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 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.
15 comments:
"t'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."...a song on that theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2sgzWPpemA&t=184s
Those same Irishmen also invaded Canada a time or two, a facet of American history that is not well remembered -- at least not in the United States.
https://time.com/5549199/irish-invade-canada/
Garryowen is a beautiful song. I'm of the right generation that the very first time I heard it was in Little Big Man, when it accompanied a massacre against the Cheyenne. Even in the horror of that first encounter, I remember being struck by the beauty of the music.
On the closest examination, everyone is imperfect;
An observation that Shakespeare utilized in every single play.
From the excerpt: We are primed, as Latinos in the United States, to hate present-day Spain.
Primed by whom? Not by anyone in this pasty white boy's acquaintance, either as a child or today. We learned, as early as 3rd grade history lessons, about Spanish behavior in the New World (along with French, English, etc behaviors); none of us were taught to hate, or to disdain, today's nations because of those long ago actions. She alluded to that later in the excerpt, but I'm not sure she fully understands it.
But like everyone else in the United States, U.S. Latinos gravitate towards simplistic racialized stories of Good versus Evil to explain every...thing in the world.
This part, though, seems more of a general public school education dysfunction than anything unique to Latino education.
Eric Hines
I assume her intended audience understands where the priming comes from, but you're right that I never encountered it. Spain was in fact not a major character in my formal education about US history: I heard more about them than you did perhaps because of Spanish Florida having bordered Georgia, where I grew up, and having fought some important battles during the colonial period against Georgia's excellent Coastal Rangers (led by the Scottish Highlanders of Clan MacCleod settled in Darien after the '45 by the wisdom of James Edward Oglethorpe, who knew they'd be a formidable defense for Savannah against Spanish raiders).
But Spain was already gone from the West by the time Texas was seceding from Mexico; and the Spanish don't turn up again in the narrative until the Spanish American War, which never got as much attention as it deserved. Their appearance in that narrative is mostly pathetic, not domineering colonizers but whipping boys for Teddy Roosevelt and Black Jack Pershing.
The Mexicans turn up pretty often -- the aforementioned Texas War of Independence, the Mexican-American war, frontier clashes with cowboys and cavalry around the Rio Grande, Black Jack Pershing again with Pancho Villa, and then a little here and there until they become the chief figures in the immigration saga of today. But Americans tend to see them as almost always already distinct from Spain and its long influence.
I heard more about them than you did....
No doubt about that. My grade school education was in Iowa and Illinois, where my local history lessons centered on those two States. Florida and Texas were a ways off.
Spain's role in national and world history was generalized. They came, they saw, they conquered, they did some nasty stuff. But that was then, and as our history lessons progressed forward, the past was the past.
Eric Hines
Eric, if you want a knock-down, drag-out family fight, ask a Chicano/Mexicano activist what he thinks about New Mexican Hispanos, and vice versa. This little Gringa kept her head down, mouth shut, and stayed ready to run as the "discussion" grew a "little bit warm."
Hispanos are descended from the Spanish settlers in New Mexico prior to 1800 or so. Chicanos and Mexicanos are the children and grandchildren of Mexicans who came in after 1900, more or less. Chicano activists incline toward La Raza type groups and anti-conquistador protests. Hispanos are generally very proud of their ancestry and of the Conquista.
The Indians all consider the Latinos either allies against someone, or enemies when it comes to water access, or newbies. Sometimes all at the same time.
LittleRed1
@LittleRed1 -- I was living near Tierra Amarilla (TA) in the 1960s when Reies Tijerina was waging his war for relevance and recognition, so your comment rings some bells for me. Because of the violence, my parents decided against sending me to high school in TA and sent me to McCurdy Boarding school in Espanola. It was there that I sort of learned the differences among various hispanics and indians, etc. AND to keep my mouth shut!
You know, my memory got that wrong; it was MacIntosh, not MacCleod. Lachlan MacIntosh of that ilk was with Washington at Valley Forge.
That last lesson, at least, is an invaluable one. Often expensively taught!
I expect no small amount of the admiration for the 'Spanish people' is admiration for the virulently anti-US and pro-migration Socialist government currently in power in Spain. At least until they start dealing with the ongoing Morrocan invasion
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s and as a Catholic in a largely Mexican American parish, the Latinos I grew up around usually wanted to claim as much Spanish blood as they possibly could. Indio was a perjorative. So when the writer says "We are primed, as Latinos in the United States, to hate present-day Spain." it sounds strange- but later on is more clear that it's specifically within the Latino *activist* community. The shift is reflected in the switch from Hispanic to Latino, I think, related to what LR was pointing out in NM.
Ancestry is complicated. We learn of heroic forebears and then are ashamed to learn they also did evil. Yet both of those are at a comfortable distance, and getting upset is rather a pretend game. We are shocked when someone takes either the heroism or shame too seriously. They aren't you, after all.
But in my case it is my immediate ancestor, my father, who was the shameful criminal. Having realised that I don't have to answer for him, pushing it back a few generations was no problem.
Perhaps the Scot and Scotch-Irish ancestry soothes it a bit. Of course our ancestors were violent hard drinking men and women; they were just like us, after all. That recent video of Jim Bowie is a fine example of how celebrated behavior in his era sounds like gang violence today.
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s and as a Catholic in a largely Mexican American parish, the Latinos I grew up around usually wanted to claim as much Spanish blood as they possibly could. Indio was a perjorative.
I went to a language school in Saltillo, Mexico in the 1960s. I was shocked to find out that the locals used "India" as a synonym for whore.
I bought into the "Spaniards as oppressors" narrative for Latin America. It took years for me to realize that narrative was simplistic. For example, the Spanish conquest of Mexico wasn't just several hundred Spaniards against tens of thousands of Aztecs, but (tens of?) thousands of Indians allied with the Spanish. For some funny reason they didn't like the Aztecs harvesting them for human sacrifice victims. Not to mention being eaten.
The Incas had some human sacrifice, but not on the massive scale of the Aztecs. A maiden on a mountaintop, that sort of thing.
There were a lot of Spanish immigrants to Latin America---Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina etc.---from the late 19th century on. Those Spanish immigrants had nothing to do with whatever depredations the Conquistadores may have committed centuries before.
Another complication was to find out that there were Conversos (Jews converted to Christianity) who emigrated from Spain to the New World. Some places they emigrated to were New Mexico, northern Mexico, and Antioquia, Colombia---Spanish speaking but as far as possible from the Spanish church and crown. A neighbor of mine found Conversos in his family tree. No accident that Monterrey MX and Antioquia, Colombia are entrepreneurial hotbeds. Nor that there are a lot of jokes about tightwads from Monterrey.
I also acquired more admiration for the Spanish for their taking their country back from the Muslims. While Spain deserves condemnation for having booted out the Jews in 1492, most people don't realize that France and England had also kicked out the Jews several centuries before. (I met a Spaniard whose family had secretly practiced Judaism in Spain for centuries.)
And 20th century Spain. Franco didn't commit to the 1936 uprising until government police had kidnapped and assassinated Jose Calvo Sotelo, perhaps the leading rightist in Parliament. When government police assassinate a leading member of a democratically elected Parliament, one has good reason to mistrust the government. As the historian Stanley Payne put it, it was safer to revolt than to not revolt. The "Loyalists"---more accurately Anarchists--- killing a quarter of Spain's Roman Catholic clerics in the first months of the civil war is a further black mark against the "Loyalists."
Gringo
Post a Comment