In 1995, Barcelona, Spain, announced the creation of a new, 11th district of the city.

This District 11 wasn’t carved out of Barcelona’s 10 existing districts. In fact, it wasn’t within or anywhere near city limits. It was 1,000 miles away. District 11 was the Bosnian capital city of Sarajevo, then under siege by Serb forces, who shelled the city for nearly four years, killing thousands of civilians.

Three decades later, the wartime Barcelona-Sarajevo partnership endures as a model of the mutual aid and close connections cities will need to forge if they are to survive a 21st century of climate change, pandemic, and nation-state violence.

Barcelona and Sarajevo together demonstrated that the best way for cities to help each other in times of conflict is to eschew the bitter political arguments of the moment—and instead focus on what cities do best: emergency response, aid to neighborhoods, planning, and building.

Today, cities around the world are debating about how, and whether, to respond to global conflicts, especially the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Some localities have chosen to stay out of faraway wars, on the theory that it is not cities’ job to conduct foreign policy. Other localities have jumped in, declaring their support for a cease-fire, often on terms preferred by pro-Palestinian groups.

Both approaches have proved counterproductive, fueling conflict instead of solidarity.

Cities that tried to duck the debate over declarations have faced disruptive protests and boycotts for perceived callousness. In my own small Southern California town of 26,000, a so-called “progressive” group, angry that our council decided not to entertain a cease-fire motion, launched social media campaigns accusing council members of supporting genocide.

Meanwhile, those cities that consider cease-fire declarations have become bitterly divided, especially since declaration debates are often accompanied by antisemitism and harassment. And even when localities manage to adopt cease-fire declarations, they find that the statements have little real-world impact on the faraway people and places suffering from war.

That’s why the story of Barcelona’s 11th district deserves more attention now. Rather than just debating or issuing a declaration, Barcelona activated its people, its governments, and its resources to assist Sarajevo as if it were a Barcelona neighborhood, with Barcelona’s own people suffering under attack. Through the years of the war, Barcelona’s District 11 intervention provided humanitarian aid, including money, food, and medical supplies, to Sarajevo.

Why did District 11 come about? Barcelonans felt a close connection to Sarajevo, for several reasons. For one, Barcelona was preparing to host the Summer Olympics in 1992, and some local officials maintained working relationships with counterparts in Sarajevo, which had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. For another, residents of Barcelona, a diverse and freewheeling city, felt a cultural affinity for Sarajevo, a melting pot with no majority ethnic group and a tradition of tolerance. And Sarajevo, like Barcelona, was part of a province that had sought to achieve greater autonomy and independence from its central government.

Then, on May 17, 1992, the young photojournalist Jordi Pujol Puente—who came from Catalonia, the autonomous region of which Barcelona is capital—was killed in Sarajevo while covering the fighting.

The tragedy inspired a public outpouring in Barcelona. In 1994, Barcelona reinforced its support for Sarajevo with a written agreement pledging to reconstruct the war-damaged city and establish a Local Democracy Agency in the Bosnian capital.

After the war and siege ended in 1995, Barcelona and its provincial government expanded its support, by coordinating the rehabilitation of the Mojmilo neighborhood and rebuilt Olympic installations and a school.

In 1998, Barcelona and Sarajevo extended their agreement to include support for culture and sports, expand programs for youth, and promote business cooperation between the two cities. In 2000, Barcelona and Sarajevo signed a “twinning protocol” that made them, effectively, sister cities.

The Barcelona-Sarajevo partnership has ebbed at times, but never ended. In 2022, city leaders reinvigorated it, with 30th anniversary events and new bilateral agreements to work on university collaborations, sustainable development, gender policies, social policies, cultural policies, the green economy, youth programs, and peace initiatives.

I learned the story of District 11 during a recent visit to Barcelona to attend the first-ever local democracy festival, organized by ALDA, which was founded in the Balkans during the 1990s. ALDA has grown into the leading creator of collaborations between local governments and civil societies in Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa. It is expanding its work further into Africa, and into South America. A Barcelona official attending the festival told me that the city is working to assist Ukrainian municipalities damaged or occupied by Russia and has been increasing its spending on humanitarian aid for Gaza.

Back in Los Angeles, where I work, the city council is engaged in a divisive debate about a cease-fire resolution in Gaza. I find myself wishing that L.A., and other cities, would stop arguing about Israel and Hamas, and instead provide more direct support to municipalities suffering from war.

Los Angeles and its leaders might even follow Barcelona’s example. Adopt a couple cities (say, Rafah in Gaza and Kharkiv in Ukraine) as L.A. neighborhoods, and rededicate some of the money budgeted for L.A.’s 2028 Olympics for current aid and future reconstruction.

The post How Cities Can Help Other Cities in Wartime appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the beginning of Society of the Snow, Spain’s entry for Best International Feature Film for the upcoming Academy Awards, there is a scene in a Catholic church in Montevideo, Uruguay, where a priest can be heard stating that “Man does not live by bread alone.”

It’s the first indication that the film, about the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes, will be centered on the spiritual and explicitly religious dimension of the experience.

The story of the crash is, at this point, ingrained in the Uruguayan national memory: In October, 1972, a rugby team from Montevideo and their friends and family boarded a flight from Uruguay heading for a match in Chile. Severe weather in the Andes led the pilots to make a fatal mistake, clipping the top of a mountain and shearing off the plane’s wings and tail section, sending part of the fuselage sliding into a ravine. Of the 45 people who boarded the plane, only 16 survived 72 days in subfreezing temperatures before being rescued.

When the news broke in Uruguay that some passengers survived, reporters called what happened both “a tragedy and a miracle.” But after the survivors arrived safely in Chile, journalists started asking questions about how they lasted more than two months in the bleak environment without food. Papers in Chile and other countries blasted headlines of “cannibalism” across their front pages and printed stories insinuating that the “stronger” survivors overpowered and killed the weak, and that group solidarity had quickly devolved into selfishness and domination.

Only when the survivors made it home to Montevideo did one of them, Alfredo Delgado, finally address the accusations during a press conference. He framed it in religious terms. Amidst the silence of the mountains, he said, he and the others felt “the presence of God.”  Making a direct analogy to the Catholic Eucharist, he continued, “If Jesus at his last supper had shared his flesh and blood with his apostles, then it was a sign to us that we should do the same—take the flesh and blood as an intimate communion between us all.”

According to journalist Piers Paul Read’s book Alive, which inspired an earlier 1993 movie about the crash, what followed was stark silence—and then spontaneous applause from the audience. Back home among their fellow countrymen, Delgado and the others could speak honestly.

I was in the old city of Montevideo the weekend Society of the Snow premiered there, and I spoke with a number of people who had seen the new film, which was playing throughout the city. I was curious about their response to a new representation of an incident that is so well-known to all Uruguayans.

“At the end of the movie, people in the theater were crying,” Maya Smeding, a student at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, told me. “Uruguay is a small country and one of the important messages of the film is that if we don’t come together as a people, we cannot accomplish what we need to do.”

Sandra Henry, a landscape designer from Montevideo, was 12 years old when the crash occurred. “When I saw this movie, I understood with my soul what went into the choice they made,” she said.  “It was a human feeling that they needed to survive and return to their families.”

During my stay in Montevideo, I also visited the Museo Andes 1972, which is dedicated to the crash. Opened in 2013 and self-funded by Uruguayan businessman Jörg P.A. Thomsen, the nondescript museum is snuggled among the 19th and early 20th-century neo-classical and art-deco buildings that are common along the city’s narrow streets.

The Museo Andes 1972 exists for the survivors, but also to commemorate those who didn’t come home. “Some of those on the plane were rugby players,” said Thomsen, “but many were not. Many were Catholics, but others were not. Most were men, but Liliana Methol, who died in the avalanche, played a wonderful and important role.”

Thomsen told me that he wanted to document the story of what happened because it “says something positive about the Uruguayan national identity.”

Still from Society of the Snow (2023). Courtesy of Netflix.

In addition to the pictures, newspaper articles, and artifacts from the crash site held in the museum’s three floors are tools the survivors crafted out of the wreckage to survive. They turned shards of aluminum into water spouts to melt snow to drink and sewed cloth from the airplane seats into gloves and snow shoes. Insulation from the tail of the plane was sewn into a large sleeping bag that two of the men used on their ten-day trek over mountain peaks in search of help.

