FAREWELL TO GERMAN ARCINIEGAS.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Brief Article

We thought he would be with us forever, cajoling us into new approaches to history and culture. Long before postmodern relativism pried the academic community away from Eurocentric perspectives, Germin Arciniegas, who died late last year, was insisting that Spaniards didn't "discover" but "covered" America. For Arciniegas, the "seven-colored continent," as he called Latin America, was quintessentially Indian, not European. The Spanish veneer concealed a collective psyche steeped in myth and mystery, and forged from centuries of proximity to nature. The Spanish language, Catholicism, private property, and Renaissance notions of selfhood were imported from abroad and imposed on the Indian populations, argued Arciniegas, but beneath the surface, Latin America was never "Latin" at all.

German Arciniegas, one of Latin America's most prominent intellectuals, was born in Colombia in 1900 and grew up in a rural area near Bogota. He studied at the Universidad Republicana de Bogota, where he was involved in labor politics. In 1920 he entered law school at the Universidad Nacional, where he founded a reformist student newspaper. During the twenties and thirties Arciniegas collaborated with fiery activists such as Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, and during the forties he taught at several North American universities, including Columbia, Chicago, and...