Forjando Patria: Pro-Nacionalismo

1: Forjando Patria

23 In the great forge of America, on the anvil of the Andes, the bronze and iron of virile races have been alloyed for centuries and centuries. When the task of mixing and blending peoples came to the brown arms of Atahualpa and Moctezuma, a miraculous tie was consummated. The same blood swelled the veins of the Americans, and their intellectuality flowed through the same paths. There were small patrias: the Aztec, the Maya-Kiché, the Inca . . . that would later perhaps have grouped together and melded into great indigenous patrias, as the patrias of China and Japan were in the same age. But it could not be thus. When other men, another blood, other ideas arrived with Columbus, the crucible that unified the race was tragically overturned and the mold in which the Nationality was created and the Patria crystallized fell to pieces. During the colonial centuries, the first forges of noble nationalist impulses also burned, only the Pizarros and Ávilas just intended to build incomplete patrias, since they valued only the steel of the Latin race, leaving the crude indigenous bronze on the slag heap. Later on, imitating the most brilliant of previous centuries, Olympic men took up the epic and sonorous hammer, clothed themselves with the glorious smith’s apron. They were Bolívar, Morelos, Hidalgo, San Martín, Sucre1 . . . 1 Forjando Patria 1 Simon Bolívar (1783–1830), Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753–1811), José María Morelos (1756–1815), José Francisco de San Martín (1778–1850), Antonio José de Sucre (1799–1830).—Trans. 24 F o r j a n d o P a t r i a they went to scale the mountain, to strike the divine anvil, to forge with blood and gunpowder, with muscles and ideas, with hope and disenchantment, a peregrine statue made of the metals that are all of the races of America. For various decades, a thunderous hammering that made the high mountain ranges tremble could be heard, stirring virgin fronds of new life and making the twilight red, as if blood splattered even the heavens. In Panama, where oceans and continents kiss, the marvelous image of the great American Patria was glimpsed as if in an epic poem. Single and great, serene and majestic like the Andean mountain chain. But the time had not yet come. The miracle unmade itself. That sublime vision of patria was lost like sea-foam or the fog of the mountaintops. Those men who today are longed for, like Homeric demigods, passed on to a better life. A new idea came later, during the independent life of those countries. No longer would there be a single gigantic patria that would bring all of the men of the continent together as one. Rather, looking to past tradition, powerful patrias would be formed that corresponded to colonial political divisions. Unfortunately, the nature of this task was not well understood by the forgers. There was an attempt to sculpt the statue of those patrias with Latin racial elements , leaving the indigenous race in a dangerous oblivion. If the indigenous race was remembered at all, in the name of mercy, a humble bronze pedestal was made with it. Ultimately, what must happen did. The statue, inconsistent and fragile, fell many times, while the pedestal grew. And that struggle, which has sustained itself in making a patria and nationality for more than a century, is at the root of our civil contentions. It is now the task of the revolutionaries of Mexico to take up the hammer and tie on the apron of the forger to make a new patria of intermixed iron and bronze surge from the miraculous anvil. There is the iron. . . . There is the bronze. . . . Stir, brothers! ...