Re-imagining the Cultural Legacy of a Sixteenth-Century Empire: Spanish Exiles in 1940s Mexico

Abstract

The Spanish intellectuals who settled in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War faced a daunting task: how to recover and piece together again the signs of a political and cultural identity in exile, in order to establish new symbolic ground capable of nurturing and sustaining the expression of a collective national consciousness and history outside of Spain. I argue that this project of cultural reconstruction in Mexico, self-consciously inscribed within the master tropes of conquest, reconquest, empire, and anti-imperialism, was predicated on an alternative 'chronicle' of sixteenth-century Spain: the tradition of humanism. In this essay, I first locate the exiles' impassioned discussions about Spanish history, hispanism, and the traces of empire, within the context of ideological culture wars between the two Spains, Franco's at home and the Republican intellectuals' abroad. Secondly, I examine the émigrés' collective commemoration of two key cultural events of 1940 — the fourth centenary of the death of Juan Luis Vives, and the 400th anniversary of the founding of Vasco de Quiroga's famed Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo in Mexico — as a discursive vehicle capable of replacing the Conquerors' tale with a more satisfying story of the historical legacy of Spanish empire in Latin America.