Spanish Conquering of the AmericasThe Spanish treatment of native peoples they encountered in conquest of the Americas can be summarized in one word: poor; However, good natured fun and friendly relations between cultures wasn’t of utmost importance to the Spaniards. Ultimately their goals in conquering the Americas were to convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity, to obtain riches, and to beat out rivals: England and France.
The Spanish obsession with discovery a source of wealth in the New World is apparent from their initial interest in America at all, touched upon vaguely in Christopher Columbus’s Journey of the First Voyage (1492), which documents Columbus’s first of four trips to what he thought were parts of the continent of Asia. This first trip landed Columbus and his men in the West Indies. In his journal, Columbus vividly describes the appearances of the native people in a way that somehow dehumanizes them. He writes, “They are very well made with handsome bodies, and very good countenances.” (Columbus pg 7.) Here, he describes them as “well made” (Columbus pg 7), as if put together intentionally and methodically rather than by the less predictable biological process. He pushes it even further in the next line of descriptive language when he compares the native americans to livestock, stating “their hair is short and coarse, almost like the hairs of a horsetail.” (Columbus pg 7.) The analogy is subtle, and could be passed off as a simple simile, but it is hard to overlook beside the comment on how these people are “well made.” (Columbus pg 7.) It is as if Columbus is trying to sell these people as a salesmen or auctioneer, examining their features objectively and convincing a seller of how productive and useful they might be, hence the parallels he draws between these people and livestock and manufactured goods. Columbus sees these people as inferior, subhuman even, and capable of serving as a source of labor in the form of slaves. He sees them as something that can be sold, a form of riches very different from the standard silver or gold.
It is this dehumanization that makes these people very easy for Columbus and other Spaniards to treat horrendously. They are not even seen as being human, therefore it is not seen as necessary to treat them as such. Bartolome de Las Casas describes these atrocities in A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552.) Las Casas, a Spanish conqueror who once waged military attacks against the indigenous peoples, eventually renounced slavery and its cruelties. In describing the treatment of the natives by the Spanish, Las Casas says “… they treated them not as beasts, which i cordially wished they would, but as the most abject dung and filth of the earth.” (Las Casas pg 12.) Here, Las Casas places
a point of contention. The natives are “the only real and authentic people of the Indies where it now comes easy to treat them with respect. They are of all kinds of race, all kinds of species. Most of the natives of India are the same.” As for “the other race”, Las Casas writes: “Many of the Indians who are now doing it for the Empire are not yet even allowed to join in it on any of their own terms. There are many of them who want their only nationality (and even to get it, they must be willing and able to join)….” (Las Casas/A Concise History of Mexico from 1532 to 1613 pg 11.) “It is quite true that the Spaniards began to do this as a religious and economic matter.” (Las Casas) In A Colonial Life (1611), for example, Las Casas cites the same language passage that goes back to the “Clergy of Stendahl” who was sent to the Spanish conquest in the 1610s for Spanish training in Spanish-speaking New England to try to understand all of New England. The Spanish conquistadores wanted to stop the development of Native America, but in the 17th century they refused to change the history of what Columbus referred to as America. This led to what is known today as ‘the Spanish Civil War.’ In what follows, a number of Latin and European immigrants came to Texas to fight the Spanish in its war against Columbus. I know firsthand this struggle, and in particular this book, and others based on it, and the fact that I was born to the Mexican people in 1807, in the heart of the American Plains, was nothing short of a war. They were fighting an Empire whose sole purpose was to annex the nation of Mexico. In doing so, they were helping to prevent the Spanish from conquering part of Africa and Europe. As a nation, they were fighting against us, to the end being fighting us to the end. Their whole purpose was to build a wall and to subjugate us to a slave race. To make us slaves, their chief goal was to enslave us so long as we would not have our property. This is all very real in a very real situation. As a Spanish citizen, you have to say, what have I become. How can you write a story about me as the firstborn grandson of a colonial slave and as a member of the first black family in the country on such an economic, political, or spiritual level? What can I say, if I come through this war, because I have become a slave? And then, that was the goal, didn’t it not? Your mother said: ‘So you die