The Spanish Heritage in the United States

The Spanish Heritage in the United States by Dario Fernandez Florez, 1965. Finish typing at HS (Pages 139-1420 1966 Review by David M. Pletcher The general format and the numerous illustrations of this volume suggest an official guidebook, an impression which is strengthened at the end by a photograph of West Point cadets admiring the Spanish pavilion at the recent New York World's Fair. The author conducts an extensive and carefully selected tour through the Spanish Conquest, emphasizing colorful episodes which took place in North America, and gives his followers glimpses of colonial Florida, New Mexico, and California. Then he passes on to the nineteenth century, reviews the Hispanic vogue in American literature exemplified by Washington Irving, William H. Prescott, and others, and concludes with brief examinations of such topics as the teaching of Spanish in American schools and Spanish influences on American architecture and painting. After the Conquest the topics tend to be bland rather than controversial. Cuba, a major focus of Spanish-American relations through the whole nineteenth century, is not even listed in the index. Since the book comes to us from Franco's Spain, one need not be surprised that such evidences of Spanish "influences" as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and For Whom the Bell Tolls are also overlooked. The author has set out to whitewash the "Black Legend" wherever it still remains, suggesting by innuendo that, compared to the later imperialism of the United States, Spain's record was not so bad after all. This thesis has certain merits, but Fernández-Flórez has pushed it too far. Thus he disposes of the Battle of Cajamarca with a sentimental poem on constancy, suggests that Las Casas was paranoiac, and remarks delicately that "some weak races, such as the Carib Indians, suffered severe perturbation with the coming of the conquest" (p. 32). On one page he writes of "the glorious and well-deserved zenith" of the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century and on the next page of "the expansionist greed of the United States" in the nineteenth century (pp. 173, 174). At another point he interrupts an account of a Negro companion of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca to scold the United States for its "Jim Crowism" against the Mexicans. The most attractive feature of the book is its numerous maps and engravings from the colonial period. It contains a long and useful bibliography, which probably gives undue emphasis to older titles. There are remarkably few typographical errors, although Herbert E. Bolton's classic on Florida and Texas appears as The Spanish Wonderlands—possibly a Freudian slip.