11 - Invisible Pueblos

In 1972, the Cuban born, Italian raised writer, Italo Calvino, wrote an imaginative and deeply original book called Invisible Cities. Invisible Cities imagines how Marco Polo might have described the vastness of the Mongolian Empire to Kublai Khan. Despite being a work of fiction, in reading Invisible Cities, you quickly experience the challenges and constraints of language and culture when describing the unknown and new. While Calvino was writing, I imagine he was sitting in a room and asking himself a series of questions that guided his thinking: how do you explain the color red to someone who has never seen it before? What about purple? Or the sounds of the city beyond the river? Does the river have a name? What about the market? Or the town beyond that? The people beyond that? What do they speak?

This week’s episode of The Bridge Between is inspired by Invisible Cities.

When I sat down to write this episode, I kept thinking about how high-ranking Mexican officials were told about the arrival of Hernán Cortés to the Yucatan peninsula in 1519. I didn’t want to write something from the perspective of the Colonizers. We have their accounts and they can be easily accessed. Instead, I wanted to take the perspective of the person who, for the first time, had no choice but to tell Moctezuma II about a previously unknown presence that just arrived along the shoreline. How does this person describe armor, horses, or the foreignness of their language? What words do you use? Did their voice hesitate? Did they stutter?

I am also taking this perspective because so much of our collective understanding of Indigenous populations is incorrect. What has been presented to us is largely a fabrication—a presentation of a monolith population, somehow idyllic, unchanging, primitive, without culture. That understanding is wrong. This is an attempt, a modest attempt, to help de-center those narratives.

This story is called Invisible Pueblos. #BridgeBetweenPodcast