{"id":412,"date":"2025-02-04T16:56:51","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T16:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/?p=412"},"modified":"2025-02-04T17:02:47","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T17:02:47","slug":"race-and-the-republic-the-politics-of-race-on-the-spanish-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/race-and-the-republic-the-politics-of-race-on-the-spanish-left\/","title":{"rendered":"Race and the Republic: the politics of race on the Spanish left"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his post, Henry Brown,<\/a> lecturer in Modern European History here at Cardiff, explores antifascism and race in modern Spain<\/h4>\n

On the night of January 5th<\/sup>, 2024, along with most Catholic nations, Spain celebrated Epiphany (Noche de los Reyes Magos<\/em>). The character of the festivities generally revolves around the \u201ccabalgata\u201d or procession of the Three Magi \u2013 Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar \u2013 who appear, accompanied by \u201chelpers\u201d on elaborate floats, throwing candies and toys to the crowd. In the city of Alcoi, King Balthazar appears each year with a blackened face and red lips accompanied by an army of \u201chelpers\u201d who are similarly painted, often wearing red loin cloths together with fezzes or turbans. During the processions in the Catalonian town of Igualada, nearly 800 participants of the \u201ccabalgata\u201d apply blackface while dressed in mocking orientalist costumes. This year, the deputy mayor of Madrid, a city that had banned the practice in 2015, was forced to apologise after a video emerged of a blackfaced Balthazar performing a mock West African accent to children during the celebrations. In light of my ongoing research into antifascism and race in modern Spain, these images disturbed me not only for their immediate content but because they revealed how uncritically pervasive these racial constructions remain.<\/p>\n

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The Three Kings in Alcoi (Misterfan2000, 2020)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Criticism of blackface has generally not been led by the traditionally antiracist forces of the left. Instead, the initiative has come from Afro-Spanish and antiracist advocacy groups, such as the SOS Racismo <\/em>Federation and the Black African and Afro-descendant Community in Spain (CNAAE). In Alcoi, the local response, from both the left and the right, cis that these performances have nothing to do with race. Rather they are innocent manifestations of local traditions. In 2023, the socialist deputy mayor of the city, Jordi Valent\u00ed, denied that there was any \u2018racist or slave component\u2019 to the spectacle, instead Balthazar and his attendants were \u2018magical\u2019 characters beloved by children. Valent\u00ed is not the only socialist politician to have met these accusations of racism with incredulity. The regional president of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), Borja Sanjuan Roca, denied that the abuse hurled at the Real Madrid <\/em>striker Vin\u00edcius J\u00fanior \u2013 which included cries of \u201cmonkey\u201d \u2013 constituted racism on the part of the Valencian fans. Rather, the spectators were simply expressing frustration at the flamboyant antics of a player whom Sanjuan considered \u2018a disgrace to football.\u2019<\/p>\n

Public declarations that \u2018Spain is not racist, but there are racists in Spain’, bely the concerning reality that racial discrimination in the country is both pervasive and on the rise. In 2023, according to the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights there were 856 recorded hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia, compared to 515 in 2019. Reports by the antiracism NGO, SOS Racismo<\/em>, have revealed widespread discriminatory housing practices against \u2018distinguishable\u2019 foreigners while a United Nations working group described the Spanish police\u2019s racial profiling of individuals of African descent as \u2018endemic.\u2019 There is also a rise in \u2018harmful prejudices\u2019 among younger generations, with one study finding around 25% consistently displaying broadly hostile or ambivalent attitudes to most forms of inclusivity. SOS Racismo<\/em> have also signalled a broader lack of integration and engagement across government and civil society on issues relating to racism. This reflects a widely held assumption in Spain that refusing to recognise racial difference is the best antidote to racism.<\/p>\n

All of this points to an obvious but seldom recognised conclusion that although Spain vocally describes itself as a post-racial society and celebrates its culturally diverse heritage, race and racialisation have been, and remain, embedded in Spanish politics and culture. This deracialised understanding of its own past was exemplified by the 1992 Seville Expo<\/em>, an exhibition commemorating the fifth centennial of the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of the Americas. The administration of Felipe Gonz\u00e1lez \u2013 the first socialist premier since the Civil War of 1936-9 \u2013 hoped to use the exhibition to strengthen Spain\u2019s cosmopolitan credentials to the European Community. Consequently, the Expo\u2019s displays described the Spanish conquest of the Americas as a wondrous, mutually beneficial discovery and intermingling of peoples, laying the foundations for a multicultural and globalised world. Spain\u2019s abuse of indigenous peoples through the encomienda system and lucrative participation in the transatlantic slave trade (which helped to finance Barcelona\u2019s distinctive modernist architecture) were almost entirely omitted.<\/p>\n

