Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend,Off-Whiteness,and Anglo-American Empire: A retrospective

Abstract

Located at the intersection of American Studies, LatinX Studies, and Romance Studies, the scholarly book Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire turns a “critical ethnic studies” lens on Anglo-American culture. It argues that constructions of Anglo-American identity as “American” have depended on figures of Spain. These figurations have been crucial to the dominant Anglo fictions of “American” exceptionalism, revolution, and manifest destiny; to Anglo-America’s articulation of its empire as an anti-empire; and to its fears of racial contamination and hybridity. Spain’s Long Shadow unfolds the story of one imperialist shadowing another. Now, nearly two decades since its publication, what insights and which questions linger, especially as we engage with what Claudia Milian has termed “a globally entangled LatinX Studies”? Pushing off from Spain’s Long Shadow’s concluding thoughts, this essay responds to that question in relation to the more than 3 million-plus people of a heterogeneous LatinX diaspora living in Spain today. This estimate constitutes approximately 6.4% of Spain’s current population, which is also Europe’s largest concentration of LatinXs. This undertaking is conceptualized as a retrospective—a thinking piece that looks at the past, the present time, and the speculative future to postulate and assess global LatinX processes. The piece fleshes out and updates Spain’s Long Shadow’s invitation to develop new perspectives, frameworks, and scholarship on the transatlantic transcultural impetus of LatinX cultural production from South-North and West-East axes of orientation.

Keywords

LatinX cultural production Spain national self-conceptions decolonial optics transatlantic LatinX studies West-East axis

Located at the intersection of American Studies, LatinX Studies, and Romance Studies, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) theorizes, explores, and practices a LatinX Studies informed “critical ethnic studies” lens on Anglo-American culture, one that has long been conceived as “white” and “nonethnic.” The monograph argues that constructions of Anglo-American identity as “American” have depended on figures of Spain (DeGuzmán, 2005: xii). In the American Revolution’s aftermath, Anglos appropriated the name “America” from Spain, officially dropping the rival designation “Columbia” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xix). The foundational act of symbolic, and later territorial, appropriation was obscured by the myth of “American independence” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xx). From colonial times to the present, figurations of Spain and Spaniards have been crucial to the dominant Anglo fictions of “American” exceptionalism, revolution, manifest destiny, and birth/rebirth; to Anglo-America’s articulation of its empire as a benign anti-empire; and “to its fears of racial contamination and hybridity” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xii). The story that unfolds in the pages of Spain’s Long Shadow is that of “one imperialist shadowing another” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xix). The Anglo-American symbology of Spain and Spaniards may be understood in connection with the colonial presence and enduring legacy of Spain in the Americas, the history of domestic and foreign relations between the US and Spain, and Anglo-American cultural constructions of that history.

The book examines textual and visual representations produced by Anglo-Americans, the ethnic group that historically has sustained a hegemonic relation to the dominant fictions that demonstrate and uphold a vested interest in figuring Spain and Spaniards as morally blackened figures of alien whiteness, conquered Orientalized imperialists, or modern primitives in the mapping of Anglo-American identity as quintessentially “American.” The cultural Imaginary of those Anglo-Americans as well as of certain non-Anglo-Americans who assimilated according to the ethos and discourse of a hegemonic Anglo-American ethnic group was my object of study.

Tatiana Flores in Rutgers’s Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Art History accurately summarizes the foundational premise of Spain’s Long Shadow. She observes:

… DeGuzmán “argues that Anglo-American identity was constituted through alter ego/imago imperial conflict with, and later totemic appropriation of, Spain as ‘Other’” (SLS, xxxiii). Her book convincingly establishes that in the US imaginary, Hispanics have never been and will never be white. To quote a vivid passage:

Rather than a celebration of ethnic and cultural fusion, Anglo-American imperial discourse took the Moors, Gypsies, and Jews that the Spanish Empire had endeavored to expel from the Iberian Peninsula and Native Americans and Africans whom the Spaniards in the Americas had enslaved and used as labor, including sexual, and inscribed them under the skin of or transformed them into physical marks on the imagined body of the Spaniard. Far from reflecting mixture (as if there were such a thing as purity!) as an ongoing process among world populations, this representational practice projected Anglo-Americans’ own fears and fantasies about miscegenation as national and, moreover, imperial degeneration onto the Spanish Empire. (SLS, xxviii)

