Excerpt of "The Spirit of Hispanism" by Notre Dame Press

the S P I R I T of H I S PA N I S M Commerce, Culture, and Identity across the Atlantic, 1875â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1936

DIANA ARBAIZA

U N I V ER S I T Y O F NO T R E DA M E P R ES S NO T R E DA M E , I ND I A N A

ARBAI.indb 3

11/12/19 12:26 PM

ARBAI.indb 4

11/12/19 12:26 PM

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

vii ix

Introduction 1 one. Hispanism as Vindication: Spain as Other in the Age of Commerce

two. The Emergence of Hispanic Idealism, 1892â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1900

three. Complicated Harmonies: Economic and Cultural Initiatives in Progressive Hispanism

116

four. Ramiro de Maeztu and the Search for a Hispanic Economic Ideology

154

five. Commercial Hispanism: Marketing Spiritual Capital

187

Afterword 238 Notes 245 Works Cited 263 Index 286

ARBAI.indb 5

11/12/19 12:26 PM

I I L L U S T R AT I O N S

Figure 1. Allegorical Float at the Centennial of 1892 69 Figure 2. Design for a Proposed Monument to the “Discovery” for the Chicago Exhibition of 1893 73 Figure 3. Scenes from the Parade of Commerce and Industries in Madrid at the Centennial of 1892 74 Figure 4. Cartoon Parodying the Centennial Celebrations in Madrid 75 Figure 5. Cartoon of Columbus in an Advertisement 83 Figure 6. Allegorical Representations of Spain and Spanish America in El Centenario 96 Figure 7. Caricature of the United States in La Campana de Gracia 99 Figure 8. Illustration for an Article on Rodó, Author of Ariel 108 Figure 9. Illustration of the Metaphor of Sisterhood “from Nation to Nation” 192 Figure 10. Cover designs for Mercurio 202 Figure 11. Front Cover of How Spain Is Loved (1920) 207

vii

ARBAI.indb 7

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction

In June 2017, Borja Cardelús, a writer and documentary filmmaker, announced in the newspaper ABC the imminent establishment of the Hispanic Civilization Foundation. Cardelús, who also had a brief career as member of José María Aznar’s government, explained in the article that the goal of the organization was to improve the national and international image of Spain. To do so, he explained, the foundation would emulate the “rich western nations” that had long cultivated their image through cultural media. Spain, Cardelús proposed, did not know how to “sell” itself, paralyzed by the Leyenda Negra—Black Legend—that attributed to Spain all kind of vices while concealing its achievements. Among these accomplishments he highlighted the ability to create a civilization: en el mundo occidental solo hay dos, la anglosajona y la hispánica, y esta atesora grandes valores. No solo se compone de una lengua, una religión y una raza mestiza, sino de muchas otras cosas: música, literatura, arquitectura, unidad de costumbres, pasión vital, generosidad, solidaridad, comunicación. . . . Se trata de una cultura riquísima en valores, intermedia entre dos feroces extremos: el totalitarismo marxista y el capitalismo egoísta y excluyente. La Civilización Hispánica matiza ambos excesos, porque se halla impregnada de valores humanísticos cristianos. (2017) [In the western world there are only two, the Anglo-Saxon and the Hispanic, and the latter accumulates great values. It is composed not only of a language, a religion, and a mixed race, but also by many 1

