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THE INVENTION OF AMERICA

Edmundo O’Gorman, 1961


Both of these selected texts—“History and Critique of the Idea of the Discovery of America” and “The Structure of America’s Being and the Meaning of American History”—are excerpts from The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History by Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman (1906–1995). In 1940, the author began formulating his thesis on the historiographic discovery and “invention” of America, a construct he originally presented in a 1958 Mexican edition [La invención de América: Investigación acerca de la estructura histórica del nuevo mundo y del sentido de su devenir (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica)]. While working in the United States as a visiting professor, O’Gorman produced the expanded and reworked English version of 1961 [(Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 45–47; 138–43], from which these excerpts are taken. Here, O’Gorman significantly transforms his ideas on the continental “invention.” He goes beyond his initial articulation of the problem in 1958, adding an entirely new section (part four) that accounts for the different subtitles of the Spanish and English editions.


PART ONE
HISTORY AND CRITIQUE OF THE IDEA OF THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

. . .

XI

The time has now come to answer the question with which our inquiry began. We asked whether or not the idea that the American continent was “discovered” was acceptable as a satisfactory way of explaining its appearance on the historical scene of Western culture. We may now answer that it is not satisfactory, because this interpretation does not account adequately for the facts that it interprets; it reduces itself to an absurdity when it reaches the limits of its logical possibilities. The reason for this absurdity is the substantialistic concept of America as a thing in itself. We must conclude that it is necessary to discard both this obsolete notion and the interpretation that depends on it, in order to seek a more adequate way to explain the phenomenon.

Our conclusions have, moreover, laid open to criticism the foundations of American historiography as conceived up to now. The traditional idea of America as a thing in itself, and the no less traditional idea—that because of this previous notion, we are dealing with an entity endowed with a “discoverable” being, which in fact was discovered—are, respectively, the ontological and hermeneutical premises on which the truth of that historiography depends. If one ceases to conceive of America as a ready-made thing that had always been there and that one day miraculously revealed its hidden, unknown, and unforeseeable being to an awestruck world, then the event which is thus interpreted (the finding by Columbus of unknown oceanic lands) takes on an entirely different meaning, and so, of course, does the long series of events that followed. All those happenings which are now known as the exploration, the conquest, and the colonization of America; the establishment of colonial systems in all their diversity and complexity; the gradual formation of nationalities; the movement toward political independence and economic autonomy; in a word, the sum total of all American history, both Latin and Anglo-American, will assume a new and surprising significance. Thus it will be possible to see that the fundamental issue in the understanding of that history is the ontological understanding of America, which will no longer be conceived as an unalterable and predetermined substance, unconsciously postulated a priori, but rather as the result of a unique and peculiar historical process, which is of course intimately linked with the process of universal history. Historical events will no longer appear as something external and accidental that in no way alters the supposed essence of an America ready-made since the time of Creation, but as something internal which constitutes its ever-changing, mobile, and perishable being, as is the being of all that partakes of life; and its history will no longer be that which has happened to America, but that which it has been, is, and is in the act of being.

We may conclude that our analysis means the bankruptcy of the old essentialistic concept of American history, and that the way is now open toward a new way of understanding it as something dynamic and alive. If this is the case, we must bear in mind that we can no longer rest on any a priori idea as to what America is, since that notion may be derived only from historical research and not, as is commonly supposed, from some substantialist logically previous premise. This means that if we pretend to tackle the great American historical problem—to explain how the idea of America arose in the consciousness of Western culture—we are committed to a procedure that is diametrically opposed to the one that has traditionally been followed. Instead of starting from a preconceived idea of America in order to explain how Columbus revealed the being of that entity, we should start with what Columbus did in order to explain how such a being was conceived. This new road implies full acceptance of the historical meaning of Columbus’ enterprise as it appears from the evidence, from the viewpoint of his personal intentions and convictions, instead of ignoring their significance as it has been traditional to do. Our purpose, then, may be considered as a fourth stage of the same process, in which, finally abandoning the idea that America was the object of a “discovery,” we shall seek a new concept by which the facts may be explained more adequately. This new concept, if we may anticipate, is that of America not discovered but invented.

PART FOUR
THE STRUCTURE OF AMERICA’S BEING AND THE MEANING OF AMERICAN HISTORY

. . .

