The sixteenth-century discoverers were astonished to find that the inhabitants of the New World looked very much like themselves. They found none of the monstrous shapes, square heads and green hair which some of their contemporaries had imagined. But this very similarity of the Indians increased the conquerors' horror and surprise at the weird customs and practices they encountered. A sixteenth-century engraving which shows the Indians of Puerto Rico experimenting on a Spaniard to see if he is mortal illustrates the mutual incomprehension of these two societies. The Indians expected the Spaniards to have supernatural powers and found to their disappointment that they were ordinary men. The Spaniards expected men who looked like themselves to behave in the same way and to play according to the rules of the game.

Something of this mutual misunderstanding has continued to dog the relationship of Latin America to the rest of the world. Latin Americans have often expected miracles of Europe and have been disappointed to find her fallible; while for Europeans the exotic dream of America often turns out to be a distorting mirror in which they see their own grotesque reflection. To avoid falling into such sterile attitudes, we must understand consequences of metropolitan Europe's cultural hegemony and the constitution of non-European cultures as peripheral or marginal. This helps to account both for the obsession with copying, imitation and conversely with originality.