Are you feeling super Hispanic? Cuz it’s Hispanic Heritage Month— yay?
Why are the “Hispanics” like this? Let’s do a deep dive.
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Grab your Mexican street corn, hard shell tacos, and spa water cuz it’s our time bb! And by our time I mean the one month out of the year where we get recognition in the US.
I recently did some deep dives on Fiestas Patrias, which are Latin American Independence Day celebrations, for POPSUGAR but I went a little too crazy on the research. Here is what didn’t make it in.
You can read the original article here.
It’s super interesting to see what was happening economically in the Spanish colonies and how that was the true driver of revolution. But is it really a revolution if the same people stay in power? Criollos (white Spaniards born in the colonies) are still in power to this day.
When Latin America began to liberate itself from Spanish rule, New Spain (Mexico) and Peru were the epicenter of the Spanish empire importing and exporting goods back and forth from Spain, the Caribbean and the Philippines. Spain would even distribute goods for other countries. Although we learn in school that the Spanish were a commanding force within the global economy, which is true, it’s been pointed out by scholars that Spain was incapable of maintaining control over its colonies due in part to the ever shifting inconsistencies in its own structural and economic policies.
Countries like England, Holland, and France had developed their domestic economies before branching out into colonialism. Not being totally dependent on colonial production meant they were protected from pirates, smuggling, and natural disasters that resulted in economic losses. (Did you know: The British actually paid pirates not to attack them and had certain days when they could pass unharmed?) Because Spain and Portugal had underdeveloped domestic economies it forced them to rely too heavily on their colonies. Eventually, King Charles III started cracking down with trade restrictions in an attempt to gain full control of the illicit trade circuits that had formed over centuries in the Americas.
Too often American (meaning North and South America) history is remembered from the ideological perspective of “fighting for freedom” and the “enlightened” ideas of Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire and Montesquieu, as opposed to the economic demands of the Elite minority that didn’t want to pay taxes or be governed. France, Great Britain, and Spain were all fighting to control trade routes, ports, and resources while at the same time criollos in the colonies were trying to avoid paying taxes.
Criollos were fed up with Spanish royals and elites giving preference to “peninsulares” (Spaniards living in the colonies born in Spain). They were furious that they couldn’t hold certain positions in society because they were born in the colonies. And criollos were concerned with the erosion of their privileged status within the casta system hierarchy. The last straw for criollos were the tax reforms imposed by the Spanish Bourbons (a wealthy class of elites and royals). The reforms included more exploitation of resources, establishing state monopolies, increased taxes, and allowed the opening of new ports that would trade only with Spain.
Much of what influenced the formation of fiestas patrias in Latin America had to do with the criollos post colonial effort to direct the cultural narrative shift from loyal colony to independent nation. A new story needed to be told in order to continue the story of the Americas. According to Rebecca Earle’s article: “'Padres de la Patria" and the Ancestral Past: Commemorations of Independence in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America,” civic festivals present the state's official view of itself. It’s where they get to decide what is of national importance. For criollos this meant inventing a tradition that instated them as heroes while at the same time creating a shared national identity narrative. In the words of British historian Eric Hobsbawm, criollos sought to create "a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seeks to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” In other words they knew they had to use culture as a way to instill their values and indoctrinate the lower classes.
It comes as no surprise that Indigenous, African and Asian histories have been removed from criollo versions of the past. Today, Latin American origin stories are still under debate, the question being if they were “birthed by conquest” or by the pre-colonial period. This Hispanic Heritage Month let’s remember why we’re actually here, not cuz of “freedom” but because of genocide, greed and taxes.
Thanks for this investigation of history, Yvette. What a mine field of misdirection and misconceptions history can be. Still, sometimes we learn as much from the misdirection as we do from the facts, although I shudder to think about how much history has been lost thanks to those would conceal perspectives that could undermine their authority.