Word: mestizo
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...Spanish conquistadors, ruthless and brave against greater forces, overran the region in the 16th century. The social system the conquerors brought with them was rigid and shot through with the sort of caste prejudice that obsessive inferiority feeds on. As they colonized, the conquistadors fathered the first generation of mestizos, part Indian and part Spanish. The mestizo grew up insecure, second-class, and prone to imitate the manliness of the powerful Spaniard who conquered his Indian forebears and sired his class...
Because of the shadowy origins of a great-great-grandmother, Venezuela born Simón Bolívar was considered a mestizo, and resented the second-class treatment he received at the court of King Charles IV of Spain in 1803. Returning to Latin America in 1807, he led the wars of independence that cost the Spanish throne some of its richest New World possessions and established Bolívar, a lover of fine horseflesh and handsome women, as one of the foremost machos of history...
...Eladia Mejia is no little old lady in a rocking chair. She is stout, straight-backed, witty and indomitable, and her passion is teaching mestizo peasant children in the bandit-infested mountains of western Colombia. Since this requires schools, she builds them-partly with her own hands. Her record: 129 schools, plus four hospitals and a half-completed orphanage that will cover four city blocks when it is finished. "I am no architect," says she. "But I have the lines of four walls in my head, and with that I do a devil...
Born in Mexico in 1899, Chavez studied music during his youth and was well acquainted with the works of the classical masters and the native Indian and Mestizo music of his own country by the time...
...last century, once bitterly said: "Poor Mexico: so far from God, so near the U.S." Yet it is Mexico, in part because it is so closely subject to U.S. influence, that has pioneered the way to mature independence and independent nationality in Latin America. Proud of its mestizo origins, without need either to brag or apologize for them, the country is visibly experiencing some of the creative results of having found itself. Ruiz Cortines, with the backing of the rising middle class, has already changed the republic's standards of public morality. Last week, after his frank survey...