Visible Ink

We lament Old Spanish Days, when the ranchers pitted, in small corrals, Spain’s most powerful animal, the bull, against Chumash culture’s most powerful, the grizzly. To punctuate their point, the ranchers would also polish off a major threat to the message of the priests: Chumash bear shamans.

As Octavio Paz details in Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith, Nueva España similarly enacted the erasure of other indigenous cultures to the south. He shows how negated cultures, given time, can percolate up through the colonial veneer and form a third culture, such as modern-day Mexico. Thus, Chumash culture is written, mostly in invisible ink.

So we also celebrate those writers, such as some at the Independent, who have attempted to make that history visible.