Personally, one feels more concerned by the gratitude owed to the country of Lázaro Cárdenas and by his generous welcome in the Spanish exile than by the events that occurred five hundred years ago, perpetrated by a horde of hungry nobles and mercenaries hungry for loot with the necessary collaboration of the indigenous enemies of the Aztec empire.
Opinion – From October 1 to 12, by Javier Pérez Royo
In your Cantata of the striker Don Rodrigo Díaz de Carrerasparody of epic songs performed by the Argentinian ensemble Les Luthiers, a group of natives joyfully welcome the protagonist, who arrived on the banks of the Río de la Plata in 1491 – hence the word “advanced” – by shouting: “They discovered us.” ! “They finally discovered us!” » For a long time, feelings of superiority, condescension, subordination, humiliation or mutual ridicule governed the interpretations made on one side or the other of the Atlantic over the period from the end of the 15th century to first third of the 19th century. It is enough, without going any further, to look back at some recent headlines.
When the scandal broke out around the casting of this indescribable commercial product by Nacho Cano entitled Malincheits author affirmed that the condition of the Mexican actors and actresses in question would in reality be that of scholarship holders in training to later produce the ineffable work in Mexico itself. You must ignore, without question, what Ms. Marina represents to the imagination of this country and the predictable box office failure and public order success that its staging would have south of the Rio Grande.
Without leaving the North American country, the new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, sparked bitter controversy by demanding that Spain apologize for the conquest and its correlation of genocide, pillage and cultural destruction. An anachronism which had its isostatic response in the hilarious campaign displayed on the bus shelters of Madrid celebrating the colonizers as “heroes and saints”. It reminds me of the time when, during a class on teaching the Holocaust at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, a speaker tried to blame the Spanish teachers there for having their hands full of guilt towards the diaspora thanks to the legacy of Isabella the Catholic. It is, in all cases, a conception of nations as organic entities which transcend history since the dawn of time.
Personally, one feels more concerned by the gratitude owed to the country of Lázaro Cárdenas and by his generous welcome in the Spanish exile than by the events that occurred five hundred years ago, perpetrated by a horde of hungry nobles and mercenaries hungry for loot with the necessary collaboration of the native enemies of the Aztec empire; and he feels closer to the humanist values of theorists of the Salamanca school like Francisco de Vitoria than to the gastronomic tastes of the priests of Huitzilopochtli. I identify with the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende, with the transformative impulse of the original Sandinistas – not with the grotesque caricature that represents the current regime of Daniel Ortega – or with the baroque, dreamlike and tragic worlds created by Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez and even by the first Vargas Llosa and I am repelled by the Tridentine chants, the apology of thirdly, gachupina guilt, the self-justification of the Creole bourgeoisie pregnant with military leaders and subservient to the United Fruit Company and Uncle Sam or the discourse of perennial Spain where the sun does not set.
The very concept of the “Fiesta de la Hispanidad” evokes old echoes. That, in its current form, it was reestablished as a national holiday by the government of Felipe González in 1987, in one of those many concessions aimed at integrating the right into democratic concelebration, cannot make us forget that it was the patriarch of the Restoration regime, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, to whom we owe the proposal to celebrate the Colombian anniversary since 1892, under the regency of María Cristina of Habsburg-Lorraine. In 1918, Alfonso XIII, at the initiative of another conservative prime minister, Antonio Maura, added the complement “de la Raza” to the festival. But it would be two prominent figures of Spanish reactionary thought who would invent the formula “Hispanic Day”: the traditionalist monarchist Ramiro de Maeztu and the trabucaire cardinal Isidro Gomá. Another prelate, the primate of Spain, Pedro Segura, crowned in 1928, with the royal acquiescence which had already consecrated Spain to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1919, the Virgin of Guadalupe as patroness of the Spanish-speaking community. American.
The intrinsic relationship between the monarchy, the Catholic Church, conservatism and a certain idea of Spain is notorious. There is an illiberal, fundamentalist and pre-modern history which postulates the existence of a common thread black which, starting from the converted Visigothic military monarchy, travels through the centuries in a journey of catholicity and overflowing universality, marking the route with the fight of Muslim arrows against the law of gravity in Covadonga, the warlike acts of the kingdoms medieval Christians united in a common enterprise, the alienation of Al Andalus as an additional ingredient of Hispanic cultural identity. The apogee was reached with dynastic unification under the Catholic Monarchs, the seed of the American empire and the cradle of the European empire. This is the declaration which defends, around the Catholic monarchy, the origin of “the oldest nation in Europe”, whose emblematic architectural syntagm crystallizes in the Escorial: impressive monumentality, durability of granite, austere majesty, ossuary royal and plant in the shape of a martyr. grid as a warning to the heterodox. A paradigm of national genealogy on which liberal and democratic formulations are based – the spirit of independence of Numancia, the defense of local jurisdictions and freedoms against royal centralism, the irmandiñosthe Communities, the Germanias, the matxinadasthe constitution of the nation as a subject of sovereignty expressed in the constitutional text of 1812, popular republicanism and civic progressivism – have not prevailed and have not even managed to scratch the surface..
Anyone who is not moved by conversion to Catholicism, warlike ardor and the unity of destiny in the universal is not less Spanish, any more than those who cease to be. Already at the time, they criticized the exploitation of the Indians, extractivism under the guise of evangelization and, ultimately, the disastrous management of resources which, as Ramon Carande and Pierre Vilar have studied, were of little use to the development of Castile – nor to the rest of Castile. the territories of the Hispanic monarchy, excluded from colonial trade until the 18th century – and much for the bankers Italian and Flemish industrialists made their finances shine and promoted, in the words of Jan de Vriers, their industrious revolutions. This gold which “is born honored in the Indies / and is buried in Genoa” (Quevedo) had on its recipients the effect that the rain on the roofs of houses, which “although it falls above, then descends all the way down” . , without those who receive it first benefiting from it” (Tomás de Mercado). Perhaps for Castile, exhausted by the demands of foreign imperial wars, Mark Twain’s aphorism would have been good: it was good to discover America, but it would have been better to go that way.
