You know, once I was rising up in Jackson Heights, Queens, I discovered the similar historical past that they taught children throughout America.
That George Washington reduce down his cherry tree, that Ben Franklin flew his kite, and Abe was sincere.
Guess what was lacking?
Us, the Latino contributions to this nation.
Colón: You cannot have a historical past e book about the United States with out contemplating the histories of all of the Latino communities.
Most of the historical past we're nonetheless taught is from the level of view of the conquistadors who tried to wipe out any hint of superior indigenous cultures.
As a child, that lack of inclusion in historical past textbooks made me really feel invisible.
I believe it is important that we set the file straight about Latinx historical past.
Well, with the strike and with the boycott, we have been attempting to provide farm staff primary human rights.
Ortiz: We do not simply make a contribution to U .S.
historical past, we have now modified U.S. historical past.
Latinos are the most extremely embellished ethnic group in U.S. army historical past.
People are inclined to overlook that Latinos have been right here lengthy earlier than the United States existed.
Colón: If we contemplate the richness of our previous, we're in a position to reconstruct a a lot richer image of how our cultures got here to be.
It's necessary to not underestimate the folks that got here earlier than us and what they knew.
Leguizamo: They invented life-saving medical practices and engineered unimaginable infrastructure.
They additionally calculated the actions of the planets and so they wrote all of it down of their sacred books.
It's as epic as any of the nice wonders you've got discovered about in historical past class.
This is the story from the level of view of the individuals who have been already dwelling in the Americas.
Carrasco: It is actually necessary for Latinos to know and for different folks to find out about Latino roots.
Leguizamo: Imagine how others would see us in the event that they knew our wealthy historical past.
Imagine how we'd see ourselves if we knew our personal tales.
We're going to fill in the components of our historical past that have been misplaced, all the approach from the historic Olmecs to the Latinos who helped construct this nice nation.
I do know that is rather a lot of floor to cowl, however don't be concerned, as a result of I obtained you.
♪ This program was made attainable partly by… Narrator: To carry the historical past on this sequence to life, the following program consists of photos generated by AI instruments.
To be taught extra about the course of of creating these photos, go to pbs.org/historia.
This is my likelihood to dig deep on the actual historical past of Latinos.
Our historical past is a sophisticated one as a result of Latino identification is not all the time properly-understood, even by ourselves.
It means you are descended from the unique peoples of the Americas, as a result of as soon as Europeans arrived to the New World, they combined with the native populations and enslaved Africans, and the first Latinos have been born.
Of course, we are available each colour and various taste.
Some of us are Afro-Latino or Indigenous Latino.
Some determine as “Latinx”, however “Hispanic” refers to native Spanish audio system.
Today, a whole lot of tens of millions of folks throughout the globe share this identification, however our roots return hundreds of years.
Between 2000 BC and 1492, the peoples of the Caribbean, Central and South America constructed unbelievable cities.
Fernández: The sophistication in the arts and structure of these huge cities that have been larger than European cities.
When the Spanish arrived right here, they discovered civilizations that have been in some ways extra superior than the place they got here from.
But as a way to justify colonizing and changing the natives and stealing their wealth, the conquistadors created a story about barbaric cultures that needed to be subjugated.
Anything that did not match this narrative was destroyed.
♪ Fernández: We know, we have a tendency to begin Latin American historical past with Columbus.
I all the time begin in my classroom with the Taíno folks.
It's necessary to know who have been the unique folks of the land that Columbus first encountered.
Leguizamo: Today, we use the phrase “Taíno” to check with all the indigenous folks of the Caribbean, however the truth is, there have been many alternative political and cultural teams dwelling all through the area.
Moya: The Taíno folks have been initially from the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, and so they have been in a position to transfer into the Caribbean Islands, going to Puerto Rico, then Hispaniola, what's Dominican Republic and Haiti in the present day.
It's the solely time that we all know of thus far the place historic seafarers have been transferring out of the continent, shedding sight of the land behind them to cross a whole lot, even hundreds of nautical miles and settle into newly inhabited lands, on this case, islands.
Researchers have instructed that there may have been anyplace between 70,000 to 100,000 indigenous peoples dwelling in the Caribbean earlier than contact.
♪ We typically assume of islands as paradise, a ravishing and heat place the place there are not any stressors, however eking out a subsistence for hundreds of years on an island is actually arduous work.
You have to have the ability to handle agriculture in a spot the place hurricanes are extraordinarily frequent.
You want to have the ability to navigate successfully the difficult ocean currents which can be nonetheless difficult to navigate in the present day.
You have to have buying and selling companions throughout completely different islands and converse completely different languages so as to take action.
They had intensive agriculture, which allowed them to feed a rising inhabitants each inside in addition to between islands.
The Indigenous folks of the Caribbean have so many superior cultural achievements that I really feel I get misplaced once we discuss them as a result of we regularly discuss them in the worst attainable second of their historical past, which is, of course, contact with Europeans.
When Columbus first set foot in the New World, that was the starting of the finish for a lot of indigenous cultures.
Let's identify it for what it actually was.
