1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (66 page)

People from Manila? I asked.

Not just Manila, I was told. From Legazpi’s time, poverty, colonialism, and slavery had scattered Filipinos across the world. Filipinos were nannies, nurses, and construction workers in Hong Kong, Sydney, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Paris. They had made money and wanted to visit home. Home was the sea and the beach and a cookout beneath the palms. Home was
bahay kubo.

Rudmar stood with his back to the water, scowling at the hills. After logging companies had exhausted the hills of Luzon, they turned to the other seven thousand islands in the archipelago. Industrial ships pulled into Mindoro’s lightly settled bays and unloaded bulldozers and trucks and men with saws and come-alongs. They stripped the slopes bare. Floods ensued, wiping out farms and villages. Compounds in the runoff washed over the island’s white beaches, staining them permanently yellow. The government ultimately banned most logging, but the damage had been done.
They took the color from the earth,
Rudmar said. He wanted his home back.

This anger, magnified and distorted, was the well from which the New People’s Army drew. Their bases were in the ravaged hills, perhaps close enough to watch me bumble around Thelma’s Paradise. Living amid ecological mayhem, the guerrillas saw all the costs of the great market and none of the benefits. It was no accident that their attack on Bulalacao the year before had targeted the construction equipment that built resorts. A few months after my visit, they came out of the hills again, assaulting a nearby military outpost—troops from a government that they viewed as a corrupt handmaiden to global capitalism.

A small resort occupies the point at Maujao, where Asia, Europe, and the Americas met for the first time. (
Photo credit 10.3
)

Great Manila, like small Bulalacao, is wrestling with the push and pull of the global market. Its outer harbor is a mass of sleek, wired-up international buildings, but the populous inner harbor is unchanged in many ways—houses still crowd the water, and people still live their lives on boats much like those in Legazpi’s day. (
Photo credit 10.1
)

Yet there were real benefits from the logging, too. My grandfather got his table. Craftsmen got paid to build it. Shipping companies got paid to carry it, giving people jobs. The students got to have breakfast with my grandfather, a wonderful raconteur. Even the men with chainsaws should be considered. These agents of destruction were just putting food on the table.

Economists have developed theoretical tools for evaluating these incommensurate costs and benefits. But the magnitude of the costs and benefits is less important than their distribution. The gains are diffuse and spread around the world, whereas the pain is intense and local. Economists say that the transactions in such cases have
externalities
: spillovers on parties who are otherwise not involved. The side effects can be positive; some Mindoro villagers are using the semi-legally cleared land to plant bigger gardens. But the worry is negative externalities: erosion, landslides, yellow sand. In theory, the solution is obvious: increase the price to take into account the full range of costs. Rather than paying, say, $100 for his table, my grandfather should have paid $125, with the extra money going either to compensate villagers for their yellow beaches or to cover the costs of logging companies adopting protective measures. In practice, making those arrangements is not easy.

Complicating all is the welter of mixed motives. On the one hand, people want the wash of goods and services that the worldwide market provides. No one forced Thelma to build a resort for foreigners. In Amapá, nobody twisted Dona Rosario’s arm to buy a television and a freezer. Nobody was holding a gun to the head of the teenage Chinese villagers in Shaanxi who clamor for Nintendo games and U.S.-brand cigarettes and DVDs of Will Smith movies. Or, for that matter, their counterparts in Beijing and Shanghai, whose demand for French wine is driving Bordeaux prices to amazing heights. Smart phones, aerodynamic sneakers, beige faux-leather living-room sets—people desire these things. Absent catastrophe, they will get them. Or their children will.

