Racializing the nation in nineteenth-century Spain (1820–65): a transatlantic approach

• Garcia-Balañà, Albert ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat Pompeu Fabra

     Universitat Pompeu Fabra

     Barcelona, España

     
• Localización: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, ISSN-e 1469-9524, ISSN 1470-1847, Vol. 24, Nº. 2, 2018 (Ejemplar dedicado a: New directions in the political history of the Spanish-Atlantic world, c. 1750–1850), págs. 265-277
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The article argues that the idea of raza (race), as a community based upon a common genealogy recognizable through phenotypes and skin colour, gained ground in conceptions of the liberal nation in Spain between the 1820s and the 1860s. This racialization of the nation is inseparable, the article maintains, from the varied meanings and political uses of the concept of casta, and especially castas pardas, in the late-imperial transatlantic monarchy of 1800–12. Nevertheless, a racialized approach to casta was not the only possibility when Spain’s continental American empire collapsed, as is demonstrated by the example of the deputy Domingo M. Vila in the 1820s and 1830s. This racializing meaning became dominant with the consolidation of the idea of the sovereign (Spanish) nation, during the second third of the nineteenth century. This is suggested by the second example studied here, that of the republican Fernando Garrido, an anti-Bourbon conspirator and deputy at the same time as the formulator of the very transatlantic concept of the “raza ibérica” – conceived in opposition to the “other” peoples of Iberoamerica – as the foundation for his democratic nation in the early 1860s.