nese. This is the price or the gift, depending on how you look at it of global interdependence and communications.
So the cultural dilemma of the American of Mexican, Cuban or Puerto Rican descent is suddenly universalized: to integrate or not? to maintain a personality and add to the diversity of North American society, or to fade away into anonymity in the name of the after-all nonexistent  melting pot ? Well, perhaps the question is really, once more, to be or not to be? to be with others or to be alone? Isolation means death. Encounter means birth, even rebirth.
California, and especially Los Angeles, a gateway to both Asia and Latin America, poses the universal question of the coming century: How do we deal with the Other? North Africans in France; Turks in Germany; Vietnamese in Czechoslovakia; Pakistanis in Britain; black Africans in Italy; Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and Latin Americans in the United States-Instant communications and economic interdependence have
transformed what was once an isolated situation into sal, defining, all-embracing reality of the twenty-firsi Is anyone better prepared to deal with this centra dealing with the Other than we, the Spanish, the Americans, the Hispanics in the United States? We ai black, European, but above all mixed, mestizo. We ai and Greek; Roman and Jewish; Arab, Gothic an Spain and the New World are centers where multipl meet centers of incorporation, not of exclusion. W1 elude, we betray ourselves. When we include, we find
People and their cultures per isolation, but they are born oi reborn in contact with other r and women of another culture another creed, and another rc
Who are these Hispanic  ourselves ? Perhaps no ter renders the simultaneity of cultures than  The / the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. In  The A narrator finds a perfect instant in time and space the places in the world can be seen at the same morr out confusion, from every angle, in perfect, simulti istence. What we would see in the Spanish-Ameri would be the Indian sense of sacredness, commui the will to survive; the Mediterranean legacy of lav phy and the Christian, Jewish and Arab strains r a multiracial Spain; and the New World s challenge the syncretic, baroque continuation of the multici multiracial experience, now including Indian, Eur black African contributions. We would see a strug mocracy and for revolution, coming all the waj medieval townships and from the ideas of the Eur lightenment, but meeting our true personal and < experience in Zapata s villages, on Bolivar s plain; Amaru s highlands.
And we would then see the past becoming pres seamless creation. The Indian world becomes pre paintings of Rufino Tamayo, who was born in an lage in Oaxaca and whose modern art includes an I tinuity in the sense of color and the spirit of cele the cosmic consciousness and in Tamayo s capaci ate on canvas the dream of a form that can conta A younger painter, Francisco Toledo, also from an lage in Oaxaca, gives the ancient Indian fear and ture their most physical and visual proximity to lives, while the Cuban Wifredo Lam permits his Al to grow in his pictures. The Mexican painter Albert
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- the traditions of Spanish art and commerce: gly recov^ offs are framed by sardine cans.
His Velazquez	laugh, even at ourselves, as in the
Culture is co|ombian Fernando Botero. It is the way paintings o	Venezuelan Jacobo Borges imag-
we remem en of memory. But culture is above all our ines the en	so often sacrificed and denied, our shack-
l^dies,our carnai bodies, like the body of the Mexican led' Kahlo. Our bodies are deformed and dreamy crea-
  ntheart of the Mexican Josd Luis Cuevas. Indeed, like ^Luevas offers the mirror of imagination as the only G S hk figures are the offspring of our nightmares, but also b brothers and sisters of our desires.
The union of Cuevas in the Americas with Goya in Spain 2 reminds us that when we embrace the Other, we not only   ourselves, we embrace the marginal images that the modem world optimistic and progressive as it has been, has shunned and has then paid a price for forgetting. The conventional values of middle-class Western society were brutally shattered in the two world wars and in the totalitarian experience. Spain and Spanish America have never fooled themselves on this account. Goya s  black paintings  are perhaps the most lasting reminder we have of the price of losing the tragic
41. Mirror of the Other
sense of life in exchange for the illusion of progress. Goya asks us again and again to harbor no illusions. We are captive within society. Poverty does not make anyone kinder, only more ruthless. Nature is deaf to our pleas. It cannot save the innocent victim; history, like Saturn, devours its own children.
Goya asks us to avoid complacency. The art of Spain and Spanish America is a constant reminder of the cruelty that we can exercise on our fellow human beings. But like all tragic art, it asks us first to take a hard look at the consequences of our actions, and to respect the passage of time so that we can transform our experience into knowledge. Acting on knowledge, we can have hope that this time we shall prevail.
We will be able to embrace the Other, enlarging our human possibility. People and their cultures perish in isolation, but they are bom or reborn in contact with other men and women, with men and women of another culture, another creed, another race. If we do not recognize our humanity in others, w< shall not recognize it in ourselves.
