Latino historians need new histories of the Spanish colonial period

I’ve been in Tucson and Santa Fe for the past week. As one does when here, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Spanish colonial period.

My grandma lives in Tucson in a house built during the mid-twentieth century, with some wooden beams that, if left untreated, could become a home for termites. Her pest control company is called “El Conquistador,” a name rich with dark ironies considering the service they perform. One of the shopping malls I spent a lot of time in as a kid is called “El Con,” short for El Conquistador. I didn’t realize, or didn’t remember until I was there this week, that the visage of a Spanish conquistador separates the “El” from the “Con.” The Hilton chain operates a resort in Tucson called “El Conquistador.”

On Kino Parkway, you’ll pass a fourteen-foot statue of Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Jesuit Priest who, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, oversaw the construction (by Indigenous people) of more than twenty missions in Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora.

I suppose it’s possible to drive through Tucson and not pay too much attention to these relics from, and superficial commemorations of, the Spanish colonial period. But if you look even a little bit, they’re really hard to ignore. They’re even harder to ignore in Santa Fe, where the Spanish colonial period casts a long shadow.

Between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, there’s Bernalillo, where you’ll find the Coronado Historic Site. The “New Mexico Historic Sites” page says it’s where the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado entered the Rio Grande Valley “with 500 soldiers and 2,000 Indigenous allies” and “found a dozen villages inhabited by prosperous native farmers.”

Santa Fe itself, inhabited by Pueblo Indians for centuries before the arrival of Europeans, was first occupied by Spaniards in 1598 with the arrival of Juan de Oñate, who led the massacre of hundreds of Pueblo Indians. It’s where the 1680 Pueblo Revolt took place, as a result of which the Spanish conquerors were forced south of the Rio Grande and didn’t return for more than a decade. When they returned in the early 1690s, they learned that at least some Pueblo Indians had continued practicing Catholicism in their absence.

Parallel histories shaped the whole southern rim of what is today the United States, from Florida to Louisiana, Texas to New Mexico, and Arizona to California. Spain was the colonial power that ruled over these places for some 300 years—not continuously or in the same way everywhere, but with long-lasting consequences, for sure. Latinos today still look back to this period when we describe the roots of Catholicism in our communities. Even those who highlight their Indigenous ancestry today argue that Spanish is a marker of Latino authenticity, which I’ve always considered curious since it’s the language of the colonizer.

But even though Latinos readily acknowledge that the Spanish colonial period has had important consequences, the stories we tell about that period barely scratch the surface of everything it meant. They’ve focused either on Spanish cruelty and the violent erasure of Native peoples and cultures, and Native resistance against it. Some Latinos talk about all the good Spaniards did; how they contributed to the “civilization” of lands and peoples across the continent. I’m reminded often of the store I wrote about in my first book, called Jácome’s Department Store. The store’s logo depicted a Spanish missionary preaching to a kneeling Indian, with a Spanish conquistador on horseback in the background. Store letterhead said something up top like, Fray Marcos de Niza in Arizona since 1539, Jácome’s in Tucson since 1896 (It has been awhile since I looked at it, so I might not have it exactly right). The store’s owner in the mid-twentieth century, Alex Jácome Jr., was proud of the fact that his store had one of the largest Spanish import businesses in the Southwest, selling furniture, jewelry, and much more.

These different responses to the Spanish colonial period can be seen in the response to the Juan de Oñate statue put up in El Paso in 2006. Many Latinos and Indigenous people hated the statue, seeing it as an abhorrent commemoration of a colonizer who was a genocidal maniac. They cut off the statue’s foot, just as Oñate cut off the feet of all Pueblo males over the age of twenty-five. Other Latinos loved the statue, seeing it as an important recognition of the area’s Spanish past that significantly revised the histories taught in schools about the region’s settlement by Anglo pioneers.

As important as these histories are, there are others we also need to know about the Spanish colonial period and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, Latino communities today. I’m writing a book about the whole sweep of Latino history. An important idea for me is that Latinos have always been both colonizers and colonizers, even though Latino history has been written largely as the history of a colonized people who have been victimized by the imperial expansions of Spain and the United States. My book is the reason I’m thinking about what new stories we might tell about the Spanish colonial period.

Latino historians in general should be in greater conversation with scholars of colonial Latin America. I’m including myself in this group. It’s not that conversations don’t take place at all, but I increasingly feel like the history of colonial Latin America needs to be much more central to the field of Latino history. Colonial Latin Americanists have written about the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples, how some of them bought their freedom and became the owners of colonial mines that contributed to Spain’s wealth, Black religious icons, the Sephardic ancestry of Spaniards in the Americas, notions of blood purity and the development of racial caste systems, the loyalty of Black and Indigenous peoples to the Spanish crown during Latin America’s wars for independence.

Some of my favorite books and articles on these subjects are:

Marie Arana, Bolívar: American Liberator (Simon & Schuster, 2014)

María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008)

Marcela Echeverri Muñoz, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780-1825 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Mariner Books, 2016)

Erin Rowe, “After Death Her Face Turned White: Blackness and Sanctity in the Early Modern Hispanic World,” in The American Historical Review (2016)

David Sartorius, Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Duke University Press, 2013)

Within the field of Latino history, I also like work by Ramón Gutiérrez (When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away) and Lisbeth Haas (Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936). Literature and cultural studies scholars like María Josefina Saldaña Portillo have also done great work; her book Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States is in many ways a model. But most Latino historians tell single, simplified, not particularly-nuanced tales about the Spanish colonial period. See, for example, Juan Gonzalez’s Harvest of Empire, and Laura Gómez’s Inventing Latinos.

I want to be crystal clear when I say that we shouldn’t two-sides Spanish colonialism, by giving the impression that there was a good colonialism and a bad colonialism; or insisting only that Latinos have made arguments in support of and opposition to the Spanish empire. But I do think it’s important to tell more complicated histories of the Spanish colonial period that help us better understand how complicated Latino communities are today.

My main questions about the Spanish colonial period that I hope could lead to new histories of Latinos include: Is there a way to acknowledge the basic fact of racial mixture that defines Latinos in a way that does not celebrate the national ideologies of mestizaje articulated in the early twentieth century? Is there a way of writing about the Spanish colonial period that helps us better incorporate Black, Indigenous, Jewish, Middle Eastern ancestry as central elements of Latino identity? Can we write new histories of the Spanish colonial period that help us understand legacies not only of violence and erasure, but also the capitalist desires, anti-Indigenous and anti-Black discrimination, and the religious and linguistic practices of Latinos today?

I really mean it when I say that I’d love to hear your impressions about the Spanish colonial period—everything from books I should read, the episodes and characters you think are important to consider, and your arguments about why and how it’s important to remember these histories. Please share your comments!

Also, I’m back! I don’t expect that you’ve particularly missed me, but I’ve been in New York recording a series of lectures for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, as part of a virtual class to be offered next summer on “The History of Latina and Latino People in the U.S.” Learn more about the class here (there are other cool classes being offered as well, including one by my colleague Kate Masur, on “America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction.”)