“Aquellos neófitos indios, chinos o anamitas”: Asia and the Imperial Imaginary in Doña Luz

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Spain’s uneasy transition to modernity was met with the precipitous decline of empire that culminated in the loss of its remaining colonies, known as the Disaster of ’98. During this period politicians and intellectuals alike attempted to grapple not only with Spain’s diminished imperial power, but also Spain’s national identity predicated on intra-national politics of race, gender, class, and regional difference. While there is no shortage of studies that examine nationalism in fin-de-siglo Spain, there has been a tendency in literary criticism to overlook nineteenth century projects of Spanish imperialism—mostly notably in the Philippines.¹ The object of the present study is to recover Spain’s colonial intimacy with the Philippines in order to advance a more nuanced understanding of how the trans-Pacific circulation of people, objects, and ideas were important in conceptualizing domestic categories of identity in the face of imperial decline.² To this end, I examine Juan Valera’s regional novel Doña Luz, which reveals how anxieties around Spanish national legitimacy in relationship to Asia transpire.³ Read through the lens of empire, I argue that Doña Luz renders the Philippines a toxic space and a threat to the health of the modern nation.

Doña Luz (1879), written during the early years of the Restoration, is a seldom studied but exemplary text for examining modern imperialism because it showcases two important colonial figures: a missionary priest stationed in Asia and a war hero from the Spanish-Moroccan war.⁴ Set in 1860 in an imaginary town in Andalusia, Doña Luz tells the story of a beautiful but illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat who struggles to repress her desires for el Padre Enrique, and eventually marries the war hero Don Jaime. While at first glance the colonies do not appear to be central to the propulsion of narrative, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that the traces of Asia and Africa (with the evangelization project in Asia and the Spanish-Moroccan War looming in the background) set the imperial backdrop of Doña Luz’s search for identity as she moves through her relationships from missionary to soldier. Though scholars have identified the narrator’s colonialist and orientalist depictions of Doña Luz, none have critically explored the racialization of the novel’s Spanish protagonist (most notably as a neophyte Indian, Chinese and Anamese woman) who ultimately struggles to be pure. The novel’s focus on Doña Luz’s shameful status as a bastard child, in conjunction with her own obsession with chastity and hygiene, speaks to Spain’s larger problem of negotiating racial identity and the future of the modern nation in the context of imperial crises. Central to my discussion on race, gender, and class is the unique Spanish concept casta (caste) and its various semantic permutations including casta/o (chaste) castizo/a (of good origin). In this light casta has the potential to signify race, gender, and class not as discrete entities, but interlocking categories of identity that are articulated through one another. As we shall see in the novel, illegitimacy and race hinge on this very concept of purity as casta.

Typical of Juan Valera’s female characters dishonorable origin in the novel becomes the object of psychological fixation that disturbs the protagonist’s sense of self and blur her rank in society (Smith 804). Living within the margins of her father’s class, Doña Luz wields a dangerous, ambiguous power. This is because she is simultaneously casta (chaste and opposed to sensuality) but not castiza (of good origin and without mixing) (DRAE). Like so many other nineteenth century Spanish heroines, on various occasions the narrator describes her as chaste, clean, and pure. She is even purity incarnate: “Doña Luz era en todo la pulcritud personificada” (Valera 56).⁵ This desire to be pure and clean is motivated by her familial stain:

La misma impureza de su origen, el vicio de su nacimiento, la humilde condición de su...