TUCSON – My adopted city is late to the renaming party. Tucson recently changed the name of Christopher Columbus Park, because ole Christopher has become persona non gratis.
My Roman nose is not out of joint over this, even though I am 100 percent Italian, which means that I’m a mixed breed, or “mongrel,” if you prefer to use an insulting term. This characterization reflects the fact that Italians have some of the most diverse DNA in the world, a result of so many different people and races marching across the peninsula and spreading their seed.
Italy didn’t become a nation until 369 years after Columbus sailed into the Caribbean on behalf of the Spanish Crown (a k a Hispanics) and began brutalizing the indigenous people, thus continuing the barbarity and butchering that Homo sapiens, including indigenous peoples, had inflicted on each other for tens of thousands of years beforehand.
Anyone who believes that conquering and colonizing are just White evils or European evils instead of evils of human nature has probably paid an exorbitant price to be miseducated in college instead of reading unbiased, unvarnished, apolitical history, which costs nothing at a public library and doesn’t require going into debt with a tuition loan.
My mom’s side of the family hailed from Bassignana, a village just to the north of Genoa, which was the home of Columbus. But even with that connection, Mom and her relatives held no special regard for Columbus, didn’t feel any kinship to him, weren’t members of the Knights of Columbus, and didn’t see Columbus Day as anything other than a holiday.
My dad had even less of a connection to Columbus, because his side of the family hailed from Lombardy instead of Piedmont. Lombardy is named after the Lombards, a Germanic people who had begun invading the Italian peninsula in the sixth century. Over time, they were joined by Saxons, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians and Ostrogoths.
Of course, long before that, in 218 BCE., the Carthaginians of North Africa took their elephants from their outpost in Spain, crossed the Alps, and invaded the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War.
The citizens of Italy have a more mature sense of history than Americans do, if for no other reason than they are surrounded by the remnants of so many past empires and civilizations. They know that glory is fleeting, that good and evil are universal and transcend race, and that the great diversity of the world cannot be reduced to the seven artificial categories concocted by the U.S. government and promulgated by America’s key institutions. The seven are: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and, most recently, Middle Easterner.
Human diversity doesn’t fit neatly into seven boxes. Just because tens of millions of people, prestigious universities, and directors of DEI believe it does, that doesn’t make it so. There is considerable crossover between the boxes, each box isn’t discrete or homogeneous, and there are hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in the Americas and the world, not seven.
The categorizers can try to strip you of your uniqueness, but you don’t have to accept it.
Let’s take a peek into the Hispanic box to see a small sample of the diversity and the bloodshed within. The focus will be on the sub-box of Mexicans, who are just one of the scores of nationalities, races, and ethnic groups in the larger Hispanic box. It’s a box that I know well, having lived in the barrio of San Antonio for five years, having lived in southern Arizona for another 35 years, and having extensively studied the good, bad and ugly history of Spaniards, Mexicans, Tejanos, Mestizos, Mayans, and Aztecs.
Trigger warning: The following runs counter to the fatuous but popular DEI narrative that all Hispanics—or Latinos, if you will—are people of color, are disadvantaged minorities, are victims of injustices but never victimizers, are bereft of a voice and political power, and are in need of the paternalism and pandering of so-called White people. The following also runs counter to the equally fallacious narrative that Mexicans and other Latinos don’t have a legacy of slave-holding and oppression.
The peek begins with a look at the origins of the word “Mexican.”
People from a land known as Aztlan, which was in the desert of today’s northern Mexico, originally called themselves the Mexica but later became known as the Aztecs. Circa 1300 CE, they migrated south to the fertile and swampy Valley of Mexico, near the present site of Mexico City.
They were an industrious and fierce people who believed in blood sacrifice and worshipped a warrior god named Huitzilopochtli. They drained the marshlands, built islands for villages, dug canals, constructed aqueducts, and planted crops—all without animal power and the wheel. Their settlement would eventually become the city known as Tenochtitlan. By 1450, or 42 years before Columbus landed in the Caribbean, the city had an estimated population of 200,000.
