LITR 4231 Early American Literature 2012 Student Midterm Samples #1. Long essay describing and focusing learning, challenges, issues concerning Early American Literature. (6-8 paragraphs)

Roberto Benitez

The Purposes of Beginning Origin Stories

Ever since humankind became self-aware, it thought about its own origin and purpose.  Rock art up to two hundred thousand years of age displays humankind’s first attempts to tell its own story in an effort to explain its own existence.  Like many of its characteristics, the inexorable reaction to move forward into its future while simultaneously looking back to its past, or mirrorism, is exclusively human.  Everything that humankind has done, is doing, and plans to do, even on the most tectonic level of the individual human, has a connection to what it has done; in effect, its past dictates its current and future condition.  Coupled with the need for the narrative of its existence, historical events such as the rediscovery of the Americas, the founding of the United States of America, and the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe exemplify the humankind’s need for repurpose, rebirth, and transformation, respectively.  The biblical creation story found in Genesis provides us with a clear example of a difference making past laying the foundation for the present and future of humankind. 

In the first place, the mere idea of an omnipotent entity presents a palatable all-encompassing purpose to its existence.  In contrast, the idea of the random mistake science offers is short on purpose and replete with existential angst.  Scientific explanations oblige the individual to discover for himself his own purpose in life:  an executable task for a few.  Secondly, Genesis, and other similar stories found throughout the civilizations of humankind such as the Iroquois creation story, is the basis for the ingrained belief of a greater being who desires our existence.  It goes without saying, but without a divine creation story there is no God because humankind’s existence gives the idea of God its own purpose.  Lastly, for the purposes of this brief assessment at least, this story neatly packages the calling for significant social behaviors such as gratitude for a higher power(s) or Mother Nature, gender identity, man’s penchant for sin, his inevitable death, and the cyclicality of existence itself.  Throughout human history when conflicting origin stories and the societies they formed faced off against each other, there always had to be a winner, they could never coexist. 

When Cristóbal Colón discovered what he mistakenly believed to be the Indies, for example, we find the clash of two societies with two distinct beliefs concerning their existence and their place on Earth.  In his letters from his voyages to America, Columbus focuses not so much on operational observations that simply report what he sees, but on a biased us and them, binary comparison of the two differing societies.  His observations judge the immeasurable and true potential of the newly discovered lands if they were to fall into the hands of a civilized society and under the eyes of the one true God.  From a pedestal, he depreciates the natives’ generosity and indifference towards the value of material possessions, and assesses their convertibility to Christianity and capability to become loyal subjects of the Crown.  In other words, Colón repurposes the natives by evaluating them for what they can be, not what they are, and in doing so, he envisions a newly created land and man:  an origin story. 

            In a similar vein, the founding fathers of the United States – and before them, the eventual colonists of North America – envision a profound shift in their condition and consciousness, and achieve that transformation in name of the people of the original thirteen colonies.  Unhappy with the laws and taxes of the English crown and eager for enlightened societal progress, Jefferson, Washington, et al. take a bold step and establish the foundation of a new society by writing the Declaration of Independence.  If we are to believe that the European discovery of America and the subsequent establishment of the thirteen colonies was its first birth, then this declaration represents its second or its rebirth.  The declaration brought forth a shift from a colonial society, with a strong impression of self-government, to a completely independent nation severing the ties to English monarchial rule and every unenlightened concept that it entailed.  This shift is an example of the pattern of rebirth that humankind incessantly seeks, a pattern repeated during most election years, for example, anywhere on Earth that happen to coincide with a nationwide discontent with current state conditions.

            Along with the repurpose of the land and peoples of Latin America and the rebirth of society in North America, we can examine the religious transformation – all of the terms, admittedly interchangeable – of the indigenous populations of Mexico found in the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  The purpose of this origin story is more practical than the radical change set forth by Columbus and less conflictive than America’s revolutionary Declaration of Independence, but as far-reaching, nonetheless.  Practical because in New Spain, which would centuries later become Mexico, there was one religion, Christian-Catholic, but two sets of people:  the devout Spanish and their Creole, or Mexican born white, descendants and the uncommitted, unidentifiable subjects.  If they were to become loyal to the crown, the new Amerindian subjects, which represented the vast of the population of New Spain, needed to believe the Catholic precepts that stated that God divinely appointed the rulers of Spain, and, by extension, New Spain. 

The indigenous people of Mexico and mestizos, or people of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry, would not take full ownership of a religion that worshipped a white God and His white son.  Who could blame them?  At the time, unassimilated Amerindians, could still, albeit secretly, practice Aztec traditions, religious ones included, and mestizos were simply confused, lacking an identity and floundering in the void left between their European and Amerindian bloodlines.  They, meaning everyone from the crown and Church to the rest of New Spain’s inhabitants needed a galvanizing event to unify New Spain under one religion and they found one in Juan Diego, a mestizo himself.  The apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego were successful in attracting the indecisive for two reasons:  number one, the simple fact that he was mestizo and, number two, the simple fact that the Virgin Mary was apparently mestizo as well due to her dark pigmentation.  The former meant that God, the white God, choose him and did not discriminate based on his impure blood and the latter meant that the indigenous could view the Virgin Mary as one of their own.  Both served the purpose of transforming an uncommitted to downright defiant populace from a people who either lacked or desperately hung on to an incompatible identity to one that could connect to their current conditions. 

Today, these origin stories represent continuity as much as they represent creation of a new concept or idea, in the case of Genesis and the discovery of the New World, or the replacement of the old with the new, in the case of the Declaration of Independence and the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Knowing where something or you come from or knowing the purpose of anything or any task suggests where it must go and why it must go there; this was true then and is true now.  Information found in origin stories such as these grant humankind a purpose to its existence by illuminating its past and paradoxically allows it to proceed in its endeavors by enlightening a path to its own future.