By Julián Fernando Trujillo Amaya

FRAGMENTS…

The El Dorado myth is a European creation based on various stories that had been narrated by Native Americans and a series of medieval representations that formed part of the Renaissance’s collective imagination. The El Dorado myth envisioned the dreams of some Europeans and founded their own reality in the New World. America became the realization of a utopia. The “City of God”, “The New Atlantis” or “Paradise Lost” was no longer a desirable and imaginary, but non-existent location. The “Utopia” now was not only conceivable but truly possible. America was a real possibility and its existence an indisputable fact. However, the reality overcame the fantasy of the Renaissance’s great utopias and served as a basis or stimulus for its development: “the utopia is American”, as Arturo Uslar Pietri said . And certainly the “New World” recovered the hope of forlorn Europeans in search of a “heavenly Jerusalem” on Earth and became an object of idealization through travel journals, letters, chronicles, stories and legends. In El Dorado there was a symbolic articulation of the ambition for wealth and the European’s willingness to dominate on the twilight of the middle ages. This built a complex network from which the modern bourgeoisie world conception emerged. El Dorado then became the motivation for many expeditions, and was the yearning of many a conquistador and colonizing companies that eagerly looked for a world full of riches to seize in the paradisiacal landscapes of the American continent: “everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome”.

The ethical and political lesson that the El Dorado myth leaves behind should be critically analyzed and not disguised with the rhetoric of marketing. One aspect to take into account, in the archaeological analysis is its utopian character. Christopher Columbus believed that he had found “the paradise on earth” that the West European culture had dreamed of for so long, with the installation of the “New World” in the virtual space of the utopias. This type of discourses and beliefs, that the West used to conceive the Americas, has helped to increase the ambition without limits of Europeans and people from the United States. It has forged the violent character of those who yearn for the riches of El Dorado and has negatively influenced the collective imagination of corrupt politicians, the disoriented revolutionaries groups and Latin American drug traffickers. They, just as the conquistadores, pirates, adventurers, merchants, bankers and others who seek El Dorado, have erred in trying to follow the mistaken path of Christopher Columbus delirium, pioneer in the construction of the El Dorado myth: “Gold – said Columbus in his Diario de viajes – is the most exquisite of all the elements that are found in the new world, he who holds gold can buy everything you need in this world and in the thereafter. Indeed, with gold you can even achieve that your soul enters paradise”.

El Dorado has an explicit plot which is repeated over and over for centuries. The graph of its historic trajectory and the places that indicate the legends can be visualized in the maps that represent the expeditions and travels of the conquerors in the territories of the “New World”. In the same way, is possible to recognize a basic diagram, and several connections can be identify between the characters, objects, places, actions and concretes effect that compose El Dorado myth.

These networks show an asymmetric relation between two types of characters, the winners and the losers. According to this mythical conception, foreigners are the winners and natives are the losers .  While for the foreigners gold represents wealth, fortune and success, for the natives from Latin-American gold represents divinity, balance and harmony.  The natives work, own and offer gold to their gods. The foreigners search, crave and usurp gold for its personal benefit. Their urges to find gold leads them to violence and to make large investments, expeditions and dangerous trips. Natives make rituals and other cultural practices, built legends and produce artworks with gold. The effects of El Dorado in foreigners are the expansion of power, wealth accumulation and elegant life style of the Leisure classes. The consequences of this myth for natives are death, misery, slavery and expropriation. For the foreigners, El Dorado myth serves as a utopia and a justification of existence; through the one they feed their thirst for adventures and utopian fantasies. By contrast, for natives El Dorado was first a ritual to relink them with the gods and a collection of stories, but then it became a strategy to mislead foreigners that were looking for gold and finally a tragic reality. When drawing the map of the networks that compose the texts which presents the stories and tales about the search for El Dorado, the pattern of connections between all these paths and elements (gold, places, characters and actions) are evident, “but in order to see this pattern, we must first extract it from the narrative flow, and one way to do so is with a map. Not, of course, that the map is already an explanation; but at least it shows us that there is something that needs to be explained”.

The construction of El Dorado myth extends his network through new literary works, music, movies, videos and television series. Besides The road of El Dorado by Artur Uslar Pietri (1947) and The equinoctial Adventure by Lope de Aguirre de Ramón Zender (1964), which worked as  base for the movie “Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes” (The Warth of God, 1972) directed by  Werner Herzog, we also have the novel by  Wolfgang Hohlbein “Indiana Jones und das Gold von El Dorado” (1991) and the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull” (2008), the animated adventure musical comedy film “The Road to El Dorado”, directed by Eric “Bibo” Bergeron, Will Finn y Don Paul (2000), the french-japanese television series “The mysterious cities of Gold” (1982, 1983, 2007), the literary works of the Colombian writer William Ospina tittled “Ursua” (2005), “The cinnamon country” (2008)  and  “The snake without eyes” (2012),  which with the mini TV show of adventure and fantasy “The Search for El Dorado” (2010) are a proof of the El Dorado myth in the collective imaginary of the Occidental World. American Utopia is still alive, as well the lyrics of the song “El Dorado”, from the British group Electric Light Orchestra, clearly says: “And now I found the key to the eternal dream/ Then I will stay, I’ll not be back, Eldorado./ I will be free of the world, Eldorado./ Then I will stay”.

Through these discourses and symbolic forms, the dominant powers in Western culture reiterate and promote complex mythology which conceals the painful tragedy of indescribable reality. The horrors of El Dorado myth have been lazily extended over five centuries for the leisure classes of the “First World”. This reality of poverty and injustice that generates war and violence requires an immediately and radical change. According to Zerda, the El Dorado that we should conquer is a genuine and sweeping utopia that does not condemn the peoples of Latin America to centuries of misery and solitude: “The current generations enjoy the benefits of the art of iron and technologies such as the printing press, which are powerful elements of civilization. With this, and other knowledge we must, not only hold up the memory of the ages and the social construction of our ancestors, but also free from extermination the countless cultures that are degraded and vilified outside the protective scope of our most developed population centers.”

However, when there is no more gold to explode, we will just have the myth and our representations of it to remember the sad utopia that we were not able to change.  The British group Iron Maiden expresses it unmatched in the lyrics of their song El Dorado: “So gone is the glory/ And gone is the gold/ Well if you need a story/ I’ve come it has to be told (…) El Dorado come and play/ El Dorado step this way/ Take a ticket for the ride/ El Dorado streets of gold/ See those over sold/ You’ve got one last chance to try”. But much more forceful and emotive is the video of the band “Calle 13″ entitled Latin America whose chorus says: “You can’t buy the wind. You can’t buy the sun. You can’t buy the rain. You can’t buy the heat. You can’t buy the clouds. You can’t buy the colors. You can’t buy my happiness. You can’t buy my pains”.

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El Dorado Leyenda, Mito y Utopia New 01

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