t h e music, dances, and designs of the various Indian groups. T h e curriculum thus includes rural industries, singing, folk dances, popular arts, reading, writing, and arithmetic. T h e schools are organized as cooperatives, and the students cultivate the school lands on a collective basis. Education, however, is not enough. Under the Cárdenas administration three regional Indian conferences have been held, at which elected delegates, to the n u m b e r of several hundred, met with government officials to give voice to their grievances. I attended the first of these congresses, and listened for three days as ragged, dust-covered O t o m i peasants— the stunted inhabitants of an arid, desolate, and almost sterile part of the great Mexican p l a t e a u — d e m a n d e d schools for their children, guns with which to defend themselves against the ravages of hacienda "white guards," and water with w h i c h to irrigate their farms. It was significant that among these Indian delegates were women, w h o addressed President Cárdenas without bashfulness or fear. It was also noteworthy that the Otomis were not asking for charity. Village groups would offer to b u i l d and to maintain a rural school if the government w o u l d send them a teacher. Others asked for bags of cement so that they could dam mountain streams and pipe the water to their communities. As a result of this congress, cooperative sewing centers have been established and cloth given the women; wells have been d u g in the villages; public baths are being built; and the ixtle weaving industry has been stimulated. T h e living conditions of the 300,000 Indians in this zone are gradually being improved. T h e Indians are being given a new economic status by the government's agrarian program. T h e henequen plantations

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of Yucatán have been swept away, and the hard-fiber zone of the peninsula has been transformed into a giant cooperative, owned by 30,000 Mayan peons. T h e backward, exploited Chamulas, of Chiapas, have been given coffee plantations to administer collectively. Land distribution, federal credit, and a technical and social reorganization of agriculture are revolutionizing the mores of the Aztecs, the Zapotees, and the other great Indian groups. T h e impulse to cultural revolution comes from 22,000 rural schools scattered over the vastness of rural Mexico. T h e rural school teacher must teach the adult peasants and workers in night classes, organize them into trade unions and peasant cooperatives, and reorganize the hygiene, habits, and production techniques of the community. T h e country schoolhouse is now called the Casa del Pueblo, or house of the people, for it is here that the people meet to decide their local problems. T h e test of the Mexican rural teacher's capacity is not his academic qualifications, which are generally meager indeed, but his ability to lead the community toward a new way of life. As a mestizo nation, Mexico emphatically repudiates the fascist doctrine that the races of the world can be divided into preordained slave and master groups, that certain peoples are the creators of cultures, others its imitators and transmitters, and still others its destroyers. It also rejects the notion that race purity is desirable. T h e mestizo conception of life recognizes that each human group has its potential contribution to world civilization and denies the value of applying Hitler's garbled Darwinism to human society. Therefore Mexico refuses to accept two diametrically opposed concepts of the Indian problem. T h e first of these unacceptable positions is that the Indian must be subjected to a European education alien to his mores, since he can become a civilized human being only to the extent that he ceases being an Indian. T h i s view entails the total rejection of the Indian's potential cultural contribution. T h e second view is the

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idealization of the primitive Indian culture pattern and the demand that the march of civilization be interrupted so that its picturesque beauty and esthetic squalor may be retained. T h i s philosophy has been urged by itinerant social theorists, more anxious to express their dissatisfaction with American industrial civilization than to study the status of the Indian. It is not strange that this theory of "the noble savage" has been propounded in direct proportion to the square of the distance between the theorist and his subject. Stuart Chase urges that there are certain broad human values in the Indian way of life which should be retained. He contrasts the "timelessness" of the Mexican villages with our arrogant American will "to get ahead." He notes that the barefooted Mixtec, in the high Oaxaca uplands, is unperturbed by the business cycle and by the possibility that his life insurance policy will lapse. While he deprecates the terrible poverty of the Indian villages, Chase believes that they have a modicum of security which we lack, for their economy is too rudimentary to be attacked by the civilized torments that infect more complex and articulated social organizations. Finally, Chase welcomes the leisure of the Indian way and stresses the fact that the artisan who varies his designs at will earns the psychological dividends of creative activity. T h e acceptance of this seductive view would negate every effort to incorporate the Indian into modern civilization. T h e Indian's cyclical time concept (in contradistinction to our linear one) reflects his dependence on the vagaries of weather and crop growth and his utter failure to control his physical environment. T h e might of tribal tradition is proportional to his poverty and despair, for where the Indian is given the opportunity to live a fuller life he rejects the ways of his ancestors. T h e Indian Weltanschauung is incompatible with the existence of science and fruitful skepticism. If one seriously accepts it as a desirable way of life, one must answer Hamlet's provocative question in the negative. If the mental security of the Indian way is unhealthy, his

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economic security is specious. T h e Indian villages are not subject to the spectacular phenomena of economic crisis and technological unemployment, but the Malthusian law bears down on them with terrible rigor. T h e recompense for the Indian's labor is so meager that he is unable to accumulate a surplus, and one year of bad weather will often suffice to obliterate his life savings and force him to move into the forests, with a few head of scrawny cattle and his ragged, barefooted wife. When his corn patch fails him, he will grub for wild roots and herbs. When a hurricane destroys his pitifully small crops, he will starve, or else go to the cities to beg. This is not economic security as we conceive it. When we see the stunted, prematurely aged, and sick Indian resting after hard physical labor, either in a broiling sun or at an impossible altitude, we either condemn him as lazy, or else applaud his understanding of the values of leisure. T h e Indian habit of working just long enough to earn enough maize and frijoles to feed his family, with a small surplus so that he can drink himself into a stupor, is symptomatic of his cramped spiritual quarters and his traditional destitution. I have seen tragic Indian fiestas, such as the Day of the Dead at Patzcuaro, which show the Indian's tenacious grasp on a tradition in which he no longer believes, because more adequate values have not yet been given him. Individuality of craftsmanship has a definite psychological value. T h e Indian crafts are often superb; just as frequently they are meretricious and gaudy. T h e rainbow sarape of Teocaltiche and Saltillo is not a perversion imposed by the purchasing power of Mid-Western Babbitts, but a design which appeared as early as the eighteenth century and finds acceptance today in tens of thousands of mestizo and Indian homes. T o be sure, the Indian potter is free to draw strange birds and monsters on the edges of his jars, but in his daily life true diversity is absent. His village is probably a potters' village. T h e interests that absorb the people of the cities are alien to him, and he has less opportunity even to know the

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peasant arts of other Mexican regions than the average MidWesterner who has never been south of the R i o Grande. Modern Mexico has assimilated one important thing from the Indian tradition—its emphasis on cooperation, communal ownership of property, and a direct village democracy. T h e new collective farms of La Laguna, Lombardía, and El Mante are efforts to harness the cooperative tradition of the Indian to a more or less mechanized technology. T h e Indian indorses this return to communal ownership. When the Kikapoo Indians, of Sonora, were given an ejido by the Cárdenas government, it was not yet time for planting, and these tall, nomadic northerners waited, on their newly acquired land, refusing to touch the food which the government had given them. T h e reason they gave for this abstinence was that the tribe believed that " H e who does not work, neither shall he eat." T h e basic culture pattern of the Indians is, I believe, slowly being destroyed by Mexico's march toward national integration. T h e flowering of that civilization was arrested by the nihilistic practices of the Conquerors and their spiritual advisers. T h e great Indian political federations and the intellectual caste which built them were destroyed, and, at the end, there was merely the truncated culture of the Indian villages—a culture inadequate and obsolescent, even by Mayan and Aztec standards. T h e segment of Indian culture which survived was based on a molecular economic system in which congeries of villages form self-sufficient economic units, industry is handicraft in character, the interchange of agricultural products and the machine-made goods of the cities is precluded, and barter forms the primary nexus of the market place. I believe that these remnants of a once great civilization have little place in modern Mexico, for they rest on a disappearing incomptent economic organization. T h e i r preservation would spell continued poverty for the people, ignorance, and the persistence of local as against national loyalties.

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Racial differences become less and less significant as the life conditions of the two groups approach uniformity. Mexico has produced Indian statesmen such as Benito Juárez, Emiliano Zapata, and Lázaro Cárdenas; Indian military leaders such as Alvarez and Guerrero; and Indian historians such as Ixtlilxochitl. T h e sad, plaintive music of the Jalisco mariaches and the audacious, sure color sense of the Chiapas sarapes are but two instances of the creative vitality of the Indian people and their contribution to the Mexican arts. Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco are probably the two men who have done most to dramatize the pathos of the Indian. Their paintings cry out against the servitude of the vanquished race; they do not appeal for the preservation of that segment of Indian culture which is compatible with continued servitude. T h e Mexican view of today is that the Indian must be amalgamated into a mestizo nation. This process will destroy much of the old, but it may lay the foundations for infinitely more vital cultural contributions. T h e economic emancipation of this people is essential, before the descendants of the builders of Teotihuacán and the astronomers of Chichen-Itzá can emerge from their status as a fellaheen people.

Some Considerations Regarding temporary Latin ylmerican WILLIAM

Con-

Music

BERRIEN

E Ñ O R F R A N C I S C O C U R T L A N G E , the Uruguayan musicologist, has recently spent several months in Mexico City preparing for publication the fifth volume of the Boletín latinoamericano de música, a work devoted for the most part to the study of music in the Americas. Within four years four volumes of this bulletin have appeared, ranging in size from 288 pages in Volume I, to 860 pages of articles on different phases of music and musical activities in Latin America, in Volume IV, which also contains a musical supplement of 134 pages of Latin American music printed for the first time. T h e completion this year of five large and significant volumes, in less than five years, would seem to indicate that "something is going on down there," musically speaking. And something is going on down there. T h e idea of music in Latin America is nothing particularly new, even to the man in the street, who commonly attributes even to the humblest Latin Americans a love for music and a pronounced melodic gift. People have spoken for years of Latin Americans as a race of music lovers, without pausing to reflect what the term "race" might mean in this instance and without attempting to determine whether the average Latin American's love for music is a fact or a myth. Nor can we stop to consider to what extent this popular belief is true or false. T h e fact remains that the countries of Latin America have produced, sung, and applauded music since the earliest days known to the historian of these countries. Not only did music exist in

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pre-Cortesian days in Mexico, but there were institutions for the teaching of music, and musical instruction was specifically a requirement in religious and military schools. Recent editions of canciones antiguas of the seventeenth century, edited by Josué Wilkes, of Buenos Aires, show that in the second century of Hispano-American colonial life music already had its established place. Travelers from Europe to eighteenth-century Brazil never failed to be impressed by the nostalgic charm and grace of the modinha, which, shortly after it had become acclimated in the salons of the colony, was introduced with great success into the neoclassic salons of the Portuguese homeland. And the only composer of opera from the western hemisphere to gain an international reputation in the nineteenth century was the Brazilian, Carlos Gomes, whose II Guarany, Lo Schiavo, Salvatore Rosa, and Maria Tudor commanded the respect and admiration of Verdi and are still upon occasion performed in the leading opera houses of Italy and Brazil. But the activity which affords stimulus to the numerous and lengthy studies of Professor Curt Lange and his fellow musicologists is a relatively new phenomenon. It is, in short, the same thing which has been in progress in the plastic arts and in the literature of Latin America during the past twenty years. One may use a phrase of Pedro Henríquez Ureña and call it an adventure "en busca de nuestra expresión." In music what it really amounts to is the quest of a truly American 1 musical idiom: the evolution of an authentic and independent new music for a New World. These are, perhaps, high-sounding words; but it is safe to say that what has been accomplished musically in Latin America in the last quarter of a century is of more importance than the achievement of the entire eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the same field. T w o things have contributed to the eagerness and conviction with which Latin American i T h e term American is used here in its broadest sense, and not to designate exclusively the inhabitants or the art of the United States.

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composers are working on the development of this essentially American music: first, the failure of composers of former generations—who wrote what they were pleased to call musica universal—to create works of real significance, their efforts for the most part being mere pale reflections or dilutions of certain European composers—colorless pastiches of the more sugary works of Chopin, or flamboyant and superficial rhapsodizings which sought to employ the pyrotechnics of a Franz Liszt; secondly, the relatively recent awareness on the part of these composers of the richness of their own musical heritage. In speaking of the music of Carlos Chavez, Aaron Copland remarks that composers of the United States are less fortunate than those of Latin America, since the latter may "borrow from a rich, melodic source or lose themselves in an ancient civilization." It it true that in many Latin American countries an advanced aboriginal culture offers a starting point in the creation of a music that may be something more than a mere continuation of the European tradition. What this preConquest music was really like and what value it may have for composers today, we are only now beginning to find out. But Chdvez himself feels that in point of force and originality this division is perhaps the most important of all. Research in this field has already begun, with interesting findings, especially in Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru. T h e traveling layman may gain some notion of what this early autochthonous music must have been like by listening to natives of isolated regions, who in their rites and ceremonies continue to employ a music strikingly different from that of the European tradition in rhythm, melody, harmony, and even tone division, as well as in the instruments they employ to accompany the chant and the dance. Besides this indigenous music, the Latin American can find new themes, rhythmic patterns, and harmonic structures in the music of colonial days and in that of the era of independence. T h i s heritage of mestizo music represents the composer's most immediately usable source of inspiration. Con-

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taining, as it does, an intermixing of the musical elements supplied by the Indian, the Negro, and the European (in this case Portuguese or Spanish), this so-called música mestiza is one of the richest and most valuable products of race mixture in America. T h e variety of popular forms which this música mestiza offers is very great. By popular forms I do not mean the tango as we know it here today—a genre of cheap salon or street music which has greatly degenerated in the past fifty years, especially in the River Plate republics; nor do I mean the vulgar and somewhat dreary café chantant sentimentalities of an Agustín Lara, in Mexico. With the exception of an occasional Afro-Cuban melody which comes to us in a relatively unadulterated version, in the United States we do not hear the true popular melodies of Latin America. But a great number of real and distinctive popular forms exist throughout the Latin American countries and offer an almost endless variety of musical ideas in an almost inexhaustible scale of moods and nuances. Lack of time prevents even an enumeration of the more representative of these folk-music types, but anyone who has traveled in Argentina will recall with ease the great variety afforded by the pericón, the gato, the vidalita, the triste, the estilo, and the media caña, to mention only the best-known forms. And other countries, notably Brazil, can boast of a still greater number of distinct forms. Besides this wealth of thematic material, the heritage of colonial days and the era of independence offer the composer another source of new and effective ideas in the form of countless indigenous and semi-indigenous instruments, large and small. Modern composers have, in general, made evident the fact that the use of percussion instruments may add greatly to the richness of a score, in sonority and rhythm. It is precisely in the percussion section of the orchestra that one finds a number of original Latin American instruments which, used in connection with the instruments of the con-

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ventional orchestra, may add noticeably to the effectiveness of the composer's scores. In Latin America, then, the composer has no lack of new and original materials with which to work toward the evolution of a new music. T h e question is, to what extent is he to use these materials and how may he use them profitably, without merely exploiting their newness? I should like to take a few moments now to discuss a point which is almost sure to come up for comment in any consideration of Latin American contemporary music. When one mentions the fact that Latin Americans are striving to create a new and authentic musical idiom, that they would like American music to be independent, something more than a mere imitation and continuation of the European tradition, there is almost always someone who asks, " D o you mean that they are trying to ignore European music?" T h e answer is: certainly not. Composers of the present generation are interested, more than ever before, in the best European music, especially that of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. But they realize that they themselves may have something personal to say, something that may reflect a heritage which goes back to the time before Europeans came to America, and that they can probably write the best music when they are being themselves. For Latin Americans contain in their blood, and in their manner of being, a heritage which is not exclusively European. Indian and Negro elements have contributed definite traits to the character of the Latin American as he is today, whether he be writer, painter, musician, or politician. It is only logical that these non-European elements be represented in some manner in the artistic expression of present-day Latin Americans, since these elements inform their tastes, their desires, their personalities. Another question often asked is: "Is nationalism the goal of Latin American composers, now that they are attempting to write real Latin American music?" Here again the an-

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swer is: certainly not. It must be remembered that this real Latin American music is something new and young. Even when we consider that composers such as Heitor Vila-Lobos, of Brazil, and Carlos Chdvez, of Mexico, are considered representative composers the world over, and that such men as J u a n Carlos Paz, Domingo Santa Cruz, Allende, Roldan, Garcia Caturla, and Fabini are not far behind them, even then it would be foolish to believe that Latin American composers had achieved an esthetic which might be regarded as crystallized or final. Nationalism in Latin American music or in any other music is only a step in the final process of the creation of a new idiom. T h e other evening I was chatting with a distinguished g r o u p of exiles from totalitarian countries. Regarding Latin American music they expressed some concern, since they seemed to feel that it was dangerous to emphasize the Brazilian or Cuban or Peruvian or Mexican elements in a composition. T h e i r recent past experiences had made them keenly aware of the possibilities of disaster in overemphasis of the national note in life, in politics, in art, in music, in anything. I could sympathize with their point of view and see in their past experience the cause of their concern; b u t it would be hard to imagine that the use of elements from the musical traditions of Latin America by composers of Latin American countries constitutes a danger. After all, what composers of those countries want to do is to compose good music; in a surprisingly large number of cases they are doing so. But is it asking too much for them to want to have something to say of their own? Neither Vila-Lobos nor Chdvez—to cite the cases of the two Latin American composers generally considered the most important of those now living—is a nationalist in the narrow sense of the word; each merely expresses musically what is a part of him, of his experience. T h e native themes and forms, one might say, are in their blood. So it would seem entirely unnatural that they should ignore that which is a part of

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them, merely because it is something peculiar to their nation. Modern critics in all countries are generally in agreement regarding the high esthetic value of the novels of Giiiraldes, Rivera, Azuela, Gallegos, José Lins do Régo, and other similar leading prose writers of contemporary Latin America. T h e best novels of these writers have a definitely American flavor, a definitely American manner of saying what they have to say, and it is precisely such authors as these who have given the Latin American novel a place in world literature today. Equally American in inspiration is the character of the painting of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Portinari, Pedro Figari, Siqueiros, and other such masters. In both painting and writing, the best results have been achieved in Latin America by artists who have neither ignored nor forgotten the greatness of European art, but who have succeeded in talking forcefully and plastically about the life which surrounds them and of which they are a part, in an expression intelligible to the world at large. In their works and in their artistic program there is no chauvinism, no implicit denial of the greatness of the European masters, whose works they know and admire. But neither is there that servile attitude apparent in the works of earlier, lesser artists who, without knowing the European tradition thoroughly, sought to make their work as European as possible, merely because that was thought the smart thing to do. And with the composers it is the same as with the writers and the painters. A casual comparison of the work of Carlos Chávez, the most Mexican of the newer composers, with that of Ricardo Castro, the most europeizante of those composers of the former generation, would quickly disclose the superficiality of the knowledge of the European tradition which the former generation possessed, as compared with the sound, level headed musical education of the leading composers of today. Such a comparison might be made, also, with the works of composers in the leading centers of musical life throughout Latin America, and with practically the same results.

