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119 EPILOGUE The Lingering Lake and Archipelagic Hispanization I n the late 1940s enterprising researcher Emilio Pastor y Santos uncovered a loophole in the diplomatic treaties signed between Spain and the United States in 1898 and between Spain and Germany in 1899. Although these settlements effectively ended Spanish colonialism in the Pacific, Pastor discovered that his country had in fact retained sovereignty over four islands not formally considered in the deliberations. In order to gain a wider audience, he published his findings in a detailed monograph in which he advocated that Spain pursue its ersatz diplomatic claims through the establishment of a naval station in the region.1 What must have appeared initially as a cruel April fool’s joke among diplomats soon took on a more serious tone when the Council of Ministers (appointed by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco) started to debate the issue earnestly. The members of the council decided, while accepting the claim as legitimate, not to press the diplomatic issue in an international arena. Spain, politically isolated since the end of the Second World War, had no membership in the United Nations—an organization that had recently designated the “Spanish” islands as “trust territories” under the auspices of the United States. The Council of Ministers might have found the Yankee administrators far more benign than the newly independent Republic of Indonesia , which had competing claims to the islands. In the 1950s Indonesian troops occupied Mapia (one of the islands identified by Pastor), forcing the U.S. Navy to evacuate many of its inhabitants to the nearby Palauan Islands. Although Palau officials over the years rescinded their claim to Mapia, the Indonesian occupiers imposed the Malay tongue of Biwak on the islanders, pushing the Mapian language to the brink of extinction.2 Pastor’s claim, still haunting many Spanish-language Internet pages, is more than just a historical curiosity. His attempt to regain a Spanish Micronesia stems from a confluence of the literal and the conceptual Spanish Lake that emerged in the nineteenth century following the loss of Madrid’s American territories. In 1825 the literal Spanish Lake had its lifeline to Nueva España permanently severed by the declaration of Mexican independence. 120 Epilogue Similarly, the loss of continental holdings in North and South America extinguished the raison d’être of the conceptual Spanish Lake. Ironically, the remaining Spanish territories, which encompassed the Philippine and Mariana islands, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, as well as small holdings in Africa, added greatly to the maritime dimensions of the empire, which still stretched across the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. At the same time, the conflict that had shattered the Spanish empire left deep scars on the Iberian Peninsula. Liberal reforms triggered by the Napoleonic invasion were met by Carlist traditionalism that had split the country of Spain into two warring parties. Three Carlist conflicts (1833–1876) left Spain internally disunited and with the international image of an empire whose remnants were ripe for the picking . Christopher Schmidt-Nowara challenged this notion, which he argues is partially attributable to U.S. narratives following 1898. According to this historian, the nineteenth-century Spanish empire was not an empty shell of its former grandeur, but allowed an unprecedented degree of experimentation reflecting a newfound sense of national identity.3 It is in this unconventional spirit that we analyze the last seven decades (1828–1898) of Spanish colonialism and archipelagic Hispanization in the Pacific—and also examine their enduring legacies in the present day. In the realm of administration, Spanish officials were forced to rethink the nature of their empire. Javier Morillo-Alicea suggested that the islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico formed a Spanish imperial archipelago that differed from continental holdings in the Americas. The Habsburg conquests of the 1500s relied on the notion of creating associated kingdoms that over time became regional metropoles in their own right. When the continental empire faded, however, a lengthy process of restructuring sought to revise the direct link between the Iberian Peninsula and the archipelagoes in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Decades of bickering over imperial administration , financing, and the need to create a government agency mimicking those of colonial superpowers Great Britain and France foreshadowed the establishment of the Ministerio de Ultramar (Overseas Ministry) in 1863.4 The timid first steps along this long and difficult path were taken in 1828–1829 to restructure the literal Spanish Lake with the proposal to make the Marianas a politically distinct entity from the...

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