Spanish Colonization

5 Key excerpts on "Spanish Colonization"

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  Speaking Spanish in the US

  The Sociopolitics of Language

  • Janet M. Fuller, Jennifer Leeman(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  US intervention in Latin America did not end with the annexation of the lands that now comprise the Southwestern US and Puerto Rico. Instead, the US continued to exert economic, political and military power in the Caribbean as well as Central and South America. Whereas 19th and early 20th century intervention was focused on allowing US businesses to maximize profit, primarily by supporting repressive governments that kept workers in line, in the second half of the 20th century Cold War concerns (i.e. stopping communist movements) also played a crucial role. US policies and involvement have contributed to economic and political instability, as well as social unrest, which in turn have led to increased migration to the US. The need for workers in the US has also attracted immigrants, sometimes as the result of active recruiting efforts by businesses. Thus, despite the long history of Spanish in the US, immigration has been a key factor in its continued presence and strength, given the pattern of language shift that results in the third generation being likely to be predominantly or exclusively English-speaking. For this reason, in the second half of chapter we look at the history of Latin American migration to the US, and we briefly consider current immigration policy.

  Spanish Colonization in North America and the Caribbean

  With the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492, the Spanish began a centuries-long period of exploration, conquest and colonization in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas. Columbus and his men claimed the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola (shared by the present-day countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). After returning to Spain and impressing the Spanish monarchs Isabelle and Ferdinand with tales of gold and riches, Columbus again sailed to the Caribbean, bringing more ships, men, and livestock, as well as plans to create a Spanish empire in the Americas.

  In the Caribbean the Spanish colonists enslaved the Indigenous Taíno population, forcing them to work on sugar plantations and ranches as well as in the mines. As a result of the brutal treatment and exploitation they suffered at the hand of the conquerors, together with the devastating effects of exposure to European diseases, hundreds of thousands of Taínos died. According to Taylor (2002), the number of Taínos on Hispaniola dropped from at least 300,000 in 1492 to just 500 in 1548, a 98% reduction in just over 50 years. Others put the original number higher and the speed of the devastation even faster (Gonzalez, 2011). With the decline of the Taínos, their Arawak language was lost. A few Arawak borrowings into Spanish (and English via Spanish) have endured, including huracán , tabaco and guayaba (‘hurricane, tobacco, guava’). And many Puerto Ricans of all ethnoracial backgrounds refer to the island as Boríquen or Borínquen , and to themselves as Boricuas

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  The First Wave of Decolonization

  • Mark Thurner(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 A Brief Conceptual History of 'Colonia'

  Francisco Ortega

  [O]ne should not lose sight that this is a colonia that must depend on her metropolis, Spain, and it must pay with profits the benefits . . . it receives from Spain; and so it takes great skill to combine such dependency with mutual and reciprocal interest, which would cease at the moment when European manufactures and products are no longer needed in these regions.1

  —Conde de Revillagigedo, Viceroy of New Spain, 1831 [1789–1794]

  The vast and beautiful dominions that Spain possesses in the Indies are not properly colonies or factories as those of other nations but an essential and integral part of the Spanish Monarchy.2

  —Royal Order, Supreme Junta, Seville, January 22, 1809

  Was Hispanic America ever a colony? The question may startle some readers. Undoubtedly, substantial parts and peoples of the region were forcibly annexed by the Hispanic Monarchy in the early sixteenth century. Furthermore, certain strains of Latin America’s nineteenth-century national historiographies grew out of the conviction that the region’s peoples had revolted against the colonial tyranny of the metropole. However, as the two quotes above suggest, in the decades before independence the ‘colonial’ status of the American or ‘West Indian’ possessions of the monarchy were much debated, and even today the idea of ‘Spanish colonialism’ remains a contested and sensitive topic on both sides of the Atlantic. In this essay, I will suggest that the contested and politicized meaning of the term ‘colony’ with which we are familiar today actually emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.3 At this time, ‘colonia’ came to be associated with an imperfect and dependent status that did injustice to the historical ‘constitutions’ of the American lands and peoples.

  In what follows I propose to briefly trace the conceptual history of colonia in the Spanish-speaking world up to the years of the wars of independence. My reading aims to avoid the anachronism of projecting back in time present usages. I depart from the conviction that the meaning of colonia

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  A new Compact History of Mexico.

  • Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo, Bernardo García Martínez, Luis Jáuregui, Josefina Zoraida Vázquez(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • El Colegio de México

    (Publisher)

  [1] This potential was realized with the conquest of Mexico and the subsequent conquest of Peru, which resulted from the Spanish advancing beyond the islands and onto the continent itself.

  At the same time, the American continent, which did not yet have that name but was defined as the New World, began to play a role in the circuit of exchanges that was gradually beginning to encompass the globe. Such exchanges involved people, animals, plants, metals, manufactured goods, and everything associated with them, from diseases to culture. Naturally, exchange activities were managed first and foremost with a view to serving European interests, and Spanish interests in particular. That explains the evolution of colonial dependence which would characterize the Americas in the centuries to come.

