El concepto de América Española en Estados Unidos: de la Leyenda Negra a la anexión territorial

Abstract

This text examines the history of the concept of Spanish America in the nineteenth-century United States —the most commonly used designation in that period for the peoples and countries south of the US border. In the early ni neteenth century Spanish America was defined mostly in cultural terms, as the opposite of American good habits, customs, and institutions. Around the middle of that century, during Texas' independence and the Mexican War, Spanish Americans started being described as racially inferior; also during that period Spanish America was described by Manifest Destiny ideologues as incapable of being the agents of their own history. In sum, by the end of that century the se mantic field of the concept was pregnant with cultural, racial, and temporal meanings, which consistently defined Spanish America as the opposite of everything Americans deemed praiseworthy in their self-image as a protestant, disciplined, rational, white, and fully historical people.