Nationalism and Transnationalism in Spain and Latin America, 1808–1923

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Nationalism and Transnationalism in Spain

and Latin America, 1808–1923

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Rob Stone (University of Birmingham)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Jo Labanyi (New York University)

Roger Bartra (Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM, México)

Other titles in the series

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Roger Bartra

Adolfo Bioy Casares: Borges, Fiction and Art

Karl Posso

Barcelona: Visual Culture, Space and Power

Helena Buffery & Carlota Caulfield

From Silver Screen to Spanish Stage: The Humorists of the Madrid Vanguardia and Hollywood Film

Stuart Nishan Green

Modern Argentine Poetry: Exile, Displacement, Migration

Ben Bollig

Catalonia: National Identity and Cultural Policy

Kathryn Crameri

Melancholy and Culture: Diseases of the Soul in Golden Age Spain

Roger Bartra

The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y Cantares’

Nicolas Fernandez-Medina

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Nationalism and

Transnationalism in

Spain and Latin

America, 1808–1923

EDITED BY

PAUL GARNER AND ANGEL SMITH

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2017

© The Contributors, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78316-971-9

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-973-3

The right of the Contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: The Enlightenment (1887), coloured engraving depicting Spanish emigrants sailing to Argentina © Thaliastock / Mary Evans.

Contents

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Series Editors’ Foreword

List of Tables and Figures

Notes on the Contributors

Notes

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

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Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Tables and Figures

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Notes on the Contributors

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Gregorio Alonso lectures in Spanish and Latin American history at the University of Leeds. He is the author of La nación en capilla. Ciudadanía católica y cuestión religiosa en España, 1793–1874 (Granada: Comares, 2014); and co-editor and contributor to Politics and the Memory of Democratic Transition: The Spanish Model. (New York: Routledge, 2011) with Diego Muro, and Londres y el Liberalismo Hispánico (Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2011) with Daniel Muñoz-Sempere. He is at present researching on the Latin American liberators’ links with European and Anglo-Saxon political traditions. The resulting monograph will be published by Alabama University Press in 2017.

Manuel Chust is Professor of Modern History in the Department of History, Geography and Art, University Jaume I de Castellón in Spain. His major works include Ciudadanos en armas. La Milicia nacional en el País Valenciano (València: Edicions Alfons El Magnànim, 1987), La cuestión nacional americana en las Cortes de Cádiz (Valencia: Fundación de Historia Social/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), and La Tribuna revolucionaria (Madrid: Sílex, 2014). He has co-authored Tiempos de revolución. Comprender las independencias iberoamericanas (Madrid: Taurus, 2013), and has also edited or co-edited amongst other works, La construcción del héroe en España y México (València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2003); El imperio sublevado (Madrid: CSIC, 2004); 1808. La eclosión juntera en el mundo hispano (México D.F.: FCC/El Colegio de México, 2007); El laberinto de las independencias iberoamericanas (València: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2010); La Patria no se hizo sola. Las revoluciones de independencia iberoamericanas (Madrid: Sílex, 2012); and El poder de la palabra. La Constitución de 1812 y América (Madrid: Acción Cultural Española, 2012). He was president of the Asociación de Historiadores Europeos de América Latina (AHILA) between 2006 and 2009 and has been its general editor since 2008.

Paul Garner is Emeritus Professor of the University of Leeds and a Visiting Professor in the Centro de Estudios Históricos at the Colegio de México. He has published a number of books and articles on the history of Mexico in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including La Revolución en la Provincia. Soberanía estatal y caudillismo serrano en Oaxaca 1910–20, 2nd edn (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988, 2003); Porfirio Díaz: A Profile in Power (Harlow: Longman, 2001); Porfirio Díaz. Del héroe al dictador. Una biografía política (México D.F.: Editorial Planeta, 2003; 2nd edn, 2010); British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1889–1919 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Leones Británicos y Águilas Mexicanas. Negocios, política e imperio en la carrera de Weetman Pearson en México 1889–1919 (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Instituto Mora/Colegio de México/Colegio de San Luis Potosí, 2013); Porfirio Díaz. Entre el Mito y la Historia (México D.F.: Ediciones Crítica, 2015).