  In general terms, that was the context in which the events associated with the beginning of the colonial era in Mexico took place. Specifically, those events originated in Cuba, where the Spaniards had already been established for almost 20 years. Wanting to expand, they organized several expeditions. In 1517, a voyage led by Francisco Hernández de Córdoba brought them to the coast of Yucatán. This trip, which was more of an exploratory journey, produced the first contact between the European and Mesoamerican worlds.

  The first expedition was followed by another, and a third, by then with the goal of conquest clearly in mind. This implied that the Spaniards had to resolve a variety of legal issues among themselves in order to define and regulate the privileges or rights to which the conquistadors aspired. The third expedition, organized by Hernando Cortés (also known as Hernán Cortés), left Cuba in 1519, cut off its ties there, and ended up founding a town—Veracruz—and setting up a cabildo

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  The Story of French New Orleans

  History of a Creole City

  • Dianne Guenin-Lelle(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Mississippi

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Spanish Period: Creolizing the Colonizer

  Introduction

  The Spanish colonial period is arguably the period of the most intense creolization in New Orleans history. My argument is based on how Spain had no interest in the Louisiana territory, a “gift” the Spanish Bourbon king Carlos III received from his cousin, Louis XV, for his military allegiance to France during the Seven Years’ War. Consequently the Spanish metropole acted in a most deferential way to the local Louisiana population in administering the colony, affording local Creoles freedom not allowed in other Spanish territories. Also due to Spanish manumission practices slaves were allowed to buy their freedom, resulting in the emergence of a remarkably large population of free people of color in New Orleans, further adding to the creolization of the city by implicating new social order, mobility, and self-determination for this significant population of African descent.

  Throughout the Spanish period, the local Creole population overwhelmingly resisted Spanish rule. The chapter posits that the locals’ mytholgized associations with France and the process by which the act of remaining staunchly French in their collective imaginary suited local resistance to colonial rule and contributed to uniting the disparate, sometimes competing, Creole elements against a common foe. In other words, by self-ascribing a posteriori associations as “French” during the Spanish and later American period this population created a semantic space of opposition to the colonial yoke. Associations with France in the colony after it was no longer French sustained the “in-between-ness” of New Orleans as a hybrid space, which could not be controlled or for all intents and purposes governed by the Spanish and later the Americans. Much of this hybridity consisted of mythmaking and illusion, with associations with France masking a fierce independence and antipathy toward any colonizer, and by displacing that resistance the colonized were able through their own agency to shift their hemispheric allegiance without appearing to do so.

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  A Companion to Latin American History

  • Thomas H. Holloway(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The sedentary areas of Mexico and Peru became the two great viceroyalties of Nueva España and Nueva Castilla, respectively, and were consolidated by the 1550s. Spaniards went immediately to these promising areas of sedentary native populations, lured at first by gold and then later by silver. After the military conquests thousands of Iberians went especially to the economically flourishing areas of the colonies, where employment and other opportunities were most promising. This process was so rapid that every major Spanish city in the “Indies” had been founded by the end of the sixteenth century.

  The conquests of the sedentary peoples were rapid and permanent. The Spaniards enjoyed a tremendous military and technological advantage. Most people had no place to migrate or escape to and chose not to leave their ancestral, sacred lands. In most places, the Spaniards acquired supplies and local allies with each victory, so that each successive conquest in the sedentary areas made the next one easier. But among the more mobile non-sedentary peoples, fighting in many areas went on indefinitelyand expeditions could not achieve final results. Forts were built, permanent paid soldiers were stationed on frontiers, and native peoples were brought in from other regions as middlemen to help pacify the war zones. Rebellions or new hostilities continued for centuries. The enslaving of Indians and the establishment of missions – ecclesiastical fortresses where people from a large area were congregated – were typical features of European expansion into the vastly underpopulated regions of Latin America. In places such as northern Mexico, the Río de la Plata region, Venezuela, and the Amazonia, Europeans adopted new strategies to take advantage of local situations.

  Contact with Europeans devastated native peoples in many ways. Nothing remained the same. The initial shock of conquest was accompanied or followed soon after by waves of epidemic diseases, a spiritual and cultural crusade against native religions and life-ways, and multiple attempts to reorganize native society. It is difficult to generalize about the experiences of hundreds of culture and language groups under colonial rule. In general, however, it is safe to say that processes of change were more extensive and rapid in areas where many Europeans went, and were delayed in places where Europeans were few. Resistance to change was often complex and subtle, but many changes resulted from cultural contact over the course of generations, so that individuals, groups, or even whole communities could not, over time, resist all aspects of cultural influence from Spaniards and Africans, nor did they always want to. Likewise, Spaniards and Africans were not immune to native cultural influences.

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