Sublime

Several years ago, I met Julio Payes, a permanent resident from Guatemala

within thirty years of Columbus’s first American landfall, the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés and his company of adventurers signalled that European intrusion into the Americas held a different significance from the piecemeal colonization of Europe’s oceanic periphery or Portugal’s hijacking of Asian trade.

the Hacienda Barú National Wildlife Refuge

The total population of the hemisphere was about one hundred million at the end of the fifteenth century, with about two-fifths in North America, including Mexico. Central Mexico alone supported some thirty million people. At the same time, the population of Europe as far east as the Ural Mountains was around fifty million.

foreshadow a future filled with the seductively colonizing commodities of American modernity.

One such value is that the Maya, like many indigenous cultures, are noncapitalistic. Their economic goal is subsistence and participation in the community, not capital accumulation.