What Is the America?

What is the America?

The Americas as a place has many definitions in the minds of many. To a United States citizen the word America may mean the U.S only, the land of the free, but to another of a different country the word may mean something completely different. By definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the Americas is defined by "the lands of the western hemisphere including North, Central, and South America and the West Indies," which is clearly a place much larger than the United States. This may seem different from what you had expected, but it's true; America spans a great distance across the western hemisphere and with this large area it has many different origins that come with it. With a place as large as the Americas, it is easy for one to ignore the structures, cultures, ideas, and beliefs the very nations we are living in were built on, especially when the past consisted of many wars and eras of domination. So how exactly did the Americas come to be? Surprisingly, America was here before anyone decided to go out and discover it. The Americas was an invention of the mind that reflects the geo-politics of knowledge from where a person originates from. This invention of the Americas within the mind, marked different distinct times of colonialism, cartography, and paradigm shifts that have helped create the Americas into what it is today.

The Americas was never on anyone's map to begin with, even when the Incas and Aztecs lived in "America", they themselves had no idea or concept of the Americas. Although these indigenous people did have names for certain common places that they visited, they did not have a broad idea that expanded to the point of creating an entirely new continent. In the words of Mignolo, ""America," then, was never a continent waiting to be discovered. Rather, "America" as we know it was an invention forged in the process of European colonial history and the consolidation and expansion of the Western world view and institutions"(2005: 2). America was only an idea's during the time of colonization, in other words, it was invented and "forged" through the mind.

After the discovery of the physical America, the colonization of America and the colonization of being have built up America into what it is today. This idea of colonization came hand in hand with the idea of modernity, and in a direct way, to modernize was to colonize. For the Europeans, in order to modernize, the only possible way was to expand their capitalistic powers and colonize the native population or indigenous people. Modernity was not a natural condition but rather a set of presumptions and its very source of knowledge came from the mother-land. In the eyes of the colonizers, the natives were labeled as barbarians and people of the past and saw them in need of civilizing. This process of civilizing directly dictated the cultures and beliefs of the Europeans and helped to create the very idea and basis of what America was at the time. This colonization occurred in many different ways--through economic, political, religious approaches. It was through the improper use of the idea of God as a cover that allowed the white European to go about this subjugating and colonization and set up a new "modern world-system". The modern world-system was an invention that allowed the Europeans to create their own hierarchy, in which the Americas were subordinated to the mother-land or European states. For the European conquerors, this was a chance to assert their "coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the concept of newness itself" (Quijano 1992: 550), over America in any way possible and create a new experimental testing ground.

Through the colonization of being, the Europeans were able to further affect the way America was created and viewed in the world. This colonization of being was performed on the Natives living in America at the time