columbus, and the death and survival of races

On Columbus Day, Catherine and I took Greta right down the street to Kiddie Park, one of a vanishing breed of mom-and-pop amusement parks for kids.    The park is usually not open on Mondays, but had opened just for Columbus Day, and was more packed with people than we'd ever seen it.

At some point during the day, it struck me as I looked around that we were the only Anglos in the whole aplace.    The park was mostly run and patronized by people for whom the arrival of Columbus was a death knell.    With explorers came new diseases and germs, and cattle with their diseases and germs, all of which hit an utterly vulnerable population, like the Bubonic Plague times three.

In the 1330s the plague killed nearly a third of Europe.    In the 1500s, smallpox and anthrax and a hundred other Old World bugs killed ninety-five percent of the Americas.    This is stuff we didn't study when I was a kid, but is now common knowledge, the kind of knowledge called mesofacts (like the fact that we have several new elements in the periodic table!    Who knew!    Did you?), based on research that has completely overturned our ideas of what these continents were like and what happened to the people on them.

A thriving population, as dense as that of Europe or Asia at the time, with at least a few cities as big as London or Paris (one where Mexico City is now;  another where St Louis is now;  another where the Amazon rain forest is now, thrillingly recounted in David Grann's The Lost City of Z and its followups) —– a thriving population not decimated, for "decimated" means you lose a tenth, but, what, nona-decimated?    What's the word for losing 95 percent of your population?    Destroyed?    Nearly destroyed, but not quite.

It turns out that we're living in one of those post-apocalyptic scenarios we so love to see in movies like The Book of Eli.    These populations were among the healthiest in history, but (therefore) vulnerable to all sorts of diseases that Mithridatean Europeans had become immune to.    They were like a superhealthy kid who never had chicken pox.    The axe was waiting to fall.    It just so happened to fall the way it did;  if not, it undoubtedly would have fallen later.    If the Native Americans hadn't been so vulnerable, we could imagine a history more like that of India, with colonization, rebellion, and cultural superiority/inferiority complexes and all that.    But that's not how it happened.

Which means that every mestizo that you know is descended from the 5 percent.

Interesting, then, that that proud history is so buried, often by the ones who should be proudest not to bury it.    For instance, the word "Mexican," which derives from one of the populations that mixed profitably with Europeans just a bit south of here, has become a pejorative, supplanted by the more respectable-sounding "Hispanic" in recent decades.    "Hispanic," of course, is a word that refers not to any Native American population but rather to the inhabitants of Spain.    The word "Hispanic," the way we norteamericanos use it, could mean a person from Spain or a more-or-less purely descended Spanish person from Venezuela, or a more-or-less purely descended Spanish person from Mexico, or a mixed-ancestry person from either Venezuela or Mexico.    Most "Hispanics" in Texas, naturally, are better called Mexican.    Why lump oneself into that fuzzy catchall?

Many accept the term "Mexican-American."    But even that has begun to carry a pejorative sense.    My 8-year-old nephew refuses to call the domino game Mexican Train by its name because he's been so thoroughly taught that that word is an insult.

Hispanic life in the US is filled with such ironies.    Grab any handful of academic papers that talk about it and about language, and most of them (95 percent, quizas?)    will refer to Spanish as the language of the oppressed, and English as the language of the oppressor.    But in reality, of course, it is Spanish that is the language of the oppressor, the invader, the conqueror, the conquistador.    The languages of the true oppressed, ramrodded, bullied, defeated peoples have nearly disappeared.    (To be fair, even in these papers, academics often prefer the term Chicano to Hispanic, "Chicano" being derived from "Mexicano," which then preserves the Nahuatl name, even as it's attached to the Spanish language.)

Of course, the Spanish culture of the brown-skinned people that make up a majority of San Antonians and a sizable number of Texans is a matter of interest.    It's where they got their language and many of their customs.    But of equal or maybe greater interest is where they got their other customs, not to mention their brown skin.    They're the hardiest of Native Americans, the ones who didn't get killed off in waves of disease, the survivors, the ones who married out and didn't die out, the five percent.

All of our categories are a bit arbitrary.    I just got through calling Catherine and Greta and myself "Anglo," when in fact none of us is strictly Anglo.    There's plenty of recent pan-European (and, probably, Native American and African) blood in our veins.    But there you have it.    There we were, "whites" and mestizos at an amusement park, all of us fairly forgetful of the dramatic history carried in our very flesh.