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La Leyenda Negra/The Black Legend: Historical Distortion,Defamation, Slander, Libel, and Stereotyping of Hispanics
By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca
Scholar in Residence and Chair of the Department of Chicana/o and Hemispheric Studies, Western New MexicoUniversityThis series was originally published in
Somos Primos
,
104th-116th Issue
I Overview and IntroductionI
was having dinner, not too long ago, with a group of librarians at an ALA conference in Philadelphia when theconversation turned to Hispanics apropos some new titles just published about the Spaniards in North Americawhen one of the librarians remarked off-handedly that the Spaniards didn’t really do much with North Americaother than to desecrate it in their search for gold. And how did she know that, I asked. Whereupon she respondedthat it was well documented. Well-documented indeed!Hispanics in general, and American Hispanics (U.S. Hispanics) in particular, have been the butt of historicaldistortion, defamation, slander, libel, and stereotyping in an unbroken string of public perceptions since thedefeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Queen Elizabeth lost no time in turning the inglorious Spanish defeat intoa major public relations campaign against the Spaniards. The result has been a 420 year assault on the Hispaniccharacter. Never mind that it was the weather that defeated the Spanish Armada of the most powerful nation atthe time, not the English navy.Some 36 years earlier in 1552, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bishop of Chiapas, had penned a blistering account of the Spanish treatment of the indigenous people the Spanish crown claimed possession of entitled
 A Brief  Account of the Destruction of the Indies
. As a tribute to his work de las Casas has been called Champion of theIndigenous Peoples of the Americas, and his work has been considered an anti-imperialist tract against theSpanish enterprise in the Americas.Using de las Casas’ work as fodder, the English crown spun a yarn about the Spaniards that persists to our day.Spaniards were characterized as “inherently barbaric, corrupt, and intolerant; lovers of cruelties and bloodshed.”According to one source, “painting the Spanish as cruel and avaricious became an integral portion of the patriotic duties of pamphleteers of London, Frankfort, and France.” Thus emerged
The Black Legend 
, equatingSpaniards as “black-hearted,” in league with the prince of darkness himself. Protestant Europe seized this
1
 
opportunity to paint Spaniards as repressive, inhuman, and barbaric.Unfortunately, the origin of the Black Legend is attributed to de las Casas. Over the next century, 42 editions of 
 A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies
appeared in Holland, England, France, and Germany. Inactuality,
 A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies
, did not accuse the Spanish monarch of genocide (ashas been imputed) but sought to instruct the King about better governance in the crown’s colonial enterprise.This is not to dismiss the colonial intolerances of imperialism. The English enterprise in the Americas was notany better or beneficent than the Spanish enterprise in the Americas. They were both imperial powers. TheSpaniards were not any more cruel than the English.Abetting inculcation of The Black Legend in the consciousness of Protestant Europe were references to theexpulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 as proof of Spanish iniquity and degeneracy, laying aside the historicalfacts that in 1290 England expelled its Jews and in 1306 France expelled its Jews. Anti-Jewish sentiment wasrife throughout Europe. Another charge leveled against Spain to buttress The Black Legend was the“Inquisition” and the burning of hundreds of thousands of Protestant heretics, assertions that have no basis inhistorical fact. The Inquisition was real in Spain; as real as it was in England and France.Demonization of Spaniards transmogrified into demonization of Hispanics in general. Maria de Guzmán callsthis “Spain’s long shadow.”
II The Columbian ExchangeB
y the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Spain held firm control of its empire in the Americas, a control that,despite its loss in attempting to gain a foothold in England by force of arms, continued for another 30 years until1620 with establishment of the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts by the English. Emboldened by the disaster of the Spanish Armada, which was actually a Luso-Hispanic collaboration, the English intensified their slanderous characterization of the Spaniards over those 30 years. Propagandists vilified Spaniards as “corruptand cruel people who subjugated and exploited the New World Indians, stole their gold and silver, infected themwith disease, and killed them in numbers without precedent” (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article).There is no dispute that the Columbian contact with the Americas impacted the indigenous peoples of theAmericas and the Spaniards and ineluctably altered the course of history. Within a century that contactdevastated the Indian population within those zones of contact to one-tenth of their original size. Thatdevastation was engendered principally by smallpox, influenza, and measles, diseases for which the Indians hadno immunity. This is not to diminish Spanish excesses against the Indians, excesses such as forced labor,starvation, and corporal brutality practiced by all the other imperial powers around the globe. However, it wasthe Spanish excesses that “provided powerful ideological sanction for English involvement in the New World”(Digital History, Ibid.).The heat of the Black Legend revealed the “true” nature of the conflict: Protestant England versus CatholicSpain. Some historians point to this conflict as the root cause of slavery in the Americas, singling out Bartoloméde las Casas as the architect of that trade by his suggestion in his
 Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies
(1552) to augment the indigenous workforce of the Americas with African slaves. But this view of non-whitesas human commodities was part of the paradigm of ethnic-specific supremacy espoused by imperialism around
2
 
