Excerpt from the Introduction to Spatial Theories for the Americas In the Americas, we live in a land with a very short memory, a limitation that has been imposed on us and reinforced by centuries of Eurocentric narratives. Leopoldo Zea wrote in 1953 that the Americas were not discovered but "covered" with a narrative of European superiority and modernity that fogs our view to this day.5 Until very recently, even intellectuals committed to understanding the identity of those lands suffered from and reproduced the idea of land without memory. The Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, for instance, wrote that "America was, if it was anything, geography, pure space, open to human action. Since it lacked historical substance--ancient social classes, established institutions, religions, and hereditary laws--reality presented no obstacles other than natural ones. Men struggled not against history but against nature. And wherever there was a historical obstacle--indigenous societies, say--it was erased from history, reduced to a mere natural fact, and dispensed with accordingly."6 Paz contradicted himself in the paragraph above, so I guess I am absolved of any heresy in disagreeing with the great Mexican scholar.

The Americas were never lacking institutions, religions, laws, or social classes. They had it all, in a variety of forms. America was home to over twenty-five million people in 1492--people who had lived here for thousands of years; people who built great cities such as Tenochtitlán and Cusco, to use the European concept of urbanism; people who also built thousands of other settlements, mostly low density and in deep synergy with nature. It was a nature transformed and modified by human hands but still very much revered and respected. Octavio Paz was wrong in the first sentence quoted above, and he knew it. The third sentence says it all: wherever there was a historical obstacle, it was erased.