Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (review)

Felipe Fernández-Armesto has written a well-researched and skillfully constructed history of the United States from the viewpoint of Spanish speakers (what he calls “a Hispanic perspective”), asserting that the United States is a country with a Hispanic past and a Hispanic future. The first two chapters deal with the process of conquest and colonization by Spaniards in Florida and the Southwest, and the rest of the book deals with the struggles of Spanish speakers (mostly Mexicans) and English speakers (mostly from the United States)Americans), who are shown frequently in discord with one another. It also deals with the often- contentious relations of colonizers and settlers with the indigenous population.

Fernández-Armesto’s writing style is eloquent and poignant, as in “the name ‘greaser’ stuck to people of Hispanic background with the tenacity of a fatty stain” (p. 259). He believes that rehispanization of the United States will happen, likely as a “relatively painless process” that may benefit the country in previously unanticipated ways—although during the twentieth century, “rehispanization proceeded too slowly to make such a future imaginable” (p. 290). The purpose of this book is, thus, to show that there are U.S. histories other than the standard Anglo narrative. The chronicle shows a Spanish history rolling from south to north and intersecting with the story of the Anglo frontier.

What I find conflicting in this “essay designed to open a different vista” (p. xxi) is a kind of Manichean viewpoint that defines most things done by Spain and Hispanics as good, and things done by the British and later the Americans as bad. In a sense, the author demonstrates the frank partiality he attributes to the Texas Rangers. I prefer works that attempt more balanced views, like Juan González’s Harvest of Empire, a History of Latinos in America (Penguin Books, 2000), similarly contentious but with more nuanced stances. I find questionable the ubiquitous use of the notion of “empire”—the romance-speaking Spanish and French Catholic powers, and the British were advancing their own empires, while the Apache and Comanche had visions of empire over the plains, and Mexicans “behaved imperially, much as Spaniards did previously and gringos simultaneously” (p. 78). Moreover, “the white man did not introduce imperialism to the plains: he arrived as a competitor with a Sioux empire that was already taking shape there” (p. 65).

Descriptions of indios appear uncritically taken from colonial documents instead of contemporary works, such as The Jumanos, Hunters and Traders of the South Plains by Nancy Parrot Hickerson (University of Texas Press, 1994).The chapter in which the author’s approach is most cohesive deals with the nineteenth-century domestication of the prairie that “made the United States a truly continent-wide country” (p. 220), and became the effective laboratory of democracy for the world. Other independent republics in the Americas were fissile, but the United States avoided a major crisis of fragmentation: the addition of the former Spanish and Mexican territories, and the Mormon republic contributed to defining the power of the central government, and the country’s identity as well.

Lastly, the author complains about misguided anglocentric histories that sideline Spain, but ends up by attributing the differences between the United States and Latin American countries to the natural environment, which is an explanation from the nineteenth century. He says “There seems to be nothing in culture—nothing, at least, in language or religion or historical experience—that narrows particular political or economic outcomes, whereas environmental conditions genuinely do limit what people can achieve” (p. 336). Latin American republics had less grassland to work the magic that U.S. farmers did, and the Argentine pampas remained dedicated to cattle ranching.

In the long term, the author says, there is little chance that Hispanics will coalesce around political interests. Their future lies in the people’s shared religious and linguistic...