Pre-Columbian iconography, television and now the Internet perhaps are each one Expression of its time in the way of Jackes Lacan, a process that the French psychoanalyst called "The Mirror Stage", a necessary period in the formation of identity, in the projection of " I " that in the collective history we called Nation, a feeling that genres some question: What is Ser Colombiano? Or What is Being Latin American?, a paragraph answered more known to us, though diffuse, the one given by an Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges: To be Colombian is an act of faith.
In just five centuries we colombians have had several names, it shows the difficult transfer in search of identity: at their arrival Europeans called us occidental “Indians” with all pre-Columbian natives, the West Indies, because of Europe thought they had reached Asia by the "other side".
Then we were christened the New Granada with Spanish pomp, to be like the old Spain, like the cross and the sword; later, wanting to let go and stand out from the peninsular Spaniards we think of la gran Colombia (the Great Colombia), to redeem and compensate the Admiral oblivion without pomp and bury the enigma of Columbus, suddenly overshadowed by the cartographer Vespucci, Americo; and pride reached until 1830 when we separated from Venezuela and Ecuador.
With the Constitution of 1853 that tried to enshrine press freedom "without restriction" and free carrying of weapons, a Constitution for angels as then called it Victor Hugo, we dream to become the United States of Colombia up to La Guerra de los mil días (the Thousand Days' War 1898-1901) when we lost to Panama, being called since 1886 the Republic of Colombia. Then to native ancestors we begin calling them "Indians" and something contemptuously for all who were not white nor would feel like those ones; the black slaves brought from Africa, today Afro- Colombians, and all native-born Colombians, archaeological artifacts like gold and clay figures, precolombinos.
How old are we Colombians and South Americans?
We would have only about 200 years, the Bicentenario of each country, to whom identify Nation with Republic, a legal notion that the legalistic spirit of sixteenth-century in Spain, with the sword and stamped paper, we inherited alone with se obedece pero no se cumple ("is due but not fulfilled"); for others, in a more sociological than legal sense, as a nation would have more than 500 years, those who have gone after Europe "discovered" us.
But if a nation cannot be defined separately from its immovable and permanent heritage that is its geography, the Colombian nation and all South American´s have more than the 12,000 years the traditional academy considers the beginning of America´s peopling, through the Bering Strait, date overcome after linguistics and molecular studies on archeology based on DNA analysis, whose advances mentioned Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University (the Settlement of the Americas, a New Prehistory: 2000) that makes us ask ourselves if history has to be rewritten?
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Enter to preColombia Gallery
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