Their ingenuity, when menaced by the deadly cold, reminded me that there’s a connection between tool-making, survival, and the imagination. “To me,” Thomsen said, echoing Henry’s comment, “a key to their survival was knowing how their families would suffer if they did not return.”

Touring the museum, what seems to be left after more than 50 years is not condemnation or second-guessing of each other, which was common enough during their ordeal, but the solidarity and love that the survivors and those who died had demonstrated.

I finally watched Society of the Snow for myself when I returned home from Uruguay to Los Angeles. In the very first shot, the camera moves across a slate of vacant whiteness in the Andes, a suggestion that viewers, like the survivors, have the obligation to create our futures out of the emptiness that we will at times confront.

Uruguayan cinematographer Pedro Luque later told me he struggled with the fact that in a vast white landscape, visually determining distances was unreliable. “It was abstract because of the vastness of the landscape that entrapped them like a giant monster,” he said. “But at the same time, the whiteness allowed us to create striking compositions like Japanese calligraphy with simple but powerful visual strokes.”

If snow-bleached distances were abstract, living close to one another is what brought the survivors’ moral visions into focus, as they struggled to live after seeing their friends and relatives die.

Society of the Snow lingers on these spare moments, where survivors try to make sense of their extreme situation, and struggle to define what their values actually are, and how to make them real in their behavior toward one another.

In one of the scenes, Arturo Nogueira, who did not survive long enough to be rescued, explains that for him, God is not an abstraction but is present in the friends who try to keep him warm or bind his wounds.

I thought of a little red shoe in the museum that was brought back from the wreckage and donated. Purchased as a present for a relative’s newborn child, the survivors gave one shoe of the pair to anyone who was going on a dangerous search expedition with the idea that they would be sure to bring it back—a talisman of strength, memory, and return.

It’s still hard to imagine that this story took place, but it did. Society of the Snow’s director J.A. Bayona has spoken about it as a film about understanding that you and the other are the same, and about supporting one another for collective survival. He recently told the Buenos Aires Herald: “If you have the strongest legs you will walk for us, and if you need my body to survive, I will give it to you so you can return home.”

Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan has written that if man does not live by bread alone, it is only because “bread is never alone.” The survivors of the 1972 crash have all asked themselves why they were spared, but also the unavoidable question of why the others were not. I think that Society of the Snow provides one among the many possible answers: They shared a faith in one another.

The post A ‘Tragedy and a Miracle’ in the Andes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This month marks the anniversary of one of the many atrocities of the last century carried out in the cause of nationalism. On Monday, April 26, 1937, less than a year after dissident Spanish generals launched a coup d’état against a democratically elected coalition government, German and Italian airplanes bombed Gernika, in the Basque Country of Spain.

Within a week, Pablo Picasso commenced the mural-sized painting— “Guernica,” using the Spanish rendering of the Basque town’s name—that now stands as the exemplar among artists’ public opposition to war.

There was no military reason to bomb Gernika. No barracks or munitions factories of significance were to be found there. Nor was the town on the front lines. Politically, people identified it with Basque culture and independence. Attacking it was the equivalent of targeting the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, but not the navy yard to the south of the city. The strike, which destroyed more than half of Gernika’s buildings and killed hundreds of its citizens, was conceived cynically as a testing ground for the tactic of the blitzkrieg, or lightning war, that Germany would deploy with stunning success two years later when it invaded Poland and ignited World War II. In the aftermath of Gernika, terror from the air would come to define modern war. So, too, would total war—conflict in which military forces made no distinction between soldiers and civilians.

In a class I teach on “Guernica” and antiwar art we spend the semester wrestling with the question of art’s efficacy. What can it do in the realm of politics and war? We know that art can be the handmaid of power, and that it can make such power appealingly seductive. It can serve the cause of subjugation as easily, and earnestly, as that of liberation.

At the same time, art wields no direct power. It controls no budgets, enacts no legislation, commands no troops. Humans control these things. Humans start wars. Only humans can stop them. To expect artists or works of art to do this is both naïve and unrealistic. It misunderstands art, and it also simplifies history.

Paradoxically, antiwar art’s lack of actual power is its power. It provides means for us to enter into the maelstrom of war, to register its broad sweep of destruction—cultural, economic, physical, and psychological. How? Through imagination. Picasso did not witness the bombing of Gernika. He read about it. Then he found the form to bring audiences to the event. In doing so, he gave them a way of perceiving and understanding the destruction, albeit indirectly.

In celebrating Picasso’s achievement, we tend to forget the press of events and the stakes of political tension in Europe during the 1930s. With the memory of World War I still fresh, the continent knew that another would be every bit as traumatic, if not more so. No wonder artists took sides. In a decade marked by the intense politicization of art, some artists, both in Spain and across Europe, willingly embraced fascism; Picasso was among many cultural workers who opposed the fascists and aligned themselves with the left. Following the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso joined the Communist party and remained a member until his death in 1973. He embraced the communist directive that art was a weapon in the war with fascism.

Picasso conceived and designed “Guernica” for the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in Paris with the clear notion that it would elicit empathy and support for the beleaguered Popular Front government desperately fighting the fascist insurgence. Depicting combat through traumatized women, a dead infant, a decapitated soldier, a wounded horse, and impassive bull gave animal presence to vulnerability and violation. The distortions of the female bodies—with limbs awkwardly thrust into space, hands and feet swollen, and mouths open in screaming agony—was a forceful means of bringing audiences into the space of trauma. With a palette reduced to black, white, and gray, the painting was easily reproduced, and thereby was known globally.

Initially, “Guernica” didn’t enjoy the burnished reputation it has today. It worried some critics who targeted the painting’s apparent ambiguity, noting that its imagery fell somewhere between personal symbolism and overt propaganda. Was Picasso again exorcising personal demons in a cubist style understood, and appreciated, solely by cognoscenti?  Was he really willing, or even capable, of serving a cause beyond himself?  To be fair, without the painting’s title, or its inclusion in the pavilion, it was not necessarily clear that Picasso was addressing a particular event, or even the Spanish Civil War.

Not that that really mattered, in retrospect. The power of the painting is evident in the many examples of antiwar art that followed “Guernica”, sometimes through direct quotation, other times in continuing its exhortation to witness and to condemn state violence. Consider the work of David Smith, Leon Golub, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, Martha Rosler, and Coco Fusco, among so many others.  The legacy is long and impressive.

Why do we still think of “Guernica” now? Because war remains with us—and has even returned to Europe. And because the painting, and works like it, continue to challenge perspective and consensus.

My students are living proof of this challenge. In a recent class, we discussed the canonical presence of the painting in any consideration of modern art, especially that conceived for public places, as well as its ongoing relevance in regard to militarism, elitism, and imperialism. Some students noted that the United States often articulates its identity through its martial past. Our visual culture is suffused with stories of sacrifice, heroism, and triumph on the fields of battle, from the War of Independence to the War on Terror. Such imagery creates pressure to embrace and perpetuate tradition. Antiwar art is a reminder that the responsibility of citizens is to exercise independent judgment—even and especially when this means challenging dominant sensibilities and proscriptive histories, not to mention nationalist mythologies.

Other students told me they see the subject and style of “Guernica” as evidence that art need not exist within an ivory tower.  It might be something other than a manifestation of individuality, or a commodity with market value. Art belongs in the polis where it can contribute to public debate.

Still others in my class read the painting through their experiences as first- and second-generation Americans. The history of the Spanish civil war reveals to them that Spain was not only a colonial power with a troubling history in Africa, the Americas, and elsewhere. It also suffered violence at home. Spaniards treated their countrymen with the same disdain as they did their colonial subjects. “Guernica” exposes the so-called monolith of the West as something more complicated and diverse than might be acknowledged, or admitted. In turn, this suggests that there is still much to be learned from and admired within the Western tradition—without, of course, ignoring its long and devastating presence around the globe. Studying Picasso’s painting reveals that it now speaks to broader histories and experiences than he could have intended or anticipated.

“Guernica” is also a lesson in civics. The painting didn’t halt the march of fascism, or of war. But it demonstrates that art’s awe and wonder—its creativity, insight, and inspiration—can communicate individual dissent, and that dissent, in and of itself, can hold great power.

