Speaking Spanish in the US. Janet M. Fuller
view of the Spanish represented by the Black Legend, a new literary and cultural movement, sometimes referred to as Hispanophilia, emerged toward the end of the 19th century (Nieto Phillips, 2004). Hispanophilia celebrated Spain’s colonial presence in the Southwest, with novels, magazines and films of the era portraying the Spanish conquistadors not as cruel fanatics but as romantic, noble adventurers and missionaries (see Chapter 7 for a discussion of such representations in film). This new glorified account of the Spanish conquest, which Nieto-Phillips (2004) calls ‘the White Legend,’ framed Spaniards as ‘civilizing’ the ‘primitive’ Native peoples, thus minimizing genocide, enslavement and oppression. Not only were the Spanish portrayed as heroes, but mestizaje (i.e. racial ‘mixture’ between Spanish and Native peoples) was downplayed or denied. In this way, Spanish-speakers were represented as the ‘racially pure’ descendants of Europeans.
According to Nieto-Phillips (2004), the White Legend and the downplaying of mestizaje served various ideological and discursive purposes for both New Mexicans and Anglos. In particular, the narrative that framed the Spanish colonizers as courageous and chivalrous gentlemen didn’t just represent resistance to the Black Legend; it was also a counterpoint to the racist portrayals of Mexicans (including New Mexicans) as members of a ‘mongrel race’ (Gómez, 2007; Nieto-Phillips, 2000, 2004). According to the dominant racist views of the time, Whiteness was the ideal and interracial unions were degrading. Further, these views had political implications; as we noted earlier, anti-Mexican and anti-Indigenous racism was central to arguments against New Mexican statehood. Representing New Mexicans as the descendants of Europeans, rather than Native people and Mestizos, was a way to ‘Whiten’ the state’s population and thus make a claim about fitness for self-government, even without the huge influx of Anglos which had altered ethnoracial and linguistic demographics in California and Texas (Gómez, 2007; Nieto-Phillips, 2004).
Language and linguistics – in particular the existence of a unique New Mexican variety of Spanish – also played a supporting role in discourse about New Mexicans’ purported Spanish origins. Multiple factors contributed to the development of New Mexican Spanish, but some researchers focused primarily on the linguistic and social isolation of New Mexican communities (Lipski, 2008). For example, New Mexican linguist Aurelio Espinosa’s early 20th century research emphasized similarities of New Mexican varieties of Spanish, as well as popular sayings and folksongs, to those found in Spain. Just as New Mexicans’ language supposedly showed little African or Indigenous linguistic influence, the implication was that New Mexicans themselves were also racially ‘pure’ (Nieto-Phillips, 2004; Wilson, 1997).
During subsequent periods of immigration from Mexico, some treaty citizens sought to distinguish themselves from new arrivals by virtue of their proficiency in English and/or their assertions of European ancestry (Gonzales-Berry & Maciel, 2000; Lozano, 2018). Whiteness claims were a way to resist racial discrimination, segregation and disenfranchisement. However, rather than challenging anti-Mestizo and anti-Indigenous racism, many such claims focused on improving the status of the individuals who were able to successfully make them and thus they have been sharply criticized.
New Mexico’s Bureau of Immigration also deployed a romanticized depiction of the Spanish colonial past in its efforts to attract tourists and potential migrants from the East (Nieto-Phillips, 2004). In contrast with earlier images of hostile ‘savages’ and ‘cruel, swarthy Mexicans,’ the Bureau’s marketing materials painted a picture of New Mexico as a an ‘enchanting’ landscape where ‘peace-loving Pueblo Indians and noble Spaniards had co-existed for nearly three centuries’ (Nieto-Phillips, 2004: 119–120). While on the surface this might seem like a positive portrayal of the Spanish and Pueblo peoples, it relied on exotification, as well as the implication that these cultures were less developed or sophisticated than the supposedly more modern and industrious Anglo Americans. As such, it sought to attract Eastern tourists by offering them a nostalgic escape from industrialized urban centers (Nieto-Phillips, 2004).