On the other hand, the same people who want to satisfy their desires also resist the consequences of satisfaction. They want to have what everyone else has, but still be aggressively themselves—a contradictory enterprise. Floating in the capitalist stream, they reach down with their feet, looking for solid ground. To be a good place to stand, it must be their own, not somebody else’s place. As human desires bring the Homogenocene into existence, billions of people marching through increasingly identical landscapes, that special place becomes ever harder to find. Things feel changed and scary. Some people hunker down into their local dialects or customary clothing or an imagined version of their own history or religion. Others enfold themselves in their homes and gardens. A few pick up weapons. Even as the world unifies, its constituent parts fragment into halves, and the halves into quarters. Unity or division—Thelma’s Paradise or New People’s Army—which will win out? Or is the conflict inevitable?

After an hour or two, the pilot hurried us back to Bulalacao. He was worried about taking a boat with no lights, charts, or navigation equipment around the rocky, island-dappled coast at night. I walked along the town esplanade with Rudmar, looking for a place to buy some water. Afternoon light was beginning to throw deep shadows. I came upon some women and children in what looked, to my inexpert eye, like a family garden around a palm-thatched home—a
bahay kubo.

The women and children moved with enviable efficiency—they were getting things done. Towering above their heads were tall stalks of maize, now the second most important crop in the Philippines. Below it were squashes and peppers. I could see why the botanists had been amused by the song—the plants they were growing would not have been out of place in Mexico. Yet at the same time the garden was obviously something else.

Gardeners work in partnership, more or less successfully, with what nature provides. They experiment all the time, fiddling with this, trying out that. People take seeds and stick them in the ground to see what happens—that’s how Ifugao villagers bred hundreds of types of rice in a few centuries. An essential factor is that gardeners experience the consequences of their own actions. They make decisions and expend labor; a few months later they discover what they have wrought. Externalities are rare. Gardens are places of constant change, but the changes are owned by the gardener—which is why they feel like home.

Despite the visible impatience of the pilot, I spent a few minutes watching the family in their garden. In this place the Columbian Exchange had been adapted and remade. Families had embraced the biological assaults of the outside world—some of them, anyway—and made them into something of their own. Other problems would be dealt with as they came. Even people trying to preserve the past by growing traditional varieties of rice are necessarily facing the future. The women were weeding around the maize. Every stalk carried its American past in its DNA, but the kernels swelling in the cobs were concerned with next season’s growth.

APPENDIX A
Fighting Words

A book like this must thread a path through terminological quicksand. The problems are threefold. First, many of the names that readers are familiar with are inaccurate; sometimes they are viewed as insulting. Second, different people perceive things in different ways, so a term that may be spot-on from one point of view may seem wildly off target from another. Third, words can be used in different ways in past than present, so that one can employ a term accurately (that is, use it in the way it was used by the people under discussion at the time and place under discussion) but convey entirely the wrong thing.

Take the word “Asian.” In countries like the United States, the term is a replacement for “Oriental,” which is viewed as Eurocentric. In other parts of the world, though, “Oriental” and its translated equivalents seem unexceptionable. Because “Asian” is a common word in all places, substitution should be unproblematic, at least at first glance—what’s the cost? The cost is that although the dictionary defines “Asian” as meaning “of, relating to, or characteristic of the continent of Asia”—the entire landmass, from Israel to Siberia—in practice the word generally refers to specific groups. In the United States it usually indicates East and Southeast Asia (China, Japan, and Vietnam, for example), whereas in Britain it is mainly used for South Asia (India and Pakistan, for example).

That is a comparatively simple distinction. Consider the Parián, the big Chinese ghetto in Manila that played an important role in the silver trade. Spanish records routinely refer to its inhabitants as
chinos
and
sangleys.
Using the latter is discourteous, to say the least—
sangley
is a pejorative, analogous in weight, perhaps, to “kraut” or “frog” for German and French people.
Chino
means “Chinese person.” It isn’t particularly pejorative, but it also isn’t particularly accurate: more than a few Parián residents were not from China. As used in Manila, the term really meant something like “people from Asia who are not from the Philippines.” (Because the Spaniards often distinguished the Japanese from other Asian peoples, it may be more accurate to say that it meant something akin to “people from Asia who are not from the Philippines or Japan.”) Unsurprisingly, Parián residents didn’t think of themselves in this way. Most were from Fujian, and Fujianese people typically described themselves as Hakka or Min—“Chinese,” in their view, applied mainly to the Han, the dominant ethnic group.