VII

Just as a stranger is recognized as a man, although his personality, his spiritual being, is still unknown, so America was recognized as a continent but its historical being was still veiled in mystery. There was as yet no place for America within the framework of universal history.

As the new lands were gradually explored, Europeans acquired some knowledge of the natives and their ways of life. So long as there was a chance of explaining those regions as part of the Island of the Earth, that is, of Asia, the problems and doubts to which the inhabitants gave rise did not come to the surface. But when eventually it was realized that the new lands formed a distinct geographical entity, difficulties arose. The Christian principle of the unity of all mankind made it necessary to assume that the inhabitants of America were descended from Adam and Eve. But how had sons of Adam been able to make their way as far as America? This question very soon gave rise to the so-called problem of the origin of the American Indian that so much worried the early Spanish historians and led most of them to postulate the existence of the narrow sea passage that we know today as Bering Strait.1

If the new lands were the fourth part of the world, their inhabitants, in spite of their strangeness, shared in the same nature as that of the Europeans, Asians, and Africans; or to put it in terms of the period, they too were descended from Adam and were beneficiaries of Christ’s redemption and had a right to receive the sacraments of the Church. Thus the indigenous civilizations were linked with the course of universal history in the same way as other civilizations in other parts of the world.

The consequence was that the native cultures of the newly found lands could not be recognized and respected in their own right, as an original way of realizing human ideals and values, but only for the meaning they might have in relation to Christian European culture, the self-appointed judge and model of human behavior. The historical being that America revealed as its own was subjected to that test, giving rise to the no less famous historical problem of the nature of the American Indian, on which [the sixteenth-century historian Friar] Bartolomé de las Casas and [the philosopher and theologian] Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda were so active. The object of this passionate debate was to determine to what degree the native inhabitants of America fitted into the ideal embodied in Christian culture; even in the most favorable case for the Indians, it was impossible to give a higher meaning for their civilizations than that of forms of life pertaining to man, no doubt, but to man only as a creature of nature. The historical being exhibited by America was rejected as lacking in spiritual meaning, according to Christian standards of the time. America was no more than a potentiality, which could be realized only by receiving and fulfilling the values and ideals of European culture. America, in fact, could acquire historical significance only by becoming another Europe. Such was the spiritual or historical being that was invented for America. This way of conceiving the historical being of the new lands found expression in the name of “New World,” which to this day is used as a synonym for America, and which clearly indicates the qualities that, in the spiritual order, differentiated the “fourth part” of the world from the aggregate of the other three parts which were the “Old World.” The meaning of these two designations is now evident. If World in its traditional sense means that part of the earth providentially assigned to man for his dwelling, America was literally a “new” world, which offered the possibility of enlarging man’s old cosmic home by adding a new portion of the universe conceived as capable of becoming another Europe.

We can now perceive the enormous difference between this concept of a “new world” and that which Vespucci and Columbus [SEE DOCUMENTS I.1.1, AND I.1.5] had in mind when they used exactly the same words. To them “new world” implied a dichotomy or irreducible dualism between two entities, each already constituted as a ready-made world, one being “new” only in the sense that it had been recently found. But the concept of a “new world” based on the revolutionary idea contained in the Cosmographiæ introductio [of the cartographer Martin Waldseemüler] refers to an entity which is a world only in so far as it is capable of transforming itself into a replica of the “old” world. In the first case we are dealing with two distinct irreducible worlds, which is why Vespucci’s solution was inadmissible; in the second case we are dealing with two different forms of being of one and the same world, one potential (“new”) and the other actual (“old”); so the dichotomy is resolved into unity.

In general terms, the ontological analysis of America is now complete. We have been able to show that America’s internal structure is a composite of two fundamental elements, namely, (1) that of being one of the “continents” of the earth, and (2) that of being a “new world.” On the one hand America is conceived as a physical entity, i.e., something endowed with a fixed, unalterable nature; on the other hand it is conceived as a spiritual entity, i.e., something capable of fulfilling the possibilities with which it is endowed and thus of realizing itself within the sphere of historical being. We can see, perhaps to our astonishment, that this dual structure, closed and static from the physical point of view, open and dynamic from the historical point of view, is a structure of body and spirit like that of man himself. Not only was America invented and not discovered, as we believe we have proved, but it was invented in the image of its inventor. We have thus established a fact of far-reaching consequences, which opens the possibility of a dynamic and as yet unexplored idea concerning all historical entities. This question, however, goes beyond the bounds of the present inquiry.

