Hispanic Utopias

Introduction

Don’t laugh at dreams, which make man divine with knowing the future.

– Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, República literaria [Literary Republic] (1655)

The aim of this book is to reconstruct the utopian tradition of Spanish-speaking peoples and introduce it into the broader current of modern utopian literature in Europe and America. The three writers and editors of this book are convinced that this rich, vibrant tradition has gone underappreciated. After all, Utopian Studies emerged as an academic field in the English-speaking world in the 1970s and has revolved ever since around the Anglo-Saxon canon, with additional token examples drawn from Classical, French, German and Russian sources.¹ There is a glaring absence of Spanish and Spanish-American writers in works such as The Utopia Reader, edited by Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent and published in 1999, to which this anthology pays critical homage.²

The notion that Hispanic peoples were incapable of writing about utopia did not arise simply from the ignorance or paternalism of foreign academics; until quite recently this was also an internalized myth. Since the Spanish Civil War, prominent Spanish intellectuals circulated the idea that Hispanic culture is fundamentally realistic, sceptical and conservative and has thus generated societies with little appetite for innovation and fantasy.³ In 1983, the philosopher Fernando Savater still took for granted ‘the non-existence of the utopian genre in Spain’, in terms very similar to those used three years later by the philologist José Carlos Mainer to emphasize the imitative nature of the science fiction novel in Spain.⁴ This paradoxical view of the Spanish people, as being idealistic and quixotic yet having no talent for social speculation, is also found in Spanish America, often considered a land of utopias and delusions, where even a specialist such as the Hispano-Uruguayan Fernando Aínsa has assumed ‘the destitution of the utopian genre in Spanish expression’.⁵ It has only been since the turn of the century that a new generation of studies began to alleviate what Stelio Cro termed the ‘non-place of the peninsular utopia in criticism’, by unearthing a rich tradition of both highbrow and popular speculative literature and thereby shedding new light on the relationship between Spanish-speaking peoples and the genre and the way of thinking inaugurated by Thomas More.⁶

Building on these foundations, this book demonstrates the existence of a rich and varied Hispanic utopianism from the sixteenth century to the present. The fact that the very first vernacular language into which More’s Utopia was translated was Spanish and one of the first utopian works published in Europe was written by a Castilian, Juan Maldonado, demonstrates that this Hispanic utopianism sprang from the same trunk as other European utopias – namely, Renaissance humanism. The Spanish Monarchy played a prominent role in the origins of Western modernity as an early example of what historians have called the ‘Modern State’ and in particular as the institution that organized American space. This is why utopia, which is closely linked to modernity, also found a propitious environment in the Spanish Empire of that era and why Spanish people on both sides of the Atlantic figured so prominently in the creation of the Western utopian tradition.

Tracing that tradition through the literature of the Golden Age, the Enlightenment, the liberal revolutions and American wars of independence, constitutionalism and romanticism, through the intense socialist experimentation in Latin America, the vitality of anarchism in a number of Spanish-speaking countries, dreams of republicanism and federalism in peninsular Spain, through the guerrilla movements and social revolutions in Spanish America, the Cuban Revolution, the Spanish-American literary boom, through the dreams of European integration, of pan-American integration, liberation theology, the Spanish transition to democracy and La Movida Madrileña, the counterculture, Zapatismo, and so on, leads us to conclude that this utopianism was no mirage of the Renaissance era, but rather that it constitutes an essential ingredient of the culture of Spain and Spanish America.

Nationalism plays no part in making this claim; it is not a question of Hispanic ‘honour’ or ‘pride’. During the Early Modern Period, in which the first part of this story takes place, national literatures did not yet exist, since nations as we conceive them today did not exist: the Hispanic utopians of the Renaissance wrote in Latin and felt themselves part of a pan-European intellectual community that aspired to unify and reform Western Christianity in accordance with their humanist ideas. Maldonado, whom we have cited as one of the founders of this tradition in Spain, wrote his utopia in Latin, as did More. And, like More, he belonged to the humanist circle which surrounded Erasmus of Rotterdam and influenced the court of Charles V. The Spanish Monarchy was at that time a dynastic conglomeration of European, American, African and Asian territories, and this ‘transnationality’ (pardon the anachronism) was the key to its strength and modernity.

Spanish utopianism thus arose from the same ‘European experience’ that gave origin to the modern utopia, according to J. C. Davis.⁷ In the Hispanic case, this pan-European cultural framework was combined with a markedly transatlantic and American dimension that made it somewhat unique. It would be some time before the borders of kingdoms were established as the bases of national identities that did not fully take shape until the nineteenth century. By that point, the Spanish Monarchy would no longer be the source of such an identity, as the project of forming a single nation from Hispanic territories on both sides of the Atlantic had failed along with the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812. Instead, the new nation-states emerged from the disintegration of the Monarchy, each developing its own literary and cultural traditions while appropriating fragments of a common past. In this collapse of the Monarchy, the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean were retained for another century, making them mixed territories until 1898, both Spanish and Spanish-American. The utopians always saw farther: the bond that linked this enormously diverse group together was precisely their aspiration to improve what existed. Dreams of Spanish-American unity, like comparable dreams that spoke of Ibero-American, Latin American or Pan-American unity, were situated in the realm of utopias and there can be no doubt that they constitute a common tradition. The same could be said of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors who dreamed of rebuilding some sort of rapprochement or solidarity between the Spanish-American republics and the former mother country.

