Inventing America 1492-1992

...Those in the Spanish-speaking parts of America then sought a new basis for unity independent of the European metropolis, and a new name to describe themselves...

...Miguel Rojas Mix contends that debates over identity in the former Spanish colonies are best understood as part of that search for unity...

...The Conquest introduced alien, European systems, disrupting social and economic life at all levels...

...Luis Guillermo Lumbreras describes economic life before the arrival of the Spanish...

...They, too, are inventing-a new form of public life, independent of the state, that draws on pre-Conquest memories and modem exigencies to create bold new solutions to the problems born 500 years ago...

...Some pre-European techniques, he argues, can be recovered to increase arable land, reverse ecological damage, and reestablish the Andean peoples' long-lost control of their destiny...

...Finally, Anibal Quijano shows us that the communal traditions celebrated by Galeano and Lumbreras are already being reborn, in the collective struggles of the urban poor...

...Communal ways of life were driven underground, but still survive, as Galeano points out...

...In Spain, it was called "the Conquest...

...She shows how the Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre-"blood purity"--was transformed in the colonies, to create novel and cruel forms of racism...

...In fact, the Andean climate, terrain and plant and animal species required radically different survival techniques from those that had evolved in Europe...

...This issue of Report on the Americas-the first of a series on the quincentenary-looks at this invention and at the re-invention of other Americas, including "Latin" America, by people trying to remake their world...

...A MERICA WAS A "NEW WORLD," NOT JUST in the sense that it was new to Europe, but because it was a new creation...

...As colonial culture evolved, men's control of women's sexuality and the elite's preoccupation with racial purity became thoroughly intermeshed, with consequences that have lingered well beyond the colonial era...

...They did not think of themselves as alike, and their lands would not have a single name until 1507, when the German map maker Martin Waldseemiiller, impressed by Amerigo Vespucci's book Mundus Novus, carefully scripted "America" across a sketch of what we now call Venezuela...

...One of the most horrible aspects of the new order, as Verena Stolcke points out, was the widespread, almost universal, violation of native women's bodies and dignity...

...A return to these ways may be the only way to overcome the enormous cruelty and suffering still found throughout the continent...

...Because America refused to remain a subject continent, in their struggles for independence, colonial peoples reinvented themselves...

...On this side of the Atlantic, when Christopher Columbus crossed in 1492, were many lands with vastly different climates, topographies, and animal and plant life, where millions of people lived in hundreds-perhaps thousands-of dissimilar cultures...

...By replacing indigenous technologies with ones that depended on European resources and ecology, the new societies were condemned to poverty and dependency...

...Turning all these people into "Indians"-a subject people-and the whole territory into "America"--a subject hemisphere-became Western Europe's greatest enterprise for the next hundred and fifty years...

...The conquerors committed a fundamental error by assuming that Andean societies were more backward or primitive versions of their own...

...Rather, it was invented, to meet the psychological and commercial needs of an expanding Europe...

...But as Eduardo Galeano reminds us in this issue, America was not "discovered...