VIII

One final question claims our attention; it concerns the meaning of American history. Since the spiritual being with which America was endowed is, as we now know, a being ab alio [from another], because it consists in the possibility of becoming another Europe, it follows that, in its essence, the history of America is the way in which that possibility has been actualized.

We recall that our alien stranger had two roads that he might follow: that of imitating Europe, and that of accepting European values but realizing them in his own way. This explains an otherwise baffling phenomenon in American history, the fact that it took a double course, as may be seen in the two Americas, Latin or Spanish and Saxon or English. The whole question is, of course, much too complex and involved to be dealt with here in detail, so we must limit our description to a general outline.

One of the two roads that could be followed consisted of an attempt to imitate the European model by adapting the new circumstances to its image. Thus America would actualize the possibilities of the spiritual being with which it was endowed and, therefore, be itself. Allowing for shades and grades which must be overlooked in any generalization, this program inspired the action of taking possession of the New World on the part of the Iberian nations, eminently typified by Spain. If one studies the general principles that guided her colonial policy, whether in the sphere of religious, imperial, economic, or cultural interests, or in that of social relations, it can be seen that an attempt was made to acclimatize European ways of life on American soil, with the design of preserving both the original external forms and their internal significance. This is evidenced in the transplantation of church, governmental, administrative, and educational institutions, in the strict and jealous upholding of social privileges and titles of nobility, in all the artistic and cultural expressions that began to appear in the colonies, and in certain other measures like the planning of Mexico City, which was designed to be so far as possible a Spanish capital.2

The existence of a huge indigenous population turned out to be the major obstacle to the achievement of these aims in all their purity,3 but this only reveals more clearly the original intention. Instead of getting rid of the natives or enslaving them, or simply using them without worrying about their future, as other imperial powers have done, Spain tried to protect them by means of special laws and institutions which, like the encomienda,4 were contrived for the purpose of paving the way for the eventual assimilation of the natives into a European society. Spain knew no principle of racial discrimination, either in theory or in fact, and if the program did not yield the fruits that were expected and the Indian remained in a position of more or less servile inferiority, to a great extent for reasons not imputable to Spain, that does not diminish the historical significance of the attempt, which was achieved to some extent in the large Mestizo Latin-American population of our day.

Latin America was never a frontier land in the sense of dynamic transformation that has been given to that term by American historians ever since Frederick Jackson Turner; it was rather the passive object of transplantation and grafting. Notwithstanding the many changes that took place, the Spaniards—unlike their English brothers in the northern part of America—never engaged in any widespread and tenacious effort to transform forests and deserts into cultivable areas; they confined their settlement to regions that seemed to be naturally destined by Providence for man’s benefit. The ancient religious idea of a God-made and God-given world lingered on vaguely. When at the close of the sixteenth century the Jesuit José de Acosta speaks of the project of opening a canal in Panama to join the two oceans, he not only believes the task to be practically impossible, but is more seriously concerned with the fear of Heaven’s punishment for “wanting to correct the work which God, so wisely and providentially, ordered in the making of the Universe.”5

In the colonial history of Latin America we have, then, the actualization of America’s being according to one of the ways in which that goal could be achieved. We are dealing here, no doubt, with a form of authentic and genuine historical life in that it represents an attempt at being oneself. But since it consisted of a sort of historical mimetism of Europe, it must also be said that that life [in colonial Latin America] was [lived as if on loan] . . . [as if it were an] alien form of life. We must add, however, that the historical life of Latin America at a later period no longer merits this description, for underlying the wars for independence and the many violent upheavals which are so typical of that history there is a design and an attempt to live a form of life that may truly be considered its own. The desire for historical autonomy found its chief inspiration in the history of the other America, where the European model had been actualized through the other channel, and where new forms of historical life had been produced by and for a peculiar new type of man who, certainly not by chance, has been universally granted the name of American.