Think of it as a way of casting a ballot in public, with fellow citizens knowing exactly how you voted. In an age when we are too easily manipulated by rhetoric and half-truth, accountability and transparency are a salutary public tonic. We need more such art.

The post ‘Guernica’ Did Nothing—Which Is Why It Still Matters appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Provocatively deemed “The Spanish Holocaust” by historian Paul Preston, the Spanish Civil War—a conflict, extending from 1936 to 1939 that resulted in the repression, torture, and death of hundreds of thousands of people—weighs heavily in Spain’s collective memory. The traditional narrative of the war, asserted by the victorious dictator Francisco Franco, held that Franco and his Nationalist forces defeated an oppositional leftist coalition, the Republicans, to restore Spain to its past greatness. This interpretation of events remained essentially unchallenged in Spanish popular memory for decades, aided by censorship and repression during Franco’s own rule from 1939 to 1975, and by informal and institutionalized practices of later governments.

The Nationalist narrative persisted because Spanish authorities stifled any and all opposing memories of the war, silencing the stories of the hundreds of thousands of Republicans killed and exiled during and after the war, as well as those of the estimated 114,000 Republican victims whose fates remain unknown today. That is, until these narratives re-emerged at the turn of the 21st century, brought to light by Emilio Silva, a journalist and human rights activist whose grandfather, who identified as a Republican, was murdered in 1936 by Nationalist forces and tossed in a ditch.

Silva’s search for his grandfather both literally and figuratively unearthed long-silenced stories of the war’s brutality and revealed the myriad of tensions related to Spanish memory. His efforts, along with countless others demanding Spain and those who perpetrated Spain’s bloody past to confront this violence, have opened up avenues to negotiate more equitable and democratic memories today.

There is arguably no better example to illustrate the triumphs and challenges of Silva’s and others’ labor than the evolution of the Valle de los Caídos, or Valley of the Fallen (referred to here as the Valley), a contested site of memory in a mountainous region overlooking Madrid, the capital city and a strategic battleground during the Spanish Civil War.

Franco decreed the erection of the Valley on April 1, 1940, the one-year anniversary of the Nationalist victory over the Republicans. Hoping to honor his notion of the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and “to further the memory of the fallen in our glorious Crusade” for “a better Spain,” he ordered the construction of a basilica, a cemetery, and a cross extending 150 meters high and 47 meters wide in the Cuelgamuros Valley. Nearby stands El Escorial, a UNESCO site that houses the remains of Spanish kings dating back to the 16^th century, speaking to a sense of royalty that Franco ascribed to this memorial.

Upon the opening of the Valley on April 1, 1959, Franco relocated the remains of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a fascist leader killed during the Spanish Civil War, to the center of the basilica, honoring him with the only engraved tombstone at that time. When Franco died of natural causes in 1975, he, too, received a ceremonial burial with tens of thousands of people mourning at the Valley, as he was lowered into his dignified resting ground.

The almost 20-year construction of this monument to Nationalist glory and Republican defeat relied heavily on the labor of Republican political prisoners. They had to work above and around the bodies of deceased fellow Republicans—an estimated 33,000. Franco had ordered these victims’ remains to be exhumed from elsewhere and dumped under the spot where he built the new memorial. The Valley is a mass cemetery, yet without any signage or interpretation acknowledging these victims, the site continually reinforces amnesia of Republican memories.

In the generation following Franco’s death, the Spanish government preserved this intentional silencing of Republican narratives, institutionalizing forgetting through efforts like the 1977 Amnesty Law, which barred Spanish Civil War perpetrators from domestic prosecution. Yet while Spain refused to judicially confront its own violent past, its courts served as a global leader of universal jurisdiction. In 1998, former Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón issued an international warrant for former Chilean right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, illustrating transnational penal accountability. Ironically, when Garzón sought, ten years later, to bring charges of crimes against humanity committed during the Franco dictatorship, he was promptly convicted of a heinous crime and disbarred from his judgeship, a conviction that still holds today.

Emboldened by Garzón’s stance, non-state actors in Spain increasingly spoke out about reconciling past human rights violations in their own nation. As individuals and through organizations, hoping to create a more just society, Spanish citizens began to act.

Emilio Silva led the way. A trained journalist, Silva sought to write about his family history as he learned about the repressed Republican memories held on to by those who have suffered decades without answers to the whereabouts of their loved ones. Speaking to community members and discovering scant archival records, Silva came to learn that his grandfather might be buried in León. When Silva wrote an article for a local newspaper in 2000 entitled, “My Grandfather Was a Disappeared, Too,” it broke the decades-long silence about Republican loss. Immediately, the article connected Silva’s story to those of thousands of other families in Spain searching for loved ones disappeared, forgotten, and silenced during and following the Spanish Civil War. Volunteer archaeologists and anthropologists came to assist Silva, eventually finding an unmarked mass gravesite and exhuming Silva’s grandfather and 12 other previously disappeared victims of Franco’s forces.

In the 22 years since, Silva’s triumph has spurred hundreds of exhumations, many of which have been spearheaded by the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), or Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. ARMH, founded and led by Silva, advocates for the state to dedicate more labor and resources towards righting the wrongs of Spain’s past and prioritizing the victims of Franco’s terror and repression over the hagiographic memory of Franco himself.

Since its genesis, ARMH has fueled a new Spanish memory landscape rooted in civil society activism—the efforts of people on the ground rather than edicts from their iron-fisted leaders—that combats the political polarization that has mired Spanish memory activism. ARMH holds elected officials accountable to do more to actively confront and reckon with Spain’s bloody past. It works directly with local social networks to finance and resource reconciliation and exhumation processes, collecting testimonies from around the world to pinpoint loved ones’ last known whereabouts and resting grounds, and serving as a nexus for volunteers specializing in anthropology, history, digital media, and other disciplines to provide additional documentation of life for disappeared persons. ARMH’s grassroots actors have circulated petitions to the Spanish government to condemn Franco’s regime and to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to insert Spain into global human rights dialogue; have created community empowerment outreach programs to raise awareness about the past while bringing suffering families together; and have supported exhumations of forgotten victims of the war throughout the nation, driving Spain to rewrite and rebalance its memories of the past.

Individuals and organizations who contest monolithic state-created and state-sustained narratives create broader, more inclusive tellings of complex pasts. By amplifying voices previously silenced, they prioritize human rights and help societies reckon with and learn from past atrocities. They legitimize the identities, legacies, and memories of all people in society—not just those with the power to dictate how the past has been remembered and forgotten.

This is apparent at the Valley of the Fallen. ARMH’s front-line activism has been integral to reinterpreting the site to work toward memorializing both sides of the war. In 2007, ARMH’s demands to resignify the Valley manifested in the Historical Memory Law that specifically bans any shows of support for Franco and his fascist ideologies within this site of memory. ARMH continued to fight so that, in 2018, this law expanded to limit the burials of the Valley to those who died during the Spanish Civil War, calling for Franco’s exhumation. The leader’s body was exhumed and reinterred at El Pardo-Mingorrubio cemetery in October 2019, now resting next to his wife, his regime officials, and former Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Most recently, ARMH has spoken out about the passing of the Democratic Memory Law, legislation that holds the state fiscally responsible for searching for and identifying victims from the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. While this law makes huge strides in condemning Franco’s regime, ARMH “criticizes” this law for not going far enough, denouncing the legislation for failing to eliminate the 1977 Amnesty Law, failing to support or compensate families of the disappeared, and failing to pursue justice against Nationalist perpetrators. ARMH remains committed to fighting for national reconciliation that asserts the state as culpable and responsible for locating, exhuming, and reburying Republican victims and prosecuting those who perpetrated crimes.

Today, the Valley represents a more democratic site of memory as the battle to exhume and return unidentified victims from this space continues. While thousands remain buried underneath the basilica, their stories and memories are slowly becoming unburied.

The post Unburying Franco and the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No, I always said. It sounded like a ploy for tourist dollars. And besides, I wasn’t even sure I could prove my connection.

My parents were born in Mexico and fled north to California in the U.S. in 1914 and 1930, respectively, during the Mexican Revolution. Like many Mexican Protestants, they suspected they had originally descended from Spain’s banished Jews—a vast Sephardic diaspora that extended from China to India to the American West that began with the Edict of Expulsion, the 1492 charter that told hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the Spanish Kingdom to convert, leave, or be killed.

