Hello Everyone,
Yesterday, I finished a beautiful book called “Song of the Hummingbird” by Graciela Limon. The story takes place in newly colonized Mexico, about thirty years after the Aztec Empire was destroyed and left in rubbles, and now covered with monasteries. It begins with Hummingbird, whose real name is Huitzitzilin, who has been asking for weeks to have a priest hear her confession. The priest that agrees to hear her is young Benito, who’s naive and idealistic ways gets in the way of fully understanding the wise words of the old lady. She was a young women when the Spaniards arrived to her land, known then as Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), and in a few years she saw her home ruined and devastated, lost the people she loved, and had to learn to live in her native land as a foreigner speaking a different tongue– Spanish.
This book has helped me heal in numerous ways, some that I have yet to realize. I learned the importance of knowing my history and background as a way to know who I am and how much I am worth even when other people see me as less than due to the color of my skin, language, and race. Through Huitzitzilin’s story, I realized in what ways my own mind had been colonized. Meaning, the ways that the values and ideas of the dominant race, and class, being that of the white Protestant Anglo Saxon men, were instilled in me whether I agreed or not. Lies that I started believing because they are said so often, such as that paler skin, blond hair, and blue/green eyes were the only characteristics that made a person beautiful. I started believing that natives were indeed savages before the colonizers came to America (North, Central, South). Hence the colonizers named that area of land and water the Caribbean, coming form the word ‘carib’, meaning cannibals. Quite the contrast of the views of the colonizers, the native communities were not savages, the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas among other smaller groups, were intelligent communities who already knew that the earth revolved around the sun, and that there were 365.25 days in a year and came up with the number zero. These native American groups knew all that, while the Catholic Church in Europe were still imposing that the sun revolved around the earth. The colonizers in return to the welcoming ways of the Aztecs, raped their women, killed their king, and brought disease to them.
Now the Aztec’s, Maya’s and other native groups of people’s knowledge, history, and people are destroyed. After I read the book, I was saddened that many people, especially numerous Latinas/os consider the white men and women to be the ideal example of beauty. In fact, it is a common belief that leads many Latin Americans to prefer offspring with Caucasian characteristics, while relegating darker skin as the least desirable. Thus separating families as the whiter son or daughter tends to receive more praise and job opportunities than their darker sibling. The people who destroyed the homes of my ancestors should not be the ideal examples of beauty to us. They took away our homes, language, and dignity. When the Spanish first arrived, they found the Aztec women very beautiful even though the Aztecs themselves thought the Spaniards were ugly and not pleasing to the olfactory senses.
I had to stop and grieve for the first time the fall of the Aztecs and the Mayas, the Pipils and other natives of the Americas. I felt ashamed that all this time, I had felt glad that the Spanish, English and other conquistadors came to the Americas because I was taught that they were savages, scary people who mercilessly sacrificed their people to their bloodthirsty gods. None of that is the full truth. Those were accounts of the people who won the battle, therefore they get to write history however they want, whether it is accurate or false.
Lets get away from the colonized mind of what ideal beauty is, and realize that we are beautiful people as well.
