Joseph, I guess I have been feeling guilty about what the Conquest did to Mexico and South America since I was in school. When I was little, in grammar school, they started to teach us about the history of Mexico and the Southwest, (something my father, not my mother, was aware of) and when I found out what the Spaniards had done, I went to my father and told him that I hated every drop of Spanish blood in me because I thought it was terrible that the Spaniards had reduced the Aztecs' beautiful pyramids to rubble and built Catholic cathedrals on top of them. He told me that I shouldn't feel that way since we were Mestizos and the blood of both ran in our veins. He said the Indians were very cruel people whose religion condoned human sacrifice. (I think he even told me that women were treated very poorly by the Indians, whereas the Spaniards put women on a pedestal--I think he inferred that had the Indians won, I would be making corn tortillas in a hut there instead of living free here). He himself was an atheist, and he hated priests, but he never told me why. He was very torn about his feelings for Mexico. He had loved his childhood there, but he had hated the oligarchy there. He blamed them for having to leave Mexico at that time. The fighting between the Federales and the Revolucionarios was the worst there in that place. You know, today we had a visit from one of our friends who has a young son 16 years old who has been watching the "How the West Was Won" series on TV. His son's reaction was the same as mine when he saw what the Indians had suffered under the white man and his manifest destiny. He was very upset by the revelation. I think at an early age we either develop a social consciousness or we do not. Some cheer the white man's conquests and others feel bad about the sacrificing of the indigent people, their customs, their religions, their language, their history etc. It is this pillaging and subjugation that makes it impossible to trace our Indian ancestors. Our Indio ancestors had traditions, oral histories that are now lost. Emilie Garcia Port Orchard, WA.
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