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What seems to me a greater problem than that represented by the possibilities of an excessive nationalism in the program of the new founders of an American music, is the temptation which Latin American composers have to exploit the new and sensational qualities of the materials with which they work, at the expense of doing something really worth while with these materials. In other words, both the folk music and the native instruments of Latin America offer the indolent or superficial composer an opportunity to be exotic or startlingly primitive, and nothing more—to rely, in gaining his effect, on the unique qualities of his materials, rather than on his skill in using these creatively. It is conceivable that a charlatan might string together loosely a series of folk themes, play up certain trick effects attainable through the employment of strange instruments, and rely for success on the sheer virtuosity of his accomplishment. In general, however, this has not been the case. In the present generation of conscientious and highly autocritical musical leaders, and particularly in the cases of such men as Fabini, Chavez, and Vila-Lobos, one will not easily find mere exploitation of the primitiveness and exoticism of the materials. As in the case of the Spanish composer, Manuel de Falla, such Latin American composers as these three very seldom use a folk song or theme already existent in the music of their respective countries. Theirs is the more difficult task of using their own original themes, often cast in a form or mold which has existed in their countries for many years. Such music as this is no more dangerous to the cause of good, "international" music than for Bach to have used certain already existent dance forms in his suites or for Brahms to have introduced such forms in symphonies and concertos. Today one hears very little about the nationalistic menace of such music as that of Sibelius, and yet, even in the work of this composer, both themes and "flavor" are often markedly Finnish. Composers such as Vila-Lobos and Chavez possess, in addition to a thorough knowledge of the American past, an ex-

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cellent training in the works of leading European masters, from the days of the early Italians to the present time. T h e y realize, as do the majority of serious Latin American composers, that it would be folly to attempt composing works of an ambitious nature without the thoroughgoing study which is expected of a responsible composer in any part of the world; and they do not, of course, believe that it would be possible to create a new, American music without such study. As we shall see, the very composers who are leaders in the movement to evolve a new music for a New World are the men responsible for introducing more good music of the best European tradition to Latin America than audiences in these countries ever heard before. And it is not to be expected that every work of such composers as Vila-Lobos and Chdvez will inevitably be based on themes that are obviously Latin American. Composers of repute, such as J u a n Carlos Paz, in Argentina, and Domingo Santa Cruz, in Chile, use typically American themes very infrequently, preferring for the most part to employ an international idiom in their work; yet their music has a personal, individual quality. These men, in turn, are interested in the more "native" composers and are often responsible for having native scores heard for the first time. It may not be beside the point to state here that one should keep two things in mind when listening to and judging serious Latin American music. On the one hand, one must be prepared to hear something new and something different and to judge it on the basis of its own vocabulary and idiom. On the other hand, once having become accustomed to the "differentness" of much of the music heard, one should not demand that all Latin American music be too evident in this "differentness." One should be prepared to find among Latin American composers musical citizens of the modern world, as well as citizens of the various countries. Both the "Argentinesounding" and the "non-Argentine-sounding" composers of Argentina, for example, have something definite to say musically, and it should be kept in mind that any advances made

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by one group will of necessity be beneficial to the other. A m o n g the most promising of the younger Argentine composers is J u l i o Perceval, who writes with skill, both in the Argentine and international idioms. His elder and better established colleague, J u a n Carlos Paz, while almost never using the Argentine idiom, has encouraged Perceval in both types of composition and has arranged for the public performance of Perceval's works in both idioms. A remark often heard regarding the music even of such composers as Vila-Lobos, Chdvez, Fabini, and Allende, who often employ themes cast in forms derived from the American heritage, is "Why, that music doesn't sound typical." Such comments are usually made by persons who suppose that all Latin American music must, perforce, be dreamy and wistful, or else gay and giddy, of the fandango type. It does not seem to occur to such persons that there are an infinite number of possibilities in American music, and that representative composers often prefer to be subtle rather than obvious. T h e n , too, it is a fact that here in the United States we hear only the banal and pseudo-popular type of Latin American music, which is broadcast over the radio because it is "catchy" or played by dance orchestras because of its infectious rhythm. When first heard, certain sections of the Iberia, of Alberiiz, the works of Ernesto Hdlffter Escriche, and a number of the scores of Manuel de Falla do not seem particularly Spanish to a person not familiar with the folk tradition of the Iberian Peninsula. Both in Spain and elsewhere, the common idea of Spanish music had been conditioned by the facile but unauthentic idiom of the zarzuela and such works as Carmen or the dances of Moskowski, which had, in turn, been largely based on zarzuela music. People accustomed to hearing this obvious type of Spanish music could not recognize the real essence of the music of Spain in such masters as Falla. In somewhat the same manner, people demand that a Latin American score have a tango movement, or something of the sort, to be typical. It is as though one found certain

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North American scores not typical because they did not sound like a melody by Irving Berlin or a march by J o h n Philip Sousa. Even the average concert goer in Latin America has had to be taught to recognize as real Latin American music that which is based on the true folk music, rather than that which employs the more obvious materials afforded by street songs and tunes of the cafe chantant type. T h e problem of educating the Latin American musical public has been one of the most fascinating undertakings of the last twenty years; it has been almost as interesting as the composing of the music itself, and certainly it has been a task to which the best composers have been earnestly devoted. Only now, one must realize, is the apathy with which the Latin Americans regard works not of European origin beginning to diminish. It is only within the last twenty years that people in the Latin American republics—I refer, of course, to the general public—have been willing to read books that were not translations of European publications, especially French; it really did not seem to matter that often the works translated were not those of the best writers, nor that the literature being written by Latin American authors was for the most part as good as, if not superior to the majority of the works imported. Almost all of the music performed in the theater or the salon was that of European composers; if a Latin American composer were to succeed, let him be as European as possible, even if in trying to be so he might have very little to say. And it must be admitted that the works of the European composers performed were not the best, except for occasional performances in the largest cities. Certain composers of the Romantic period shared the popular favor with Meyerbeer, Verdi, and Liszt; Bach, Mozart, and Haydn were neglected, and Brahms was practically unknown. Naturally the composers of the new school had very little to say to such an audience. If they wanted to have an audience

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capable of appreciating their serious efforts, such an audience had to be created. T h e great absolute music of the eighteenth century was unexplored ground to the majority of Latin American concert goers. Music since the time of Debussy was familiar to perhaps a handful of aficionados in the principal centers; as for the literature of song, only the operatic aria or romanza thrived. Clearly, then, the public must be educated to enjoy something other than the more obvious works of the Romantic repertoire, since modern Latin American music appeals more to the person who has learned to love the music preceding Schumann and subsequent to Liszt than to anyone else. Fortunately for Latin America, the men who have most interested themselves in the musical education of the public have been composers of first-rate importance—men of talent, vision, and sound training. T h e number of such composers and musicologists is increasing to such an extent that one can find a nucleus of creator-teachers in most of the cities and larger towns of Mexico, Cuba, and South America. Recently admirable work in such musical education has been undertaken in Puerto Rico also. Because space is limited, I should like to single out four leading composers who have worked with energy and zeal toward educating the musical taste of their countrymen. T h e r e are many more, but I select these because in every case they head the lists of composers in their respective countries. Many of us in the United States already know and applaud the work of Carlos Chávez as composer and director, as well as author of a stimulating book on the music of the near future. Regarding Chávez' work as a leader in the education of musical taste in Mexico, and the stimulus he has given other, younger composers, I quote from an article which Herbert Weinstock wrote on the composer and which appeared in the Musical Quarterly in October, 1936: In a very real sense, all of Carlos Chávez' endeavors have been educational. The relation, for example, between his work in building up the repertoire of the Orchestra, and that in the De-

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partment of Fine Arts, is that of elements of the same expression. Chdvez found the National Conservatory a disorganized imitation of those European academies in which inflexible, lengthy, and antiquated courses year after year produced hundreds of dilettantes, "lady-pianists," and amateurs able only to come badly through the terrors of a free pupils' recital. He recast the courses, centering them about modern methods of instruction adapted to Mexico's particular needs. He oriented the Conservatory towards the production of professional musicians, capable teachers, and a body of trained music-lovers. He put the student orchestra on a new basis, formed groups of executants to give as wide hearing as possible to the music of all epochs, founded a chorus, started historic, scientific, and artistic research, and instituted the giving of concerts to workers in the public parks. He all but abolished free pupils' recitals, substituting for them performances by adequate executants, for which small admission fees were charged. Soloists of promise among the students were afforded appearances with the Symphony Orchestra, and the Chorus of the Conservatory became, under Luis Sandi, a body able to acquit itself brilliantly in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms and Palestrina's Missa Papœ Marcelli. Students of composition were encouraged to compose with primary materials immediately, and to enlarge their resources as rapidly as possible. Research in native music was furthered, and a real school of young composers steeped in native idioms began to appear. Chavez gave them the most valuable of encouragements, playing the best of their works with the Symphony Orchestra and the ensemble including native instruments, called the Mexican Orchestra. T w o of the compositions which he conducted in his first American broadcast—Luis Sandi's El Venado and Daniel Ayala's U Kayil Chaac—were originally written for the Mexican Orchestra. Music, which had been a dead thing for which students prepared for long years, became a living reality in which they took part at once. This same program was carried by Chavez into the Department of Fine Arts. Research and noting down of native music, the collecting and study of native instruments, the distribution throughout the schools of copies of simple arrangements of native melodies, the publication of an excellent book on preCortesian percussion instruments, the performance of simple works in schools, the training of childrens' choruses, were all part of it. Chavez formulated related plans for the divisions of

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plastic art and the dance, the art schools for workers, and the theater for children. W i t h o u t any compromise in standards or quality, art was being taken down from its lonely pedestal and given a warm place among the people. T h e response, and particularly that of workers and children, was overwhelming. Unaware of the moral gulf which, for many people, divides the music of today from the classics, the children sang pentatonic music, simple classical music, and ultramodern music, with equal relish. T h e i r sense of the exact beauties and qualities of each was amazing. W h e n Chavez' Llamadas, scored for small orchestra and chorus, was performed in the Casa del Pueblo at union meetings, the workers' enthusiasm was wild. It was their vociferous demand, carried to the authorities by Diego Rivera, which caused Llamadas, rescored for large orchestra and chorus, to be played at the dedication of the Palace of Fine Arts. T h e lesson in this for those w h o believe in the necessity of playing down to the general public and to children is too obvious to need pointing. If Chavez were never again to take active part in strictly educational work, the importance of his efforts in this field would remain enormous. By turning music at once back to Mexico and ahead into the present and future, he was giving it a new life. I n C h i l e m u c h of the e x c e l l e n t w o r k in o r g a n i z a t i o n of m u s i c a l bodies a n d the d e v e l o p m e n t of s o u n d musical taste a m o n g the g e n e r a l p u b l i c is d u e to the zeal a n d vision of D o m i n g o Santa C r u z , a composer of great merit, and d e a n of the first college of fine arts in any L a t i n A m e r i c a n

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versity. W h e n o n e considers the l o c a t i o n of C h i l e w i t h r e g a r d t o E u r o p e , it is n o t hard to see w h y t h e music lovers of Santiago a n d other C h i l e a n cities are less f r e q u e n t l y visited b y l e a d i n g artists and m u s i c a l entities f r o m a b r o a d than

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cities of Brazil, A r g e n t i n a , a n d U r u g u a y . E x c e p t for r e l a t i v e l y i n f r e q u e n t visits f r o m f o r e i g n artists a n d g r o u p s , the C h i l e a n p u b l i c m u s t d e p e n d to a large e x t e n t for recitals, o p e r a , a n d concerts on such p e r f o r m a n c e s as can be o r g a n i z e d w i t h the t a l e n t of their o w n c o u n t r y . B e f o r e the year 1920, t h o u g h C h i l e h a d p r o d u c e d n u m e r o u s o u t s t a n d i n g m e n of letters a n d c o u l d boast of an active a n d i n t e r e s t i n g literary life,

the

c r e a t i o n a n d a d e q u a t e p e r f o r m a n c e of g o o d m u s i c practically

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did not exist, save for occasional visits paid the country by famous artists and organizations from Europe, willing to make the trip across the Andes from Buenos Aires. Musical taste in Santiago, as was the case in numerous other American cities, had been vitiated by concert programs limited to the waltzes of Chopin, the rhapsodies of Liszt, and the more obvious Italian operas. With the aid of the Chilean conductor, Armando Carbajal, Santa Cruz set about purging Chile of what he called the Italian epidemic. In less than twenty years these men and their immediate associates have organized an excellent choral society called the Sociedad Bach, have brought into being a symphony orchestra capable of giving creditably the most varied and taxing programs, and have entirely reformed musical education in Chile, so that now one may receive there a thorough training in the classics and at the same time become acquainted with the works of leading contemporary musicians, both European and American. T h e incorporation of the Facultad de Bellas Artes (College of Fine Arts) into the progressive National University of Chile, in Santiago, is an important step in the training of composers, critics, teachers, and executants, and has contributed greatly to the standardization and amelioration of the program of musical education throughout Chile. Señor Santa Cruz and his associates have kept in mind the importance of making good music accessible to people living in the provinces. T h e musical needs of Chileans living in small towns are met by frequent tours both of the symphony orchestra and of the Sociedad Bach. For the first time, many people who do not live in Santiago are becoming acquainted with composers as widely separated as Bach, Gluck, Vivaldi, Händel, Prokofieff, and Ravel, while having an opportunity to hear an occasional new score by Santa Cruz himself or a late work of Allende, Isamitt, Leng, and other contemporary composers of Chile. T h e devotion with which the leading musicians of Santiago approach their task of carrying good music to the provinces is immediately apparent to those who

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have had an opportunity to watch these artistic leaders work, and it is not difficult to imagine the importance, for the future, of these efforts to develop a refined musical consciousness among those Chileans who do not have the opportunity to come frequently to the capital. Another prominent composer who has devoted a good portion of his time and efforts to the education of the musical taste of his compatriots is Juan Carlos Paz, of Buenos Aires, to whom the Argentine public is greatly indebted for its introduction to the latest developments in music the world over. Paz was for a number of years the guiding spirit of the Grupo Renovación, the members of which included the leading creative musicians of Argentina—Ficher, Gianneo, Castro, and Sicciardi. Besides creating a new music for Argentina, these men made it possible for the Argentine public to hear, shortly after they had been written, many of the leading works of contemporary composers from all parts of the world. Paz, himself a leading exponent of composition in the twelve-tone scale, recently organized in Buenos Aires a series of concerts of the world's latest music, a veritable musical "antología de las tendencias actuales," as he calls his series. People who fear that in evolving a new and independent music American composers may forget what is going on in other parts of the world, would do well to glance through the programs of the Conciertos de la Nueva Música, which Paz organizes, and notice the number of times the latest scores of European masters are given their American première by this group. Many different musical tendencies are represented in the different programs, in order to give the listener an introduction to the varieties of musical schools and the ideas now flourishing throughout the world. Thus in a recent program expressionism, neoclassicism, post-impressionism, jazz sequences, twelvetone music, polytonalism, and atonalism are each represented by one work. T h e works of Latin American composers of ultramodern tendencies are played, not on special programs devoted exclusively to the music of the Latin American coun-