Three boats and 86 males landed in 1492, bringing with them billions of European germs in what turned out to be the apocalypse.
Now, the first folks to come across Columbus in the New World have been the Taíno.
Sadly, the Taíno have been additionally the first to endure this civilization-ending devastation.
Columbus arrives to this landmass.
He would not know the place he's, and truly, one of his three ships runs aground and is destroyed.
The folks dwelling on that island, they arrive out to assist him, and so they assist them load all the folks on their canoes.
As the Spanish inform it, they gave them their finest homes for them to remain and to retailer their items.
That was the first encounter.
Leguizamo: We by no means even cease to consider how these natives lived earlier than these ships arrived.
When historical past is written by the victors, we miss out on the perspective of the oppressed.
Columbus: “They willingly traded everything they owned.
They have no iron.
“Their spears are made of cane.
“They would make fine servants.
“With 50 males, we may subjugate all of them “and make them do whatever we want.”
Leguizamo: Contrary to standard perception, he did know the Earth was spherical, however he did not know that there have been two whole continents and tens of millions of folks between Europe and Asia.
When he by chance docked in Hispaniola in 1492, mistaking it for India, he shortly took the alternative to start enslaving the native individuals who lived there, stealing their land and sources, brutalizing their households, and spreading European ailments.
I do not assume he was neither significantly courageous nor significantly visionary.
You have to recollect, earlier than the Portuguese and the Spaniards got here to the Americas, that they had gone to the Canary Islands, that they had gone to the Azores, so that they have been pushing the boundaries.
If it hadn't been Columbus, it might have been every other chief of an expedition.
So it was going to occur.
There was nothing particular about Columbus, actually.
In my opinion, the solely factor that was distinctive about Columbus was his cruelty, as a result of he shortly turned identified for enslaving, brutalizing, and terrorizing the Taínos.
Columbus's males even documented that he captured Taíno girls and gave them to his crew to be raped.
Life underneath Spanish rule was a nightmare.
The indigenous folks of the Caribbean have been the first to expertise the brunt of European colonization and the atrocities that got here with that.
And of course, there was additionally compelled displacement and enslavement.
So it actually quantities to one thing very near a genocide.
De las Casas: “It was a general rule among Spaniards “to be merciless.
“Not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel, “in order that harsh and bitter remedy would stop “Indians as daring to think of themselves “as human beings “or having a minute to think at all.
“So they'd reduce an Indian's hand “and leave them dangling by a shred of skin, and they would send him on saying, ‘Go now, spread the news to your chiefs.'
“They would check their swords and their manly energy “on captured Indians “and place bets on the slicing off of heads “or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow.”
Leguizamo: When we inform the actual story of Columbus, that is how we problem our colonial mindset in the current as a result of the fact is the Taíno weren't frightened or awed by these European sailors.
Fernández: There was rather a lot of rebellions in opposition to Columbus.
It was utter chaos.
The Taíno weren't a passive folks.
There have been 5 completely different kingdoms on Haiti alone, and a few of them have been allies and a few of them have been enemies, and so they have been skilled warriors.
And the truth is, when Columbus and his followers have been waging warfare on them, they fought again.
Leguizamo: Each chiefdom was dominated by a pacesetter referred to as a “cacique” or chief.
Notably, girls may turn into caciques in addition to males, and lots of fought in battle alongside their male relations.
Agüeybaná II was one of the strongest caciques in the complete Caribbean at the time of the European invasion.
He had seen firsthand the Spanish arrival in Puerto Rico in 1493, and he devoted his whole life to the combat for his folks and their land.
We know that Agüeybaná was succesful of uniting a big alliance of indigenous peoples.
He united to combat in opposition to the Spanish, and I believe that tells us one thing about management at the moment, and it additionally tells us one thing about pan-Caribbean unity in the face of oppression.
The Taíno fought again.
Let's get rid of these stereotypes of the passive Indian.
Colón: There are historic paperwork that inform us that in 1511 the Taíno folks of Puerto Rico mounted an enormous resistance in opposition to the Spanish that included burning down the Spanish metropolis of Caparra.
It included raiding many cities, and in addition that they labored along with indigenous peoples from different islands, not simply from Puerto Rico, however as soon as African peoples arrived into the Caribbean, they typically united with indigenous folks to combat.
We know that Spanish authorities have been so afraid of this that they have been writing to the crown asking for reinforcements to be despatched, or the complete colonial enterprise would have been threatened.
And I point out that as a result of it actually goes in opposition to this concept that these folks by no means resisted, that they by no means fought again.
And as a result of we expect of them that approach in the present day as docile, we are inclined to devalue their contributions to our heritage.
Leguizamo: But here is the factor.
Because the Taíno tales weren't preserved, historians have lengthy relied on the writings and narrative from the Europeans, which painted the Taíno as easy and backwards.
Fernández: It's completely not true that the native folks misplaced as a result of that they had inferior weaponry.
That's completely not true, and it simply feeds into these hierarchies of European superiority.
The benefit that the Spaniards had in phrases of conquering the Native American was immunity to smallpox.
