Find the good in colonial heritage
While long ago we were taught to relish our Spanish tradition, now we are taught to denounce the Spanish conquest as the looting of native mineral wealth as well as the extermination of countless individuals. The history of Latin America, the new thinking goes,”is composed with the offender pencil of genocidal muskets and marked with all the ink of indigenous blood.” But can not we admit the good with the bad? We had been bequeathed the gift of Spanish, with which we could communicate with some 600 million people, as well as the attractiveness of Catholicism and the heritage of Latin doctrine and law. Our European heritage shaped the ideals of heroes such as Simón Bolívar and Rubén Darío, in addition to those of many brutal dictators and bad rulers. “We are,” as Bolívar said,”a middle species between the owners of the country and the Spanish usurpers.” That’s our inheritance, and”we must learn to live with it.”