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July 9, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

Immigration — and the Curse of the Black Legend

By TONY HORWITZ

Vineyard Haven, Mass.

COURSING through the immigration debate is the unexamined faith that
American history rests on English bedrock, or Plymouth Rock to be specific.
Jamestown also gets a nod, particularly in the run-up to its 400th
birthday, but John Smith was English, too (he even coined the name New
England).

So amid the din over border control, the Senate affirms the self-evident
truth that English is our national language; "It is part of our blood,"
Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, says. Border vigilantes call
themselves Minutemen, summoning colonial Massachusetts as they apprehend
Hispanics in the desert Southwest. Even undocumented immigrants invoke our
Anglo founders, waving placards that read, "The Pilgrims didn't have
papers."

These newcomers are well indoctrinated; four of the sample questions on our
naturalization test ask about Pilgrims. Nothing in the sample exam suggests
that prospective citizens need know anything that occurred on this
continent before the Mayflower landed in 1620. Few Americans do, after all.

This national amnesia isn't new, but it's glaring and supremely paradoxical
at a moment when politicians warn of the threat posed to our culture and
identity by an invasion of immigrants from across the Mexican border. If
Americans hit the books, they'd find what Al Gore would call an
inconvenient truth. The early history of what is now the United States was
Spanish, not English, and our denial of this heritage is rooted in age-old
stereotypes that still entangle today's immigration debate.

Forget for a moment the millions of Indians who occupied this continent for
13,000 or more years before anyone else arrived, and start the clock with
Europeans' presence on present-day United States soil. The first confirmed
landing wasn't by Vikings, who reached Canada in about 1000, or by
Columbus, who reached the Bahamas in 1492. It was by a Spaniard, Juan Ponce
de León, who landed in 1513 at a lush shore he christened La Florida.

Most Americans associate the early Spanish in this hemisphere with Cortés
in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. But Spaniards pioneered the present-day
United States, too. Within three decades of Ponce de León's landing, the
Spanish became the first Europeans to reach the Appalachians, the
Mississippi, the Grand Canyon and the Great Plains. Spanish ships sailed
along the East Coast, penetrating to present-day Bangor, Me., and up the
Pacific Coast as far as Oregon.

From 1528 to 1536, four castaways from a Spanish expedition, including a
"black" Moor, journeyed all the way from Florida to the Gulf of California
— 267 years before Lewis and Clark embarked on their much more renowned and
far less arduous trek. In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led 2,000
Spaniards and Mexican Indians across today's Arizona-Mexico border — right
by the Minutemen's inaugural post — and traveled as far as central Kansas,
close to the exact geographic center of what is now the continental United
States. In all, Spaniards probed half of today's lower 48 states before the
first English tried to colonize, at Roanoke Island, N.C.

The Spanish didn't just explore, they settled, creating the first permanent
European settlement in the continental United States at St. Augustine,
Fla., in 1565. Santa Fe, N.M., also predates Plymouth: later came Spanish
settlements in San Antonio, Tucson, San Diego and San Francisco. The
Spanish even established a Jesuit mission in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay 37
years before the founding of Jamestown in 1607.

Two iconic American stories have Spanish antecedents, too. Almost 80 years
before John Smith's alleged rescue by Pocahontas, a man by the name of Juan
Ortiz told of his remarkably similar rescue from execution by an Indian
girl. Spaniards also held a thanksgiving, 56 years before the Pilgrims,
when they feasted near St. Augustine with Florida Indians, probably on
stewed pork and garbanzo beans.

The early history of Spanish North America is well documented, as is the
extensive exploration by the 16th-century French and Portuguese. So why do
Americans cling to a creation myth centered on one band of late-arriving
English — Pilgrims who weren't even the first English to settle New England
or the first Europeans to reach Plymouth Harbor? (There was a short-lived
colony in Maine and the French reached Plymouth earlier.)

The easy answer is that winners write the history and the Spanish, like the
French, were ultimately losers in the contest for this continent. Also,
many leading American writers and historians of the early 19th century were
New Englanders who elevated the Pilgrims to mythic status (the North's
victory in the Civil War provided an added excuse to diminish the Virginia
story). Well into the 20th century, standard histories and school texts
barely mentioned the early Spanish in North America.

While it's true that our language and laws reflect English heritage, it's
also true that the Spanish role was crucial. Spanish discoveries spurred
the English to try settling America and paved the way for the latecomers'
eventual success. Many key aspects of American history, like African
slavery and the cultivation of tobacco, are rooted in the forgotten Spanish
century that preceded English arrival.

