RE: Christian saints and colonial conquest

[Julio Pino <jpino@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The reason why the indigenous of Latin America where, with important
exceptions like the Carib, not exterminated by the Spaniards had nothing to
do with the nature of the two colonizing societies, Catholic versus
Protestant, but with LABOR SHORTAGE.The settlers of N. America were family
homesteaders who could afford to exterminate the locals and replace them
with white laborers. The conquerors of Latin America were sojourners who
required Indian labor for mine, hacienda, and plantation work, or else
imported African slaves.
Let's not assign any moral superiority to one set of colonizers over another.
BTW, most demographers, eg Hanke and Lewis,  conclude the Indian population
of both Mexico and Peru dropped by between fifty to ninety percent during
the first century after the conquest of the Aztec and Inka.
Julio Cesar Pino
At 11:00 PM 2/12/00 -0300, you wrote:
>Louis Proyect wrote:
>> NY Times, February 12, 2000
>>
>> When Armies of Conquest Marched In, So Did Saints
>>
>> By CHRIS HEDGES
>>
>snip
>> Catholic saints, on the other hand, included martyrs, missionaries, nuns,
>> aesthetic visionaries, mystics and Indians, blacks and mulattos, often
>from
>> humble backgrounds, who had visions or led pious lives. "There was more
>> room in Catholic tradition for sacred biographies of women, as well as
>men,
>> for veneration of the humble and the powerful, the colonized races as well
>> as Europeans," said Mr. Greer. "But this does not mean that when holding
>up
>> an image of a saint, such as Martín de Porres, a mulatto doorman for a
>> monastery in colonial Peru, that other races were treated any more
>equally.
>> It was rather a validation of their humble status. It illustrated a
>> different conception of what constituted achievement."
>>
>> "There is a way in which the colonized races, the Indians, blacks and
>mixed
>> races, are part of the vision in the Catholic colonies," he continued,
>> contrasting them with the view of Protestant New Englanders. "They are
>> considered socially inferior, but not, as in New England, excluded from
>> view."
>>
>> Many indigenous people, especially given the persecution and forced
>> conversions, found it prudent to fuse the imported Catholic saints with
>> their own deities. Slowly, the transplants began to mutate. Native saints,
>> even those imported from Europe, began to take on characteristics peculiar
>> to the New World, and they were joined by a pantheon of new saints who
>> legitimized the colonial process and embraced its peculiar elements
>>
>> "There were saints brought from the Old World who were conflated with
>> indigenous deities," said Charlene Villaseñor Black, assistant professor
>of
>> art history at the University of New Mexico, who has just finished a book
>> on St. Joseph, the patron saint of Mexico. "St. Joseph was conflated with
>> the Aztec rain deity Tlaloc, and he ends up taking over some of the tasks
>> of Tlaloc. He becomes associated with earthquakes, rain and fertility.
>>
>> The saint did not have these associations in the Old World. The Virgin
>was,
>> as well, conflated with Tonantzin, the major mother goddess figure of the
>> Aztecs."
>
>This is, in general, the very and deep difference between the societies that
>the two colonizations created.
>The spanish one created a society in which the indians were not extermined
>in the way that it happened in the protestant settlements. Today the native
>and original population of Latin America is the main part of the workers and
>peasant classes, but they still exist. Possibly, IMHO, we can not say the
>same in the anglosaxian America.
>
>Julio FB
>
>
>