It seems the conquistadors' finest weapons weren't their weapons and metal.
No, as a substitute it was their our bodies, which carried billions of lethal germs with them.
It was dozens of pandemics, one proper after the different, primarily smallpox, measles, and typhus, that just about worn out the native populations.
♪ There's no query about it as a result of the Spanish friars who wrote again to the king of Spain mentioned, you already know, “I'm trying to convert all these people, and they're just dying all around me.”
Motolinía: “As the Indians did not know the remedy “of the illness, they died in heaps like bedbugs.
“In many places it happened “that everybody in a home died, “and as it was impossible “to bury the nice quantity of useless, “they pulled down the houses over them “in order that their properties turned their tombs.”
The statistics speak for themselves that the estimates are that there were about a million inhabitants of Hispaniola in 1492 when Columbus and his followers arrived.
16 years later, in 1508, 94% of them were gone.
94%.
When I think about what the indigenous people lost, it's almost too much for me to wrap my head around, let alone my heart.
Imagine 94% of your community gone.
Empty homes, empty towns, almost all of your friends and family gone.
How do you keep going after such a loss?
That's why we should never forget the genocide that was inflicted on our ancestors.
We need to celebrate the people of Taíno heritage who still exist today.
Columbus committed so much violence, rape, and murder that he was eventually arrested for his violent atrocities.
The governor of Hispaniola arrested him on mismanagement and brutality charges against the Taíno and his own soldiers, and then had him forcibly returned to Spain where he was stripped of his noble titles.
And yet we still celebrate Columbus Day.
Don't get me wrong, we're starting to see change.
Indigenous Peoples' Day is now replacing Columbus Day in many cities and states across the U.S. Colón: Indigenous ancestry is a central part of Puerto Rican identity to this day.
In fact, we call ourselves “boriquas”, and boriqua is the Taíno word.
The idea that the Caribbean's indigenous peoples disappeared soon after European contact and that they contributed very little to our culture and our biology today.
But when we look at the DNA that people still carry in them, that forces us to reconsider this extinction narrative.
In fact, we are connected culturally, biologically, and also genetically to these people.
The history of the New World civilizations isn't just oppression and pain because our story is so much bigger than that.
And our story includes more than just the Taínos that had the bad luck to be the first ones to meet Columbus.
At the time of Columbus's arrival, indigenous civilizations thrived throughout all of Southern and Central America, including what we know now as modern-day Mexico.
It all starts here.
The Olmec, the Taíno, the Maya, the Inca, the Aztec, these were the OG civilizations of Latin America, and their great-great-grandkids to the Nth degree would become the Latinos of today.
♪ First we have to pay homage to the “madrina”, or godmother of all ancient Mesoamerican cultures, the Olmecs, whose culture was old when Rome was young.
Carrasco: There existed in Mexico what is called the mother culture of Mesoamerica, the Olmecs.
Leguizamo: The Olmecs had already formed a complex, wide-ranging civilization, all before Buddha was even born.
They're considered the earliest major Latin American civilization.
So many of these things, the numerical systems, the writing systems, the calendar, were created by the Olmecs.
Carrasco: Over the last 100 years, a number of archaeologists sort of accidentally discovered these huge heads.
Some of which weighed 9 tons, taller than a man.
Why the great heads?
Well, nobody really knows, but it seems to me what the big heads represent is some sort of awareness of the importance of intelligence.
The materials that they used for their monumental architecture were brought from great distances.
Things that were very heavy, very difficult to transport.
They developed some kind of transportation system, maybe through the waterways, to take these stones, float them down close to these ceremonial centers, then transport them across logs or some way of rolling them into the ceremonial center.
And then the sculptors went to work.
Do you play basketball?
Well, without the Olmec and their rubber balls, you would never have heard of Kobe Bryant.
People think rubber was invented by Charles Goodyear in the 1840s, but he was building off the tech originally invented by the Olmecs 3,000 years ago.
In Mesoamerica today, people still play the ballgame.
So the ballgame is a great element of the Latino ancestors.
Leguizamo: The Olmec established several great cities throughout their empire, but the greatest jewel of all pre-Columbian Mesoamerica was a mysterious city called Teotihuacán.
Now, most of us are taught to think of Greece and Rome as the cradles of Western civilization, but the ancient peoples of Central and South America had sophisticated cultures hundreds of years before Europe.
And I'm here at the real cradle of Western civilization, Teotihuacán, where there's evidence of diverse, powerful, intelligent cultures dating back to 400 BC.
So the great capital of Mesoamerica was Teotihuacán.
And it comes into being as an urban center.
We really are in the first century of the Common Era, and it rises to be the great imperial center.
Teotihuacán is the symbol of this great achievement of building some of the first cities in the world.
And Mesoamerica, Mexico, as well as Peru, are two of the areas where people invented these first cities without any influence from other cities.
The others are Mesopotamia, northern China, Egypt, and the Indus Valley.
And this is really important for Latinos to know and for other people to know about Latino roots.
Leguizamo: All these places that today we'd consider Third World turns out were actually the places where civilization began.