Matters get more complex still when one considers that Spaniards in different places used
chino
to mean different things. In Mexico, the rulers of New Spain viewed anyone with “Asiatic” features as a
chino,
including people from the Philippines. Thus a Spanish word used to distinguish Filipinos from other Asians in one place was used to describe them in another. Worse still, the word
chino
in Spanish America soon lost its connection with China, and even Asia. Peculiarly, some of the mixed descendants of Indians came to be known as
chinos.
(A popular folk figure in the Mexican city of Puebla is the
china poblana,
the Chinese Pueblan woman, a racy, flirtatious sort who wears a white blouse, a colorfully patterned skirt, and a shawl. Visitors to Puebla are told that the style was originated by Catarina de San Juan, the pious, vision-filled Mughal slave whom I described in
Chapter 8
; the patterned skirt, one is solemnly assured, was inspired by her sari. But Muslim women like Catarina didn’t wear saris; purdah was becoming popular, and they wore concealing garments. In addition, there is ample testimony that in Puebla Catarina wore black and was anything but flirtatious. The dress style, researchers say, is simply an adaptation of Indian dress.)

Similar concerns apply to “European.” The idea of Europe as a geographic entity has existed for a long time. The idea that this entity was populated by people with commonalities enough to be described as a group has not. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary,
the first English use of the word to mean “a resident of Europe” occurred only in 1639. For most of the time surveyed in this book, people from the eastern Atlantic shore referred to themselves by nationality: English, French, Dutch, and so on. The people from the Iberian Peninsula who play such a large role in this book often identified themselves by region—Extremaduran, Basque, Castilian, and so on. If all these diverse people had recourse to a collective noun, it was “Christian,” because Europe was part of Christendom. (Early in the writing of this book, I tried using “Christian” in that sense. I gave a few pages to a friend, who asked why I was dragging religion into a story about trade—was I writing some kind of pro- or anti-Christian tract?)

The peoples of Africa, America, and Asia quickly learned that Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, and English were different. Nevertheless, they also regarded them as members of a single group—people who showed up from another continent, wanting to take over. In China, Europeans were often grouped together, disparagingly, as
gweilo
or
laowai;
the terms retain some sting for those to whom they are applied.

Given these spiraling complexities, I couldn’t find a consistent way to use historically accurate terminology. Instead, I refer to people
geographically,
by their place of origin, using modern terms. Thus I call the conqueror of the Philippines, Miguel López de Legazpi, a Spaniard, even though he was Basque, led an expedition composed mainly of Basques, and presumably spoke Basque at home. When the regional origin becomes important, as in my discussion of the Basque-Vicuña war in Potosí, I use more local geographic names. This scheme courts anachronism, though I have tried to avoid it. Because the United Kingdom of Great Britain didn’t exist until Scotland and England merged in 1707, for instance, I don’t call anyone before that date from these countries “British.” At the same time, I also don’t ever label anyone from Ireland as a Briton, even though Ireland was formally part of the United Kingdom between 1800 and 1921—it’s too confusing. I am sure that I have made mistakes; readers who wish to tell me about them can contact me at
charlesmann.org
.

Despite its problems, this scheme has the virtue of allowing me to avoid another intractable issue: race. Race is part of any discussion today of the interactions of people of European, African, Asian, and Indian descent. But at the dawn of globalization modern concepts of race didn’t exist. Fighting off the yoke of African Islamic empires, the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula didn’t, as a rule, kill or enslave “blacks,” they killed and enslaved “Moors” or “infidels” or “idolaters.” At the beginning, slavery had little racial baggage; the question that preoccupied Spaniards was not whether “black” or “red” people could be enslaved but whether Christians could be put in bondage; heathens, heretics, and criminals of any color were fair game.