No one spoke of this history, really. I first learned of it at the age of 9, after I read all of the Old Testament and told my mother I wanted to be Jewish. We were, once, she told me—or rather, our ancestors were. But now we were Protestant. It was years before I patched it all together and connected my family’s story with the Inquisition’s legacy. Eventually I began writing about my family and the hidden Jews of Mexico, as families like mine are sometimes known—a group who often practiced Catholicism, but never quite belonged.

The citizenship offer was announced in 2015, and set to expire after three years. As the window began to close, my son, then 28, said, “We should do this.”

“What?” I said. “Why?”

“It’s EU citizenship.”

I thought about this. I had visited Spain but had never really considered a move there. At the same time, since 2016 we had been living in a United States where, every morning, we’d been greeted with a new atrocity committed by our own government against immigrants and the children of immigrants, including those from Mexico, part of a population recently portrayed as murderers and rapists. The atmosphere was threatening to get worse. Spain and the European Union looked progressive, in comparison. My son, a software engineer, was already a citizen of the world, having traveled all over, working with colleagues from Silicon Valley to Poland, and backpacking through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and all over South America. “It will be fun,” he promised. “We will do it together.”

So I agreed to apply.

It seemed, at first, like a manageable process. Get a few documents together, brush up on my Spanish, and study for a citizenship test—the same things required of people seeking citizenship in the United States, plus proving my Jewish background. The amount of paperwork turned out to be massive. Everything had to be translated into Spanish by a translator certified by the Spanish Government. Everything had to not only be notarized, but recognized by the equivalent of notaries in Europe.

We needed our birth certificates and our driver’s licenses. We needed the state of Washington to attest that we had clean criminal records for the last two years—no easy feat, I was to learn, as numerous copies of my fingerprints were rejected for review by the FBI, time and again, because they were considered illegible. I needed copies of my marriage certificate from Colorado. I needed to learn grown-up Spanish, as opposed to my vestigial childhood Spanish, and pass a rigorous, three-part test. Everything cost money. Everything took time.

I also had to establish my direct descent from specific individuals who left Spain under duress during the Inquisition—proof that needed to be documented with papers recognized by both the Jewish Council of Spain, a group of rabbis who represent the present-day Jewish communities in Spain, and the Spanish government. I would need to list names of people in my family—father to son or daughter, mother to son or daughter, a direct, unbroken line—all the way back to someone who had fled Spain. Many people who escaped the Inquisition took on new identities to board ships to the Americas, and kept those new identities in the New World. How, I wondered, did they expect us to have legal proof of descent after hundreds of years of clandestine existence?

Most of what I know of my family’s distant past I’ve learned since 1992, the 500th anniversary of the Inquisition. For the milestone, I wrote a piece for the literary journal the Raven Chronicles, where I had the opportunity to interview an elder in Seattle who I hoped would be able to tell me more about the Sephardic community there. When I arrived at my interviewee’s home, the dining room table was covered in old photos. Isaac Maimon, a retired greengrocer, told me about his years teaching Ladino, a Jewish dialect of Spanish, at his synagogue. His father had been the first Sephardic rabbi in Seattle. Mr. Maimon had immigrated with his family from Turkey as a 13-year-old at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and grown up in a vibrant community of Jews from Turkey, Greece and the Isle of Rhodes. He had strong feelings about Spain; he might forgive the country for what it did to its Jewish citizens, he said, but he would never forget. As we spoke, his wife was kneading and rolling dough in the kitchen, which had a Dutch door into the room where we talked. This allowed her to join us as she baked, and kept Mr. Maimon, an Orthodox Jew, from being alone with a woman who was not a relative.

Before I left, I told him that there was speculation in my family that we, too, were descended from Spanish Jews. Immediately, he began to grill me on family customs. Did we light candles on Friday night, a telltale remnant of Shabbat observances past? Did we play cards, a way to study Torah without having the actual texts? Did we have any documents or objects—a menorah or mezuzah—that might hint at Sephardic ancestry? To acknowledge the 500-year anniversary, Sephardim all over the world, he told me, were sharing antiques or relics that linked them to their Spanish past. Some people even had keys to the homes their ancestors left behind in Spain, as though this would all blow over and they could return in their own lifetimes.

Everyone, it seemed, except the Jews of northern Mexico and New Mexico, who said, “thank you very much, but we are happy the way we are”—in other words, hidden. Catholicism is still strong in Mexico, and even after 500 years people feel that they could hurt their business prospects, or endanger themselves, by openly declaring their Judaism. It has become more than a habit or an affectation. After so much time, a way to stay alive is a way of life.

Unlike some families, ours did not have any old artifacts. My mother’s family had moved constantly while she was growing up. My father’s family walked north with what they could carry. All we had were stories and strings of names.

We were going to have to dig to confirm a Jewish past. At first, an acquaintance of mine who specialized in Mexican Jewish genealogies told me that we could submit a simple report from a genealogist, summarizing the evidence of our ancestry. She referred us to a woman in Spain who did such work; she merely noted a couple of the surnames on my family tree, that there were Alcalás and Gutierrezes in Spain who had also suffered under the Inquisition—gruesomely, I might add—and that it was reasonable to believe we were their descendants. But by the time we received the “report,” the Spanish Government was no longer accepting such documents as valid proof. The connection had to be spelled out generation by generation, name by name.

Over the years various relatives had passed along family trees of sorts, but I felt inadequate to trace the connections between people who all shared the same few names, over and over. An ancestor at the top of the chart had been married four times. We turned next to an American genealogist who specialized in the history of Northern Mexico. He mined the records of the Mormon Church, who collect genealogies for religious reasons, but make them available to everyone.

He also found a privately published book that told the stories of Spanish settlers of Monterrey and Saltillo, Mexico, and provided photos of church records from the Cathedral in Saltillo that provided proof of our descent from one of four particular individuals—people recruited to Mexico by the famous Luis de Carvajál, a governor of the Spanish province of Nuevo León, who was himself later sentenced to death by the Inquisition in Mexico. These four were mysteriously able to board ships without the mandatory background checks attesting that they were of good Catholic backgrounds. It was the first time I had heard the names of the specific people in my family who left Spain for what was, to them, a New World. Even now, I can barely look at their names without feeling a bit shaky.

The citizenship process, for us, culminated in a trip to Málaga, Spain, moments before the pandemic broke out in Europe. There, we visited a notario (a kind of legal officer with more power than notaries in the U.S.) to witness our signatures on piles of official papers, after which he affixed his own signature and seal. Only then could our application, along with those of more than 132,000 other descendants of Spanish Jews, make its way to the Spanish government.

Just over a year later, we are now waiting to hear back. If everything is approved, we will visit the local Spanish Consular in the Seattle area to receive our passports and our citizenship. I have mixed emotions about this subject; because I can afford the time and money to pursue Spanish citizenship, I feel that I am claiming privilege when what I want to claim is justice. I know my feelings will continue to evolve as world events unfold. I also identify as a descendant of Opata Indians from the Sonoran Desert. I have taken an active role in recovering that culture in recent years, another case of land stolen and people who deliberately hid their identity in order to survive. No story takes precedence over any other, of loss and recovery, of conqueror and conquered, or of exile and return.

As my son and I wait to hear if we will be granted citizenship, it is easy for me to ignore the larger questions. We have a new administration, and the existential threat hanging over our heads has abated. My relationship with Judaism has evolved over the decades, and this seems to be one more step in the process. As I talk to others with dual citizenship or multiple ethnic, cultural, or religious identities, I see that they are comfortable in this in-between place, called nepantla in Uto-Aztecan. I am by nature oriented to place as a way of being, but I have come to understand that I should never take it as a given. As my ancestors fled for their lives or were driven off their land, I should be prepared to pull up roots and relocate if I have to. At the same time, I should also be prepared to defend my place, and that of others, in the world.

The question before me remains: After an absence of 530 years, will Spain feel like home? Or just another diaspora?

The post My Jewish Ancestors Fled Spain. Will Returning Feel Like Home—Or Just Another Diaspora? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California is an orphan of a state, and Monterey’s beginnings are the closest thing we have to a birth story. Admission Day—September 9, 1850, when California became an American state—doesn’t really amount to a birthday, since California was a province of two other countries, Spain and Mexico, long before that. Other birthday options are problematic, too. We can’t know the exact day, thousands of years ago, when native peoples arrived. And 16th- and early 17th-century Europeans (like Sebastián Vizcaíno, who gave Monterey its name) didn’t stick around long enough to establish much.

