I.3.5 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 833254
The following passage is excerpted from the summary to the book A América Latina. Males de Origem by Brazilian physician and historian Manoel Bomfim (1868–1932). When it was published in 1905 [(Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, Livreiro-Editor)], Males de Origem was the cause of a tremendous argument between Bomfim—who was a staunch defender of Brazil’s historical miscegenation—and the well-known literary critic Sílvio Romero, who argued for the country’s “whitening” as a means of remedying its underdevelopment. The current translation is derived from the centenary edition of the book, with forewords by Darcy Ribeiro, Franklin de Oliveira, and Azevedo Amaral [A América Latina: Males de Origen (São Paulo: Top-books, 2005), 351–59].
Given the pace and directions of civilization’s advance, societies have little choice: either they participate in the general movement, or are crushed. Latin America is threatened; inundated by civilization, and this flood will be a threat and a danger if Latin America does not seek out, through a conscious and methodical effort, the only possible salvation: to move in the direction of progress, join the movement, presenting herself to the world as vigorous and modern, in control of herself, as one decided to live free among the free. Old evils oppose themselves to this progress: it is necessary to know them, and to know their essential causes. The nature and the origin of these evils will indicate to us their remedy. We should reject dissertations and precepts formulated at a distance; we should send packing doctors and other oracles—economists and sociologists who never tire of giving absurd advice, of proposing doctrines about us; let us forget them and return to the fundamental issue.
Let us turn to these peoples, abandoned, backward, and ineffectual. Let us observe them, sad and resigned, or rebellious and agitated—but always miserable, in the midst of a mild and abundant nature. This is enough to confirm the conviction that the evil is fundamental, organic, and comes from our inheritance, from our social and political education, from the very conditions of our formation: the parasitic oppression which from the very beginning pit the colonial populations against each other, leading them to this near incapacity for progress, sinking them in ignorance, confusing them, perverting them, as they were born and developing. It is sufficient to observe—if one knows how to penetrate the mist of appearances, overlooking the discrepant details—in order to discover the solid foundation of the true causes. This observation is difficult and, more often than not, incomplete. A society is too vast a phenomenon; in order to dominate it in all its manifestations, it is necessary that the spirit overcome its nature, never allowing itself to be tempted or taken in by a series of mere effects. Nevertheless, this temptation is sometimes irresistible, be it in life or in nature itself.
. . .
Let us contemplate these societies once again as they appear to us now and as they manifest themselves in history. They were born of the assault on this continent and from the violent and transitory settlement of the Iberian adventurers, devoured by greed, thirsty for riches, living for many centuries by warfare and depredation. The colonies of the Spaniards and Portuguese had no other reason for being. They dreamed of conquests in order to gain treasures; they found a new world and fell upon it as if it were the realization of their dream. Ferocious and insatiable, they only wanted to enrich themselves. Where they found established nations, mature civilizations, accumulated wealth, they destroyed everything in their plundering fury. Here, as everywhere, they conquered the natives of these lands, enslaving them, sparing no cruelty, to wrest from the labor of these unfortunate peoples the riches they desired. The native defended himself; impelled by an irrepressible need for freedom, indifferent to pain or death, he refused the civilization of slavery; an enormous struggle arose, a centuries-long struggle that established an incompatibility between the natives and the foreign intruders from the very beginning. The invaders won, reduced and exterminated the indigenous populations, seizing the land; but, instead of settling here permanently, normally, peacefully, they perpetuated the same system of exploitation and oppression. They came from the [Iberian] Peninsula—but only to hoard new riches. Where the native absolutely refused to work, where his people were eliminated by massacres, he was soon replaced by the black African, whose trade the parasitic genius of the Portuguese invented and shamelessly exploited. In the colonies, only the slaves worked; everyone else exploited and oppressed them. Production depended solely on the number of slaves and the cruelty of the lashings. Progress was condemned as useless; intelligence persecuted as dangerous. With the colonist above the slave, the taxation system above the colonist, absolutism and religious archaism above them all, these societies sank deeper and deeper into poverty, degradation, and obscurantism. The metropolis wallowed, howled with delight, having realized its ideal, total parasitism. The ruling classes and the Church, which absorbed and dominated them, either became parasites of the State—the greatest parasite—or lived off the colonies directly. Trade became a regal institution, mingling with taxation; the judicial system was the guarantor of spoils; the mother country a nest of leeches on the colony. Bloodsucking all, they considered themselves to be in the best of the worlds and thought only of conserving that state of affairs in which the only ones who really had reason to desire change were the slaves. But the captives had no voice to complain, or even to moan. Until then, the Iberian world had an ideal—an ideal of adventure, conquest, and heroic plundering; but now, linked to slavery, a new agenda was elaborated, a new political and national ideal took shape and soon imposed on itself: to conserve. No innovations, no progress. No rights, no freedom above all in the colonies, because freedom and rights represented challenges to the exploiters’ privileges on which they all lived. In order to maintain and secure this ruthless control definitively, America closed itself off from the world and civilization. Industry was forbidden, the only work allowed was the animal labor of the slave.
