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3. Hispanismo: Site, Heritage, Memory
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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61 Chapter 3 Hispanismo Site, Heritage, Memory The city of Quito is a precious jewel and spiritual fountain, a witness of the linkages between Ecuador and the renewal of Latin culture. Quito, without Gothic art, born for the future, must never let itself be defrauded by pressing modernity and must conserve for posterity the purity in which Latin America was formed and the spirit in which it was born. Julio [Giulio] Aristide Sartorio, 1934 Visitors to Quito in the 1920s and 1930s increasingly commented on the city’s majestic colonial architecture. This represented a marked change from nineteenth-century accounts, which often decried the city’s insularity or stressed the physical prowess of its indigenous population or the lack of basic services.1 This shifting discourse stemmed from a variety of causes. To begin with, activist municipal authorities vastly improved the city’s services and infrastructure during the early twentieth century, making it easier for tourists to look beyond the dusty streets and poncho-clad Indians to note the buildings and plazas through which they walked. Another crucial factor was an evolving global sensibility in the aftermath of World War I. Rather than seeking the energy of the teeming city centers of nineteenth-century progress, Western travelers began to embrace the primitive, the pastoral, the vibrancy of cultures unencumbered by the weight of modernity in such places as Mexico, New Orleans , or Italy. Quito, with its picturesque churches, red-tiled roofs, and unique location nestled in the heart of a dramatic inter-Andine valley, appeared as the quintessence of traditional Spanish America—a quaint idyll sought by nostalgic tourists eager to find traces of a simpler past. 62 \ Hispanismo The rhetorical association of Quito with Spain simultaneously drew upon a twentieth-century global movement known as Hispanism, which identified a common cultural raza between Spain and its former colonies; adherents of Hispanism believed that la raza’s spiritual purity would redeem the world from its current materialistic morass.2 By conceiving the city as a spiritual, administrative , and artistic center grounded in its Spanish heritage, Ecuadorian hispanistas attempted to situate the city’s history on the world stage, particularly with respect to its glorious artwork. The movement also sought to transcend local political differences through a unifying rhetoric that might supersede the traditional liberal-conservative and class divides. These political and social divisions were especially sharp during the economic and political crisis of the interwar years, an era that coincided with the greatest expansion of the myth of Quito’s Hispanic character. During this time, Quito’s Hispanists built upon an intellectual legacy with roots in the colonial period but that found its modern formulation in the historical and religious philosophy of the city’s archbishop, Federico González Suárez. Working with the institutional support of the National Academy of History, González Suárez’s students put aside regional and political debates to advance a scholarly vision of Quito and Ecuador firmly grounded in its colonial heritage. In so doing, they not only sought to heal the wounds of the Liberal Revolution but also attempted to limit the active expansion of the socialist and indigenist movements. Quito, as the local symbol par excellence of Spanish culture, became their canvas and their museum, a city to be revered and celebrated because of its redemptive qualities. By rehabilitating the city center, identifying and protecting its architectural marvels, and elaborating a complex web of Spanish cultural iconography, the city’s Hispanists invented a tradition of a whitened and legible Spanish city that, paradoxically, contrasted with its social reality as a burgeoning mestizo and indigenous space as the elite fled to chalets and villas on the outskirts.3 Postcolonial Diplomacy and Anxieties The early modern Spanish conceived the discovery and conquest of the Americas in biblical terms, seeing the hand of divine Providence in the glorious rise of the house of Habsburg. Millenarian visions of the new rule of Christ, foretold by the book of Revelation and by medieval scholars of renown such as Joachim de Fiore, likewise abounded. Hardened by the wars of the Reconquista , Iberians were emboldened by the feats of Cortés and Pizarro and clamored to participate in the great battle between the forces of good and evil. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has written, the Americas were viewed as a territory in the grip of the forces of Satan, whose conquest, while difficult, could lead to the establishment of a terrestrial paradise.4 This was to be...