♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, this is David Rubenstein.

I'm going to be in conversation with Marie Arana or about her award-winning book, "Silver, Sword and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story".

Welcome Marie.

ARANA: Thank you so much, David.

It's so great to be here.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let me give people a little bit about your background.

You are currently the Literary Director of the Library of Congress.

Is that right?

ARANA: That's correct.

RUBENSTEIN: And among your responsibilities is to kind of organize the National Book Festival.

For those who don't know what the National Book Festival is, what is the National Book Festival?

ARANA: Uh, the National Book Festival is a splendid sort of celebration of reading and books.

And it is by now I think the most distinguished and it's certainly the most popular, uh, book festival in the country.

It was started by Laura Bush and, and, uh, Jim Billington 20 years ago.

It's uh, going to be celebrating its 20th year this year.

RUBENSTEIN: You were, for a decade, the editor of "Book World", which was the "Washington Post", uh, book review section.

Uh, what was that like?

ARANA: Being a literary critic, um, is a very satisfying career.

I recommend it except that you, you, you make ah, friends, and then you lose them depending on how their reviews turned out.

And you know, you don't have any control over the reviews, but I have to say, you know, switching over to a National Book Festival where all you're doing is good reviews, celebrating people and patting them on the back and, and, uh, making their books well known.

That's a very different field than the literary criticism.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, Silver, Sword and Stone is, uh, your sixth book.

You've written two novels and four nonfiction's and a very important history book before on Simon Bolivar.

Uh, what propelled you to write a book about him?

ARANA: Well, I was trying to think, you know, in my whole book writing career pretty much has been trying to explain Latin America at Hispanicity, Hispanics, to the American reader.

Um, and just finding that Americans don't know enough about this neighbor and about this, you know, very, very important body of land that lies below the Rio Grande.

And so every book has been a kind of brick in the edifice of trying to, to relate something about Latin America.

When I was trying to think of a person who actually represented more history and more geography than, um, anybody else in Latin American history, Simon Bolivar was really the one.

Uh, he, um, liberated six republics.

He, his family had been in the Americas for 300 years before he actually started the revolution.

Um, the revolution actually kind of completely focused all of the ills and problems of, of colonization in Latin America.

And then of course, everything changed to a different kind of problem after the revolution.

So I thought his life represented something that was really remarkably, um, illustrative and, a good comparison to the American Revolution, which went so differently and was so, uh, so small in a way, in compared to the revolutions that swept Latin America at time.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, I assume in part of your motivation of explaining a Latin American, Central America and Mexico to, uh, people in the United States is that you are part Peruvian, your father was Peruvian, your mother was American.

And you were educated in the United States at Northwestern, but you grew up to some extent in Peru.

Is that right?

ARANA: That's correct, until I was 10 years old.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's talk about what the title of this book means before we get into this interesting history that you've come up.

"“Silver, Sword and Stone"”, what does silver mean?

ARANA: Silver is the extractive societies that, uh, Latin America has become.

Uh, and the, the fact that the riches have always been plumbed and taken out of, of the, um, continent ever since, um, you know, for our four or 500 and more than 525 years now, since the conquistadors came in and began the plunder.

There has been a sort of continuous plunder of Latin America.

So, silver represents that, it represents the mining, it represents the, the, the sort of post-colonial, colonialization of Latin America.

RUBENSTEIN: And the sword, what does that represent?

ARANA: Sword represents the violence, the wars, the battles, the tremendous sort of brutal force that, uh, Latin America has experienced throughout its history, uh, from pre-Colombian times.

And so the sword is very much, uh, a part of the culture.

RUBENSTEIN: And stone?

ARANA: And stone, uh, stands for religion, faith.

Uh, stone of course, in, in, um, the pre-Colombian world was worshiped for itself.

Uh, the stone was considered to be the most concentrated focused form of what we call Pachamama, which is the earth.

And, um, so stone became sort of all your ancestors, everything that's buried in through history and generations of earth, becomes this concentrated focused stone.

And the stone is something that is worshiped.

It was also worshiped, I would say in European cultures, I mean, Stonehenge is an example.

But a stone stands not only for worship from the pre-Colombian age, but also because all the cathedrals, all the temples were built of stone.

And in fact, when the conquistadors came to, to, uh, the Americas, they put their stone on top of the, of the temples stone.

So it was all, it was almost a symbol to say, we own your faith, and we now are your faith.

And they would literally take apart the temples and then build the cathedrals from the temple stone.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let's go through this book and the history of it.

So let's talk about silver first.

In silver, before Columbus showed up was gold and silver very important to the cultures of Latin America?

And you might describe in the beginning, what were the major cultures?

There are three main cultures you focus on in the, in your book.

Those three cultures, what would are they and what silver or gold or precious metals important to them then?

ARANA: Well, let's go back.

