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Anti-Spanish sentiment

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Anti-Spanish sentiment, also referred to as Hispanophobia (from Latin Hispanus, "Spanish" and Greek φοβία (phobia), "fear"), is the fear, distrust, hatred of, aversion to, or discrimination against Spanish people, culture, or nationhood.

Instances of anti-Spanish prejudice, often embedded within anti-Catholic prejudice and propaganda, were stoked in Europe in the early modern period, pursuant to the Spanish Crown's status as a power siding with the Counter-Reformation. The Spanish colonization of the Americas was also singled out as uniquely barbarous by some commentators. 20th-century Spanish historiography shaped the construct of "Black Legend" to denote such manifestations of prejudice, generally overplaying their reach and pervasiveness. The justification of the civil wars from which new republics emerged independent from Spanish rule in the Americas also partially relied on a hispanophobic discourse.

Within Spain, elements of stateless nationalist movements (such as Catalan, Basque, and Galician) competing with Spanish nationalism embrace anti-Spanish views and discourse.

History

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"Black legend"

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Main article: Black legend (Spain)

Early instances of hispanophobia arose as the influence of the Spanish Empire and the Spanish Inquisition spread throughout Europe during the Late Middle Ages. Hispanophobia then materialized in folklore that is sometimes referred to as the "black legend":

The legend first arose amid the religious strife and imperial rivalries of 16th-century Europe. Northern Europeans, who loathed Catholic Spain and envied its American empire, published books and gory engravings which depicted Spanish colonization as uniquely barbarous: an orgy of greed, slaughter and papist depravity, the Inquisition writ large.[1]

La leyenda negra, as Spanish historians first named it, entailed a view of Spaniards as "unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, hot-blooded, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian". During the European colonization of the Americas, "[t]he Black Legend informed Anglo Americans' judgments about the political, economic, religious, and social forces that had shaped the Spanish provinces from Florida to California, as well as throughout the hemisphere".[2] These judgments were handed down from Europeans who saw the Spaniards as inferior to other European cultures.[3]

In North America, hispanophobia thus preceded the United States Declaration of Independence by almost 200 years. Historians theorize that North European nations promoted hispanophobia in order to justify attacks on Spain's colonies in the Americas. New Englanders engaged in hispanophobic efforts to assimilate Spanish colonies:

[I]n North America a deep current of Hispanophobia pervades Anglo-Saxon culture. ... As early as the late seventeenth century, we find Puritan divines like Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell studying Spanish—with a view to winning converts to their version of Protestantism. Sewell spoke of "bombing [sic] Santo Domingo, Havana, Puerto Rico, and Mexico itself" with the Spanish Bible, and Cotton Mather even wrote a book on Protestant doctrine in Spanish, published in Boston in 1699, intended for—as he might say—the darker regions of Spanish America.[4][better source needed]

Nazi Germany

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Main article: Nazi racial theories

For the Nazis, the psychology of the Spaniards deemed incompatible with the ideal Nazi Germans, particularly regarding their Catholicism.[5] Also, Ottavio de Peppo noted that Spaniards' religious sentiments were useful to weaken Germany's position because of that contempt of the Nazis to the Spanish psychology.[6] Hitler himself said that "All of Spain is contained in Don Quixote—-a decrepit society unaware the world has passed it by", because Spain was a stagnant nation dominated by three elements that Nazis detested; the Church, the aristocracy, and the monarchy, since Franco had promised a royal restoration. Hitler praised the Arab occupation of Iberia as "cultivated," while referring to the Spaniards themselves as "lazy" and of "moorish blood;" he also slandered the Catholic Queen Isabel, calling her "the greatest whore in history."[7][8] The German writer Wilhelm Pferdekamp, published many hispanophobic articles, including one titled Afrika beginnt hinter den Pyrenäen ("Africa begins behind the Pyrenees").[9]

Americas

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Depiction of Simón Bolívar signing the Decree of War to the Death against Spaniards in 1813

In the 19th century, the justification of the Spanish American wars of independence relied on blaming Spain and its legacy for all of the ills of the New World, with the remaining insignificant Peninsular and Canarian population in the new republics being subsequently harassed, extorted and eventually expelled.[10]

Mexico

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According to historian Marco Antonio Landavazo, anti-Spanish sentiment in Mexico is underpinned by basic ideas that are synthesized in the interpretation of the conquest as genocide, the identification of an intrinsically perverse character in the Spaniards and, therefore, the need for the extermination and expulsion of the "gachupín".[11]

This sentiment, already extant in the 17th century, gained notoriety in the wake of the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821),[12] and was articulated from then on as one of the tenets of the Mexican national building, urgently pushed by elements of the political class of the young country, with the result of the hardening of the borders of its political community.[13]

Thus, already towards the heights of 1810, an independence hero like the priest Miguel Hidalgo decried the Spaniards as "denaturalized men" moved by "sordid greed" and whose only god was money.[14]

Throughout the 1820s, Spaniards were quantitatively insignificant (estimated by Harold Sims at 6500 people out of a population of about 6.5 million) but many of them―despite a certain heterogeneous social extraction shown in recent research―held an important influence in the economic, military and political elites of the First Mexican Republic.[15]

