Two hundred years ago Mexico became an independent nation when the entire national territory included precisely the northern part of what is now the United States, even Don Jose, Maria Morelos y Pavon precisely in the constitution of Apatzingan called the north of Mexico because evidently before the world, before the international community Mexico reached the Atlantic side to Santa Fe and on the Pacific side to Alta California or the Primerias.
Ten years ago UNESCO recognized the royal road inland as a world heritage of humanity and it is an itinerant heritage, it is not a heritage located with permanence, but it disseminated a whole culture, a whole idiosyncrasy that evidently transforms what today is our artificial border at the Rio Bravo. Because our cultural border, our historical border reaches to Rio Rojo, ahead, up and north of Santa Fe. It has once again been argued that the wall, that the Mexican border requires a wall to divide what is the United Mexican States from what is the United States of America, this wall is artificial, because this wall was the product of dispossession.
The beginning of the Camino Real is located in Mexico City, in the Santo Domingo square, it is located there because there was the Mexican customs office and on the other side was the exit to the north of the Republic and the evangelists or those who were then managers of how the documents were made that allowed to handle the customs papers to both introduce and remove goods from the center of the city, so from here it starts and crosses the Republic to cross Texas and New Mexico on the Atlantic side. Why Camino Real de Tierra Adentro? To differentiate it from what had coastlines on the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific side, why Camino Real? Because it was a royalty, it was a connotation when the King, the reign from Spain made official that it was a road that was subject to the sovereignty of the Viceroyalty and that it had the right to certain custody and use as a concession given by the King to those who at a given moment were the miners, later followed by commerce, but always, Above all, the cultural dissemination is due to the influence of two fundamental religious currents, on the one hand the Franciscans and on the other hand the Jesuits, who made the mission of Father Kino to Alta California, and also the Jesuits from Coahuila to Texas give rise to this, to what is our culture beyond the artificial conventional borders. If Mexico wants to vindicate its rights as UNESCO has put them, the platform to do so is that this itinerant road identifies us as creditors as holders of a right to the soil, to make it both material and immaterial, from material culture to tangible culture and to that which is called intangible culture, which is of greater wealth. It is a 1600-mile road that has served as a corridor for merchandise.
The Camino Real is an inheritance of New Spain, we have maps from the XVI century that already put Camino Real a and put the description, there are diaries and reference that left especially the missionaries, for the part of the east and the frank north of New Spain, there are the Franciscans and for the west or the west, there are the Jesuits who began to go there for evangelical reasons, but also to take advantage of the many products that they found. We have such a gigantic and rich documentary heritage that we can easily reconstruct a good part of the history of Camino Real.
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