ARBAI.indb 1

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction

other things: music, literature, architecture, unity in traditions, vital passion, generosity, solidarity, communication. It is an extremely wealthy culture in values and intermediate between two ferocious extremes: Marxist totalitarianism and the selfish and exclusive capitalism. The Hispanic civilization nuances both these excesses because it is imbued with Christian humanistic values.]1 Co-promoted by Cardelús and the entrepreneur José Antonio PérezNievas, the organization was officially established in January 2018 with a note of presentation to the press that followed the arguments of the mentioned article. The alarms soon rang. The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Juan Manuel Bonet, defended his institution against the foundation’s accusations of incompetence while the historian José Álvarez Junco warned about the resurgence of a Spanish nationalism “sin complejos” as a response to the Catalonian independence movement (Hermoso 2018). Most of the foundation’s website remains under construction, leading one to wonder whether it will truly attain the ambitious project of developing a series of multimedia content to promote “Hispanic civilization.” Yet, regardless of the success of the foundation’s future efforts, its establishment is itself quite symptomatic of a surge of Spanish conservative nationalism. In 2013, Santiago Abascal, leader of the ultraright party Vox and former president of the Fundación Denaes (Fundación Para la Defensa de la Nación Española), extolled the virtues of Spain’s civilizing work (2013), a discourse closely followed by the leader of the Partido Popular, Pablo Casado during a recent electoral campaign (“Pablo Casado: La Hispanidad” 2018). Nuanced by contemporary rhetoric, this nationalism still reveals a haunting circularity in its attempts to strengthen Spain’s national unity and international status by drawing on an idealized imperial past and on the notion of a global Hispanic identity due to the colonial legacy. Reading the mission of this foundation, one cannot help but see parallels between this and the earlier discourses of Hispanism, the movement of rapprochement with Spanish America that flourished from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century. The distinction that Cardelús established between Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic evokes Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s civilizatory dichotomy in the pro-

ARBAI.indb 2

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction 3

logue to the Antología de poetas hispano-americanos, published in 1893. His list of “music, literature, architecture” brings to mind the vision of Rafael de Altamira in the early 1920s of shared Hispanic artistic expressions. The ultimate series of oppositions with which Cardelús defined this Hispanic identity—in contrast with Marxism but also “selfish” capitalism—are strikingly reminiscent of Ramiro de Maeztu’s conception of la Hispanidad, a derivation from late nineteenth-century conservative Hispanism that emerged in the late 1920s and amalgamated traditionalist, Catholic, and fascist values. This last reference by Cardelús to a particular economic worldview within Hispanic civilization has a long tradition in Hispanist rhetoric, and it is central to this book’s analysis of the Hispanist movement. Alongside appeals to the common language, culture, and values—and even religion and race in some cases—defenders of Hispanism argued that Hispanic nations shared a unique economic philosophy, a statement that seems to return once again in characterizations such as Cardelús’s. This book considers Peninsular Hispanism as an overlooked site of Spanish thought on global capitalism and Spain’s marginal role within it. Also called Hispanoamericanismo, Pan-Hispanismo, or even Americanismo,2 Peninsular Hispanism has been consistently called out as a nationalistic discourse of imperial nostalgia. This book draws on those readings but especially underscores its neoimperialistic character, exploring how, from the late nineteenth century, Hispanism was envisioned as a source of both symbolic and material regeneration: a cultural and economic reconquest. At a time when European powers were embroiled in an accelerated imperialistic race, Hispanism captivated multiple generations of Spaniards who considered the remaining relationship with Spanish America as a potential restitution for their colonial loss and diminished role in the world order. In reaction to the construction of the Spaniards as inept and unskilled for the economic activities of modern life, Hispanism developed the representation of the Hispanic community as a superior, antimaterialistic race, a characterization that would acquire a central importance in Spanish nationalism. This construction of “Hispanic idealism” not only rewrote the depiction of Spain as a commercial Other in Western modernity, it was also envisioned as an advertising device to reenter Spanish American markets, appealing to the solidarity of a Hispanic community that allegedly held a less

ARBAI.indb 3

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction

utilitarian worldview. The historical period investigated in this book— stretching from the Restoration to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War—overlaps with the rise and decline of Hispanism as a project aiming to achieve the symbolic and material regeneration of Spain. As Hispanism was mobilized simultaneously as a compensatory response against capitalism and a strategic discourse to encourage commerce with former colonies, Hispanism became a site of active debate about how to reconcile moral and material interests in Spain. The Spirit of Hispanism sheds light on Spanish aspirations of shifting from a model of territorial domination to one of economic and cultural hegemony in Spanish America. At the same time it explores how Spanish intellectuals and entrepreneurs conceived the relationship between Spanish culture and modern commerce. The study of Hispanism from the vantage point of the interrelationship between economy and culture seeks to elucidate the development of the movement during the period of this study, but it also clarifies the incongruous and yet frequent juxtaposition in contemporary Spanish public culture of the notion of a particular Hispanic economic ethos with blatant calls to better sell “the brand Spain.” Hispanism: Between Nationalism and Neoimperialism Hispanism, the movement that sustained the position that Spain and Spanish America should engage in a more intimate association on account of their common bonds, flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century along with many contemporary movements advocating a transnational identity—Pan-Latinism, Pan-Americanism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Germanicism. Within this trend, Hispanism was the only movement that rearticulated a postcolonial relationship between a former metropole and its colonies. It participated in some of the rhetoric and political ideology of these movements calling for the establishment of alliances among ethnicities or cultures that superseded the concept of nations. Yet, in the nineteenth century, the articulation of Peninsular Hispanism was tightly connected with the development of Spanish nationalism. Indeed, while the success of Hispanism as a transnational

