An American Latina Looks at Spain

The hatred of one's origin ends up being a damaging hatred of the self; Grim's Hall has long argued that some sort of patriotic forgiveness and acceptance of one's ancestors is necessary to one's own health in much the same way that such forgiveness and acceptance of your parents and their mistakes is for us. I've spoken of that in terms of Germany and Japan, also America and the American South (passim); but here is a lady writing from the perspective of Latinos looking at Spain. The finding is the same in spite of the difference of points of origin. 

A reader named Victor wrote to me this week with a confession. A United States Latino, steeped in the Chicano Movement, he had gone to Spain braced to hate it. He had been educated to loathe the brutal colonial country of the Conquistadores who raped, pillaged and genocided his — our — ancestors. He expected, upon landing in Spain, to feel the old inherited grievance rise in his throat [but found that] Spain was a diverse land of many different kinds of people, and none of them, now, were conquistadores. He grew to love it. He learned to hold the present beauty and the tragic history of Spain — real Spain, not the idea of Spain — in the same hand. “It’s complicated,” he wrote.

Those two words are the most honest thing anyone has said to me about our complicated American Latino history and Spain’s role in it in a long time.

We are primed, as Latinos in the United States, to hate present-day Spain. It’s a litmus test of belonging the right way. How do you feel about Spain? The question never means modern Spain. For United States Latinos, Spain froze back in 1540, when it toppled Moctezuma’s empire, a Forever Inquisition onto which we have projected all the simplified racialized sins of United States slavery, only brown instead of black. How do I feel about Spain? we answer, standing before the proverbial class, all eyes upon us, fingers hovering over the big red cancel button. If we want to fit in as real woke U.S. Latinos, there is only one correct answer: Spain is the colonizer, and because we are enlightened Latinos, we hate Spain and we hate Spaniards.

American Latinos are trained to look at a modern, democratic, post-Franco country and see nothing but the Inquisition wearing a fresh suit and ridiculously shiny Italian loafers. For educated U.S. Latinos, Spain ceased to exist and evolve in the 16th century, and is nothing but a racist, colonizing land full of white people. In reality, Madrid itself is home to 1 million Latin American immigrants in 2026 — meaning there are more Latinos in this one city in Spain than there are in the entire nation of Uruguay. And Spain itself has never been a monolith. Far from it. But like everyone else in the United States, U.S. Latinos gravitate towards simplistic racialized stories of Good versus Evil to explain every fucking thing in the world. And it’s exhausting.

Emphasis in the original. I often elide curse words in the interest of keeping the Hall family friendly, not because I personally oppose them nor their usage. I'm going to leave that one out of respect for her voice. 

It's a much longer post that's worth reading. She's finding a lot to struggle with that is analogous to what any of us would; and, indeed, she's only part way there because she still does have good guys and bad guys in her conceptions. On the closest examination, everyone is imperfect; in the American context, for example, it's the very same people who freed the slaves as who committed the genocide against the Lakota or the Cheyenne or the Apache. Not the same kind of people, the same people: Sherman and Sheridan and Custer and their commands. 

There may not ultimately be good guys and bad guys at all. Virtues are strengths, and thus the virtuous are "powerful for good and evil," as Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the Scots-Irish on the American frontier. The harmless are usually weak, not virtuous; the great usually have scores on both sides of the ledger. You end up forgiving either the weakness or the sins, or else you don't forgive and hurt yourself most of all.