Analysis Of The Book Tony Castanha - 880 Words

Throughout the entirety of the Caribbean history there have been many myths. One of the greater ones has been that the indigenous people that Christopher Columbus encountered are extinct. The book’s author, Tony Castanha, debunks that myth with stories of resistance to Columbus retold by people with Boriken descent, uncovering census data, and the retelling of the old Jibaro culture. With all this evidence, it is apparent that the Jibaro people are in fact not extinct. The first chapter mainly discusses the reasoning for the common beliefs of the indigenous Caribbean. The common beliefs that the indigenous are cannibals and are considered â€Å"noble savages† are all due to the early Spanish colonizers. They were the ones who perpetuated these stereotypes when they returned to Europe and it was the Spanish chroniclers who wrote the history books purposely erasing the indigenous people’s true nature from their writings. In fact, due to the suppression of information of the indigenous people, â€Å"Many native people here don’t know that they’re native. They don’t know their real history because modernization overtook them.† People forget their own roots because they grew up thinking they were of some other descent, but many of them survived. Many inhabitants of Boriken have been living in the mountains of the interior regions of the islands for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans. In fact, the term Jibaro is in reference to La Gente de la Montana which means the