Say what you will about the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show, it was one hell of a lesson on the span of time.
Here in the Anglocentric Northeast, we tend to think of the European incursion onto native peoples’ land as beginning with the Dutch in New Amsterdam and English Puritans at Plymouth Rock. But the actual past is a lot more complicated than the stories subsequent generations decide to tell themselves.
It is difficult to wrap one’s mind around the spans of time involved, even of the relatively short European presence in the Americas. The Spanish established San Juan, Puerto Rico, more than 100 years before New Amsterdam. La Isabela in today’s Dominican Republic predates San Juan as a Spanish outpost by about 30 years.
By the time English Southold, Southampton, and East Hampton were established, a string of Spanish mission settlements along the Southeast coast as far north as present-day Georgia had been built, thrived, and were then abandoned for more than 50 years.
In my 20s, I worked a few field seasons as an archaeologist on one of these, Santa Catalina de Guale, on St. Catherines Island, the northernmost outpost in Spanish Florida between 1587 and 1680 and which was occupied until 1684 — two years before New York Gov. Thomas Dongan provided the townsmen of East Hampton with a founding document, a patent by which local political authority was formally established.
Dense human population centers in the Americas date back many, many millenniums. The Taino people who occupied the Caribbean when Christopher Columbus’s ships arrived had been in the region since about 200 B.C. The first generally accepted city-states in this hemisphere date back at least 2,000 years more, to sites in Peru.
By the time of the Declaration of Independence, Bad Bunny’s home island had been a Spanish colony for more than 250 years. It would become part of the United States just over a century later. This long past is part of all Americans.