The spanish domination during the colony was overwhelming and absolute, reaching so inhumane extremes, which only demonstrate the spiritual poverty of the spanish who carried out the invasion. By the end of the colonial period, it is estimated that the New Spain approximately had six million people, of these, according to the 1793 census there were eight thousand peninsular Spanish, who controlled the political, economic and social power of the entire population.
The three hundred colonial years were a true hell for the invaded peoples. All their culture, knowledge and millenary history, became demonic representations. In practice they did not have rights under the law of the colonizer. Their place in the new order was of slaves and primitive beings, in permanent suspicion and mistrust; given that the indigenous culture always represented to the spaniards, in addition to backwards, a link with the evil and the devil.
"The vitality of the old cultural substrate is present in the practices that anthropologists have called syncretism. This revitalization of the ancient culture sought to incorporate it in the present through the procedure of covering up with a christian varnish that allowed its acceptance in the dominant society." (Enrique Florescano. 1987)
However, by the 18th century the creoles started an awareness of "la patria", to counter position the gachupines.[1] The unrest that arose in the middle of the 16th century between the sons of the conquerors born in Mexico (creoles) and the spaniards arriving from overseas to "make America" and that later took Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731-1787) as the first "mexican-creole" historian who begins to claim the New Spain should be for creoles. Clavijero wrote "The Ancient history of Mexico", but unlike the missionaries and conquerors, Clavijero begins giving to the ancient Anahuac history a belonging to the rebel spirit that was brewing among the
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- ↑ In the colonial caste system of Spanish America, a peninsular was a Spanish-born Spaniard or mainland Spaniard residing in the New World, as opposed to a person of full Spanish descent born in the Americas or Philippines (known as creole or criollos). The word "peninsular" makes reference to the Iberian Peninsula where Spain is located.
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