Another year marks the anniversary of October 12 and it will not be strange to see the return of passionate comments about the ephemeris. It is curious how this commemoration continues to be talked about. Back in 1992, the country went crazy about the Fifth Centenary, although the events were little reminiscent of the real event. A theme park in Seville was not much compared to the Barcelona Olympics, the AVE, the Ibero-American Summit or the lecture peace campaign on the Middle East. No one remembered that the Museum of America in Madrid, the only one dedicated almost exclusively to Spain's presence in the New World, was closed for construction. To be honest, the reality of finding or meeting, as it began to be called at the time, mattered to almost no one. But the symbolic potential of October 12 was, and still is, enormous.

Everything is politics, said Gramsci. The anniversary is a great excuse for the average politician to remember a few clichés and for social networks to demonstrate the knowledge legendary nature of the matter. Because that's what we are talking about: legends. The Dictionary of the RAE says that legend is "Relation of events that are more marvelous or traditional than historical or true". We are not talking about what the events were in reality, but what we think or what we have been told they were. Like the legends that are repeated from generation to generation, in the case of October 12 we drag two colored legends: one black and one pink.

The followers of the black legend maintain that Spain dedicated itself to exterminating people and left only ruins when it left; meanwhile, the standard-bearers of the pink legend claim that the Spaniards improved the conditions of the indigenous people and created an empire as extraordinary as the Roman one. Each one of them makes a collection of arguments to weave their legend leaving aside what spoils their legendary party. The believers in the black legend despise the vast legal corpus in defense of the Indian, the achievements of viceregal art and music, the improvements in the food per diem expenses of the population, the introduction of written culture or the creation of hospitals and educational institutions at all levels. In order to continue ignoring, they repeat that the genocide committed by the conquistadors destroyed the Amerindian populations. Beyond the fact that today many countries maintain a high percentage of indigenous populations, they do not remember the impact of diseases imported from Europe, even now that it is not necessary to make a great effort to recognize what is involved in the transport of unknown viruses to other parts of the planet. They are also unaware of the military capacity of the European armies of the 16th century, incapable of producing genocides as in the 19th and 20th centuries, and they forget that the American peoples themselves, divided among themselves, cooperated with the Spaniards first in the conquest and then in the consolidation of the colonial order. Finally, they are convinced that evangelization was a monstrous process of acculturation and do not find the prohibition of human sacrifice or the preaching of the religion of love as relevant.

The faithful of the pink legend believe that 16th century Spain undertook a disinterested process of civilization of peoples subjected to barbarism. They often repeat that international law was created out of nothing at the University of Salamanca and maintain the strange certainty that the well-intentioned New Laws prohibiting indigenous slavery were complied with. They admit that some individuals committed outrages, but they would be exceptional cases. They like to repeat epic words such as "gesta" or "empire", but they are not enthusiastic about certain economic vocabulary such as "exploitation", "corruption" or "monopoly". They overlook the systematic abuses against the indigenous population such as the encomienda or the mita. Nor do they insist on other fundamental elements of the empire, such as the fraudulent purchase of posts, the endless clientelistic networks, the real slavery of the population brought from Africa, the inefficient monopoly of trade by Spain or the abundant cases of corruption between the clergy and the civil authorities.

Politics feeds legends that are repeated with superstitious fervor. Polarization, a sign of our times, impedes our ability to think beyond closed blocks. But truth is hidden in nuances. That is why we should ask ourselves what we remember every October 12.

What is being commemorated is an extraordinary event in the history of mankind. Nothing less than the first meeting between two worlds that cleared the way for them to relate to two others, Africa and Asia. Western man took up the challenge of confronting his beliefs with other civilizations and, by mixing with them, engendered what we call globalization. The miscegenation that began on October 12 was not a love story, but a painful process with lights and shadows. But it gave rise to the world as we know it today.