Alexander von Humboldt visited the north of the Spanish possessions in America in 1803. In his ‘political essay on the kingdom of New Spain’ the roughness of the landscape, desolation and emptiness are the recurring topics in their writing on the western provinces of the western provinces of the Interior, which was then the official name of the vast territory occupied by northwest Mexico and the southwest of the United States, from the Rio Bravo to the Californias. When he later arrives in New Mexico, he describes the region as “a long riverside valley inhabited by miserable settlers.” And it makes a comparative note: it is the size of the kingdom of León, but a population less than the number of Franciscan friars living in Spain. The simile is fun, but it does not tied what we know of the area today. Cochise in the high Sonora were so great that when the Mexican army faced them, it was invariably defeated. The vigor and skill in the combat of the Apaches is legendary, but, if they won at one hundred percent of the occasions it was because they could put a higher number of riders that the central government of Mexico could send. In those cities there were no ‘settlers’, so Humboldt did not tell its people in New Mexico, in 1803, the town nation continued to inhabit the millenary cities of Adobe that the conquerors crowned and Oñate decimated in the seventeenth century, but could not submit. In those cities there were no ‘settlers’, so Humboldt did not tell his people. Further north were the Zuni and Navajo regions, the Jicarilla peoples. It doesn’t matter what measurement system is used, New Mexico’s population had to be superior to that of Franciscan friars in Spain, but Humboldt’s gaze erased the bodies that were not European. This selective, limited and limiting look, which blinded huge numbers of communities of a considerable part of the world – all the people who lived in what today are Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Sonora, Chihuahua and Coahuila – became a Iron topic when the lessons of ‘Philosophy of History’ of Hegel were published in 1837, a decade before the genocidal operation that would mean the shift of the United States to California from 1847. In the widely read ‘introduction’ to the Lessons, which open with a Humboldt epigraph, Hegel said that North America – a North America that excludes Mexico (“only one ISMO”, in their words) – it was not yet part of the story, but eventually it would be when the systems of European beliefs and production will be installed on a continental scale in what it called “the land of the future.” What in Humboldt was a limiting look in Hegel is a political act. The deletion of bodies of history was a conceptual genocide that preceded the historical genocide after the occupation of northwest Mexico by the army and the US settlers. “America,” Hegel said, “he always showed himself psychically and physically incapacitated and still is. His aborigines, after the arrival of the Europeans, gradually disappeared in the face of the activity of the newcomers ». The diction of the philosopher is important here, because for the European mind it is the “breath” of God what gives and removes life.
#Álvaro #Enrigue #Invisibility
