At the beginning of the year I went to see a friend in Colombia. She had wanted to introduce me to one of her former professors, but our plan was foiled by a strike going on at the university. Strikes, she said, were not uncommon in her country.

On my return to Canada, I joked about the incident with a co-worker who like me is of Italian descent. "They're just like Italians down there," I told him. (After soccer, strikes seem to be Italy's favorite national pastime.)

My colleague didn't laugh. "No, they're not," he corrected me. "They're Indians."

I explained to him as gently as possible that although most Colombians have some Indian ancestry, unmixed Native Americans make up only 1% of the country's population. Anyone who goes to Colombia (or at least the parts I visited) in the hope of experiencing indigenous Latin American culture is bound to be disappointed. The same is true of many other countries with a mestizo majority, such as Chile, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The "Indian experience" might be better sought in nations like Bolivia and Guatemala, where over half the people are Native American, or Mexico, Peru and Ecuador, where they are not the majority but form a substantial percentage of the population.

However, the idea that Latin Americans are Indians lives on. Proponents of this notion argue that the region's apparent "Europeanness" -- language, architecture, agricultural practices and so on -- is merely a mask concealing its true character, which is Indian. According to this paradigm, not only those who truly are of unmixed Native American descent and who practise their traditional lifestyles but mestizos as well are subsumed under the category of "Indian."

It's not hard to explain why White Supremacists would subscribe to such a view. They adhere to a "one drop rule," whereby anyone with even the slightest trace of non-White ancestry is automatically excluded from the European fold. Thus the average Latin American mestizo who leads a lifestyle not too different from his or her European forebears and their modern-day descendants is considered Indian.

It's more difficult to account for leftists' embrace of this idea. Ironically, perhaps they too follow their own sort of one-drop rule. My friend at work, for instance, once told me the few Hispanic immigrants he knew couldn't possibly be like Italians because they looked Indian. In other words, they look; therefore they are. It's a similar logic to that used by White Supremacists against the immigration of people of color to Europe and North America: they can never be like us because they don't look like us. Partly too there's a tendency on the left to see Latin Americans as among the "wretched of the earth." From this perspective, it may be awkward to admit they have anything in common with the "oppressors" (i.e. Europeans and North Americans).

That's not to say the various Amerindian cultures that existed prior to the Spanish and Portuguese conquests have left no mark on modern-day Latin America. Indeed, in most countries unmixed Indian groups remain to this very day. And while virtually all these groups have been touched in one way or another by contact with Europeans, they themselves have influenced the Western society that overtook them. For example, corn, a Native American crop, has become a staple food throughout the Western Hemisphere. I, for one, who am of entirely European descent, enjoy my corn on the cob immensely.

Nonetheless, claims that Latin American mestizos are "Indians" in European guise tend to be vague and ambiguous at best and inaccurate at worst. The Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, for instance, states that "the soul of Mexico is Indian." The "soul," however, is a difficult concept to define. In the absence of a clear definition of the word, perhaps it is better to judge a culture by that which is observable rather than ethereal and ultimately unverifiable. One might ask why, if Mexico's soul is Indian, do most Mexican mestizos (the majority of the country's population) speak Spanish rather than a native language as their mother tongue. After all, three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines did not lead to the adoption of the colonizers' language there. If the Mexican soul were truly Indian, one would think it would be strong enough to withstand the conquerors' linguistic influence.

In attempting to attribute aspects of modern Latin America to its Indian past, some commentators start to look like St. Peter's mother grasping desperately at the onion.¹ For example, in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean Dr. Peter Coy sees the former region's compadrazgo (godparent) system as a relic of Native Americans' "ritual accumulation of lifelong personal bonds." In reality, though, compadrazgo isn't an Amerindian survival. It's a direct offshoot of the tradition of godparenthood in Spain and other European Catholic countries, where ties between godparents and -children are strong (a famous fictional example of which is the relationship between Johnny Fontane and Don Corleone in Italian-American novelist Mario Puzo's The Godfather). Trying to explain compadrazgo by resorting to a vague and ill-defined concept like the ritual accumulation of lifelong personal bonds stretches the limits of credibility.

At times Coy's desire to distance Latin America from its Iberian roots borders on the absurd. For example, he claims the "ritualized remembrance of, and hospitality towards, deceased relatives… has more in common with Oriental ancestor-worship than with All-Souls' Day." Of course ultimately American Indians came from Asia, but their cultural connection with that continent is no closer than that between Asians and Europeans. I might also suggest that Dr. Coy come to Sicily when All Souls' Day is celebrated on November 2. He might recognize the European Catholic origins of the same holiday in Latin America.

The effort to depict Latin America as indigenous rather than Western is similar to the tendency in other countries to identify with the conquered rather than conquerors. Some modern French, for instance, speak of "our ancestors the Gauls" (the Celtic people who inhabited what is now France before the Roman invasion), not "our ancestors the Romans." Undoubtedly the Celts have played a role in shaping France. As an example, there are more Celtic loan words in modern French than in English, even though Celtic languages were spoken in what is now England long after they disappeared from France. It was the Romans, however, who gave France her language and most of her culture. Perhaps it is somewhat uncomfortable to admit that one's culture is ultimately derived not from within but from without, and through conquest in addition.

This inclination might be even stronger among groups whose ancestors were forcibly taken from their homelands and mistreated in their adopted countries. For example, some Afrocentrists in the United States see Black American society as an offshoot of African culture. But as sociologist Pierre van den Berghe writes in his book The Ethnic Phenomenon, the search for Africa in modern-day Black America is "elusive." African Americans, he argues, are more properly "Afro-Saxons:" their culture ultimately stems from the same roots as that of the Whites around them.

And so it is with Latin America. Most of the differences between Americans and their neighbors to the south are due not to greater Indian cultural survivals among the latter but to the fact that the former trace their "Europeanness" to Great Britain whereas the latter derive theirs from Spain and Portugal. Dr. Coy, quoting a Brazilian saying that "The cat born in a store is not a biscuit," states "the time has perhaps come for the biscuit to stand up and proclaim that he is not a cat." But if Latin Americans are "biscuits," are not Canadians and Americans as well? They after all were born in the store too. I'll suggest another animal analogy: saying North Americans but not Latin Americans are Western is like saying cats are mammals while humans are reptiles.

Most serious scholars recognize that Latin America's culture is based predominantly on that of Europe. For instance, in his book Race and Racism Pierre van den Berghe explains that while indigenous traditions may be found in contemporary Mexican society, the Spanish element is clearly dominant. Even a popular tourist guide to Chile states the same of that country. And many ordinary Latin Americans realize this as well. My Nicaraguan ex-boyfriend, who was obviously of mixed race, once told me the Indians in his country spoke a different language from that of the "Whites" (i.e. the mestizos like himself). Certainly it's important not to ignore the native contribution to Latin America or the struggles of Indian groups right now. But to say the region is "Indian" is to fall prey to a false romanticism that only serves to distort history and the situation of Latin Americans today.

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