Confluencias

Dr. Felix Luna, the most prestigious Latin American history scholar, discusses the merger process of the Spanish and precolumbian American cultures. Crashes and conflict anecdotes are overlooked, and the Author focuses in what today constitutes the people of the Spanish America, unearthing the clues of the particular crossbreeding that underlies not only in the racial but also in the ling?istic, artistic, religious and institutional aspects of this unique and many times fascinating melt-pot culture.

"Confluences" develops a fascinating theme: the mix of Hispanic culture with pre-existing American cultures to discovery. In putting it this way, the treatment of the shocks and conflicts of the conquest of America is left behind. It is not that I am unaware and much less that I hide these shocks: I simply take them for granted, to enter a much richer terrain, which is the formidable contact that the new world had as a stage. Every process of domination of one people by another is horrible. It involves massacres, cultural devastation, uprooting, compulsions. Such terrors took place on the American continent as they have throughout the world throughout human history. But this would not be the subject on which Confluencias would focus, but rather that which has to do with what the peoples of America populated by Spaniards are today. It seemed to me that recounting the vicissitudes of discovery and conquest, even if it were exciting, was less fruitful than looking for the keys to this almost unique phenomenon such as American miscegenation, not only racial miscegenation but also manifested in the linguistic, artistic, religious and institutional. The discovery and conquest of the New World were individual feats; the confluence of different forms and cultural contents, on the other hand, was the result of anonymous, prolonged and, generally speaking, peaceful processes that were foundational because they constitute, whether you like it or not, the historical basis of Latin American peoples.
America is already known, it is not a homogeneous entity; their cultures were and continue to be indifferent, as their nuances in language, race, religion, artistic and musical forms and the modalities of daily life are extremely varied. To speak of an American people, at the time of the conquest and now, is an abuse.