So the closest thing we have to a moment of birth is probably June 3, 1770. On that day, Junípero Serra, California’s controversial and cruel saint, held Mass and Spanish military Capt. Gaspar de Portolá planted the Spanish colors in Monterey, which would become California’s first capital—and most enduring place.

A quarter-millennium later, Monterey, for all its rough history, is often dismissed as too precious, and too much a place apart. But the same has been said about California. Indeed, the peninsula city—by serving both as a hideaway enclave and an open door to the world’s diverse peoples—has become an emblem of the state.

“Monterey was California’s experiment,” writes Dennis Copeland, the city of Monterey’s museums, cultural arts, and archives manager. “Monterey today represents California’s past, present, and future.”

Indeed, Monterey has a special ability to keep its past alive and connect its story to California’s future.

The famous—and famously brutal—mission system began in San Diego in 1769, but Monterey’s mission, at Carmel, would become the headquarters. In 1776, Spain declared Monterey the capital of its Alta California colony—inspiring the creation of other Spanish settlements in the late 18th century, including San Jose and Los Angeles.

Monterey survived a brief 1818 attack from—of all countries—the newly independent Argentina (its revolutionaries burned the presidio, stole what they could, and left). The Mexican government took over from Spain in 1822, and Monterey remained the provincial capital. Mexico also designated Monterey an official port of entry, making it a center of trade and commerce and California’s first “front door,” according to the late local historian J.D. Conway.

In that role, Monterey changed the world’s perception of California—from a feudal Spanish frontier backwater into a highly desirable destination. “The cosmopolitan atmosphere created by the international trade helped make Monterey a hotbed of liberal thought,” which produced elections and local self-government, wrote Conway in his terrific 2003 history, Monterey: Presidio Pueblo and Port. California’s tradition of political revolt got its start when Montereños rebelled against a series of provincial governors who were seen as favoring Mexico City’s needs over their own.

Monterey was where the Americanization of California began, with Commodore John Drake Sloat’s peaceful conquest of the city in 1846, and the establishment of the first American fort. In 1849, Monterey hosted the convention to produce the state constitution that California would use to muscle its way into the United States in 1850.

In the decades after statehood, a misguided conventional wisdom held that Monterey no longer mattered. Sure, the place suffered some indignities. Legal chicanery allowed a land baron to steal 30,000 acres. Santa Cruz, fueled by its American prejudice against the more Mexican Monterey, formed its own separate county. And in the 1870s, Salinas stole Monterey’s status as the Monterey County seat through a corrupt bargain that allowed the city of Hollister to make itself the seat of its own breakaway county, San Benito.

Despite these blows, Monterey—a global-facing, Spanish-Mexican-Catholic city—kept on prospering. Its sleepy reputation reflected the ignorance and bigotry of the rest of California, which was growing more Anglo, more nativist, more Protestant, and more violent towards native peoples than the missions had ever been. “California’s change from a Hispanic culture to an Anglo-Protestant culture made Monterey appear to be out of the mainstream,” Conway wrote.

Monterey quietly kept welcoming people: Chinese fishermen, Portuguese whalers from the Azores, even wealthy tourists who came to stay at Charles Crocker’s Hotel Del Monte. Artists arrived to form colonies, while marine scientists made camp to study the bay and the ocean. Waves of migrants from Sicily, Spain, the Balkans, Japan, and the Dust Bowl formed communities and businesses that local boy John Steinbeck would make famous in Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.

In the 20th century, Monterey kept making itself the capital of new things. As the state grew interested again in its Spanish heritage, Monterey mined its own history and architecture to become the Adobe Capital of California. Monterey’s fishing and canning innovations also made it become the Sardine Capital of the World. And in the century’s second half, Monterey cemented its reputation a capital of tourism and cosmopolitan cool, with the establishment of the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958 and opening the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984.

Monterey’s embrace of military training and education facilities, especially for the study of foreign languages, has paid huge dividends. The Navy’s Postgraduate School found a home at the old Del Monte Hotel, and the military’s Defense Language Institute grew up at the Presidio of Monterey, spinning off the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Taken together, these institutes have allowed Monterey to host a cultural festival that celebrates it being a Language Capital of the World.

In all this, Conway, the local historian, saw a civic “schizophrenia”; Monterey, like California, clings to its past while relentlessly seeking out future new identities. That two-sidedness has made the city difficult to govern. Locals have fought for decades over water, growth, and downtown redevelopment.

But Monterey’s ability to remain so attractive and alluring—over these 250 years—also holds an important lesson for Californians: size and political power are not what make a city great. Instead, it is the places that truly welcome strangers, that collapse time and space, that connect us to history and the future, that remain worth celebrating.

I’m sad that COVID-19 forced the cancelation of the 250th birthday party Monterey spent two years planning for itself. But you can still honor the occasion the next time you visit the peninsula. First, savor the views from Lower Presidio Historic Park, where a native village once stood, where Vizcaíno landed in 1602, and where Serra and Portolà got things started in 1770.

Then wander over to San Carlos Cathedral, one of oldest buildings in this state, and say a prayer that California, and its real capital, will still be around to celebrate in another 250 years.

The post Why Monterey’s 250th Birthday Bodes Well for California’s Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In Venezuela, I was a professor, but as the economy fell apart I found work as a freelance journalist, covering my country’s current events despite dealing with blackouts and failing communications. Since October, whenever I haven’t been working on a news story in Madrid, I’ve either been taking a small rest from my previous beat or thinking up my next one. My life has been my job, and I love my job; otherwise, I wouldn’t be a journalist.

On the day of the announcement, I didn’t buy Death in Venice. Still, the image of Aschenbach, Mann’s novelist protagonist wandering a Mediterranean city abandoned by cholera remained with me as Madrid changed suddenly from a vivacious European capital into a state of solitude and uncertainty. Restaurants and bars in the trendy districts of Malasaña, Chueca, and the main venue of Gran Vía emptied. Like Mann’s early 20th-century Venice stricken by cholera, the once-gentle streets and squares soon acquired a more menacing appearance.

By evening people had gathered at their local supermarkets in long lines to buy canned goods and toilet paper. Many left the city, with more than a few probably carrying the virus themselves.

The day after, instead of doing any of the necessary things like shopping and laundry, I went to the Prado Museum.

The visit offered me a rare moment to think. In my case, focusing on my work helps to keep other concerns at bay. There’s a time and place to think and worry about Venezuela and my family there, but that’s usually late in the evening or during the weekend. For me and many of my classmates, having a virus suddenly open up so much free time to think is unnerving.

Those of us who are non-Spaniards and, like the protagonist of Death in Venice, foreigners, marveled at the opportunity of being part of a beautiful, historical metropolitan city, only to find ourselves stranded and isolated in a moment of crisis. Many of us had come to Spain to find new opportunities, to discover our own new worlds. Now we were in a lockdown, desperately trying to make the most out of the limitations.

And so, perhaps in the spirit of Aschenbach, I went to the Prado seeking something that felt beautiful and eternal before the viral outbreak put a stop to life as we know it.

The Prado is an excellent place to visit in a crisis because it has had such a convoluted life itself. When the museum opened its doors in 1819, the then-recent Napoleonic invasion had destabilized the country. Long decades of war between liberals, conservatives, absolutists, and opposing royal bloodlines were soon to come.

I entered the museum through an atrium with a triumphant statue of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire by Leone Leoni. It stands over a chained figure, called The Fury, which has been interpreted either as the Ottoman Empire or Protestantism.

It’s a proper introduction to the Spanish Hapsburgs and the Siglo de Oro, the zenith of imperial grandiosity and cultural influence, the era of Miguel de Cervantes and Diego Velázquez. However, knowing what lies behind all the splendor, you discover a strong warning about the false reassurances of opulence and power in front of disease and social strife.

As a result of the priorities of its rich patrons such as the Hapsburgs, countless portraits of aristocrats and saints fill a great part of the main floor of the Prado. It’s interesting how these paintings, in most cases meant to exalt the figures they portray, are celebrated, while their subjects have drifted off into oblivion. A few paintings by El Greco, for instance, feature distinguishing-looking men—Portrait of a Nobleman, Portrait of a Doctor, and most famously The Nobleman with His Hand on his Chest. Whoever these gentlemen were has become irrelevant in comparison to the great El Greco himself.