Not only did the United States keep alive the Hispanophobic Black Legend—the maligning of Spain as a barbaric, fanatically religious, brutal, and degenerate backwater that was promoted by Northern European adversaries during the heyday of the age of exploration—it also “appropriated the name ‘America’ from Spain” (SLS, xix). Before that, DeGuzmán explains, “what ‘America’ denoted was not the United States but South America” (SLS, xix). The burgeoning US American empire co-opted Columbus as forebear, forging the myth … that Anglos presided over a “foundational moment of civilization in the New World.” (Flores, 2021: 75)

The myth of Anglo-American independence, requiring and courting a persistent agon with Spain and things “Spanish,” has “masked the facts of domestic crises and international conflict and dependence” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xxi). The multi-regional, national, and imperial “drama of the repulsion of and attraction to figures of Spain has evolved to include” LatinX and “the Spanish language” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xxi). These two signifiers, as Claudia Milian discusses, cannot be confined to Hispanidad’s Spanish, but instead, here in the US and transnationally in Spain and elsewhere, form a “porous crux of LatinX Spanish” (2023: 166). On the one hand, representations of Spain in the creation of US culture “may seem like an unlikely and risky topic” for LatinX Studies (DeGuzmán, 2005: xxv). On the other hand, such representations and misrepresentations are worth examining to make sense of how hitherto dominant Anglo culture has framed LatinX histories, cultures, and lived experiences closely mingling with referents of “Spain” and “Spanishness.” LatinX cultural producers have certainly negotiated the assumptions and power dynamics of these framings and have developed their own angles, within the US, in Spain, and elsewhere.

The late scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification”—signaling “a dual activity of seemingly identifying with the dominant culture through a recycling of its tropes” but performing that reuse with a renewed and noticeable difference—is “preliminarily” generative in thinking through what non-Anglos, or the diverse populations of US LatinX, are doing with Anglo-American figures of Spain. But, rather than simply adapt the term “disidentification” to the question of LatinX engagement with Spain and ongoing Anglo-American hegemony, I emphasize, among other trends, the simultaneous agonism and “postcolonially” identificatory—or potentially “decolonial”—interrogating uses of Spain in LatinX writing from the 1980s onwards (DeGuzmán, 2005: 292).

The double dialectics of the triangulation between Anglo-American hegemony, a legacy of Spanish empire, and the multifarious purposes of LatinX cultural productions in these entangled legacies “makes the term ‘disidentification,’ theorized with one majoritarian culture in mind, trickier to import” without modification (DeGuzmán, 2005: 292). The disidentifications of “minoritarian subjects” discussed here take the form of a critical analysis, deconstruction, and re-construction of at least two majoritarian entangled national and imperial projects simultaneously to “situate [themselves] in history and thus seize social agency” (Muñoz, 1999: 1). That double (even triple) critical analysis is evident in, for example, how “Cenen,” an Afro-Puerto Rican New York contributor to the black feminist anthology Home Girls (published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press), posited her cultural connection, even a feeling of affinity, with Spain as an Afro-Puerto Rican. Take note of this excerpt: “African, Indian, and Spanish are not white anyway, as far as I’m concerned. Except for the North [of Spain], there are very few places in Spain where the Moors had not entered, where the Africans did not go … [T]hink how Europe doesn’t perceive Spain as being part of the European continent, because of its mixture with Africa” (Cenen and Smith, 1983: 44). Here, a historically informed identification with the mixed-heritage Spanish is performed by an Afro-Puerto Rican who underscores her marginalization within the continental United States both as an Afro-Latina and as a Puerto Rican from one of the world’s oldest colonies. Cenen expresses her understanding of what Roberto Dainotto observes many decades later in Europe (in Theory) that this continent’s cultural identity has long conjured a stark “north/south” contrast, denigrating its south: Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece (2007: 1-2), a point that Milian stresses (2023: 161).

