Mendoza

A wine-country city at the foot of the Andes, built on land taken from Indigenous peoples during Spanish colonization, Enrique Dussel was born here and later argued that European modernity's story about itself depends on hiding exactly this kind of history.

Mendoza sits in dry country at the foot of the Andes and grew wine by channelling snowmelt along irrigation ditches the Huarpe people had dug before the Spanish arrived and took the credit. Dussel was born there in 1934 and later argued that Europe's account of modernity works by forgetting exactly this sort of arrangement, and that 1492 looks like a discovery from one side of the ocean and like the start of something else entirely from the other.