How Long a Revolution?

Here in Mexico we are remembering two periods in our History. Independence from Spain (1810), and Civil War (1910). As a physicist the number of years in between is interesting. Exactly one hundred years, furthermore we are in 2010.

Recently a Mexican historian published in a Mexico City newspaper (in Spanish) a review of these two events. He brings up the question of a process lasting hundreds of years. You may not know that people have been living here planting corn, for at least three  thousand years. Human habitation is longer, at least thirteen thousand years, since the end of the last glaciation, and the likely migration through the Bering Strait.

I see a continuum of human presence similar to other regions on Earth. Neanderthals went to Europe before modern humans, around six hundred thousand years ago. For me in a geological time-frame, America is not fundamentally different than the "Old World."

I want to direct attention to a longer time-frame than Prof. Enrique Semo, whom I linked above.

Five hundred years ago Mexicans got a case of an alien invasion, just like Prof. Stephen Hawking has been telling audiences recently, aliens from other planets would likely get us sick. The Spaniards got the Americans sick five hundred years ago, and stole the resources from this part of the world. Only recently the Incas, Aymara's and other original people have been claiming back their mineral heritage. In the case of Bolivia and Evo Morales, it is Lithium. In the case of Mexico, the list is long: Silver, Gold, Mercury, and on, and on.

Time has come to America for reckoning. How long a Revolution? Who owns what?