Most of the immigrants to Spain, though, are Hispanics. It’s the same culture. Spain lucked out in that it has an infinite supply of same language / same culture immigrants and smartly encourages them to come.
Barcelona, in particular, will benefit from having more Spanish-speakers, which will put to rest all Catalonian silliness.
It’s also quite fitting that the children of the Spanish Empire should pay the debt of gratitude to the madre patria.
I disagree with this statement. Most specifically this point.
“Most of the immigrants to Spain, though, are Hispanics. It’s the same culture. Spain lucked out in that it has an infinite supply of same language / same culture immigrants and smartly encourages them to come.”
I don’t think you have really thought this through. By that very logic, England, Canada, America, Australia, and New Zealand are also quick lucky what we have an infinite supply of the same language / same or similar culture immigrants from the Caribbean, India, and former African Colonies of England.
After all, they all speak English, and English culture was enforced on them. Heck they are practically the same.
While Hispanics were certainly influenced by Spain for a very long time, and speak the same language. Heck I’ll even agree a lot of their culture is far similar to Spain than India is to England.
The problem is, they are not the same people. They have similar values, but you can’t just replace one with the other and expect them to magically become Spanish overnight. Magic dirt is not a real thing.
What this will do is continue to destroy yet another Western Nation, by trying to fix the symptoms rather than fix the problem. Also lets say it does fix the problem which it most certainly cannot. Fast forward two or three generations and you have significant numbers of two different peoples living in the same place.
Diversity is not a strength, and this path will do nothing but create issues for the descendants of the Spanish, who will now, not only have to deal with the problems created by their government, but will have to deal with a foreign people living in their lands.
This route leads to madness and needs to end.
The Spanish and the British empires worked on entirely different principles and with entirely different goals. The results are also completely different.
The Catholic King and Queen Ferdinand and Isabella had as their explicit goal to create a mixed-race society on the Americas that would mimic, in all of its institutions, the Spanish society. They never engaged in the kind of ghettoization that was so normal in the colonies of the British Empire.
Both Spain and Latin America suffered from military dictatorships until recently, both have had severe difficulties with establishing a lasting democracy, both are very socialistic and uncomfortable with capitalism. They have a shared cultural space with works of art that are mostly interchangeable.
There’s no analogy with the Anglo world here.
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“would mimic, in all of its institutions, the Spanish society”
I agree about that but still after hundreds of years and turmoil of various kinds and immigration of various kinds Mexicans and Chileans and Venezuelans have pretty different values in lots of areas.
With English speaking countries you need to distinguish what I call 24/7 English countries where a large majority speaks English all the time and 9-5 English countries where it’s used in some spheres of life (mostly related to school and work) but most don’t use it at home or with close friends (or entertainment). Those from 24/7 countries can move around with fairly small cultural adaptation problems while moving from a 9-5 country to a 24/7 country is a much bigger adaptation than Latinos will have in Spain.
And again, it’s not the adults that will do the hard work in assimilating, but their kids. Venezuelan parents should not be surprised or bothered when their children start calling them vosotros or pronouncing casa and caza differently etc.
Also, IINM Catalonia heavily discouraged Spanish speaking immigrants favoring Moroccans (thinking they would learn Catalan and help them for a pro-independence majority). Didn’t work out that way…
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It is true that the Spanish and British Empires worked completely differently. That they had different goals and priorities. However that does not mean they cannot both end up in the same place in the end.
You are quite knowledgeable of Spain and its colonies, so if you state that the Spanish King and Queen deliberately set about to make a mixed race society in America, then I will take your word for it. I would like to point out one thing though. Your statement defeats your original point about having the same culture, unless they had imported tens of thousands of Central and South Americans and did the same in Spain proper. After all if they did not, then they are not in fact the same.
Your third paragraph I feel doesn’t really belong. These are similarities, but similarities do not a people make. Same with the art. By that standard, Britain, Germany, the US, and France all share similar works of art that is mostly interchangeable. But said artwork no more makes me a Frenchman, and it does a German an American.
The issue is once again, people are not interchangeable parts. They can live in a group together, but it doesn’t meld them together. A good example is the Irish and Scottish. They have been part of Great Britain for hundreds of years. They speak the same language, have mostly the same beliefs, culture, governments, etc. Yet they are separate. They hold themselves separate. They are British, but not English. They can do this, because they live in their homelands, the lands of their ancestors. They might be under English Rule, but they are not in England, they do not live in mass in England sharing English cities and land.