In a room filled by royal portraits painted by Diego Velázquez, the work that stands out is his subversive masterpiece, Las Meninas. There, Charles V’s great-grandson Philip IV is reduced into a small, blurry figure in the background while granting the foreground to the painter and other members of the household staff—all the people who made this royal opulence possible.

Despite the Hapsburgs’ wealth and power, the art that they financed ultimately outlived them, but only by surviving a fire that destroyed the royal residence in Madrid in 1734. Hundreds of invaluable works of Da Vinci, El Greco and Raphael turned into ashes. Las Meninas was among the few paintings that were saved, but it could have easily turned into dust.

During my visit, the museum appeared to be half empty. Most of the visitors were tourists who probably wanted to make the most of their time in the city before it shut down. An elderly couple, both in wheelchairs, stopped and contemplated Renaissance art. A school group moved along quickly. Young art students commented on this or that piece. Despite the fear and the tension in the world outside, here there was a sense of routine and calmness. Maybe it was a temporary distraction, but for a moment there was the illusion of disconnection from the rest of the world.

Maintaining the illusion of being a distant witness, unaffected by your surroundings, is also part of being a journalist. Some of my professors in the Master’s program have covered train accidents, plane crashes, and terrorist attacks. When they talk about these things, their usual cool, professional, generally friendly manner sometimes changes, taking on a more distressed tone when a particular nerve is touched.

One artist who thoroughly shatters the illusion of disconnection is Francisco Goya. I remember growing up and being intrigued by his Disasters of War illustrations, which used to decorate the walls of an elderly uncle who lived in Caracas. Penitents wearing conic hats standing trial, tormented figures haunted by demonic-looking birds. I didn’t expect art from so long ago to be so nightmarish.

Goya pretty much has his own wing. His earlier paintings are mostly picturesque scenes of gentry life, with young aristocrats playing the blind man’s bluff, allegories of the seasons, lots of hunting. But the special attention he gives to the poor, the old, and the disabled in the margins is noticeable.

On the upper floor of the wing, its walls painted in dark gray under dim light, is where you can see some of Goya’s most famous and haunting creations. The soft, placid art meant to decorate drawing rooms and hunting lodges would hardly recognize the faceless Napoleonic soldiers and the blood-stained corpses of The Third of May 1808.

But even this painting is overshadowed by Goya’s Black Paintings—surrealistic and esoteric images he painted directly on the inner walls of his house, named later Saturn Devouring His Son, The Witches’ Sabbath. By then, Goya was in his 70s and was traumatized by war, embittered with politics, and alienated from a Spanish society that rejected the constitution and embraced the absolutism of Ferdinand VII and the Catholic Church. His favorite subjects became witches, madmen, half-human beasts.

The faces are darkened and distorted, the brush seems quick and choleric—though it’s impossible to know how much those effects are Goya’s and how much are from the transference to canvas and the modifications done by the museum staff decades later when they brought it to the Prado. The New York Times once described it as “at best a crude facsimile” of Goya’s original artwork. We are fortunate to admire it, as we are fortunate to see Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

Art is a reflection of the artist’s mind—and the time and place they lived. In this sense, walking around an art gallery is roughly similar to the pleasure I get from browsing books in a bookstore. I can lose myself inside the minds of others without focusing too much on my own.

Being a journalist, I’ve learned that you either try to divide your professional and your personal mindset or your job will encompass the entirety of your life. Coming so recently from Venezuela, I find the adjustment to being in Spain now similar: I have to define a headspace for the country I come from and another for the country I am in—and making these two headspaces is a slow, painful process. When I look at Goya’s Black Paintings I see what happens when all those hatches collapse and you’re flooded with anger, sadness, and outrage.

I continued to the lower main area of a lower floor and joined the little crowd of tense onlookers in front of Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death. Looking at an army of skeletons rounding up and massacring the living—kings, beggars, maidens, and gamblers—it is hard not to think that our fears of worldwide epidemics aren’t new. We visitors eyed each other uneasily and then moved on.

But one piece in this section that captured everyone’s attention, and had the museum staff yelling at us to stop taking pictures, was The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, a large triptych of connected wooden panels filled with strange, dreamlike imagery.

On the left panel, Adam and Eve are with Christ in the Garden of Eden surrounding a strange pink structure that could be the Tree of Wisdom. On the right panel, a twisted and somewhat playful vision of hell is filled with puzzling demons and musical instruments and other objects of pleasure turned into torture devices, with a burning city in the background.

The middle and largest panel has been variously described as the world, a perfect utopia free of sin or a false, terrestrial paradise filled with mundane pleasures. Naked, sensuous figures frolic in a pasture filled with wondrous animals and strange, colorful edifices that imitate the pink “tree” seen in the Garden of Eden.

I suppose that Bosch’s painting could be interpreted as an indictment of the frivolities of ephemeral, empty joy in contrast to the eternal salvation offered by God and the Christian faith. However, under that logic, then those of us who came to the Prado to admire the painting for its masterful craft and imaginative design instead of its religious message would be falling into the false, terrestrial paradise that Bosch warns us about.

Maybe those of us who aren’t particularly religious obtain the same comfort in paintings, architecture, books, and movies in our modern, secular era that others get from religion. The sensation that art, skill, and imagination are something majestic: bigger and more lasting than our short, common lives.

I left the Prado with a poster of The Garden of Earthly Delights. That night, I met up with my fellow journalism students and had a few drinks at a terrace near Gran Vía. Later, I went down to a 24-hour supermarket in Plaza de Tirso de Molina to get provisions for the quarantine.

In the 10 days since, I have been self-isolating due to the coronavirus, only going out of my apartment to do shopping and laundry. The Spanish government has established fines of up to 600,000 euros for going out without a motive, so it’s not like I have much of a choice in the matter.

The first official cases of coronavirus have just been reported in Venezuela a few days ago, so I’m more concerned for my family over there than for myself in Madrid, since I know that my country’s decayed healthcare system isn’t properly prepared for an outbreak of this scope.

I don’t know what will happen in the following months. I hope things don’t end as tragically as they did for Aschenbach in Death in Venice, who was consumed by cholera while looking at the unattainable beauty of the young man who had become his obsession. But in these times of uncertainty, I have the satisfaction of having stood in the building that for over two centuries has been a sanctuary for Velázquez, Goya, Bosch, and other beautiful things that still endure, despite the chaos that has sometimes surrounded them.

The post A Letter from Madrid, Where Impending Quarantine Permits a Last Look at Goya appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, flamenco is a pervasive marker of Spanish national identity. For proof of its currency in pop culture, look no further than Toy Story 3: Buzz Lightyear is mistakenly reset in “Spanish mode,” and becomes a passionate Spanish flamenco dancer. Indeed, the world outside Spain often stereotypes the nation as inhabited by flamenco dancers, singers, and guitar players who are so “passionate,” they have little time to engage in the day-to-day world of the mundane.

Inside Spain, however, the relationship between the flamenco art form and Spanish national identity has been fraught for more than a century. Indeed, the world’s love of flamenco has long created problems within Spain, where the performance was once considered a vulgar and pornographic spectacle. Over the years, many Spaniards considered flamenco a scourge of their nation, deploring it as an entertainment that lulled the masses into stupefaction and hampered Spain’s progress toward modernity. Flamenco’s shifting fortunes show how Spain’s complex national identity continues to evolve to this day.

Flamenco, which UNESCO recently recognized as part of the World’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, is a complex art form incorporating poetry, singing (cante), guitar playing (toque), dance (baile), polyrhythmic hand-clapping (palmas), and finger snapping (pitos). It often features the call and response known as jaleo, a form of “hell raising,” involving hand clapping, foot stomping, and audiences’ encouraging shouts. Nobody really knows where the term “flamenco” originated, but all agree that the art form began in southern Spain—Andalusia and Murcia—but was also shaped by musicians and performers in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe.

A model wears a Bates bedspread as if it’s a flamenco dress, in a 1964-1965 advertisement for the Bates textile company. Image courtesy of the Bates Mill Store.

Moreover, from the mid-nineteenth century on, flamenco entertainment spread quickly from southern Spain to the capital (Madrid) and onward to other Spanish urban centers, flourishing there as a consequence of the rise of a mass urban culture and increased foreign tourism.

