Memory and Identity

What are the identifying traits of a person? Sex, age, eye color, height, scars, glasses, a mole above the lips? A passport or identity card, a document that says one exists a license to exist? In Latin America, how many possess a credential? Many of the poor and peasants who shouted Land and Liberty! with Zapata go through life worshipping their land titles as if they were images of the Virgin of Guadalupe. They carry them with them to Mexico City in their wallets, those yellowing titles giving them the sacred right to possess land, inherited from their parents, delivered to them by the blessed revolution, and now rejected as proof of ownership by the Ministry of Agrarian Reform because in Mexico land is divided in layers down to the very core of hell and for a long time public servants have divided it among their friends. (During the administration of L6pez Portillo, his supporters presented him not only with horses but also with the ranches to quarter them.) What are the identifying traits of a country? The space it occupies on earth, the number of years since it was discovered and named (in which case, Latin America is but a lion's cub, since it will only be 500 years old in 1992)? Or its development, its trajectory in universal history -its personal history of conquest, invasion, violence, repression, loss of political sovereignty, the crushing of all of its values, and gradual emancipation? Its idiosyncrasy or, better, its character, its particular manner of being despite the terrorism of the colonial period that destroyed its idols and altars -a massacre that failed to extinguish its spirit to the point that Tonantzin continues to be our mother within the Spanish Virgin Mary? The intrinsic energy or perhaps the sublime indifference that forces us to live on the brink of tragedy or in limbo

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