You know, Latin American history begins, you know, coming down the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago.

Um, in just before the time that the conquistadors came, uh, people don't realize how unbelievably percolating and effervescent the continent was with indigenous people.

There were 800 different indigenous peoples in the Americas.

And there were about 100 million people, uh, in, in, in the area.

And it was, um, randomly sort of, uh, a kind of tribal existence except for the major civilizations that cropped up and those major civilizations we all know, as we all know, are the Inca, which had a huge, huge, um, uh, empire that stretched a distance as far South as where Argentina is now, and as far North as Columbia, where Columbia is now, it's probably about the width of the United States of America.

It was a huge empire, the Aztecs too, very powerful as well.

Um, and the, the, the Muisca, uh, who were in Colombia and who, um, all of them valued gems and they valued gold to the extent that it was, uh, uh, for the Inca and for the Aztecs who worshiped the sun, gold and was a symbol of the light of the sun, the brightness of the sun.

So it was a religious artifact.

Uh, people didn't lust after it, nobody lusted it after it.

It belonged to the emperors.

They decorated themselves with it, the nobles decorated themselves with it.

But it was not currency in the way that it became.

And silver, which was worshiped for, uh, because it reflected the light of the moon.

And so the indigenous who worshiped, uh, the environment, they were very astronomical in their knowledge.

They knew the planets, they knew the solstices, they knew how the heavens moved.

And so the sun and the moon were very important to them because also it was what governed the agriculture.

So gold and silver were, were important as religious objects, but not in the way that they became.

RUBENSTEIN: So, Christopher Columbus sails initially in 1492, he does three trips eventually, mostly going to the Caribbean area.

He never actually got to the mainland of, uh, Latin America.

But when he comes back and he talks about the riches of this area that produces more people coming from Spain, largely, but also in Portugal, they are what you call the conquistadors...

So why, when they were coming over the conquerors from Spain, where they coming to, uh, for religious freedom originally, were they coming to get gold?

Were what were they coming for and was gold, a major thing that they found and loved?

ARANA: We have to remember that Europe at the time, and Spain particularly, was in financial trouble.

Uh, they were bankrupt.

They had gone to war, they had cleared out the Muslims, uh, and they had gone to war against the Caliphate that ruled the Southern part of Spain.

And they had ejected killed 200,000 Muslims, uh, ejected the Jews.

And they have spent a lot of money doing that.

And they were fighting wars with the rest of Europe, also for, for domination.

They were bankrupt.

They needed gold, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.

When they took over the throne, uh, in 1490 were impoverished.

So, um, they were desperate for, for gold.

Portugal was desperate for gold as well as what it was a war between Portugal and Spain.

Um, the Pope at the time said, okay, let's divide the world.

Uh, let's calm down and divide the world.

Everything, uh, from the, from the North Pole to the South Pole, West of the Canary Islands belongs to Spain.

Everything to the East belongs to Portugal.

And so, um, the people who set out, uh, Columbus was convinced that he could find, um, Asia if he went West.

And it was the only way he could go, because he could only go West from the Canary Islands, given what the Pope had just said.

So, who actually accompanied him and went back with him and then became the conquering force, were fortune hunters.

They were all looking for gold, they were all, sort of, desperadoes.

They were, um, uh, reckless, wild, wooly.

They had been slaving up and down the Coast of Africa, uh, trying to get gold in, in, in Africa and had been seeking gold that had been enriching themselves with gold.

And they had just gone through their parents had, and they had just gone through these wars against the Muslims and the Jews.

So, they were honed for war.

They were absolutely ready for war and in a very brutal wars that they had had with the Muslims.

So, when they conquistador set out, they were warring people really.

And, and, uh, all of their mission was focused around seeking gold and seeking fortunes.

RUBENSTEIN: When they sought the gold, they would ship it back, I guess, and get favors from the King and so forth.

Let's talk about the sword part.

Um, how is it that the conquistadors, they're not hundreds of thousands of them, there are hundreds of thousands of local indigenous people.

How is it the conquistadors with relatively modest numbers of people are able to conquer the, uh, indigenous people?

The Incans, the Aztecs, the Mayans, so on and so forth.

How did that happen?

ARANA: It's all a sense of timing.

The timing was extraordinary.

Because at the time, uh, well, Columbus didn't run into any big civilizations.

Basically, he was roaming around the Caribbean.

He was in Panama, he was in Hispaniola, which is Dominican Republic, Haiti, um, and Cuba.

And he was basically, uh, he, he couldn't get enough gold.

Uh, he was basically making up stories to the King and the Queen that he would find gold.

That gold was just over the horizon, that he was almost there.

Um, and he, uh, you know, it was basically getting some pearls, getting things like that to, sort of, satisfy the King and Queen, but basically, he was not encountering, uh, the sort of riches that later came with Cortes in Mexico and Pizarro in... Now, why was the timing, uh, important?

