Old Grudges, Pressing Challenges
In this column, Alfredo Toro Hardy explores the nature of Spanish and Portuguese colonization in America, and the reason why, while Hispanic Americans of today resent that past, Brazilians have no quarrel with it. Do these centuries-old grudges make sense when faced with so many pressing challenges today?
The fact that Portugal expelled the Moors in 1249, while it took until 1492 for the Spaniards to do the same, had fundamental consequences in relation to their possessions in America. In Spain, a continuum existed between the re-conquest of its own territory from the Moors and the conquest of its new American territories. The year of 1492 represented the end of the former and beginning of the latter.
In just about fifty years
As a result, the spirit of mission that had animated the Spanish life during eight centuries, simply moved to the other side of the Atlantic. No other European country without the sense of warfare and religious mobilizations, that prevailed in Spain, could have found the energy and the daring to take hold in a short period of time of such an enormous and inordinate geographical space. In just about fifty years, indeed, Spain subdued the indigenous populations, Christianized them, urbanized and populated the new territories, founded universities, put in motion a process of economic expansion, and created its ruling institutions.
During that brief period, the Spanish conquerors defeated war-oriented indigenous populations through most of the continent. This included the mighty Aztec and Inca empires. Meanwhile, their missionaries thoroughly evangelized the Indian populations. For that purpose, they had not only to master the different indigenous languages but also their meanings and symbols, as this was the only way to make their teachings understandable. After attaining its religious purposes, the missionaries simply discarded such knowledge as an expression of paganism.
Urbanization had been an essential part of the Spanish re-conquest of its territory from the Moors. Indeed, every advance upon them had to be consolidated by building cities and towns within a concept of expanding frontiers. Not surprisingly, urban-minded Spaniards brought the same approach to the Americas. Towns and villages would become the tools for consolidating conquered spaces and for integrating the hinterlands to the coasts.
Populating the newly founded towns implied bringing women from Spain. Much has been written about the solitary nature of the Spanish conquerors as the leading cause for miscegenation, with Indian women being the only females available to them. Undoubtedly this is truth, yet only to a certain extent. From the registered 45,327 Spaniards that came to America in the sixteen century, 10,118 were women. In other words, there could have been around 20 thousand married couples and around 25 thousand single men. Moreover, during the first quarter of that century, a third of all the arrivals were women. This entails, that half of the men could have access to a Spanish wife. (Maura, 2003; Martinez, 1983).
As early as 1538, the Spaniards founded the University of Santo Tomas de Aquino in the Dominican Republic of today. It was not only the first in the hemisphere but also amid the first fifteen within the Spanish world. This institution was followed in 1551 by the founding of the University of Mexico and that of San Marcos in Lima. When these universities came to life, a wide network of schools already existed throughout the region.
In 1545 began the twenty-year span in which the major mining discoveries in Mexico and Peru took place. They were to become large-scale operations that put in motion numerous interconnected economic activities. Workers needed housing and stores, while mines required masonry, winches, ladders and huge amounts of leather. Mules and horses were needed to move the bullion to mints and exporting coastal areas. Plantations and ranches had to be established to provide supplies to mining activities and to the emerging adjacent towns. And so on, amid a flurry of action.
To administer these territories, the Spanish created a centralized political structure. From Spain, the Council of Indies was responsible for the whole, while in America two main viceroyalties were created: New Spain (current Mexico) and Peru. These viceroyalties controlled smaller administrative units called audiences, which in turn had jurisdiction over governorships. From the beginning, then, a complex bureaucratic system was put in place.
Nothing remotely similar
Nothing remotely similar happened in Brazil during the same period. The fact that Portugal completed its war of re-conquest 243 years before Spain, had much to do with it. There was no connection between the re-conquest of their own territory from the Moors and the conquest and colonization of their American possessions. Moreover, while in the case of Spain an old sense of purpose was easily switched from its own land into its newly acquired transatlantic territories, Portugal had ample time to define different priorities. Naval exploration and international trade represented these priorities.
