It is an established popular belief that puts the Virgen de las Mercedes on the side of the Spanish arquebuses and cannons to annihilate Indians who rebelled against the abuses to which they were subjected.
Much has been written about the supposed episode that there was a battle in the Santo Cerro de La Vega between indigenous people and Spaniards and the image of the Virgin appeared to defend the Spaniards.
Several historians document that such a battle did not take place, at least not in that place and year (1495), but it has helped to be assumed by generations for having appeared in an official high school history textbook, in which it is recorded the apparition of the Virgin, placed on the side of the Spanish conqueror.
But legend aside about the historical fact, the qualitative thing to highlight on this October 12, Columbus Day, is that the colonizers exterminated the indigenous people of America and that there was a brutal dispossession of their lands and wealth.
The Day of the Race for some is an expression of a mixture or a new identity of race and culture; for others it is the ominous memory of plunder and slave treatment.
It was the time when in Quisqueya, and here we quote the historian José Miguel Soto Jiménez in his Memorias de Concho Primo, “the violation of the vegetal homeland, of the wild anatomy of the virgin mountain range” took place.
The assessments that can be made about this date will always be influenced by ideological, political and even moral and cultural questions, but perhaps one of the most dispassionate is the one formulated by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in his memoirs.
“We came out losing… We came out winning… They took the gold and left us the gold… They took everything and left us everything… They left us the words.”
It is that language that distinguishes us before the world that allows us to value a culture imposed by blood and fire and claim before history the justice of being recognized as a plural continent, which has learned to defend its idiosyncrasy and its freedom.
