“Magic Realism”

I want to share my art and its origin, in the form of painting, Jewelry or any other forms of expression.

HISTORY OF THE EVOLUTION OF MAGIC REALISM

Pre-Colombian refers to the period before contact with the Spanish at the end of the 15th century in the Americas. Pre-Columbian America was a restricted world, a world that lacked iron and the wheel, drought animals and ships, where mathematics was rudimentary and discursive writing had not been invented (Williamson 42). During this period the civilizations that lived in the Americas, were all Indigenous.

Indigenism is the understanding the values of people of a local area. The development of these people started by kinship, then develop into tribes, and into cities. Some of the tribes that lived in the Americas were the Olmecs, Aztecs, Mayans, Incas and other Indian tribes like the Arawak that lived in the Caribbean islands like Hispaniola, Cuba and Puerto Rico.

The Olmecs lived in the Americas during (1500-400 BC), then came the Mayan Indians in Central America, and Guatemala. During the 15th century the Aztecs lived in the central highlands of Mexico and the Incas lived in South America, Peru. Many parts of the new world were densely populated approximately 57 million people lived in the new world. They had a wide range of societies, from nomadic hunter-gatherers to fully sedentary civilizations with political and social organizations as complex as those of the Old world. These tribes had highly developed societies and some of them like the Aztecs had very large populations some 200,000 inhabitants (Williamson 39).

Williamson describes the Aztec society itself as being sharply divided between nobles and commoners. The aristocracy comprised warriors, priests and important state officials, who owned private land and directly profited from the fruits of conquest. The mass of commoners, however, were agricultural laborers, who lived as their forebears had done before the Aztecs embarked on their imperial carrier. He explains the basis of Aztec dominion was the levying of tribute in the form of goods and labor from tribes defeated in battle. Religion and myths were used as tools by Aztec nobility. It was a very difficult and complex religion, which had some 126 main gods (44-45).

The Mayas of Middle America, and the most highly developed in the arts and sciences, had territories which included the Yucatan peninsula, south Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The economy of the Mayas was based on maize, which was cultivated by slash-and-burn methods that exhausted the soil within a short period. The Maya kingdoms were ruled by a leader with religious as well as political authority; society was divided into a class of commoners on the one hand and an upper class of priests, warriors and administrators on the other.

Their concern with the fate of the cosmos produced a complex calendar system and a well developed mathematics, which employed the concept of zero several centuries before it was discovered in India. Hieroglyphic writing appears on stelae, on temple walls and doorways, and in a number of codices; otherwise Maya culture was oral and rich in mythology, of which something has been preserved in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quieche Maya of Guatemala, which was written in the European Alphabet from oral sources after the Spanish Conquest (Williamson 47).

The Incas were originally one of several insignificant tribes that lived in the Cuzco valley in the central highlands of the Andes. Pachacuti laid the foundation of the well-organized Inca state centered upon Cuzco, a holy city where the temple of the Sun, which represented the source of the Inca power. Their terrain was wide spread over a wide range of altitudes so they overcame this problem by having settlers cultivate crops at different altitudes.

It was common practice with the ayullu (an extended kinship group) for an individual member to work a neighbor's field in return for similar assistance; he would also render tribute by taking turn to labor for a time in the field of the ayullu headman and tribal chieftains (Williamson 49).

As a direct descendant of the Sun God, the supreme Inca was absolute ruler possessed of an awesome majesty. Inca religion was very much a family affair, since the supreme Inca and his kin possessed the sacred aura of divine descent. Incas sacrificed youths, girls and children in perfect physical condition. The religious establishment was large and influential. This very close identification of religion with government afforded enormous power to the Inca state.

Post-Columbian Period in the Americas was a period of contact, conquest and discovery. On the morning of October 12, 1492 Christopher Columbus came within sight of land after a long enduring voyage in search for better routes to the mainland of Asia. He though he had found a westward passage to Asia and that the purpose of his exploration could now be realized: to obtain a license from the rulers of Japan and China to establish a private trade in gold and spices under the auspices of his patrons, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. He had indeed crossed an ocean, but it was not Japan he had landed on. It was an island in the Bahamas called San Salvador (Williamson 4-10).

The conquistadors were groups of men that were in search of self improvement and the achievement of noble status by acquiring wealth, land and lord ship over men. The people of the islands, lived in a subsistence barter economy, in which gold had purely decorative value and where mechanisms of labor service had not been developed. Neither side understood the expectations of the other: the Spanish interpreted the Indians' reluctance to work as laziness, while the Indians could not comprehend the Spaniards' lust for gold or their demands for labor (Williamson 12).

Entering the 16th century, the land was being mapped (cartography) and Spain had to deal with the new lands and the different people that lived on these lands.

The Indians were easily converted to new religions, because they already believed in more than one god, they were Polytheistic. The Spanish treated American Indians cruelly, there are two legends that exist the "White and the Black Legends". The white legend said that the Indians were being protected by the priests that came to indoctrinate them. The Black legend said that Spain came to the new world to destroy and steal from the Indians, and portrayed the Spanish as monsters.

