- The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century
In 1508, Juan Ponce de León conquered the island of Puerto Rico. Whereas the island's 'discoverer' Christopher Columbus could be cast in a universally significant light, Ponce de León much more uncompromisingly represented imperial chauvinism and the shadow of Spanish domination from which the Puerto Rican nation (as with Spain's other remaining colonies) was striving to emerge during the nineteenth century. Yet in the years immediately following liberation from Spain (but occupation by the United States), Ponce de León was rehabilitated as a symbol of Puerto Rican national identity, built no longer in opposition to Spain but upon the foundation of its Spanish roots.
In The Conquest of History, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara explores how different elements from the history of Spain's imperial involvement in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines (the three colonies remaining to her at the end of the nineteenth century) became symbolic of the struggle between two definitions of nation: that of Spanish overseas empire; and that of the colonies seeking to define themselves on their own terms. This is a book that deals with the "crafting of national histories in an age of empire" (p. 12), but an age in which Spanish empire was in terminal decline and entering its death throes. It therefore becomes the story of two competing tendencies (Spain striving to keep a grip on the remnants of its colonies, while the colonies strived to assert their independent national identities), and their competing use and iconic interpretation of key symbols of Spain's imperial history.
Schmidt-Nowara starts by exploring how the Spanish themselves "understood the relation between empire and nation" (p. 19). In the nineteenth century, following the loss of her mainland American colonies, Spain had to deal with the ongoing tension between treating the remaining colonies as subordinate, or else as equal members of a greater Spanish nation state. This difference was played out throughout the century in the peninsula's internal conflicts, but in part became resolved by stressing how different the Spanish concept of empire was to that of her rivals. Whereas the English were seen as being obsessed with economic exploitation, Spain was portrayed as employing a more civilized approach, seeking "to incorporate colonial subjects into the march of [End Page 231] European civilization" (p. 34). There was an attempt on the part of the Spanish simply to ignore the "division between colonizer and colonized" (p. 41), defining colonial history as a necessary part of the nation's history: neither colony nor metropolis could exist without the other. Thus following the final loss of the colonies in 1898, Spain continued to look to the Americas as a source of national identity even in their absence; and this was simply a continuation of the process following the Spanish-American revolutions, by which the remaining colonies proved central to the Spanish patriotic imagination.
In the second chapter, that most iconic of Spanish-American symbols—Christopher Columbus—is studied. Through the battles for ownership of Columbus's memory, he came to embody both sides of the contest for national identity in Spain's colonies. For the Spanish, Columbus was of great ideological importance both as the "starting point of Spain's narration of modernity" (p. 55), and as a representation of the "fraternal harmony between Spain and the Americas" (p. 57). Clearly this latter had become something of a forlorn hope, desperately clung on to against all evidence to the contrary, by the nineteenth century; and when in 1877 the Dominican Republic claimed that Columbus was in fact still buried in Santo Domingo, and had not, as claimed by the Spanish, been transferred in 1795 to Havana, the ensuing argument unleashed a fierce debate on "how best to represent the nation's imperial history" (p. 75). On the one hand Spain became very defensive concerning the "charges that the nation failed to commemorate Columbus properly"; while on the...