ABSTRACT
The Antioquenos stand apart from other Colombians not only for the predominance of Spanish blood, but for their food, their dress, their language, their politics, and their religion. They are a culturally cohesive mountain people living in a very rugged part of the Andes, and their special breed of cattle, their ridge-top rural settlements, their fondness for tobacco and rum, are all part of the legend and folklore of the paisas, as they like to call themselves. Recently French scholars, too, have plunged into the Antioqueno controversy. One group of priests, in an essentially Marxist interpretation, has emphasized the classic stratification and class conflicts within Antioquia, refusing resolutely to reach down to the level of individual human action. The soils of the granitic batholith of Antioquia were thin and unproductive, and the slopes were inordinately steep, so that there was little interest in accumulating land and the resultant latifundia so characteristic elsewhere in Latin America.