A new American society bloomed from the remains of this ignoble exploitation. To this new society, life already appeared as a permanent conflict with the metropolis. Disrupted and thwarted in their natural development, these young societies rebelled from their inception against oppression and plunder—the same struggle of the primitive aboriginal, but now transformed into rancor and disaccord, feelings that grew and spread from generation to generation. To the enmity of the American peoples, the monarchy responded with ferocious retaliation and ostensible scorn. One side wanted to live, to have a country; the other to protect its privileges, which are based in the system they imposed. These new populations, in their grasp for life, are led to hate, repudiate, and combat the metropolis and its agencies. At the same time, they are forced to imitate the oppressor, because they descended in large part from the peoples of the metropolis, and were educated and governed by them. Ignorant and destined for brutalization, the American societies knew neither how to achieve a place in life, nor how to organize a nation. They rebelled because they were vigorous; they revolted because the whip cut too deeply. The only result of all this, however, is that they became accustomed to rebelliousness, to combat, and knew no other kind of justice or social discipline but brute force. The hatred and horror of this oppression grew in their souls; and since this oppression is represented by the authorities, they developed a hatred for authority, for the state, which appeared to them as the epitome of evil. Thus, what was born and developed was not nations, but encampments, where the defeated was reborn rebellious, undiminished with each new generation. The Iberian colonists established here did not concern themselves with the creation of normal nations, nor would the metropolis allow it since it was in their interest to perpetuate the regime of direct exploitation, hindering in any way possible the organization of permanent and homogeneous American societies in harmony with normal trends and needs. The government, leadership, social and political education that the new populations received, were all counter to their natural expansion.
Thus were formed and lived these peoples, until the time when all their energies were atrophied and debased by parasitism. From decadence to decline, the Iberian nations reached the point where they could no longer retain their prisoners: the moment when the ideals of liberty and justice bestirred France and spread to all Western nations, summoning consciences to self-possession. In the Latin colonies—and for this very reason they are Latin—these aspirations of liberty did have repercussions. The native population grew, and with it the unrest; and, however low the public morale, the American populations could not ignore the state of abjection and backwardness in which they found themselves. [They had] neither industry, nor trade, nor instruction, nor science, nor art, nor even a normal government, nor the dispensation of common justice: nothing. Nothing, in sum, that could attenuate the despair and shame of the subjugation in which they found themselves.
Some ardent spirits appeared: they talked of “freedom, independence, motherland…” The same conflict, the old rebelliousness, ignited a struggle that quickly became widespread. The oppressed hurled themselves into open battle, demanding complete freedom, proclaiming absolute independence. It was a cruel war with heroic moments, with dark, inhuman, and sometimes loathsome aspects, a war prolonged through difficult alternatives. But a vigorous reaction came quickly, vanquishing the revolutionary impetus on more than one occasion. It is a formal reaction, from all over. It does not come from the metropolis and its official governments, since they were defeated. It was simply the opposition demonstrated by that part of the population which, in the colonies, represented directly or indirectly the mother country—its privileges and oppressions. These privileged ones knew that, in defending the mother country, they were defending themselves. To this end, they fought with the strength and fury born of their instinct for self-preservation. But times were against them: the impetus set in motion by the idea of liberty was very strong, and its champions were not disheartened. The colonial Iberian regime had against it human evolution, which would not halt, as Spain did, at the ideal of the sixteenth century—the conservative ideal. In the eyes of the world, such a regime was a monstrosity.