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tries, but intermingled with the music of the new European masters, so that the work of Paz's compatriots and fellow Americans may be judged on their own merits as good or bad music, without reference to the homeland of the composer. In the past two seasons over thirty such programs have been presented in Buenos Aires alone. In order that listeners may become better acquainted with outstanding scores, these are repeated on two or three programs during a season. And, as in the case with other Latin American ventures in educating the musical taste of the people, these concerts are given before audiences of different social and economic levels, there having been to date concerts in places as different as the salon of the Amigos del Arte, the Museo Provincial, and the Teatro del Pueblo. Without in any way belittling the disinterested impulse which has led Paz and his associates, year in and year out, to continue this program of stimulating an appreciation for and an interest in modern music, one may admire the farsightedness which has led them to prepare a receptive audience for those Latin American works of the present and the future which require an acquaintance with ultramodern scores for their full understanding. In the nineteenth century Brazil gave South America its greatest composer, in the person of Carlos Gomes, and today this country has produced the undisputed leader of South American composers, Heitor Vila-Lobos. It is not necessary here to dwell on the importance of Vila-Lobos' vast creative achievements, since his works are known throughout Europe and America by those who follow the history of twentiethcentury music. Recognized for many years as one of the most resourceful, vital, and original composers of our day, VilaLobos has added to his activities that of leader in the movement of improving the musical taste of his countrymen, through a program of musical education which might well be studied thoughtfully by other countries. Feeling that the years of childhood and adolescence are crucial ones in the development of artistic taste, Senhor Vila-Lobos has emphasized the

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importance of making the good music of the past and the present thoroughly familiar to children. If time permitted, it would be interesting to consider in some detail the number of first-rate composers, painters, and writers in Brazil and in Spanish America who have addressed a part of their creative work especially to children, endeavoring thereby to make artistic works of quality accessible to the child from his earliest years. Vila-Lobos has, during the past few years, written very little new music, feeling that his present program as director of musical education in R i o de J a n e i r o merits the major part of his time. It is interesting to note that one of the most original and dynamic creative artists in America is content to devote several important years of his creative life to matters of musical education. Since he considers that the best manner of learning to love good music is to perform it, Vila-Lobos has set himself the task of arranging for choral singing masterpieces from every period from the early sixteenth century, in three, four, and six-part arrangements. H e then trains groups of young singers from Brazilian schools—ranging in number from fifty to two or three thousand—to sing these works, hoping that in this way good music will become so much a part of them that it will be forever intimately identified with their personalities and their experiences. T h e results attained by Vila-Lobos from these enthusiastic groups is really amazing, and he has for the past few years been training the teachers of Brazil to carry on his program of musical appreciation through direct acquaintance with the music itself. It is difficult nowadays to get Vila-Lobos to talk of his own compositions, though he is one of the most prolific of modern composers and though his many works, in all forms, have had a strong influence on numerous South American composers; his interest for the m o m e n t is his work as an educator. He feels that what young Americans need now is sound musical training, and anyone who has heard one of his large groups rehearsing the Vila-Lobos arrangements of sections of great

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classic scores, cannot doubt that a sound musical training is precisely what the Brazilian children who come under his influence or that of the teachers he has trained, are getting. T h e Vila-Lobos arrangements were published five years ago and have circulated through many sections of Brazil, so that it is not hard to believe that the present generation of Brazilian school children will prove discerning and appreciative music lovers in future years. T h e work of Chdvez, Santa Cruz, Paz, and Vila-Lobos illustrates the educational program now being carried out by leading composers and musicologists in many of the Latin American countries. In R i o de Janeiro, for instance, musicians and critics of repute, such as Luiz-Heitor Correa de Azevedo, Francisco Mignone, and Lourenzo Fernandes, collaborate with Vila-Lobos in his general scheme and supplement his program with important projects and research of their own. In Sao Paulo, under the leadership of the distinguished folklorist, poet, and musicologist, Mario de Andrade, the Departamento de Cultura undertook, in 1935, valuable research in many fields of music, especially in folklore, and began its exemplary program of spreading an acquaintance with good music among the poor. Little by little such countries as Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador are undertaking cultural programs very much on the lines of those just described. But the development of Latin American music and the creation of a public capable of enjoying that music cannot be achieved by a number of isolated units working for themselves and by themselves. In considering the development of a continental Latin American art, it is well to keep in mind the difficulties occasioned by the great distances between the centers of culture in the Spanish American republics, and the noticeable lack of cultural intercourse between these countries and Brazil. There has never been a tradition of cooperation among the Spanish American republics, based on a thorough knowledge of and respect for the art and culture of

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one another. Until very recently the attention of Latin Americans has been focused first on Europe, and then somewhat grudgingly on the native country. Very seldom, in the past, has one country given serious consideration to the artistic life and productions of its American neighbors. This may seem too broad a generalization. Yet we may take the case of Spanish American literature as an example of this indifference. The fact is that until recent years the reading public of one Spanish American republic did not concern itself greatly about the literature of any other republic. True, there were certain outstanding figures—Marti, Rodo, Dario, for example—whose fame transcended frontiers. But these were exceptions. In general, an author acquired continental fame in America after he had been recognized in Paris or Madrid. There was no vital conciencia americana to stimulate the interest of the inhabitants of one country in the culture of another. Bolivar's dream of a patria grande had never become a reality, even as a workable idea; the americanismo literario of Rodo and his disciples seemed more rhetorical than real, and never greatly impressed the general reading public because the very men who founded such a program did not really know America and its peoples. The somewhat juvenile snobismo of certain Spanish American intellectuals, who felt that nothing outside Paris really mattered, contributed to this lack of interest in American literature as a whole. T h e idea of a Spanish American literature, rather than a literature of Peru, Cuba, or Argentina, is now a growing reality; but to this day there is almost total ignorance in Brazil regarding the literature and art of its American neighbors, and vice versa. Recently important steps toward the creation of a conciencia americana have been taken in Argentina, where within the last year or two some twenty important Brazilian works have been translated into Spanish. But the road ahead is a long one and there is not yet a firmly established tradition of literary cooperation. In music, a practical solution of the ideal of americanismo

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has been sought by Professor Francisco C u r t Lange, working in Montevideo. Realizing that Latin American music could never fully succeed until composers and musicologists in the twenty republics had some central organ to help them in their efforts toward a c o m m o n goal, Professor Lange began, in 1935, the publication of the Boletín latinoamericano de música, as noted above. Critics and historians of music in all parts of the world have been greatly impressed by the large amount of serious work which the issues of the Boletín reflect. T h o u g h European and oriental music is not neglected in the issues of the bulletin, which carry articles by musicologists throughout the world, the major part of this publication is wisely devoted to the discussion of problems pertinent to the creation of a new music for America. T h e Boletín is a sort of clearing house for the ideas of composers of different American countries, including the United States, and contributions to this bulletin will be of great importance in the evolution of an esthetic for American music. T o g e t h e r with articles of a theoretical or critical nature, the Boletín has given us invaluable information regarding the sources of Latin American music, new or relatively u n k n o w n instruments, folklore, and figures of importance in colonial times as well as in the present. T h e discussion of problems concerning both the composition and the diffusion of Latin American musical compositions, written by men w h o have been leaders in both fields and appearing in the Boletín, furnish both stimulus and method to those Latin Americans who live in the less progressive countries b u t w h o are anxious that their native cities and towns join in this continental program of furthering good music. T h e Boletín is in many ways an admirable expression of the best contained in the idea americanismo. T h r o u g h its articles and its musical supplement, the Boletín serves to make known the music of one country to another, and it is only through the splendid cooperation of composers of many nationalities that Professor Lange has succeeded in his formida-

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ble task. Articles in the Boletín appear in Portuguese or Spanish, according to the language of the author, and this in itself is a step in the direction of continental understanding, in that it implies that cultured Spanish Americans and Brazilians will take the trouble to acquire a reading knowledge of both major languages of South America. It is Professor Lange's intention to publish, in the future, summaries in English of all articles, and this will be an additional step in his program for including the United States in his work. T h e United States has already been represented in the first three issues of the Boletín by numerous articles written by North American musicologists. In still another way is the Boletín a work of americanismo; volumes to date have been published in Montevideo, Bogotá, and Lima, and the next to appear will be printed in Mexico. Through his many years of work in Montevideo, Professor Lange has succeeded in establishing a continental musical conscience in what is perhaps the least American and most European city of South America. A n d through his trips to Bogotá and Lima, two other capitals in which the continental consciousness is not strongly developed, he has awakened great and active interest in a project which by its very nature implies strong and genuine continental collaboration. It is significant that this great program of americanismo musical is no mere diplomatic rhetoric; the initial efforts and the guiding intelligence belong to Professor Lange and his enthusiastic colleagues throughout Latin America. T h e i r success, in the face of apparently unsurmountable obstacles, has led apathetic governments to realize the value of the movement americanismo musical, and of late some financial support from Latin American governments has helped to expand the scope of the activities of those composers and musicologists who had the faith to start unaided. It is the intention of Professor Lange and his colleagues to start an inter-American institute of music at Montevideo, with the expressed purpose of furthering the cause of good music in the two Americas. By the time this volume appears,

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Professor Lange will be in the United States for a visit of several months, which he intends to devote to the study of music and of the organization of composers and music teachers in this country. H e hopes, through contact with our leaders of musical life, to gain the knowledge of the music and musical history of the United States essential to its incorporation in the activities of his inter-American musical institute H e r e is another important step in the development of a vital and significant americanismo musical. Considering the nature of these lectures and the auspices under which they are given, it may not be beside the point briefly to consider the question of music as an instrument in a workable Pan-Americanism. In this day, when so m u c h rhetoric is being broadcast regarding friendship in the Americas, those of us w h o are really interested in bringing such a thing about are always on the alert to find opportunities to make something more than rhetoric out of such an essentially logical idea. W e cannot hope that in the very near future Americans to the north and south of the R i o Grande will be speaking the three m a j o r languages of this hemisphere—or even two of t h e m — i n spite of the fact that this is not only a desideratum, but an eventual necessity. But art and music have always been especially forceful aids to international understanding. T o n i g h t we may wonder how, in hearing and enjoying the music of both Americas, we may best understand Latin Americans and how they may best understand us. A t the outset, it seems important to stress the fact that inter-American exchange in the field of music will be best accomplished, if undertaken as a non-governmental enterprise. If the problem of such exchange is attacked by universities, clubs, musical organizations, chamber-music groups, and symphony orchestras, as individual, nonofficial groups, it will be possible to make sure that really representative music of Latin America is played here and that the best music of the U n i t e d States is played in Latin America. If programs

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designed to introduce Latin American music into the United States are organized and directed through diplomatic or governmental channels, however, the standard of the programs is bound to suffer, because tact and diplomacy will be among the important criteria governing the choice of the music. It would be necessary, for instance, to present the music of each Latin American republic as being of equal value, and such is not the case. It would be a disservice to the cause of Latin American music in general to present, as typical of the best music that Latin America has achieved, that of a republic whose music is neither outstanding nor representative. It might be, for instance, that certain Latin American republics were backward as regards musical achievement, however advanced they might be in some other field of art, politics, or industry; and yet, if programs were arranged through governmental or diplomatic channels, the music of these republics would have to be presented on an equal basis with other countries which excel in music, to the disadvantage of the latter and of Latin American music in general. It seems to me that the newly formed Division of Cultural Relations of the Department of State in Washington has hit upon an admirable and workable plan: whereas this department is at all times willing and anxious to help the advance of cultural exchange among the American countries, it has wisely set a precedent of depending on nonofficial individuals and organizations with experience and training to arrange musical programs, art exhibits, and literary lecture series. This procedure places, in the hands of those best capable of meeting it—experts in music, in the plastic arts, in literature—the responsibility for seeing that the finest art of the United States goes to Latin America and that the finest Latin American art comes here. As I see it, there are two types of persons or organizations which impede the introduction of good Latin American music into this country. T h e first is the person, who, taking it for granted that there is no good music outside Europe, says,

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"Why, yes, I might be interested in a project to present representative Latin American scores in this country, if there were any scores worth considering." Such a remark reveals both deplorable smugness and indolence, for by assuming this superficial attitude of superiority, such a person saves himself the trouble of reading through a dozen scores and can rest content in exploiting a routine which has made success comfortable and relatively easy for a number of years. This is the type of intellectual snobbishness which the composers of the United States and the composers of Latin America have had to fight, in their respective homelands, for the last twenty years—a fight not yet entirely won. And yet when one thinks of the generally high esteem in which such composers as Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, and other such masters are held here—and the high place which VilaLobos, Chavez, Paz, Fabini, Santa Cruz, and their peers hold in their own countries—one can feel fairly sure that those diehards who will not have their music without a European trademark are fast becoming a minority. The second type of person who retards the effective introduction of good Latin American music into this country is, I believe, a greater detriment than the first. This is the untutored person who finds everything Latin American glamorous, and who has lost no time in rallying to the cause of friendship in the Americas. This type of person it is hard thoroughly to dislike—such individuals mean well—but one cannot help regretting that their enthusiasm is not accompanied by some knowledge of the Latin America which they have suddenly championed. I do not hold that we need less enthusiasm for Latin America in this country; but if that enthusiasm is to be made enduring and worth while, if cultural exchange among the Americas is really to mean something, we must have considerably more expert guidance than we have had. Perhaps more damage has been done to the cause of good Latin American music in this country by this type of enthusiasts than by any other group. The amount of

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mediocre Latin American music we have heard in this country—offered as representative—is no doubt the reason that so many critical listeners have become convinced that Latin American music is still in the ting-a-ling stage. And even among organizations of which one might expect a higher standard, there has been sinning along these lines. T h e PanAmerican Union, for example, despite its excellent library of Latin American music, has, in its ninety-odd concerts, done practically nothing to give people a conception of what good Latin American music is. In my opinion, there are two causes for this: first, the Union must be diplomatic and accordingly must play scores the selection of which has not been based on purely musical criteria; secondly, although the Union boasts many effective interests, its activities in the field of music are inadequate because the Union does not have on its staff an expert in Latin American music. Here is a case of an organization of admirable resources in general, which has failed to gain respect for Latin American music through lack of expert guidance in the field. One might cite other organizations, which, having almost unlimited resources at their command, have had little success as regards the effective introduction of Latin American music, merely because they have not placed their activities in this field in the hands of experts. T h e radio and the phonograph companies are excellent examples here. We are told on all sides that Latin American music has become known and respected in this country through the popularity of such forms as the tango and the rhumba; and there are those Latin American enthusiasts who regard with great glee the advent in our midst of the samba and the conga, believing that such vogues will work wonders in connection with developing in our people a regard for Latin American music. I cannot see that such vogues are particularly significant, as far as good Latin American music is concerned. Without for a moment minimizing the importance of the wealth of folk music in the Americas, past and present, and

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the great possibilities for a better mutual understanding which are offered by the idea that our people should know Latin American folklore and that Latin Americans should know ours, I do believe that it will be necessary from the outset to provide for inter-American exchange in the field of artistic music. It is true that our people here might greatly enjoy knowing the real folk music of Latin America and that they might learn to appreciate its great variety and richness; but this they will never learn to do merely through the pseudopopular types to which they dance in public ballrooms. We should learn to enjoy the best artistic music of Latin America as soon as possible; it is unthinkable that we should require a serious composer to write tangos, rhumbas, or congas in an effort to win our favor, merely because there happens to be a vogue for such forms at the moment. We may be said to have begun to understand and appreciate Latin American music when our musicians, critics, and our best musical audiences have become acquainted with the serious efforts of its most representative artistic music, and not before. When we begin to notice serious groups of musicians here studying such artistic music of Latin America; when a number of musical societies, devoted to the performance of modern music, schedule the works of a Paz, a Vila-Lobos, a Santa Cruz; when reputable symphonic organizations perform a number of the symphonic works of a Fabini or a Chdvez—then we may be said to have begun to appreciate our neighbors through their best music. During the last few years a number of organizations of distinction have scheduled programs of good Latin American music and have approached their performance with seriousness and with an effort to present the various scores primarily as good music which would be enjoyable in any part of the civilized world. Several chapters of Pro-Musica have recently presented programs of the works of leading Latin Americans, and with marked success. Occasionally other musical clubs have essayed something similar, although not always has suf-

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ficient thought been given to the programs. Such conductors as Stokowski, Koussevitsky, and Iturbi have from time to time given admirable readings of various works of Chávez, García Caturla, Vila-Lobos, and Roldán. And that ever-generous patron of chamber music, Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, sponsored, in 1937, a definitely worth-while festival of the music of the Americas, in Mexico City, for which a number of interesting quartets were especially written. These works now exist in the Library of Congress, and it is to be hoped that a number of them will soon be heard in this country. As time goes on, more representative conductors will no doubt examine a number of the good scores now available in the musical library of the Pan American Union and in the near future give us an adequate reading of those scores, for the first time in this country. Now and then it is pleasant to note that composers of the United States have studied the richness of Latin American rhythms and themes, and essayed to create works in the Latin American manner. The Juarezca and the Rhumba Symphony of Dr. Harl MacDonald are interesting examples of such a procedure. In his El Salón México, Mr. Aaron Copland may be said to have created one of the best recent scores of real Mexican music, a score of unusual skill and of tremendous evocative power for the person who knows the true Mexican spirit in music, and incidentally one of the most successful recent compositions produced in this country. Juan Carlos Paz and others have given us works cast in what might be called a musical idiom of the United States, and the results are very stimulating. Such interchange of musical ideas among creative artists in the Americas is not only an interesting phenomenon, but in itself a real act of Pan Americanism. It is through such association that the music of the Americas will become known and become a reality throughout the hemisphere. And whereas it is pleasant to have as visiting conductors such men as Chávez, Burle Marx, and Castañeda, it is to be hoped

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that soon our outstanding conductors of the United States will lead the major orchestras of Latin America, for true interchange works both ways. Through conferences like that organized by the Division of Cultural Relations in the field of music the attention of North American musicians must be drawn to a number of pioneer efforts in the publication of Latin American music in this country, such as the numerous works available in the New Music editions, and plans made for a substantial program of cooperation in the whole field of American music. It is to be desired that steps be taken toward the establishment of some sort of clearing house, which, through the advice of experts, may guide intelligently the presentation of Latin American work in this country and of work of our composers in the other American republics. In order that such work shall be truly effective, we shall have to have the cooperation of the best of our musicians and musicologists, and I do not doubt that this will be relatively easy to obtain, for on so many points the goals, ideals, and problems of composers and executants in both Americas are practically identical. Let us hope first that in this country we shall have in the near future a sufficient number of programs of the best Latin American music to convince musicians and critical musical audiences here that Latin American composers are today a serious group of creative artists and that they have something to offer. And let us hope that Latin Americans will soon hear enough of the good music written in this country to realize that in this century the United States has produced a generation of composers whose best works will stand comparison with representative scores throughout the world. If I might be permitted to close with a wish it would be this: let the greatest care be taken that only the best of our music be introduced into Latin America now and that only the best Latin American music be performed here. We have had enough unguided and unfruitful enthusiasm in this regard, and it will take the best music of both Americas

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to convince the discerning listener that the New World has in this century produced musicians of real importance. My hope is that very soon it will not be necessary to have all-Latin American programs here and all-United States programs below the Rio Grande. The music of the Americas may be said to have arrived on that day on which it shall be judged purely as music, without regard to the country of its composer. I believe that that day is not far off, and that already the American republics have produced a creditable number of composers whose works will stand that test.

