Indians, blacks and other undesirables

Abstract

In his famous Theses on History, the German thinker Walter Benjamin insisted that “to ignite the spark of hope in the past is a gift that can only be found in that historian who is permeated with this: neither will the dead be safe from the enemy, if this one expires. And this enemy has not ceased to conquer". Therefore, if we turn our gaze to the past, it is not to know it "as it truly was" but to rescue the dreams of rebellion and liberation of the victims of this really existing modernity / coloniality. In this sense, the book presented by Paco Gómez Nadal is, precisely, a work where "the manipulated archives of memory are reviewed to try to understand current phenomena" (p. 9). Without pretending to be neutral, Paco Gómez's work commits itself to the emancipation projects of those who have been denied and reviled by this modernity.