ARBAI.indb 4

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction 5

ideology is somewhat ambiguous, the recycling of Hispanist discourse in Spanish nationalism is daunting. Hispanism never materialized in an association of states like the British Commonwealth, nor did it develop into an international cultural organization like the Francophonie. The economic outcomes of Hispanism during the period covered in this book were much less substantial than what had been projected, and the measures that Hispanists continued to propose in the late 1920s to strengthen the relationship with Spanish America must have given their audience a dismal sense of déjà vu. After a few decades of Hispanist campaigns, even supporters of the movement confessed their desperation at the seeming stagnation of the rapprochement. Historians such as Álvarez Junco have therefore dismissed the movement as “hollow rhetoric without tangible results” (2013, 317), a description that seems to reproduce the most pessimistic presages of those Hispanists. Yet, Álvarez Junco obviates the close connection between Hispanism and Spanish nationalism in his otherwise excellent study on the formation of Spanish identity. In underscoring the crucial relationship between Hispanism and Spanish nationalism, my analysis engages with a series of works that have underscored Spanish colonialism’s central role in constituting Spanish modern identity. Spanish intellectuals involved in the Hispanist campaign were quite explicit about the role that Spanish America held in their imagination of the Spanish nation. As Rafael María de Labra wrote in 1912, “sin América no se comprende á España” (1912a, viii) [Without America, we cannot conceive Spain]. Born in Cuba, this liberal intellectual had, like many of his generation, a personal connection with the recent colonial past, but he spoke of an abstract that he considered crucial to understanding Spanish identity: the presence of Spanish America, which he recovered through the Hispanist movement. In recent years, scholars of colonial history have warned about the simplistic shortcut of presenting political history as a transition from empire to nation-state or defining nation against empire. Multiple works have called for consideration of the interconnection of both in their formative discourses (Stoler and Cooper 1997, 22; Burbank and Cooper 2010, xi), and some studies have even shown that nation-state and administrative empire were in some cases integrated in the same

ARBAI.indb 5

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction

sociopolitical system (Wilder 2005). While nation building and empire building are considered mutually formative constitutive projects in Great Britain and Holland, the case of Spain is a more complex one given that Spain was a declining colonial power during the nationbuilding period in the nineteenth century. Spain had lost a vast part of its empire in the early nineteenth century and would lose the remainder of it in 1898, though until the mid-twentieth century it still maintained a modest colonial hold in what today constitutes Morocco, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea. The fact that Spain thus epitomized a minor colonial power did not entail, however, that the idea of empire was insignificant in Spanish culture and nation building. Susan MartinMárquez has explored the impact of those remaining African colonies on definitions of Spanish national identity that translated into Spanish cultural production, while several scholars (A. Blanco 2012; Krauel 2013; Santos-Rivero 2005) have also noted that Spanish literary production at the turn of the century was unequivocally pervaded by an imperial consciousness regarding Latin America. On the other hand, multiple historians have argued that the lost empire in Latin America still exerted a powerful influence in the construction of Spanish nationalism. Already in 1980, Martin Blinkhorn suggested that the idea of the “Spanish Empire” was deployed as a foundational icon of modern Spanish identity that transcended the “Disaster of 1898,” an instrumentalization of the idea of empire that Sebastian Balfour (1997) traced up to the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The role of the empire in Spanish nationalism was more recently examined in the volume compiled by SchmidtNowara and Nieto-Philips about the paradigms that dominated Spanish historiography about its colonial history in Latin America. In this collection, several essays point at the increasing relevance acquired by this past in nineteenth-century Spain, although it is perhaps Antonio Feros who most clearly articulated the implications of this obsession with the colonial period. For Feros, nineteenth-century historiography on Spanish colonialism in Latin America was not just a defensive reaction to the so-called Black Legend, but an imperial and colonial nar rative appearing “as a central chapter in the process of constructing Spanish nationalism” (2005, 111). In examining the most influential icons in the national culture of modern Spain, Balfour pointed out at three events other than the so-