Erika Pani is Research Professor at El Colegio de México. Her major single-authored books are Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio. El imaginario político de los imperialistas (México D.F.: El Colegio de México/Instituto de investigaciones Dr José María Luis Mora, 2001); Una serie de admirables acontecimientos. México y el mundo en la época de la Reforma, 1848–1867 (México D.F.: Educación y Cultura, Asesoría y Promoción/Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2013); and Para pertenecer a la gran familia mexicana. Procesos de naturalización en el siglo XIX (México D.F.: El Colegio de México, 2015).

Antares Ruiz de Árbol Cano has a PhD in modern history from the Universidad Jaume I/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Her thesis was awarded the extraordinary prize (premio extraordinario de doctorado) for the academic year 2012–13. She has written a number of articles on repression under the Franco dictatorship and the pedagogic and political work of republican exiles. Her first monograph, ‘Hacer España en América’. Guillermina Medrano Aranda (1912–2005). La pervivencia del magisterio republicano en el exilio americano (Santo Domingo: Academia Dominicana de la Historia, 2015) has recently been published.

Manuel Suárez Cortina is Professor of Modern History at the Universidad de Cantabria in Spain. He is author amongst others of the following single-authored monographs: El reformismo en España (Madrid: Siglo XIX, 1985); El gorro frigio. Liberalismo, democracia y republicanismo en la Restauración (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva/Sociedad Menéndez y Pelayo, 2000); El águila y el toro. España y México en el siglo XIX. Ensayos de historia comparada (Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I, 2010); and Entre cirios y garrotes. Política y religión en la España contemporánea (1808–1936) (Santander: Ediciones Universidad de Cantabria, 2014).

Angel Smith is Reader in Modern Spanish History at the University of Leeds. His research has focused on labour and anarchism in Spain, the crisis of the Spanish Restoration Monarchy and on nationalist opposition movements in Spain. He has published two single authored monographs, Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1898–1923 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), and The Origins of Catalan Nationalism, 1770–1923 (Basingstoke: Palgave Macmillan, 2014). Volumes he has edited or co-edited include Francisco Romero Salvadó and Angel Smith (eds), The Agony of Spanish Liberalism: From Revolution to Reaction, 1913–23 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). At present he is working on the impact of the rise of Orientalist perspectives within the European intelligentsia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on Spanish culture and politics.

Guy Thomson is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and specialises in nineteenth-century Mexican and Spanish regional history. His doctoral research focused on economic and social change in Puebla de los Ángeles over the late colonial and early republican periods, resulting in a monograph, Puebla de los Angeles: Industry and Society in a Mexican City, 1700–1850 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1989). Research then shifted to the northern mountainous region of the state of Puebla State and centred on the rise of the Sierra’s liberal leaders from the 1850s to the 1870s. This culminated in a biography of the Nahua cacique, Juan Francisco Lucas, Politics, Patriotism and Popular Liberalism in Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra 1854–1917 (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1999). In 1994 he began work on the regional roots of the Democrat party in eastern Andalucía, resulting in the 2010 monograph, The Birth of Modern Politics in Spain: Democracy, Association and Revolution, 1854–1875 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Research continues on comparative aspects of the reception of liberalism and republicanism in nineteenth-century Mexico and southern Europe.

Introduction

Hispanism, Nationalism and the Hispanic ‘Corridor’

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ANGEL SMITH AND PAUL GARNER

This book has its origins in a symposium held at the University of Leeds on 10–13 April 2013 titled Nation Building in Spain and Latin America, 1808–1914. The focus was, on the one hand, on the importance of the Spanish heritage on nation and state building in Spanish-speaking Latin America, and, on the other, on processes of nation and state building in Spain and Latin America. The organisers set out a number of questions to be addressed and we explained that we were particularly interested in comparative studies or, at least, papers that contained an international dimension. Key questions on which we focused were the building blocks of national identity in Spain and Latin America; how institutions inherited from the colonial period evolved within the independent American nation-states; and major factors which accounted for similarities and differences in nation state formation both between the Latin American republics and between them and Spain.