'Brazilian ROBERT

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H E F I N E A R T S of architecture, painting, and sculpture, as practiced in Latin America with the exception of Mexico, are almost u n k n o w n to the rest of the world. It is true that in recent years archeologists from the United States and Europe have begun the systematic study of the preC o l u m b i a n antiquities and, together with their Latin American confreres, have begun publishing reproductions of the principal known monuments of Inca and Aztec art. But almost nothing has yet been done in this way with the arts of that long period of over three hundred years e x t e n d i n g from the Spanish and Portuguese conquests to the present day. T h e art historian, when questioned on the subject, will generally reply, to excuse his indifference, that Latin A m e r i c a n art of the colonial period and the nineteenth century is largely an imitation of European models, with some rare indigenous influence, and that contemporary production is but a weak reflection of the modern Mexican renaissance. In some respects this is, of course, true. T h e same things can be said of our own country, for all the Americas, by force of European colonization, have in a certain sense shared the same artistic destiny. Yet I seriously question that this should be the final disposition of the matter. I doubt that we shall continue to ignore the question of Latin American art, particularly at a time when, through increased travel and emphasis upon cultural and economic relations throughout this hemisphere, we are daily being drawn closer to the Latin A m e r i c a n world. T h e time has arrived for a systematic study of the subject. T h i s can best be accomplished through the collecting of in-

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ventories and photographic archives, to provide a basis of work for the scholar and an in situ Baedeker for the interested traveler. I am convinced that through this undertaking we shall eventually compel the typical art historian to reverse his judgments. In one short lecture one cannot hope to discuss the whole problem of Latin American art, nor even the production of one single country. One can only hope in a general way to reveal some of its most interesting and significant aspects, to pick and choose outstanding monuments, as I shall do today, from the corpus of Brazilian art. We need not consider that country before the Portuguese conquest. T h e Brazilian Indians had no monumental buildings like the Mayas, the Toltecs, the Aztecs, and the Incas, no sculpture nor fabrics like those of the pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico and the Andes. T h e pottery found on the Island of Marajo, at the mouth of the Amazon, the principal site of pre-Conquest finds in Brazil, has not even the quality of the primitive patterns found in the crude aboriginal jars of Santiago del Estero in western Argentina. T h i s artistic apathy delayed Brazilian development of the fine arts in the sixteenth century. T h e Jesuits, the first important colonizers of Brazil, had no Indian palaces and temples to pilfer, as did the Spaniards in Mexico, when building their late Gothic churches and convents, no trained native craftsmen from whom to develop a fine mestizo fresco school. T h e mines of Brazil were as yet undiscovered and agriculture was not sufficiently advanced to produce a source of wealth for the importation of works of art, to instruct and stimulate native expression. It was only at the beginning of the seventeenth century that northeast Brazil had developed its sugar plantations to the point where it became an important economic factor in the Portuguese empire. It was in this region of Pernambuco that the Muse first visited Brazil. It has been observed that the Portuguese possess an artistic heritage more varied in its sources and more complicated in

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its development than any of the other nations of western Europe. A single example will illustrate the claim. Let us take a detail of the doorway of a simple sixteenth-century parish church at Alvor, in the south of Portugal, constructed in the national variant of the late Gothic style called Manueline. Its format of moldings and colonnettes derives from the general Gothic vocabulary of its French and Spanish neighbors. The rich rosette near the base descends from the Roman-Hellenistic background of Portugal. The colonnette with sawed-off branches is an expression of the latent naturalism of its Celtic origins, and the Islamic arches—fitting scene of a serenade— are a reflection of its own mudejar culture, as well as of the new trade with Africa and the Near East in the flowering Age of Discoveries. T o this complicated mixture of influences add the tropical flora and fauna, plus the presence of large colonies of Negro slaves, and you have the exotic ingredients of the culture of colonial Brazil. In such an atmosphere nothing is unusual; so it is not surprising that it was a Dutchman who first recorded the landscape of Pernambuco, in the seventeenth century. The region was at this time extremely rich from its single culture of sugar cane, and being an outpost of Portuguese civilization at an era when the mother country was but a colony of the Spanish crown, it was poorly defended. Pernambuco, therefore, was an easy prey for the ambitions of the newly formed Dutch West India Company. It was shortly captured, along with its wealthy towns of Olinda and Iguarassu, and the Dutchmen added their own capital, Recife. T o this rapidly growing city the company sent as governor the cultured Count John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen. He brought with him, in 1637, a body of scientists to explore the jungles and painters to depict the forests and the seacoasts. His principal painter in ordinary was Frans Post, an indefatigable observer whose countless studies of the Pernambucan scene are preserved in some seventy landscapes and a host of drawings, now scattered through the museums and private collections

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of Europe, Brazil, and this country. T h e y are at once the first landscapes painted in any part of America by a European and the principal source for our knowledge of the architecture and mode of life of Pernambuco during the early seventeenth century. Although at first Post worked in the characteristic mode of the landscape school of Haarlem, he later developed a grander manner, based on Italianate schemes. T h i s style seems to have evolved after his return to Europe from his residence of eight years in Recife, and was probably dictated by the Roman and scientific preferences of his noble and royal patrons, for already the great personages of northern Europe were developing a pseudo-scientific curiosity regarding the exoticisms of Brazil, a curiosity which was to grow tremendously during the next two centuries. T h e Post landscapes may be grouped according to any of a number of categories. One of these is the growth of religious architecture in Pernambuco. A painting in the Netherlands Historic Marine Museum, in Amsterdam, shows a very primitive example. T h i s is one of Post's relatively informal paintings, still in the real Dutch tradition. T h e foreground is a straightforward presentation of a village scene, with the vast and hazy marsh, or varzea, extending indefinitely behind. T h e scene probably represents an aldeia de indios, or village of Indian converts, established by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century but occupied at this time by Negro slaves. T h e church itself, or rather chapel, is a crude building of wattle walls with roof of palm thatch, a type of construction which also appears in the houses in this picture and in an analogous landscape in the South Kensington Museum, in London. T h i s is still typical of the countless mucambos, or Negro huts, along the Brazilian littoral. T h e transition to a more permanent type of construction is shown in the painting of the church of St. Cosmo and St. Damian in the village of Iguarassu, one of the few sixteenth-century structures surviving in Brazil, which is in the Amsterdam Ryksmuseum. T h e

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church is equipped with a roof of tiles, the walls are covered with plaster, there are stone supports at the angles and about the door, and a single rose window has been opened in the façade. Another painting, in the museum in Breslau, is an enlarged view of the convent that appears in the background of the former picture. T h e building represents a further step in Pernambucan church architecture—the introduction of a wooden porch before the door. T h e staffage figures afford an interesting contrast between the staid clothes and demeanor of the new Dutch settlers and the flamboyant costumes and attitudes of the Negro slaves, who already present the characteristic gesture of that race in Brazil—the arm upraised to steady a bundle carried on the head. In a second Ryksmuseum landscape, we see the same Mynheer and his lady advancing toward a chapel with an indentical wood-and-tile porch. But now there are three windows in the main façade—a circle above two narrow slits. On the whole, the arrangement of this landscape is slightly more formal. Post has planted a palm tree and some tropical bushes in the foreground, in the manner of a Baroque stage set or the paintings of Claude Lorrain, to dignify the presentation. Even more complicated is the arrangement of a picture now in the Detroit Art Institute, in which a solid wall of jungle flora separates the spectator from the scene in the middle distance. T h e exotic vegetation is minutely depicted, and is peopled with tropical birds, reptiles, and the forest animals. A landscape of this type seems peculiarly fitted for the cabinet of a seventeenth-century geographer, traveler, or dilletante, and was probably devised for that peculiar purpose. T h e church at the left of the picture, ruined by the Dutch artillery in the attack on Olinda, is a much more ambitious example of Portuguese architecture in Brazil. T h e typical porch, or alpendre, is now constructed in stone, there is evidence of a vaulted chancel, while the ampler windows are separated by a stone string course which forms a rudimentary pediment. One is tempted to identify the building as the Jesuit church

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of Olinda, on which the architect Padre Francisco Dias, who was trained at Lisbon, is known to have worked at the close of the sixteenth century. Even more impressive are the ruins of the Olinda Basilica, shown in another of Post's landscapes now in the Amsterdam Ryksmuseum, a painting of which several replicas exist. T h e r e is the same vaulted chancel, but now the stone porch is exchanged for a monumental doorway in which the exuberant forms of nascent Baroque appear. T h e foreground is even more alive with a tropical population; the botanical investigation is even more complete here than in the Detroit picture. But the limitless varzea, the pleasantest feature of all Post's paintings, remains unchanged. Some of the landscapes constitute precious documents of the mode of living in Pernambuco. T h a t belonging to Robert Greg, of Alexandria, Egypt, shows a whole plantation community, similar in some respects to those of this country. T h e big house, or casa grande, is located on a slight rise in the terrain at the left. Below, the chapel, with its characteristic wooden porch, is the center of interest. Its extremely simple construction is repeated in the other buildings, the stables and the casa de purgar, or shed for the sugar harvest. In another painting, now in the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam, Post has depicted an arcaded building of this type, with its wheel in motion pressing the ripe cane which is brought from a raised storage platform at the left. Once again the gaily dressed Negroes, busy at their work, animate the picture. Occasionally, however, the artist forsook the rigid formulas by which he constructed his Brazilian landscapes. A painting dated 1665, now in the Germanisches National Museum, in Nuremberg, has a distinctly less formal composition, a more intimate contact with the South American landscape. It represents a decaying house, its palm thatch roof torn by winds and rain, on the brink of the coastal lagoons. A Dutch gentleman stands conversing on the rickety gallery, while a party of the ever-gay Negroes is dancing and gesticulating on the

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shore below. A colorful fishing bird is standing alone on the beach, in the midst of palm branches and j u n g l e debris. It is in every sense the painting of a particular moment. T h e grand classical generalities have been laid aside, in favor of a special scene at a special m o m e n t — a f t e r a storm. A n d Post has rearranged his palette to accent the vivid brilliance of the sky, the scintillating quality of the vegetation not yet dry. T h i s particular consideration of atmospheric effect, witho u t the encumbrance of the artificial background and stage set, is apparent in another landscape, now in a private collection in England. H e r e Post has painted an inland plantation house, a casa forte, with a strong tower to protect it against raids. It has a quieter, less dramatic tone. T h e exotic qualities of the landscape he seems to have neglected, in order to stress the serenity of the small domestic procession of the D u t c h landlords and their servants. T h e s e two paintings are closely related to the early Brazilian series. T h e spectator again comes near the scene; the atmospheric quality is almost as marked as in a true Impressionist painting. T h e r e is a sense of reality which most of the artist's European landscapes fail to convey. Frans Post's paintings do, as we have seen, synthesize the Pernambucan landscape at an early period in the seventeenth century. T h e y show the Portuguese buildings side by side with D u t c h structures, engulfed in the richness of the tropical vegetation of the countryside. T h e D u t c h colonists, usurping the lands of the settlers from Portugal, wander incongruously in the midst of brilliant and exotic creatures, not the least of which are the N e g r o slaves, so m u c h more suited to this exuberant landscape than their masters. T h e r e is nothing quite like these paintings in any other phase of Latin A m e r i c a n art. T h e y are almost indigenous Brazilian pictures. B u t seldom do they b r i n g us face to face with the actual inhabitants of Pernambuco: we see them only from a distance. T h e role of portraitist belongs to an-

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other Dutchman of the Count of Nassau's entourage, the painter Albert Eckhout. In one portrait, now in the Schloss Charlottenburg, near Berlin, he has immortalized an exotic Negress of Pernambuco, probably the favorite of some wealthy planter. She is a symbol of the practice of African slavery, begun by the Portuguese as early as the fifteenth century. Her costume is a catalogue of the commerce of the Portuguese empire. She wears a Mohammedan turban, over which is set a brocaded Chinese cap brought to Olinda in the trading fleet from the Lusitanian colony at Macao. T h e pearls that she wears are articles of the Indian trade from the Portuguese settlements at Goa. Her dress is of a lavish fabric woven in the Orient. T h e painting is a reminder of that strange internationalism of the life of this remote Brazilian colony, an internationalism which finds its reflection in the DutchBrazilian painters of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century emphasis shifts from painting to architecture and sculpture. T h e Dutch had been expelled from Pernambuco, the resulting financial depression had been sustained, and the cities of the Brazilian seacoast were enjoying a renewed prosperity which expressed itself to a remarkable extent in the building of churches and convents. At Belem do Pard, in the far north, a society dominated by Jesuit officials consecrated a half century to the erection of a severe Italianate cathedral, one of the largest buildings in Brazil. In Recife the church of S. Pedro dos Clerigos was begun in 1729, by the architect Ferreira Jacome, on a scale to rival the very structures of Lisbon. T h e simple rural Portuguese Baroque style characterizes a host of smaller churches and chapels, such as the Franciscan convent of Olinda (1754), whose cloister, derived from the Florentine Renaissance by way of Portugal, is typical of a whole series in the region. T h e smallers provincial capitals such as the now-abandoned S. Cristovao, in Sergipe, show interesting examples of the style, as in the Carmelite buildings of 1752 in that city. At Salva-

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dor, in Bahia, which remained the viceregal capital of Brazil until 1763, a succession of eighteenth-century styles may be studied. First the severe Counter Reformation manner of Vignola and Delia Porta, delayed a full century in its development in Brazil, is exemplified by the interior of the Jesuit church, now the Cathedral of Bahia. T h e influence of the rich and exuberant Spanish Churrigueresque is represented in the façade of the small church of the Venerâvel Ordem Terceira de S. Francisco (1703), a rarity both in Portugal and in Brazil. T h e grand manner of Portuguese building in the first half of the eighteenth century is reflected in the church of the Conceiçâo da Praia, which was brought in numbered sections from the mother country. T h e lighter Rococo, popular in the reconstruction of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755, is echoed in the charming church of N. S. do Pilar. T h e chief glory of the interior of these churches, as an eighteenth-century French traveler to Brazil remarked, lay in their sacristries. Nowhere in colonial South America could more sumptuous apartments be found. In decoration they are again international, with Portuguese tiles on the walls and paintings from Lisbon and Seville, furniture copied from French, English, Dutch, and Italian models, imported from Europe by way of Lisbon and reproduced in the dark mahogany of Brazil, the exotic jacarandâ. T h e architecture of R i o de Janeiro, on the other hand, was but a poor reflection of northern Brazilian buildings at this time. It was not until the close of the eighteenth century that the great square by the water front, with the viceregal palace, the cathedral, and the monumental fountain of the queen Maria I, was completed, together with their fine park of the viceroy Dom Luiz de Vasconcelos, in which sculptures in lead and marble by Mestre Valentim da Fonseca were exhibited. But the port of R i o de Janeiro had become a center of the utmost commercial importance. From it was exported the gold of the new region of Minas Geraes, the General Mines, which lies some three hundred miles in the interior, separated

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by mountain ranges from the port city. It was there in the interior that the greatest development of colonial Brazilian architecture took place. T h e mines of the region, discovered only at the close of the seventeenth century by explorers from Sâo Paulo, were within fifteen years so productive as to make the Portuguese crown one of the richest in Europe. But all the gold was not exported to Lisbon and what was left, together with the wealth from the diamonds discovered in the region, was employed in a lavish campaign of building. As at Potosí, in Bolivia, and in the mining centers of Mexico, sumptuous churches, palaces, and convents, incongruous in the wild and isolated region, soon came to outshine those of the capital cities. In the new towns of Minas Geraes, Ouro Preto, Mariana, Sabara, and S. Joâo d'El-Rei, however, there was no native tradition of architecture on which to draw, as in the other mining centers of Latin America. T h e impossible had to be achieved. Within thirty years the transition from crude rubble to masonry buildings had been made, and the local architects and artists were inventing new forms to add to the general repertory of Portuguese-Brazilian building. T h e first chapels of the region, the so-called capelos primitivas, constructed at the beginning of the eighteenth century, return to the simple forms of the early religious buildings of Pernambuco. T h e r e is the same arrangement of windows, the same simple doorway, as in the chapel of S. Joâo Batista, near Ouro Preto. But if the wooden porch of the Pernambucan models was ever added, it has long since disappeared, and there are no traces of the motive elsewhere in Minas Geraes. T h e Negro chapel of the Rosario, in S. Joâo d'El-Rei, is a good example of lateral construction in which the prolongation of the sacristry provides additional space for the nave. T h e single tower at the angle of the façade is, however, a rarity. More general was the expedient of a diminutive separate campanile, as at the chapel of Passagem, or the loca-

