Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS): Digital Commons
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Review of James Matthews ed. Spain at War: Society, Culture, and Mobilization, 1936- 44
Full text linkThe Spanish Borderlands Revisited: Engaging the Public in Relating the Place of Spain in U.S. History
No full textFelipe Fernández-Armesto recounts a wonderful anecdote at the start of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2014). Standing before a room of young cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Fernández-Armesto invited audience members to identify the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in United States. No student recognized San Juan, Puerto Rico. Last fall, I witnessed the same question and answer scenario play out among a community of Latino leaders in Denver. Fernández-Armesto’s experience and mine point to the absence of Spanish history as it pertains to the history of United States. This reality owes to several factors, some of them popular and others historiographical. In my paper, I seek to explore of the historiography associated with this phenomenon and offer some useful pedagogical correctives.
Peninsular exceptionalism and an overly national focus have yielded unfortunate consequences that extend well beyond the academy. The failure of historians of Spain to engage with Spanish history on a broader level has confined the legacy of Spanish colonization and settlement of the Americas to Latin America and separated national narratives on both sides of the current U.S.-Mexico border. Historical legacies as diverse as Spanish involvement in the American Revolution and Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean and its relationship to U.S. imperialism remain largely misunderstood or ignored. The disengagement of norteamericanos with the legacy and continued connectivity of the United States with Spain and the Spanish-speaking world has wrought a lack of understanding, which manifests itself in everything from public calls for Latino Americans to more thoroughly assimilate to political discourse surrounding the border wall.
The historical profession has been riven by silos for generations. Graduate-level instruction in history and the academic job market in general have served to reinforce often meaningless boundaries between continents and peoples. As a U.S.-based historian of Spain trained in the United States, I have come to realize that my focus often has been far too European in its outlook, granting attention to peninsular history over the reach of Spanish culture and society in the wider world. My recent involvement in the “Borderlands of Southern Colorado” project, launched by History Colorado, has opened my eyes to the geographic narrowness of “Spanish” history.
To this end, I call for the community of U.S.-based historians of Spain to reengage with the concept of borderlands history. In 1921, Herbert Eugene Bolton published The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest. A revival of the borderlands concept began in 1970 with John Francis Bannon. During the 1980s, John L. Kessell and David J. Weber broadened the parameters of study. More recently, the past twenty years has witnessed an explosion of written work in this same field that has deepened the saliency of Spanish history to the making of modern North America. This scholarship has retold the history of a “Renaissance Spaniard” in colonial New Mexico, recounted Spanish exploration of the Southwest, uncovered the long-term significance of Spanish conflict with Native peoples, and shifted scholarly analysis of slavery in the United States westward to confront the legacy of Spanish empire. In every case, the scholars working in this field have engaged with new historical voices and reevaluated the positionality of Spanish actors. Their work offers insights for better comprehending the broad sweep of Spanish history and presents new and exciting opportunities for teaching and future research
Madre y Matríz: The Politics of Town-Making in Cordoba, 1887-1905
No full textSpain can be difficult to place in contemporary discourses about the economic global north or global south. This ambiguity has a pointed history in moves by European actors on the Iberian Peninsula. In the late nineteenth century, the House of Rothschild expanded their investment portfolio via the mining and rail industries of Andalucia. This paper sifts the results of these activities that produced the rural industrial and mining village Pueblonuevo del Terrible in northern Cordoba province. Drawing on the scholarship on transnational company towns and place making, the essay explores the actions of local miners and shopkeepers that created this municipality. Documents reveal a protracted struggle over numerous issues: the power to draw political boundaries, the Catholic character of Spanish life, the place of migrants in the community, and the status of land-ownership. The parties to these disputes relied on a gendered language of family, especially the notion of a matríz, a founding, original settlement, in order to ground their sense of place and belonging. Over time, however, the language of family broke down and hobbled the political process in Cordoba. The foreign mining company largely disappeared itself from the debate and, finally, in 1905, the administration in Madrid ruled in favor of creating the new town. The essay suggests that the achievement of town status marked a crisis of politics and political meaning as much as it did a successful effort at place making by everyday Spaniards at the peak of international industrial capitalism
Review of Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean
Full text linkReview of Margarita Torremocha Hernández, Cárcel de mujeres en el antiguo régimen: Teoría y realidad penitenciaria de las galeras
No full textReview of Sarah Finley, Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Full text linkTown and Country: Connecting Late Medieval Castilian Urban Experience with Sixteenth-Century Colonization of the Americas
