Conquistadora - Esmeralda Santiago [1]
“Taíno,” the cacique greeted the men from the ship with the word meaning “peace,” even though armored men who carried weapons seemed anything but peaceful.
The sailors looked at the borinqueños as if they’d never seen humans. They gaped at the tattooed and pierced bodies, and swept their eyes over the women with an especial hunger. They stared at the cacique’s feather headdress, at the golden disk he wore on his breast, at his gold bracelets, and at the small nuggets knotted with cotton thread around the warriors’ necks and arms. The cacique was a shrewd leader and noticed the covetous glances. He told his borinqueños to give the men the adornments given to them by Atabey, the goddess of sweet waters and of rivers. The cacique also gave away hammocks woven by the most gifted weavers in the village, baskets full of cassava bread, sweet potatoes, peanuts, guavas, and pineapples. The borinqueños filled barrels with clean drinking water. With these gifts, the borinqueños thought, these men encased in metal who rattled every time they moved would climb into their enormous sailed canoe and disappear into the same horizon that had delivered them, hopefully never to return.
They did leave on that November day, but waves of them came back, their vessels slicing across the horizon. Wherever they landed, they demanded tribute from the caciques and the cacicas, who offered more clear water, ever-larger baskets filled with food, the best hammocks, and more nuggets. The ships would leave. And more would return.
Because the first sound from the mouths of the borinqueños was the word taíno, the men from the sea thought the people were describing themselves and renamed them for the word “peace.” The men from the sea also renamed Borínquen, meaning Great Land of the Valiant and Noble Lord, as San Juan Bautista, meaning Saint John the Baptist. They came with weapons that severed a man’s head in one stroke. They brought animals that borinqueños had never seen: horses, pigs, hounds, goats, cattle. They trampled through the yuca fields, smoked the people’s tobacco, and raped the women.
The caciques and cacicas rallied the people. They charged their warriors to poison their arrows so that when the tips entered the men’s unarmored flesh their blood would flame and boil inside their bodies. When a warrior dropped his heavy club over an unhelmeted head, the macana crushed his opponent’s skull as easily as if it were a calabash. They held the newcomers’ faces down in the clear, fresh water of Borínquen’s rivers until their bodies went limp. The women fed them unprocessed cassava to churn their guts into mush.
The men from the sea were too strong, their weapons lethal. They brought enormous dogs to chase and herd the people from their villages, and after a man in heavy robes sprinkled the borinqueños with water and made perplexing gestures over them, they changed the borinqueño ancestral and clan names to their own language. They forced the women to cover their breasts, their bellies, the hallowed parts from which their children reached into the sun. They called themselves católicos; they called themselves españoles; their chiefs called themselves caciques, even though none were born in Borínquen from borinqueñas.
Their most famous chieftain was Juan Ponce de León, who lined up the borinqueños and pointed at this one, at that one, at the other. He separated men from women, mothers from children, elders from their families. He formed them into groups. Then his men led the borinqueños from their villages to other parts of the island. They enslaved the borinqueños to labor in waist-deep water in the island’s rivers, and forced them to rip from Atabey’s pebbled, sandy veins the shiny nuggets she’d so willingly gifted before the men came from the sea.
The borinqueños began to die from diseases they’d never known and from infected wounds opened on their backs and arms and legs from whips they’d never experienced.