Columbus in 1892

The story of the nationalization of Spain's colonial past, of the lionization of the conquest and colonization of the Americas by the Spanish state and its cultural institutions, is protracted and complicated. For a long time, it was thought that it was only in the aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban- American War of 1898, when Spain had lost all of its colonies, that it turned to its colonial past for nationalist inspiration (Serrano, El nacimiento 245–329; Pike). In contrast to these opinions, Ángel Loureiro has remarked that “Spain has been haunted for two centuries by the specter of its former colonies” (“Spanish Nationalism” 65) and that at the end of the nineteenth century “Latin America is [already] seen by Spaniards […] as symbolic and material compensation for Spain's economic and political dejection” (69). Echoing Loureiro's concern with the place of the Spanish-American ex-colonies in the Spanish national imagination, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has recently argued, in The Conquest of History (2006), that Spanish patriots appropriated the history of the colonization of the Americas for their projects much earlier, since at least the mid-1820s. This recognition of the importance that the Spanish empire in the Americas has had for the nation-building process in Spain was long overdue. For this reason alone, Schmidt-Nowara's study is nothing short of groundbreaking; it attests to the existence of a patriotic imagination based on past Spanish colonization during the course of the nineteenth century by unearthing a series of largely unknown documents and by reinterpreting better-known ones. This recognition of the American empire's early symbolic importance for Spain's imagined community, however, has a blind spot: it assumes that the only possible way in which Spanish patriots related to the conquest and colonization of America was through its glorification for nationalistic purposes.

Although this is largely true, especially for the first half of the Bourbon Restoration (1875–1898), I argue that it is possible to rescue some alternative, critical visions of both past Spanish colonialism and the Spanish political community. Taking my cue from Schmidt-Nowara's insights about the political use of the imperial past, in this chapter I focus on the Columbian commemorations of 1892 in order to examine an important chapter in the Spanish state's appropriation of the symbols and figures associated with the early modern empire.