No full textUrban government and the foundation of new towns are fundamental to understanding Castilian expansion from the eleventh-century conquest of Toledo to the sixteenth-century conquest of Tenochtitlan. The economic, social, religious and military connections between town and territory relied on a broad framework of institutions and laws as well as monarchical intervention. The result in Castile was the emergence of an original urban model of secular construction and proven political success to ensure control of territory and to govern heterogeneous populations. This Castilian model influenced the America’s urban systems, given its proven ability to control and defend territories. In fact, the Spanish kings favored transplanting this model, which linked town and country, to the colonies. These municipalities could ensure the sedentarization of the settlers, enable the settlers to govern minority communities, and allow the settlers to occupy effectively the newly conquered lands. Though the American Urban systems created during the sixteenth century included different types of cities – such as pre-Hispanic hubs, ports, vice regal courts, and mining cities, in every situation, municipal governments prioritized the links between town and country taking advantage of previous experience in Medieval Castile. This article focuses on late medieval Castilian urban experience and its application to the Americas to advance the study of urban behavior at the beginnings of the modern age. In the process, the article calls for a re-periodization of Spanish and Spanish American history by demonstrating the continuity between two chronological periods that have long been divided by the watershed events of 1492. The article also compares aspects of urban systems in both Spain and America during sixteenth century in order to identify reciprocal influences and thereby underscore transatlantic connections
Undergraduate Research, Student-Student Mentoring, and Student-Faculty Collaboration in a DH-Intensive Seminar on Early Modern Spanish Cities
No full textThis article reveals strategies, resources, and experiences from this newly designed Spanish undergraduate seminar that responded both to students’ request for program diversification as well as personal interest in training Spanish majors in the application of digital humanities software programs to analyze, examine and visualize early modern Spanish cities
Mediating Memory: Mass Grave Recovery and Digital Culture in the Iberian Peninsula
No full textThe large corpus of digital and social media on the Web pertaining to the recuperation of historical memory demonstrates how present-day Spaniards continue to grapple with events stemming from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. In an ever-connected world, there is, not surprisingly, a wave of media inundating the Spanish public that focuses on the recovery of victims from mass graves in the Iberian Peninsula. Digital media and its various modes of dissemination encourage the constant updating of information and provides producers of digital materials and users of social networking sites the means to constantly renew conversations about the recuperation efforts. By cyclically publishing digital texts online that show the rituals and commemorations pertaining to the ongoing reburials, contemporary Spaniards keep the physical sites of memory alive by broadcasting the repeated rituals of exhumation and inhumation as the identification of remains continues. Blogging, website building, and participating in social media circles generates local and regional online communities centered around memorial rites. This article studies the types of media being produced regarding the recuperation of mass graves (photographs, videos, social network site data), how that media is disseminated to contemporary audiences through weblogs, and social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr), and analyzes the performative rituals of searching and reburial, as represented in digital texts. Digital productions allow families and communities of survivors—both physical and virtual communities—to highlight the process of locating the disappeared. The consideration of different genres and modes of representation surface a pattern of ritualistic practices that advances from the search for the missing, to the exhumation process, leading to the reburials and culminating in commemorations honoring the victims.
The array of multimedia elements containing rituals of reburial and commemoration disseminated through the Web give a polyphonic voice to community efforts. Geographic Information Systems (GIS)—also referred to as digital mapping platforms—lends the ability to layer a variety of multimedia elements onto a digital cartographic interface. Thick mapping efforts convert a purely geographic space into a place by imbuing the topography with memories and histories. This article will also discuss how Virtual Cartographies layers data acquired from the Spanish Ministry of Justice of mass grave locations alongside a robust collection of multimedia texts directly related to specific gravesites in order to give depth to spaces of mourning and share various ritualistic practices. The deep layering of multimedia elements lends insights into the histories surrounding the topography. In the case of the exhumations, a thick map that combines information about the geography with digital texts about the spaces, contextualizes the processes undertaken by individuals and communities around the disinterments. By inscribing gravesite locations with the testimonies, videos, narratives, articles, radio program, social network groups, etc. about the exhumations, Virtual Cartographies contributes a thick map that gives depth to spaces of mourning, while creating a framework for analyzing the exhumations and mourning rituals