A key idea advanced in Spain’s Long Shadow still stands in the case of Cenen and related writers: “Spain is not presented as the Old World source of pure Hispanicity of which Latinos are regarded as an impure and unfortunate derivative, but rather as existing within the continuum of latinidad” (DeGuzmán, 2005: 293). I would now call this Latinidad continuum LatinX to more emphatically import the X-factor. I argued: “Chicana writer Ana Castillo’s novel Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999), with its revisionary casting of Carmen (the Spanish Jewish Gypsy woman of the Mérimée story and Bizet opera) as a Chicana one-legged flamenco dancer who leaves the United States for Spain, calls our attention to the interest Latinas have in intervening in Anglo-American representations of Spain and Spaniards” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xxvi). Castillo also builds on that history to “create a little jaleo—turning the ‘great Hispanic panic’ into a source of [LatinX] celebration” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xxvi) resisting the merely punitive uses of “Hispanic” as the “panic” of what Esteban Muñoz terms the US “phobic majoritarian public sphere” (1999: 4).

Written in a more acerbic and melancholy picaresque metafictional manner than the later Peel My Love Like an Onion, Ana Castillo’s earlier novel Sapogonia takes up Spain, Barcelona in a short section, and Madrid in a more extended one (Castillo, 1994: 16-24 and 43-58). Sapogonia lingers in the largely immigrant working class neighborhood of Vallecas in Madrid’s southern part, a neighborhood with centuries-long histories of marginalization and resistance (see Pattem, 2017). This work explores issues of class, colorism, and ethno-racial identification and identity through the colliding and shifting perspectives of a variety of LatinX characters, especially the anti-hero Máximo Madrigal. He is portrayed as a chameleonic, rather machista, “light-skinned” (43) expatriate of Sapogonia, the metaphorical homeland of mestizas, mestizos, and mestizXs, if you will. Máximo has internalized colonial desires (including the desire to control women, particularly indigenous women) and goes to Spain to find his long-lost “gallego” (Galician) father. He is motivated by the mistaken notion that his father, supposedly from Northwest Spain, may be wealthy and will make him an heir to his will (43). The subsequent unfolding of events undercuts these class and colorism-inflected expectations, products of internal and internalized colonialism, and brings Máximo to New York. Like the son of migrants from Spain to Brooklyn Heights Prudencio de Pereda (a novelist and translator) whom Milian discusses (2023: 172), Castillo’s character witnesses the exploitation of immigrant workers, including those from or in Spain (1994: 60).

Spain’s Long Shadow demonstrates how a myriad of LatinX writers “are seriously invested” in figures of Spain, “but in a highly ambivalent way” that either oscillates between or combines criticism of and identification with Spain (DeGuzmán, 2005: 293). The identificatory aspects bear the traces of Muñozian disidentification because they tend to involve suppressed, minoritized, marginalized, or, to quote Milian, “minor, unauthorized, out-of-bounds” (2023: 174) aspects of Spain’s historical and contemporary realities and cultures: for example, the Islamic, the African, queer mystical “Golden Age” poets who were likely from converso families, defeated rather than triumphalist “conquistadors” and their progeny, and so forth.

Spain’s Long Shadow brought to light a rich, varied, and dynamic catalogue of representations of Spain in the following LatinX works: Chicano writer Nash Candelaria’s 1977 Memories of the Alhambra; the Puerto Rican writers Carmen de Monteflores’s 1989 Cantando Bajito/Singing Softly and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s 1990 Silent Dancing; US-based Jewish Argentinean Judit Moschkovich’s early 1980s essay “‘— But I Know You, American Woman’”; Puerto Rican writer Edward Rivera’s 1982 Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic; Chicana writer Ana Castillo’s aforementioned 1990s novels; Puerto Rican poet Victor Hernández Cruz’s 1997 Panoramas; Colombian US-based poet Jaime Manrique’s 1997 My Night with/Mi noche con Federico García Lorca; Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón’s 2002 Del otro lado de la noche/From the Other Side of Night; Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza; Chicago-riqueño poet Rane Arroyo’s 1998 collection Pale Ramón; and Hispano-Navajo Colorado-born, California-based Mexican American writer Floyd Salas’s 1996 novel State of Emergency set in 1960s Spain during the later Franco regime.

Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca’s extended poem “Thirteen Mexicans,” “composed of elegiac vignettes” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xxvi), poses the question: “Why not erect a statue of a mestizo Chicano poet/who doesn’t deny his Spanish or Native American ancestry/but builds on both?” (Baca, 2002: 64). To expand on Santiago Baca’s line of thought: How does one critically—and in non-monolithic ways—attend to slippages, dissonances, contradictory and uncanny overlaps and hauntings that build on both? And not only on both Spanish and Native American, which has many times been involved in the occlusion of African heritages and presences, as Tatiana Flores has pointed out in her critique of “Latinidad,” but also on all the diasporas that continue to produce LatinX’s deracinated “X” without, as Milian writes, “fixed geography” and with “geographies outside the Americas” (Milian, 2019: 5-6)? How do twenty-first century LatinX texts—a few of which I will be talking about shortly—take up Spain and its legacies in surprising and irreverent ways, circumventing the double-bind of either having to be for or against Spain?

I have always regarded Spain’s Long Shadow as an extension and a precursor of LatinX Studies. Spain’s trajectory “has remained largely unexamined” because of the Black Legend’s “lingering effects” in literary criticism and historical studies, “a legend with substantial historical referents” (DeGuzmán, 2005: xxvi-xxvii). The Black Legend has functioned as a “blinding white smoke screen, preventing scholars from venturing to raise” crucial questions about certain processes of historical and contemporary identity formations within and beyond the United States, that is, transnationally (DeGuzmán, 2005: xxvi-xxvii): meaning, in this case, Spain and its non-Peninsular territories (the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, its enclaves in Morocco, and so on).

Reflecting on and refracting Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (2002), I re-issue my call in Spain’s Long Shadow for this new scholarship: “A similar book, though potentially more politically controversial, yet equally necessary, should be written titled The Transatlantic ‘Origins’ of Latina/o Writing” (DeGuzmán, 2005: 300), without subscribing to notions of historically valued origins versus derivative copies (see Richard, 1995; Canclini, 1994 on this subject). Those “origins” with regard to peninsular Spain would have to be reconceptualized avoiding “monocultural simplification” (Milian, 2023: 161) as other than merely Castilian, Catholic, “white,” and so forth. This is not to say that reconceptualizing them could or should be used to cover or engage in subtle apologetics about the dynamics of forced migration, conquest, slavery, colonialism, multi-factorial hierarchies, among other considerations, “both internal and in relation to the Americas” (DeGuzmán, 2005: 300).

Now, more than two decades into the twenty-first century, what insights and which questions linger, especially as we engage with what Milian has termed “a globally entangled LatinX Studies”? What might be postulated in relation to the more than 3 million-plus people of a heterogeneous LatinX diaspora living in Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, and Spain’s small towns and rural areas, approximately 6.4% plus of that country’s current population, and the largest concentration of LatinXs in Europe? I reiterate and update my call in Spain’s Long Shadow—and also in my subsequent analytic endeavor Buenas Noches, American Culture (DeGuzmán, 2012: 222-223 and 251)—for new scholarship on the transatlantic and transcultural impetus of LatinX cultural production that takes into account a South-North and West-East axis.

I offer four propositions as brief illustrations to stimulate new areas of research. These considerations push beyond Spain’s Long Shadow’s original focus on Anglo-American representations of Spain. What follows provides a few glimpses into how LatinX writers throughout the Americas posit complex links to Spain and its histories—taking an interest in LatinX lived sociopolitical experiences and cultural productions in Spain and its extra-Peninsular territories. These propositions conduct readers toward a deliberation of how the growing presence of a wide range of LatinX populations in Spanish territory, alongside other migrant populations from the Philippines, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, is actively producing culture. This growing presence and cultural production also stand to make an impact on the curricular offerings and programs of Spanish universities, however resistant and/or frustratingly slow academic institutional change may be. Anti-immigrant nationalistic political sentiments have been gaining ground since the 1980s in Spain, Western Europe (see Betz, 1993), and many other parts of the world, including the United States. Over the last decade, these sentiments have intensified enormously, presenting many new challenges to academic institutions and to education within and beyond institutions.

