Two Spains, Many Spains: The Spanish Civil War

"Here lies half of Spain. It died of the other half."

—  Mariano José de Larra, 19th-century Spanish satirist

When I first visited my wife in Valencia I stayed with her at her parent's house. One day I was passing through the hallway where, like many families all around the world, they had hanging photos of both parents' families, pictures more or less organized with my father-in-law's family on one side and my mother-in-law's on the other. As I looked at the old photos with curiosity, I was suddenly struck by a curious discrepancy: the portrait picture taken of my wife's father's father when he was a young man showed him in one kind of uniform, while the photo of her other grandfather showed him in a different uniform. Given their age, I knew her grandfathers (whom she referred to in Valencian as "los iaios") would have only fought in one war, the Spanish Civil War. And apparently, I realized, they fought on opposite sides: one grandfather, from the city, in the Republican uniform, the other grandpa, from the pueblo, in a Nationalist (pro-Franco) uniform.

Somehow that impression, of the two grandfathers on the family photo wall, has stuck with me, a symbol of the personal divisions caused by the war, neighbor killing neighbor, regions (like Valencia) divided by city and countryside. But also of how people had moved on. While it took little effort for me, even the clumsy, Spanish-challenged outsider that I was, to realize that my wife's two families have very different politics, the civil war _never_ came up in family visits or meals with them, nor did any bitterness or resentfulness, at least of a personal nature, about their opposite positions during the war.

And yet there they sat, the two photos, side-by-side on the same wall of portraits, both at the top of their respective family trees, which joined together with my wife (or with her parent's marriage). What to make of it?

Easily the most iconic depiction of the Spanish Civil War is Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937),
which depicts the Spanish Nationalist forces bombing the Basque town on April 26, 1937.

 
As well as being a national Election Day, this past Sunday (November 20th) was the 36th anniversary of Franco's death, which was a very important symbolic marker point in Spain's democratic transition… and which I'll use as an excuse to continue my essay series on "Las Dos Españas". Of all the arguments for it, the Spanish Civil War seems to be the ultimate proof of there actually having existed Two Spains. The war literally tore the country in two, and factions seemed to line up ready to die for their half of Spain.

I'm sure all of you, having taken an interest to Spain, have heard something about the war, but it's worth recapping its main events for those of you who found history class dull. Fixing a "start" to the Civil War, is one of many narrative points continuously under dispute, further underscoring a classic dilemma historians regularly run into when telling a story… Aristotle once nicely summarized the principal structures of a story by saying that any narrative must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Given this basic arch, any account of a polemical past event usually embeds its argument in what the storyteller chooses to be the beginning, middle, and end of what took place as they tell it.

An example of the many political and ideological recruitment
 posters of the war, this one featuring the Republican
slogan ("lema"): "¡No pasarán! ¡Pasaremos!"

Some start with the chaos of the Spanish Second Republic (suggesting the military coop was an inevitable maneuver to reestablish political order), others take it back to the Spanish-American war of 1898 and the failure of Spanish Imperialism (arguing that the military and old order was still in denial about the democratic consequences of modernization). Or maybe it started in 1492… Rather than invoke these deeper origin stories, I'll just schematicize the war here so as to do my due diligence that you have some sense of when it happened and what was the outcome.

On July 17, 1936, a faction of rebel military troops led by Franco and two other generals declared a coup d'état and moved from their different satellite positions to seize power from the Republican government in Madrid. Over the next few months both sides consolidated control over certain regions of the country, effectively dividing the country in half, with the city of Madrid itself at the border and under siege. Early in the conflict Republican Spain had to move its headquarters to the city of Valencia. For the next two years front lines move little with the exception of the Basque region falling to Franco. Then, from May 1938 through April 1939 Franco's armies progressively began to defeat the Republican Spain, first winning the Battle of Ebro in the fall of 1938, splitting the Republican territory, and then besieging both cities separately. On April 1, 1939 Franco declared victory when the last Republican troops surrendered.

The Siege of Madrid a major site of the Civil War conflict,
and inspiration for Hemingway's play The Fifth Column.

When I asked my wife, what image does she think of when she thinks of the Civil War,
she told me: "battles and trenches in fields." And it's true that these kinds of photographs,
representing a new kind of battle field journalism, are typical representations of the war.

Though as the war progressed and intensified, more and more images of urban fights and
 destruction, like this one which I believe is from the siege of Teruel, would also appear.

General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde,
leader of the rebelian forces and future dictator.

In the time between July 1936 and April 1939 both sides committed horrible atrocities, executing prisoners, and even civilians. One area of much dispute and symbolic argument today is whether the total death tolls on both sides were comparable, or whether the winners (Franco and the Nationalists) were more brutal. (Whatever one's feelings on this question, a second question, where it is harder to argue there is doubt or confusion, is whether Franco's postwar repression was brutal, inhumane, and arguably criminal.)

In this entry I'm not really interested in educating you about the Civil War. (You can find plenty on that at other sites like this one.) Rather, what I want to turn to is how it is remembered (and deployed) today. With Franco's victory, and the postwar internal repression of any opposition (think Laberinto del Fauno (2006)), the lived-history of the civil war quickly became a taboo subject, either discussed behind doors in secret or white-washed by a Franco regime eager to turn the page and modernize industrialize Spain on its own terms.

In this vacuum of Spanish commentary on the Civil War (other than the clearly biased Franco regime doctrinal accounts), foreigners came to define the war, its political significance and symbolic meaning. The first and most prominent group to do so were former members of the International Brigade. Here is where we can situate Hemingway's Civil War as retold in The Fifth Column (1938) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). To quote Spanish historian Paco Pereda on Hemingway's place in these debates:

"Hemingway is an ambiguous character in Spanish history because he was more or less well liked by both the Republicans and the Fascists. It was his political beliefs that did it for the Republicans and the fact that he liked bullfighting, drinking, hunting, and powerful emotions (pleased) for the Fascists".

Indeed, at the start of the war, Hemingway spent some of his energies trying to lobby the Republican side to protect bullfighting even though it was heavily implicated with the pro-Franco rebels. After the war, according to Laprade, Censura y Recepción de Hemingway en España (1991), Spanish censors struggled from 1953 into the 1970s with striking a balance between celebrating certain Hemingway prose (basking in the glow of international recognition he gave bullfighting) while censoring other things Hemingway wrote (that awkward little story he published about bells tolling, or his affiliation with communist Cuba). The popularity of the film For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), however, proved too much to ban outright, and so apparently it was also screened, though with more politically delicate segments edited out.

Hemingway was not alone. There were many other expat and outsiders' recollections and opinions on the Spanish Civil War. Many of them, though attempting to show support for Republicans, perpetuate certain common stereotypes that I've put under the title of the "Hemingway paradigm"… the alleged ineptitude of well-meaning leftist Spaniards (accounts exaggerate the incompetence of Socialists, the inane political divisions among left-wing parties, depiction of anarchists as politically naive), and their hot-bloodedness and intensity. One of the best written of these expat accounts is George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938), which improves on some of these stereotypes (e.g. an interesting account of anarchists proving to be quite adept community managers and organizers), while still remaining trapped in a very English style of Romanticism and nostalgia for a simpler Spain.

While I have not yet read it, I'm certain, given the quality of Paul Preston's historical work, that his book We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War (2008) would give you a very good sense of this community's take on the war, and situate their work in a particular post-Civil War campaign. The list of figures he discusses—Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn (a.k.a. Hemingway's third wife), W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Kim Philby, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly, André Malraux, Antoine de Saint Exupéry—gives you an idea of the quality, color, and character of this impressive and vocal group of expat witnesses.

For most of these accounts, written in the 1940s at the beginning of what was suddenly a global war, World War II, the Spanish Civil War was quickly redefined as a precursor to the WWII struggle of fascists versus socialists (with usually no compunction shown in such accounts about the blatant presumptions of internationalism that ignored any Spanish singularities). This is still often the Spanish Civil War's place in European or World Histories… preface to WWII… as it is taught in the UK or USA. (Thus, expats like Hemingway and Orwell are quite dogged about their efforts to depict German airplanes or Italian resources involved in the Civil War, or to address the questions about Soviet Russia's relationship to the Republican Socialist government… all proxy questions about the "cold war" in the mid-1930s which they believed foreshadowed the outbreak of WWII.)

Notice the caption for this map, "the little World War,"
with all of its embedded internationalist presumptions about the conflict.

 
But the Expat International Brigaders weren't the only ones at liberty to write. In a later entry I'll discuss the Spanish exodus which resulted from Spaniards who fled Spain at the end of the war for France, Russia, Mexico, and other countries around the world. Many of these Spanish exiles ("exiliados españoles") would spend the rest of their lives trying to restore Spain's image, denounce Franco's dictatorship, or continue their particular political projects on behalf of an international communism, socialism, or such. (Some would return in the 1970s at the end of the dictatorship.) In the process, many wrote their own recollections and memoirs, few of which achieve the same renown as Orwell's or Hemingway's. But they gave a powerful personal account to the cultural dislocation caused by the war. And one that was not so peculiarly Anglo-Saxon. (A huge thanks to my undergraduate UT Austin history professor for encouraging me and other students to examine the University's very large collection of such memoirs and war-related materials… For a stroll down memory lane, I reread my undergraduate paper on Jaun Bautista Climent’s memoir, Crónica de Valencia, published in serial form between 1989 and 1991 in a Mexican journal, Novedades.)

And in all these recollections there are many visions of Spain and of what happened during the Civil War. Here again, one can see the neatness of the "Two Spains" thesis begin to unravel. On the Left: Andalusian anarchists, Catalan communists, Basque unionists… all loosely managed by a Socialist-party government expelled to Valencia. (The Republican government, it should be remembered, also repressed anarchist uprisings, and outlawed the Marxist POUM group.) On the Right: Monarchists, Fascist idealists ("Falange"), Catholics… all eventually riding along with the might of Franco's military. (Franco, however, was wary of the ideological wing of the Falange, would expel the King, and only halfheartedly catered to Catholic concerns… though perhaps, after the army, this last group was the one that most clearly profited from his dictatorship.)

And in the middle, I can only imagine, were those people who had no particular -ism or -ist, but simply had the misfortune of being born in a country pulled apart at the seams by divisive, radical, and eventually violent sentiments. Every one of these groups would project their own worldview, personal experience, and vision of Spain onto their account of the Civil War.

Yet, many of these Spanish stories aren't told, or aren't published. One of the peculiar features of the democratic transition in the 1970s was the collective decision (or at least the decision made by the architects of the Spanish Constitutions) to simply move forward, and to not officially, publicly scrutinize the atrocities of the Franco Regime. In some sense, during the 1980s, most Spaniards were satisfied with this great forgetting simply because of all the work and opportunity the country faced with joining Europe and embracing its new democracy. (But you can contrast this transition with other countries that have dealt with systematic repression followed by social repair, such as South Africa's approach to ending Apartheid through its "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," widely considered to be a model of humanitarian justice and peaceful transition. Or an analogy closer to home, and much more politically disputed, might be the debate in the United States over awarding "reparations" for slavery or more recently the use of "affirmative action" to offset the history of segregation.).

A colleague of mine, Oliver Hochadel, brought this creative critique cartoon to my
attention. It plays on the excessive interest and attention given to the archeological dig
at Atapuerca, as compared to the continued delay and deliberate diss-attention
paid to uncovering the graves of the victims of Franco's repression.

García Lorca (1898-1936), easily one of the most famous and
tragic victims of the Franco repression during the Civil War

This "decision" to forget the war and postwar dictatorship was always only partial, as disputes continue today over what officials, the government, and individuals owe the victims and exiles from the Franco period. It surfaces in disputes about unburying the mass graves of victims of Franco's repressive purges during and after the end of the war, including Federico García Lorca's unmarked grave. It surfaced with the passage of the "Ley de Memoria Histórica" in 2007, providing institutional mechanism by which victims can seek "reclamaciones", removing Francoist symbols such as statues throughout the country, and granting "right to return" to all exiles and Spanish nationality to any descendants who seek it. And it resurfaces in professional debates among those who actually write history, historians. (There was recently a flare up of outrage over definitions in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE), which in the initial version gave "franquismo" (Francoist movement) an innocuous description as a "political movement with totalitarian tendencies".)

Today there is a new historicism emerging within Spain, an interest in exploring the history of Spanish exiles, the Civil War, and the postwar regime, and their many legacies today in Spain. And this local movement is offering "surprising discoveries": that Spain was not backward in the 1910s and 1920s, but had Nobel Laureates, important scientific research centers, thriving cultural movements; critiques of "Spanish exceptionalism" but also attempting to add a Spanish perspective to a long line of predominantly English historians writing on this subject: Gerald Brenan (The Spanish Labyrinth, 1943), Raymond Carr (The Spanish Tragedy, 1977), or Paul Preston (The Spanish Civil War, 2006), to name a few prominent ones. These accounts characterize the Civil War as a (startling) rupture in the history of a country that was advancing and modernizing like any other European country, and do not accept the vision of Spain as a country doomed by disposition to violent implosions as Hemingway or others might have led us to believe. Does this mean Spain can move on now?

Until recently, it was hard to find a cultural account of Spain, especially if it is written by an expat, that did not weigh in, in some way or another, on the Spanish Civil War and editorialize about what it meant for the country. In some respects this makes sense. The War is still recent history, still has major ramifications for Spain's social, economic, and political realities, and there are still people alive who were directly affected by the war and by the repression following it. This said, I encourage my readers to consider two pieces of advice when you encounter any mention of the Civil War, in books or when talking with people. First, be wary of any neat account of the war which depicts the conflict as inevitable or demonizes one side or the other. Even my fairly limited forays into its history have shown me that it was a real mess, and that one must tread lightly about offering strong theses about its significance and legacies.

Second, it is important to remember that there is a new generation of Spaniards that were born _after_ the dictatorship, and for whom the bell never tolled. They do have photos of their grandfathers up on the wall of family portraits, but they are also ardently (and digitally) photographing new images of Spain and (increasingly) of their adventures abroad. Many self-identify as much or more as Europeans than with either of the "Two Spains" (the so-called "Erasmus generation"). For them, the Civil War is a tragic moment in their collective past, but their eyes are directed towards the future.

Shared Language ≠ Shared Culture: Spain's 4 Official Languages

"Come, let us go down and confound their speech."
Living with the Tower of Babel in a modern society

There is a lot of confusion among foreigners about what are the official languages of Spain. I know this personally because of the number of times I've had to explain it, and then re-explain it to my family when they visit me in Valencia.

For starters, there are _not_ five official languages, only four. Somehow outsiders have been given the impression that Valencian is a distinct, official language from Catalan, and continue to reproduce this false impression in educational textbooks or blogs. It is not! Valencian is a _dialect_ of Catalan, not a separate language! Don't take my word for it, just check the CIA factbook.

I am in a strong position to argue this point. I live in Valencia, I married a Valencian-speaking Valencian, and I am currently enrolled in classes of "valencià." So let me say it again and once and for all, valenciano is linguistically a dialect of catalán. There is no debate among language experts about this.

I suspect the origin of confusion on this issue has to do with the ongoing political tension surrounding regional identity and language between the Comunidad Valenciana and Cataluña. The government of Valencia regularly posts the dialect of valenciano in its official decrees as if it were a distinct language so as to distinguish itself from its northern neighbor. But one should not be naive. This representation of Valencian is political posturing. (It is kind of like renaming french fries "freedom fries.") It reflects certain Valencians' annoyance at being confused associated with their Catalan-speaking neighbors.

To make sense of this language farce debate, you need only remember one simple rule: shared language does not equal shared culture. For an in-depth explanation of the history of the languages of the Iberian peninsula, how they have evolved in dialogue with changes in the ruling powers, see here. A quick pass through the four official language—castellano, catalán (spoken by 17% of Spaniards), gallego (7%), and euskera (2%)—will suffice to show some of the lingual complexity and richness of Spain and how it reflects a cultural and political diversity, too.

Lingual boundaries don't always following political boundaries.

"Castellano" (Castilian Spanish), a.k.a. "español" is the national language and, in case you had any doubt, is natively spoken by everyone in Spain. (Some Spaniards, however, as explained below, are bilingual and thus also speak other official languages). Castellano is a Romance-language, that is based on the Latin introduced by the Romans. Castellano originated in the northern part of the Castilla la Vieja region, at the foot of the Cantabrian mountains. As Castilian, centrist Spain conquered other regions of Spain (discussed in my entry on 1492 and "la Hispanidad"), rulers required the conquered to speak "castellano" or Spanish, though often locals continued to speak their own regional language.

Linguistically castellano is technically the name of a dialect of Spanish, español. Though in Spain by default everyone usually refers to Spanish as castellano, and not español. Or actually, Spaniards call Spanish "castellano" when talking about Spanish within Spain, but tend to call it "español" when talking about the language at a global level, or when referring to the language as spoken by non-Spaniard Spanish speakers. Spanish, after all, is the second most natively spoken language in the world, after Chinese (Mandarin). (It drops to third, behind English, in lists of total number of both native and secondary speakers, and to sixth place for number of only secondary language speakers. French, Russian, Portuguese, and Arabic apparently have more pull in secondary language markets.) So one can understandably be confused by this equivalence made in Spain between what is castellano and español, given that everywhere else in the world it is simply called español.

A globally significant language.

To add to the confusion, there are dozens of regional dialects of Spanish _within_ Spain: murciano, extremeño, andaluz, leonés, aragonés, canario… which, themselves being dialects, could be considered on par with castellano, the dialect of the Madrid and Castilla La Mancha regions. Moreover, within these dialects one can encounter dozens of very distinct accents, dialects or sub-dialects. Just within Andalucía alone there must be hundreds of different accents. A person from Sevilla speaks with a very different accent than someone from Granada, even though both are in the region of Andalucía and natively only speak Spanish, a.k.a. "castellano." All this on top of the myriad of global regional dialects for "el español."

Four linguistically distinct languages, but hundreds of regional dialects.

Have I lost you? Well, now I'm going to bring in the other languages.

Catalán (Catalan) is another Latin-influenced language spoken in "los países catalanes," which includes Catalunya, but also includes Valencia and the Balearic Islands. Today, politically and geographically Valencia and the Balearic Islands are not part of Catalunya even though they share the language. Much like English is named for England, but spoken by non-English people (e.g. Americans, Canadians, Australians...), Catalán, the name of the language, comes from the medieval Catalan Principality, which only loosely corresponds with modern Catalunya, and which was part of the "Crown of Aragón" kingdom that once reigned over the Valencian, Catalunya, and Balearic Island regions (many, many centuries ago), not to mention regions of Italy and France. What's more, Catalan is still spoken in parts of southern France and Sardegna in Italy.

But the Catalunya region of today is not a vestige of that Empire. The modern political community emerged at the same time as and parallel to Valencia and the Balearic Islands. So despite what some Catalán people may think Catalunya has no political or cultural authority over Valencia even though they share a language. To draw an analogy, you could say that there are cultural attempts to build a "Catalanidad" (my word invention) that runs through all the Catalan-speaking communities, much like "Hispanidad" reaches across the Spanish-speaking world. But these attempts are frustrated by regional resentment (particularly in Valencia) at Catalunya's self-fashioned claim to be the center of Catalan(-speaking) identity.

Gallego (Galician), also a Romance family language, is the third most spoken official language and is used in Galicia. It is similar to Portuguese, reflecting Galicia's geographical proximity to Portugal, but is considered a distinct language.

Names in Euskadi look so different that highway
signs have to also list the castellano name:
Donostia, a.k.a. San Sebastián

Euskera, a.k.a vasco (Basque), the fourth official language, is not a Latin-based language but rather a wholly unique and indigenous language to the Basque Country. It is believed to be the language of the people in the region before the Roman conquest who resisted Romans and the uptake of Latin which occurred in the other regions of the Iberian peninsula. This singularity of euskera arguably feeds the Basque separatist sentiment today, though it is important to bear in mind that many people born and growing up in the Basque Country, especially in cities like Bilbao, do not speak euskera on a regular basis. (The same goes for gallego and catalán in Galicia and Catalunya.)

There is a fifth distinct language, aranés, a variant of Occitan spoken in Val d'Aran. But it is spoken by so few people that it is not counted among the official languages.

The Instituto Cervantes, official purveyor of
Spanish culture and language around the world

Spain's Constitution takes a pluralist approach to defining "official language," by calling "español" the _national_ official language and all other languages declared official by autonomous regions to also be officially recognized. Galicia recognizes gallego, Cataluña and the Balearic Islands recognize catalán, and the Basque country euskera. I suppose one could thus legally interpret the Constitution to mean that technically valenciano is a fifth language, because the Valencian government names it so, but to do so is to circumvent all linguistic reason and pander to Valencian reactionary politics.

If you have followed me so far, this is all you really need to know to understand the official languages of Spain, their relation to each other, and how they loosely graph onto geographical regions and cultural identities.

However, now I want to venture into the realm of speculation. It is my impression that, when people here use "castellano" instead of "español" to refer to the Spanish language, they do so in part because all of these languages—catalán, gallego, español especially—in Spain are (in spirit, if not linguistically) "español." I'm playing a bit on the lingual confusion created here by how "español" (the noun) is a language, but "español" (the adjective) is a description which incorporates (at minimum) a nationality and (more broadly) a shared geo-cultural identity which transcends regional languages.

Not everyone here would agree with my cultural assertion that Catalan, Valencian, Castilian are all "español." (Consider the opinions of separatists who would argue that the Basque Country or Cataluña are distinct cultures and therefore also languages from Spanish). There is a hugely important backstory to this fierce regionalism and linkage between language and political identity: under Franco's dictatorship, all regional language (esp. Catalan and Basque) were banned, and only castellano was allowed. When the dictatorship ended, the regional languages, which had continued to be spoken at home and in private, flourished once again, as did much lingual resentment towards central Spain and castellanismo.

But, again, I think the (unconscious) reasoning for why Spaniards refer to the Spanish language by its national dialect, "castellano," within Spain, while recognizing that the actual linguistic language (as disseminated globally) is "español," comes from the view that all four languages are "español." Seen in this light, Valencians sometimes make a reverse move by calling their catalán language by the local dialect, valenciano. Yet other catalán-speaking regions like Mallorca and Menorca speak catalán dialects such as mallorquí or menorquí, and don't claim them as a separate language. This says more about the identity politics and posturing of Valencia than about its linguistic distinctiveness.

Bottom line: Spain has four distinct languages, but many, many regional dialects, idioms, and cultures. 

Postscript:  Another blogger, Mr. Grumpy at Tumbit, posted a brave series of entries on his thoughts about the regional languages and dialects in Spain, Valenciano/Catalan, Galician, and Basque. I point you to them because 1) they provide a nice introduction to each language, but also because 2) they illustrate a common misconception among Anglophones: that bilingualism is somehow an impractical unnatural state... and thus, by extension, speakers of Catalan and Basque inevitably must fail to learn Spanish as well as Castilian speakers would. This is, empirically, not the case. Much of the world's population is bilingual (consider, for example, India or China). Moreover, children are perfectly capable of learning more than one language at a time, bilingual kids simply do so differently than monolingual ones. There is also an undertone of crass lingual functionalism whenever tourists, immigrants, or expats complain about the advantage or practicality of a country focusing on just one language, as opposed to many. As I hope this entry illustrates, and perhaps also proven by the hilarious failed language endeavor of esperanto, languages do not merely exist to unify humankind through logic, but embody histories of people that are heterogeneous, fluid, and even irrational...

... and can justifiably be deployed to keep people out of a culture a much as bring them in. While I certainly at times share Mr. Grumpy's frustration with how Catalan can alienate foreigners (though, to use American legal lingo, we are in fact "aliens"), I think it is time we Anglophone expats stop contributing to encouraging this monoligualist misconception of language learning and politics.

Two Spains, Many Spains: 1492 and "La Hispanidad"

"Here lies half of Spain. It died of the other half."

—  Mariano José de Larra, 19th-century Spanish satirist

John Vanderlyn's Landing of Columbus, 1847

Today is "La Fiesta Nacional de España," what was formerly "El Día de la Hispanidad" in Spain, and as such offers another opportunity to return to the theme of "las dos Españas" (see "Las dos Españas" entry). The narrative of "Two Spains" is very attractive for its explanatory power. Consider the deep significance of the year of 1492 in Spanish history. It was:

1) the year that the Catholic Monarchs ("los reyes católicos"), Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II, defeated the last outposts of Moorish occupation in Andalucía thereby unifying Spain,

2) the year when Christopher Columbus ("Cristobal Colón" in Spanish) "sailed the ocean blue," initiating Spain's imperial conquest of the New World, and

3) the year when all the Jews in Spain were either expelled or forced to convert to Catholicism, starting the Spanish Inquisition.

Don Quijote, one of many classics
from "El siglo de oro"

1492 thus marked the beginning of a high point in Spanish political power, and in particular Castilian and central Spain. It was not only the year that marked the completion of "la reconquista" of Spain by los reyes católicos, but the initiation of "la conquista" of the New World and the importation of all its wealth and territorial power. Isabella was the monarch from Castile, Ferdinand of Aragon. Their seat of power, though initially split between the two regions, would eventually be located in Toledo, near the center of the Iberian peninsula. (In 1561 the capital was moved to Madrid, also in the center, which has been Spain's capital ever since.) Thus would begin what would come to be called "El siglo de oro" (the Spanish Golden Age), running from roughly 1492 to the middle of the 1600s and marked by its wealth of cultural classics Cervante's Don Quijote, Lope de Vega's many plays, and Baltasar Gracián's philosophical treatises, among others, would all pass through the Castilian courts forging the basis for a nationalist national culture, a.k.a. "la Hispanidad."

"Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando" (as much as the one is worth, so much is the other), the motto of the Catholic Monarchs symbolizing their sharing of power between Aragon and Castile. Here it is shown with the escudo of the reyes católicos, showing the castle and lion of Castile and the eagle and "senyera," or four red stripes on a golden background, emblems of Aragon's rule over the países catalanes. This is the first official seal of a unified Spain.

The 12th of October in 1492 was the day Columbus first spotted land in the Americas, so to celebrate it today as El Día de la Hispanidad is in part to celebrate the expansion of Spanish (read Castilian) culture across the globe. What's more, initially this holiday was known as "El Día de la Raza" (Day of the Race) to mark the meeting of the peoples of the New World and the Old. In the 1920s, a Spanish priest living in Argentina suggested substituting "la Hispanidad" for the more racially loaded term "la raza," reasoning that much as "Cristianidad" demarcated all the christian people, hispanidad would mark all the Spanish peoples ("pueblos hispánicos"). In some respect, the switch could be interpreted as focusing on the shared cultural heritage of Spanish-speaking people, rather than on the direct racial lineage. Yet, to give you a sense of the strong interlinking of centrist, Castilian culture, language, and religion, it was common to hear one say "habla en cristiano," speak in Christian, to mean speak Castilian Spanish, "castellano." (This use of "cristiano" interchangeably with "castellano" would continue in Spain up through the Franco dictatorship, the 1940s to 1960s.)

In 1958, the holiday's name was changed from "de la Raza" to "de la Hispanidad" in Spain (though, amazingly enough, not in most Latin American countries). "La Hispanidad," for better and worse, was still marked by the legacy of the earlier centrist and imperial period. Which is perhaps why in 1981 the newly formed democratic Spanish Congress renamed the holiday "Fiesta Nacional de España y Día de la Hispanidad," and then in 1987 dropped entirely the "Día de la Hispanidad" bringing us to the present name. Yet in much of the country today, October 12th is celebrated and known more informally as el día de la Virgen del Pilar, who incidentally is the patron saint of La Hispanidad and the Spanish Guardia Civil. Madrid marks the day with a parade of the country's military forces. So while in name it is no longer El Día de la Hispanidad, the holiday continues to be infused with that spirit.

There were Spanish critics of la conquista even during the Spanish Golden Age. This sketch showing the cruelty of conquistadores was included in Bartolomé de las Casas's accounts of the "destruction of the Indies" written in 1542.

Which brings us back to the Two Spains and a counter-interpretation of the modern-day significance of 1492. Many Spanish intellectuals in Hemingway's day, and really ever since, have sought to make sense of Spain's descent from political power in the 20th-century by reinterpreting 1492 and the Spanish Golden Age. Spain was a victim of its own success, so they reason. The readily available "cheap" wealth, gold and other treasures, from the New World kept the Castilian regimes from investing in the newer and (in hindsight) more enduring capitalist wealth brought with industrialization. Thus, scholars such as José Ortega y Gasset, so influential to the Generation of '27, reasoned, Spain was slow to modernize. Employing the racialized explanations common in early 20th century, they even saw the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 as an economic deterrent to Spain's modernization, since Jews were associated with financial innovations and modern intellectual traditions which had taken place in other European countries.

Photo of a group of authors, including Lorca (second to the left), later dubbed the "Generación del '27"

So 1492, once celebrated as a moment when Spain consolidated and purified its national identity, is also seen as a moment when the country got trapped in the past and turned away from many of the liberal European currents driving the Enlightenment and industrialization. And Americans will surely not be surprised to learn that there are contested politics today surrounding the significance of Columbus and the conquering of the New World. Spaniards traveling in Latin America, and particularly Mexico, might hear a local speak quite sarcastically of "la Madre Patria," referring to Spain and its alleged pretension of being the motherland for all Spanish-speakers. Such resentment is a lesson to anyone foolish enough to believe that shared language equals shared culture or understanding, though this is a sentiment which, at its core, is the ideal expressed in the celebration of El Día de la Hispanidad.