Finally, the rebellious and conservative elements in the colonies were persuaded. Those unwilling to compromise were crushed; the moderates, the legitimate conservatives, intervened. These came to terms with the revolutionary agendas: they agreed to a separation and governmental independence for the colonies. It was a way to trick or nullify the revolution and to impede the arrival of true liberty. They threw off the metropolis, only to conserve all the privileges, injustices, and oppression it had generated and by which it had established the new societies. Through different processes, they arrived at the same result: they stole independence throughout Latin America. And when, soon afterward, they announced that “the time for revolutions and reforms is closed” and that social and political stability are consolidated, it became evident that what had taken place was only a change of names in positions of authority and the inscription of abstract and sterile formulas in dead Constitutions. All these elements, hostile to liberty, retrograde and anti-social residues of oppression, remained in place. It was impossible for these societies, which had lived in civil conflict from their earliest days, to become pacified and normalized.
Independence established, [the same characters] are found everywhere— royalists yesterday, conservatives always: “monarchists and clerics” in Mexico, “conservatives” in Chile, “unitarianists” in the River Plate, “Bragantistas [monarchists] and moderates” in Brazil. Linking themselves with the original freedom fighters, they fomented discord, distorted ideals, encouraged selfish ambitions, exploited human foibles and miseries, entrenched disagreements. And the struggle rekindled with rebellions and conflicts in the name of other principles, yet at its core sustained by the same causes. This same struggle continued to eliminate the good, the strong of spirit and heart, and those of sound character—this being the most common result of civil wars, as [the Roman historian] Tacitus had already noted. The good are destroyed, and soon the fight is a brutal struggle for possession of the government, for the material ownership of power—to oppress in order not to be oppressed.
The general mass of the population, conditioned and nurtured by this intensive culture of ignorance and servitude, has no incentive, no desires, or clear needs beyond the appetites of low animals. They are ignorant, do not know how to work, see no beauty, nor show any interest in working, since nothing bids them to do so. Totally incapable of progress, [this mass] is easily manipulated by charismatic leaders and political bosses to further their exploits and political attacks. The ruling classes, direct inheritors and unfailing preservers of the governmental, political, and social traditions of the metropolitan State, seem incapable of throwing off the burden of this inheritance. Everything the peninsular parasitism implanted in the character and intelligence of the old masters is now to be found in the new ruling classes. Regardless of the individual, whatever his point of departure and his goals, the Iberian character traits are there: the conservatism, the formality, the morbidness, the traditionalism, the dour somberness, the instinctive horror of progress, of the new, of the unknown—a horror truly instinctive and unconscious since it is inherited. From time to time there arises a spirit capable of efficient action, [but this is] a mirage lost in the desert. Meanwhile, society continues to crawl along at the mercy of those who lead it. Assisted and reassured by these, the fractious remnants of the parasitic past are reborn, proliferate, indoctrinate, and lead. And the new country never becomes a nation, remaining only the ex-colony, extended into the independent State, against all laws of evolution, extinguishing progress, captive to a thousand prejudices, bound to conservatism by ignorance.
The result of this recalcitrant past is this society that we see now: poor, exhausted, ignorant, brutalized, apathetic, with no idea of its own value, hoping that the heavens will remedy its misery, beseeching fortune from chance—lotteries, jogo de bichos,1 religious pilgrimages, “ex-votos.” Illiteracy, incompetence, lack of preparation for life, superstitions, and absurd popular beliefs, all of these [are but] spider webs over neglected minds. [This leads to] either passive corruption or to the agitation of base interests: group conflicts dominated by a narrow and sordid utilitarianism, where the most astute neither know how to think nor are capable of sustained endeavor, running from enterprise to enterprise, squealing when they are hungry, grunting like piglets when they are satiated.
All this, however, makes no impression on those who lead, who behave as if they considered no motives other than selfishness, fear, material interests; had no regard for the fragility of social work inspired by other motives. And each person understands life in accordance with his own interests, or does not understand it at all. This is the case of the majority, who are careless, feeble-minded, and without moral direction or assistance succumb to ignorance, which poses an insurmountable obstacle to the development of all civic virtues. Aside from that, there is the fatigue, the disbelief, the expectation of disappointment. If it is true that “social campaigns are the measure of the vitality and progress of a people,” then Latin American societies in general and notably in Brazil are a very sad testimony to their present value.
The result of all this—even for the most enlightened—is a painful pessimism, a negativistic and sad skepticism, against which no enthusiasm, no ideals, no dreams of generous sacrifices can prevail.
1
Jogo de bicho (the animal game) refers to a popular form of gambling in Brazil that involves a lottery-type drawing. In 1943, it became technically illegal in all but one Brazilian state; however, the game is generally tolerated by officials throughout Brazil.—Ed.