The premises for a twenty-first century LatinX Studies are:

1. Evidence can be found that LatinX writers in the Americas are currently invested in historical and contemporary representations of Spain, Spanish cultural production, and/or lived experiences and debates about conceptions of self and other (or self as other). How are these contemporary writers engaging with the shifting shape and substance of Spain’s long shadow? Take Dominican currently Puerto Rico-based writer, musician, and singer Rita Indiana’s relatively recent novel Hecho en Saturno (2018) or Made in Saturn (Indiana, 2020). Like her previous Spanish-language La mucama de Omicunlé or translated-to-English novel Tentacle (Indiana, 2018: 24-43, 55, 57, 59, 111, and 127), Made in Saturn appropriates Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s aquatint etchings published in 1799 “Los caprichos” as well as his early nineteenth century pinturas negras or black paintings, especially the one of the Roman god Saturn devouring his own son. These paintings comment on the follies and decay within Spanish society at the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. Via Goya, a major Spanish painter though also an eventually voluntary exile from Spain to France who could be considered an early Decadent, Indiana’s literary enterprises elaborate trenchant and melancholy satires. Indiana parodies the socio-political and environmental ruins created in the present-day and slightly futuristic Hispanic Caribbean, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba by European and North American colonialism and neocolonialism and revolutions that have failed to alter these structures of plunder and predation.

A significant sector of Spain’s press has been following Indiana’s contributions. According to Silja Helber, in 2011 Indiana was selected by the center-left newspaper El País as one of the 100 most influential LatinX personalities (Helber, 2020: 279). We can appreciate the complexity of this current Hispanic Caribbean-Spanish Peninsula Möbius-strip of mutual regard in the context of something such as the XXVIII Cumbre Iberoamericana of March 2023 in which the Dominican Republic was a salient participant. El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Mexico were noticeably absent, and Brazil refused to participate. The Cumbre rhetorically celebrated inclusive politics addressing the socio-economic welfare of women, of the disabled, and of minorities, and the protection of the environment. But, surely, one cannot overlook the concerning potentially self-interested “Hispanidad” as well as more generally neoliberal ring of the phrase “continente de oportunidades” (“continent of opportunities”) in relation to América Latina. Made in Saturn evinces a keen awareness of the many ironies of the historical and contemporary power dynamics at stake.

2. Documentable evidence exists for US-based LatinX interest in the significance to self-conception of Spain and its embattled histories. This interest is not confined to the Spanish colonial legacy in the Americas, but, instead, also includes histories primarily unfolding on the African and European side of the Atlantic and elsewhere, such as the Philippines. Consider the Bakersfield, California-born son of Mexican migrant farmworkers Rigoberto González’s piece “Spanish Literature Animates the Ghosts of its Embattled History.” There, he writes:

Reporting from Madrid … I’ve been here in Spain working on my next project about my Purépecha grandmother. The connection to this country is that her uncle, my great uncle, relocated with his Spanish employers, who were fleeing the perils of the Mexican Revolution. He was their servant in Michoacán and, circa 1910, he chose to leave his family and the Americas in exchange for Europe. He was never heard from again … what better place to contend with the past than in Spain, a country that continues to reckon with its embattled history and generations of ghosts. (González, 2019)

González reveals that his “book companion” throughout his stay in Spain is Jewish American writer Aaron Shulman’s nonfiction historical narrative The Age of Disenchantments: The Epic Story of Spain’s Most Notorious Literary Family (The Franco-supporting Paneros) and the Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War (see Shulman, 2019). Shulman’s book and González’s actual experiences during his stay in Spain compel him to search for clues about his great uncle’s exile from Mexico. González’s approach dialogues with Spain’s reckonings with the consequences of its twentieth-century Civil War including Franco’s fascist regime (1939–1975). These legacies were largely suppressed under the mid-1970s Pact of Forgetting. González’s article from 2019 was written well after Spain’s passage of the 2007 Historical Memory Law but a few years before the 2022 Democratic Memory Law. González’s account still anticipates many of the concerns of the Democratic Memory Law: the attempt to come to terms with the profound legal and psychological imbrications of exile and immigration. One of the central imbrications is constituted by the fact that Spanish exiles are immigrants to the Americas, among other places, and their grandchildren are now exiled immigrants “returning” to Spain. Many of the “new Spaniards,” then, are not “new.” They are returning. González does not limit his consideration of these deeply ironic historical reversals to exiles of the Spanish Civil War and to their returning descendants. His meditation extends to the entire relationship between Spain and the inhabitants of its former empire, whether in the Americas, Northern and Western Africa, or the Philippines. He writes:

