The history of pre-Hispanic South America is prolific in narratives of violence perpetuated, in battle and commerce, to an indigenous population. Mostly for the sake of feeding a perverse avarice and yearning for luxury that was the fashion for Old World society at the time. This conquering force overcame great odds and difficulties to satisfy their greed for material treasure, and consequently, took out their frustration and discomfort on these communities. Their occupation exhibited the brutality of a society desperate to pay their debts and build their riches with whatever could be extracted from other people and foreign lands.

Disregarded by history are the narratives of the daily life of these indigenous people as they built true humane societies and developed myths to satisfy their curiosities of the workings of their natural world. What has been lost to history is the spark of wonder when the European met the American for the first time. Zoratama is that glimpse, told in the passion of a conquistador, for an American beauty: the love, the eroticism, the loss, and the tragedy. Jaime Bedoya Martinez’s Zoratama constructs the vision for modern Hispanic society through the eyes and passion of consorts of divergent worlds. His view that the legacy of the Muisca has been abandoned is true in that beyond anthropological and archeological studies explaining in detail the life, religion, and society of these people, little credit is given to their contributions to current culture. And the assimilation, whether military or societal, of these cultures is anything but polite; the Spaniards greedy and brutal, the Muisca resolute and tribal.

Mr. Bedoya beautifully builds an alternate storyline which ultimately argues that commitment to passion and transcendence has no boundaries. Zoratama, the Muisca princess, and Lázaro Fonte, the Spanish conquistador, construct a love story for the ages, replete with spiritual integration and an offspring of a new race. Ultimately, the writer in his true fashion destroys this love, immersed in the tragic myths of both races, in an absurd annihilation of people, family, emotion, and sentiment because the ironic metaphor that evolves is the incarnation of a new race, culture, and historical footprint.