The announcement on Monday by Minister Ernest Urtasun in the Congressional Culture Commission that he wants to “overcome the colonial framework of museums” has caused an earthquake within the framework of the cultural wars that are currently taking place. The spokespersons for PP and Vox replied that Spain had not had colonies and the representative of Abascal’s party directly called him “Hispanophobic.” If in the countries around us processes have begun to return pieces resulting from looting, in Spain the debate goes further and for some there were no colonies because the viceroyalties were something else. Did Spain have colonies?
Philologist Elvira Roca Barea, author of the best-selling Imperiophobia and the Black Legend (Siruela), is clear that not. And she points out that it is an ahistorical vision. “We cannot consider that all expansion is colonialism. The expansion of Athens that is manifested in the Delian League, is it colonialism? Was it that of the thirteen North American colonies to the west? When the Iberian kingdoms took place in the 15th century, that form of expansion linked to the industrial revolution that is colonialism had not been conceived. And legally the Spanish expansion is completely different,” she points out.
Regarding whether they were comparable regimes, he says that he prefers to go to objective realities “such as that the growth of the viceregal capitals left Madrid converted into a La Mancha town.” And he denounces that the history of all the Indian communities that were as conquering or more has been “destroyed, because there were four Spaniards, you need 80,000 Totonacs and Tlaxcalans to conquer Tenochtitlán, but we erased them from history, they were wax in the hands of Europeans. And no, they defended their interests.”
Guillermo Serés, director of the Center for Studies of Colonial America (CEAC) of the Autonomous Community of Barcelona, ??has a similar opinion, who remarks that “if colony is a desire to Hispanize a territory, yes, there have been, as at the time it was Romanized Spain, but if colonial is understood merely as despoliation, no. It took away the printing press, religion, culture, a language was never imposed. There were deaths, exploitation, yes, but they were also previously under the domination of the Aztecs. He took the best of Europe there, but we have a black legend created by the English and Germans.”
A story “that there was bad, but the good was more” that for José Antonio Piqueras, professor of Contemporary History at the Universitat Jaume I, part of the “national imagination that has been built since the 18th century and that rests on the historical mission of Spain : discover, colonize, civilize a continent. And if you assimilate the term colonial with exploitation, the historical role is eroded.”
But, he assures, “of course Spain had colonies, the problem is that the question is posed in nominalist terms. The administration of these territories may be a viceroyalty, a governorship or a general captaincy, but they are not equal parts of the crown of Castile: they are colonies of settlement and extraction, the first and largest extractive economies in the world. An economy based on the extraction of metals with coercive forms of work for the Indians sanctioned by law is what has sustained the empire since the 16th century. That, plus the slave trade, only occurs in what we have later called colonies. In the 18th century, already in the Bourbon era, official documentation will speak of colonies directly.”
The emeritus professor of Contemporary History at the Pompeu Fabra University Josep Maria Fradera, author of Before anti-imperialism (Anagrama), emphasizes along these lines that “one thing is the institutional nomenclature, such as the viceroyalties”, and another, “the social structures and “economic forces that make empires maintain themselves.” “The word colonies is uncomfortable for the Spanish conservative and Catholic tradition. They say that we had viceroyalties, not colonies, as if he had gone to give charity to the Americans. It was an empire of mining, of silver, the backbone of the empire. An institutional structure based on the work of the Indians in the service of the Spanish, as in the 19th century the Spaniards and Catalans who went to Cuba lived on the work of slaves.”
The Mexican Mauricio Tenorio, professor of History at the University of Chicago, author of the essay History in Ruins. The cult of monuments and their destruction (Alianza) clarifies that since Charles V, attempts have been made to build complex institutions such as viceroyalties to maintain power and they are not treated as colonies but as kingdoms of kingdoms, “which does not mean that they are not There is metal extraction, exploitation, nor that Indians are not being killed.” “Now towards the Caribbean or Africa, Spain directly has colonies that it exploits, it was a slave trader. And one thing is Mexico City, and another is the borders with North America, where she tried to kill Indians and expand, and many of those who did so were Tlaxcalans, Purepechas, subjects of her Austrian majesty. It is difficult to accept history as it was, contradictory and full of infamy.” And he smiles when he says that we are among the great civilizational benefits that were promoted before and during the Franco regime and the history lessons that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador gives every day. “If you ask the Mexican indigenous people who has to ask for forgiveness, they will tell you that the Mexican nation screwed them.”
Bernat Hernández, professor of Modern History at the Autonomous University and researcher at the CEAC, points out that “the conquest of the New World, like any war and invasion, was very difficult,” but adds that “historians today know that indigenous involvement was fundamental for the territorial dominion. The conquest of Guatemala was a largely indigenous work.” “The monarchy segregated the native population from the end of the 16th century into the so-called Indian towns. It provided the ‘Indian republic’ with its own laws for its benefit. Its real situation, however, was that of populations under guardianship and subject to exploitation. by their own elites and by the Creole world”.
The anthropologist Gustau Nerín, professor at the University of Barcelona, ??author of Colonialism and Imperialism (Shackleton) and scholar of Equatorial Guinea, points out that “Evidently Spain had colonies: it even had the General Directorate of Morocco and colonies. And Equatorial Guinea operated with very clear discrimination, with brutal discriminatory legislation, Guineans live in one part of the city, buses separate them, they cannot drink alcohol or olive oil, there is different labor legislation… A population that arrives from outside and imposes its models. Colonialism. Also in Ifni, in the Sahara, in Morocco. When it is discussed whether Spain was a colonialist, there is a double supremacism: that of believing themselves superior to the populations in which they intervene and that of believing that they are better than the rest of Europeans, they act better.”
And the supremacist discourse that existed in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, he reasons, “is shared by Spanish, French, and English museums, even those of countries that did not have colonies at that time. In the act of collecting, bringing objects, exhibiting them , that compulsive mentality of accumulation is something very Western, linked to that symbolic appropriation of the culture of the other. Japanese do not come to make museums of Spanish works. And I don’t know what people would think here if the French had taken the tomb of Santiago of the cathedral of Compostela”.
The Cuban essayist Iván de la Nuez points further. “Denying colonialism, I don’t know what meaning it can have, that debate is at the heart of the construction of modern thought, in 1551 there was already a debate between Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas. Without this debate, Francisco de Vitoria and the foundation of modern law cannot be understood. I don’t think it is serious to deny colonialism and that it brought slavery and cruelty. To deny that is to deny the Indian Chronicles and a part of Spanish thought. And to say that there were allied Indians, that’s what all empires do, divide and conquer. Julius Caesar invented it. There was discovery, conquest, colony and slavery. “It seems more honest to me to say that we like colonialism and that we think it is the culminating moment of the history of Spain.”
But in the face of that, he warns, “there is also an anti-colonial tradition at the heart of Spanish thought and Latin American culture and that is at the foundation of the modern West. The Americans did not invent it on their campuses.” And he concludes that today museums They are subject to discussion throughout Europe “because many pieces were brought in spuriously, but also because our societies are full of immigrants from former colonies who face a stereotypical mirror. That is already a problem that has to do with the present and the future of our societies.”