The term
negro,
a Portuguese word for “black,” didn’t come into wide use until the 1450s, when Portuguese ships came to what is now Senegal and dubbed it the
terra dos negros
(land of the blacks). Although “negro” referred to skin color, it was mostly an ethnic descriptor, much like “Irish” or “Malay.” An analogy might be
ang mo,
the Fujianese word for “redhead.”
Ang mo
was used to label the Dutch, even though most didn’t have red hair. Later
negro
came to mean “slave,” and was used by Africans themselves. As the historians Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton have noted, Central Africans insisted that European visitors use one Portuguese word for black (
negro
) to describe slaves and a second, alternative Portuguese word for black (
preto
) to describe free Africans.

From the beginning, Europeans had terrible things to say about “blacks,” but the disdain wasn’t as monolithic as sometimes portrayed, and hard to distinguish from the garden-variety ethnocentrism that seems to be an ineradicable part of the human condition. More important, the negative beliefs weren’t racial in the modern sense—they didn’t invoke an inheritable genetic makeup. Europeans criticized African
behavior,
not African racial stock; Africans were bad because they were supposedly “promiscuous,” “thievish,” or engaged in “devil worship,” not because they were physically or mentally inferior. (I am oversimplifying a little: Europeans also believed that parents who engaged in harmful practices like devil worship would pass on a terrible moral stain to their children, who would grow up to be physically and mentally inferior. But this is still quite different from the modern conception of race.)

Races in the contemporary sense of heritable genetic patterns associated with geographic origin certainly exist, though actually identifying which genes make someone “African” or “Caucasian” remains a tall order. Are men and women “black” if they have very dark complexions and broad noses, but their hair is not twisted into corkscrew curls? Are they “white” if they have aquiline noses and flat hair but dark complexions? The complications are endless, and nobody has come close to resolving them. They are also beside the point: this type of scientific description is not what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theorists had in mind when they evolved the social concept of “white,” “yellow,” “red,” and “black” races. The two definitions of race, genetic and social, are only loosely connected—one reason that discussions of race are so often dialogues of the deaf. To avoid the confusion, I have always referred to people by geographic origin—African, European, Asian, and so on—except, occasionally, for rhetorical purposes.

I make one big exception to this rule. In this book, indigenous people are usually referred to by their ethnic names, not by a geographic label. In the modern context, it seemed to me forgivable to refer to people from Yuegang as “Chinese,” even if they would not have used that name. But it seemed foolish to refer to, say, the Inka as “Peruvians”—the gap between the Inka empire and modern Peru is too great. I make exceptions to my exception. In
Chapter 9
, for instance, I refer several times to “Angolans” in Palmares, because it is not clear which ethnic group from the area that is now modern Angola they belonged to. A bigger exception, as I imagine the reader is already thinking, is my use of the term “Indian.” On the simplest level, the plain sense of the word is wrong—among other things, Indians are not from India. (“Red Indians,” sometimes heard in Britain, is not preferred as a way to distinguish Indians from the Americas from Indians from India.) Unfortunately, alternative terms are no better. “Native American,” for instance, literally means someone who was born in the Western Hemisphere. My family and I are native Americans—yet we are not Indians. Canada has introduced the term “First Nations,” an admirable term, but one that lacks useful adjectival and possessive forms. As a writer, I am reluctant to inflict terms on readers that I cannot easily say.

On a deeper level, “Indian,” “Native American,” and “indigenous” are remote from the way the Americas’ original inhabitants thought about themselves. Just as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans did not describe themselves as “Europeans,” the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in that same era did not think in terms of any collective entity. Today, such group nouns are important. In my experience, indigenous Americans tend to use the word “Indian” when referring to their fellows. For better or worse, I am following their example.