Beginning with the islands of Azores and Madeira close to Africa, the Portuguese would keep pushing south through the coasts of West Africa. Along this descendent route they establish a system of slave and ivory trading posts, without inland colonization. In the late fifteenth century, they had discovered a sea route to the East around the Cape of Good Hope. In 1510, they founded the colony of Goa in the western coast of India. A few years later the Malacca peninsula (current Malaysia), became the strategic base for its trade expansion towards South East Asia, China and Japan. Subsequently, they built fortified settlements in today’s Indonesia, seeking to control the spice trade. The Portuguese Empire of the East, with its capital in Goa, included possessions in all of the Asian sub-continents.
The Portuguese had thus a global reach unknown to the Spaniards (whose sole Asian possession was The Philippines, which became a simple extension of its American Empire through its galleon trade with Mexico, inaugurated in 1565). But whereas the Spaniards had their American possessions under a firm grip, Portuguese were highly vulnerable in their over expanded territories. The Dutch, through their East India Company, were responsible for providing the blow that in a few years seized most of the Portuguese possessions in Asia.
While the attention of Portugal was elsewhere, Brazil was of minor concern for them. There, they would replicate their experience in the western coasts of Africa: Establishing isolated trading posts along the coastal areas, without aiming at inland penetration. These first five decades, in which Spaniards were making deep inroads into their own American territories, was a period of absolute neglect for Brazil. As a result, impoverished Portuguese settlers were left to their own devices.
Through an old indigenous practice of incorporating strangers into their own tribes by way of marriage, these settlers became assimilated into the indigenous populations. Taking as many “wives” as possible implied, by extension, widening their network of relations with different local tribes. The result of this process was a polygamist society in which the multiple offspring of the settlers, ended up being much closer to their Indian mothers’ way of life, than to their European fathers’ one.
Speaking in the Indian Tupi language and living under primitive conditions, the descendants of the first Portuguese settlers became a troop of rough adventurers, much closer to plunder than to production. Armed with rudimentary military tools, this amalgam of Europeans and Indians transformed themselves into a human-hunting society. Their aim, indeed, was to capture and enslave Indians with the purpose of selling them. This happened, basically, in the current state of Sao Paulo.
After depleting the coasts from their human preys, Portuguese and their offspring began making inland raids that were to become more and more ambitious and predatory. Preceded by banners, they gathered into huge groups that for extended periods of time raided the inland territories. The enslaved Indians, for which good prices were fetched, became their main commodity of trade.
The main buyers of this human merchandise were the planters of north-eastern Brazil. Indeed, this other pole of Portuguese settling took shape further north along the coasts of Brazil, where sugar plantations began to emerge. It was undoubtedly a more civilized society, where production and not plundering was the goal.
When France proclaimed its right to take possession of any non-occupied part of Brazil, the Portuguese Crown was forced to react. In 1549, Portugal appointed its first Governor General in Brazil, with base in Salvador de Bahia. With sugar exports, later followed by precious metals, generating increasing revenues, and Crown authorities exerting a larger role, Portuguese America became a much more structured society.
Eventually, it would end up catching Hispanic America in this regard. Moreover, at the end of the colonial period, Brazil surpassed its Spanish American cousins in terms of institutional strength and territorial cohesion. The reforms introduced in Brazil at the end of the eighteen century, and the fact that the Crown move there for more than a decade as a result of the Napoleonic invasion of Portugal, were responsible for it. Hence, if at the beginning of the colonial period Spaniards greatly surpassed the Portuguese in terms of providing structures to their American territories, at the end of that period the Portuguese outshined them.
Rear-view mirror
What both Spanish and Portuguese had in common, though, was their utter lack of curiosity in relation to the indigenous populations that they found in America. The Portuguese were harsher towards them than the Spaniards, whose laws provided the indigenous people with a more humane treatment. However, the Spaniards’ behavior was more censurable given the extent of its overall destruction. While the tribes that inhabited Brazil were certainly affected, they did not undergo the erasure of their civilizational legacy as the Mayas or the Incas did at the hands of the Spaniards. A civilization legacy, whose scientific knowledge (particularly in astronomy) and many of its cultural traits, represented significant contributions to human knowledge.