For instance, the pyramids of Teotihuacán were built around the same time as the Roman Colosseum.
Archaeologists estimate that Teotihuacan had up to 200,000 inhabitants at its peak.
For comparison, London's population didn't even break 100,000 until the 16th century.
So one of the wonderful things that archaeologists have been able to find is that Teotihuacán was a multi-ethnic city.
The things that brought people of different ethnicities from all over Mesoamerica to Teo are the same things that draw people to cities today.
Better infrastructure, bigger ideas, and of course, a shot at a better life.
Newscaster: Mexico's famed Teotihuacán archaeological site still holds many mysteries for historians.
But the answers they seek may lie below the surface.
Leguizamo: We didn't dig the subway tunnels of New York until about 100 years ago.
2,000 years earlier, the original scientists and rulers of Teotihuacán built a series of tunnels dozens of feet beneath the ground without the use of machinery or power tools.
These tunnels connected chambers holding treasures long forgotten until they were unearthed in 2003.
It was a groundbreaking discovery that changed our perception of the civilization that once thrived here.
And I'm here to meet the man who uncovered these wonders, archaeologist Sergio Gómez.
¡Qué placer!
¡Mucho gusto!
¿Dónde estoy?
Estamos en frente del Templo de la Serpiente Emplumada, donde hace varios años descubrimos un túnel que nos conduce hasta casi el centro de la pirámide.
Es probablemente uno de los descubrimientos más importantes que se han hecho en los últimos años en Teotihuacán.
¿Y por qué dices esto, por qué?
Tenemos una gran cantidad de objetos importados de la zona maya, muchas cosas increíbles traídas desde Centroamérica.
Y también tenemos pequeños fragmentos de turquesa importada desde Arizona.
Leguizamo: This monumental discovery of turquoise all the way from Arizona proves that the people of Teotihuacán had significant trade relationships with societies as far away as Arizona to the north and Honduras to the south.
¿Qué tan profundo es?
Vamos a bajar 15 metros.
¿Es peligroso?
Es muy peligroso.
No puedes tocar las paredes, que es muy venenoso.
Pero vamos a entrar con mucho cuidado, sin tocarlo.
Sí, tranquilo.
Un casco para tu precaución.
Con precaución.
Vamos a pasar.
Leguizamo: To put that into context, their network extended almost as far as the Roman Empire at about the same time.
Leguizamo: ¿Esto qué es?
Gómez: Ese es el hueco por donde yo baje la primera vez.
Al fondo encontramos cuatro ramos de flores perfectamente conservados.
¡No!
Gómez: Increíble.
Leguizamo: Increíble.
Leguizamo: As we get further into the tunnel, I can feel how deep I am below the surface of the earth.
Gómez: Estamos llegando a la parte final del túnel, donde encontramos tres grandes cámaras.
La percepción que tienen del tiempo es distinta.
No importa si no la viste terminada.
La proyectaste, y tal vez tres o cuatro generaciones después lo terminaron.
Pero nosotros tenemos mucha prisa.
En la actualidad queremos hacer las cosas muy rápido.
Para ellos era diferente.
Todo el universo gira en torno a este eje.
¿Cómo hicieron ellos sin la tecnología?
¿Quién puede venir aquí?
¿Todo el mundo, el público?
Este es un lugar muy sagrado, un lugar muy delicado, y nunca va a ser abierto al público.
Y por eso me da gusto que hayas venido.
Sergio, thank you for bringing me here.
I feel very honored, and it's so special to see this sacred space.
Leguizamo: We have to stop centering the European version of history and reconsider our own past.
Take the incredible inventions and medical knowledge of South America's greatest empire, the Inca.
♪ The Inca people gained control of the region and established their empire in 1438.
The Inca's extending from modern-day Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, central Chile, and parts of Argentina.
Leguizamo: They ruled for nearly 100 years before Europeans reached their territory.
The Inca were also extremely organized.
They had a system of recording using these knotted cords called “khipus”.
They divided up their people, they had censuses.
They had labor requirements.
That was the way they supported a massive agricultural economy.
Leguizamo: Khipu are collections of knotted strings which the Inca encoded with meaning to keep records and record data.
Using different string colors and weaves, the khipu makers could have created over 1,500 separate units of information.
And in comparison, the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq and Iran, worked with fewer than 1,500 cuneiform signs, and Egyptians had fewer than 800 hieroglyphics.
Even after the Spanish formally colonized these lands and set up their own rules of law, native people still found ways to challenge European supremacy.
Carrasco: The Spanish courts, they were always demanding what becomes very important for immigrants today, “papeles”.
You gotta have your papeles.
Indigenous people would come in Peru with their khipus, in Mexico with their codices, and they would use these in the courts to say, “Hey, we have now a historical past, “we have a style of telling stories, “we had our personal authorized system, and right here it's.”
Leguizamo: In fact, the khipu were accepted as legal documents in colonial Spanish courts.
There are even accounts of khipu being used as evidence against the Spanish during cases in which Native Inca people accused colonists of stealing their land or property.