Because those large civilizations, which had conquered and conquered and conquered tribes to build their own empires, and they were ruthless in conquering, um, the tribes around them and the peoples around them, they had made a lot of enemies.

So it's, it's a sort of a myth that, you know, Pizarro or Cortes strode into, uh, the, the Aztec, the heart of, of the Aztec world or the heart of the Inca world, uh, with very few people and managed to, to outwit them.

Um, they, as they marched, they recruited the enemies of the emperors.

So by the time, uh, uh, Cortes reached Tenochtitlan which is Mexico and Montezuma, he had 4,000 troops behind him.

There were all army troops and they all knew who Montezuma was.

RUBENSTEIN: So, you pointed out that gold and silver was important, but it wasn't, uh, the end all be all of the civilization before the con-conquistadors got there, then they made a obsession over it.

They shipped it back and so forth.

When they came over, uh, and met the local, uh, indigenous people, the conquistadors, um, they used obviously violence, the sword, but have the indigenous populations been very violent before?

ARANA: Yes they had... Um, and in different, uh, degrees to different degrees, it depends on the people.

They were very, as I said, you know, 800 indigenous people in the, in, in the Americas.

So there were the Tainos, for instance, in the Caribbean who were, uh, specific, they were not necessarily warring people.

There were the Caribs, who had swept up from the, where Columbia is now.

They got swept up from the Orinoco River and gone into the, into the Caribbean, really out of desperation.

They were very, very, warlike to be sure.

And there were, the enslavement of other tribes was prevalent in the larger civilizations.

There were also rituals, you know, and, um, Columbus and others took advantage of the fact because, uh, of course, cannibalism was seen as being a tremendous, um, you know, uh, sort of abomination to the church.

And so they, they began calling everybody, you know, cannibals to make it useful for them to sort of conquer them.

But, but, uh, in fact there were cannibals, uh, tribes and there were, uh, a very brutal, um, rituals, the, um, in the Mexican world and the Central America world, there were, um, tribes that actually you, they would have sport and the winners would lose their heads.

And, um, the, the whole attitude toward death, you have to understand it was not the same attitude that we have as Westerners.

Um, the indigenous world was a very, very different world unto itself.

The vocabulary was different.

The, um, the whole notion of, uh, religion and faith was different.

So when we, when we try to label things as being brutal or, or violent, it takes on a different meaning.

To them sacrifice was a religious, uh, ritual.

RUBENSTEIN: Now let's talk about religion.

That's the stone part.

So before, um, the conquistadors came over, what was the basic religion of the indigenous people?

I assume they had many different ones, but what basic type of religion was it?

ARANA: They were very different, but, uh, and, and at the same time, surprisingly similar.

I mean, you look at the Inca and the, uh, the Aztecs who were so many thousands of miles apart, and yet, um, they both worshiped the sun.

They both have tremendous respect for the earth.

Um, they had a concept of the underworld, which was similar and the underworld was not a bad place by the way.

The underworld was where the roots came out of and where, everything that they ate and lived with, uh, came from the earth.

So there was a, there was a, um, a sanctity really to, to the earth.

And that was shared even thousands of miles apart.

So it's tremendously interesting to me, at least that these religions would have had so much in common when there was so little contact between them.

RUBENSTEIN: So, when the conquistadors came over, they were looking for gold, they use violence to get the gold in some cases, but did they have any religion that they wanted to impose on the, um, local people they found, or that they didn't care about religion?

ARANA: Oh, you bet.

Absolutely.

They cared about religion.

They, they, they may or may not have been religious themselves, um, but they understood that religion was the guise under which they were going to conquer.

And so they understood from the very beginning, uh, that they had to bring priests with them.

Columbus did not bring a priest, but very soon thereafter, uh, the conquistadors learned that they had to bring a priest with them.

Uh, number one, to satisfy the Queen because she was beginning to get worried, because word was getting back that there was tremendous violence that the enslavement of the, shall we call them Latin Americans, the indigenous was so vile and so violent.

And so, and, and the death rate was so dramatic.

I mean, there was, uh, there were 20 million people in the, um, in the Central American area when, uh, when Cortes arrived for instance, and it quickly dwindled to 1 million.

So, it was devastating not only by virtue of the violence and the enslavement and the sending the Indigenous off to do the mining and, and the work.

But there was also smallpox, which they carry with them.

And they quickly learned that smallpox could kill, would kill the Indigenous.

And so religion became a way to palliate, to sort of mitigate, at least for, uh, the people who are sitting back in Spain, in, in horror of what was happening.

It was like, okay, but we're doing this, um, we're, we're spreading the word of Jesus.

And that made the difference, all the difference.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, the word indigenous is often used in a way that's somewhat pejorative, which is to say indigenous means they're local people.