As early as the late 19th century, the recognition of the tremendous economic potential of tourism and the commodification of ethnicity and culture played a role in the promotion of a sanitized colonial past and, in turn, of an emerging Spanish-American identity. In addition to tourist brochures, travelogues, movies and the like, Hispanophilia and the celebration of ‘Old Spain’ could be found in architectural motifs, as well as New Mexican souvenirs and cultural artifacts (Nieto-Phillips, 2004; Wilson, 1997). Language was another way to construct an exotic, romantic Spanish ambience; the same period saw an increased use of Spanish in business names and real estate, such as hotels named El Conquistador and La Hacienda, as well as housing developments with plazas and streets named Alameda and Camino. In many cases, Spanish was both used by Anglos and directed toward Anglos (often with little regard to Spanish grammar rules) (Hill, 2008: 131). As we discuss in Chapter 7, Spanish is still sometimes used by businesses to create a particular sense of place or to convey exotic flavor or cultural authenticity.
The celebration and commodification of an imagined Spanish colonial past has endured through the 20th century and into the 21st. As was the case earlier, the symbolic meaning and discursive implications of the emphasis of Spain’s role in the history of the area are multifaceted. The existence of multiple, competing and contradictory meanings is evident, for example, in the controversies surrounding several statues of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate, who became the first governor of colonial New Mexico at the end of the 16th century. Oñate led a brutal massacre of approximately 800 Acoma men, women and children as punishment for having violently resisted demands that they turn over their food to Spanish soldiers. Following the massacre, Oñate sentenced the survivors to forced servitude and ordered the amputation of the right foot of all men over the age of 25.
Despite this brutal history, in New Mexico there are numerous businesses, schools and streets named for Oñate and other conquistadors, as well as a variety of Spanish-themed celebrations and pageants. For example, a reenactment of the Entrada, the Spanish reoccupation of Santa Fe after the Pueblo Revolt, was a central part of the city’s annual festival until very recently. The reenactment was created in the early 20th century as a tourist attraction designed to capitalize on the region’s cultural history (Rael-Galvéz, 2017). Similar motivations shaped late 20th century plans for official commemorations of the 400th anniversary of Oñate’s arrival in New Mexico. A larger-than-life bronze equestrian statue of Oñate was built for the new visitors’ center in Alcalde, New Mexico, and others were planned for Albuquerque and El Paso (Texas), which Oñate founded.
Although the promotion of tourism was a key impetus, there were also non-economic motivations to commemorate the Spanish conquest. Indeed, some advocates of Oñate monuments saw them as ‘an opportunity to help correct a deficiency of Spanish history in New Mexico public education’ (June-Friesen, 2005). In other words, the monuments and the visitors’ center were a way to provide what they believed was a long overdue recognition of the presence and cultural contributions of the Spanish and their descendants, as well as to challenge to the traditional teaching of US history as having progressed from east to west. Interest in Oñate may also have been related to New Mexicans’ ‘insecurities over losing their language, culture and political and demographic dominance’ as a result of intergenerational language shift to English and the influx of Anglos from the East (Brooke, 1998). Thus, for some, recognition of Oñate and Spanish colonial history was a way to reclaim a non-Anglo past, more than a celebration of the Spanish conquest itself.
However, for many people, the Oñate monuments and conquistador-themed commemorations of the quadracentennial did not simply represent the recognition of a long-overlooked history. Instead, the celebrations of Spanish colonial history replaced one historical erasure and whitewashing with another, by focusing exclusively on Europeans and their descendants, and failing to acknowledge and address the atrocities that the Spanish committed against the Acoma and other Native peoples. For this reason, activists demonstrated and spoke out against the statues. In one high-profile act of protest, a group calling themselves ‘Friends of Acoma’ cut off the right foot of the Oñate statue at the Alcalde visitors’ center. They sent a letter to the local newspaper explaining their motivation by stating: ‘We see no glory in celebrating Onate’s fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it’ (Alcorn, 2018).
In the years since, opposition to Oñate monuments