Latin America [antikvár]

Desarrollos Radiantes y Dulzura (Radiant Grown and Sweetness) There are expressions and looks that do not belong to only one country—they belong to an entire continent, to humanity. They embody both timelessness and the consequences of history. In the beginning there was the journey, a journey marked by migrations, coincidences, inner quests, and an imperial undertaking. This prophesied land was but a secondary outcome of the compulsion to embark on the voyage. Part chimera, part conundrum, she has had several names in different languages, multiple lords with feathers and crowns, and her frontiers have been redrawn throughout history. Her true name is a secret one, but there has been a recent consensus to call her "Latin America," which, in a way, evokes her double nature. This region of the world is one where myth, history, and poetry meet. In order to imderstand it, one must recognize the relationship among the three points of origin, which we can do by examining certain defining historical moments. The first of these was recounted by the moons that lit the way for the people arriving from Aztlan, the legendary ancestral home of the Aztecs. Guided by their god Huitzilopochtli to the place where the eagle perched on the cactus and devoured a serpent, these early Aztecs would remain in the Valley of Mexico to fiilfill the destiny of Aztec splendor and apocalyptic submission. The second date belongs to the historical time that governs our world: October 12,14-92 brought together imagination and adventure, meeting and separation, modernity and the Colonial era. Even closer to our time, on the fifth of February the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda finished his Canto General, the most ambitious and most emotional attempt to examine the simultaneous nature of Latin America, something that only gods and visionaries can achieve. Then at last appears a fluctuating moment in time, which all Americans respect in their own way, depending on the history of their native land. Revolutions and poetry, names close to their heart or names despised, and the story of their families and the place of their birth converge to form our own nationality and personal history. Into this intimate expression rushes the plurality of the continent, the alternation of the common and the foreign, depending on whether one lives in Managua or Guayaquil, whether one loves in Cartagena or Bahía. Latin America is nature in all its splendor, a magnificence associated with extreme, archaic landscapes in which different varieties of human culture were brought together and fused. We assume that the first groups of people came from the north, crossing the Bering Strait, joined perhaps by others, drifting along the Pacific coast. Following this first stage of the true discoverers came the slow task of inventing ancient cultures, which reached different degrees of complexity, from the gatherers of fruit to the cultivators of corn on mountain slopes. It includes the enigmatic culture of the Maya; the urban splendor of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan;