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The Spanish Borderlands Revisited: Engaging the Public in Relating the Place of Spain in U.S

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The Spanish Borderlands Revisited: Engaging the Public in Relating the Place of Spain in U.S Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Journal of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Volume 44 Issue 1 Iberia in Entangled and Transnational Article 5 Contexts 2019 The Spanish Borderlands Revisited: Engaging the Public in Relating the Place of Spain in U.S. History Charles Nicholas Saenz Adams State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Saenz, Charles Nicholas (2019) "The Spanish Borderlands Revisited: Engaging the Public in Relating the Place of Spain in U.S. History," Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies: Vol. 44 : Iss. 1 , Article 5. https://doi.org/10.26431/0739-182X.1329 Available at: https://digitalcommons.asphs.net/bsphs/vol44/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. It has been accepted for inclusion in Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies by an authorized editor of Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Spanish Borderlands Revisited: Engaging the Public in Relating the Place of Spain in U.S. History1 Charles Nicholas Saenz Felipe Fernández-Armesto recounts a wonderful anecdote at the start of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2014). Standing before a classroom at Tufts University, Fernández-Armesto asked his students to answer what was, by his own admission, a “rather a sneaky question.” “Where, in what is now US territory, was the first enduring European colony, still occupied today, established?” Initial responses proffered Jamestown, Virginia – a response fitting the presumptions of the reigning national narrative. Other students, perhaps acutely aware of Fernández-Armesto’s scholarly work, put forward Saint Augustine, Florida and Santa Fe, New Mexico. No student correctly identified Puerto Rico as the oldest continuously inhabited site of settlement in the United States built by Europeans, their colonial subjects, and shared descendants.2 This anecdote is far from exceptional, and observers should see it bearing significant social and historical baggage. In the summer of 2018, I witnessed the same question and answer scenario play out among a community of Latino leaders in Denver, Colorado. A room of self-identified Latinos struggled to name Puerto Rico as the oldest site of permanent European colonization in the modern United States. Fernández-Armesto’s experience and my own – and those shared by many others – point to the absence of Spanish history as it pertains to the history of United States. An expanding public consciousness of latinidad among U.S nationals, propelled by a sizeable and growing Hispanic population expected roughly to double by 2050, has not developed a historical awareness to match.3 In the 1 The author would like to thank fellow members of the Borderlands of Southern Colorado Symposium and related initiatives: Alice Baumgartner, Minette Church, Paul Conrad, Derek R. Everett, Philip “Felipe” Gonzales, Beth LaDow, Patty Limerick, Mary E. Mendoza, Fawn-Amber Montoya, Andrés Reséndez, Rachel St. John, and Patricia Trujillo. A special thanks goes to Dawn DiPrince who conceived of the project and continues to give it life. Two anonymous reviewers provided valuable insights on an earlier draft. 2 Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2014), 3-4. Fernández-Armesto’s book is one of several recent surveys of U.S. history told from a Latino perspective. Other works of this kind include Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (London: Penguin, 2011) and Zaragoza Vargas, Crucible of Struggle: Mexican Americans from the Colonial Period to the Present Era, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 3 See U.S. Census Bureau forecasts. These statistics are updated frequently, and, despite a recent downturn, remain largely consistent. An assessment of the field appears in Adrian Shubert, Modern Spanish History in North America,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 45, no. 2 (2015): 303-310. 72 aftermath of Hurricane Maria, many who identify as Americans seem unaware that Puerto Rico is part of the territorial United States.4 Distressingly few Americans properly situate Spanish imperialism alongside that of the United States, both in the past and present, producing tragic results. Contemporary discourse feels, at times, like Samuel P. Huntington’s denial of the nation’s Hispanic presence has found common ground in a concerning number of American minds.5 The historical profession bears some responsibility for the present circumstance. Scholars of U.S. history have been loath to situate the place of Spanish empire in framing the development of the United States. Part of the issue owes to what Richard L. Kagan dubbed “Prescott’s Paradigm,” which has juxtaposed narratives of Spanish decadence with the ideals of American progress. An adherent of the “Romantic school,” like George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859) sought to write books that would speak to popular audiences by offering comfortable affirmations of American identity; ideas that carried influence through the end of the twentieth century.6 In this fashion, Spain emerged as something like the great tragedy of early American historical scholarship, not a national history worthy of celebration much less emulation. American scholarship on Spain became rooted in narratives of cultural contrast borne of the “black legend” and decline.7 As Kate Ferris has explained, “understanding Spanish history through a ‘paradigm of backwardness’ formed part of a historiographical mapping of a kind of Spanish sonderweg, in which ‘failures’ and ‘absences’ of social democracy and republicanism in the twentieth century were traced back through the supposed failures and absences of bourgeois liberalism and republicanism in the nineteenth.”8 The trope persisted until, at the very least, the publication of David R. Ringrose’s splendid account of Spanish Legislation designed to grow the Smithsonian Latino Center into the National Museum of the American Latino dates to 2003, but has languished in Congress. 4 Kyle Dropp and Brendan Nyhan, “Nearly Half of Americans Don’t Know Puerto Ricans Are Fellow Citizens,” The New York Times, September 26, 2017. 5 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). 6 Richard L. Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (Apr. 1996): 423-446, 425. 7 The phrase “black legend” alludes to a common Anglo-American narrative trope with origins in the era of the Protestant Reformation that portrayed Spain and Spaniards as particularly backward, cruel, and overly zealous in religious terms. Its use in historiographical discourse dates to the nineteenth century, but received widespread attention with the publication of Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica. Contribución al estudio del concepto de España en Europa, de las causas de este concepto y de la tolerancia política y religiosa en los países civilizados (Madrid: Tip. de la Revista de Archivos, 1914). 8 Kate Ferris, Imagining ‘America’ in Late Nineteenth Century Spain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3. 73 economic resiliency during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which he dubbed nothing short of a “miracle.”9 While American historical scholarship on Spain has moved, thankfully, beyond a fixation with Spanish savagery and imperial collapse, American historical scholarship on the United States has begun, only very recently, to reverse this trend as it relates to thinking about the nation’s colonial origins. Prescott’s commitment to an authoritative and anti-imperial history of Spain was damning in the extreme. Much as his words served to celebrate American exceptionalism, they also, simultaneously, relegated Spanish history and culture to a second rung of historical importance; thereby eliminating the need to mention Spain’s contributions to the emergence of the United States at all. The result was a colonial history of the United States that omitted mention of Spanish empire almost entirely. In 1992, the late David J. Weber wrote: In American popular culture, the American past has been understood as the story of the expansion of English America rather than as the stories of the diverse cultures that comprise our national heritage … for many historians ‘colonial America’ remains synonymous with English colonial America. Mistaking regional history for national history, most historians have continued to see the nation’s “formative years” as a phenomenon of the eastern seaboard.10 The better part of three decades later, Weber’s critique remains nearly as relevant as ever, though significant progress has been made towards adding greater complexity to this picture. Well ahead of developments in other historical fields, historians of the U.S. West have led this charge using the borderlands as their framework, aided by productive and synergistic collaborations with historians of Latin America and, importantly, archivists in Mexico and Spain. Especially promising, the advent of transnational history has posed new conceptual and methodological frameworks in complement to borderland studies. The time has come for historians of Spain
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