Eduardo Galeano - The Memory of Fire Trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

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The Cry

of “America” explodes in Chuquisaca. While Spain seethes, up in arms against the French invaders, America rebels. The Creoles repudiate the throne that Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, occupies in Madrid.

Chuquisaca is first. The rebellion of America’s Salamanca announces that Spain will lose her dominion over the Indies.

Chuquisaca, formerly La Plata and Charcas, and the Sucre to be, lies at the foot of two mountains in love. From its patios and gardens rises the aroma of citrus blossoms, and through its streets pass more knightly gentlemen than commoners. Nothing is so abundant here as cloaks and clerical tonsures. Very Chuquisacan are doctors, stiff as their gilt-handled canes, and friars who go about sprinkling houses with hyssop.

Here, the world seemed immutable and secure. Astoundingly, the shrill cry of liberty has come from this mouth accustomed to falsetto Latin. La Paz and Quito and Buenos Aires will immediately echo it. To the north, in Mexico …

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The Virgin of Guadalupe Versus the Virgin of Remedios

Making its way through curtains of dust, the multitude crosses the town of Atotonilco.

“Long live America and death to the bad government!”

Father Miguel Hidalgo hauls from the church the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and ties it to a spear. The raised standard glows over the crowd.

“Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to the Spanish dogs!”

Fervor of revolution, passion of religion. The bells have rung out from the church of Dolores, the priest Hidalgo calls for struggle, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe declares war on the Spanish Virgin of Remedios. Indian Virgin defies white Virgin; the one who chose a poor Indian on the hill of Tepeyac marches against the one who saved Hernán Cortés in the flight from Tenochtitlán. Our Lady of Remedios will dress up as a general; and by order of the viceroy the firing squad will riddle with bullets the standard of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Mother, queen, and goddess of the Mexicans, the Virgin of Guadalupe was called Tonantzin by the Aztecs before the archangel Gabriel painted her image in the Tepeyac sanctuary. Year after year the people stream to Tepeyac in procession, Ave Virgin and Pregnant, Ave Damsel with Child, go on their knees up to the rock where she appeared, to the crack from which roses bloomed, Ave Possessed of God, Ave Most Beloved of God, drink water from its springs, Ave that Maketh God a Nest, and beseech love and miracles, protection, counsel, Ave Maria, Ave Ave.

Now the Virgin of Guadalupe advances, killing for the independence of Mexico.

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El Pípila

Hidalgo’s troops storm out of the mountain scrub, and fall upon Guanajuato with volleys of stones. The mining town joins the insurgent avalanche.

Despite the havoc wrought by the king’s fusillades, the multitude flood the streets, a surge that sweeps the soldiers aside and beats up against that bastion of Spanish power, the Corn Exchange. There, beneath the vaulted ceilings of its thirty halls, lie eight thousand bushels of corn and an incalculable fortune in silver, gold bars, and jewels. The lords of the colony, scared out of their wits, have locked themselves in with all of their treasure.

In vain, the dandies beg for mercy. Throat-cuttings, looting, a vast drunken spree follows, and the Indians strip the dead to see if they have tails.

El Pípila, a miner, is the hero of the day. They say he hoisted an enormous stone slab onto his back, scuttled like a turtle through the rain of bullets, and with a lighted torch and plenty of pitch set fire to the Corn Exchange door. They say that El Pípila’s name is Juan José Martínez and they say he has other names too, all the names of the Indians who are or have ever been in the mines of Guanajuato.

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Hidalgo

Everybody knew, in the town of Dolores, that the priest Hidalgo had the bad habit of reading as he walked through the streets, the great wings of his hat between the sun and the pages, and that it was a sheer miracle that neither horses nor the Inquisition ever hit him, because more dangerous than reading was what he read. At a slow pace the priest moved through the cloud of dust in the streets of Dolores, always with some French book covering his face, one of those books that talk of the social contract and the rights of man and the freedoms of citizens; and if he didn’t greet people it was because of his thirst for erudition, not rudeness.

The priest Hidalgo rebelled along with the twenty Indians who made bowls and pots with him, and at the end of a week there were fifty thousand of them. Then the Inquisition went to work on him. The Holy Office of Mexico has pronounced him a heretic, apostate of religion, denier of the virginity of Mary, materialist, libertine, advocate of fornication, seditious, schismatic, and sectarian of French liberty.

The Virgin of Guadalupe invades Guadalajara at the head of an insurgent army. Miguel Hidalgo has the portrait of King Ferdinand removed from the walls and replies to the Inquisition with a decree abolishing slavery, confiscating the goods of Europeans, ending the tributes paid by Indians, and recovering farmlands from those who have usurped them.

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Morelos

He is a country priest, like Hidalgo. Like Hidalgo, he was born in the Tarascan country, in the mountains of Michoacán where Bishop Vasco de Quiroga had created, two and a half centuries earlier, his communist utopia — lands of redemption later laid waste by plagues and by the forced labor of thousands of Indians dragged to the mines of Guanajuato.

“With violence I go to the hot lands of the south.”

José María Morelos, shepherd and muleteer, parish priest of Carácuaro, joins the revolution. He takes the road with twenty-five spearmen and a few shotguns. Behind the white silk kerchief that binds his head, the troop keeps growing.

In search of Atoyac Indians hidden in the palm groves, Morelos crosses the little town of Pie de la Cuesta.

“Who goes there?”

“Holy God,” say the Indians.

Morelos talks to them. From now on, to the cry of “Who goes there?” people will answer, “America.”

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Moreno

Great fortunes in a few hands, thought Mariano Moreno, are stagnant waters that do not bathe the earth. So as not to escape from tyrants without destroying tyranny, parasitical capital amassed in colonial business would have to be expropriated. Why seek in Europe, at the price of extortionate interest, money that is more than abundant at home? From abroad should be brought machines and seeds, instead of Stoddard pianos and Chinese vases. The State, thought Moreno, should become a great entrepreneur of a newly independent nation. The revolution, he thought, should be terrible and astute, implacable with enemies and vigilant towards onlookers.

Fleetingly he held power, or thought he did.

“Thanks be to God,” breathed the merchants of Buenos Aires. Mariano Moreno, the demon of hell, has died on the high seas. His friends French and Beruti go into exile. Castelli is sentenced to prison.

Cornelio Saavedra orders copies of Rousseau’s Social Contract, which Moreno had published and circulated, rounded up; and he warns that no Robespierre has any place on the River Plata.