*
When the Spaniards reached what is now called Bogotá, all they saw were flies.
An electric-black cloud of dark bodies humming, swarming, twitching, and pulsing. “The quantity and color of them…,” I once read in an old history book in the Luis Ángel Arango library in Bogotá while imagining a tribe of plucked paper wings and metallic bodies like fitted armor plates and wind-up tin toys, “…is what led the Spaniards to the name that they would bestow upon the indigenous group of the region.” As I turned the page, I slid my finger on the glossy edge and it cut a red meridian into my skin.
In Castellano: Moxcas; in Spanish: Moscas; in English: Flies.
“There were so many.” The Spaniards wrote it in their journals, in their letters home, in their bestselling chronicles, and in the margins of their bibles. “So, very-very many.” Because it was so unbelievable (“Too many to be men!”) that they could only compare them to flies.
The Spaniards stumbled off their boats and wore out their feet hiking up the Andes just to look deep into the eyes of the New World, and all they could see was a buzzing empire of black flies. Old-World words for New-World women and New-World men. And, “This is what they are still called today.”
I dug my fingernail into the papercut slit and stared at the red stain I’d left on the page. I remembered my third grade teacher saying, “Muiscas,” a slight variation on the old word, I was told—linguistic shifts and drifts, accents and pronunciations misheard, misremembered, and misspelled. So, Muiscas, I wrote down on my notebook and stared at my teacher as she dug her own finger into a history textbook as if it were an open wound, “That is what we are.”
Moxcas.
Moscas.
Muiscas.
Flies.
Though, of course, the only true thing about this story is that someone believed it to be true.
“So many!” They said they had said. Unconquered, unruly, undiscovered, ungodly, uncatalogued, and unnamed: blank spaces in maps and dictionaries. “Moscas,” the book said they had said—and said it enough that we started saying it too. Wrote it down. Read it aloud. Write, read, repeat. Shithole empires of winged insect kings and six-legged subjects.
“And some, I assume, are good people.”
False entomology, fake etymology.
Because they were neither unknown nor unnamed, and an old made-up story printed on a blood-stained page does not truth make.
The people of the Andean plateau knew what they were—had always known—and being unknown to foreigners did not change this. When the pale invaders asked, “What are you?” they replied, “Muysca,” in their native tongue, pointing at each other and themselves. “We,” they said, “are people.”
Lina M. Ferreira C.-V.
*
To help more directly, please visit:
Hispanic Federation: http://hispanicfederation.org
Hope for Haiti: https://hopeforhaiti.com
Salvadoran American Humanitarian Foundation: https://www.sahf.org