ARBAI.indb 6

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction 7

called Discovery in America: the “Reconquest” of Spain in the Middle Ages, the Second of May uprising against the French, and the victories against rebellious Moroccans in nineteenth century (1997, 2). While these icons had a similar importance as organizing myths in the for mation of Spanish national identity, several authors, including Balfour, have argued that Spanish nationalism took particular pride in the American colonization as a means to assert its imperial status during what Eric Hobsbawm called the “Age of Empire” (1875–1914) (1989, 2–3). This imperial past provided certain symbolic value to compensate for what had been lost, but as Schmidt-Nowara (2006) demonstrated, Spanish intellectuals also strove to instrumentalize this imperial past for the concrete purpose of maintaining their remaining possessions in America and Asia. According to Schmidt-Nowara, nineteenth-century Spanish historiography elaborated a master narrative about colonial history by which to justify continuous dominance in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The success of these efforts was relative since, as noted by Schmidt-Nowara as well as Kohichi Hagimoto (2013), intellectuals in these colonies contested the metropolitan imagination of history. Yet, the fact that Spanish colonial historiography had a questionable reception in the colonies does not diminish that, from Spain, it was consciously conceived as both an exercise in nation building and an effort to integrate the remaining colonies. The obsessive rewriting of the imperial past in Latin America clearly indicates the interconnection of nationalism and imperialism in late nineteenth-century Spanish culture. Hispanism not only absorbed this historiographic discourse but also furthered the relevance of imperialism in national identity. In his thorough study on Hispanism, Isidro Sepúlveda (2005) studied how the “imperialistic dreams” of this movement contributed to the development of Spanish nationalism through several decades. As he showed, the role of Spanish America in the formation of Spanish nationalism is clearly exposed when considering how Spanish intellectuals and politicians of diverse ideological backgrounds took shelter in Hispanism well into the twentieth century. The preoccupation with the idea of the Spanish Empire during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera translated into the regime’s official sponsorship of the Hispanist project (Boyd 1997). Franco’s regime also tried to instrumentalize the persistent nostalgia for the Spanish Empire in

ARBAI.indb 7

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction

America by appropriating the discourse of la Hispanidad, the most reactionary derivation of Hispanism, which Alistair Hennesey even qualified as an ideology of “surrogate imperialism” (2000). In his insightful study of the republican exiles in Mexico, Sebastiaan Faber (2002) pointed out that despite their progressive political views, these intellectuals still imagined Spanish America as the sole remaining field in which they might exert cultural hegemony. This diaspora endorsed a more progressive brand of Hispanismo, emphasizing equalitarian values of republicanism and social justice that contrasted with the Hispanist discourses of the Falange Española (Spanish phalanx) that influenced the Mexican right (Pérez Monfort 1992). Nonetheless, Faber commented that their concept of Hispanism deleted the heterogeneity of the American nations and even the Iberian peninsula (2005, 89–90). As I understand it, Faber suggests that even if some particular Hispanism aimed at establishing a nonhierarchical relationship, such an initiative would be undermined by the very same idea of “the Hispanic world,” a spurious and essentially imperialistic concept that obliterates the multilingual and multicultural world encompassed by the category “Hispanic.” These studies finally demonstrate that Peninsular Hispanism, in all its various ideological and temporary articulations, was a manifestation of Spanish nationalism inextricably linked to the idea of empire that absorbed the cultural specificities of the former colonies as well as those of Iberian communities. In reviewing this scholarly literature, I underscore the connection between imperialism and Spanish nationalism to sustain my presentation of Peninsular Hispanism as an ideology of neoimperialistic character. Because of the coincidence of Spanish decay with the imperialist expansion of European nations in the late nineteenth century, the Hispanist movement can be considered as a postcolonial ideology. With the prefix post I do not imply the superseding of an imperial consciousness, but rather that Hispanism emerged as a restitution for the loss of continental Spanish America and as an anticipated reparation for what was foreseen at the time as the imminent loss of the remaining colonies in America and Asia. Yet, beyond the interpretation of Hispanism as a transparent articulation of the centrality of empire in Spanish national formation, I propose Hispanism as a movement that attempted to create a kind of economic and cultural neoimperialism (without aspirations of

