Spanish America, a shared future

Summary:

On 4 April 2024, the Rafael del Pino Foundation, López-li Films and the Asociación Unidos por la Historia organised the meeting "Hispanic America, a shared future" with the participation of Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach, BA and MA in History at the Universidad Iberoamericana and PhD at the University of London; Carlos Leáñez Aristimuño, Venezuelan university professor and creator of the professorships "La guerra de los idiomas" and "Lengua, ciudadanía y nación hispanohablante" at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas; José Luis López-Linares, film producer; Juan Miguel Zunzunegui, professor at various private universities, cultural centres and institutes in Mexico; and Manuel Lucena Giraldo, Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

Carlos Leáñez: Since 1492, a generative empire has unfolded in America. It is a generative empire because it gives to its god the most it had, because it gives its blood in miscegenation, because it makes the other a fellow human being and not a slave. It is one that founds not factories on the coast to exploit, but cities on the coast and inland that bring cultures, civilisation, a massive transfer of technology that completely changes America.

Several centuries later, in 1824, this experiment was interrupted, because we were in a latency that lasted two hundred years but was about to come to an end. In 1824, the battle of Ayacucho took place, sealing the secession of most of the empire, fragmenting it and generating a sense of impotence and dependence. The American republics are the wreck of a galleon and we live clinging to a piece of the galleon, believing that our political destiny lies there. This is not so. We were more and we can be again. All we need to do is tear away a series of veils that have been covering up our history. In 1824, too, only 30% of Spanish Americans, at most, are Spanish-speaking.

We go to 2024. Political fragmentation and dependence continue, but there is something going on, a loose end left, that 30%. 94% of Hispanic Americans speak Spanish and practically all of them as their mother tongue. It is a fact that Spanish is one of the three mega languages of the world, along with Mandarin Chinese and English. We have a symbolic space that we are not taking full advantage of. This implies that 7.2% of the world's population is Spanish-speaking. This means that Spanish is the world's second mother tongue. This implies that the world's third largest GDP is produced in Spanish. This implies that, in artificial intelligence, which is something that is changing the world, the three most perfect languages are English, Spanish and another language that is not Mandarin Chinese due to a series of complications. We are on the crest of the wave.

It is a fact that, in 2024, a new territory that began to emerge at the end of the 20th century, which is the internet, has finished emerging. We are a new humanity, we do not live like our grandparents, who lived in a physical territory. We live in a physical territory and in a virtual territory, which is also real, it is also part of our life. Spanish is the third language on the internet. 70% of Spanish speakers have access to the internet. Anglo-Saxons 79%. That 70% spends around seven hours a day on the internet. This is a change that we have to take note of because it is not being measured, it is not being perceived and this benefits us enormously.

There is a recipe for power that was very clearly applied by the United States of America, which is to combine large scale with a single common language and a large territory. Large scale, 335 million people; a common language, English, and a large shared territory, ten million square kilometres. This is something that we Spanish speakers already have in our hands. We already have the large scale, 500 million people; we have the common language, Spanish, and we have a virtual world territory, the internet. Spanish speakers are talking to each other like never before. Madrid is the spearhead of this. Madrid prefigures this a little bit.

There is a centripetal dynamic that occurs because of the large scale, the common language and the virtual world territory. But we are not aware of it because we are not able to see it and because we urgently need to get out of narratives that make us victims in America and, on the other hand, victimisers in Spain, the bad Spaniards who came here. These victims and perpetrators are all clinging to a canoe: Venezuela, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador. We need to speed up history, to see the reality of our historical cultural bloc, to see the opportunity cost at all levels that living in centrifugal dynamics and in the unconsciousness that we are family. We are a gigantic house with many courtyards and we have become confined to the courtyards. We have to reopen the passages between the courtyards and reassemble a big, beautiful, powerful house and realise that we are not the ugly duckling in the fairy tale, but swans.

Hispanics have a bright future. We just need to become aware of a number of factors and throw overboard the disabling narratives.

Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach: Walking through the towns of the Hispanic community is something that unites us, we have to live it, because those of us who have this common heritage have to feel it in our towns. Go to any small town in Chile, in Argentina, in Peru, in Mexico and you will see that church, those royal houses that later became town halls, those courtyards, those streets with their Arabic-style gates, and we all feel like brothers. That is what we are and if we do not recover that fraternity we will not be able to achieve what we can achieve.

We have a lot of problems with the use of words and, unfortunately, this coming of artificial intelligence, a lot of that information is going to be informed by people who don't know or understand us, who use words to define us that are not us.

If we go to the mixed dictionary of the Royal Academy, you will not find the term Hispanoamerican, you will not find the term Latin America, you will not find the term Iberoamerica, nor Hispania. What is happening that others are defining us?