The reason for flamenco’s horrible reputation among Spanish elites during the 19th and 20th centuries was that historically, performances were associated with the ostracized Gypsy (Roma) population in Spain, and they took place in seedy urban areas.

Spanish elites particularly despised how foreigners linked Spain with flamenco. Spain’s national identity had previously been defined by outsiders who tied the country to Inquisitors, beggars, bandits, bullfighters, Gypsies, and flamenco dancers. Usually foreigners imposed the flamenco identity onto Spain as a backhanded compliment to highlight Spain’s steadfast authenticity. The nation had not fallen prey to the soul-sucking effects of industrialization. But with very few exceptions, Spanish elites and social reformers never liked—nor wanted—this art form to represent themselves or their nation, and they fought flamenco fever with all the resources they could muster. But flamencomania proved much more difficult to eradicate than the so-called Black Legend: the negative propaganda, spread by Spain’s French and British rivals, that characterized Spain as the land of cruel Inquisitors, sadistic colonial rulers, repressive politicians, and intellectual and artistic yokels.

Flamenco came to encapsulate Spanish elites’ feelings of shame about the country’s declining status as a great power in the modern era. Flamenco’s critics were divided into three main groups: the Catholic Church and its conservative allies, left-leaning intellectuals and politicians, and leaders from revolutionary workers’ movements. During the convulsive period between the Restoration and the beginning of the civil war, from 1875 to 1936, these groups used flamenco to critique what they saw as Spain’s political, economic, and cultural ills.

The Catholic Church perceived flamenco as an offshoot of the sort of mass cultural entertainments that led to immodesty, the breakdown of the family, and the weakening of the Patria. But for many progressive intellectuals, by contrast, flamenco—along with its twin scourge, bullfighting—was thought to keep Spaniards in a stranglehold of backwardness. They saw the entertainment as a distraction that prevented Spaniards from solving the nation’s numerous ills, including a corrupt political system, a wildly inadequate and unequal educational system, a lack of infrastructure and technological know-how, and vast inequalities of wealth. Meanwhile, for working-class reformers and revolutionaries, flamenco and its concomitant lifestyle exploited people’s poverty and diverted workers away from becoming full actors in seeking revolution to end social, political, and economic inequality.

In reality, all of these groups used flamenco as a vessel to contain their dissatisfaction with the ideological and structural changes that emerged out of the French and Industrial Revolutions. They railed in newspaper diatribes against this form of entertainment, with some critics seeing flamenco as the perverted outcome of increased secularization, while others thought it showed resistance to progress and modernization. What they were really complaining about, however, was the permeation of modern mass culture into the daily lives of everyday citizens.

The many World’s Fairs of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries gave flamenco a boost, making Spanish Gypsy performers all the rage, especially in Paris. Flamenco “deep song” (cante jondo) received the blessings of European avant-garde artists such as Sergei Diaghilev and Claude Debussy, who had attended flamenco performances at the Paris World’s Fairs of 1889 and 1900, and found it primal and authentic. That led Spanish intellectuals and artists such as Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca to elevate this form of flamenco to “high culture.” Thus, the support of Europeans outside Spain transformed the cultural meaning of flamenco for Spanish artists and intellectuals in much the same way that 20th-century European support for African-American jazz and blues aided their popularity in the United States.

But after the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, flamenco performances in Spain diminished considerably. The Catholic Church and leaders of the Sección Femenina (the female wing of Spain’s Fascist Party) disavowed flamenco. To counteract its perceived evils, they promoted folk dancing and singing, encouraging a new kind of national identity predicated on Spanish regional diversity and cleansed of flamenco’s torrid reputation.

But by the 1950s, after years of international isolation, the Franco regime needed money. This led the regime to change course, promoting flamenco in order to jump-start Spain’s tourist industry. A tourism promoter named Carlos González Cuesta wrote, “We have to resign ourselves touristically to be a country of [Spanish stereotypes], because the day we lose the [Spanish stereotypes], we will have lost 90 percent of our attraction for tourists.”

So the Franco regime pandered to tourists’ love of flamenco, increasing the number of clubs that specialized in it, advertising female flamenco dancers on tourism and airline brochures, encouraging professional flamenco performers to star in Hollywood films, and featuring performers in traveling exhibitions like the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair. These strategies worked; the regime was able to bring in millions of tourists and their money to help fund Spain’s economic boom of the 1960s.

After Franco’s death in 1975, the role of flamenco once again changed dramatically. The nearly simultaneous movements for regional autonomy within Spain and the growth of a world music culture complicated flamenco’s relationship to Spanish national identity. The foreign depiction of Spain as the land of flamenco, the not-quite European country with the Oriental-Gypsy soul, has been exploited by entrepreneurial spirits within Spain. That is not to say that flamenco flourishes today only to serve the interests of commerce. Artists, scholars, and historical preservationists have chosen to undertake serious study of the art form and to promote its historical and artistic significance for both Spain and Andalusia. In fact, one could say that flamenco today has undergone both extreme commercialization and renewed artistic and academic respect, once again demonstrating its complex relationship to Spanish national identity.

The post How Flamenco Explains Spain’s Complex Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The plaque tells a quick story: Miranda was born in Caracas in 1750, fought with the Spanish troops during the American Revolution, served as a general during the French Revolution, briefly led an independent Venezuela, and died while jailed in a Spanish fortress in 1816.

I can’t blame you if you haven’t heard of Miranda before—though the most nationalistic of my fellow Venezuelans would no doubt be offended. They would boast that Miranda’s name is engraved on the Arc de Triomphe, and that he was allegedly a lover of Catherine the Great.

Unlike many born in Spanish America at the time who either saw themselves as Spaniards born overseas or identified with a specific colonial region, Miranda saw himself as part of a single unified identity, distinct from the European, and bound by language, culture, and geography, ranging from northern Mexico to Tierra del Fuego. It was Miranda’s dream of a united Spanish American nation that inspired the ideals of Simón Bolívar. The flags of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador were based on Miranda’s design. He died, filled with sadness, without seeing his dreams of independence fulfilled.

His tragedy, two centuries old and so unique, feels strangely resonant and universal to me. Today, as I watch my fellow Venezuelans try to understand themselves, their place in the world, and the meaning of an increasingly-distant place we all once called home, I can’t help but wonder if his life is a warning to those who look back, an inspiration for freedom and cosmopolitan values, or just a meaningless act of Quixotic romanticism.

In Venezuela, Miranda is part of our history, but he is also part of something more emotional—our national mythology—which puts Simón Bolívar at the center and Miranda as his mentor. Bolívar not only occupies a Washington-like role of Father of the Nation, his name and face are a constant, from every main street and square in every town to our highest mountain, our largest state, our main airport, and our currency.

National mythologies, though, are like the statues of great men on high columns. They force you to admire them from below, but they are so far away that you can’t see the small details and imperfections of the real men. They get robbed of any semblance of humanity.

When Hugo Chávez became president in 1999 and started the Bolivarian Revolution by calling himself a “son of Bolívar,” he was hardly being revolutionary. He was following our long-established republican cult, as many have before him, where all of Bolívar’s mistakes are justified, all his contradictions forgotten. Growing up—as I did—in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela meant spending an entire class in middle school learning about Bolívar, seeing portraits and out-of-context quotes of his speeches decorating the walls of public buildings. We even watched his remains get exhumed on live TV for the production of a CGI portrait of the “real Bolívar.” And so Bolívar became nothing but the great man in the column, Zeus in a long, monotonous pantheon of seemingly interchangeable portraits of independence heroes in military regalia.

It was Miranda who stuck out.

There is, for starters, an Arturo Michelena painting titled Miranda en La Carraca. Here, Miranda is portrayed in the cell where he would die. He’s not standing tall, or mounted on horseback. He appears almost humble, far from the luxurious lifestyle and the glittering personalities he was famous for keeping company with. He looks at the viewer with slight reproach. One can’t help but wonder what he is thinking as he sets his eyes on you.

A few years ago, when UNESCO added Miranda’s diary and documents to the Memory of the World Register, they were digitalized and uploaded on a website with lot of fanfare, proclaiming that these papers were available to everyone for the first time. At the time of this writing, that website is broken.

