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2. Finding a Science in the Mystery of Race in Spain In 1971, the historian of Spain and Latin America Frederick Pike offered the then standard summation of the meaning of raza, a view that had been held for the previous one hundred years: “A fundamental characteristic of Spaniards has always been the unassailable conviction that there are fundamental characteristics of the Spanish people. . . . And it has never mattered in the least whether there is scientific evidence to support the view that there are basic character traits of the Spanish people or of any national group. Spaniards tend to be convinced that there are things science knows not of and that one of these is the existence of a character, a nature . . . a raza.”1 Pike implied that the Spanish notion of race remained stuck in the Romantic era, ignoring the value of science and celebrating instead the mysteries of the intangible but nevertheless meaningful components of racial identity, like culture, behavior , values, etc.2 Missing in Pike’s assessment is an acknowledgment that this conception of the Spanish race, like all racial definitions, was not without ideological components or a historical context. The notion of a raza, culturally determined or not, connoted a historical link, a unity of people over time. Yet Pike ignored the idea that the term itself might be imbued with political or ideological connotations that were dependent on historical contexts. In reality, the term raza has a complicated historical lineage that requires further analysis. Though the term traces its lineage to the twelfth century, its ideological meaning in the nineteenth century crystallized around the idea of Spain’s legacy as a conqueror, empire builder, and unifier of different peoples.3 This idea of the Spanish race as a conqueror was often the tool of historians, writers, philologists, and ideologues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hoping to align the political and imperial history of Spain with Finding a Science in the Mystery of Race in Spain | 21 the Catholic Church as the great unifying forces of the Spanish past. It was to this end that, in 1918, the Spanish King Alfonso XIII initiated—through royal decree and with the support of conservative prime minister Antonio Maura—the Fiesta de la Raza, to be celebrated on October 12, a day laden with religious, political, and national symbolism. October 12 commemorated Columbus’s first landfall in the Western Hemisphere and also was the day of the appearance of the Virgin Mary to Saint James, the patron saint of Spain. La Virgen del Pilar is considered the patron saint of the Hispanic peoples, and, in a sense, of Spain and its empire. Thus, the idea of race connoted both the ecumenical mission of the Catholic Church and the conquering spirit of the Spanish state. The Spanish race was fundamentally a religious entity, united by common religious principles and values. Its ecumenical generosity , reflected in its willingness to convert all peoples to Spanish Catholicism and thus to Spanish identity, made it capable of absorbing vast numbers of people.4 Recently, however, historians have begun to reexamine the meanings of raza over a much wider swath of time, long before the nineteenth century. Even in this reexamination, the older meanings of raza are viewed in connection with their more modern incarnations. Whether raza had a Romantic quality or a Catholic ecumenical one, the term over the past five centuries has also carried an ethnic connotation, making human difference a product of the natural world, and assuming traits shared across time and generations. The Use of Raza before the Nineteenth Century: To Include or to Exclude In many ways, the idea of raza was linked to a number of linguistic tools that defined inclusion and exclusion prior to the nineteenth century. For example, early responses to the contact with the indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere relied on the idea that Spanish identity was something attainable , via conversion or via linguistic appropriation, i.e., learning to speak Spanish.5 Yet, such ecumenical notions about Spanish identity in the New World were often matched by an equally divisive language of exclusion within the Spanish peninsula. The 1492 act of expelling Jews from the Iberian Peninsula utilized a separatist discourse that worked in close proximity to the rhetoric that supported the potential inclusion of the colonized populations.6 Thus, the actual history of the term is far more complicated as it intermingled with many other ideas over Spain’s complicated history of human...

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