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tion of a tiny belfry on the roof immediately above the façade, as in the chapel of Sant'Ana, in Mariana. T h e next step in the development of Mineiro architecture was the expansion of the chapel into the church, without radically changing the architectural form. In the Capela das Almas, of Ouro Preto, we see the transition in progress. T h e façade arrangement remains in general the same, though a separate pediment is now added. T h e lateral elevation, however, is much higher and there is an extensive chancel appended at the rear. By the 1730's this disposition had become generally accepted, and twin lateral towers were being added to the façades. T h e greater coordination of these churches is shown in the Carmelite establishment of Ouro Preto, which, although it dates from the end of the century, still preserves the earlier forms. It was in the arrangement of their façades that the Mineiro churches attained their principal distinction. T h a t of N. S. do Rosario, constructed in 1785 by the architect José Pereira Arouca, is an example of the elliptical plan introduced in Minas Geraes at this time. T o conform to the general disposition of the building, the façade is made convex and the towers are oval. T h e result is a remarkably compact and uniform structure, unique in the history of Portuguese, Brazilian, and indeed of all Latin American building. It was only in this region of Minas that round and oval contours were uniformly developed in the colonial period. Great edifices were constructed in close succession, outstanding among which are the Franciscan churches of Ouro Preto (1792) and S. J o â o d'ElR e i (1774). T h e y are distinguished for the richness of their decoration and for the similarity of their doorways. Both are attributed on good evidence to the crippled mulatto sculptor and architect of Minas Geraes, Francisco Antonio Lisboa, called from his infirmities Aleijadinho. T h e scheme of the rich doorway of the church at S. J o â o is derived undoubtedly from the Baroque portals of northern Portugal, but in the

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hands of the mulatto craftsman the profiles, the moldings, and the fine relief sculpture take on a more delicate and expressive form. T h e general design of undulant pilasters, topped by fragmentary Baroque arches carrying torch-bearing putti, with a medallion of involved sculpture representing the Immaculate Conception in the center, is repeated in two other buildings ascribed to Aleijadinho, the Franciscan church at Ouro Preto and the Carmelite establishment at S. J o a o d'ElR e i . It has been said that of all the regions in Brazil, it was Minas Geraes that most closely followed in its colonial building the contemporary architecture of the north of Portugal, of Oporto, Braga, Viseu, Viana—the towns of the Minho. One of the peculiar features of that architecture is the pilgrimage church, placed on a hillside with elaborate gardens and stairways before it. Typical of these sanctuaries is the church of the Bom Jesus near Braga, approached by a complicated spiral stair filled with fountains and statues of an allegorical nature and equipped with devotional chapels at regular intervals. Just such an arrangement, though on a simpler scale, was attempted in Minas Geraes, at the mountainous site of Congonhas do Campo (1757-circa 1814). T h e church is a modified version of the elaborate two-tower structure in Portugal; the stair is a condensed edition of the example at Braga. For the angles, Aleijadinho executed in the soapstone of the region a series of figures of Old Testament prophets. T h e i r exotic eastern costumes recall the oriental traditions of Brazilian life. In the statue of Jonah the latent provincialism of the sculptor is revealed in the hesitant stylization of the figure, while that of the Prophet Habakuk has a remarkable poise and distinction, heightened by the slight conventionalization of the profile. A series of domed chapels similar to those at Viseu leads up to the sanctuary. T h e group of the Last Supper, carved in cedar wood by Aleijadinho and his helpers, within one of these chapels, is typical of popular Mediterranean processional sculpture, replete with tawdry colors and forced, awkward gestures.

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T h i s , then, is the achievement of Brazilian artists in the eighteenth century. A t no time in any other Latin A m e r i c a n country were so many churches erected, in such a variety of styles, Italianate, Spanish, and principally Portuguese. T h e r o u n d and oval towers a n d the church plans of Minas Geraes stand out as distinct innovations in colonial A m e r i c a n building. O n the other hand, the Portuguese-Brazilian architects neglected the structure of their buildings. W i t h rare exceptions they p r e f e r r e d flat wooden ceilings to the cupolas a n d vaults of their Spanish A m e r i c a n colleagues. N o r were their churches so solidly constructed. N o w h e r e in Brazil is there a structure with the massive proportions of a typical colonial church or convent b u i l d i n g in Mexico, C u b a , Peru, or Colombia. T h e s e characteristics derive from the local traditions of Portuguese architecture, cultivated in Brazil d u r i n g the colonial period, and were soon to be forgotten during the subsequent era. In the nineteenth century Brazil shared in the common fate of L a t i n A m e r i c a n art—its Europeanization. T h e universal admiration of French culture permitted bands of artists f r o m Paris to take over the national practice of architecture, sculpture, and painting. G r a n d j e a n de Montigny and the T a u n a y s , invited to R i o in 1 8 1 6 , established in the new Brazilian Academy the standards of the French École des Beaux-Arts. T h r o u g h their teaching and their commissions, they persuaded the Brazilians little by little to forget their own exotic traditions, in order to imitate Parisian production. Historical painting à la Meissonier became the preoccupation of Pedro A l e x a n d r i n o and Carlos Meireles. R e l i g i o u s painting was sacrificed on the altar of St. Sulpice, so to speak. T h e travel lithographs of Debret, Denis, and R u g e n d a s translated the Brazilian cosmos into French. Occasionally, it is true, some native painter i n f u s e d a measure of indigenous spirit into his work by b o r r o w i n g f r o m contemporary literature its cult of indianismo. B u t even this much independence was soon to b e

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lost i n the n e w w a v e of i m i t a t i o n w h i c h f o l l o w e d the introd u c t i o n of Impressionism, w h e n i n n u m e r a b l e B r a z i l i a n landscapes w e r e distorted i n t o the visions of M o n e t , Pissaro, a n d R e n o i r . U n t i l a b o u t a d e c a d e ago, B r a z i l i a n p a i n t i n g lacked a n a t i o n a l spirit; it h a d n o truly i n d i g e n o u s

figures.

In the history of t h e fine arts it is generally impossible to say d e f i n i t e l y w h e n a n d h o w a m o v e m e n t becomes

inter-

n a t i o n a l . O n e c a n n o t state at exactly w h a t m o m e n t it crosses the frontiers of the l a n d in w h i c h it was b o r n , to b e c o m e a force i n the art of f o r e i g n nations. T h e critic a n d illustrator Santa R o s a has r e m a r k e d that at some i n d e f i n a b l e time a n u m b e r of B r a z i l i a n artists b e c a m e a w a r e of w h a t had b e e n a c c o m p l i s h e d i n M e x i c o d u r i n g the early twenties, and det e r m i n e d to b e c o m e a p a r t of that m o v e m e n t . T h e new style of fresco p a i n t i n g w h i c h D i e g o R i v e r a h a d created o n t h e walls of the M i n i s t r y of E d u c a t i o n a n d at C u e r n a v a c a h a d already b e c o m e a source of i n s p i r a t i o n to L a t i n A m e r i c a i n general, j u s t as it h a d b e c o m e a p o w e r f u l force in this c o u n t r y . T h e p a i n t e r of G u a n a j u a t o a n d his f o l l o w e r s a n d associates i n M e x i c o h a d i n reality led a successful r e v o l t f r o m France, i n d e e d f r o m E u r o p e . H i d a l g o - l i k e , they had risen to b r e a k those s t r a n g l i n g c u l t u r a l ties w h i c h in the n i n e t e e n t h century had r e p l a c e d all o v e r L a t i n A m e r i c a the p o l i t i c a l b o n d s of the c o l o n i a l era. T h e M e x i c a n I n d i a n n o w replaced t h e Paris S a l o n a n d the really i n d i g e n o u s subjects of M e x i c o at last b e c a m e w o r t h y of b e i n g p a i n t e d . W h a t R i v e r a has d o n e for the M e x i c a n I n d i a n , C a n d i d o P o r t i n a r i has i n the last few years done for the Brazilian N e gro. H i s w o r k was first e x h i b i t e d in this c o u n t r y w h e n he sent a p a i n t i n g to the C a r n e g i e I n t e r n a t i o n a l E x h i b i t in 1935 a n d was a w a r d e d h o n o r a b l e m e n t i o n . T h i s p a i n t i n g ,

"Coffee,"

s h o w e d clearly the d i r e c t i o n in w h i c h the artist was w o r k i n g . U p to this t i m e the portrayal of the N e g r o e s of Brazil h a d b e e n a k i n d of s u b e q u a t o r i a l " U n c l e T o m ' s C a b i n . " P o r t i n a r i delineates the u n i d e a l i z e d toil of the N e g r o e s on a great c o f f e e fazenda

in his n a t i v e state of S. P a u l o , as o b s e r v e d by himself.

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He has abandoned for the rhythmic patterns of Rivera the photographic realism of his francophile predecessors in the genre in Brazil. Sometimes he attains even more monumental effects than Rivera. T h e seated woman in the foreground, the huge figures struggling beneath the crushing load of the coffee sacks, the imperious form of the white overseer are characteristic of his style. These figures appear throughout the series of frescoes representing the essential commercial activities of Brazil, which Portinari is now completing for the new building of the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro. T h e panel representing coffee culture is intimately related to the Carnegie picture. The same monumental seated woman occupies the foreground beside the same pile of coffee bags. T h e overseer has the same commanding gesture, while the foremost standing Negro is taken directly from the prizewinning picture. Yet the composition has been greatly simplified, as befits the new technique, and the details of the background have all been suppressed in favor of a simple but impressive pattern of dark and light abstract forms. In another panel stalwart Negroes, with trays of coffee beans, create an essential rhythm for the composition. Beside it is the epic of cocoa culture, in which the artist introduces those extremely colorful Bahian women who play a leading part in one of the three frescoes he has painted for the Brazilian building at the New York Century of Progress Fair. Grazing is the principal activity of the extreme south of Brazil. Another of the Portinari panels is devoted to this subject, with colossal Negro figures again forming a pivotal composition. Again there is the majestic seated woman, a favorite with Portinari, executed with that peculiar wiry drawing which is an essential characteristic of his fresco style. In the story of the cotton picking it is the stooping figure with broad straw hat, thrice repeated, that determines the compositional pattern. The work is full of varying psychological suggestions. T h e distortion of the last figure in the series seems to reflect

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a brutal Negro cult figure. But the face of the young girl in the foreground is a very tender portrait of a sensitive child. By such figures one is reminded of Portinari's especial distinction as a portraitist. In a painting in his own collection, he has drawn a somnolent young girl of Indian extraction in a kneeling pose, reminiscent of Rivera, yet very different in its introspective tragedy. In another he shows a blatant young Negress clutching her ink-black baby brother, as she stands firmly planted against a background the striking pattern of which is formed by the simplified islands of the Rio bay. In one of his fresco heads of Brazilian Indians, Portinari attains the monumental quality present in the Negro sketches by Rubens and Van Dyck. Finally, Candido Portinari has entered the realm of fantasy in a series of recent pictures. Perhaps it is under the influence of the young Bahian novelist, Jorge Amado, that he has come to paint such strangely beautiful scenes as that in which clowns play leapfrog and Bahian women dance the carnival against the limitless blue of the South Atlantic. What contacts with sur realism are suggested in the curious tree stumps, the diminutive trees and animals of the toylike children playing football in another of his fantasies? From such paintings it seems obvious that Candido Portinari is one of the greatest of living artists. They demonstrate the exceptional quality and variety of his technique, the originality of his vision and conception, the diversity of his style. He has demonstrated that Brazilian painting, in spite of its exotic past and constant borrowings from foreign sources, can be both monumental and original. He is the foremost interpreter of that great force which is daily growing more articulate—the Negro of the Americas. Upon such a basis Brazilian painting should continue to grow in importance and to play an outstanding role in the future art of Latin America.

Spanish -American Literature and CONCHA

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A T E F U L was the day when the trail of the Spanish conquistador in the New World was followed by the missionary, who saw not merely rich lands to be placed at the service of the crown, but also a new brown humanity to be rallied to the sign of the cross and converted to the Christian faith. While the bearers of the sword, who brought into submission one tribe and one kingdom after another, from Mexico to the Straits of Magellan, concerned themselves with the distribution of land, the founding of cities and military posts, and the administration of justice, the bearers of the cross devoted themselves to the more fundamental aspects of a true conquest. It was their function to teach both the Christian doctrine and the essentials of learning, and so we owe to them the first printing press in America as well as the first schools, churches, universities, and art schools. Even when engaged in these tasks, they found time to write grammars, to organize theatrical performances, to initiate the natives into the cultivation of new and useful plants—in short, to give the bewildered population new channels of expression for their genius and a new conception of life. More than three-quarters of a century before Harvard was established, there were universities at Santo Domingo, Mexico City, and Lima. Córdoba, Chuquisaca, and Santa Fe de Bogotá followed closely. A printing press was set up in the capital of Mexico in 1539; a school of painting was established in Mexico before 1530 and one in Quito not long afterward. T h e Indians were initiated into the pleasures of the theater as early as 1538 in Mexico, and 1596 in Paraguay.

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Cultural traditions dating back thousands of years seemed to disappear under the impact of a new and more aggressive civilization. Gone were the pagan temples, palaces, ritual objects, and picture manuscripts. Outwardly, the Indians and the mestizos that came later, after the fusion of aborigines and conquistadores, seemed to conform to the new ways of life. Thus passed almost three hundred years. What happened during these three centuries in the fields of literature and of art is an absorbing story: these spiritual expressions of a people were both made to serve the objectives of church and state. It is not surprising, therefore, that certain works of fiction should have been prohibited in the colonies by a decree of 1 5 3 1 , "because they are harmful to the moral health and the welfare of the natives." And it is equally natural that religious subjects should predominate in the plastic arts of that period. Art was a weapon of religion, and we see it emphasized as such in the trial by the Inquisition of the Flemish painter Simon Pereyns, who went to Mexico and incurred the displeasure of the church in 1568, because of certain remarks which were considered irreverent. These included an innocent statement to the effect that he was interested in doing some portraits instead of painting religious figures exclusively. Many are the illustrious names that have come to us from that period. In the first place, there were the chroniclers of the Conquest, who in prose and verse recorded deeds that culminated in the subjection of peoples as widely separated as the Aztecs, Chibchas, Incas, Araucanians, and Guaraníes. T o this group belong, also, those keen observers who noted down public and private incidents, customs, amusements, occupations, religious practices and beliefs, folklore, flora, fauna, and historical events. Among these, special mention may be made of Alonso de Ercilla and Pedro de Oña, who in the epic poems La Araucana and Arauco Domado depict with touching beauty the efforts to conquer the Araucanians, the most indomitable of all the Indian peoples; of Bernal Diaz

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del Castillo, whose Verdadera historia de la conquista de Nueva España relates deeds as fascinating as those in the most imaginative work of fiction; of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, author of Relación y Comentarios, an account of the settlement of Paraguay and the River Plate region; of Bartolomé de Las Casas, who championed the cause of the oppressed Indians in Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. T h e works of these men are indispensable sources for the study of the conditions existing in all these countries at the time the Spaniards conquered them. But perhaps the greatest of all the writers of colonial times are the Peruvians Garcilaso de la Vega and Pedro de Peralta y Barnuevo; the Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Juana de Asbaje before she withdrew from the world), and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. Garcilaso de la Vega ( 1 5 3 9 - 1 6 1 7 ) is also known as el Inca Garcilaso, indicating his Indian ancestry on his mother's side. His Comentarios reales give a magnificent description of the territory of Peru and a record of the legends of his forefathers, their laws and systems of government, their methods of procedure in peace and war, their religious beliefs, ceremonies and sacrifices, festivals, cruelties and superstitions, their sufferings at having become vassals—they, who were once masters of an empire. " H e gives us completely the eternal charm of Peru, the gentleness of its vicuñas, and the softness of its coastal oases" and "succeeds in presenting those eternal truths—the patrimony of historians with the soul of poets—that may err in detail but preserve the essentials." Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Council of the Indies prohibited the reading of the Comentarios reales, because "the natives learn from it many undesirable things which arouse a consciousness of nationality." Don Pedro de Peralta y Barnuevo (1663-1743), a criollo who never visited the country of his Spanish ancestors, spoke eight languages and was able to compose poetry in all of them. He wrote some thirty works, including plays and