How many in Spain do the same? The Muslims held it for hundreds of years. I feel fairly confident they put their own people in Spain. Do those who survived the Reconquesta not hold themselves apart? What about the people of the old kingdoms of Spain. Do they not hold themselves apart. Are they not both Spanish and Catalonia comes to mind? Except once more, they (Muslims excepted) live in their own homelands, where their ancestors were from. Part of Spain, but different.
Even the Old Roman Empire fell to the same false narrative. They conquered the world and “Romanized it.” The various nations and tribes were put under the same government, culture, leadership, language, etc. For hundreds of years. That no more made them Roman, than it made Romans Gauls, Greeks, Franks, Etc.
I repeat Magic dirt is not real. All such an action as you suggest will do is boost the population for a generation. Then the newcomers will have the same blasted issue as the locals, but now there is a civil war brewing between the locals and the foreigners. Just like in England, in Germany, in France, in Sweden, in the US, etc. If Spain takes the same route, they will have the exact same problem.
People are not interchangeable, even if they share a language and a mixed culture.
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@ – W
I shall not enter into a detailed analysis as to why you are mistaken in seeing similarities between Spanish-speaking immigrants and immigrants from former British territories with respect to their former colonial master: this blog’s host is, after all, a scholar of Spain and Latin America.
However, the concept of “Hispanidad” is quite omnipresent throughout Spanish-speaking America, including Puerto Rico, which says a lot about the heritage left by the former Spanish Empire.
If you think that a Canadian, a Nigerian, a Sri Lankan and an Australian share a common culture just by virtue of speaking English and of a common British colonial past, I think you should revisit your thinking.
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Avi
Please go back and re-read what I wrote. I stated
“they are not the same people. They have similar values, but you can’t just replace one with the other”
My point was not that a Canadian, a Nigerian, a Sri Lankan, and an Australian share a common culture due to speaking English and having been an English colony in the past. My point was quite literally the opposite.
My argument was that I find Clarissa’s point of view here illogical. Because if you take the same argument she made in the opening post.
“Most of the immigrants to Spain, though, are Hispanics. It’s the same culture. Spain lucked out in that it has an infinite supply of same language / same culture immigrants and smartly encourages them to come.”
And applied it to any other country that had colonies around the world it would ring false.
I fully acknowledge that Spain and its former colonies are an area she is better informed of than myself. However that does not necessarily make her correct on this.
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“And applied it to any other country that had colonies around the world it would ring false.”
Portugal might disagree… (again a similar goal) Portuguese and Spanish colonialism was much more like the British colonialism that created the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and not like the British colonialism in India or most of Africa (I’m not sure where SAfrica falls as the Boers were a large confounding factor).
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I find it doubtful that Portuguese speakers from Angola or Mozambique would fit in easily in Portugal.
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“Portuguese speakers from Angola or Mozambique would fit in easily in Portugal”
Probably not entirely but on the other hand, the Lusophone Africans I’ve known (admittedly not a huge amount) seem a lot more closer to other Lusophones than to other Africans while Africans from former English colonies don’t seem much like 24/7 speakers (lots of reasons my perceptions could be skewed but that’s what they are).
The Iberian empires sought to create racially mixed monocultures (rather like lots of western TV shows now…) while the UK sought to recreate stratified societies based on linguistic and culture differentiation with a local Anglicised ‘elite’ to mediate between the British and the non-anglicised majority.
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The Portuguese settlers were driven out of Mozambique immediately after independence. I suppose in a monoculture, it’s dangerous to stand out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozambique#:~:text=After%2010%20years%20of%20sporadic,them%20returned%20to%20Portugal%20penniless.
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Dear – W, I think you are right and I did not read your earlier post with due care.
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“Portuguese settlers were driven out of Mozambique”
They certainly never got close to finishing the project but it’s worth remembering that from the pov in Lisbon, Mozambique and Angola were not ‘colonies’ but integral parts of Portugal, a very different proposition from British colonialism which rebuffed Malta’s request to join the UK in the 1950s.
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I guess, but they had been there for 400 years, so how much more time did they need?
They both degenerated into particulary nasty civil wars, which doesn’t give me much faith in their system.
Even Mugabe managed to do okay for 20 years and built a great education system so that many of his citizens were able of succeed in other countries evem after his rule imploded.
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“I guess, but they had been there for 400 years, so how much more time did they need?”
You’re in Africa… it’s my understanding things don’t change very fast there… the original plan wasn’t something that could be done very quickly (meaning in under 500 or so years) and was never really finished anywhere but it was clearly the model.
And the civil wars in Africa owed a lot to proxy wars of attrition by the US and USSR so I’m not sure how organic a lot of chaos was.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
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