BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

BULLETIN 4

ON THE CIVILIZATION OF THE TWO AMERICAS

We inhabit a different world on this side of the Atlantic; we truly live in what centuries ago Seneca predicted would be the novos orbes--a New World, with distinctive individuality. A good number of these characteristics are geographical, resulting from the shape of these lands stretching from the Arctic to the Antarctic zones to make the two Americas lands of all climates, of all products and of all types of economic organization, separated by the oceans from other parts of the world. The geographical isolation of the New World, coupled with the shape of the American continents extending from north to south, cannot be found anywhere else in the world and provide the ideal environment for the establishment and developing of human societies with very advanced standards of political, economical and social progress.

The New World for several thousand years before Columbus had an aboriginal population which the Europeans first called Indians and whose number, notwithstanding the slaughter and the enslaving and the ill treatment for centuries practised on them by Spanish, English,

French, Dutch and Portuguese colonizers, is now larger than it ever was and shows a decided tendeney to increase, even in those coun tries where, as in the United States, the Indian was considered to be a vanishing element of the population a few years ago. Mr. John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, asserts that the Indian population of the United States is increasing more rapidly than the Negro and the White. That is true, too, of Mexico, Central America, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and some other countries in this part of the world.

It does not seem probable that there were more than fifteen million Indians in the New World in pre-Columbian times; but that number, if we pool present day Indians and mixed-bloods, has more than doubled, for the Indian population of the New World today exceeds thirty millions. It still predominates wherever there were advanced aboriginal civilizations, as in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. We have, therefore, to conclude that the Indian is not disappearing, that he is an important--an increasingly important--factor of the ethnic elements living in the New World.

But as the Indian himself has survived the impact of European civilization, so also have his philosophy of life, his artistic capabilities and means of expression, his simple economic life. This is more evident in Mexico and Peru, but it is by no means absent among the Indians in the United States and elsewhere.

The most advanced civilizations of the New World in pre-Columbian times were born and developed in the tropical and torrid zones. Mayas, Toltecs, Aztecs, Chibehas, Quechuas, lived from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn. This singular paradox is completed by the fact that the more backward Indians generally lived in the temperate and the cold zones of both Americas. And if it is alleged by some that the high civilizations flourished in the plateaus, that assertion overlooks the fact that the Mayas usually attained their extraordinary progress in the lowlands. As a rule, the Indian has remained numerically and culturally strong where he was so at the time of the conquest, and has been overrun and destroyed where he had a poor cultural structure, as we can see today in the United States and Argentina. It was not long ago that Ortega Gasset was drawing a parallel between these two countries and coming to the conclusion that they appear to have a common vital horizon, as belonging to peoples born and developed off-center, far from where the old Indian civilizations had developed, and thus showing a tendency to make of the United States and Argentina the center of other civilizations.

The underlying aboriginal cultural layer is not lost in the New World: it is kept alive by the increasing number, influence and preparation of the aborigines themselves and by their reaction following the impact of European civilization brought across the Atlantic more than four centuries ago. The most gigantic migration ever recorded in history was that of the Europeans to the New World, starting in 1492 and still going on. It is close to impossible to tell how many Europeans came to the New World during colonial times, but from 1820 to 1935 the United States received well over thirty millions of them; Argentina, from 1858 to 1935 more than six millions; Brazil about the same number in that period; and Cuba about one million during the course of the twentieth century. These figures referring to four countries give an idea of what a vast migration has taken place from Europe into the New World. Spain, Great Britain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, at one time or another colonized or attempted to colonize more or less extensive territories of the New World, almost all of which are now independent countries. Haiti excepted--In these--only three languages dominate: English, Spanish and Portuguese, with such close affinities between the latter two, that it can properly be said that the whole of the New World, from Alaska down to Cape Horn, speaks either English or Hispano-Portuguese with accents, regional terms, and African, Indian and foreign words. This situation, which we cannot find in any other part of the world, points to the possibility of further greater changes in the languages used by the peoples of the New World. Language is, however, a vehicle of culture, and every mingling of languages will be accomplished by mingling of cultures, ideas and accomplishments of every kind.

The European brought the Negro to the New World. With the beginning of the 16th century the African slave trade was started, and Spaniards, British, French, Dutch, Prussians, Portuguese, Anglo-Americans and Latin-Americans engaged in the cruel traffic which, so far as the New World is concerned, did not come to an end until about 1870 with the last smugglings of Africans into Cuba. A conservative estimate of the number of Negro slaves brought to the New World in nearly four centuries would amount to more than ten millions. It can be said that at one time or another the Negro slave, in smaller and larger groups, has been all over the New World, from Canada to Argentina; but it is a fact that the Atlantic sea coast has always been his special place of abode. Again, as in the case of the Indian, the Negro has been able to survive political oppression and economic exploitation; and has not only survived, but increased his numbers to the point where there are today more than thirty million colored people in the New World, all of them incorporated in the civilization of their particular countries and proving their capabilities as useful elements of society. The Negroes brought across the Atlantic represented a vertical cross-section of many different African societies, more or less advanced, and their presence and exploitation have contributed to shape and determine the political, social and economic life of extensive regions of the New World.