We very much underestimate people who lived in the past.
It's important to not underestimate the people that came before us and what they knew.
Verano: In Western medicine, there's often been a little bit of elitism saying that the Greeks were the greatest artists of all time, the Romans were the greatest engineers.
Now, where Peru stands out in particular is in a form of surgery on the skull that we call “trepanation”.
It comes from the Greek word “trypanon”, which means a drill.
If you have a depressed skull fracture and the brain is swelling, or there's a hematoma blood clot underneath the bone, if you can cut a window, you can let the brain expand, then the patient can survive, and then it can retract.
Just an amazing 2,000-year tradition of skull surgery.
We know the Inca weren't the only ones performing these surgeries.
In ancient Greece, they also drilled holes in patient skulls, but the Inca were a lot more successful.
One of the most impressive statistics that we have from studying trepanned skulls from Peru is that by Inca times, when they got the best results that we know of, they had survival rates of 80% to 90%.
If we contrast that to Europe into the early 20th century, they had about a 10% survival rate.
American medical practitioners didn't even reach the same level of success performing trepanations until after the Civil War, but even then they lagged behind the pre-Incan civilizations who also pioneered the use of anesthesia hundreds of years earlier.
Verano: The Peruvian case is like an unwritten chapter in the history of medicine.
It should be written as its own thing.
Just 7% of American physicians today are Latino.
Imagine how much higher that percentage would be if Latino kids knew that they'd been descended from surgeons and masters of medicine.
But it was the Inca gold and silver, not their medical expertise, that drove the Spanish all the way to South America.
There's no question that the Inca had great wealth in precious metals, primarily gold, but also silver.
Some of these rulers were buried with great amounts of things like crowns made of gold, scepters, nose ornaments, and a variety of other items that we can really appreciate for their artistic fineness.
It's the quality of the work.
Some of these things are masterpieces.
The Spanish, of course, didn't care about that in the 1500s.
Leguizamo: Though the Inca didn't think of gold and silver as currency, Europeans certainly did.
It was this drive for wealth that spurred the conquistadors to violently seize the land and belongings of indigenous Americans and led to the centuries of devastation that followed.
Verano: In Cuzco, the walls of the central temple had huge gold plates on them.
The Spanish pried those off, quickly melted down these metals, and took them away.
So we've lost a tremendous amount of Inca gold work.
There's a great illustration done by a native Peruvian artist.
Leguizamo: In the drawing, an Inca ruler asks a Spanish soldier, “Why are you guys “so totally fixated on gold?
“What do you do with it?
Do you eat it?”
And the Spanish soldier jokingly replies, “Yes, we eat it.”
In 1545, a rich silver deposit was discovered in Potosí, Bolivia, ripe for Spanish exploitation.
So what did they do?
They enslaved the native Bolivians in their own land.
So by the year 1600, Potosí had over 600 mines in operation, which yielded 9 million silver pesos annually.
That's more than all the other silver mines in the world, combined.
Now, over the centuries, the Spanish would steal an entire mountain's worth of silver on the backs of enslaved indigenous Incans and African miners.
During the colonial period, 80% of the silver of the world came out of Peru and Mexico.
During this period, silver was the central thing in the making of a world economy.
♪ Now, all that silver didn't just float to Spain.
No, the Spanish traded silver pesos with the Ottoman Empire, China and India, profiting all along the way.
Now the more wealth they piled up, the more power they had to crush other cultures, not just in Latin America, but all over the world.
In fact, it was this ill-gotten wealth that funded the Enlightenment era in Europe in the 1700s.
Because suddenly governments could afford to pay scientists and philosophers and artists to sit around and create all day, ideas flourished, technology advanced, but only in Europe.
Normalmente, las condiciones de una colonia es que todo el producto que se hace emigra a Europa.
The European commercial revolution of the 1500s, 1600s, would have been impossible without the silver of the Americas.
And this isn't even ancient history, okay?
The Spanish stole so much silver from Potosi that, in 2011, the mountain collapsed, hollowed out from the inside.
Now this backbreaking labor proved deadly.
Potosi became known in Quechua as “the mountain that eats males,” as many as 8 million indigenous and African enslaved people may have perished in the mines 500 year history.
And that 500-year-old transfer riches continues to affect us today.
Because Europe used that stolen money to fund their empires, which generated more wealth.
And it was an ongoing cycle, but the poor indigenous Inca miners back in South America, well, they were left with generational poverty instead.
♪ Hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish, however, Maya society was thriving.
Their culture may be best remembered today for their meticulous calendars and knowledge of astronomy.
The Maya originally just meant “the folks in the Yucatan Peninsula,” and that was the word for their language.
But now it's understood that encompasses the Yucatan Peninsula, the Peten Basin, the Guatemala Highlands, Belize, part of Honduras, Campeche, Tabasco, and Chiapas.
The Maya were probably the most sophisticated culture in pre-Columbian Americas.
Leguizamo: One mind-blowing example: how the Maya tracked the movements of the cosmos and recorded it in their codices, which were their form of books and sacred texts.