My experience in Washington is that America is only the United States, nothing else. In 1991, I celebrated taking the first map of America, drawn in 1507 in the monastery of Saint-Dié in Alsace, and it was lent to the National Gallery in Washington. On display, they would have seen the reaction of the Americans. There you see the word America for the first time. On the map you see a little piece of Venezuela and a little piece of Brazil. That is the America that Amerigo Vespucci saw. The monks of Saint-Dié wrote that they had learned from the letters of this traveller that these are not islands, but something else. The rivers are enormous. This traveller says that they are a quarter of humanity. And they said a very beautiful thing: as we know three parts and they have women's names - Africa, Asia and Europe - we have called these lands America. This is the first time the word America appears. 1507. Neither Isabella the Catholic nor Columbus knew her. They were dead. This America, the one that unites us today, thirty-five countries. But, in the United States, America is nothing but them. We are not America.

When I was in the Sacred Hearts school in Mexico, my classmates said we were in South America. I said we were in North America. The religious sister sent me to the library to get an atlas. Of course we are in North America, we are neighbours, but for them we are in South America.

They don't understand us, but they have defined us. A large part of the language problems we have is because we have accepted this in Spain and in other countries. For example, the word Spanish colony is an invention of Northern Europe, especially the English. It began to appear with great force in the 17th century. The word appears in European documents, but never in Spanish documents because they were never colonies. (20:40) We were something else. When we talk about Spaniards, we are talking about something more than Spaniards. The five hundred men who accompanied Cortes came from North Africa, Greece, the Italic peninsula, Portugal, Flanders. There is an enormous crossbreeding here. That is one of the merits of what I am. Crossbreeding has been something positive for us, something that has made us more open to others.

I always remember our first viceroy in New Spain, in 1535, who was Antonio de Mendoza. In Granada they called him the Moor, he was always dressed as a Moor, he loved the culture of Granada. It's natural that these people who are going to arrive there are open to miscegenation. They are going to call the pre-Hispanic pyramids mosques, they are going to call the priests satraps. They come from a world that has already been mixed with another religion, another language, other customs. It is not strange to them. Since the 16th century, there has been an immediate mixing of races. The new arrivals wanted to marry the local women straight away, because they were giving the women property. The Hispanic aristocracy, the most important and oldest, all had an indigenous mix. It wasn't seen as something that demeaned people. In the United States, yes, they reject miscegenation.

I want to tell you something that is not in the textbooks. From 1810 to 1821, New Spain's war of independence shattered the world economic system, in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, all over the world, because the first silver producer in the world was New Spain. It was completely shattered. You will never see it in an economics textbook. Do you see in Spanish history textbooks who paid for three quarters of the provisioning of the two armies, the French and the Spanish, for what happened at Cadiz? Three quarters were paid by New Spain, the other by Peru. What England did to put an end to Napoleon's power, from 1808 onwards, was to get money from Veracruz to pay Prussia, Denmark, Norway and Russia to destroy all Napoleon's alliances with money from New Spain. That is not in the textbooks.

They don't know how much our countries have been giving to the rest of humanity. It is not even known in Spain. In the past, what happened in Lima, or in Santiago de Chile, was immediately known in all the other cities because five original documents were always made.

Juan Miguel Zunzunegui: In school, we look at the history of Mexico and it's a whole year about the Aztecs, about how they were the most wonderful, mysterious, magical and mystical human beings that humanity has ever produced. Then I come to the second year and it's the conquest of Spain. After a year of hearing that the Aztecs were the most wonderful thing, on the first day of the second year of primary school I found out that four hundred barbajans conquered the Aztecs. I said to myself that something didn't add up. This doesn't make any sense. This was in 1982, the year of the World Cup in Spain in which, as Mexico had not qualified, all Mexicans supported Spain. And this whole mess is being told to me in Spanish.

I studied a lot of things because nothing was clear to me. What I studied the most at the beginning was language. You discover something marvellous with it. The narrative of the conquest is so terrible that I say "now tell me the same thing in Nahua". Because as long as you can't tell me in Nahua you are just a confused Hispanic. And then they say "yes, because even the language was imposed on us by those bastards". This leads me to two reflections. One, that in 1821, 90% of the population did not speak Spanish, but the indigenous languages. That alone means that Spain never imposed the language in 300 years. That is fundamental.

The problem with this discourse of self-hatred, which is hating Spanish, is that you are already despising the language in which you express yourself. If this black legend poison has reached its point, if you hate the language in which you express yourself, you hate the deepest part of your soul, you hate the deepest part of your being. The fact that you speak Spanish does not only mean that you speak Spanish; it means that you think in Spanish, that you understand the world in Spanish, that your worldview is in Spanish, that you love in Spanish and that, if you believe in God, you believe in God in Spanish, and in the one the Spaniards carried, moreover. The most beautiful things in your life happen in Spanish.

