Anti-Spanish sentiment

Anti-Spanish sentiment is the fear, distrust, hatred of, aversion to, or discrimination against Spanish people, culture, or nationhood.

Instances of anti-Spanish prejudice, often embedded within anti-Catholic prejudice and propaganda, were stoked in Europe in the early modern period, pursuant to the Spanish Crown's status as a power siding with the Counter-Reformation. The Spanish colonization of the Americas was also singled out as uniquely barbarous by some commentators. 20th-century Spanish historiography shaped the construct of "Black Legend" to denote such manifestations of prejudice, generally overplaying their reach and pervasiveness. The justification of the civil wars from which new republics emerged independent from Spanish rule in the Americas also partially relied on a hispanophobic discourse.

Within Spain, elements of stateless nationalist movements (such as Catalan, Basque, and Galician) competing with Spanish nationalism embrace anti-Spanish views and discourse.

History

"Black legend"

Main article: Black legend (Spain)

Early instances of hispanophobia arose as the influence of the Spanish Empire and the Spanish Inquisition spread throughout Europe during the Late Middle Ages. Hispanophobia then materialized in folklore that is sometimes referred to as the "black legend":

The legend first arose amid the religious strife and imperial rivalries of 16th-century Europe. Northern Europeans, who loathed Catholic Spain and envied its American empire, published books and gory engravings which depicted Spanish colonization as uniquely barbarous: an orgy of greed, slaughter and papist depravity, the Inquisition writ large.^[1]

La leyenda negra, as Spanish historians first named it, entailed a view of Spaniards as "unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, hot-blooded, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian". During the European colonization of the Americas, "[t]he Black Legend informed Anglo Americans' judgments about the political, economic, religious, and social forces that had shaped the Spanish provinces from Florida to California, as well as throughout the hemisphere".^[2] These judgments were handed down from Europeans who saw the Spaniards as inferior to other European cultures.^[3]

In North America, hispanophobia thus preceded the United States Declaration of Independence by almost 200 years. Historians theorize that North European nations promoted hispanophobia in order to justify attacks on Spain's colonies in the Americas. New Englanders engaged in hispanophobic efforts to assimilate Spanish colonies:

[I]n North America a deep current of Hispanophobia pervades Anglo-Saxon culture. ... As early as the late seventeenth century, we find Puritan divines like Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell studying Spanish—with a view to winning converts to their version of Protestantism. Sewell spoke of "bombing [sic] Santo Domingo, Havana, Puerto Rico, and Mexico itself" with the Spanish Bible, and Cotton Mather even wrote a book on Protestant doctrine in Spanish, published in Boston in 1699, intended for—as he might say—the darker regions of Spanish America.^{[4][better source needed]}

Nazi Germany

Main article: Nazi racial theories

For the Nazis, the psychology of the Spaniards deemed incompatible with the ideal Nazi Germans, particularly regarding their Catholicism.^[5] Also, Ottavio de Peppo noted that Spaniards' religious sentiments were useful to weaken Germany's position because of that contempt of the Nazis to the Spanish psychology.^[6] Hitler himself said that "All of Spain is contained in Don Quixote—-a decrepit society unaware the world has passed it by", because Spain was a stagnant nation dominated by three elements that Nazis detested; the Church, the aristocracy, and the monarchy, since Franco had promised a royal restoration. Hitler praised the Arab occupation of Iberia as "cultivated," while referring to the Spaniards themselves as "lazy" and of "moorish blood;" he also slandered the Catholic Queen Isabel, calling her "the greatest whore in history."^[7][8] The German writer Wilhelm Pferdekamp, published many hispanophobic articles, including one titled Afrika beginnt hinter den Pyrenäen ("Africa begins behind the Pyrenees").^[9]

In Europe

England

Further information: Spain–United Kingdom relations

Anti-Spanish sentiment in England is rooted in the historical rivalry and resulting mutual antipathy between British and Spanish empires.

Relations between England and Spain were not significantly hostile until the Age of Discovery and the rise of European colonialism in the 16th century, in which both countries' interests came into conflict following the European discovery of the Americas. Spain was the first European power to secure control over vast areas of the New World, and an outright antagonism soon developed with England as the latter pursued its own colonial enterprises in the Americas once economic benefits became apparent. The English Reformation encountered resistance from Catholics within the broader Counter-Reformation movement; Spain's status as a Catholic power as well as its opposition to the Protestantism led to anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic sentiments in England to go hand-in-hand for centuries to come. Conflicting religions and imperial ambitions, along other factors contributed in prompting both countires to seek leadership of opposing sides during major geopolitical conflicts in Europe and the Americas which led to multiple wars between England and Spain until the 19th century.