Anti-Spanish sentiment gained momentum in the Mexican public sphere towards by the late 1820s, with decrees in 1827 and 1829 calling for the expulsion of all peninsulares residing in Mexico.[16] In the context of a growth of Mexican nationalism, the preponderance of Spanish landowners and merchants in Guerrero led mulatto militias to murder several Spanish merchants in 1827 and 1828.[17] Anti-Spanish sentiment was one of the causes behind the sacking of the Parián market in Mexico City in 1828.[18] Anti-Spanish sentiment motivated twelve state expulsion laws published in 1827, three federal laws of December 1827, March 1829 and January 1833, and two decrees, in January 1833 and 1834.[15] Two years later, the definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Mexico and Spain was signed.[19]

This process resulted in the effective expulsion of almost half of the Spanish population from Mexico.[15]

The murder of Spaniards—sometimes amidst cries of "death to whites", to "Spaniards" or to "gachupines"—lingered during the 1840s and 1850s in the countryside of the states of Guerrero, Morelos and Yucatán, spurred by the tension between Spanish hacienda owners and the impoverished indigenous peasantry, even though the behavior of the former did not differ substantially from that of the Criollo hacienda owners.[20]

Although lesser in terms of casualties than xenophobic outbursts of anti-American and Sinophobic sign, anti-Spanish sentiment manifested itself during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, with slightly more than 200 Spaniards killed.[21]

United States

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Anti-Spanish propaganda depicting a dehumanized personification of Spain ('the Spanish Brute') in satirical magazine Judge (July 1898)

In 1890s United States, anti-Spanish propaganda was disseminated by outlets published by the likes of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, aiming to set the mood of the public opinion in favour of War against Spain.[22]

References

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  1. ^ Horwitz, Tony (9 July 2006). "Immigration — and the Curse of the Black Legend". New York Times. p. WK13. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  2. ^ Weber, David J. (February 1992). "The Spanish Legacy in North America and the Historical Imagination". The Western Historical Quarterly. 23 (1). Utah State University: 5–24. doi:10.2307/970249. JSTOR 970249. Archived from the original on 2 June 2008. Retrieved 15 November 2018. Alt URL
  3. ^ Amago, Samuel (2005). "Why Spaniards Make Good Bad Guys: Sergi López and the Persistence of the Black Legend in Contemporary European Cinema". Film Criticism. 30 (1). Allegheny College: 41–63. JSTOR 24777304.
  4. ^ Falcoff, Mark (1 January 2000). "Beyond Bilingualism". American Enterprise Institute. Archived from the original on 11 July 2007. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  5. ^ The ambassador in Salamanca, Viola, to Ciano, minister of Foreign Affairs, 3 July 1938, Document 280, M.d.A. Esteri, I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani. Ottava Serie: 1935–1939 (Rome 2001), vol IX, 376–8.
  6. ^ The head of the cabinet, De Peppo, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ciano, 3 July 1938, Document 281, ibid. vol IX, 378. On the Austrian situation, R. V. Luza, The Resistance in Austria, 1938–1945 (Minneapolis 1984), 66–72.
  7. ^ "Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944: His Private Conversations". Hugh Trevor-Roper
  8. ^ "La opinión de Hitler sobre los españoles: "moros y vagos" que adoran a una reina "ramera"". abc (in Spanish). 2018-07-16. Retrieved 2023-04-30.
  9. ^ Oliver Gliech, Ein Institut und sein General : Wilhelm Faupel und das Iberoamerikanische Institut in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Francfort, Bibliotheca Ibero-Americana / Vervuert, 2003, 615 p. «Wilhelm Faupel. Generalstabsoffizier, Militärberater, Präsident des Ibero-Amerikanischen Instituts», p. 131-279.
  10. ^ Cano Borrego, Pedro Damián (2022). "Hispanofobia, extorsión y expulsión de los peninsulares y canarios en las nuevas repúblicas hispanoamericanas". Revista de la Inquisición. Intolerancia y Derechos Humanos. 26. Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Servicio de Publicaciones. ISSN 1131-5571.
  11. ^ Landavazo 2005, p. 33.
  12. ^ Landavazo 2005, pp. 33–34.
  13. ^ Pani 2003, pp. 358–359.
  14. ^ Landavazo 2005, p. 34.
  15. ^ a b c Pani 2003, p. 357.
  16. ^ Jackson & Castillo 1995, p. 88.
  17. ^ Aviña 2014, p. 24.
  18. ^ Lomnitz 2001, p. 131.
  19. ^ Valadés, José C. (1994). Orígenes de la República Mexicana: la aurora constitucional. UNAM. ISBN 978-968-36-3320-0.
  20. ^ Landavazo 2005, pp. 36–37.
  21. ^ Landavazo 2005, p. 39.
  22. ^ Head, Michael; Boehringer, Kristian (2019). The Legal Power to Launch War. Who Decides?. Milton Park: Routledge. p. 76. ISBN 978-1-138-29208-6.

Sources

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