The Maya calculated accurately the 365 plus days of the solar year over 2,000 years ago.
♪ The codices have information about the Venus cycle, the first rising of Venus with the sun, over 800 years accurately calculated.
There is a Mars table that showed that they accurately calculated the cycle of Mars.
So these documents were probably painted within a couple of hundred years of the Spanish arriving, but it's clear that some parts of them were copies of much, much earlier documents, just like the Bible is a collection of documents from a lot of different periods of time and different kinds of material.
Leguizamo: Before European contact, the Maya had developed one of the most advanced water management systems in the world.
Macri: The Maya, they were experts at managing water.
Leguizamo: The Maya aqueducts were so brilliantly constructed, they rerouted rivers to flow beneath their royal plazas.
We have amazing evidence of their ability to store water, some in the chultunes, some in reservoirs.
So even at 1,000 BC, the people of San Lorenzo had constructed pipes of concrete blocks to direct water where they needed it to be.
At the site of Palenque, they diverted a stream through the region known as the palace, where there were toilets, stones with holes in the center that water was diverted underneath it to go through and take it out to the stream.
Leguizamo: In contrast, the White House didn't get indoor plumbing until 1804, when Thomas Jefferson installed a cistern that distributed water through wooden pipes.
♪ The Maya developed a writing system, they developed the notion of the zero, which doesn't exist anyplace other than in India.
Perez: The Maya language contains figures and characters by which they could signify everything they desired, and that these great books are of such a astuteness and subtle technique that we could say our writing does not offer much of an advantage.
Leguizamo: The conquistadors and the Catholic friars considered all indigenous documents to be the work of the devil, and they burned all that they could find.
They wanted to eradicate their religion and their society and their culture.
The Spanish soldiers and the sailors who arrived to do the conquering were not educated people, and they didn't know even the science that was known in Europe.
Leguizamo: Just like in the Caribbean, in Mesoamerica, conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro committed forced conversions alongside the pillaging in mass murder.
One of the things the Spanish did was round up Indians and make a move to a certain region where they would be converted to Christianity.
People had to leave the area that they knew well to live in a place that was unfamiliar to them, so you find people gradually less and less able to take care of themselves.
Once people have been properly colonized by foreign invaders and mistreated for a generation or two, they are no longer having a literate society.
and then you have Indians who don't read and write.
And that happened with the Aztec and it certainly happened with the Maya people.
Leguizamo: So why doesn't history remember these empires as equal to the Spanish?
Well, like they say, history is a fable agreed upon.
The agreed upon narrative of European superiority is passed down even when it's not the whole truth.
I think the history textbooks not only don't get it right, they mainly don't say anything.
They say very little about Mesoamerican civilizations.
♪ Leguizamo: I'm here at Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which houses an amazing collection of Aztec artifacts.
♪ I'm here to meet expert Simon Martin, who's been studying Mesoamerican cultures up close and personal for decades.
So this is our Aztec sculpture.
This is the kind of great period that everyone's heard about.
This is when the Spanish arrived.
And these are some of the objects they would have seen when they went to Tenochtitlan, the predecessor of Mexico City.
Right, the capital of the Aztecs.
Yeah.
We know so much more about them because the Spanish actually saw Aztec society in action.
How advanced were they?
Well, they were very sophisticated.
They turned essentially a swamp into a city.
So they expanded using drainage and using raised fields and building big dikes and aqueducts.
And there were at least 100,000 people living on essentially an island in the middle of a lake.
One of the buildings that most impressed the Spaniards when they came into Tenochtitlan was Temple Mayor, the great Aztec temple.
Leguizamo: In 1978, a group of electricians installing pipes underground struck a huge carved stone, which we came to discover was a centerpiece of the Templo Mayor, unseen for hundreds of years.
Narrator: The discovery were a 20-ton stone medallion, which archaeologists say could provide the missing link to Aztec religious customs, which were wiped out by the conquering Spaniards.
The medallion is a story in stone.
Except for one small crack, it is perfectly preserved five centuries after it was buried.
They would like to widen their search to find more of the ancient city, but it lies under the National Cathedral, and too much history would have to be torn up on top of the ground to get at the mysteries below.
Carrasco: This discovery is a sculptural and architectural masterpiece because what the Aztec artists and sculptors were able to do was to put a kind of symbolic picture of their whole view of the universe in this one building.
It rocked me to find out Tenochtitlan was five times larger than Madrid before Cortés invaded the Aztec capital.
I wish I could have seen what a major metropolis, 100% built by Aztec engineers and artists, would have looked like.
♪ Ledesma: The Aztecs, they called themselves Mexicas because their biggest god was Mextli.
What we know from their ecological records and the historical sources, the Aztecs, or Mexicas, started here in 1325.
♪ Verano: There were native healers in Mexico, and when the Spanish first had contact with them, they were very impressed with their ability to treat fractures, wounds, their control of herbal medications.
And it's been said that when the conquistadors came to the city of Tenochtitlan, if they had injuries themselves or illnesses, they would prefer to go to an Aztec doctor rather than their own surgeons that came across with them from Europe.