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treatises on the most diverse subjects—cosmography, the circulation of the blood and so forth. In addition, he was twice Rector of the University of San Marcos, and took time to supervise the construction of the walls of the city of Lima. Now let us turn to the two literary geniuses of colonial Mexico. J u a n Ruiz de Alarcón (i58o?-i63g) belongs to that brilliant galaxy of dramatists who lived during the last quarter of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, and whose work is mainly responsible for the naming of that entire period—siglo de oro—the golden age of Spanish letters. Though born in Mexico and thoroughly Mexican, his work was done in Spain under the influence of Lope de Vega and side by side with such masters as Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina. Hence the objection often encountered to his inclusion among Mexican dramatists. Critics have found in him, however, that restraint, quiet pride, good taste, reserve, timidity, and courtesy that characterize the Mexican Indian. Beautiful and talented Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ( 1 6 5 1 95) mastered Latin when she was only ten and became an accomplished student of philosophy, physics, mathematics, and history, as well as a confirmed believer in the rights of women and in the folly of men. T h e envy of the whole viceregal court, at the age of seventeen she retired to a convent, where she surrounded herself with scientific instruments and several thousand volumes, including works in Latin, Greek, French, Portuguese, and Dutch. T h e learned nun, who composed poetry of such merit that she won for herself the appellation of " T h e Tenth Muse," took issue with the Bishop of Puebla, who reprimanded her for her interest in worldly matters and for shocking her contemporaries by dint of her clear intelligence and her determination to use it. Such were some of the literary figures that add luster to the long colonial era that began when Cortés conquered Mexico and ended on the eve of the movement for inde-

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pendence. But for all their prestige, one must confess to a feeling of disappointment at the very slender literary production of such a vast colonial empire during a period of nearly three centuries. T o be sure, the printing presses were busy in several strategic cities—Mexico, Lima, Bogotá, Quito, Buenos Aires and the missions of Paraguay. Caracas did not have a printing press until 1806; Santiago de Chile not until 1 8 1 2 , when one was imported from the United States for the purpose of issuing revolutionary literature. But nearly 250 books were printed in Mexico before 1600, and there are several volumes by the tireless scholar, José T o r i b i o Medina, which list thousands of titles of Spanish American imprints of the colonial period, only a handful of which are of such quality as to be worthy of a permanent place in literature. T h e explanation is that literature cannot flourish in a society lacking essential freedom and in which the expression of ideas is subordinated to the interests of church and state. It was doubly a hindrance to have civil and ecclesiastical censorship. T h e r e were fifteen laws regulating the books trade, and heavy penalties were imposed on anyone printing or selling books in Spanish America without special permission from the Council of the Indies. A decree dated 1543 prohibited the printing, sale, or possession of romances treating of "worldly matters and containing fabulous or fictitious accounts." T o this civil regulation the ecclesiastical censorship of the Inquisition was added. T h e cost of paper was high, and subject matter was limited to "discreet" accounts of historical events, the geography and natural history of the New World, and the doctrines and history of the church. These factors clearly explain the lamentable situation. But if these were almost insurmountable barriers to literary expression, religious fervor gave rise to a vigorous art that flourished in Mexico, Quito, Bogotá, Lima, Cuzco, Chuquisaca, and Potosí. As against the handful of great literary works produced during the colonial period, the architectural monuments, the religious sculpture, frescoes, and paintings that will

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survive for centuries number many hundreds. Spanish colonial art is a commentary on a religious faith that knew no bounds and that dotted every hillside of Mexico and every village plaza in Spanish America with places of beauty in which to worship God. While the writers of colonial times were legion, the artists who signed their work and whose names have come down to us are but few. Among them are the Mexicans, the two Echaves, Cabrera, Herrera, Correa, and Rodríguez Juárez; the Ecuadoreans Miguel de Santiago and Gorívar González-— painters—and Manuel Chili, José Díaz, and Father Carlos— sculptors. Another name to be recorded with special respect is that of Gregorio Vásquez Arce y Ceballos, who decorated many of the churches of Bogotá. He is considered by some critics to be the most versatile of all colonial painters, since, while others devoted themselves exclusively to religious subjects, he painted portraits, landscapes, and hunting scenes as well. The Quiteño school produced prolific artists, whose works were as much a source of joy to the faithful throughout South America as they today are priceless possessions to collectors. Between 1788 and 1799, according to José Gabriel Navarro, 266 large boxes containing paintings and sculpture were shipped from the port of Guayaquil. No record exists of those sent overland. Yet rare is the place where some manifestation of the artists' genius cannot be found. Architecture, painting, and sculpture, at the service of a religious faith, produced cathedrals, church decorations and religious figures carved out of wood and delicately polychromed, while the literature of that period yielded stilted, pompous discourses and accounts of events generally devoid of substance, feeling, and beauty. As a symbol of the plastic sense of the Indian, Spanish colonial art challenges the imagination. The native not only mastered a new technique but actually introduced innovations into the Plateresque and Baroque forms imported from Spain. Essentially creative by nature, the native artists are responsible for many new architectural features observed in columns, capi-

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tals, vaulted ceilings, and arches, as well as for the use of certain native motifs in sculptural decorations. Aboriginal influence upon art forms originating in Spain is undeniable. T h e will to create on the part of the Indian is shown in the use of themes and motifs taken from the local flora and fauna, from Indian folklore and astrology. T h e façades of the magnificent churches, the altars and the ceilings richly covered with gold leaf, the pulpits and confessionals of unsurpassed beauty, the ritual objects, the inlaid choir stalls, the sculptured figures, mellow with age, all are reminders of the innate artistic capacity of the aborigines of America, and of the force of a crusading faith that combined, as far as art is concerned, excellence of technique with a certain measure of tolerance. While in the colonial period these accomplishments in the field of art are superior to those expressed through the written word, in the nineteenth century, literature, now created in the spirit of revolt, achieved a preponderant and much more significant rôle. T h e church-building era and the great epoch of missionary zeal had definitely come to an end before the founding of the Academy of San Carlos of Mexico in 1783. By the beginning of the movement for independence, initiated in 1810, the institution had experienced a series of vicissitudes, and foreign travelers—Humboldt among them— reported nothing but utter neglect within its ancient walls. Painters from many parts of Europe, their imagination stirred by the wars of independence, came to America, often at the invitation of progressive governments. Theirs was the task of keeping alive an interest in art that in previous centuries had been the sole prerogative of the church. T h e y saw the young nations emerge to independent life and fall at times into a chaos of civil strife and uncertainty. T h e i r function was in some ways akin to that of the first chroniclers, who recorded their impressions when they set foot upon the virgin soil of America. T h e i r themes ranged from portraits

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of the liberators, caudillos, and great ladies of the time, to landscapes, rural scenes, peasants, racial types, and epic deeds. European artists held sway for the first sixty or seventy years of the nineteenth century and launched several generations of native artists, whose innermost desire seemed to be to go to Europe for further training, a practice which has continued to our own day. And now let us enumerate briefly some of those foreign artists who influenced and shaped the art of Spanish America during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century: Goulu, Pellegrini, Monvoisin, Rugendas, Amadryl, Bâclé, Pallière, Carlsen, Grashof, Sheridan, Rawson, Stuz, Manzoni, Cicarelli, Wood, Kirchbach, Somerscales, Mochi. Of these, two of the most influential were the Frenchman, Raymond Monvoisin, who visited Argentina, Chile, and Peru; and the German, Johann Moritz Rugendas, whose travels took him to Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. A few native painters, such as the Uruguayan Juan Manuel Blanes, attained distinction for their portrayal of great leaders and historical scenes, or for their emphasis on local customs. Such were, in Argentina, Carlos Morel and Prilidiano Pueyrredon; in Peru, Francisco Laso, Ignacio Merino, and most authentic of them all, the self-taught mulatto, Pancho Fierro, a native of Lima. Others were noted for their success abroad; such were Arturo Michelena and Cristobal Rojas, of Venezuela, who achieved European recognition fifty years ago. While this art, based on European models, was developing in South America, Mexico saw the rise of lithography as a medium full of rich possibilities. It was used to illustrate the most beautiful books ever published in Mexico—Paul et Virginie, for example—and also as a sharp weapon in political struggles. Some journals and newspapers, famous in Mexican history, were founded for the sole purpose of overthrowing certain political regimes, and suspended publication on attaining their goal. General Santa Ana, of Texan and Mexi-

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can War fame—or infamy—was the target of most of the caricatures of the day. But despite these healthy manifestations and despite the interest in esthetic matters of governments and influential personages, art was still far removed from the people, and the European technique was inflexible, permitting no deviation, no experiments. Gauchos, Indians, and huasos, appeared highly stereotyped and drained of all strength; historical scenes, with their profusion of detail, left one completely indifferent to heroism and tragedy; the caudillos in their portraits resembled perfectly amiable and harmless gentlemen; charming little boys were almost always depicted clutching something in their hands, while little girls usually appeared frightened, as if about to lose their beribboned petticoats. Literature, on the other hand, was a vital force from the time of the wars of independence through the long period of national integration, political chaos, and uncompromising nationalism that followed. This, we must remember, was the nation-building period; poetry and prose were more under the sign of Mars than of Apollo. Their function was to further the plans of the builders, not necessarily to express esthetic feeling. They were instruments in the hands of the orientadores, of the men whose clear vision was focused toward one goal—the awakening of national consciousness. T o this early period belong those writers whose poetry inspired the young nations at the dawn of their independence— José Joaquín de Olmedo, of Ecuador, author of the stirring Oda a Junin, which commemorates one of the decisive battles of the war of independence; and Andrés Bello, of Venezuela, who wrote the celebrated Oda a la agricultura de la zona tòrrida, describing the varied beauties of the tropics, with the strange fruits of their fields and far away, looming on the distant horizon, the snowcapped mountains. Finally, the poet urges the inhabitants of this earthly paradise to enjoy it in peace. In another poem Bello advocated the necessity for poets and writers to seek inspiration in the destiny of a nascent Amer-

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ica. In Cuba, a young poet, José María Heredia, voiced in his poetry revolt against that regime which came to an end only in 1898; and in Mexico, a novelist, Fernández de Lizardi, published an epoch-making novel, Periquillo Sarniento, a keen social analysis of the times. Men and morals, education, politics, and folk ways are mirrored in the pages of this first significant novel of Mexico. But hardly are the literary events of the first quarter of the nineteenth century reviewed than we are reminded of the universal political struggles of that era, and of such writers as H u g o and Chateaubriand, who exerted a decisive influence during these formative years. T h e beginning of the romantic period in Spanish American letters, a movement that extended approximately until 1880, coincides with a period of civil war in Argentina and equally serious political upheavals in other South American republics. Chile, the only peaceful country at the time, thus became a haven for political exiles. Bello, the Venezuelan humanist to whose poetry we have referred, was called to Chile by the government in 1829, and founded there a school for boys. He also became the first Rector of the University of Chile, and wrote a grammar and a civil code. In Chile, Sarmiento, Alberdi, Mitre, and other patriots from Argentina found refuge. This is a commentary on the value of a peaceful environment: some years later, in 1849, Chile, that had never been artistically productive during the Spanish regime, received in its newly established art school young students from the very countries—Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru—that had had the most famous schools. On the other side of the Andes, civil war continued to rage until 1852, when the dictatorship of Rosas, which had lasted since 1840, was finally overthrown. As reminders of that period we have two books which have become literary classics and have found their way into English: Amalia, a historical novel by José Marmol, and Civilización y barbarie: Vida de Juan Facundo, by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the school teacher who later became president of Argentina. Translated

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into English by Mrs. Horace Mann, Facundo—as the book is generally known—was the first Spanish American book to receive that distinction. The theme, an account of life on the pampas during the desperate struggle to overthrow the Rosas dictatorship, centers around the life of Juan Facundo Quiroga, a sort of "bad man" who, though never attaining the stature of the Mexican Francisco Villa, had nevertheless much of the latter's cruelty and terrorizing passion. Imperfect in style, often ungrammatical, Facundo defies classification. Originally intended as a biography of Facundo Quiroga, it resulted in a tale far more gripping than a novel, far more significant than any historical or sociological treatise, of that eventful period in Argentine history. T h e physical aspect of the country, as well as the attitudes, characteristics, and mores of the people conditioned by it, are superbly described. The gaucho, a product of that environment, is deftly portrayed. One type of gaucho is the bad man, or outlaw; another, the infallible guide who knows every inch of the interminable plains; still another is the rastreador, who can track down a criminal on discovering but one footprint; and, most attractive of them all, the singing gaucho, whose guitar is his closest companion. Facundo and Martin Fierro, the classic gaucho poem of Argentina, published in 1872 and also available in English, are two masterpieces of nineteenth century Spanish American literature. Another classic of this period is the Colombian novel Maria, by Jorge Isaacs, published in 1867, the English version of which attained the greatest success thus far achieved by any Latin American work translated into English. Maria shows, above all, the influence of French romanticism and has been justly compared to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie. No Spanish American novel has had more readers nor caused more tears nor filled adolescent hearts with greater grief. A tale of love that ends with the death of a flowerlike maiden in the Valley of Cauca while her sweetheart is studying medicine in France, it continues to be "required reading"

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for young and old. T h e masterly description of one of the world's most beautiful valleys, interesting descriptions of home life and social customs, all contribute to Maria's appeal as a novel. As the century entered its last three decades, literary activity increased throughout Spanish America and exhibited much vigor, a bold search for original patterns, and a grave concern for peculiarly American problems. With his Tradiciones Peruanas Ricardo Palma ( 1 8 3 3 - 1 9 1 9 ) introduced a festive note. Each of the tradiciones centers on some specific event of the colonial period, which the author illumines with his exuberant imagination. Brief, pointed, amusing; gossip here is raised to the level of art, making the tradiciones a synthesis of colonial mores. Concerned with more far-reaching and profounder matters, the Chilean, Alberto Blest Gana, portrayed rural and urban life and the various social strata of his time. His Martin Rivas is available in an English translation. Many novels of this period have the Indian as their main character, or focus their attention on the plight of this race. Among these are Cumandá, by the Ecuadorean, J u a n León Mera; Manuel de J . Galván's Enriquillo; and Aves sin nido by Clorinda Matto de T u r n e r , of Peru, one of the first women writers of Spanish America to wrestle with sociological problems. Also worthy of special mention is J u a n Zorrilla de San Martin's Tabaré, a long poem dealing with the subjection of the Charrúa Indians. Mexico's literary scene was somewhat similar. At least one novel, La parcela, concerns itself with the land problem; while others deal with historical themes. Not a few have a marked autochthonous flavor, as for instance the charming Navidad en las montañas by the full-blooded Indian, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano. Other nineteenth-century writers who cannot be overlooked, even in a brief survey, are Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, of Chile, whose historical writings are avidly read because of an ability to make the past live that

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few authors have, and which makes the reading of history a joyous adventure; Juan Montalvo, of Ecuador, author of several essays, and noted for his determined opposition to the dictatorship of Garcia Moreno; Manuel González Prada, of Peru, writer on the Indian problem, on political corruption, and the need for change on all fronts, both poet and fighter; Justo Sierra, of Mexico, whose career extended into this century and who was poet, humanist, and editor of one of the most scholarly books ever produced in Mexico—México y su evolución social; Salomé Ureña de Henríquez, of the Dominican Republic, poet, educator, and leader of men. Her influence was to be widespread through her associates, particularly Eugenio María de Hostos, and her distinguished children, Pedro, Max, and Camila Henríquez Ureña, all writers of the first rank who have lived in many countries. T o the Caribbean group belongs José Martí, who devoted his life to the cause of Cuban independence but found time to write poetry, essays, stories and verse for little children, editorials, and book reviews. In passing it may be well to emphasize the fact that Cuban literature is, throughout the nineteenth century, imbued with a passion for freedom. It is a literature of revolt. By the 8o's, readers and writers began to weary of romanticism. A movement which in its inception had been nonconformist, was now considered conventional, hollow, and unsuited to the needs of poets and creative writers vitally interested, not in literature with a political or social purpose, but in "pure" art. T h e modernista period, which was not without forerunners, is formally initiated in 1888 with the publication of Rubén Darío's Azul. The Nicaraguan poet, and several other select spirits all over Spanish America, reacted individually to certain foreign influences: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Ibsen, and Poe. Their followers are Amado Nervo, in Mexico, José Santos Chocano, in Peru, and Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, in Bolivia, to mention only three from a legion of outstanding writers.

