Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World

Abstract

Workers whom their employers called “Chinese” in eighteenth-century Borneo wrote to their places of origin, spreading the surprisingly disclosed new identity among the folks at home who had previously identified only with small, traditional ethnicities. Names as widely accepted as “Welsh,” “Dutch,” and Deutsch seem originally to have meant something like “foreigner.” Africans never called themselves Africans until Europeans invited them to do so. Does anyone believe that the Angli so called by the slave dealer who presented them to Gregory the Great would have designated themselves as such back in Britannia? Commonly, perhaps normally, identities that transcend the limits of communities formed by awareness of kinship or genius loci or mutual acquaintance or dependence start outside the group.Antonio Feros, however, has had enough of studies of Spanish identity-formation that focus on foreigners’ perceptions. In his new book he sets out to trace the process from within Spain and Spanish territories overseas: “the history of Spaniards’ visions of themselves” (11). The project is important because what Richard Ford called the “unamalgamating bundle” of Spanish peoples, nations, and historic communities has defied all the centralizing efforts of governments of the last three hundred years, and the conscious policy, intermittently but zealously pursued over the last couple of centuries, of building a single sense of nationhood. Spaniards’ commitment to self-identification as Spaniards is weaker than the corresponding sentiment in France, Germany, the Netherlands, or even Italy, despite an at least comparably propitious starting point in a long history of shared experience, dynastic unity, self-differentiation from foreigners, and state-building. Risking presentism, Feros admits that his book “emerged . . . out of debates in the 1990s” over whether “Spain was a unified nation” or “a state composed of multiple nations” (280). With Catalan nationalists’ threat to hold an unconstitutional and inevitably inconclusive referendum on independence in October of last year, the debates are now more intense than ever. Feros’s message is salutary in the circumstances: reject rhetorical simplifications. Base the country’s future on a genuine appreciation of the complexities of the past. It is as misleading to pretend that Spanish history is exempt from racism as to say that Catalonia is not—in some sense to be negotiated—part of Spain.Feros eschews the obvious comparative approach, except sporadically and unsearchingly with Britain and the United States, but sticks resolutely to the critical examination of Spanish sources, tracing the lurches and continuities of long and unresolved debates. Scholarship of a high standard gives him an impressive command of the sources—more thoroughly, perhaps, for Spain than for the overseas territories. Though he spends a lot of time, for instance, on the problem of how elastic Spanish identity was for indios and blacks in the time of the empire, he might have profited from the vast literature on indigenous self-identification with the Spanish monarchy in colonial documents in indigenous languages, and it would have enhanced his discussion, as far as the accommodation of blacks is concerned, to refer to the struggles of Alonso de Sandoval and St. Pedro Claver to vindicate slaves’ rights in seventeenth-century Cartagena. He might have made more of the apparent coincidence between the economic opportunities a global monarchy offered and the willingness of subject-peoples to share a common identity. And I do not think he allows for the influence of a model of sacred history of Jewish origin in the making of a tradition of Spain as an agent of Providence. More rigorous copyediting would have eliminated occasionally unclear or misleading formulations. Still, this courageous and well-informed work should help disinterested readers understand Spain and challenge partisans to think again.