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The Suspect Whiteness of Spain Baltasar Fra-Molinero With Spain’s conquest of America in the sixteenth century and the extension of its military presence in the Netherlands and Italy, a political campaign in the presses of northern European countries against the legitimacy of the Iberian hegemony took the form of anti-Spanish political propaganda. One of the arguments northern Europe leveled against Spain and Spaniards was predicated on race. Northern EuropeanschargedthatSpaniardswerelessthanwhite,orinthewords of Sir Edmund Spenser, they were a “mingled nation” (91). The mixture of Moorish and Jewish populations with Roman and Germanic peoples throughout the preceding centuries created a perception of Spain as religiously suspect, its Christianity different and strange. This perception was contradictory, because Spain had been criticized since 1492 for its racial politics of exclusion. Early in that year, Islamic presence in Spain came to an end with the conquest of Granada on January 2, and the Jewish minority was given the choice of forced conversion to Christianity or expulsion on March 30. The annus mirabilis of 1492 can be considered the starting date of the whitening of Spain, an act of erasure of its diverse past. And like all acts of erasure, political acts of historical denial leave lasting social consequences. Spaniardshaveseenthemselvesaswhitesinceearlymodernity.The Atlantic slave trade that Spain and Portugal initiated in the middle of the fifteenth century received a decisive impulse after the conquest of the American territories and the exploitation of sugar cane and Baltasar Fra-Molinero 148 mining in the newly invaded lands across the ocean. With Spain’s and Portugal’s justification of slavery and conquest on religious grounds, a new concept of “race” developed in both countries that excluded from their native communities an ever-expanding number of other peoples. Statutes of “limpieza de sangre” ‘purity of blood’ spread in the sixteenth century with the foundation of the modern state, the first one in Europe. Blacks, mulattoes, and Indians were immediately marked as racially impure, together with Lutherans and descendants of Jews and Muslims. Since high office necessitated a thorough investigation into a candidate’s ancestry—the “pruebas de limpieza” ‘proof of purity’—being of old Christian stock and of a lighter skin became one and the same thing. Whiteness and Christianity were conflated. Race was religion turned biology. Whiteness became a default category in whichone’spersonalhistory—ancestry—tookasociallyrelevantvalue. Controlling one’s ancestry became a national obsession, and erasing entire branches of one’s family tree a generalized exercise in silencing the past. Purity of blood ceased to be a sociopolitical prerequisite in Spain only in 1869, when its empire was coming to an end. The loss of empire increased its sense of inadequacy as a “white” European country . The silence over personal ancestry was transferred to the Spanish colonial past with the early imperial losses of the nineteenth century. At the close of that century, the crisis of 1898—the Spanish-American War that resulted in Spain ceding Puerto Rico, the Philippine Islands, and Guam to the United States and abandoning all claim to Cuba— was for many a crisis of whiteness. Given Spain’s early relations to whiteness, the discussion that follows addresses the escalation and suspicion of modern Spanish whiteness. It then turns to the mechanisms by which Spanish filmmakers interrogate Spain’s national-racial identity since the end of General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in 1975, Spain’s instauration of a parliamentary democracy in 1978, and its 1986 incorporation into the European Union, the unofficial international club of white countries . Shaped from Richard Dyer’s theoretical definition of whiteness, the assertions that emerge herein target three areas of representation and symbolic social practice that constitute the changing nature of Spain’s national identity and its redefinition of whiteness. Spanish filmic exempla best illustrate three discernible social paradigms that The Suspect Whiteness of Spain 149 define and contest the suspect whiteness of Spain. The first exemplum relates to Gypsy identity, the second to Latin American and African immigration, and the third to the new sexual politics of the Spanish state under democracy, with its shifting redefinition of Spanish whiteness. The Oriental Within: Tourism, Flamenco, Gypsies, and Carmen For African-American writer Richard Wright, who traveled extensively throughout Spain in the 1950s while expatriating in southern France, Spain was decidedly non-European. In his travel book Pagan Spain (1957), Wright depicts a poor, Moorish, Gypsy, Fascist, Catholic country enamored of bullfighting, practicing strict segregation along gender lines, and curiously lacking a racial definition for a person like him...

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