the world then. Nothing in de las Casas’ work indicts it as the blueprint for the Black Legend or slavery.In the years following establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Protestant English settlers(essentially Puritans, though hailed as Pilgrims) regarded themselves as the vanguard in America against thePapist Spanish Catholics. The Puritan English settlers believed it was their destiny to rescue the Indians fromtheir Spanish oppressors; but the Puritans also saw slavery as authorized by the Bible and a natural part of society.The most ardent of those rescuers was Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the most prodigious writer of PuritanAmerica. In his zeal to free the Indians under Spanish rule from the yoke of Catholicism, he translated the KingJames Bible into a rough but tolerable Spanish for publication and distribution to the Indians of New Spain.Perhaps this contributed to the very common practice of intermarriage between Spanish colonists and theIndians of New Spain encouraged by Catholic priests.By the end of the 17
th
century the most virulent reference of the Black Legend which made Spain less thanEuropean was propagation of the concept that Spain’s greedy thirst for gold could be attributed to Spain’s racialcorruption after 800 years of Moorish occupation mixed with Visigothic and Jewish remnants. That referencehas become so historically ingrained in the collective consciousness of the world that even today the Spanish past in the Americas is characterized as a search for gold, nothing else. Never mind that Spanish settlersestablished communities, built human networks, and practiced agriculture, ranching and mining whosetechniques are still with us in the Americas.The polemics of the Black Legend has so demonized Spain and its progeny that efforts to repair the character of Spain and its progeny seem almost insuperable.
III Cultures in Conflict
 
T
he success of the Spanish enterprise in the Americas was stunning, and as exploits of that success circulatedthroughout Europe and the rest of the world during the 16
th
century, resentment toward Spain hardened intovirulent propaganda. By the end of the 16
th
century, Spain’s dominion in the New World and the riches itamassed therefrom made it one of the world’s most singular powers. It was the first global empire of the 16
th
century and would remain a superpower for the next 150 years. Fierce competition with Spain over the spoils of the New World fueled the pitch and stridency of The Black Legend emanating from England, Holland, andFrance. With English, Dutch, and French toeholds in North America in the 17
th
century, the prejudices of TheBlack Legend in Europe took root in Colonial America. The clash of cultures was inevitable.Surprisingly, in 17
th
century America Catholic France was the most vocal in its diatribes against Spain, thinkingthat Spain was the abyss of darkness. In the 20
th
century, a French minister harrumphed that Spain had noliterature. This illustrates how The black Legend befouled Spain’s reputation for centuries. However, the mostvirulent denigrations of Spain came from the English. According to some historians, “The Black legend derivedin part from the Spanish themselves who wrote about their experience in the New World with a naïve egotismthat was easily turned by European translators into the dark deeds of evil and cruel colonial slavers and tyrants”(http://www.library.unlv.edu/millionth/decade8.html). In other words, if the Spaniards were characterized asmalevolently as they were, they brought it on themselves. Moreover, “Protestants, particularly Calvinists, wereat the forefront of industrial creativity and development when compared to Catholics, Jews, and Muslims”
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