In the symposium, discussion of the Spanish colonial heritage and of the comparisons and contrasts between Spain and the new American republics also served to highlight the fact that in the aftermath of American independence relations with Spain were not entirely broken. Spain and the various Latin American republics went about constructing their own nation-states, Spaniards were expelled and it sometimes took decades to re-establish diplomatic relations. However, it was also the case that some Latin Americans sympathised with the Spanish Pan-Hispanist or Hispanist discourse, which affirmed that Spanish and their Spanish American colleagues remained united by ties of blood, language and culture; that significant numbers of Spaniards continued to live in America; that from the 1830s Spaniards began migrating to the New World in search of job opportunities; and, finally, that the former colonies adopted Castilian Spanish as their official language, facilitating cultural and intellectual exchange, most particularly from the late nineteenth century.

At the symposium it was agreed that we should produce an edited volume. And given the discussion outlined above, it was felt that rather than focusing purely on nationalism and national identity, it would be more innovative to also bring into the equation the linkages that remained or were re-established between Spain and her former colonies. As has increasingly been recognised in recent decades, the post eighteenth-century world has been marked by the rise of the modern nation state, but also by the development of new transnational connections. Our aim in this book is to study these processes within a Hispanic context.

No edited volume can, of course, be comprehensive, and the chapters that follow focus on four aspects of the above. First, a number of chapters deal with Spanish Hispanism: from the attempt to build a nation state across two Hemispheres at the Cortes of Cádiz to efforts to retain some Spanish influence over the new independent Latin American states and to maintain what Spanish Hispanists saw as a common cultural home (Chust, Smith, Árbol Cana). Second, there are chapters that analyse the construction of the alternative nation states, with specific reference to Mexico (Pani, Garner) and to the Cuban independence movement against Spanish rule (Smith). Third, several chapters engage with the political and institutional imprint of Spain on the new American states (Chust, Alonso, Suárez Cortina), with the chapters by Alonso and Suárez Cortina centring their attention on the Catholic Church. Finally, chapters by Chust, Alonso, Suárez Cortina and Thomson also encompass the theme of the circulation of ideas between Spain and the Americas. In the sections that follow we aim both to put these chapters into a broader context and emphasise the contribution they make to our understanding of nationalism and transnationalism in a Hispanic setting.

The chapter by Manuel Chust centres its attention on the remarkable attempt by Spanish liberals between 1810 and 1812 to create a bi-hemispheric nation state, which straddled Spain and the American colonies. The Cádiz Constitution of 1812 was rooted in the liberal principle that the nation should be based on popular sovereignty and transformed the old colonies from monarchic possessions to an integrative part of the Spanish nation. The liberals were no doubt encouraged to take such a stance by the fact that elites in the Americas were criollos, and therefore to a significant degree of Spanish descent, with the result that it could be argued that they both shared the same race and culture.¹

Had this effort succeeded it would massively have changed the course of world history. It was, however, soon to run into trouble. As Chust shows, the peninsular liberals wished to establish a unitarian political system, which would in reality have meant that power remained located in Madrid. On the contrary, the American deputies wanted a more federalised arrangement, in which large provincial administrations (diputaciones provinciales) would attain a significant degree of political and administrative autonomy. The peninsular deputies were no doubt influenced by the structures and mentalities inherited from the Hispanic Bourbon Monarchy, which had attempted to turn the old composite monarchy inherited from the Habsburgs into a more centralised state based on the Castilian legal system, and by post ancien-régime French liberals, who stressed that the nation was indivisible and that political power rested solely in the hands of the deputies elected by the nation. As Smith notes in his chapter, the American deputies, on the other hand, utilised arguments drawn on the anti-absolutist medieval sources to argue that an original pact had been established between the conquistadors and the Monarchy, and that with the abdication of Fernando VII power reverted to the people. And of course they had the federalist example of the United States on their doorstep. The absolutist coup of 1814 was the final nail in the coffin of this project. King Fernando VII aimed to once again turn the former American colonies into possessions of the Crown, meaning that the American criollo elites now had absolutely no reason to remain linked to Spain.

