It all began, for us, barely five hundred years ago when no foreign foot had set foot on these soils, until one day our mountains in the Euparí Valley felt the fateful hoof of a conquest cavalry and the devastating thunder of the Christian harquebuses.
Then, like an evil God, Messer Ambrosio Alfinger, the German, riding from Coro through the ruins of Perijá, came down with his horde of white adventurers, dressed in metal attire, war javelins, shot muskets and a pack of trained dogs. to tear Indian flesh. Since that event, other conquerors arrived, and the jungle was filled with screams, smoke from the fire, hangings, robberies and violence.
A row of Indians, captured with iron chain leashes around their necks, were taken, day after day, to the slave auctions in the markets of the Antilles. Of the great Indian homeland of the Euparí Valley, only the reed of Cañaboba remained, whose notes of broken complaint still emerge in a dying thread from the mountains as a fatalistic lament for the extermination of the old race and as an accusatory cry before history for the collapse of his own history.
Then the blacks arrived kidnapped in Colombia for a terrifying servitude in the homes of Christians, in the airless wombs of the mines, in the pastures, ranches and plantations. None like theirs was a more persecuted and tormented race.
In sailboats of martyrdom they reached the beaches of the Caribbean, and with the sweat of their temples and the blood of their bodies they watered the flanks of the geography, and in other directions, like here, every stone of our bridle paths, every adobe of the mansions. stately, baptized they are with the tears of their foreign pupils. Later, when the country recruited them as combat beasts, they went to the trenches to fight for a liberation that they did not have and to defend a soil that was not theirs because their grandparents were not born here.
In the time of La Colonia, which history described as one of pastoral peace, some towns in the Vallenato province were already present such as San Lucas del Molino, San Juan del Cesar, Santo Tomás de Villanueva, Santa Cruz de Urumita, Valencia del Dulce Nombre of Jesús, Becerril del Campo, San Antonio de Badillo, El Paso del Adelantando and the Santos Reyes del Valle de Upar.
To these distant centers and separated from the rest of the world by jungles of dense tangles and rivers of overflowing thrust, from time to time the mail mules arrived late, bringing new news, always already old, about the distant wars of Europe, the arrival of a viceroy, the birth of a prince, the death of a pope, an assault by pirates in the Caribbean, the arrival of galleons to Cartagena, the shipwreck of a ship. But the final holocaust that the white settlers made of the last chimilas and tupes among the thickets of the immense plain of Euparí was always ignored in the pens of the chroniclers of that time.
From this violent dispossession, settler towns such as San Miguel de Punta Gorda, Las Pavas de Venero, San Antonio de Ariguaní, La Jagua de Ibirico, Espíritu Santo (Codazzi), Palmira, San Diego de las Flores, San Francisco were born, deep into the mountains. peace. No one took the trouble to chronicle this savagery that was committed in the name of Christian civilization with this new massacre; No one censured the excessive crime or the plundering of the land, not even the curates of Indians who depended on a bishop who lived in beatific leisure on a distant gannet beach.
From a mixture of races, we are here. Of the rapacious Hispanics, boastful and devoted to their crucifixes to the point of fanaticism; of the taciturn and indolent Indians who carry in their souls the pang of dispossession; of black muzzles hunted in the African bushes with their backs curved in penance for a servitude of all hours. Our man from the vallenato country is born from them. The fishermen and boatmen are born who on the waves of our rivers and swamps sunset their lives with cast nets of illusions while they tamed the back of the waters with their canaletes singing trovas of profound painful poetry; From there the mountain mestizos were born, collecting the fruit of the coffee plantations of the Sierra reddened by the lumps of blood in the dying twilights, singing verses to alleviate sorrows, remembering love affairs, nostalgia and resentful joys; From there were born the macheteros who went singing tenths of despair to the armed brawls called civil wars, to take trenches for ideas they did not understand, in the endless hustle and bustle of great causes and small intrigues of others, present in the stunned 19th century.
We are children of the open plains of Euparí, an empire of the rattlesnake and the curlew where the men of the dairy sing Creole romances, matching the hoofs of their surly colts and galloping among the troops of cattle, chests in the air and faces under the camp of their hat that makes the brave sun more gentle.
CHILDREN OF THE MOUNTAIN
In short, we are children of the tight mountain of the Euparí Valley, empire of midges and Tertian fevers, which was once violated by the threshing of horseshoes that led to some neighboring village among the flying crosses of its flute-playing birds; mountains favorable to the ambush of the vengeful arrow of the indigenous or the machetes of highwaymen; bush where the tiger’s pupil patiently lurked; haven of freedom for fugitive blacks; hidden paths of cane rum smugglers; lost gaps where the soldiers traveled in the useless countermarchs of the civil strife of Colombia to pay the gods of war their tithe of blood.
Here, between the vibrating curtain of the jungle and the folds of the mountains, in an hour of history, the shreds of all the blood of the world merged into a single vital tangle, because that is what we are: scraps of bastardy, twisted fringes of all cultures of the world. We have tiny Visigoths and Chimilas, Celts and Bantu, Vandals and Caribs, Romans and Zulus, Iberians and Carabalíes, Arabs and Tupes. Our culture, in constant renewal, carries the atavism of all civilizations and barbarism because we are halfway between the hut and the castle; of the totem and the cross; of the timpani and the castanet; of incense and bija; of the ringing of the bell and the lowing of the conch; of the plume of feathers and the morrion of the Castilian soldier; between the wall of the Caribbean ports and the palenque palisade of the black maroon.
For this reason, our culture, like our race in formation, is predestined, one day to come, to be cosmic, universal in the words of the thinker Vasconcelos.
Finally, on this anniversary of our city, the lady of the Upar Valley, I want to evoke all the deities of the ancestors: Cacaseráncua, the greatest god of the four tribes that live in cold huts among the wrinkled backs of the snowy landscape. , who with bursts of rainbow light did the wonder of creating the world in the belly of a snail. I want to invoke Maruta and Marayaina, gods of the aboriginal theogony of tupes and chimilas in the fiery esplanades of Euparí, the last of whom breathed reason into men with the wings of a hummingbird. I want to ask for help from Changó and Cazanga, the bitumen gods who stayed there in the bushes of Africa, who with their spells twisted the course of the storms and the destiny of men at will. I want to raise my cry of supplication to the white Christ that the Castilian thirds brought on their war banners and on the amulet of their scapulars.
I invoke all these divinities to extend their hands of protection to these people, to the wonder of our frozen mountains and their suffocating plains, to their suffering villages, to the vital joy of their accordions so that they may reach beyond all echoes and all distances; and so that they, finally, deities of our ancestors, may be conducive to the understanding of men like clay from the same clay, and finally and always give us the supreme miracle of peace.
By Rodolfo Ortega Montero
