Much current activism, protest, and counterprotest question the foundations of race and nation. During times of strife and remarkable change, how does a multiplicity become one nation? What does that unity look and act like? Antonio Feros offers a long-term view of how ideologies of race, nation, and identity intertwined and were even precocious in Spanish contexts.
Feros begins with the familiar: 1492 as the pivotal year that “challenged the very notion of what was Spain and who was Spanish” because of simultaneous, discordant processes of internal unification and imperial expansion across many continents (1). The internal consolidation of 1492 was political and spiritual: the overthrow of the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, further fortified the political sway of Castile as well as the religious agendas of the forced conversion of Jews and the expulsion of all Muslims. Feros mostly presents a gaze from Spain outward (and inward), an important perspective obverse to Americas-centered studies of identity, race, and nationhood such as those of Alejandro de la Fuente and Tamar Herzog.
The multiplicities of Spain are geographic, social, and political. Feros carefully explains how the intransigence of autonomous regions in Spain loomed large at many junctures in the development of Spanish nationalism. Feros missteps, however, when he discusses early Iberia. He reasons that the dissected terrain of the Iberian Peninsula impeded communication, thus preventing regional unity. Small, independent polities therefore seem to be a “natural” state (inferences echoed in early modern climate theory) disrupted only by external forces. This perspective overlooks tremendous archaeological evidence of substantial long-term and far-flung communication networks as early as the Gravettian period (33,000 to 24,000 years ago) that shifted in their scope and tenor over time. People, not geography, decided the location of Iberian political and cultural boundaries. Early medieval Christian kingdoms were a solution for a historical moment that ended up having enormous staying power.
In the first chapter, “Spains,” Feros presents the prolonged contest between contrary visions of the nation and patria for all Spanish subjects. Was Spain their homeland, or was their true patria and nation their Spanish territory of birth, such as Catalonia, Valencia, or Castile? From a juridical-political standpoint that held until the nineteenth century, it was impossible for peninsulares to be a native of Spain or a Spanish citizen. These concerns about political identity may not be clear to a Latin Americanist, and Feros reveals the underlying reason: the Indies of Castile were open to all peninsular subjects, and subjects born there (creoles) were known from the beginning as Spaniards.
Early modern Spaniards did not possess a coherent vision of humanity as divided into radically distinct races, because, as Rebecca Earle has previously shown, medieval humoral theory thwarted ideas of permanent, embodied racial difference. Early debates centered on national discourses rather than scientific racism. Chapter 3, “The Others Within,” illustrates forms of Spanish discrimination against Jews and Muslims not only for religious reasons, but also from fear of biological contamination. Spanish construction of Indigenous Americans and Africans as inferior (Chapter 4, “The Others Without”) indicates the gradual emergence of a “proto-racialist” discourse in the Indies, distinct from Spain. The notion of a Spanish “race” (Chapter 2) informed a mythistory of a Spanish nation, pure in origin, cleansing, white, and European that developed in the eighteenth century (Chapter 6) and strengthened during the nineteenth century (Chapter 7).
Racial ideologies underwrote American independence movements and enforced a liminal state for people of African descent. Feros draws on multiple significant lines of evidence to argue that “race and nation were concepts linked from the outset and developed in conjunction with one another” (9). The Constitution of Cádiz (1812) invoked a civic definition of citizenship, a path to recognize and accept “ethnic and cultural differences and the right of various nations to decide their own future” (284). Feros offers a mirror for scholars to contemplate similar struggles in the past and today.
