by Marie Arana
From time to time, the deep racial prejudices rush back to haunt those who may be unaware of their own genealogical past. With the proliferation of genetics tests, Latin Americans who identify as “white” are gradually learning that they may be only partially so, the great majority descended from ancestors who represent every race of man. I myself am an example of this. Told throughout childhood that our family is cien por ciento criolla—100 percent Spanish blooded—although our history reaches back half a millennium in South America, I have learned since from genetic tests that I am only slightly more than half Caucasian: I am brown, I am yellow, I am black. I belong, as the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos put it, to the Cosmic Race. La raza cósmica. Most of us with deep roots in these Americas do.
Which brings us to a phenomenon particular to Latin America: that those who are visibly identifiable as descendants of Indians or Africans insist with a certitude bordering on defensiveness that they are not. For many, it is an insult to call out one’s darker ancestry, “the stain”—la mancha—that the majority of us inherited from our colored races. But as Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes once wrote, “We are all men of La Mancha.” We are people of the stain. Or, as the old joke goes, like bananas, we Latin Americans eventually show our black spots. Fuentes went on to spell this out more fully: “When we understand that none of us is pure, that we are all both real and ideal, heroic and absurd, made of desire and imagination as much as of blood and bone, and that each of us is part Christian, part Jew, part Moor, part Caucasian, part black, part Indian, without having to sacrifice any of the components—only then will we truly understand both the grandeur and vassalage of Spain.”
This inherent and deeply ingrained racism has ways of emerging in strange ways. In the Andes, until the recent wave of indigenismo, an Indian seldom alluded to his or her race: Bolivia’s Indians referred to themselves as campesinos, country people; Peruvians called themselves serranos, people of the mountain. Blacks of Venezuela call themselves morenos, which literally means Moorish but can also mean tanned or bronzed, as in azucar morena—the color of brown sugar. And then there are the nicknames (not always affectionate) for anyone with the slightest racial feature: slanted eyes (chino); indigenous features (cholo); dark skin (sambo); fair haired (guero). It is why, in Latin America, race is devilishly hard to catalog with any certitude in a census. An outward trait can belie the genome, and a person is likely to identify as an ethnicity he is not. Japanese are often mislabeled as chinos (as was the Peruvian president “El Chino” Alberto Fujimori); Arabs are called turcos (as is one of the richest men in the world, the Mexican billionaire “El Turco” Carlos Slim). Contradictions abound. Curiously enough, in Paraguay, where Guaraní is spoken by the overwhelming majority, were you to call a passerby a Guaraní, chances are he would be taken aback. The Guaraní represent a minuscule population—2 percent—in a country that was once entirely theirs. And yet 90 percent of all Paraguayans speak the Guaraní language.
What does this mean for matters of the spirit? For the 80 percent who count themselves Catholic, faith in this part of the world, like race, is an amalgamation. Even in urban, predominantly white areas, worship is more often syncretic than orthodox. Latin American Christianity, whether it be Catholic or evangelical, is infused with superstition, exorcism, sacrificial rites, curative rituals, dark powers, voodoo, nature worship, and the supernatural. Nowhere is this more richly documented than in the region’s literature, in which devout Catholics—for all their prayers to the Holy Virgin—consult seers to communicate with the dead or shamans to purge evil from the living. A cobbled life of the spirit is as evident in the novels of Gabriel García Márquez as it is in the poetry of Octavio Paz. Since pre-Columbian days, religion in this turbulent sphere has had to tweak, mutate, make room for the incoming stranger. As the superior general of the Society of Jesus said when Xavier Albó took up his priestly work in South America, “You cannot be truly religious here if you are not interreligious; you cannot be a Catholic if you are not ecumenical.” Faith in a nervous precinct, in other words, must be supple if it is to survive. The pre-Columbian Indians knew this. And although the impulse on Latin American ground since time immemorial—since long before Cortés or Pizarro or Columbus—is to believe in a higher power, to yearn for a currency beyond life on earth, the urge in this fickle landscape is also toward change.