The second road, it will be recalled, consists not in adapting the new circumstances to the model, but the latter to the former. We have here the explanation for the essence of the history of the English-speaking America and for its phenomenal success. It is true that, as in the case of the other America, here too we have an initial transplantation of systems, institutions, habits, and privileges of European origin; but in the North a process of transformation immediately set in, inspired by an ever-increasing feeling that the new lands did not mean a providential gift from God to the motherland, but rather a providential opportunity to exercise religious, political, and economic liberty, so hindered and fettered in the Old World. So, within the variegated framework of different faiths, different habits, and national idiosyncrasies, every group saw in its own portion of the new lands and its own peculiar way of life the New Jerusalem come true. Step by step with the exploration and occupation of the immense continent, the old European forms of cultural and social life were slowly transformed or discarded altogether as they gave way to new habits that were to be the foundation of a new society.6 In this process the American native was left on one side, and although some attempts were made to incorporate him and Christianize him, in general he was abandoned to his own fate and even systematically destroyed, as a man with no hope of redemption, since his indolence and lack of initiative, thrift, and foresight were judged by Puritan standards as a sign that God had justly forgotten him.

In strong contrast with the lordly and bureaucratic ideals of the Spanish conquerors and settlers, who sought only privileges, preferment, rewards, luxury, and leisure, these men of the other America set up as a principle of life personal skill, frugality, and labor, and instead of passively settling in only those places where God had revealed wealth, they took pains to create it, razing forests, draining marsh lands, and, in general, converting what was useless, fruitless, and uninhabitable into the opposite. If the martial courage of the conquistadors and the self-denial and patience of the monks claim our admiration and gratitude, no less worthy of praise are the early settlers and pioneers who laid the foundations for the great republic of the modern world.

Thus the second new Europe was created, not as a copy, but as an extension of the old Europe in that its historical possibilities were actualized with originality in another setting. Historical life in English-speaking America is, no doubt, of European cast, but on all sides and in all spheres one sees the imprint of new inventive forces. Perhaps the most outstanding instance is the political Constitution of the United States of America, European in its philosophical foundations, but at the same time expressing the genius of a nation that may indeed consider its cultural life as an authentic creation of its own.

All of this raises still another question, that of determining the meaning of the historical situation that arose after America had realized the being with which it was originally endowed, thus wiping out the initial dichotomy of an Old World and a New World as distinct entities. When America has reached that point there is no longer any true historical meaning in conceiving it still as a new world, save in some vague metaphoric sense which can only sow confusion and flatter those who like to see in Europe, against all evidence, a world in hopeless decay. To us it seems that we no longer have two distinct worlds, one young and promising, the other old and dying, but that a new historical entity has been formed, which may well be called Euro-America and in which the great ocean of ancient geography undergoes its last transformation; it has been converted into the new Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean of our day.

Much more could be said on this subject, but let us close with this thought: just as the process of the invention of America’s geographical or corporeal being made it necessary to abandon the archaic insular concept of the physical world, so the process by which America actualized the possibilities of its spiritual being made it necessary to abandon the no less archaic insular concept of the historical world as something peculiarly belonging to Europe. It was the Spanish part of the invention of America that liberated Western man from the fetters of a prisonlike conception of his physical world, and it was the English part that liberated him from subordination to a Europe-centered conception of his historical world. In these two great liberations lies the hidden and true significance of American history.

1
For instance, [Gonzalo Fernandez de] Oviedo, A General and Natural History of the West Indies, First Part (1535), Book XVI, Preface; Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 1590, I, Chapter 20; Juan López de Velazco, Geografía y descripción de las Indias, Madrid, 1894, p. 3.

2
Edmundo O’Gorman, Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana colonial de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 1938.

3
Oviedo, Sucesos y Diálogo de la Nueva España, anthology by Edmundo O’Gorman, Biblioteca del Estudiiante Universitario, no. 62, Mexico City, 1946, II, pp. 157–63.

4
Encomienda was a feudal system established by Spain that involved the Crown granting a specified number of natives to the conquistadors and to others of means, including native noblewomen. In return for their protection and for their guarantee of instruction in the Spanish language and in Catholicism, the colonists would receive labor and/or tribute in the form of gold or other commodities and food items from their wards, the encomenderos.—Ed.

5
Acosta, op. cit. note 1 above (1590), Book III, Chapter 10.

6
Of great interest in this score is Professor Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Frontier, Cambridge, Mass., 1952.