Im a bastard! Really! No kidding! Coño, que mierda, no??

The title of my post might surprise you, but it's the truth! I AM A BASTARD!.... Dang... But the good news is (at least for me individually) that I’m not alone. There's a hole lot more bastards out there (that might not even know they are) and that makes me feel a little bit better about myself....

Anyways, the fact is all Latin Americans are bastards! We all share the same burden! Mierda, carajo! Que vamos a hacer? This is rather shitty you know! While studying the background and "legal frameworks" upon which present day Latin America was founded, this is the ultimate conclusion I can come to: All Latin Americans are born of a marriage that legitimately never took place. In other words, a forced marriage or violation from which the bastardization of a whole continent emerges.

The illegitimate marriage of which I speak of is the following: the "social contract" called "el requerimiento" (nothing else than a Spanish piece of paper that was read out loud to indigenous peoples, in Spanish, to justify and "legitimize" the forceful entry of Spanish troops into local indigenous villages to seize and conquer them, who at the time did not even understand the Spanish language! How Ironic, isn't is?)

As part of the official definition of the word, one understands that a "bastard" is a person who was "born of parents who are NOT married to one another".... Really? No shit! Ok, so then by Parents I should mean the union between Spanish and Indigenous cultures back in the day when the conquest of the Americas was taking place (My ancestors are both Spanish and indigenous, so therefore I am a Mestizo) and by married I mean the LEGAL and mutual AGREEMENT between two parties to perform an action.

But because this later MUTUAL AGREEMENT never actually took place in the colonization process (simply because there is NO WAY a Native American could understand a single word of what the Spanish 'conquistador' was bluffing in Spanish while reading this "Requerimiento" document out loud in front of him in order to justify invasion), then I can safely (and sadly) conclude that I am indeed a bastard: The son of two melting cultures that came together in a rather illegitimate way, where no social contract (in Rousseau's sense of the word) was ever established...

And this is where it all comes down to: Where the hell do so see a MUTUAL AGREEMENT in a one sided declaration of sovereignty over another sovereign culture? As a logical follow-up on this same line of thought, (again...) I can only conclude that I, along with all my other fellow Latin Americans, are all bastards: We are born of an illegitimate union of Spanish and Indigenous blood that took place in a rather violent and brutal way.

So there you go, cheers to all the bastards in the world! Salud amigos!

Andres

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