By Jaime Ortega Carrascal |
Bogotá, (EFE) changes, says Colombian anthropologist Carl Henrik Langebaek.
In his book “Conquistadors and Indians. The Untold Story” (Debate), launched at the Bogotá International Book Fair (FilBo), Langebaek breaks down the political, economic, social and even religious context of Christopher Columbus’s voyages and the little-explored role of women, indigenous peoples and blacks.
“The Spanish Conquest is surrounded by myths. One believes that everything has already been said and everything has been said, but in reality we repeat myths. Perhaps one of the most common is that the indigenous were passive before the Conquest, that the military superiority of the conquistadors basically overwhelmed them, and that the indigenous had no way to defend themselves. This is a very big and very repeated myth ”, he affirms in an interview with EFE.
Another myth is that this period was a confrontation between two cultures, the Spanish and the indigenous, “and it turns out that both things are constructions of the Colony. The Spanish identity was not consolidated in the 16th century, there were no Spaniards, people identified more with their small town, with their province”.
“And on the other hand, there were no indigenous people, there were no Indians because that is a colonial invention. There were a lot of very diverse communities with different interests, some communities helped the conquerors, others resisted, and others fled,” says Langebaek, a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) and professor at the Universidad de los Andes, from Bogota.
The indigenous mentality
In the same category falls the belief “that the indigenous have no history, that the indigenous are not capable of change, that they are adverse to change” and that their resistance was to keep their culture identical, when what happened was that they were ” capable of using Spanish weapons, of learning Castilian, of making alliances with the Spanish or with other indigenous societies.
In the same way, he dismantles the thesis that Spain sent thousands of prisoners to conquer the New World, “an absolute myth” because “the number of prisoners that arrived was minimal” because the Crown made an effort to prevent that from happening. and besides, the trip was very expensive.
“The Conquest is full of grays, of much more complex paths than what we have been told and one of those stories is that, that many prisoners arrived who had been released from jails. That is not correct information, ”he explains.
Without ignoring that the conquerors were cruel, both the Spanish and the French or the English, he adds that people of different origins and social conditions came in the caravels.
“There are some very nice statistics that show how in 1539 19 carpenters and 300 servants arrived, or bureaucrats from the Spanish State arrived. So, a very diverse population arrived here, many of which have never taken up a weapon against the indigenous people, which is another story that they don’t tell us, ”he maintains.
Women
In the chapter “The many faces of the Conquest”, the author rescues the role of women in this period, both Spanish and indigenous.
“Many women from Spain arrived, not in the same proportion as men, although in some years they reached between 40 and 45% of the migration”, and not only as companions of their husbands but also businesswomen, women who they disguised themselves as men so that they would be allowed to participate in the conquering hosts, ranchers, bakers, there was everything”, he points out.
Also “on the indigenous side, women were key because in indigenous societies women occupy a preponderant place to negotiate with the enemy, to negotiate with the stranger, and from very early on women are guides, they are translators. They are women who often unite with the Spanish and have children with the Spanish, sometimes voluntarily”, she clarifies.
In his opinion, “we have looked at the Conquest through a number of unusual myths”, such as “that the Spanish of the 16th century were racist, and not”, he argues, and explains that, on the contrary, they were a mestizo society in which there were “people from Africa, from northern Europe, there were Jews, there were Moors.”
Based on all this, the author points out that the message of his book is that we must “get out of simplistic schemes”, especially for politicians “who want to tell us that this was a thing of good and bad (…) and show a reality that always defies what we have been told”.