The independence of the former colonies and the construction of the new American republics significantly altered the terms of the debate. In Spain it was argued that the remaining Caribbean colonies in the Antilles still formed part of the Spanish nation. Cuba and Puerto Rico comprised what was referred to as la España ultramarina (overseas Spain). Moreover, what has become known as a Hispanist or Pan-Hispanist discourse was advanced, which, while recognising that the former mainland colonies no longer formed part of the Spanish political nation, affirmed that the history of the Americas had begun with the Spanish conquest and colonisation, which introduced Spanish civilisation and the Catholic faith, and that they were therefore still united with Spain by language and culture. The vocabulary was never homogenous, but Hispanists talked of the ‘Spanish race’ or ‘Spanish races’ (comprising both peninsular Spaniards and American criollos), of ‘Spanish Americans’, of the ‘family’ of Spanish nations, and of Spaniards and Americans forming the same ‘people’. The conclusion drawn by Spanish Hispanists was that they needed to work together, most particularly in the face of the threat posed by the ‘Anglo-Saxon races’, above all the United States.² It is important above all to relate the elaboration of this discourse to Spanish nationalism. In the nineteenth century, nationalists emphasised the country’s greatness through reference to past and present glories. And as state-sponsored nationalisms co-opted the country’s dominant religion, such glories often took on a religious dimension.³ Spanish nationalists followed this general pattern, with all but the most left-wing viewing the country’s great and everlasting contribution to humanity as its civilising and evangelising mission in America.

The problem was that attempts by Hispanists to re-establish links with the former colonies tended to be accompanied by an assumption that they knew what was best for the Americans. Furthermore, there was a barely concealed attempt to maintain or re-establish colonial control where possible. As Smith indicates, in the case of Cuba, while Spaniards claimed that the inhabitants formed part of the Spanish nation, in reality from the 1830s the new liberal order built a colonial system, concentrating political power in the hands of the captain general of Cuba and rigging economic exchange so as to favour the Spanish exchequer and the powerful peninsular merchants and shipping magnates (the so-called peninsulares). At the same time, between the 1840s and 1860s there were attempts to establish Spanish Bourbon princes on the throne in the new American states, and in the first half of the 1860s Spain pursued an aggressive foreign policy in the Americas, which culminated in a failed attempt to retake the Dominican Republic and naval skirmishes with Ecuador and Peru.⁴

Three key factors were probably at play here. First, there was a fear, perhaps above all in military circles, that allowing liberal regimes to operate in the remaining colonies could provide a springboard for opposition to colonial rule. Second, in the mid-nineteenth century, while Spain saw Britain and France as the major world powers she still considered herself a significant political player on the world stage; it would only be after military defeat at the hands of the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898 that she would become resigned to second-class status. And third, the links between political and economic elites in Spain became close, with the major colonial interests establishing significant influence over Spanish government policy.

Yet of course such policies were hardly likely to endear Spain to the new American republics. It is true that some more conservative Americans, afraid of radical liberal transformations, could look back nostalgically to the Hispanic empire, stress their common Catholic identity with Spain, and so sympathise with Hispanist discourse. As Erika Pani notes, such a perspective was adopted by the Conservative party during the rule the Second Mexican Empire of Maximilian I, which it saw as re-connecting Mexico with its Latin roots. In addition, the argument that the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ was a threat to Latin America carried significant weight, most notable after Mexico’s military defeat at the hand of the United States between 1846 and 1848 led to the loss of half its territory.⁵

Nevertheless, for liberal American elites, from the 1820s the emphasis would be on constructing alternative nations, and hence it was necessary to differentiate the historical roots and culture of these nations from Spain (as well as from each other). One way in which they did this was to build on the critique of Spanish colonial rule elaborated by criollo ‘patriots’, unhappy at their marginalisation from power, from the seventeenth century onwards. In order to undertake this task they could count on the writings of the Spanish friar, Bartolomé de Las Casas, who in the early sixteenth century bitterly attacked what he saw as the greed and savagery of the conquistadors. Such a perspective had simultaneously been adopted by the Hispanic Monarchy’s European imperial and religious rivals on the European political stage, who portrayed ‘Spain’ as a backward land of the cruel Spanish Inquisition, populated by fanatical friars and idle aristocrats, and who also condemned Spain’s colonisation of America, claiming that the conquistadors had only ever been interested in power and wealth, and had ruthlessly exploited the natives. In some renderings of this critique there was, moreover, a racial component, in that Spain’s ‘Semitic’ (that is Moorish and Jewish) heritage was linked to the country’s supposed exceptionalism. Indeed, by the nineteenth century it became common for cultural elites of the Great Powers to adopt an Orientalist perspective on Spain, arguing that its lack of dynamism could be put down to the centuries of Moorish rule.⁶ The vision of a backward Spain out of touch with the modern world was enthusiastically taken up by Latin American liberals from the early nineteenth century, who repeated denunciations of Spain’s colonisation of America and affirmed that she had held back their economic and social progress. However, rather than backing any claims to Spanish racial deficiencies – which of course would have negative implications for the criollos themselves – this was put down to poor governance and human frailties, such as greed and lust for power.⁷