A particularly striking feature of the Spanish colonization was the way in which political and social relationships were expressed in the layout of new towns. Urban settlements in the Indies conformed to a standard plan, a Traza, which adelantados carried with them on their expeditions. Other countries also left traces of thier customs in the Americas, like Portugal left in south America, France in Cuba and Haiti, and Italy in Argentina.

Until the 1540's only about 6% of Spanish immigrants to the Indies were female. This meant that Spanish males depended mostly on native women for sexual relations. Black men also lacked for women of their own race in the early period and they formed liasons with Amerindian women.

Social patterns became progressively more complicated as a result of two factors. First , there was a constant and even accelerating drift by Indians towards Spanish urban areas, and conversely, growing Hispanic influence in the Indian communities. Secondly, there occurred an increasing mixture of the races, to which the influx of large numbers of African slaves to many parts of the empire contributed. Even so, the instructional division remained between a Hispanic society and a clearly separate Indian sector comprising many and diverse communities - a distinction which has in practice persisted to this day (Williamson 143).

The third major ethnic group, blacks from the continent of Africa, came to form a part of Spanish American society, mostly as slaves. Slavery was common in the Mediterranean societies - both in Christian and Muslim religions. When labor became scarce as a result of the decline of the Indian population, the Spanish Crown permitted systematic importation of African slaves. Spain awarded contracts to Portuguese slave traders, called "Asientos". Slaves were used on sugar-plantations as laborers. In addition to laboring they were used in Hispanic households. Creoles could afford to own a few slaves. Artisans and craftsmen, often employed black slaves as assistants in their workshops. Even in captivity, the Africans and their descendants kept alive some memory from their nations of origins in Spanish-style religious brotherhood. These invoked their ancestral deities and practiced secret tribal rites. Women slaves suffered from being forced into sexual relations by their masters, increasing the growth of the mulatto population. By the late eighteenth century, the majority of blacks in Spanish America were free. They were to be found working as wage-laborers, self-employed artisans or humble peasants.

These three different nations of peoples and cultural beliefs intertwined to a new mixture producing new societies and cultures in the Americas.

The Modern period in the early 19th century was the age of revolution (the breakaway from Spain). Independence from Spain, would divorce the greater part of the Creole intellectual elite from the common people, and as a result the question of cultural identity would become a central concern of writers and intellectuals in the new nations.

The ferment that resulted from the demise of classical liberalism proved, however, to be immensely creative in the arts. The intellectual quest for some timeless national essence was the result perhaps of an illusory problem, but for the preoccupation with identity which absorbed Latin American artists acceptance of hybridity as a positive reality; it helped to dignify the traditions of the Indians and the blacks; and it legitimized plebeian art forms, opening up creative channels between high cultures and low (Williamson 512).

Latin Americans were drawn to art that was passionate and irrational - to the legacy of the surrealist. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of surrealism on Latin American aspirations to perfection (Williamson 516).

"Negrismo" would lead to an immensely valuable injection of black music and poetry into the cultural mainstream in Latin America. Some of these music forms were the rumba in Cuba, or the sambas in Brazil (Williamson 516).

In the 1920's the white writer Alejo Carpentier was one of the musicologist concerned with black music in Cuba; his abiding interest in the African roots of Caribbean culture would combine with surrealism in the 1940's to produce his theory of the 'marvelous reality' of Latin America the cornerstone of "magical realism"(Williamson 517).

"Negrismo" also brought the inflection of black speech into the repertoire of poetry as part of a general modernist tendency towards the domestic. The mulatto poet Nicolas Guillen, a pioneer of Afro-Cuban poetry, declared:(Williamson 517)

And now that Europe strips off

to toast its flesh under the sun,

and goes to Harlem and Havana for jazz and son,

flaunt your blackness while the chic applaud,

and to the envy of the whites

speak out as a true black (Williamson 517)..

Modernist attraction to primitivism strengthened a developing interest in contemporary Indian communities. A Guatemalan writer, Miguel Angel Asturias, was a key figure of Indigenismo whose anthropological researches in Paris. His contacts there with surrealist movement revealed to him the cultural value of the Maya myths and folklore. He began to incorporate these into his works, thus paving the way for Magical Realism.....(Williamson 517)..

Magic Realism combines reality and the magical. A world that a child would live in, a dream world. It comes from many sources. It's a combination of the magical, the real, the ghostly, the ordinary, and the extraordinary. It can be found in all cultures and has a big impact in the Latin America community.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vergara, Argos Puerto Rico Ediciones Universales Rio Piedra, Puerto Rico.

This book gave me an understanding of the Tiano Indians in addition to some history of the island of Puerto Rico.

Williamson, Edwin The Penguin History of Latin America Penguin books 1992.