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1. The Racial Alloy The Meanings and Uses of Racial Identity in Late-Nineteenthand Early-Twentieth-Century Spain A Jewish church? . . . [I]t could mean many things! Synagogues, mosques, and churches passed into and out of many hands. Jews, Moors, Christians were all here, and the contact with Spain purified them. —from Raza, screenplay by Francisco Franco, 1941 Franco’s screenplay Raza remains famous today mostly as a curiosity , a mediocre film written by a dictator not normally associated with literary pursuits.1 Almost always overlooked in the discussion of the film is the meaning of the title Franco chose: Raza (Race). What could a Spanish dictator who had courted the Nazis allies in the Spanish Civil War mean by the word “race”? Franco’s racial ideals certainly appeared to have little to do with the kind of pure lineage that obsessed the Nazis.2 Indeed, his idea of race—that of a National Catholic state as the happy meeting ground of many different peoples willingly blended together—differed from most European conceptions of race in this period.3 Franco believed that racial strength was based on mixture and hybridity—the fusion of peoples. In fact, the notion of the Spanish race he proposed was, in a sense, counterintuitive, particularly at this moment in European history. Racial strength, in Franco’s view, emanated from bringing races together, not the domination of one pure race over all mixed ones. Yet, even given the distinctiveness of this formulation, historians have directed very little attention toward Spanish notions of race in the first half of the twentieth century. The actual explanation for this historical neglect of racial thought in Spain is wide-ranging and begins first with the effort to deny that Spain ever possessed an idea of race akin to those of its European counterparts. Some 2 | Impurity of Blood scholars have assumed that for a few obvious reasons, racial identities simply failed to develop in Spain. On the one hand, Spain’s multiethnic past would undermine any defense of Spanish racial purity. The backwardness of Spain’s scientific disciplines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also would have seemed to forestall any attempt to formulate scientific theories of the Spanish race. Others have claimed that the missionary spirit within traditional Spanish Catholicism clashed with the idea of an immutable racial identity that denied any possibility of conversion or change. The reality of Spain’s experience with racial ideas—the existence of scientific inquiry into the makeup of the Spanish race, the use of this knowledge in the establishment of social policy, and the later shifts in the meanings ascribed to this racial identity—belies these explanations. Despite historical and religious limitations, Spanish racial theorists did exist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when race and racial sciences were most in vogue in the rest of Europe. Spaniards devised their own racial identities using scientifically substantiated racial ideas. Even more interesting is that these theorists confronted head-on the apparent limitations of Spain’s history and actually used them as the defining characteristics of la raza española. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, racial theorists forged an identity whose main buttress was Spain’s history of multiethnic contact. Racial strength was rooted in the proficiency of the Spanish race to fuse the different groups that had coexisted on the Iberian Peninsula. Even more, as the quotation from Franco’s Raza suggests, Spanish racial ideas assumed that Spaniards and their various component parts were made all the stronger for the mixture. Thus, the task of the Spanish sciences was to trace the history of racial fusion: to study both the separate elements of the Spanish composition and the factors already existent in Spain that had nurtured their positive qualities and expunged the negative ones. This study shows that, although Franco’s Raza was written within the historical context of the Civil War’s aftermath, the basic framework of the ideas he expressed in that work was rooted in earlier grappling with Spanish racial identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, it is the actual historical ubiquity of racial language and the constantly shifting meanings of this racial discourse throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that make such a study important.4 Even the most cursory glance through early-twentieth-century periodical literature will uncover specific references to the discrete and unique Spanish raza. A more focused search would reveal the variety of...

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