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Change is arguably very much on the mind of Francis I, the first Latin American pope, who was named pontiff at a point in history when his homeland represents Catholicism’s best hope as well as its most precarious wound. On his 2018 papal trip to the region, Francis carefully avoided saying too much about the Church’s raging sexual abuse scandal, but he spoke frankly about the corruption, greed, and violence that are taking a harsh toll on Latin Americans. “Politics is in crisis, very much in crisis in Latin America . . . more sick than well,” he told those who had gathered to hear him in Lima. He deplored Brazil’s Odebrecht scandal, the largest foreign bribery case in history, a scourge of corruption that involved billions of dollars and implicated presidents and politicians of more than a dozen countries from the Caribbean to the Southern Cone. “What is wrong with Peru,” Francis scolded, “that when one finishes being president, one ends up behind bars?”
The pope was clearly determined to set things right in his part of the world. A few years earlier, and more remarkably, he did what his predecessors have never done in half a millennium of history: he apologized for the rank violation of Latin American Indians. In a landmark address in Bolivia, speaking to a hall of indigenous listeners, including President Evo Morales, he offered a stinging apology that did not mince words: “Many grave sins were committed against the native people of America in the name of God,” he said plainly. The massive crowd of Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní Bolivians leapt to its feet in euphoric recognition of the significance of that simple declaration. The pope, in his usual modesty, demurred. He added that he was not really saying anything new; he credited Pope John Paul II for apologizing for the Church’s “infidelities to the Gospel . . . especially during the second millennium.” But there was no question that Francis was saying something new. Xavier Albó, who was present, was struck by the intensity and candor of his admission. The pope didn’t stop there, however; he continued his apology, not only on behalf of Rome but of Spain, Portugal, England, France—all the self-appointed conquerors of the Americas. “I humbly ask forgiveness,” he said, “not only for the offense of the Church herself, but for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”
TO RIGHT THE UNRIGHTABLE WRONG
If someone asks me if I believe in kharisiri [white ghouls who prey on Indians], I will say, No, I do not, but I have the greatest respect for the people who do.
—Xavier Albó, 2017
Xavier has gone on to attain considerable stature in his beloved Bolivia. Having inserted himself into the needs and aspirations of a never-ending sea of underprivileged, the energetic eighty-five-year-old is known as tata tapukillu or el cura preguntón: our father of endless questions, friendly curiosity, gentle intrusions. With a traditional knit cap—an Andean ch’ullo—perched on his head and a worn alpaca sweater to guard him against the chill, he putters through the streets of La Paz, stopping to chat in Aymara with the fruit vendor, or in Quechua with a cluster of schoolchildren. This is his daily ritual: the ongoing communion he maintains with his people, a liturgy of the hours, a living rosary.
If he came to these shores to learn rather than to preach, he has accomplished his ambitions. He is, like celebrated priests before him—Bartolomé de las Casas or Bernardino de Sahagún—well known as a scholar of the First People. In 2017, for his abundant contributions, Bolivia’s highest honor, Knight of the Order of the Condor of the Andes, was conferred on him. He has advised presidents on native populations; he has brokered peace among warring tribes; he has worked side by side with evangelicals; he has raised foundations, libraries, and scho
ols to teach Indians about the larger world and the proud place they hold within it. He has been both counselor and critic to the first indigenous president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, a former bricklayer and coca farmer whose election in 2005 Xavier celebrated with joy—and whose evolution into a rock-ribbed, despotic caudillo he has vigorously censured.
A fount of good humor, he calls his fellow Jesuits “the most terrifying tribe that ever descended on this mountain redoubt.” He says it with a mixture of pride for a brotherhood that has labored mightily to set history aright and regret for a church that too often has marched alongside tyrants. He has represented Latin America in intense consultations with eminences of the Holy See, and he has given testimony in Quechua at humble hearings in tumbledown hamlets. To him, it seems preposterous that a pastor would choose to communicate in Spanish—the language of the conquest—with those who have minded this land for thousands of years.
