A painting depicting the arrival of the Spanish in America.
“I was paying attention and working to find out if there was gold, and I saw that some of them were bringing gold a piece hanging in a hole in her nose“, he wrote Christoph Columbus in his diary on October 13, 1492, the day after he landed in America. Every year on October 12th Spain celebrates this Hispanic Heritage Day, commemorative date of the arrival of Spanish ships on the American continent. A milestone that revolutionized the world, stormed Europe into modernity, plunged America into genocide caused by the Spanish conquerors and changed trade relations between continents.
Historian and philosopher Enrique Dussel claimed in his famous 1492 essay: “The concealment of the Other gave Europe the feeling that it was the center of the world and America the first periphery of history.” Native Americans became the “Other” and “these World was interpreted as negative, pagan, satanic and perverted.” It was then that began a conquest that many still call a “discovery” todaya concept that has been rejected by historians for various reasons, from the fact that the word evokes Eurocentric interpretations to the arrival of Columbus in a place whose existence was already known.
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Aurora González, historian and doctor of Hispanic Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), summarizes some of the errors in the use of “discovery”, a word that is gradually being rejected in historiography: “It’s about this a deeply Eurocentric terminology this more or less consciously ignores the existence of complex societies that inhabited this territory and which are often represented in the imaginary collective as a caricatured entity, the result of centuries of construction of the stereotypical image of the Indian. Authors such as Walter Mignolo and Edmundo O’Gorman claim that America was never discovered but was invented as a colonial product. Aside from that, Talking about discovery rather than conquest or colonization sweetens the reality That was objectively violent.”
On the one hand, the Eurocentric view gradually reduces its importance in the historical story; On the other hand, only circles associated with the extreme right remain loyal to words that are practically no longer used. The concept of the “discovery of America” is similar to the idea of the “Reconquista,” the period in which the Christian world expelled the Muslim population from the Iberian Peninsula. “The term “invasion” is rarely used to talk about the arrival of the Romans on the peninsula or the capture of the American continent. The defense of the consciousness of language and its lack of innocence is often ridiculed by defenders of a static and conservative status quo,” claims the historian.
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Works such as “Vox before History” (Akal Publishers) reflect the ultra positions in Spain that try to maintain increasingly outdated concepts. “At the moment, The far right continues to refer to the Muslims who dominated the Iberian Peninsula as Intruders“continues to identify an ‘we’ with them, expelling the Islamic past from the national historical construction while perpetuating stereotypes about Muslims and Islam, some of which were already used by the Orientalists of the 19th and 20th centuries,” he argues. Gonzalez.
The decentralization of history, accept that not everything is happening in the regions now occupied by Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Germany, and that there are advances and advances that can come from other places in the world has also led to certain theories entering the public debate with vigor. Certainly some postulates are attempts to make projects visible or to arouse national pride, but from the perspective of demystifying Europe they are still relevant.
Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer, designed a novel map for the time. Dating from 1491, it already identifies borders and lands similar to those that later became America. One year before the arrival of ColumbusThis map, now kept at Yale University, gave clues to a priori unknown countries in Europe. In fact, the final result of the first world map from 1507 retains the same boundaries as Martellus’ original. “From the writings of Ferdinand, son of Columbus, it appears that Columbus found Japan where Martellus described it, with the same orientation, away from the Asian coast and with its main axis from north to south. “No other surviving map from this period shows Japan in this configuration,” said a 2015 statement from Yale University.
Something that seems to be in contrast is the arrival of the Vikings in America, almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus. A site in Newfoundland, Canada, displays Viking remains dating from marine exploration between the 18th and 12th centuries. The Remains of L’Anse aux As Meadows reveals, they were the first Europeans to set foot in the Americas.
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On the other hand, over the years the story has developed about how supposedly Abubakari IIKing of the Mali Empire, would have reached America almost two centuries before Christopher Columbus. Crowned in 1310. Abubakari II sent delegates to Egypt to learn how to build larger boats and left the African coast with thousands of ships for unknown lands, although the origin of the voyage, according to some theoretical scholars, was to spread Islam and to reach the limits of the world. Ocean. Be that as it may, only one ship returned from a first and major expedition, which must have warned that they had sighted new lands.
It was then that Abubakari II led a new fleet that was never heard from again. The three authors who examined this feat ““They agree that the fleet reached the Americas and that it had a notable, if not essential, influence on the development of some Indian cultures,” says a study by Xabier Puigserver Blasco and Eric Garcia Moral on historiography in connection with This event historians like Van Sertima, one of the main proponents of these visions, were delegitimized by other scientists.
One of the contemporary starting points for the escape from Eurocentric views was in 1978, when the Palestinian Edward Said published his work “Orientalism”. “It examined the relations between the West and the East from the perspective of imperialist dynamics, which categorized the othernesses, the peoples that Europeans encountered, from very long-standing stereotypes of the Orient,” explains González. “Although Said’s book is currently considered outdated, it reminds us of the need to ask ourselves about the origin of certain stereotypes towards the other, especially when this comes from the Global South. “It is therefore important to identify these concepts that carry a heavy historiographical burden and to create spaces to rethink a more complex, richer past, far from a single and hegemonic vision,” he says.