To begin to understand the Latin American today we must look into the past to see the kind of man that first came to the America. He was a Spaniard, a conquistadore, who came primarily to conquer, for the glory and profit of Spain, and to spread the Catholic doctrine. He was a man of deep personal dignity, with a great deal of pride and passion, and an utter contempt for death. To the Spaniard, life and death live together to their mutual advantage. His love of life is strong because he understands it is fleeting and precarious. Because of this he disdains death, thereby making it more probable . . . a symbiosis of life and death, thus the making of such men as Cortes, Pizarro, the Conquistadores, the Castillans.
How did these traits come about? According to Elena de Souchere the molding of Spain’s geographical environment and the political climate helps to develop these characteristics. She writes, “In the hostile atmosphere, there came into being a hard and willful kind of man, withdrawn into himself. And these characteristics, acquired in the course of a constant struggle against the inclemency of the elements; were accentuated by the African invader, a permanent guerilla on no fixed front.”1 The fact that these Moslems could appear at any time presented a constant danger to the Castillian Spaniard. This common danger tended to be a social equalizer because each man had to provide for his own defense. “Every man was, above all, a man alone, faced with danger with arid land, with death everywhere and ever present.”2
These were some of the characteristics of the old world Spaniards. They also had a relaxed attitude toward race. A reason George Pendle writes, is that the Spaniards were influenced by the Moslems.
The Moslems took control of Spain during the early 700’s, all except the very mountainous area in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula. There, several small Christian kingdoms began a campaign to oust the Moslems from Spain. They began to fight back against the Moslem conquerors.
Between 700 and 1000, the Moors settled among their Christian subjects, married with them, and adopted many of the Spanish customs. After 1100, however, the territory that remained in Moslem hands was broken up into a number of small states. It was then easier for the Christian kingdoms of Spain to overcome their enemies. By 1000, the struggle to reconquer Spain was underway. It continued on and off for almost 500 years, until the last Moslems were defeated at Granada in 1492.
As the struggle against the Moslems drew to a close a new struggle and adventure was beginning . . . the discovery of the New World. As one great enterprise (the defeat of the Moslems) was coming to an end and another was beginning, the Spanish people continued to live in the passioncharged tension of a great task where self would achieve victory over death. The Spaniard was always ready to prove himself, that his irreplaceable “self” might not die, that he might always persist in the integrity of his being. Hernan Cortes caused his ships to be burned in port so there would be no return in failure: it was a case of conquer or die.