The circulation of people and ideas between Spain and Latin America, as well as among the various Spanish-American countries, has been constant and intense due to their shared language. It is not too strained, then, to speak of the Hispanic utopian tradition as a whole, although the specific experiences on either side of the Atlantic since the consolidation of modern nation-states has led us to present them in separate chapters beginning in the 1870s. Though some observers – mainly those from Spain – kept trying to hold the old empire together under forms compatible with the independence of its components, the ‘intellectual meridian of Spanish America’ invoked by the Spanish poet Guillermo de Torre in 1927 remains forever fragmented. The cultural evolution and social circulation of Hispanic peoples since that time further complicated the topography of their utopias, which they have also expressed since the late nineteenth century in languages other than Spanish, such as Catalan, Galician, Quechua and even English, as seen in the Chicano text that we reproduce in Chapter 6 (see Section 6.9).

In Spain and its American dominions, as in England, the history of utopias was linked from the beginning to navigation, voyages of exploration and the expansion of the known world. All of these, voyages and utopias alike, concerned the exploration of new worlds. Renaissance humanism provided the cultural framework within which it was possible to think about worlds that did not align with tradition, to rationally discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of organizing society, and to contrast these reflections with the forms of knowledge recovered from Greek and Roman Antiquity as well as from certain medieval traditions, with the latter revisited and updated in the light of the new humanist mentality.

At the same time that they offered a mechanism for exploring new worlds, utopias seemed to offer a possible way to mitigate the anxiety caused by the rapidity and the depth of the changes that the modern world wrought. Confronted with an extremely violent world, one marked by the emergence of individualism, competition and a ruthless rivalry for power and wealth, they sought for ways to reassemble the harmony that had been lost – sometimes based on a Christianity that would return to its spiritually pure roots, sometimes by rejecting war or experimenting with the elimination of private property, luxury and consumerist emulation, all of which characterized nascent capitalism. These arguments of sixteenth-century utopias constituted responses to the modernization process then underway, whether they were seeking alternatives to the dominant meaning of modernity or proposing concrete solutions to confront the threats and contradictions of that modernity.

Any study of utopianism in countries of Hispanic language and culture must begin by citing two essential authors on either side of the Atlantic. On the American side, we have the jurist and humanist Vasco de Quiroga, first bishop of Michoacán (Mexico): while he ‘translated’ Thomas More’s theoretical proposal into practice by founding the two Hospital–Villages of Holy Faith, he also did the first literal translation of the book Utopia from Latin into Spanish, both of these in the sixteenth century.⁸ And from peninsular Spain, we must mention Francisco de Quevedo, who popularized knowledge of More, of his work and of the term utopia in the seventeenth century through his prologue to Jerónimo Antonio de Medinilla’s 1637 translation of the book, which circulated well into the twentieth century.⁹ In his essay, ‘News, judgment and recommendation of Thomas More’s Utopia’, Quevedo said of the English humanist (among other things) that ‘he called it Utopia, a Greek word which means: there is no such place. He lived in a time and a Kingdom that forced him, in order to rebuke the government under which he suffered, to make a convenient pretence’.¹⁰ With this, the neologism and the concept it encompassed became established and accepted in the Hispanic sphere, with all the penetrating ambiguity that its original author had given it: a fiction about a desirable alternative order (‘a convenient pretence’) used for subjecting the established order to criticism (‘rebuke the government’), but in full knowledge that this ideal world (this eu-topia) does not actually exist (‘there is no such place’) nor can it exist (it is an ou-topia, a non-place).

Utopia was thus born as another element of modernity, an expression of its faith in the possibility of rationally discovering ways to organize social coexistence that are better than those we have inherited. Over time it became a cultural engine of historical change, continually outlining alternative worlds and new horizons towards which innovation should be directed. These imagined worlds, initially placed on imaginary islands in a still largely unexplored overseas space, were shifted into the future beginning in the late eighteenth century, making the leap from voyages through space to time travel. Once the taboo of tampering with historical time to imagine a future of great changes had been broken, the door was also open to imagining, in the opposite direction, that history might have unfolded differently than it did, giving rise to uchronias, alternative histories. Utopian literature was continually enriched with the appearance of new subgenres such as dystopias, which in fact came into being long before they were given that name in Victorian England, permitting us to imagine worlds worse than the current one and thus warning us about the dangers that currently observable trends could present. As we will see, anti-utopian satires also proliferated in Spain and the new Spanish-American nations, criticizing or ridiculing attempts to dream up better worlds that have not evolved organically from the current reality.