For me, Spain is not so much a muse as it is a bittersweet fatherland, the empire that forced Catholicism, the Spanish language and its surnames on the Americas through its colonial rule. …

Most recently, the populations formerly under Spanish rule are migrating to Spain under a policy that allows citizens from Central and South America, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara to obtain Spanish nationality after two years of legal and continuous residence. The economic problems of the world dictate the migration patterns. In recent years, the Venezuelan, Colombian and Argentinian populations in Spain have grown exponentially. There also are asylum seekers arriving on refugee ships, and immigration from Morocco, a Muslim country. …

… how familiar this tale of desperation would be if I substituted the Mediterranean Sea for the Sonoran Desert. (González, 2019)

González reveals that his sojourn in Spain entailed a search for his great uncle that bespeaks “really a search for the stories of immigrants and the children of immigrants.” He affirms that those stories are in Spain and that he simply needs to listen for them. Attending the first Unamuno Author Festival, “where mostly American poets have converged to share their work,” he introduces the Filipino American poet Patrick Rosal, who “stunned the crowd into silence” with these words: “One day, the greatest living Spanish language poet will be a Filipino. The ones who clean your rooms, serve your food, and care for your children know a lot more than you think they know. I hope the people of Spain are ready when that day comes” (González, 2019).

The United States is the destination of the largest immigration from the Philippines. More than 4.2 million Filipinxs now live in the US (US Census Bureau, 2021). Spain’s Filipinx population is far smaller according to 2022 estimates by the Active Population Survey of Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE), numbering approximately 37,335 with the greatest concentrations in Madrid, Barcelona, the Balearic Islands, and Malaga (EPA, 2022). However, as González highlights, historically in Spain Filipinx have performed many kinds of relatively intimate labor as domestic service workers, in the hospitality industry, in the food services industry, and as nurses, teachers, and tutors. This labor is still permeated by ongoing colonial dynamics derived from the former colonial relation between Spain and the Philippines, as González suggests through his focus on Rosal. González turns the usual colonizer-colonized power dynamics around to assert that the colonized and their descendants, in this case Filipinx immigrants, know more about the colonizer than perhaps the colonizers and the descendants of colonizers do. He thus reiterates the line, “I hope the people of Spain are ready when that day comes” (González, 2019). A son of Mexican migrant farm workers, González extends a LatinX decolonial optics to affirm solidarity with immigrants from the Philippines in Spain. His purposeful move aligns with the discussion of the complexities of Filipinx histories and identities found in scholar Anthony Christian Ocampo’s The Latinos of Asia (Ocampo, 2016: 8-14). This maneuver can also be read as a reminder to US-based audiences of the other empire’s colonial history entangled with the former Spanish empire: the US American one with regard to the Philippines.

3. Evidence may be found for US LatinX awareness of the lived experiences and, especially, the cultural productions of LatinX diasporic subjects to Spain. Nearly 16% of Spain’s population is foreign-born in contrast to 13.6% of the US’s population. A large percentage of that 16% foreign-born in Spain can be classified as LatinX immigrants. It should come as no surprise that LatinX scholars, creative writers, and journalists from many countries are beginning to investigate how Spain’s various LatinX populations—often designated by the historically-loaded dubious term “nuevos españoles” or “new Spaniards”—are being received by their host country (on immigration in Spanish cinema, see Basu, 2012). LatinXs are actively and creatively negotiating Spain’s regions, cities, towns, villages, and rural areas—within the slippery, contested Iberian Peninsula and within its extra-Peninsular geographies.¹ A growing number of US-based LatinX writers are interested in Spain on account of the implications for self-conception and self-exploration. And, some of these writers are, to echo González’s words, listening “for the stories of immigrants and the children of immigrants” in Spain. Consider the excerpts I cited from the US-based Rigoberto González’s article.² Most of these excerpts go beyond remarking on the presence of LatinX immigrants in Spain. They shift their focus from presence and labor generally to a specific kind of work: literary cultural production underscored in the phrase taken from Rosal’s address to the audience at the Unamuno Author Festival: “the greatest living Spanish language poet will be a Filipino.”