Albó represents a Latin American church in the crucible of transformation. To be sure, he is less concerned with doctrine than with the long-suffered spiritual afflictions of his flock. Comparing his ministry to the practice of medicine—an equally fragile discipline—one might say that he recognizes the patient’s symptoms and is searching for cures. In the more than sixty years that he has devoted himself to Latin America, he has learned that his work is hard to explain to chance interlocutors. But eventually he puts it plainly: “I don’t want to conquer souls. I don’t want to be a master to anyone. I am here to keep company,” he says. Nothing more.
In his lifetime, he has seen self-anointed redeemers come and go: Fidel Castro, Manuel Noriega, Evo Morales, Juan Perón, Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez—leaders who promised much, delivered some, and clung to power far too long. He has watched democratically elected presidents become tinpot dictators, insatiable caesars like so many others in the region’s history since Columbus was handed the pearls of Panama, or Cortés hijacked the riches of Montezuma, or Pizarro demanded roomfuls of gold and silver. For Xavier Albó, the real treasures, he tells me, are las tres patas. The three pillars of a sturdy society, nothing less than the three legs a good table requires: a balance among economic justice, social equality, and educational opportunity. Or, you might say: the do-not-steal, do-not-lie, do-not-be-idle foundational principles of civilizations that went before. “There is nothing religious about this,” he says. And yet it is all about cardinal precepts, Christian commandments, a binding covenant on which human beings can agree. It is a question of the spirit.
“I am not one to pray,” he tells me. “At least not in any ritualized, obligatory kind of way. I am not that kind of priest. It is more deep inside.” And then he waits to see if I have caught the allusion to something David Choquehuanca, the Aymara chancellor of Bolivia, had once told him, something he had mentioned to me several days before. The chancellor had explained that the word religion did not appear in the Bolivian constitution because faith was not something concrete or rigidly understood. “For us, it is more deep inside. Not a cult, not a building, not a Bible.”
It is no surprise that the Church’s formalities have never appealed to Xavier Albó. No surprise that he is staunchly apolitical. Having departed the Spanish Civil War to arrive at the Bolivian revolution, he is wary of partisan allegiances. As I left him in his modest room after our last interview in La Paz, he seemed smaller than I had found him, a little spent by my endless questions, my curiosity, my intrusions. But his eyes sparkled.
“There’s an image I can’t quite get out of my mind,” he said as I gathered my notebooks. “It’s an old bit of history, but maybe it will tell you something about the way I think.” The image he had in mind was of Julian de Lizardi, a young Basque priest who had left Spain in 1717 to join the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Lizardi was sent deep into the unexplored interior to evangelize the Chiriguanos, a hostile tribe of the Guaraní that had fiercely resisted Christianization. Not long after he arrived, the Chiriguanos smeared their faces with war paint and mounted an attack on the makeshift little church where he was holding mass. They seized him, stripped him of his vestments, led him naked to an immense rock, and bound him there while they sacked the altar, burned the Church, and killed everyone in the vicinity. Weeks later, the Jesuit was found strapped to that towering white stone, lanced, bludgeoned, and pierced by a hundred arrows.
The question must have hung in my eyes.
“I’m telling you this, because you will understand why I couldn’t very well campaign for the man’s canonization,” he said. The prayer card with Lizardi’s likeness had stated: “Killed in a barbaric assassination by savages.”
“Savages! The Guaraní! The very people I was working with at the time.” Xavier waved his hand. “So you see. It’s a fraught business. For some, an intervention on behalf of God can be read as an act of war.”
EPILOGUE
IT’S JUST OUR NATURE
Stress is transgenerational [heritable], and a parent’s exposure to it will risk PTSD in subsequent generations.
—Biological Psychiatry, September 1, 2015
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, one of Latin America’s most distinguished novelists—an eloquent witness to the heartbreaking bloodbath that has plagued Colombia for generations—tells of the moment in the early 2000s when his twin daughters were born in Bogotá. It was in the heat of the killing, when tens of thousands were falling victim to a perfect storm of drugs, public truculence, and terror. Nestling the newborns into the young father’s arms, the obstetrician suddenly recognized him as the novelist-journalist who was meticulously recording the ongoing trauma of Colombia’s violence. The doctor insisted that Vásquez come to his home, saying he had something important to show him. Within hours, Vásquez was making his way through the vertiginous, winding streets of that Andean capital to see what the man so urgently wanted him to see. A knock on the door, and he was quickly led to a room where he was handed a small, sealed jar exuding a chemical stink and filled with a murky yellow liquid. Immediately, he understood that the ghoulish hunk suspended within were bones of a human spine.