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Modernismo gave poetry flexibility and harmony, with the introduction of new and varied metrical combinations and the restoration of others from the past. T h e result was distinction of form, bizarre imagery. Darío himself, by the dexterous exploitation of new resources, could write poetry and prose that were frivolous, grave, philosophical, mystical, sensual or pagan, with equal facility and effectiveness. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the cult of form that was the distinguishing feature of modernismo and the individualism inherited from the symbolists were beginning to be unconvincing. Many were the achievements of the movement: it had stimulated esthetic perception and led to deeper enjoyment of beauty, devoid of all trappings. Also modernismo had enriched the poets' devices of technique. American themes became paramount in Lugones' Odas seculares (1910), in Santos Chocano's Alma América (1908), in Herrera y Reissig's Los éxtasis de la montaña, and in Darío's Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905). T h e great Darío must also be included here, among the forerunners of a new movement —literary Americanism. This return to native, regional themes probably received no small impulse from the work of a Uruguayan essayist, José Enrique Rodó—author of Ariel and Motivos de Proteo, both translated into English—-whose ideas were at sharp variance with the impersonality and artificiality of modernismo. R o d ó devoted his life to the defense of idealism, which he considered characteristic of the Latin peoples, and to a resolute attack on the utilitarian spirit of the big—and now good— neighbor of the North. T h e generation succeeding the arielistas, the followers of Rodó quickly fell under the influence of two major events which definitely conditioned its world outlook and its esthetic views. One was the Mexican Revolution, which, beginning in 1910, came to fruition in the Constitution of 1 9 1 7 ; the other was the general revolt of university students against outmoded pedagogical norms and obsolete administrative and

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educational standards. T h i s started in the University of Cordoba, Argentina, in 1 9 1 8 , and soon spread through Spanish America. A d d to those major autochthonous forces the European developments of the post-war period, and the effect of the Spanish Civil War, and the result is not hard to foresee. Men and women who have now reached middle age, as well as those in their thirties or even younger, all belong to a period in which the rebellious spirit has predominated. Now Spanish American art and literature are traversing for the first time parallel and equally significant paths. We find our major writers and artists of today in quest of a means of expression that will do justice to their art and at the same time take advantage of the unlimited wealth of native themes. T o build upon what we already possess, rather than go afield to borrow foreign ideas and patterns of thought is the main preoccupation of the new writers and artists. T h i s method, they maintain, is the shortest way to the universal which all creative artists, whatever their fields, have as an abiding objective. T h i s period is characterized by a violent objection to imitation (although poets, painters, and sculptors still do influence one another), and a deep concern for human values, for the rights of the oppressed, whether they be Indians, laborers, Negroes, or Jews. T h i s period is characterized by a rising tide of nationalism, in its more constructive aspects, and by new ideas about education for the masses. All these emphases find adequate reflection in literature and other arts. Eyebrows were raised, prudish ladies—and not a few gentlemen—were shocked, when El roto, a novel of Chilean slums, appeared in the bookstores of Santiago and cast aspersions on the character of the wealthy classes, of which the author, J o a q u i n Edwards Bello, is a member. But gradually readers have become shock-proof, especially after the appearance of the works of the Ecuadorean novelists, Jorge Icaza, Humberto Salvador, Demetrio Aguilera Malta, José de la Cuadra, and Alfredo Pareja y Diez Canseco, who write

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fearlessly of exploited Indians, unemployment, conditions among railroad workers, racial degeneration, life on the water front of Guayaquil, American imperialism, and other equally "disagreeable" subjects. Slight regard for sensibilities, or even for grammar and good taste, plus an almost pathological honesty, make of these youthful Ecuadorean moderns a pleiad of writers among the most stimulating anywhere in America. They know their Marx, but in their desire to analyze social phenomena, they have often disregarded the landscape. Another group of novels—Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo (The Under-Dogs, in English translation), a vivid chronicle of the revolution in its first stages; Martín Luis Guzmán's El águila y la serpiente, by a man who accompanied Francisco Villa at the height of his career; Rafael Muñóz's Vamos con Pancho Villa, and others—deal with various phases of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The first two mentioned will probably remain classics on the life and deeds of the notorious warrior. Along with these novels, Mexico has produced others emphasizing village life, Indian community problems, and certain economic issues. T o this group belong the works of José Rubén Romero—Apuntes de un lugareño, Desbandada, Pueblo inocente, Pito Pérez, and others; Mauricio Magdaleno's Resplandor; Gregorio López y Fuentes' El indio, Tierra; Xavier Icaza's Panchito chapopote and José Mancisidor's La asonada. There is a healthy Americanist movement in other countries also—a genuine respect and love for native themes— and a vigorous note, very much in keeping with the spirit of America, in poetical and prose creations. One manifestation of this common attitude is the present vogue for Negro poetry, for poetry with the rhythm and the feeling characteristic of Negro instrumental music, song, and speech. Often the exponents of this poetry dwell upon the tragedy of race prejudice, as in the touching Venezuelan poem by Andrés Eloy

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Blanco, Píntame angelitos negros. In this, a mother who has just lost one of her babies suddenly realizes that she never has seen black angels, and so she calls on the village painter of religious scenes: "Though the Virgin may be white, paint for me some little black angels." At the risk of being unjust to many authors deserving special notice, particularly Carlos Reyles, Manuel Gálvez, Enrique Larreta, and Benito Lynch, all novelists of permanent value, we shall note at this point the three Spanish American novels which in the opinion of most critics are the most significant written so far in South America—fortunately, all available in English translation. These are Don Segundo Sombra, by the Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes; La Vorágine, by José Eustacio Rivera, a novel of the Colombian jungle, rich in folklore and descriptive passages; and Doña Bárbara, by Rómulo Gallegos, an account of life on the Venezuelan plains, of struggle against injustice and unscrupulous practices, magnificently revealing native intelligence, good humor, ripe wisdom. The response to these novels, published within the short span of two years, 1926-28, was immediate. A new standard was set, in the making of novels of universal human appeal, for the vivid description of physical environment and the successful portrayal of local characters, as well as for the utilization of native lore. The public read and discussed these novels and soon numerous imitators came to the fore, in search of themes and characters from their immediate surroundings. Don Segundo Sombra is perhaps the greatest of these three masterpieces. It has in its favor a seeming lack of purpose, which gives it a most convincing, natural, and unaffected tone. The pampas and the virtues and vices of their inhabitants are described with understanding and tenderness. T h e first page, in which the author, a wealthy landowner, dedicates the book to Don Segundo, one of his workers and the principal character of the book, is in itself a document worth quoting:

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DEDICATION T O Y O U , DON

SEGUNDO

AND TO T H E MEMORY

O F DON R U F I N O

DON NICASIO CANO AND DON J O S É

GALVÀN,

HERNANDEZ,

NOW DEAD. T O T H E HERDERS AND WRANGLERS, M Y

FRIENDS

DON VICTOR TABOADA, R A M O N CISNEROS. . . . TO ALL THE FELLOWS OF MY T O T H O S E I NEVER M E T ,

YET

V E R Y SOUL O F T H I S

WHO A R E T H E BOOK.

T O T H E GAUCHO IN M E W H O M AS T H E MONSTRANCE DOES WAFER,

LANDS:

I

BEAR,

THE

SACREDLY.

T h e j ungles of Peru and Bolivia are depicted in La serpiente de oro, El valle del Sol, La sima fecunda; a Peruvian mining district, in Tungsteno; Patagonia, in El infìerno azul y bianco. New dramatis personae such as Indians or Negroes, and certain occupational groups, such as miners, sailors, fishermen, soldiers, farmers, and cowboys, are portrayed realistically in El pueblo de Dios, Matachalé and other novels of this type. T h e same spirit that has animated the Spanish American literature of the last twenty years may be detected in the plastic arts, and particularly in painting. T h e World War was partly responsible for this. Many Spanish American painters, formerly denizens of Montmartre, the Còte d'Azure, or Majorca, were forced to return to a milieu less sophisticated, but offering the charms and challenging possibilities of a virginal and unspoiled world. Cesareo Bernaldo de Quirós, long domiciled in Europe, where his work has been moderately successful, became an artist of continental stature when he returned to his native province of Entre Rios, in Argentina, and executed a series of vast canvases dramatically depicting gaucho life and rural scenes characteristic of another

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period in Argentine history. Mexico, in turn, produced one of its greatest artists, Diego Rivera, as his native land kindled his imagination and furnished an outlet for his fertile genius. Walls for murals were offered to him, to Orozco, Siqueiros, and to other artists filled with the spirit of a revolution that had been fought for more than ten years on the strength of a simple slogan "land and justice." Land meant the economic liberation of a vast unlettered peasant population. Justice implied the essential human rights, but neither could be easily obtained in a country lacking national integration. The frescoes painted in the Secretaría de Educación and other public buildings by Rivera, Orozco, and other Mexican artists have contributed in no small measure to the attainment of this most important goal. T h e Indian, the peasant, the worker in mine and factory, the soldier, the rural teacher, the humble and illiterate folk see themselves delineated with understanding and endowed with strength and dignity. The masses receive through these frescoes—which at times depict great historical events, or at others their own fiestas and folk ways—a new conception of Mexico that would take volumes to explain. In short, the Mexican murals have a signal documental value and a definite social purpose. It is no wonder, therefore, that mural painting should have become in these last few years the objective of leading artists. The spirit permeating the Mexican school of painting, often its very technique, has moved many non-Mexican artists to adopt it: Jean Chariot, Paul O'Higgins, Carlos Mérida, Roberto de la Selva, Roberto Berdecio—to cite a few—actually prefer to be known as Mexicans rather than as French, North American, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, or Bolivian artists. Several who follow the movement from a distance have undertaken wider experimentation. They have endeavored to create a style of their own in harmony with their own local scene, as in the case of José Sabotai, Julia Codesido, and Camilo Blas, in Peru, all powerful interpreters of Peruvian

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Andean life and of an Indian race so vigorous and well poised that it may well become the hope of Peru. Another example is that of the young sculptress Marina Nunez del Prado, and the painter Cecilio Guzmdn de Rojas, who stand out in Bolivia for their devotion to Bolivian subjects. T h e latter did not reveal his true stature until he undertook the series of sketches of the Chaco War which are as eloquent a commentary on the futility of war as any ever written. In Argentina, Luis Perlotti, the sculptor; Benito Quinquela Martin; Alfredo Guido; in addition to Quir6s, mentioned above; and a score of other equally gifted painters distinguish themselves for their effective use of Argentine subject matter and idiom. T h e y do not wish to imitate the Mexican school, for they do not possess in their background —according to Guido—the passionate rhythm that is so characteristic of Mexico, nor the pictorial tradition inherited by Mexican painters from their Indian ancestors. " W e want to develop an art that is saturated with the spirit of our land," Guido declares, "an art restrained and architectural in character." Indications of the same intelligent search for the most adequate interpretation of the soul of the varied regions of American land that constitute the Spanish American nations are to be found everywhere. Argentina, Ecuador and Chile, Venezuela and Colombia, Central America—particularly El Salvador—Cuba and the Dominican Republic, all have artists identified definitely with a movement that has as an objective an art as deeply rooted in the American soil as our novel and our poetry—an art that draws sustenance from the very fountains of our life. These two spiritual currents, painting and literature, flow today along parallel channels, have their source in a common restlessness, and aspire to the same objective. It is quite conceivable that in their emphasis upon what is essentially native, they will find the shortest path to universality.

Educational

Development

in

Latin ^America AMANDA F I R S T

LABARCA

A T T E M P T S S C H O O L

T

TO

HUBERTSON

O R G A N I Z E

P U B L I C

S Y S T E M S

H E G E N E R A L conditions of education at the beginning of the nineteenth century in colonial Spanish America may be summarized in the following terms: First, education was thought to be especially fitted for the C r e o l e s , Children of Spanish descent, and for those mestizos that had acquired a certain degree of wealth. Secondly, women, even in these classes, were less well cared for than their brothers. It was supposed that they did not need to learn to read and write, and it was feared that they might read other things than their prayers. Schools in the convents were devoted more to giving them the necessary amount of religious exercises and the skills that were required to run a household than to initiating them in letters or sciences. Thirdly, instruction given to Indians included only the catechism, prayers, and elements of Christian doctrine. T h e best educated persons were sons of king's officers, captains, landowners, and merchants, the majority of whom received their instruction in the schools or colleges opened to them by the monasteries. Very few went to the universities. These schools devoted themselves especially to Latin grammar, and when they added other courses, these were scholastics and religious philosophy. Only by exception were arts and crafts taught, and only in Mexico and Lima was there anything like artistic schools.

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When the wars of independence began, the patriots tried to organize schools for the new republics. All of them felt that it was absolutely necessary, in order to found new nationalities, to have a mass population that could understand the principles for which they were fighting, and in all of the countries diverse attempts were made to solve this problem. Bolivar, Sucre, San Martin, O'Higgins, in Chile—all of them tried to found schools. Bolivar asked the Englishman, Lancaster, founder of the Lancasterian system, to come to South America to found schools there. Bolivar's initiative met no response among the city councils, and the liberator himself had to pay from his personal funds the cost of Lancaster's trip to South America. Sucre intended also to found schools and to him we owe the first decrees on primary instruction in New Granada. In Chile, one of the first chiefs of the revolution, José Miguel Carrera, issued two historic decrees ordering the founding of schools for boys and girls in Santiago, and commanded the monasteries to open them in the shortest possible time. But conditions were not favorable; the generals were so occupied in the campaigns of the war that they could not pay much attention to the fulfillment of these educational tasks. Furthermore, the wars of revolution lasted in some countries, as in Chile and Argentina, until the year 1818, and in others like Peru, much longer, so that although these countries celebrate their first declarations of independence about the years 1809 and 1810, they were not independent in fact until much later. Each of the republics had to strive against conditions that were an aftermath of the colony and of the long wars of revolution. Among the former we find the absolute lack of teachers outside religious orders, the scarcity of books and of all kinds of educational materials, and the nonexistence of school buildings. On account of the wars of independence, each republic had to struggle against poverty, all the resources of the nation having been used up in the long campaigns necessary to realize its aims. Nevertheless, in all the countries we find the first de-

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crees about education signed by the principal chiefs of the revolution, between the years 1 8 1 1 and 1 8 1 3 . W h e n the wars of revolution ended the task of founding republics was not completed, because of the economic organization of these countries. All of them, without exception, had the encomienda system, in some ways like the feudal system of medieval times. A l l the military chiefs had come under the influence of the French Revolution, with its postulates of freedom, equality, fraternity and the resultant democratic system. All of them had looked on the example of France and of the United States and thought that if they were to be independent, they should not follow the Spanish example of monarchy, but should become republics. Yet economic and administrative organization was not changed by independence. T h u s we had in all those countries two sets of ideas and of systems: the economic and social foundation of the feudal colonial system, and the democratic and republican ideals. Most of the revolutions that occurred during the first half of the century in South America had their roots in this contrast between facts and theories. Chile was the earliest to reach a working compromise between actual conditions and ideas. By the year 1833, a constitution was signed that admitted the existence of a republic under a rather oligarchic system, which, despite its difficulties, maintained peace and permitted progress during the nineteenth century. T h e Argentine Republic, although it finished its war of independence about the same time as Chile, had two great causes of trouble: T h e provinces did not wish to submit to the hegemony of one city, Buenos Aires and, on account of this desire of the provinces to have a federal government and of Buenos Aires to form a centralized republic, they had, from 1821 to 1830, various revolutions. From 1830 to 1852, J u a n Manuel de Rosas, the tyrant, ruled over Argentina. During that time instruction was very much disregarded and the more intelligent, cultivated, and progressive men were banished. Many of them went to Chile and helped there in the construction of our educational system.

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HUBERTSON SYSTEM

A t the very end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Joseph Lancaster introduced his newly devised system of mutual instruction. H e was a man with not only a profound desire to teach but the ability to do it. H e had also a great love for the poor people, and after having founded schools in Great Britain and Ireland, he came first to Caracas, called by Bolivar, then to the West Indies, and subsequently to the United States, where he lived for the most part in N e w York. W e are not now dealing with his work in the States nor with his life, full of glamorous success and also of failure, bankruptcy, and misery. In the States, he founded many schools and the use of his system became so widespread that in the early years of the century it covered almost the whole area of the country. T h i s system was sponsored by the British and Foreign School Society of London, which Lancaster himself founded, b u t which after his misfortunes was directed by a private group. T h e system was very suitable for initiating public primary education at a moment w h e n there were no schools and n o teachers available. T h e task of instruction was given to a teacher who had under him four or five monitors, each of w h o m taught something like twenty-five or fifty children. T h e classes generally began at 10 o'clock in the morning, but from 8:30 to 10 the monitors met with the teacher in charge and arranged the work of the day. T h e r e were different monitors for each subject and some of them were also supervisors who served to carry out the orders of the master teacher. T h e r e was no necessity for any special h o u s i n g — a n y large room sufficed— and the only furniture necessary consisted of tables covered with sand that served for the writing and the arithmetic. Instead of a book, loose leaves were used, and with these reading was taught. T h e Bible, especially, was used for that purpose. T h e pupils were very crowded, as there were sometimes more than a hundred under one teacher. T h e y had military disci-

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pline; they learned how to march and countermarch, how to move according to certain rules. For instance, it was not permissible for the pupils to move without an order given by the master by means of a whistle. Physical punishments were forbidden, but several other devices were used to encourage the pupils or to punish those who were disobedient. As the Bible was the book generally used to teach reading, the British and Foreign Bible Society of London united its efforts with the British and Foreign School Society to send a delegate to the newly independent countries of Latin America in the person of a Scotchman named James Thompson. We have the story of his experience in these countries, in an interesting series of letters collected under the title Letters on the Moral and Religious State of South America, Written during a Residence of Nearly Seven Years in Buenos Aires, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, and published in London in 1827. T h e r e is also a very good book on the subject, written by one of our historians and professors of the University of Chile, Domingo Amunátegui: El sistema de Lancaster en Chile y en otros paises Sudamericanos. Thompson reached Buenos Aires in October, 1818, and remained there until May, 1 8 2 1 . H e gained the friendship and the assistance of the great patriot, Bernardino Rivadavia, who helped him to form a society and to erect schools of mutual instruction in Buenos Aires. A Franciscan friar, Bartolomé Muñoz, was the secretary of the new society, which met in a Franciscan monastery. By a decree of February, 1823, the Lancasterian system was introduced in all the schools of Buenos Aires, and not only in the capital but in different provinces these schools were to be found, one as far away as R i o Negro, more than five hundred miles from Buenos Aires. T h e city council was much interested both in the schools for boys and for girls, and the cabildo opened a school for girls in accordance with the system. At the same time, news of Thompson's good work became known in Montevideo and there also schools were founded, especially for the poor people. It was