Leguizamo: Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés reportedly told Emperor Charles V that the Aztec doctors were superior to those in Spain.
So superior, in fact, that the king need not bother sending Spanish physicians to the new world.
Perez: Some of the Indians are so experienced that they have cured many old and serious infirmities, which the Spaniards have suffered many days without finding a remedy.
Leguizamo: Modern science confirmed that over 85% of the herbs Aztecs used are truly effective and could not be found outside of the Americas.
Your local pharmacy today is filled with drugs that contain compounds used by the Aztec.
♪ Hernán Cortés was the first European conquistador to reach the great Aztec capital.
And when he and his troops arrived, the Aztec king Moctezuma greeted them on the outskirts of the city.
Olmos: Gazing on such wonderful sites, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real.
Moctezuma no era un rey, era el rey, y el rey por potestad divina, entonces era una persona ya con tanto poder que no se le podía ni siquiera ver a los ojos.
Cuando llega Hernán Cortés, tiene el primer contacto con Tenochtitlan, nadie se imaginaba que, dos años después, la ciudad iba a terminar en llamas.
For the indigenous people, the Spaniards come, they don't see them as Spaniards the way we see them today from Europe.
They see them as another ethnic group who is part of a number of powerful groups.
Y por el otro lado, tenemos a un Cortes, lo primero que intenta hacer Cortés es abrazar a Moctezuma, y por supuesto que se le ponen enfrente todo mundo para que no lo toque.
Ese tipo de cosas pues nos habla ya desde un inicio de este choque de dos formas de pensar muy diferentes.
A final de cuentas, pues va a terminar en la imposición violenta de una cultura sobre otra.
Leguizamo: There was a third important person at this diplomatic meet and greet, Cortés's native interpreter, the Spanish called her Doña Marina, and the Maya gave her the title of respect, Malintzin.
Malinche is an extremely divisive figure in Latin history.
She gave birth to Hernán Cortés's son.
Metaphorically, this is the first Latino, a child with both indigenous and European ancestry.
She's the mother of all modern Mexico, but as I learned, many also see her as a traitor, a temptress who aligned with the conquistadors over her own people.
She actually was born into a noble Aztec family, and she was sold to a Chontal Mayan community.
She's basically on the lower rungs of the society in Chontal Maya.
She learns the language, of course.
Hernán Cortés is traveling through the southern part of Mexico.
He looks scary and dangerous, and so they just like, “Here, we'll provide you with some presents, transfer on.”
And among those gifts that they gave Cortés was 20 women to serve as basically sex slaves for him and his troops.
Leguizamo: Malinche was among these women.
She was no more than 19 or 20 years old at the time.
Soon, she learns Spanish and she becomes absolutely crucial in the linguistic and communicative bridge between the Spaniards and Moctezuma, because she is trilingual.
Cortés makes note of that, and he makes her his woman, and says, “I offers you your freedom if you can be my interpreter and my secretary.”
We do know, because it is in the record, that she did give away the information when they were in Cholula, that the Cholulans were going to attack the Spanish, and there was going to be a massacre.
And she went and told Cortés, so Cortés organized a massacre against the Cholulans.
And she becomes very close to Cortés, so much so that the indigenous people, as a way of kind of making fun of him, called him Malinche in some of the documents, and they're calling him Malinche, because they're saying he's not only very close to Malinche, but she has some control over him.
Leguizamo: It's painful to imagine a native woman helping Cortés in his conquest.
In Mexican arts and literature, Malinche is usually depicted as a seller of her nation.
“Malinchista” today is still used as a Spanish insult to describe a traitor or a backstabber, and it's really easy to paint Malinche as a villain in Mexican history.
She's not siding with the Europeans, she doesn't know what Europe is, who the Europeans are, and she does the work that she had to do.
I just want to say that it's ridiculous to think that a woman who is a translator for a conqueror is the one responsible for the whole falling of the Mexica Aztec Empire.
Leguizamo: Today, many Mexican and Chicana women are taking Malinche's story back, some see her now as a victim of machismo culture, and an icon of motherhood and feminine power.
My own mestizo heritage includes both the conquerors and the indigenous people.
So Malinche's story can't be fully one thing or another, and neither can mine.
♪ Parte de lo que a veces la historia no nos termina de contar es que Cortés vivió prácticamente un año en Tenochtitlan como invitado distinguido del propio Moctezuma.
Durante la estancia de Cortés en Tenochtitlan, en 1519 y 20, las relaciones se volvieron cada vez más tensas.
En algún momento, Cortés decidió apoderarse de Moctezuma.
También estaba capturado el gobernante de Texcoco, el gobernante de Tlatelolco, el gobernante de Tacuba, y rehenes de casi todos los pueblos importantes de la cuenca de México.
Por un lado, las versiones españolas dicen que la pedrada fue la que mató a Moctezuma, es decir, su propia gente lo mató.
Las versiones indígenas dicen que encontraron el cuerpo de Moctezuma con una herida de espada en el vientre.