Beyond this elevation of the single male author of the present or future, we can feel the pulse of a decolonial attention paid to what diasporic LatinX populations (in the big “X” sense) are themselves producing in Spain apart from goods and services: poetry, and not only poetry, but all kinds of media: visual, performative, musical, and so forth. A number of Madrid’s independent and/or para-institutional spaces focus on, among other socio-cultural dynamics, the cultural productions of Spain’s migrants. Centro Cultural de Experimentación y Documentación Artística La Parcería (CCEDA) is an active and cutting-edge one, combining artists’ residencies, workshops, exhibitions, publications, readings, and multimedia presentations. In 2021, it “opened its doors in response to the consolidation process of a thought, creation and action collective first set up by migrants [emphasis mine] in 2010” to “assert their own culture and voice as active agents within the cultural fabric of Madrid” (Aranguren et al., 2023: 20). In Barcelona, as well, associations or collectives of LatinX living there are generating socio-cultural and political impacts beyond their contributions to the workforce as defined by the State (see González Herrera, 2018).

4. Finally, Spanish and US universities have the potential to develop their curricular offerings in relation to Spain’s sociopolitical reality as a confluence of diasporas from the Americas, Africa, the European Union, the Middle East, and so on. Transatlantic LatinX Studies is key and will forge ahead in the creation of this pivotal research and the development of courses, programs, and public discourse within Spain and the United States. With regard to Spanish universities, a number of them already have programs in place that, with a self-evaluative decolonial optic entailing deep-structure historical and contemporary re-visions of what constitutes “Spain” and with dedicated resources, could serve as a home for this research, programming, and teaching. Consider, for example, the Universidad de Sevilla and its “Estudios Americanos” division and Sevilla’s Universidad Pablo de Olavide with its masters in indigenous studies, the Instituto Franklin of the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, the Universidad de León’s program in anthropology of Latin America, the Universidad de Granada, the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo with their Latin American, North African, and Sub-Saharan Studies, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with its contemporary Latin American Studies, and the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid with its offerings in indigenous and human rights studies. Most productive, both in Spain and the United States, for a relevant and engaged educational system would be academically well-supported collaborations between universities and para-institutional/para-academic organizations platforming the cultural production of immigrants given the tendency for academia to remain “citadel culture” (see Werckmeister, 1991). I conclude by re-iterating the importance of evaluating what Milian terms “LatinX Spain and all the sprawling pieces of the world within it,” tackling “the new language and sociocultural formations disrupting Hispanidad and US exceptionalism” (Milian, 2023: 175), querying the continuing legacies of the historically entangled empires of Spain and the United States.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

References

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(2002) From the Other Side of Night/Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Anzaldúa

(1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinters/Aunt Lute.

Aranguren

Pacheco González

Introzzi

, et al. (2023) Todo lo demás: un acercamiento a los espacios de creación contemporánea de Madrid. Madrid: CENTROCENTRO.

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(2012) Spanish responses to immigration mapped through cinema. Synopsis of MPhil Dissertation Submitted in 2010 to the Centre for Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Latin American Studies of School of Languages. New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University. Swagata Basu’s Web: https://swagatabasu.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/spanish-responses-to-immigration-mapped-through-cinema/ (accessed 5 June 2023).

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10.

Castillo

(1994) Sapogonia: An Anti-Romance in 3/8 Meter. New York: Anchor Books Doubleday. Originally published in 1990 by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe.

11.

Castillo

(1999) Peel My Love Like an Onion. New York: Doubleday.

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Cenen Smith

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(ed). Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 31–51.

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