There's another, less-known legacy of this early period that explains why
we've written the Spanish out of our national narrative. As late as 1783,
at the end of the Revolutionary War, Spain held claim to roughly half of
today's continental United States (in 1775, Spanish ships even reached
Alaska). As American settlers pushed out from the 13 colonies, the new
nation craved Spanish land. And to justify seizing it, Americans found a
handy weapon in a set of centuries-old beliefs known as the "black legend."

The legend first arose amid the religious strife and imperial rivalries of
16th-century Europe. Northern Europeans, who loathed Catholic Spain and
envied its American empire, published books and gory engravings that
depicted Spanish colonization as uniquely barbarous: an orgy of greed,
slaughter and papist depravity, the Inquisition writ large.

Though simplistic and embellished, the legend contained elements of truth.
Juan de Oñate, the conquistador who colonized New Mexico, punished Pueblo
Indians by cutting off their hands and feet and then enslaving them.
Hernando de Soto bound Indians in chains and neck collars and forced them
to haul his army's gear across the South. Natives were thrown to attack
dogs and burned alive.

But there were Spaniards of conscience in the New World, too: most notably
the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose defense of Indians
impelled the Spanish crown to pass laws protecting natives. Also, Spanish
brutality wasn't unique; English colonists committed similar atrocities.
The Puritans were arguably more intolerant of natives than the Spanish and
the Virginia colonists as greedy for gold as any conquistador. But none of
this erased the black legend's enduring stain, not only in Europe but also
in the newly formed United States.

"Anglo Americans," writes David J. Weber, the pre-eminent historian of
Spanish North America, "inherited the view that Spaniards were unusually
cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly,
corrupt, decadent, indolent and authoritarian."

When 19th-century jingoists revived this caricature to justify invading
Spanish (and later, Mexican) territory, they added a new slur: the mixing
of Spanish, African and Indian blood had created a degenerate race. To
Stephen Austin, Texas's fight with Mexico was "a war of barbarism and of
despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Negro race,
against civilization and the Anglo-American race." It was the manifest
destiny of white Americans to seize and civilize these benighted lands,
just as it was to take the territory of Indian savages.

From 1819 to 1848, the United States and its army increased the nation's
area by roughly a third at Spanish and Mexican expense, including three of
today's four most populous states: California, Texas and Florida. Hispanics
became the first American citizens in the newly acquired Southwest
territory and remained a majority in several states until the 20th century.

By then, the black legend had begun to fade. But it seems to have found new
life among immigration's staunchest foes, whose rhetoric carries traces of
both ancient Hispanophobia and the chauvinism of 19th-century
expansionists.

Representative J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, who calls for deporting illegal
immigrants and changing the Constitution so that children born to them in
the United States can't claim citizenship, denounces "defeatist wimps
unwilling to stand up for our culture" against alien "invasion." Those who
oppose making English the official language, he adds, "reject the very
notion that there is a uniquely American identity, or that, if there is
one, that it is superior to any other."

Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado, chairman of the House Immigration
Reform Caucus, depicts illegal immigration as "a scourge" abetted by "a
cult of multiculturalism" that has "a death grip" on this nation. "We are
committing cultural suicide," Mr. Tancredo claims. "The barbarians at the
gate will only need to give us a slight push, and the emaciated body of
Western civilization will collapse in a heap."

ON talk radio and the Internet, foes of immigration echo the black legend
more explicitly, typecasting Hispanics as indolent, a burden on the
American taxpayer, greedy for benefits and jobs, prone to criminality and
alien to our values — much like those degenerate Spaniards of the old
Southwest and those gold-mad conquistadors who sought easy riches rather
than honest toil. At the fringes, the vilification is baldly racist. In
fact, cruelty to Indians seems to be the only transgression absent from the
familiar package of Latin sins.

Also missing, of course, is a full awareness of the history of the 500-year
Spanish presence in the Americas and its seesawing fortunes in the face of
Anglo encroachment. "The Hispanic world did not come to the United States,"
Carlos Fuentes observes. "The United States came to the Hispanic world. It
is perhaps an act of poetic justice that now the Hispanic world should
return."

America has always been a diverse and fast-changing land, home to
overlapping cultures and languages. It's an homage to our history, not a
betrayal of it, to welcome the latest arrivals, just as the Indians did
those tardy and uninvited Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth not so long ago.

Tony Horwitz, the author of "Confederates in the Attic" and "Blue
Latitudes," is writing a book on the early exploration of North America.

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