I have an Austrian ancestor, my great-great-grandfather, who arrived in the 19th century when the Austrians imposed Maximilian. There, in Mexico, my great-great-grandfather fell in love with my Otomi great-great-grandmother, who is one of the peoples of the central languages of Mesoamerica. My Otomi great-great-grandmother fell in love with my Austrian great-great-grandfather, who was a nobleman and was disinherited. They fell in love in Spanish, because it's the only language they could both half babble. That's very nice. And to understand all that our language implies, because it has Greco-Roman, Latin and Judeo-Christian roots that make us in Latin America see that the third Rome is Hispanic America, is American Spain, which denotes the reality that the Spaniards went to the other side of the ocean and mixed at all levels. Then you have to understand that twelve friars, because twelve friars arrived in 1524, imposed their religion on a whole continent. Then you realise something very simple: the Tlascaltecs liked the religion of the Spaniards better.

This leads us to a problem because today, in the 21st century, we are very modern and we deny the existence of God, the Church smells bad and all this, but we must not forget that Spain's humanist thinking is Christian thinking. And that Spain's humanist thinking is what makes Spain mestizo (36:09). Suddenly it turned out that Christianity was a great cultural amalgam, it amalgamated Rome, it amalgamated Spain and it amalgamated the whole of America. That leads the Spaniards to certain values, the values with which the Spaniards arrive. There was a very interesting case in New Spain, where a mestizo, indigenous, Siamese baby was born and died a few days later. The authorities said that a doctor and a priest were needed. A doctor because they needed to do an autopsy because they needed to know how many hearts were in that body because the soul resides in the heart and the Siamese twins were stuck together at the side. If there is only one heart, it means that this is a human being with deformities and we have a funeral. But if there are two hearts, it means that they were two human beings stuck together and we have to have two funerals. Who cares about these things or about something as profound as holding a council in Spain to determine whether Indians have souls? Today it may seem very silly, but at the time it was fundamental, because, if they have souls, Indians cannot be slaves. Or Charles V, who stopped the conquest to ask the wise men whether what Spain was doing was right. Or Fray Bernardino Sahagún, who said that he had to learn their language, to really understand who they were and to be able to seriously transmit religion to them. It is important to understand that the Spaniards of that time had a lot of faith. Today we don't value faith either. What moved the Anglo-Saxons in their conquest of America? What has always moved them: power and money. The conquistadors were also looking for power and money, but they were also the friars, the wise men of Spain, and they were also all-terrain machines. And they were also all-terrain machines. What about repopulating the north of New Spain? Six Jesuits were sent and a year later there was a city.

Carlos Leáñez: The Internet is unshackling us. We see it clearly in a phenomenon like music. Music is flowing in an extraordinary way. If we look at something we can measure, Spotify, the ten most listened to songs in 2023 are six Anglo and four Hispanic. That foreshadows an impressive cultural presence. The mere fact of speaking a common language and having a bridge like the internet disengages us.

I don't know if you remember the boom in Latin American literature. What was that? The talents existed, the novelists, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar, García Márquez. There was that group of writers who lived through the boom in Spanish-American literature. But the publishing phenomenon had to be created. Who created the publishing phenomenon? People outside or not directly involved in the Spanish-American community. Catalan publishers. That is to say, some Catalan publishers saw the phenomenon, saw it as a business object, saw the scale, set it in motion, and that was the last moment of Hispanic America with a vibrant world presence. What happened next? When I started studying high school, my textbook was Hispanic American literature. Through that I opened up to the whole heritage of the Spanish language. Five years later, that same student was receiving a textbook called Venezuelan literature. That is to say, to divide, to strengthen the nation state, to think that there is a literature of Venezuelan stature. There is a literature of excellence in Spanish whose people were born in Venezuela. Playing with these parameters is not convincing, it is not accurate. This happened because of the current publishing industry which, essentially, acts on the basis of national markets. It does not take advantage of the world market. Marcelo Gullo is not distributed in Argentina because his company, which is global, has a local branch that decides not to distribute him. We have to understand that our territory is the language. It is not possible for this not to be a big business and to bet on a large scale. I feel that the other centres of power are very clear about what we were and what we can become again, and they are doing everything they can to prevent this from happening.

 

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for the comments, opinions or statements made by the people who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their sole responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference, written for the Rafael del Pino Foundation by Professor Emilio González, are the result of the debates held at the meeting held for this purpose at the Foundation and are the responsibility of the authors.

The Rafael del Pino Foundation is not responsible for any comments, opinions or statements made by third parties. In this respect, the FRP is not obliged to monitor the views expressed by such third parties who participate in its activities and which are expressed as a result of their inalienable right to freedom of expression and under their own responsibility. The contents included in the summary of this conference, written for the Rafael del Pino Foundation by Professor Emilio J. González, are the result of the discussions that took place during the conference organised for this purpose at the Foundation and are the sole responsibility of its authors.

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