ARBAI.indb 8

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction 9

political domination). Hispanism originated as a symbolic substitute for the political power and material wealth that Spain did not possess, but its advocates also expected that their cultural bonds with Spanish America could dynamize Spanish economic life. The fact that most of the financial dreams Hispanism inspired did not come to fruition has led most scholars to focus on the movement’s dreams of cultural hegemony, without giving due consideration to material goals or the way the fantasies of cultural and economic reconquest shaped each other. I was inspired by Ángel Loureiro’s groundbreaking article emphasizing how revisions of Hispanism often diminished the commercial interests at stake in the movement. As he explained, successive generations of Peninsular intellectuals were “haunted by the specter of Latin America” (2003, 68) and aspired to symbolic authority. But they also expected that the Spanish cultural legacy could literally be translated into financial retribution: “According to the proponents of Hispanism, one consequence of the Spanish legacy in Latin America is the spiritual debt incurred by the colonized. Indeed, Latin America is seen by Spaniards at the end of the nineteenth century as symbolic and material compensation for Spain’s economic and political dejection” (2003, 69). Loureiro thus highlights some concrete ambitions of the movement that are overshadowed by the dominant conception of Hispanism as simply a movement of imperialistic nostalgia. Also frequently overlooked is what has been called the “commercial or practical Hispanism,” which when discussed at all is usually understood as a parallel, divergent phenomenon. While Hispanism has traditionally been conceived as an exclusively culturalist movement, I depict the entanglement of the cultural and economic strands of Hispanist thought, the dialectic, tensions, and interrelations of which constitute the crux of this book. In presenting Hispanism as a form of neoimperialism, I suggest that this phenomenon attempted to create a supranational formation that went beyond a political or territorial bond and aspired to exert a new cultural and economic dominion over Spanish America against other competing powers. I am drawing upon a recent tendency in colonial studies to reconceptualize the definition of modern imperialism beyond the territorial model that has been considered the exemplar. As Ann Laura Stoler critiqued, colonial studies have tended to concentrate on Northern European empires such as the British, French, Dutch, or

ARBAI.indb 9

11/12/19 12:26 PM

Introduction

Belgian and subscribed “a myopic view of empire that sidelines a wide range of imperial forms as anomalous” (2006, 127). Yet, scholars of U.S. interventions in Spanish America have not hesitated to call these by their imperial name. For Stoler, the United States is only one of several atypical cases of what she calls “imperial formations” (2006; Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue 2007). These go beyond the idea of bordered and bounded polities to create a dynamic of rule through the production of exceptions and the redefinitions of categories of belonging. Hispanism was not quite the imperial formation that the United States became in Spanish America, since materially it never achieved such an unfortunate level of intervention as the United States. Yet, the expectations of many Hispanists and their discourses against the United States leave few doubts about their desire and vocation to become such. From the beginning, Peninsular Hispanists revealed clear economic incentives, a sense of entitlement to symbolic authority, and even aspirations to create commercial, educative, and legal pan-Hispanic leagues. Lenin’s conception of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism exerted a strong influence on postcolonial studies that, up until the 1970s, privileged a political economic analysis of colonialism. Scholars then began arguing that colonial issues were excessively folded into the study of global capitalism and turned to more cultural readings of the phenomenon. However, this important correction, which provided space for examining cultural domination and the practices of racial and gender exclusion, prompted a distancing between questions of colonialism and of capitalism. While postcolonial studies have benefited from the post-Marxist acknowledgment of the partial autonomy of the cultural field from the economic sphere, Arif Dirlik has thoughtfully noted that within the difficulty of defining colonialism and its long history, what truly characterizes and anchors modern European colonialism is its bidirectional and formative relationship with capitalism: “Modern European colonialism is incomprehensible without reference to the capitalism that dynamized it, just as the formations of historical capitalism in Europe may not be understood without reference to colonialism” (2002, 441). The recognition of this relationship opens up the field for culturally informed analysis of the political economy of colonialism and how the political, the economic, and the cultural became mutually influenced in modern colonialism.

ARBAI.indb 10

11/12/19 12:26 PM