England employed corsairs like Francis Drake and John Hawkins to destabilize Spanish presence in the Americas by plundering coastal settlements. One of the main driving forces behind the Golden Age of Piracy was a deliberate attempt by England to undermine Spain's control over its possesions in the Caribbean, as well as to sabotage lucrative Spanish trade routes passing through the region. Spain intervened in favour of the United States during the American Revolutionary War, while Britain provided varying degrees of financial and logistical support to insurgents in the Spanish American wars of independence.

Despite a warming in relations from the 20th century onwards, issues such as disputes over the status of Gibraltar (which was annexed by Britain after the War of the Spanish Succession) still cause tensions between the two countires. A 2013 poll revealed that, regardless of the dispute over Gibraltar, 17,9% of British responents rated the relations between UK and the Spain as "bad", with 1,9% rating them as "very bad".^[10]

Americas

Depiction of Simón Bolívar signing the Decree of War to the Death against Spaniards in 1813

In the 19th century, the justification of the Spanish American wars of independence relied on blaming Spain and its legacy for all of the ills of the New World, with the remaining insignificant Peninsular and Canarian population in the new republics being subsequently harassed, extorted and eventually expelled.^[11] Various independence leaders had studied in Europe, coming into contact with Enlightment ideals that made them favour aspects of French Republicanism and British parliamentarism ranging from incompatible to directly hostile towards Spain's monarchy, which they saw as oppressive, backwards and corrupt.

Mexico

According to historian Marco Antonio Landavazo, anti-Spanish sentiment in Mexico is underpinned by basic ideas that are synthesized in the interpretation of the conquest as genocide, the identification of an intrinsically perverse character in the Spaniards and, therefore, the need for the extermination and expulsion of the "gachupín".^[12]

This sentiment, already extant in the 17th century, gained notoriety in the wake of the Mexican War of Independence (1810-1821),^[13] and was articulated from then on as one of the tenets of the Mexican national building, urgently pushed by elements of the political class of the young country, with the result of the hardening of the borders of its political community.^[14]

Thus, already towards the heights of 1810, an independence hero like the priest Miguel Hidalgo decried the Spaniards as "denaturalized men" moved by "sordid greed" and whose only god was money.^[15]

Throughout the 1820s, Spaniards were quantitatively insignificant (estimated by Harold Sims at 6500 people out of a population of about 6.5 million) but many of them―despite a certain heterogeneous social extraction shown in recent research―held an important influence in the economic, military and political elites of the First Mexican Republic.^[16]

Anti-Spanish sentiment gained momentum in the Mexican public sphere towards by the late 1820s, with decrees in 1827 and 1829 calling for the expulsion of all peninsulares residing in Mexico.^[17] In the context of a growth of Mexican nationalism, the preponderance of Spanish landowners and merchants in Guerrero led mulatto militias to murder several Spanish merchants in 1827 and 1828.^[18] Anti-Spanish sentiment was one of the causes behind the sacking of the Parián market in Mexico City in 1828.^[19] Anti-Spanish sentiment motivated twelve state expulsion laws published in 1827, three federal laws of December 1827, March 1829 and January 1833, and two decrees, in January 1833 and 1834.^[16] Two years later, the definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Mexico and Spain was signed.^[20]

This process resulted in the effective expulsion of almost half of the Spanish population from Mexico.^[16]

The murder of Spaniards—sometimes amidst cries of "death to whites", to "Spaniards" or to "gachupines"—lingered during the 1840s and 1850s in the countryside of the states of Guerrero, Morelos and Yucatán, spurred by the tension between Spanish hacienda owners and the impoverished indigenous peasantry, even though the behavior of the former did not differ substantially from that of the Criollo hacienda owners.^[21]

Although lesser in terms of casualties than xenophobic outbursts of anti-American and Sinophobic sign, anti-Spanish sentiment manifested itself during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, with slightly more than 200 Spaniards killed.^[22]

United States

Anti-Spanish propaganda depicting a dehumanized personification of Spain ('the Spanish Brute') in satirical magazine Judge (July 1898)

Upon independence, American Anglo-Protestant elites inherited a suspicion against Spain owing to their British colonial past. However, relations between the US and Spain were cordial, and Spain was initially well-regarded due to its support during the American Revolutionary War.

In the 1890s anti-Spanish propaganda was disseminated by outlets published by the likes of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, aiming to set the mood of the public opinion in favour of War against Spain.^[23]