Last year, I found a copy of Miranda’s papers—a collection of 24 volumes printed in Cuba in the early 1950s. They were stacked in a cardboard box filled with cockroaches that I bought from an old book peddler whose house was falling apart.

It’s easy to lose myself in these diaries—even though I can only half-guess what’s written in French—because they reveal an intimate and precise view of a man who I always have regarded as exceptional but never quite human.

Take, for instance, his trips to the United States. His descriptions are filled with life: He lists the names of rivers and the number of miles he travels between towns. He also talks to George Washington’s former slave at Mount Vernon. And then Thomas Jefferson insisted on showing him his two-headed snake.

On his first trip in 1783, when he went from Cuba to South Carolina to New Jersey, you sense him marveling at the institutions of a strange, nascent nation. He compares a barbecue, where townspeople enjoy beer and pork and talk about politics, to Plato’s Symposium.

Yet he’s candid in his criticism. He finds Americans to be overly religious and regrets that theater was banned in most of the country at the time. Despite his admiration, he complains about the cult of personality surrounding George Washington. He derides the way the people of Philadelphia greet Washington, saying that Christ entering Jerusalem looks small by comparison.

During the French Revolution, Miranda was brought to trial and almost sent to the guillotine by Robespierre. In the process, he became a far savvier and more pragmatic politician.

On his second trip to the United States in 1804 he went from New York to Washington, D.C. to meet with Jefferson and his cabinet with one thing in mind: to get assurance that the United States would not intervene in favor of Spain if the Spanish colonies rebelled against the Crown.

Although his meetings with Jefferson were brief—and Miranda didn’t think the author of the Declaration of Independence had the right qualities to be president—he got a positive response.

He then made several observations that, in retrospect, show his keen geopolitical insight. First, he realized that the United States would expand westward and eventually add Mexican territories to the union. Secondly, he realized that the United States was the only nation in the Americas capable of building a canal on the Panamanian isthmus—something Spain had tried to do, but failed. And he hoped that a united Spanish America would be able negotiate a good deal with the United States for that canal.

Eventually, this trip would lead him to buy a ship in New York City. With the help of a mostly American crew, he tried to invade Venezuela in 1806. Ten Americans were captured and executed for piracy. There’s a small monument in my hometown dedicated to these Americans, though hardly anyone knows who it commemorates.

In a 1815 letter, John Adams describes Miranda’s charm and intelligence, but also his single-mindedness and his power to rope others into his impossible dream:

“His constant topic was the independence of South America, her immense wealth, inexhaustible resources, innumerable population, impatience under the Spanish yoke, and disposition to throw off the dominion of Spain. It is most certain that he filled the heads of many of the young officers with brilliant visions of wealth, free trade, republican government, etc., etc., etc., in South America.”

In 1811, Miranda returned to help Venezuela become one of the first Spanish colonies to declare its independence, setting up a federal republic modeled on the United States. It fell apart because of factional squabbles, economic problems, and a devastating earthquake that left the most important cities in ruins. Miranda, then leader of the haphazard government, was arrested by the other patriots and given to the Spanish Crown to guarantee their safe passage into exile.

Looking again at Miranda en La Carraca, I know he always will be entangled in myth, but I can’t help but wonder what Francisco de Miranda is thinking. Today, his life feels more relevant than ever.

As Venezuelans leave their country in droves, and try to make sense of their new identity as a diaspora, it’s tempting to see Miranda as a role model. Despite living less than half of his life in South America and, at different times, adopting names such as Merond, Martin, or Meroff to hide from his persecutors or to pass unnoticed in a foreign land but he was driven by his dream of seeing those he regarded as his own people be freed from Spanish rule.

Both he and Bolívar met tragic ends. But while Bolívar’s fate—dying of pneumonia on his way to exile, after being expelled by the nations he had liberated—was tangled with South American independence, and carries almost the gravitas and inevitability of religious martyrdom, Miranda’s fate is Byronic.

One could imagine him living out the rest of his days in his townhouse in London with his wife Sarah and his children, but instead he chose to follow his impossible dream. In that way, Miranda en La Carraca feels like a warning from a romantic, an adventurer, the father of a nation that never was, a doomed soul telling you to save yourself and never look back, because there’s nothing to salvage.

But then I go back to his diaries, to his stories of escaping from the Spanish Inquisition and his quotations of John Milton, and comprehend that a lost cause is no less great, no less inspiring than one that succeeds. For many Venezuelans, our homeland is a lost cause; but for me, whether that’s true or not, it’s no reason to give up.

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Convinced of the special place that America had both in history and in the world of his time, Adams pursued one of the longest public careers in the country’s history, stretching from the mid-1790s until his death in 1848. He constantly strove to protect the independence of the country and to advance its prestige and standing.

In no area did his determination stand out more than in his commitment to both American territorial expansion and pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere. As a Federalist United States senator from Massachusetts, he supported the Virginia Republican President Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana from France even though his own party and his state opposed it, fearing it would in time significantly enhance Republican political strength. In Quincy Adams’s view, adding the immense Louisiana Territory stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains enhanced the greatness of his country. To him that result far outweighed the possibility that new states eventually carved from the Territory might diminish the influence of his own New England.

When Adams became secretary of state in 1817, he brought to the office a vision of his country extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean. He saw his opportunity in negotiations with Spain over the purchase of Florida, the only remaining area east of the Mississippi not then possessed by the United States.

Spain was willing to sell Florida, but worried about a powerful and expansionist United States moving closer to Mexico, the jewel of Spanish America. In those talks, Adams advocated pushing the southwestern border with Spain beyond the Sabine River, the boundary between American Louisiana and Spanish Mexico, deeper into its northern province of Texas. But, sensing Spanish apprehension on that matter, Adams instead pressed Spain to relinquish to the United States its claim to the Pacific Northwest, and Spain acquiesced.

Thus, in the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, also known as the Adams-Onis Treaty, for the first time the United States gained a legitimate claim to territory bordering the Pacific Ocean. It had become a continental nation. Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, Americans would migrate westward toward a distant frontier that Adams’ diplomacy initially made possible.

Texas would reappear in Adams’ future. As president between 1825 and 1829, he tried to purchase the province from Mexico, by then independent of Spain and the new owner of Texas. His efforts failed. Later, as a congressman in the 1830s, he opposed adding Texas to the United States—because it permitted slavery. Likewise, Adams opposed the Mexican-American War because he interpreted its origins as an aggressive move to advance slavery.

Yet, where there was no possibility of slavery, Adams remained an ardent expansionist. As a congressman in the 1840s, he vigorously backed sole American control of Oregon. Since the Transcontinental Treaty, the United States had possessed the Spanish title, but Great Britain also had a claim. And the two countries had agreed on a joint occupation, with the stipulation that with one year’s notice either party could terminate the agreement. In 1846, the United States did so, with Congressman Adams enthusiastically on the side of an American Oregon.

Adams also never stopped looking south in search of domination over the Western hemisphere. And in time, a weakened Spain would again offer opportunities.

By the early 1820s Spanish colonies in both North and South America had begun breaking away from their former colonial master. Spain simply did not have the power to hold them, but Adams worried that another European power or a concert of them would replace Spain on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

With the most powerful navy in the world, Great Britain represented the greatest potential threat. But a growing rapprochement between Great Britain and the United States led to an unexpected British overture. In the summer of 1823 the British government invited the U.S. government to stand with it and together tell the world that no other power would be permitted to replace Spain. Applauding this initiative, many prominent Americans wanted to accept.

Adams was almost alone in demurring. He wanted his country to make a unilateral declaration that the United States alone would not allow any future European colonization in the Western Hemisphere. And against considerable opposition Adams persuaded President James Monroe to adopt this position. In his message to Congress in December 1823, Monroe promulgated what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine.

Yet, fundamentally it was the John Quincy Adams Doctrine. A major thrust of the doctrine proclaimed that the United States would not stand for any other European power establishing a new colonial empire on this side of the Atlantic. That prohibition applied to Great Britain too. The United States would dominate the Americas, Adams said, and assert its hemispheric hegemony without challenge. He wrote, “We have it; we constitute the whole of it.” From his time forward, the United States has in different ways affirmed its pre-eminence in this hemisphere.

Thus, for the future United States as a continental nation and the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, the vision and policy of John Quincy Adams were formative and far-reaching.

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