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even intended to open a normal school for the preparation of teachers. In Buenos Aires Thompson met one of the Chilean patriots, Camilo Enríquez, who had been foremost in the organization of our first national constitution and who was the editor of our first newspaper: Enríquez commended him to the Chilean authorities and especially to O'Higgins, who offered Thompson a monthly salary of a hundred pesos and his expenses if he would come to Chile and establish there the same kind of schools. Before leaving Buenos Aires, the citizenship of the Republic was offered to Thompson by a special decree, as a reward for the work that he had done as promoter of primary schools. Thompson accepted O'Higgins' offer and went to Chile, sailing around Cape Horn. T h e journey from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso took forty-four days. He was heartily received in Santiago: O'Higgins appointed a commission to work with him, headed by Manuel de Salas, a Lancaster Society was promptly formed and O'Higgins himself was one of its members and its protector. A large school was founded in one of the most spacious rooms of the old University of San Felipe and there nearly a thousand children were grouped, according to the rules of the system. While he was in Chile Thompson visited the Argentine provinces of Mendoza and San J u a n , where new schools were founded. As he had been called for only one year, he decided, at the end of that time, to go to Peru. Before leaving, he was also declared a citizen of Chile. His system functioned for about eleven years, but little by little, as there were no persons fitted to promote it and to make schools progress, it decayed. In June, 1822, Thompson sailed from Valparaiso to Callao. In Peru, the war of independence was going on and San Martin was at the head of the patriot army. Even while he was engaged in war's difficult tasks, he signed a decree—July 6, 1822—transforming the college of Santo Tomás into a Lancasterian school. T h e next year the patriot army met temporary reverses, and

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Lima was again in the hands of the royalists. But they did not disturb Thompson's school, and it continued its courses. When Bolivar came to Peru in 1823, he paid a great deal of attention to Thompson's work. He thought that it was especially fitted to solve the school problem in Latin American countries, and ordered that a central school be opened, in which there were soon more than 230 students. As was mentioned earlier, Thompson represented two societies, one for promoting schools of the Lancasterian type and the other for distributing Bibles. The first part of his mission was perfectly in accordance with the needs of these countries, but the second was absolutely contrary to the Catholic faith and the Catholic ideas which prevailed. While he was protected by such strong personalities as Rivadavia in Argentina, O'Higgins in Chile, and San Martin and Bolivar in Peru—the masters of the hour—he could distribute Bibles without being disturbed; but, as soon as these protectors were not at hand, the task was much more difficult and he was suspected of promoting the schools in order to bring these countries into the Protestant heresy. We must ascribe to that belief the short life of his system in these countries, because, after Thompson left, there were no pupils who would continue his work in earnest and with a knowledge of the subject. From Lima, Thompson started to Colombia, stopping in Trujillo and Guayaquil to establish small schools there. He went also to Quito, in the mountains, and by land to Bogotá, where he found that the Lancasterian system was already in operation under a Franciscan friar who had known it in England. From Colombia, in the year 1825, Thompson returned to England. Thompson did not remain long in England. He had accustomed himself to long voyages and to the people of the Latin American countries and he decided to return, going first to Mexico. There he began especially to sell Bibles, Lancasterian schools having been formed previous to his visit. But sell-

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ing Bibles was soon forbidden. H e then went to the Antilles, to Cuba, and afterwards even to Canada, but only as a representative of the Bible Society. Summarizing, we see that the first real attempt to f o u n d schools for the poor and to make primary education general on a broad scale was the result, in all Latin American countries as it was also in North America, of the Lancasterian system. If in these countries it lasted a shorter time than in North America, it was because of the lack of good teachers to continue the system and also because of the fear of the very Catholic people that under the disguise of these schools some Protestant beliefs might be taught. F O U N D A T I O N

OF

NATIONAL.

S C H O O L

S Y S T E M S

W e have already said that education during colonial times was nearly always in the hands of the church, w h i c h in its turn had to obey the orders of the king. Local self-government was nearly u n k n o w n in all the colonies. Heads of the city councils, at the beginning of colonial times, were chosen by the citizens, but afterwards had to buy their offices. T h e r e were therefore only two practicable ways of promoting a school system. O n e was to give the church the authority to govern the schools, to found and to promote them; or the national government might take into its own hands the work of organizing them. It is not strange then, that the school systems of Latin American countries were formed, not by the initative of the local communities but by the decrees of the central government. Latin American republics adopted two forms of government, the federal and the centralized. T h o s e that adopted the first, for example, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, gave the provinces some authority to open schools. In those of centralized type, such as C h i l e the central government retained all the initiative in school matters. Naturally, those governments that stabilized themselves first were also the first to begin the work of education. It was impossible to promote it in a methodical way, while there were revolutions or up-

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risings in different parts of a country. We have pointed already to the fact that Chile was one of the countries that emerged first from the chaotic conditions prevailing in all Latin American countries after the wars of independence. T h e r e we also found the first systematic law of public education, in the year 1842. Many factors contributed to make this progress possible: first of all, the peaceful state of the country; and secondly, the convergence in Santiago of various prominent men from different parts of the continent, some of them attracted by the Chilean government and others exiled from their countries. Among the former, we must name first Andrés Bello; among the latter, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Bello was engaged by the Chilean government in 1828, when he was in London, to serve in the Foreign Relations division, but soon his gifts as an educator and as a scholar became known. He was asked to head a school for the secondary education of boys in Santiago, in 1830. Although that school did not last long, it was another proof of Bello's gifts. He came to be appreciated as one of the most learned men in Chile at that time. Sarmiento came from Argentina as a fugitive from Rosas' tyranny and began his work in Santiago as a journalist during his second visit in 1839. He was a self-made man, had taught himself foreign languages, had an immense thirst for knowledge, and very soon gained not only the esteem of many of his exiled countrymen in Chile, but also of one Chilean who was to become minister of education and later president of the republic of Chile—Manuel Montt. Chilean writers were at that time emerging from different schools and ranks of society; most important among them was José Victorino Lastarría, a strong promoter of public primary education. These three men, Bello, Sarmiento, and Lastarría, were in fact those who presented to public opinion in the strongest terms the need of opening schools and of promoting secondary and university education. In 1842 the University of Chile was founded, on the old premises of the San Felipe University of colonial times. T h e constitution given by law to

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this state university was prepared by Bello, who had been in Europe for some years. K n o w i n g what France was doing at that time regarding education, he took as a model those paragraphs of the Napoleonic Code governing the University of Paris. T h i s law did not deal with university education only. T h e university faculty of letters, science, and philosophy was also to supervise both secondary and primary education and to advise the government as to how many schools were needed and where. Before the approval of the law, there was much discussion in the newspapers, especially because Sarmiento pleaded first, not for a university, but for funds for a common primary school system. He claimed that educated people could work and strive for their advancement and that what was necessary was to bring schools within the reach of the poor and the comm o n people who ignored the advantages of education. Manuel Montt, the minister of education, was very much impressed by Sarmiento's plea, and at the same time that Bello was nominated president of the new national university, Sarmiento was appointed head of the first normal school founded in South America, an institution which has continued its work to this day. F R E N C H

I N F L U E N C E

As we have already stated, the University of Chile was founded largely on the model of the University of Paris. T h i s was not an extraordinary thing; in fact, it merely demonstrates the scope of French influence on education and culture in Latin America in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a widespread phenomenon. A l l South American peoples, after years of struggle against Spain for their independence, felt that it was their duty to rebel against all that was Spanish, because everything pertaining to that nation reminded them of the colonial yoke. W e have seen already that French theories of political freedom and independence were those most cherished by the patriots, and naturally people of that generation looked toward France, the most advanced Latin country, as

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their teacher and model. Another factor which determined the scope of this influence was the strength of that literary movement called Romanticism. Nearly all poets, at the middle of the nineteenth century, were devoted readers of the French Romanticists. They knew their poems by heart and were familiar with their novels and other works of fiction. All over South America a Romantic literature was cultivated, in accordance with French ideals and schools. Victor Hugo, Musset, Lamartine were familiar names to all of them, as Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot had been to the generation that struggled for independence. W e must not be astonished, then, at finding that the law which created the University of Chile, and at the same time organized public education, was a replica in some respects of the French law. In accordance with its articles, the state was supposed to teach and to supervise education; the power of the state to instruct was held superior to that of the church. T h e reason why this happened in such a conservative and Catholic society as the Chilean of that time, lies in a Spanish tradition that the king is superior to the church. According to the Laws of the Indies, the king had the right to the patronage of the church. T h i s right was defended by the Chilean government, which in this case supposed itself the successor of the royal Spanish government. T h i s has not been the case in many of the republics of South America, and even today there are some, for instance Colombia, where the church is more important than the state in matters of education. As Napoleon had established the right of the French state to supervise, organize, and educate, so in the same way Chilean rights were framed in the law. As the emperor had nominated the Rector of the University of Paris as his representative and delegate in matters of education, so the Chilean law named the rector of the University as head of Chilean education, under the auspices of the state. T h e rector was helped by a council, and upon both rector and council this law bestowed the power of supervising teaching. In the second paragraph of Article 8 the law says that

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it is the right of the faculty of philosophy to supervise all primary schools, to propose to the government the rules that it considers suitable for their organization, and that it has the right to order the writing, translation, or revision of all textbooks used. Besides that, it was the duty of the members of this faculty to visit and inspect primary schools in the capital and in the provinces. Furthermore, they were to promote the cultivation of knowledge, of philosophical humanities, in the institute and higher schools of the nation, giving special preference in the curriculum to the national language, history, and literature. T H E

NEW

E S T A B L I S H M E N T S

T h e law organized the University in five faculties, the one I have already spoken of, philosophy and humanities, and also mathematics and physical sciences, medicine, law and political sciences, and theology. T h e first Rector of the University was, as I have said, Don Andrés Bello. H e was a Venezuelan who had worked for a time with Bolivar and who had gone with some others of his fellow countrymen to London, to ask for the help of the British kingdom in the struggle for the independence of Venezuela. H e remained in London for some years as a teacher of Spanish, and studied a great deal there and in some other countries in Europe, which he visited for a short time. H e was then engaged by the Chilean government to help in the foreign relations ministry, and by degrees he became well known in C h i l e and was reputed to be the most learned and the most cultivated man in the land. Another illustrious foreigner w h o helped us in the establishment of our system was D o m i n g o Faustino Sarmiento. H e was born in San Juan, in the year 1811. Being of a poor family, he had but little academic education. But he felt from the very beginning a strong vocation for teaching. A t the age of sixteen he began to teach reading and writing in a little town in San Luis, one of the interior provinces in Argentina. Hav-

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ing participated in some of the wars against Rosas, he crossed the Andes for the first time and, while still a very young man, taught in a rural school in Chile. Afterwards he returned to his own country in the hope of fighting against Rosas. He was defeated and came back for the second time to Chile, at that time beginning his work as a newspaperman in Valparaiso. He worked very hard, because, besides being a journalist, he wanted to be a teacher, and at the same time he was very fond of politics. When the minister, Manuel Montt, began the organization of public education in Chile, Sarmiento did his best to convince Montt of the necessity of preparing teachers for the schools before the schools were opened. As we have seen, he was appointed the first director of the first normal school in Chile, in the year 1842. It was a meager and poor school indeed, and its curriculum was also limited. It listed only methods of reading and writing, Christian morals, commercial arithmetic, Spanish spelling and grammar, geography, drawing, and elements of general history and of Chilean history. It was very difficult to find pupils for this normal school, because the school teacher's career was not an honored one and was not well remunerated. Of the twenty-eight candidates that began their studies, it was necessary to expel seventeen because of their not having the moral qualifications to become teachers. In the year 1845 the first contingent of teachers was graduated and then, although the state of the Chilean budget was very poor, the Chilean government gave Sarmiento a paid commission to go to Europe and the United States to examine schools there and to report on them on his return. He was away from Chile three years, receiving all the while his pension from our government. In the United States, he was much impressed by the common system of public education and by the theories of Horace Mann, whom he knew personally. After his return to Chile, he wrote two books on this problem, one called Popular Education and the other, Common Education, in which he endeavored to convince the Chilean people of the

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necessity of placing less emphasis on the university and the institutions of secondary education and of stressing the importance of the primary and common school. During these years lie did not have a special position in education, but he was given the direction of one of our first school magazines, The School Monitor, which he edited and to which he was also the most conspicuous contributor. Sarmiento remained in Chile nearly twenty years, but as soon as it was possible for him to return to his own country and to fight, at last victoriously, against Rosas, he left for Argentina, where he served as governor of the province of San J u a n and afterwards as minister to the United States. While there, he was elected president of the Argentine Republic and during his term he organized the primary schools of his country, founded a high school for girls, and schools of agriculture, helped to establish four normal schools, and provided necessary resources to the provinces for the promotion of public education. T h u s as president of Argentina he was able to realize his ideals on a vast scale. We have dwelt at some length on the organization of the school system in Chile because this may serve as a type for all the republics that have a centralized system of government. In such case, it is the central government that directs education all over the country, and, with the aid of certain officials, for instance the minister of public education and the Rector of the University, supervises the work of all kinds of schools and colleges. Most of the republics that have this centralized form of government also have the centralized form of teaching control. Another type exists for those republics that are federal; for instance, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico. T H E

A R G E N T I N E

S Y S T E M

T h e first things to be considered in the organization of the Argentine educational system are the provisions of the constitution of the country on the subject. This law was signed in

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the year 1853. Article number 5 states that each province has the right to adopt for itself a constitution in accordance with the republican and representative system that has been chosen, and that under these conditions the province has the right to create and to administer primary education. But article number 67, concerning the rights of the National Congress, says that subsidies may be given from the national treasury to those provinces whose incomes are insufficient to cover all the necessary expenses; and another article establishes the right of the Congress to provide whatever may be necessary for the progress of culture, creating systems of general and university instruction. Many discussions have arisen because of the ambiguity of these articles. While in one it is said that the provinces have the right and the duty of providing for primary education, at the same time the National Congress is empowered to order the courses of study of general instruction. What is general instruction? Is it the primary education and the secondary, or the secondary alone? Both interpretations have been accepted by one or another of the provinces, and in fact even today there is a great deal of overlapping in this field. Some of the provinces, for instance Córdoba, T u c u m á n , and others, mention only primary education in their constitutions. Córdoba, for example, says primary education shall be free and compulsory and it may be received in the state schools, in private schools, or at home. T h e province of Mendoza speaks not only of primary but also of secondary education as being the duty of the province; and the province of Buenos Aires says legislators of this province shall approve the necessary laws to establish and organize a system of common education, and at the same time, secondary and superior systems; and shall maintain the universities, colleges, and institutes necessary to carry out these mandates. These are the laws, but the fact is that the provinces grew in very different ways. T h e r e were some that were very rich and others that did not have money enough to pay their ex-

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penses, and as early as the year 1871 the National Congress began to give the latter subsidies to pay their teachers and the cost of the maintenance of the schools. Little by little this custom has become law. In 1905 law number 4874, better known as the Lainez Law, instituted national primary schools in the provinces instead of giving subsidies. But this has not ended the double practice of receiving subsidies and having national schools. T h e trouble has been that in some cases the provinces received the subsidies and did not apply them to the schools; sometimes, even when they received the subsidies in cash, they paid the teachers in bonds, some of which were depreciated. It is perfectly clear that the more advanced the province, the better it takes care of education; and that the less advanced provinces are those that have the greatest trouble in paying their teachers and in organizing good schools. T h e national schools in the provinces are better equipped and the teachers are better paid than in those that are maintained by provincial law; and, although the tendency of the provinces is not to allow their jurisdiction to be infringed by the national government, the inclination of the teachers is to get as many national schools as possible. T h e capital, Buenos Aires, influences the provinces also in another way: by giving an example of a good educational law. T h a t of 1884, on common education in the capital, territories, and national schools, has been the one that has been most imitated by the provinces, especially for the primary grades. What about secondary schools and universities? Those provinces that mention in their constitutions only the duty of taking care of primary education generally do not have any other kind of establishments, but the others provide some kind of secondary education, be it academic or technical. T h e federal government has established what are called Colegios Nacionales and Liceos de Niñas (high schools for boys and girls) in all the provinces. Some of the normal schools are national and some of them are provincial, as is also the case with commercial and industrial schools. All four universities

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are now of national scope, although three of them are in the provinces. Law number 1420, for the capital, as I have said has acted as a model for the provinces. It establishes that the aim of primary schools must be to aid and direct the moral, the intellectual, and the physical development of every child between six and fourteen years of age. T h e primary school must be, according to this law, nonsectarian, compulsory, free, graded, and in accordance with the rules of hygiene. By nonsectarian it means that religion is not to be taught in the schools; but the same law says that religion may be taught in the public school by authorized priests of the different denominations to those that wish to receive it, but only before or after the periods of school work. T h i s solution is not to be found in school laws of other South American countries, which either consent that the Catholic religion be taught in the schools or else completely forbid it. Free education means that no payment of any kind shall be asked of the parents. T h e compulsion clause holds between the sixth and fourteenth years of age, but at the same time the law establishes that if the child has finished the primary school course before that age, he is not obliged to remain afterwards. T h e minimum of instruction that is established by the law is reading, writing, arithmetic, national and universal geography, national history and elements of general history, the national language, morals, good manners, elements of hygiene, of physical and natural sciences, elements of design and music, gymnastics, and elements of the national constitution. Besides that, girls must receive teaching in domestic arts and sciences. T o supervise the teaching a council of education was formed which deals directly, not only with curricula and courses of study, but also with the selection of teachers. T h e lack of initiative throughout colonial times was the result of the imperative precepts of the crown, which did not prepare the provinces and small communities for a real interest in education, and that is one of the reasons why nearly all the

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countries of Latin America have had to shape a centralized educational system, in which the central government could take the initiative and dispose as proved necessary for the maintenance and progress of the schools.