Obviamente, eso hacía responsables a los europeos de la muerte del tlatoani de Tenochtitlan.
Y es interesante porque nadie se quiere hacer responsable de una muerte tan delicada.
The Aztec, they were very militaristic and they dominated a huge amount of territory.
The problem was that the Spanish arrived and the enemies of the Mexica were like, “Wow, these new unusual folks look fairly highly effective.
I believe I'll ally with them, and I can lastly defeat my enemy, the Mexica.”
Cortés maybe had less than 500 troops, and he ended up having thousands and tens of thousands by the time he created alliances with those dominated groups in the Aztec territory.
80% of the warriors are indigenous warriors from other communities.
So it's not really a conquest so much as it is also a revolution, a rebellion of other indigenous people working with this new army.
So the real conquerors were all that indigenous people rather than the Spaniards.
Carrasco: But what happens when they are able to defeat the Aztec warriors in the city, is they destroy this city so badly that even in the Spanish accounts, they're mourning what they have done.
And we have descriptions of the flattened parts of this city.
Leguizamo: It took the Spanish conquistadors years to traverse all of Central and South America, but their diseases traveled far faster.
Once the first indigenous person was infected, their germs quickly spread to the rest of their family and then their whole village.
Villages traded with one another and soon whole regions could be struck down by plagues.
Even though the Europeans hadn't yet arrived at every corner of the continent, their deadly viruses raged ahead of them, carried by the natives themselves.
A lot of people died because the diseases the Spanish were carrying travel ahead of them.
Right, right.
So when they arrived, very often the societies were already devastated.
And that's one of the reasons they managed to win so easily.
It wasn't that one civilization was stronger or better or had better military knowledge.
Yeah.
These people were vanquished by disease.
Leguizamo: The fall of Tenochtitlan was a tragedy for the Aztec, but it didn't mean the whole of Latin American civilization instantly came under Spanish rule.
No, because indigenous communities fought back with force and through subtler ways as well.
♪ Macri: At one point, the Catholic bishop brought on a Mayan man in and asked him to give him an alphabet.
That Catholic bishop said, “I would like you to jot down me a sentence in your language.”
And he wrote down, “Ma inkati,” and it means, “I do not wish to.”
And for a long time, people translate as, “I don't want.”
No, it means, “I do not wish to.”
I really like that story.
The identify of the man is Chu.
You ought to know his identify.
I imply, you shouldn't be anonymous.
That's the first written instance we have now from an indigenous particular person of resistance to the invaders, actually.
♪ Well, it looks like a small second, a scribe refusing to translate a phrase from Mayan to Spanish, however historical past is made up of small moments of resistance identical to this one.
Just take into consideration Rosa Parks sitting at the entrance of the bus and what that led to.
The scribe selected dignity for himself and his tradition in the face of torture and dying.
Those are my folks.
Leguizamo: Our ancestors endured an nearly complete genocide by warfare, plague, and non secular conversion.
The land and wealth have been seized, and so they have been compelled right into a cycle of generational poverty that also exists to today.
Today, Latinos are reclaiming their very own histories and recovering the actual tales that have been erased from the data.
At lengthy final, we're getting the uncolonized facet of the story.
When we expect of our historical past as beginning with colonization, we're actually doing a disservice to our ancestors, and that actually creates a myopic view of historical past, a perspective that's biased in the direction of just one half of our previous, and erases the relaxation.
When we contemplate that our historical past begins 5,000 years in the past and never 500 years in the past, we're in a position to reconstruct a a lot richer image of how our cultures got here to be.
We are in a position to admire the contributions of indigenous ancestors, of African ancestors, of European ancestors, and every little thing that got here after that, with a wider and demanding lens.
Carrasco: It's not simply the sufferer and the victimizer, there's the shared tradition.
And that is what Latino historical past and Latino tradition actually is about.
It's about the sharing that has taken place all by the Americas.
You cannot have an inclusive democracy except folks perceive how their histories are shared.
You have to know that what we name America or the Americas is the end result of not solely competing with each other, but in addition cooperating.
And there's actually no cultural group that has carried out extra of that or carried out it higher than the Latinos.
And that is the kind of affirmation that we have now to have of the previous, in order that we will have a shared future.
Histories which can be monochromatic and monothematic aren't solely boring, however they distort actuality.
Reality is complicated, actuality is a number of.
significantly in locations in the Americas, the place folks come from throughout the planet.
That's half of the historical past.
Leguizamo: The Olmecs, Aztecs, Maya Incas and Tainos have been conquered.
Their wealth had been stolen, their tradition had been erased.
But there was a brand new new world that was being constructed, and Latinos have been a giant half of that, all throughout the Americas, and even in a budding new nation that you already know in the present day as US of A.
And perhaps if we acknowledge these achievements of our ancestors, we'd see the great contributions we have made all through the world.
I want I had been taught that once I was rising up.
Well, there's a lot historical past we have barely scratched the floor.
Now the extra that I've discovered on this journey, the extra I've realized how little I knew.
I'm a unique particular person in the present day as a result of of what I've discovered, and that is why I wished to share this with you.
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