They're not as sophisticated, their civilizations not as great as some other civilization.

How do you compare the indigenous civilization of the Aztec, the Mayans and the Incas with the European civilization at that time?

ARANA: Well, let's, let's just take the Inca as example.

The Inca Empire began at about 1000 AD, um, and it flourished was most at its, at its peak in the 14, from 1400 to 1533 when Pizarro stepped in.

And, uh, in the Inca Empire, you had astronomers.

You had, uh, you had engineers, you had a tremendous civilized culture.

You had an organization, a social structure that was very efficient and had great ambitions to be even larger than they were.

So, um, Europe at the time was, um, was not very far along.

In many ways, uh, the, the, um, indigenous civilizations were enormously sophisticated and we find that to be the case more and more.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's go forward.

Uh, the, the conquistadors come in around the 1500s, they dominate, they conquer.

And then at some point, um, a couple of hundred years later, perhaps the 1700s, maybe to some extent, the 1800s, the local people had enough of the Spanish rulers, they revolt.

Is that right, essentially throughout this area So, uh, when you look at the revolt, what was the reason for the revolt?

The local people said, we don't like the Spanish.

We want to go back to the old ways that we had hundreds of years ago.

And what was the result of their revolt?

Did these Spanish win, or did the, uh, local people in these revolts?

ARANA: It's really interesting because what you had in the colonial structure, was, in itself, a very, um, hierarchical structure.

The, uh, the people of color, shall we say, the people at that point, they had already begun to bring slaves from, from Africa.

So you had, a not only the, the, uh, the indigenous, the Indians, but you had by then, you had 300 years had gone by, you had a huge Mestizo population.

Let's not forget that the conquistadors did not come over with women.

They conjugated with the native women.

So you had a tremendous Mestizo population, lots of race mixing at the time.

Um, so, but it was very hierarchical.

Spain was very, very, um, savvy in a way and wily because they, they gave no power at all to anybody who was not born in Spain.

So in a colonial world, you could not own a business, you could not plant a tree, you could not do anything without the, um, blessings of, of the, the Royals in Spain.

And so what you, what you had was a elite of whites, because once you, you were in Latin America and perhaps you had been born in Spain, but your children then could not have any power.

Right?

So, because they had been born in the Americas.

And Spain was very, very strict about this.

They had tremendous rules to keep the, the colonies in, in control.

And so, um, who became the most dissatisfied in the course of, of, um, the revolution was the elites.

The elite whites who had no power.

And, uh, they had been descendants of the Spanish, but the aristocrats who actually could not, um, govern.

So, they began the revolution.

And then they used the, um, of course, the indigenous to people their armies.

RUBENSTEIN: I see.

So let's go to today, um, Silver, Sword and Stone today, the silver of Latin America, you out in your book today might be illegal drugs.

Is that fair?

ARANA: Yes.

That's fair to say.

Absolutely.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, the sword of today, I think you point out that of the 50 most violent cities in the world today.

43 are in Latin America more or less, is that right?

And so the violence is still prevalent.

ARANA: Violence is prevalent.

Ah, yes.

RUBENSTEIN: So now talk about stone.

Uh, the Catholics, uh, church became very prominent because of Spanish, uh, spread Catholicism.

And today, I think there are more Catholics in Latin America than any other part of the world.

Is that right?

ARANA: Yeah, 40% of all the Catholics in the world are in Latin America.

RUBENSTEIN: So, the main message that you want to convey to people is what about Latin America?

ARANA: In Latin America, these problems, these crucibles that have gone throughout history, which are my silver, my sword and my stone, uh, I think, you know, they don't represent the whole story of Latin America.

I'm, you know, my family has been in Latin America for 500 years.

It is a, it is a warm culture, it is a, it is a very artistic culture.

Some of the greatest literature in the world comes out of Latin America.

Some of the greatest art, music, certainly we are warm, we are loving people.

But, uh, my feeling has always been that you look at the problems you get at the heart of, um, of, of a people.

And when you look at these three things that have moved geography that have written history, I mean, when you look at the happiness, the art, the music has not actually written and defined the history of Latin America.

But these three crucibles, these three problems have.

And I think we have to understand, uh, who Latin Americans are and who Hispanics are.

They, you know, now this country is almost 20% Hispanic.

They say by 2050, it will be almost a quarter Hispanic legacy or some sort of heritage of Hispanicity in the American public.

So we need to understand what the history is and why it's so different from the, uh, the history that we study in American classrooms.

The US history is dramatically dynamically, different than Latin American history.

RUBENSTEIN: We've been in conversation with Marie Arana, Literary Director of the Library of Congress and the author of "Silver, Sword and Stone".

Thank you very much Marie.

ARANA: Thank you so much, David.

Such a pleasure.

Thanks.

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