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

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