Often we have failed to meet this challenge. But we hav< finally seen ourselves whole in the unburied mirror of iden tity only when accompanied ourselves with others. We cai hear the voice of the poet Pablo Neruda exclaiming through out this vision,  I am here to sing this history. 
Article 42
The Ends of History: Balkan Culture and Catastrophe
Thomas Butler
Thomas Butler is author of several books, including "Memory: History, Culture and the Mind," and "Monumenta Ser-bocroatica," a bilingual anthology of Serbian and Croatian texts.
Abuse of cultural memory the manipulation of long-invalid past grievances to obtain present-day advantage-rules the day in the war-tom lands of Yugoslavia. Deliberate misreadings and misrepresentations of history are destroying the future in the Balkans.
The fundamental cause of Yugoslavia's terrible calamity is not just recent history, such as the infamous genocide by Croatians at the Jasenovac concentration camp during World War II. Nor is the cause rooted solely in the more distant chronicle of the Ottoman rule. Today's horrors are woven from strands of nothing less than the entire tapestry of history since the 6th-century Slavic invasion of the Balkans, with the subsequent division of Croats and Serbs between Catholicism and Orthodoxy and eventually Islam.
All these elements play a role in the minds of those destroying Bosnia. They are sick from history from halftruths and ethnic prejudices passed from one generation to the next, through religion, political demagoguery, inflammatory tracts and even, through abuse of folk song and tales. More recently, the books of unscrupulous writers and the deliberately inaccurate speeches of rm-principled leaders have further contaminated the atmosphere.
Two years ago, at an international conference in Boston on cultural memory, I argued with an American scholar about the causes of the unfolding Yugoslav crisis. She felt that everything was traceable to 1941 and the Croatian killing of some 600,000 Serbs, Jews and gypsies at the concentration camp of Jasenovac. (Many of these Serbs were from the Krajina area of Croatia, which is now trying to merge with Serbia.) But I felt that the roots of the current conflict between Croats and Serbs ran much deeper, at least as far back as the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches in 1054 A.D.
It appears we were both right. She, in that the ate cause of the fighting between Serbs and C Croatia was Serbian fear of another Jasenovac Franjo Tudjman, author of a book stating that losses were only one-tenth what they claimed, president of Croatia, Serbs in Croatia saw this c that they were not to expect fair and unbiased ti in the new state. Tudjman did not offer them guarantees that would have allayed their worrit
Although it was the Serbs in Krajina who prov outbreak of hostilities, over the long run the between Serbs and Croats in Croatia and Slav been fueled by culturally derived feelings of "otl between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. O Catholic prejudice is a powerful force. A few yet visited the Orthodox monastery of Iviron or Athos, Greece. While I was attending the early liturgy, a monk approached and asked wheth Orthodox or Catholic. When I replied "Catholic/ me to "go outside and pray."
The Greek Orthodox Church, like Rome, hi memory: In the young monk's mind, I wa municated. The Schism in 1054 A.D. and t dering of Constantinople in 1204 A.D. by the Crusade are alive in the Orthodox mind of to continue to affect Orthodox-Catholic relations, i those between Serbs and Croats. Some of the differences between the two churches seem 1 today. Take for example the "filioque" controvers ding to the Roman Catholic Creed, the Holy Spi ceeds from the Father and the Son" (et filioque whereas the Orthodox Church claims that acct the original Nicene Creed (325 A.D), the Spirit from the Father alone.
The difference had already threatened to Church in the 9th century, with pope and hurling anathemas at each other. This is not to Serbs feel justified in shelling Dubrovnik beca believe its inhabitants Eire schismatics, but rather are affected in their relations with the "Latini' five feelings of "otherness," the residue of doct putes of long ago. The sense of "otherness" i
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From Washington Post, August 30, 1992,
O 1992 by The Washington Post. Reprinted by permission.
rbated by the fact that the two peoples were ruled different and opposing empires: the Croats by the ?stro-Hungarian empire and the Serbs by the Ottoman.
for Croatian and Serbian relations with Bosnia's Muslim population (who are actually Slavs), no one will Ly that the Croats have the more harmonious dealings with their Islamic brethren. This may be because they see
Muslims as heretics, who can be saved through baptism. In fact, Tudjman was photographed a year ago, smiling benignly at the baptism of a group of Muslim children. This drove Bosnia's Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, into such a frenzy that he actually made a short-lived treaty with his arch-enemy, Serbia.
Serbs, on the other hand, take a different stance toward Muslims: They see them as traitors, as well as heretics. Scratch a Muslim, they believe, and you have a Serb whose ancestor went over to the Ottoman side four or fivehundred years ago, in order to keep his land. The late novelist Mesa Selimovic, who was Ixirn and raised a Muslim but considered himself a Serbian writer, referred tohimself and other Yugoslav Muslims as "renegades" in his autobiographical " Menu >ries."
In a lat