When Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, he not only discovered a new land mass unknown to Europe or Asia, but he and his successors encountered various peoples who inhabited nearly every inch of the continents. This “encounter” marked an epic point in world history: “For Latin America, conquest and colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese created patterns of social domination that became eternal givens, like the deep and lasting marks of an original sin” (17). The Spanish and Portuguese conquerors were not more evil than anyone else at the time. They were products of their own times and histories.

The Muslim conquests on the Iberian Peninsula shaped the histories of Spain and Portugal until the 1490s. It began in the year 711, when the Moors crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered the peninsula. The Christian kingdoms fought back, but for hundreds of years the Iberian Peninsula was effectively cut in half: the northern half was Christian; the southern half was Muslim. Over the centuries, the differences between the cultures dramatically shaped the mentalities of the Spanish and Portuguese: “Not sympathetic to cultural and racial difference, the Iberians were nevertheless well acquainted with it” (25). Thus, when the Spanish and Portuguese discovered other people of darker colored skin than theirs, it was nothing new to them, and they had already developed racial prejudices over many centuries.