Pyramidal temples dotted the city’s skyline, and the steps leading to the top of the temples were covered with dried blood. The blood came from ritualist sacrifices of humans. Paul Cooper detailed this in his book Fall of Civilizations, as follows:
. . . this was done in a wide variety of ways, but the most common was for a sacrificial victim to be brought to the top of one of the pyramids in Tenochtitlan, where a priest would plunge an obsidian dagger into the victim’s chest to remove the heart. The still-pulsating heart was placed in a bowl and burned allowing its energy to return to the sun. Meanwhile, the body was thrown down the steps of the pyramid, dismembered and fed to the animals at the city zoo.
It’s impossible to know the full extent of this bloodthirsty practice before contact with Europeans. Sacrificial victims were usually prisoners of war, captured during battle with rival states.
The Aztecs were colonizers, oppressors, and imperialists. They eventually conquered the indigenous people who had been in the valley before their arrival and who had established their own sophisticated society. This gave rise to the militaristic Aztec Empire, which sent its armies to conquer and subjugate lands beyond the Valley of Mexico.
In a story that has been repeated throughout human history and that continues to be repeated, the Aztec Empire met its demise at the hands of a more powerful empire. Of course, that was the Spanish Empire, an empire of Hispanics.
The tip of the empire’s spear in Mexico was Hernán Cortés. Through treachery, brutality, disease, and technological prowess, he defeated the Aztecs and King Moctezuma, aided by native peoples who hated the Aztecs.
The Spanish didn’t win because they were genetically superior to the Aztecs or more vicious. It’s that the Spanish, and Europeans in general, benefited from the luck of geography, climate and resources. They were on east-west trade routes, where goods, ideas and technology moved with ease; they had horses for transportation, for animal power, and for warfare; they had other domesticated animals for food; they had rivers and the Mediterranean Sea for transportation networks; they had a temperate climate; and they had timber and other resources.
This led to the development of large sailing ships, cannons, muskets, armor, mobile armies and navies, navigational know-how, sophisticated administrative states and financial systems, and strong monarchies and hereditary succession to reduce the incidence of political upheaval. And because so many kingdoms and empires were in such close proximity to each other in Europe and elsewhere along the Mediterranean, there were many conflicts and wars, which, in spite of the human toll, led to greater military prowess with more effective battlefield and naval tactics.
The Aztecs didn’t have a chance. Nor did the indigenous people of North America, who are also known as Native Americans.
The conquering and colonizing were also inevitable given human nature and the moral philosophy and economic system of the times. Consider what would’ve happened if the Aztecs had magically switched places with the Spanish and had the same luck of geography, climate and resources. Spain might be called Aztecia today.
One last peek into the history of Hispanics: They began shipping enslaved Africans to the Caribbean in 1501, long before the English and Dutch began the slave trade to North America. And they shipped a lot more than the English and Dutch did. Yet according to the narrative in K-12 schools, higher education, and elsewhere, Hispanics are not seen as enslavers and oppressors to the same degree that Whites are.
It’s beyond the scope of this essay to continue telling the history of Mexico, other than to say that it’s a history of many revolutions, of a Catholic Church that was a major political power, and of a two-class society of powerful and rich Spaniards at the top and mixed-race and indigenous peoples at the bottom—remnants of which continue today, which is a big reason why Mexico is so corrupt and a political mess.
European autocracy and bloodshed eventually led to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and to liberal democracy, which is the best hope for mankind. Because people tend to learn more from experience than from abstract theories, it’s as if they had to experience evil before they could appreciate classical liberalism. Now, alarmingly, these values are being attacked in some quarters because they are seen as White values.
A closing thought: This essay was written on Columbus Day, October 14, a day that is also being referred to as Indigenous Day. The thinking behind this change is that Columbus was evil and indigenous people are good. Actually, human history is much more complicated.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