 

The flag of "la Hispanidad," with the three crosses representing
Columbus's three ships and the purple color from the Crown of Castile,
the region which gave birth to the Spanish language

Needless to say, even the counter narrative to 1492's significance suffers from both over-simplicity and a Whiggish view of the past. For one, despite the strong Castilian political dominance, throughout its modern history, Spain retained much of its regional cultural heterogeneity. Centralist authority was always contested, and rulers varied in how much cultural and political autonomy they deferred to the kingdom's different regions. (To anyone reading this in Mexico, please take it into consideration not to presume that Spaniards are uniform in their embrace of "la Hispanidad" and "la Madre Patria". Catalan and Basque people, and perhaps most Spaniards in general, identify less with the centrist tradition than with their own particular (and much less imperial) regional identities.) Moreover, the last thirty years have been marked more by Spain's Europeanification through the EU, or by the influx of immigrants coming from countries in Africa or eastern Europe that have little to do with this reconquista story. For these reasons and more, I continue to stress that there are not just Two Spains, but many Spains.

While there is still talk in Spain about "la Hispanidad" and Spain's special historical connection to Latin America, such talk today is better understood in the context of a global capitalism than a vestige of old imperial aspirations. The embrace of shared language and shared history is opportunistic and strategic, seen to be ways that Spaniards and Latin Americans can build transatlantic alliances to mutual benefit in a global economy usually dominated by Anglosaxon countries and the English-language.

Two Spains, Many Spains: "Las dos Españas"

"Here lies half of Spain. It died of the other half."

—  Mariano José de Larra, 19th-century Spanish satirist

Stereotypes and simplifications are sometimes a good starting point, but never a good end point. One of the more enduring narratives about Spain is that of "las dos Españas." The phrase comes from an Antonio Machado poem:

Ya hay un español que quiere             There is a Spaniard today, who wants

vivir y a vivir empieza,                         to live and is starting to live,

entre una España que muere               between one Spain dying

y otra España que bosteza.                 and another Spain yawning.

Españolito que vienes                         Little Spaniard just now coming

al mundo, te guarde Dios.                   into the world, may God keep you.

Una de las dos Españas                      One of those two Spains

ha de helarte el corazón.                     will freeze your heart.

— Machado, untitled poem, "LIII," in Proverbios y Cantares, ca. 1910s

For Machado and his left-leaning intellectual peers, dubbed the Generation of '98, one Spain was heavily Catholic, reactionary, and centrist, the other a secular (anti-clerical), progressive, modern and in this sense more post-Enlightenment European Spain.

A 1998 stamp showing the "Generación del 98," a group of novelists,
poets, essayists, and philosophers, among them Antonio Machado

Keep in mind that they were called the Generation of '98 because in 1898 they witnessed Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War over Cuba. This loss quickly became the symbolic turning point in what would be the end of the Spanish Empire. As Spain entered the 20th century, the deep intellectual question was how it could recapture its political and cultural importance in a modern, industrialized Europe, having previously built its Empire around pre-modern institutions of religious conquest and New World gold.

This was the Spain Hemingway arrived to in the 1920s, a country that hadn't, as he saw it, completely fallen prey to industrialization and modernization. It still had that vitality and pre-modern spirit that Hemingway believed had been suffocated by industrialization and suburbanization in his home country. Machado, on the other hand, believed one Spain was holding the other new Spain back. One can quickly see how all kinds of cultural tensions can get folded into this modernization and anti-modernization story: centrist, imperial Spain (Madrid) versus capitalist, regional Spain (Bilbao, Barcelona); nationalist Spain versus European Spain; Catholic Spain versus secular, Enlightenment Spain… and so on.

Goya's Duelo a garrotazos (Fight with cudgels), painted sometime 1820-23 and likely a
critique of the volatile politics of the court of Fernando VII. The image is evoked by
some today to illustrate the long historical divisions of the Two Spains

My personal philosophy is that, rather than get caught up in local debates about whether one or the other Spain is the "real" Spain, it's useful to see this dualism as a core dynamism in Spanish culture, for better and for worse. Though as I will discuss in a periodic series of blog entries which I'll call, "Two Spains, Many Spains," even the notion of two Spains doesn't adequately capture the rich pluralism of Spain's many cultures and peoples today.