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By Root 1088 0

They died in rebellions, their numbers easily overwhelmed by men on horses carrying sharp swords. They died from exhaustion in the mines processing the shiny nuggets into blocks. They died from terror. They threw themselves into the chasms above the highest peaks of the mountains. They drowned in the sea. Sharks attacked them when rafts broke up as they paddled, searching for another island where they could rebuild their vegetable plots and their communities. They fled into the mountains, where they were chased and captured by hounds. They died of humiliation after hot irons branded their foreheads. They died in such numbers that their language began to die, too, and the names of their ancestors and most of their gods were silenced from tongues. The borinqueño culture, traditions, and history were chronicled by the conquerors who called them savages, who misinterpreted their customs and rituals, who told them that if they didn’t renounce their own gods, they would live in flames in the next life.

Borinqueñas were made to lie with the newcomers because the men from the sea didn’t bring their own women, and another race grew from their children. The last full-blooded borinqueño saw another kind of people walking upon Borínquen’s ground—men, women, and children kidnapped, chained, and transported on groaning ships across the ocean from lands beyond the dawn. Like the borinqueños, they knew the ways of the forest, but they were darker skinned and spoke different languages. They, too, were branded, dragged, pushed, and whipped to work in the rivers, and when the goddess Atabey refused to give up more gold, the black men were made to cut down trees, to build dwellings made from wood and from stone for their masters. The sacred yuca fields were razed so that other crops more amenable to the conquerors could grow, because even though there was no more gold in Borínquen, men, and even women, kept coming from the sea.

I

CONQUISTADORES

1826–1849

DE MÚSICO, POETA Y LOCO,

TODOS TENEMOS

UN POCO …

We’re all a bit of a poet,

a bit of a musician,

a bit mad …

CONQUISTADORES

Ana was a descendant of one of the first men to sail with the Grand Admiral of the Ocean Sea himself, don Cristóbal Colón. Three men on her father’s side were among the first conquistadores, Basque sailors with intimate knowledge of the sea and fearless curiosity about what lay beyond the sunset. Two of her Larragoiti ancestors died at the hands of fierce caribes on Hispaniola. The third, Agustín, distinguished himself as a bold civilizer and Christianizer and in 1509 was rewarded with an entire village of natives on the island of San Juan Bautista.

The taínos collected enough gold to allow Agustín to return to Spain, where, for reasons the family never learned, he chose to retire in Sevilla rather than in his ancestral village. He also changed the spelling of his surname, dropping the final i and substituting it with a y, a letter that didn’t exist in the Basque language. Ana surmised that for Agustín, the homely i at the end of Larragoiti was not quite as grand as the looped, curlicued y that bespoke affluence and masculine aggression. Subsequent generations of Larragoity sons and nephews sailed down the Río Guadalquivir from Sevilla, hoping to repeat Agustín’s success. According to Ana’s father, Gustavo, there were Larragoity descendants in Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, all said to be rich beyond imagining.

On the Cubillas side, her mother, Jesusa, boasted three soldiers, two Franciscan friars, and three merchants whose journals and letters describing the rigors and rewards of settling in the West Indies were passed down the generations, read and discussed at solemn gatherings. Cubillas descendants, too, were scattered all over the New World, their fortunes secure, and said to be among the leading families of the Antilles.

The feats over man and nature that brought such pride, however, were speculation. Neither the Larragoity nor Cubillas families in Spain knew for certain what happened to the conquistadores, merchants, and religiosos