We Are Now the True Spaniards

This book is the modified English translation of a study in two volumes published originally in Spanish in 2009, “Nosotros somos ahora los verdaderos españoles.” The new edition eliminates material not considered essential by the author for an English-speaking audience and incorporates research he carried out between 2009 and 2011.The result of more than 30 years of working on the Mexican independence movement and its antecedents, this book is very well researched and well written, besides showing mastery of the events and protagonists of New Spain's emancipation process and of Mexico's first years as a new nation. The same cannot be said for the book's treatment of peninsular history during the same period; for example, on three occasions (pp. 38, 45, 336), Jaime E. Rodríguez O. affirms that on May 2, 1808, the residents of Madrid drove the French troops out of the city, something that never took place. In any case, why is it that this book leaves us with the sense that the author, too keen on proving certain hypotheses, missed aspects, nuances, and perspectives that the historiography of the last couple of decades has put forward, bringing to light the apparently inexhaustible complexity of New Spain's emancipation process? The answer has to do primarily with three factors: the way in which the author conceives the societies of Spain and New Spain in the decades preceding the 1808 political crisis of the mundo hispánico, the manner in which he handles and conveys the terms home rule and autonomy throughout, and, finally, his way of presenting the two broad movements that emerged in 1810: on the one hand, the Cádiz revolution or, in his words, “the fundamental revolution” (through which New Spain, “alone among all the kingdoms of the Spanish Monarchy, including Spain itself ... remained true to Hispanic juridical and political culture” [p. 1]), and, on the other hand, “the Hidalgo Revolt.”Regarding the first factor, Rodríguez tells us that in the 1780s the University of Salamanca was “a center of liberalism” and that Spanish intellectuals “widely discussed” the ideas of their Anglophone counterparts (p. 11). During the reign of Carlos III, distinguished reformers “applied the new philosophy and economic theory” to the monarchy, a work that “culminated” with Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos (p. 12). Educated novohispanos, like their Spanish counterparts, “were liberales before the term was coined,” “well versed in contemporary political thought, which emphasized liberty, equality, civil rights, the rule of law, representative constitutional government, and laissez-faire economics” and engaged in transforming the monarchy “into a modern liberal state” (p. 17). Up until the aforementioned reign, the Spanish monarchy was not only representative and decentralized but also “responsive to the needs of its many constituents” (p. 24). In the specific case of New Spain, it was a particularly well-informed society (p. 44), one in which novohispanos “learned of significant events shortly after their occurrence” (p. 45). By 1809, these same novohispanos “were eager to exercise their rights and act as full-fledged members of the monarchy” (p. 72). A few pages ahead, the author reminds us “that ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ ideas had existed in the Spanish world for centuries” (p. 83). From my perspective, if we add up the preceding quotations, and many others that could be included, the result is a partial and, to that extent, distorted view of societies that did not work as neatly as Rodríguez wants to make us believe and that were not as “modern” or “liberal” as he purports.What about home rule and autonomy? At the beginning of the book, we are told that since 1808 New Spaniards tried to obtain home rule within the Spanish monarchy (p. 3). Throughout the book, home rule, an expression that is very familiar to Anglophone readers, and autonomy, a word that was rarely used by contemporaries, appear as interchangeable concepts that, according to the author, New Spaniards had very clear in their heads and therefore in their corresponding political actions (see, among others, pp. 185, 234, 253, 268, 271, 341). In this book, autonomy is the Ariadne's thread that leads us through the whole emancipation process of New Spain and that makes it historically and politically intelligible. In my view, no single concept can do that.If we put together Rodríguez's notion of the way in which the society and government of New Spain functioned with his extremely positive and uncritical view of the Cádiz revolution, we may understand how the insurgents are presented in this book. Miguel Hidalgo “assumed the status of an autocrat!” (p. 124); the insurgents fought for things that the royal authorities had already granted them (pp. 122, 133, 139); within a few weeks of the Grito de Dolores, “most criollos, mestizos, Indians, and castes repudiated Hidalgo” (p. 137); Servando Teresa de Mier was an autonomist (p. 200). At the end of chapter 4, Rodríguez states that the insurgents' main goal was “to obtain local autonomy or home rule” (p. 148), an idea he reinforces at the end of chapter 6 (p. 234). If the insurgents were autonomists, Agustín de Iturbide was much more so, of course; regarding the political group called borbonista, Rodríguez prefers to label it “autonomista” (p. 273). In the conclusion, he reasserts a direct and clearly defined line that goes from the very beginning of the crisis hispánica to the so-called consumación of New Spain's emancipation process (p. 342).Yet, is it possible that during 13 years, between 1808 and 1821, a clear and apparently undisputed notion, defined in this book as autonomy, could have guided almost everyone involved in New Spain's emancipation — a process that, among other things, began with a coup d'état, extremely violent between 1810 and 1814, evinced a very profound ideological complexity since its inception (as authors like François-Xavier Guerra, Eric Van Young, and Carlos Herrejón have shown extensively), and ended in what could be considered a paradoxical way (to the extent that independence was achieved by one of the fiercest and most successful enemies of the insurgents between 1810 and 1820)?The political history of the Viceroyalty of New Spain between 1808 and 1821 was a lot more than what appears to me as an incommensurable contradistinction between Cádiz (a liberal revolution, no doubt, but not the epitome of political modernity) and a “violent and disastrous insurgency” (p. 336). If the author had paid some attention to a bibliography that he constantly dismisses in his book or simply ignores, the result would have been a much more complex canvas of the period of Hispanic history often referred to as “the independence of Mexico.”

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• La España peninsular y la Nueva España ante los acontecimientos de 1808 (El liberalismo gaditano y la insurgencia novohispana en una era revolucionaria)

  Open Access•Roberto Breña•Historia Mexicana•2016

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