Placing the jar into Vásquez’s hands as tenderly as he had handed him his newborn infants, the physician explained that the bones had once belonged to Jorge Gaitán, the presidential candidate whose assassination in Bogotá almost sixty years before had erupted into a frenzy of killing known as La Violencia. Somehow, passed down from doctor to doctor, the specimen had ended up in a drawer in the obstetrician’s house.
But the bones told only part of the story. For ten hours after Gaitán’s murder on April 9, 1948, the people had rioted, stoning the presidential palace, torching the city’s vehicles and houses, prompting a hellish government response that left Bogotá in ruins. Within hours, as news of the assassination spread throughout the country, the violence proliferated, provoking mayhem and carnage in Medellín, Bucaramanga, and Ibagué. For ten more years, the Colombian people would extract revenge for Gaitán’s murder. That fury would spur a civil war, invite military crackdowns, spawn bands of angry guerrillas and paramilitary militias, and give rise to drug hoods whose cartels and operatives fanned through the countryside and held Colombia hostage into the twenty-first century. More than five million Colombians would be forced from their homes; forty-five thousand children would be killed.
Vásquez cradled the jar with Gaitán’s spine in his hands—the very hands that, hours before, had held the tiny, flailing bodies of his daughters. Here, in his grasp, was a relic of the murder that had sparked rebellion and hatched a reign of terror. La Violencia had begun when his father was an infant in the 1940s, accelerated when Vásquez himself first saw light in 1973, and now was still ablaze three generations later, insinuating its way into the lives of his children. The question that occurred to Vásquez with sudden and urgent force was this: had violence—the impulse to it, the dread of it, the inevitability of it—been written into his country’s genes? Was it a heritable trait? Had brutality been so deeply imprinted on his people that it had become the accepted nor
m, a way of life? Had it rattled down the generations to be engraved on the temporal lobes, ganglia, and hearts of two little girls who had entered this world only hours before?
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The study of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is a young science—much about it is tenuous and unproven, far from being accepted beyond a shadow of scientific doubt. Whereas we now know that a pregnant mother’s trauma can chemically alter the cells of the fetus she is carrying, whether an entire generation’s DNA can be marked by the horrors and abuses its parents and grandparents have endured is another question. And yet it doesn’t have to be scientifically proven for Latin Americans to believe that this is so. In many of the region’s cultures—and certainly within the Catholic context—it is generally accepted that a curse can echo its way down the generations. As recently as my father’s lifetime, it was believed that the sins of an ancestor might predispose you to be born with a tail. A woman who witnessed atrocities was bound to bear monstrously deformed children. Babies would be enslaved by the curse of their forefathers. Call it superstition, wrongheaded religious education, magical thinking—it is still alive and well in many precincts of Latin America. Whether or not science ever establishes conclusively that violence, fear, or cowardice can be genetically coded in the human helix, for centuries we have believed it to be so.
Perhaps that is why we are so predisposed to believe myths, extravagant political promises, outright lies. Perhaps it is why we have learned to witness history with a certain helplessness. For all the extraordinary advances Latin America has made in the past hundred years—for all the economic gains, the improved living conditions, the gradual eradication of poverty, the rise of a fledgling middle class—we look over our shoulders in fear that those fragile structures could easily tumble. Often they do. A sudden revolt, a foreign intervention, a pigheaded despot, a violent earthquake might bring down the house of cards. When Peru’s poverty rose in 2018 for the first time in sixteen years and hundreds of thousands of Peruvians slipped back into desperate beggary, you could almost hear the collective sigh: Why did we ever think it could be otherwise? When rumors of impending coups cropped up after the impeachment of a president in one country and the rise of an ultra-right-wing president in another, these were more than rumors: they were fears steeped in history, anxieties deeply marked by the past.