Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States. By Felipe Fernández-Armesto. W.W. Norton; 416 pages; $27.95. Buy from Amazon.com
THERE was something a bit grudging about America’s conquest of Puerto Rico in 1898, after a short war with Spain. The “so-called white” inhabitants, the first American military governor sniffed, looked as if they had “Indian blood”. A commander of the defeated Spanish forces was just as contemptuous. Locals went from being “fervently Spanish” to “enthusiastically American” in 24 hours.
Both sides missed the import of the moment, argues a new Hispanic history of the United States, the very title of which, “Our America”, sounds like a challenge to a fight. The rising superpower had just seized a colony far older than any English settlement on the North American mainland. The island of Puerto Rico became Spanish in 1508, almost a century before English buccaneer-adventurers splashed ashore at Jamestown in Virginia. Not only that, but settlements like Jamestown—a fortified trading-post, built explicitly for profit—had been founded in conscious imitation of Spanish colonial practices in the Americas, says the author, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a British academic based at Notre Dame University in Indiana.
The book takes aim at the founding myths of America that run exclusively from east to west. Those myths begin with ocean-crossings by pious, liberty-loving Englishmen. They dwell on the miracle of the Revolutionary War, in which bewigged patriots defeated vastly larger British forces. The myths end with wagon-trains rumbling across the Prairies and railways cutting through the Rockies, opening a continent to such Anglo-American virtues as rugged individualism and the plain- spoken certainties of the common law.
The book sets out to show how such tales ignore a parallel history of America that runs from south to north, embraces different values and has—for unbroken centuries—spoken Spanish. With startling facts and jaw-dropping tales of courage and depravity, the author triumphantly rescues Hispanic America from obscurity.
Spanish conquistadors brought horses to the Great Plains as early as 1540, showing native Americans in present-day Kansas how horsemen with spears could kill 500 buffalo in a fortnight. By 1630 a Franciscan mission in New Mexico claimed to have baptised 86,000 Indians in one summer. To repel French, British and Russian rivals, Spain built forts from Florida to the north-western coasts of what is today British Columbia. Catholic missions ran vast cattle ranches and planted California’s first citrus groves and vines. It was not just the French who helped George Washington’s armies defeat the British crown. Spanish forces harried the redcoats from Florida to Michigan, the book records, while Spanish gold bankrolled the siege at Yorktown (the newly founded town of Los Angeles, a continent away, sent $15 for the war effort).
Spanish rule was often pretty sketchy. One 18th-century frontier governor was a friendly Apache chief, while Spain’s agent in the Upper Missouri was a mystic from Wales, hunting for the Welsh-speaking descendants of a prince who, myth had it, crossed the Atlantic to escape the English 600 years earlier. Colonial bosses, soldiers and missionaries were not kindly men: Indians, in particular, died in large numbers from disease, exploitation and armed conflict. But the book makes a case that a rough-hewn paternalist pragmatism mostly prevailed in Hispanic America. Slavery was shunned (and in 1821 outlawed by newly-independent Mexico). Spanish officials treated slavery as a crime, and worse as a mistake: far easier to buy off natives with axes, copper kettles, food and dependence-inducing rum.
The author paints a harsher picture of English-speaking America, from the first moments after the revolution. A sort of madness for land and expansion gripped the Yankees and English-speakers of the South, buttressed by “scientific” race theories that placed white Anglo-Americans over supposedly brutish Indians, Spaniards and those of mixed race. American settlers flooded California and Texas, grabbing land with the help of corrupt lawyers, broken treaty-promises, “popular tribunals” that were little more than judicial lynch-mobs, and, when all else failed, force. The war of Texan independence involved much daring, but was also explicitly motivated by the desire to escape Mexico’s laws against slavery: Anglo settlers were anxious to import black slaves to pick cotton. The spectacle appalled such observers as John Quincy Adams, with the former president sorrowing that Texas joined the union tainted by two crimes, slavery and “robbery of Mexico”.
More than a century of unblushing, institutionalised racism followed, involving everything from segregated schools to guestworker schemes that left Mexicans at the mercy of exploitative bosses. Hard economic times triggered race riots and mass deportations.
Still Hispanics kept coming, most recently breaking out of urban and suburban strongholds to establish communities in small towns and rural counties in almost every state. A quarter of all American children are now from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. That prompts the book to two conclusions. The first—that a “second Hispanic colonisation” is under way—is essentially a bit of wordplay. The second—that “the United States is and has to be a Latin American country”—leads the author into a muddle. He offers a digression about the Protestant work ethic, and why that is a fiction behind which lurks anti-Catholic prejudice. He asks why, if the government in Washington is supposedly more democratic than the military dictatorships that blighted South America for so long, American troops have at times been used to break strikes or escort black children into Arkansas schools.
These final digressions are a shame: a quest for equivalence that is really an attempt to refute anti-Hispanic condescension. But the effort is not needed. The history of Hispanic North America is already fascinating, as the book shows. Yet—to be clear—it was also a story of the peripheries, not least for the Spanish empire itself. America is a country founded on a unique set of ideas, and most of them do not come from imperial Spain.
Hispanics will play an ever-larger role in shaping America. Centuries of proximity and shared history are bound to strengthen this. But modern America does not belong to any one race or culture: that is its genius.
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The making of America
The Economist THERE was something a bit grudging about America's conquest of Puerto Rico in 1898, after a short war with Spain. The “so-called white” inhabitants, the first American military governor sniffed, looked as if they had “Indian blood”. A commander of the... |
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