There have been still other minor racial additions to the population of both Americas in the last one hundred years, represented by about one million Chinese and Japanese, who established themselves mainly in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Cuba and Peru. More recently about one hundred thousand East Indians have been brought by the British to some of their colonies in the Caribbean. A huge and complete process of acculturation-tinued contacts between two or more cultures has been going on in the New World, for several centuries, affecting all the racial elements just described. It is generally accepted that there were more than one hundred and fifty languages spoken by the Amerinds in pre-Columbian times; yet all of those languages have given place to Spanish, English and Portuguese, extending themselves over the New World to be used by everybody in the course of time. If certain authors have begun to discuss the mixture of Spanish and English spoken all along the border lands of the United States and Mexico--what Vasconcelos, the Mexican philosopher, now contemptuously calls the "pocho" language it is likely that between Portuguese Brazil and a neighboring Spanish country that mixture will be even easier. The same process has affected the descendants of the African slaves brought to the New World. It is a fact generally overlooked that the Dahomans, the Ashantis, the Foulahs, the Kaffirs, the Calabars, the Angolas, the Yorubas, and many other Negro groups brought to the New World did not have a common language and were not all of them at the same stage of cultural evolution. The Africans and their descendants, therefore, have gone through the same process of acculturation as the Amerinds; but if the study of the mingling of eul. tures did not go beyond the point we have just reached, it would not be complete. The truth is that a "give and take" of cultures has been occurring in every direction during several centuries. The European has provided the New World with four languages and two groups of languages; he brought with him Western civilization, with its most representative economic, political and social features; but he also borrowed from the Amerind and from the Aframerican in many respects and not, as it is generally believed, in the sense of economic exploitation alone. Artistic manifestations, literary subjects, words, scientific and practical knowledge, economic institutions, some social patterns and many other cultural elements of the New World result from the mingling of cultures and, in certain regions, from the mingling of peoples, too. The assertion of Mr. Melville J. Herskovits (The American Negro, New York, 1928, p. 10) to the eitect that about 80% of the colored population of the United States has white or Indian blood, is important in itself; but that is also the situation in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic and other countries where the mixture has been taking place for centuries, more or less freely according to circumstances, lack of prejudice, and even policies of national integration. And let us not forget that in the countries where they boast of not having Negroes or Indians, they can do so because they have already absorbed these racial elements together with their cultures, many of whose characteristics can from time to time be detected in the life of these countries.

Out of that gigantic "give and take" of cultures,

which we could say has just been started, although it is more than four centuries old, the civilization of the New World is coming into existence; and there is no doubt that, in line with their formative elements, it will be a halfbreed civilization, a "mestizo" civilization. A few years ago Vasconcelos startled the Latin American countries with his theory of the cosmic race which was bound to be developed from the Mexican border down to Cape Horn. It is today highly questionable whether the Mexican border would in the long run be the northern limit to the so called cosmic race formed by the mingling of diverse ethnic elements: but if the mixture of races will not go on evenly everywhere and there cannot be any question that it is taking place in every country--the mixture of cultures which will produce a halfbreed civilization is in full swing throughout the New World. The Amerind, the White, the Aframerican and the Oriental living from Alaska to Cape Horn form, for better or for worse, the halfbreed civilization of the New World found in every country--the United States or Mexico, Cuba or Colombia, Haiti or Panama, Argentina or Brazil, Chile or Canada. In Spanish colonial times. it was said in Hispanic America that the Spaniards could do whatever they wanted in their colonies, with lust one exception: they could not have Spanish children. Their descendants were Americans. born in the New World and feeling themselves Ameri cans. This was also true of the British, the French, the Dutch, and all other colonizing nations.

The halfbreed civilization of the New World is a different civilization; a civilization which must be studies, more than by anyone else, by those living on this side of the Atlantic. And it must be so because it is ours, because it means that there is more in common among the countries of the New World than any of them have with the countries which have sent across the Atlantic the elements composing some of the ethnic groups in both Americas. It is necessary to consider and appraise what pre-columbian civilizations were like; who the white settlers were and what they added: what supplied by the Negro and by the Oriental-- all of this in order to learn where we come from, what we are and where we are bound tor in the New World. And this we must do without stopping to think about the much discussed decline of the West, the revitalizing of ancient European or Asiatic powers and other problems pertaining to the Old World. Those problems must of course interest us as something connected with other human beings, of old engaged in the struggle for progress that is also our goal; but this goal we must strive for through the employment of our own means, and unhandi. capped by the multiplicity of languages, the old feuds, the growth of the population in small countries and the limited economic resources so common in the Old World. As the Chilean thinker and teacher Gabriela Mistral puts it: it is time for all of us to come back from Europe.

The importance and usefulness of this study can be even better seen in the following words of Professor Kidder, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, before the Third Pan-American Congress of Geography and History:

"Civilization is at once our greatest achievement and our greatest danger. Being the creation of exceptional brains and always being carried forward by a relatively small number of unusual individuals, it is never really common human property. And being at the same time super-organic, it is uncontrolled by biological brakes and moves with an entirely different order of velocity than that of physical or mental evolution. Civilization also progresses unevenly, its material components always tending to outstrip its spiritual attributes. And when it gets, in one way or another, out of hand, come war, pestilence, economic maladjustment or any one of the hundred secondary ills which bring social orders to collapse. So it was with Egypt and Greece and Rome. So it must have been with the Mayas. So it may well be with us. If we are to cope with this Frankenstein's monster, if we are to keep it in its place as a servant of man, we must understand it far better than we do today... "

May, 1937

Herminio Portell-Vil