Not surprisingly, nowadays resentment against Spain is substantially deeper in several Hispanic American countries, than it is in Brazil towards Portugal. Brazilians, indeed, don’t have a quarrel with their colonial past, whereas Hispanic Americans do. This explains the reason why Spanish King Felipe VI was conspicuously not invited to the inauguration of Mexico’s new President Claudia Sheinbaum, or why a few years ago Mexican former President Lopez Obrador demanded formal apologies to the Spanish Crown for the destruction of their indigenous civilizations. This explains, as well, why in the last few decades the statues of Columbus have been taken down from their pedestals in so many cities of Spanish America. For several of their countries this remains still an unresolved contention.
The question to be asked is if these centuries-old grudges make any sense today? Several reasons explain why not.
First, colonization in Latin America was not a superficial phenomenon like in India, Africa or South-East Asia, where white colonials ruled over a local population with which they did not mixed. To the contrary, Hispanic Americans of today are the direct descendants of the Spaniards they so much complain about. As towering Spanish writer Ramón del Valle Inclan rightly answered to a grumbled Mexican, almost a century ago: You must be complaining about your forefathers, because mine never left Galicia, my province.
Second, resentments derived from living memory events, such as those of nowadays Chinese and Koreans against the Japanese, are understandable. However, harboring them for events that took place five centuries ago looks completely overblown.
Third, historical events like the mentioned one must be contextualized within their own time and prevailing idiosyncrasy, as otherwise few figures and processes would survive current judgement, i.e., Washington and Jefferson would not be able to overcome today’s categorization as slave-holders.
Fourth, selective historical judgement is by its own nature fallacious, i.e., emphasizing the destruction caused in the Americas by sixteen century Spaniards, while ignoring that nowadays’ Hispanic Americans are mostly the product of the rich cultural inheritance that they brought with them.
Fifth, historical grudges can become never-ending affairs, i.e., if the Spanish king was not invited to Mexico’s presidential inauguration, neither should have been American, French or even Austrian authorities. Indeed, under President Franklin Pierce the U.S. took half of the Mexican territory, under Napoleon III France invaded Mexico, and, under Emperor Francis-Joseph, Austria bequeathed Archduke Maximilian to usurp power from Benito Juarez.
Sixth, scapegoating the past can become an easy way out for many of Hispanic America’s current unresolved problems.
In sum, every nation or region must acquaint its own history in order to understand its particular character, including strengths and weaknesses. However, becoming hostage to the past transforms itself in an important energy consuming burden. When Hispanic America’s five centuries-old grudges are put in context with the post-WWII European integration process, or the post-Vietnam South-East Asia’s integration one, they look derisory. If countries that until not so long ago were submitted to recurrent cycles of violence and mistrust, forged future-oriented communal institutions like the E.U. or ASEAN, how to justify Hispanic America’s fixation with what happened half a millennium ago?
Hispanic Americans have countless challenges to confront. These go from defeating drug traffic to strengthening their own institutions and democracies, from coping with huge economic inequalities and unresolved social problems to accessing new technologies, from attracting foreign investments into key economic areas to preserving their own ecosystems. No doubt about it, they should be focusing ahead and cease, once and for all, to look obsessively at the rear-view mirror.
Alfredo Toro Hardy, PhD, is a retired Venezuelan career diplomat, scholar and author. Former Ambassador to the U.S., U.K., Spain, Brazil, Ireland, Chile and Singapore. Author or co-author of thirty-six books on international affairs. Former Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at Princeton and Brasilia universities. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations and a member of the Review Panel of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.
Photo by Nadejda Bostanova
References
Matinez, José Luís (1983). Pasajeros a Indias, Viajes Trasatlánticos en el Siglo XVI. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
Maura, Juan Francisco (2002). “Adelantadas, virreinas y aventureras en los primeros años de la conquista de América”. Revista de Literatura Española Medieval y del Renacimiento. Número 6.