At the same time, liberal criollos had to forge a national identity for their own republics. The material that nationalist ideologues use in order to create a narrative that legitimises the new nation-state and provides it with a glorious past is never uniform. Typically, rival nationalist discourses are elaborated which both overlap with and contradict each other. Erika Pani emphasises in this respect that as the Mexican Liberal party tried to lay the foundations for a new state in the turbulent 1860s it laid emphasis on the rebellion by Miguel Hidalgo on 16 September 1810 as the key ‘foundational myth’ of the Mexican nation, portraying him as the precursor of the modern, democratic Mexico they would forge. Moreover, in the context of the struggle against the Conservatives and the regime of Maximilian I, she argues that they focused on political objectives rather than attempting to build a common culture based on Mexico’s colonial or pre-colonial past. No doubt the fact that they drew inspiration from the French Revolution helps explain this. They modelled themselves on the revolutionary republicanism of the likes of Jules Michelet, who looked back to the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome as their inspiration.⁸ It seems that within this mindset there was little space for Mexico’s own history.

However, other patriotic and nationalist narratives integrated the pre-Colombian civilisations into the national narrative, providing the new nation with its own ancient historical roots. This was a theme developed by criollo patriots in Peru and especially Mexico from the seventeenth century onwards, and served to differentiate their own territories from Peninsular Spain. Subsequently, the key themes of the advanced nature of the Aztec and Inca empires and their heroic resistance against the conquistadors were integrated into at least some nineteenth-century nationalist narratives.⁹ In the case of Cuba, as Smith briefly notes, despite the virtual annihilation of the native inhabitants, from the mid-century onwards intellectuals who wanted cultural autonomy from Spain pursued similar themes. In the literary sphere one sees, on the one hand, a Romantic approximation of the Amerindian past, while anthropologists began to argue that the Indian imprint remained in the present-day population.¹⁰ It was an idea taken up by José Martí, who argued that miscegenation had produced a mestizo nation, which brought out the most positive features of the Indian and Spanish races.

Moreover, as Smith argues, it was not only in America that one sees a critical perspective on the Spanish liberals’ decision to build a centralised state. In areas like Catalonia, Valencia and the Basque provinces, from the early nineteenth century, voices were raised in favour of greater administrative autonomy for the provinces. As in the case of American criollos, the local intelligentsia argued that power under the Hispanic Monarchy had rested on a pact between the monarch and the kingdoms and that this balance of power should be reflected in the modern day world. In the context of the effort by the Spanish government to abolish the Basque administrative system of governance, the fueros, and to homogenise the Spanish system of civil law along Castilian lines, nationalist movements then made their appearance in Catalonia and the Basque Country from the late 1880s. Like their American counterparts they were influenced by negative portrayals of Spain within the European intelligentsia, with the particularity that this encouraged the elaboration of race-based nationalist discourses whose goal was to distinguish these territories from the Spanish heartlands of Castile and Andalusia. Thus, for the founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, the Basques were a unique superior race, totally unlike the ‘Latin’ Spaniards. In Catalonia, in nationalist circles there was less unanimity, but from the mid-nineteenth century arguments were put forward that Catalans were closer to the French ‘Celts’ or to the ‘Latin races’ of France and Italy, whereas Semitic blood had had a negative impact on the Castilian race.

In Latin America, racial ideas were no less influential but took a different course. While some sought to reproduce European and North American eugenic discourses which affirmed the superiority of the white race, and so advocated colonisation programmes to ‘whiten’ the population, others defended their countries’ mestizo heritage. The classic example of the latter is José Vasconcelos’s evocation of a ‘Cosmic race’ in Mexico, an improved race of the future created through the miscegenation of Europeans, Indo-Americans and Africans. As already noted, José Martí elaborated a similar perspective. This served to counter the US variant of the European theories