In the more than five hundred years of Western expansion, scarcely another imperial history has stirred up as passionate a dispute as that of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Long-standing and acrimonious, the beginnings of this dispute can be traced back to the beginnings of the Spanish Empire itself, when Bartolomé de Las Casas painfully recounted some of the horrors of colonization in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), a book that decisively contributed to the international condemnation of Spanish history known as the “Black Legend.” The Latin American Wars of Independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century were also an occasion to stage bitter criticisms of Spain's New World empire, as was the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898.

In contrast to these passionate critiques of imperial history, nineteenthcentury Spanish leaders generally regarded sixteenth-century imperial achievements with pride, which resulted in early twentieth-century intellectuals having to deal with a series of ambivalent, emotionally charged images of the conquest and colonization of the Americas in their attempts to reimagine a post-empire Spain. More recently, on the occasion of the 1992 celebrations of Columbus's first voyage in 1492, Spain's cultural and political establishment claimed the glory of those events for itself, transforming them into proof of Spain's modernity and its deserved integration into the European Union. In response to this move by the Spanish government, Nicaraguan poet Gioconda Belli penned an article entitled “Porque aún lloramos” [Because we are still crying], where she recounts the pain evoked by the conquest and colonization. She wrote that for her, “esta discusión a pesar del tiempo transcurrido […] aún no ha trascendido el plano de lo afectivo” [this discussion has not transcended the emotional plane {…} despite the time elapsed] (64).

Is the role of emotions in the historical controversy over the conquest and colonization of the Americas as central as Belli claims? Or are they crucial only to the colonized peoples and to those who claim their heritage?

The answers given in the following pages argue that emotions (in addition to epistemological and political reasons) have played and continue to play a central role for all of the parties involved in this historical dispute.