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‘A people capable of creating two worlds’ Trincheras No. 10 5 July 1938 (CDMH Ministerio de Cultura)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The presentation of Spain (and the Spanish) as a product of mixture and encounter goes back still further. Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain for forty years, showed unabashed admiration for Spain\u2019s entangled past in the Americas and North Africa. He conceived this entangled past as the source of Spain\u2019s racial greatness. In Franco\u2019s eyes, the centuries of intermarriage with Romans, Visigoths, Moroccans, and Jews had allowed them to imbibe and combine the strengths of these diverse peoples, producing a \u201cracial alloy\u201d that was stronger for the mixture. It was no contradiction for the caudillo <\/em>to extol the superiority of the Spanish race while continuing to make public use of soldiers recruited from Spanish North Africa, who even composed his ceremonial guard until 1956. In the eyes of Spain\u2019s fascistoid regime, the two peoples were racial cousins whose destinies were entwined, to mutual benefit.<\/p>\n

How then did Franco\u2019s opponents, ie. Spain\u2019s antifascists and the Republican regime he overturned, understand race? As my ongoing research illustrates, race was no less enmeshed in the worldviews of the socialists, communists and anarchists who united to defend the Republic during Spain\u2019s three-year Civil War (1936-9). The revolutionary antifascist militias which formed spontaneously in the summer of 1936 eagerly appropriated the symbols of other \u201coppressed races\u201d around the world. A battalion formed of socialist workers named themselves the \u2018Abyssinian Lions\u2019 in tribute to the Ethiopian resistance to the ongoing Italian occupation. While recognising Mexico\u2019s continued support for the Spanish Republic, the anarchists of Aragon identified themselves with the struggle of that Republic\u2019s indigenous population: \u2018The Aragonese,\u2019 ran one newspaper headline, \u2018are the indios <\/em>(ie. Indians) of Spain due to their simpleness, energy, and tenacious love for the truth.\u2019<\/p>\n

As the war drew on and the calls for political unity grew louder, the leaders of the Republic increasingly appealed to Spain\u2019s inherent greatness. The antifascists, it was claimed, were defending not just a state but culture itself. \u2018We fight for Spain,\u2019 declared the communist leader, Jes\u00fas Hern\u00e1ndez, \u2018and for all that it represents in human civilisation: its traditions, its artistic treasures, its land, its past and future.\u2019 Franco and the fascists, with their indiscriminate aerial bombardments, were seen as the negation of enlightened civilisation. \u2018While we strive to save everything that is of artistic value,\u2019 one Republican officer wrote to his comrades, \u2018the fascists destroy monuments \u2026 selling off paintings and reducing buildings, museums, and libraries to rubble\u2026Truly this, and only this, can be expected of them given that they represent the negation of everything that has the smallest link to culture.\u2019<\/p>\n

But this laundry list of contributions to civilisation was not confined to the paintings of the Prado Museum or the horseshoe arches of C\u00f3rdoba\u2019s Mosque-Cathedral. It also included the conquest and \u201ccivilising\u201d of the Americas. The Republic\u2019s socialist Prime Minister, Juan Negr\u00edn, who effectively led the antifascist war effort in Spain from May 1937 onwards, proudly spoke of Spain\u2019s role in the \u2018civilising of America \u2026 imprinting on it the mark of a race and a language.\u2019 The soldiers of the Republic were the new conquistadors since they were also \u2018men of the people\u2019 whose deeds spoke to \u2018the qualities of a great race.\u2019<\/p>\n

In this light, the North African troops fighting for Franco were not seen as their distant kin, but the embodiment of fascist barbarism. Unconfirmed (and wildly sensationalised) reports of sexual violence against Republican women by these moros<\/em> inflamed this conviction. Republican propaganda instructed its soldiers that they were defending western civilisation by defending white femininity from the savage racial other. The central newspaper of the Republican Army, Ej\u00e9rcito Popular<\/em>, instructed its soldiers to \u2018care for your rifle[s]\u2019 in order to avert fascist terror, to protect the lands of the peasantry, to stop Spain from becoming an Italo-German colony and \u2018to prevent the defiling of our women by the Moors.\u2019<\/p>\n

Ideas about race are not an inexplicable irruption that only requires confrontation when images of Balthazar and his helpers cause a stir on social media. As my research suggests, they are embedded across the spectrum of Spain\u2019s politics and throughout its cultural sphere. Race and racialisation have explicitly and implicitly driven political projects of anarchists, socialists and communists throughout the twentieth century. That these groups also possess tangible histories of transnational solidarity \u2013 having fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the International Brigades for three years \u2013 does not lessen the significance of this observation. Rather this puzzling convergence is one that invites explanation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his post, Henry Brown, lecturer in Modern European History here at Cardiff, explores antifascism and race in modern Spain On the night of January 5th, 2024, along with most […]","protected":false},"author":905,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,19,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currentprojects","category-european-history","category-modern-history"],"meta_box":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/905"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":419,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions\/419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}