Welcome class to another audio podcast.
And this is a small summary on your
reading
based on "The Origins of Anti-Mexican
Sentiments"
in the United States written by
Raimund A. Paredes.
And this chapter which is one of my
favorite.
And I know some of you are going to
complain because it's long
but then maybe you have to be a
historian to get really into it.
So if you reflect on what is happening
today with
all the protests across the U.S based on
black lives matters
these feelings are not new and they have
a whole history that supports it.
And that's what we're going to look into
this chapter
the beginning of your chapter talks
about
how most of the knowledge that we have
about the relation between
Anglo-Americans and Mexicanos took place
early in the 19th century.
And this is the beginning of
Anglo-Americans arriving
into Texas as you learned in professors
Jacobo's video lecture that deals with
Mexican colonization act.
The Mexican government invited
Anglo-Americans to colonize Texas
Anglos already came with this
attitude of expansion,
land grabbing, and a lot of it
was based on this idea of Manifest
Destiny.
It was almost religious where Anglo
Americans
were chosen by God to spread out
principles of democracy
and to cover North America from
the east to the west.
It's really important to understand that
the Tejanos who were in Texas
at that time were the elitists. They were
white criollos, these were the sons and
daughters
of the Spanish born in Mexico.
Now they were white but that was a
different type of white
compare to the Anglo-Saxon whiteness.
So by 1820s when Anglo-Americans are
arriving to Texas
they come with this preconceived ideas
that the spanish were dirty that the
Spanish were corrupt
and the ideas of the Catholic church
being corrupt became one of the main
clashes of cultures this anti-Catholic
sentiment
and hispanophobia is what Raymund Paredes
is going to explore
in this chapter.  The English settlement
of America is started at a time when
hatred of
catholicism in spain have been building
for over
50 years.  That is known as
Protestant Reformation. And this is the
time
where the church splits in two and
English were attacking the Spanish
and they were denouncing that the
masses were blasphemous, they indicted
the clergy
for encouragement of superstition and
ignorance, and they even
went further to claim that the pope
was the antichrist.
Englishmen came to regard the Roman
Catholic church as a supranational power
which was looking to overthrow their
government.
there were countless fights between the
English and the Spanish and one of the
most
spectacular one is the Spanish Armada
in 1588 who tried to invade England but
the Spanish got defeated. So
every opportunity that England had to
trash spain
they took advantage of it.  And this is
the account
of Bartolome Las Casas who was a friar
and he wrote a book titled "The Spanish
Colony,
in which he trashes the spanish,
he talks about the cruelty of the
Spanish conquistador,
and how many indigenous people
they killed.  So
indirectly when Bartolome Las Casas
was writing about all these accounts in
the new world this created a so-called
Black legend. And this Black Legend
became kind of like the main
advertisement for the
englishman to further hate
the spaniards for all the atrocities
that were committing
in the New World. Raymund Parades also
talks about the color black and
when the English travel to africa
on enslaving expeditions they became
aware of
human differences and the most obvious
of which was
your skin color. The coral black
had already acquired a number of
negative connotations in the English
mind
and eventually the Elizabethan
formulated a scale of human beauty
ranging from the blonde profession of
the northern europeans
to the ugly blackness of the African.
The Spaniards were placed near the
bottom
of the scale. This is really important
because at that time the English were
fully aware
of what made them pure. Purity was
connected to the religion
and also was connected to their skin
color.
For them the Spanish were impured
because the Spaniards at that time they
were already mixing
with the moors and the moors were
the northern Arabs who invaded Spain
in 711 and they remained or stayed
in Spain for about 800 years.
So these puritans in the colonies
they were always receiving anti-catholic
and hispanophobic literature
from England and one of the most popular words
is by John Foxe's
The Books of Martyrs and it deals with
the
Catholic persecution which describes
vividly
the numerous outrages of the Spanish
inquisition.
the settlers themselves produce a
conspicuous body of anti-catholic and
hispanophobic
literature in one of the earliest
colonial works of Plymouth Plantation by
William Bradford,
he believed that god protected
protestants true believers from the evil
designs of the Spaniards.
However, it was not only literature for
about
100 years from the 1600s throughout the
1700s
we have in the New World the English
battling against the spaniards.
Now this hatred both political
and military combined with
literature is something that
stayed in the New World for centuries
Raymund Paredes is also
in his chapter, he talks about the images
of Mexico that Europeans had acquired
from many Spanish. And it was divided
in one hand they talk about the aztec as
a very
high advanced culture but they also talk
about how faulty
their religion was based on human
sacrifices,
that they were devil worshipers, and they
have all these negative connotations to
it.
For example one of the Spanish writers
Lopez de Gomara
who talks about the impressive city of
Tenochtitlan
and he talks about his architecture and
how it was equal to the finest buildings
of Europe. but he also talks
about how these buildings
were created just for human sacrifices.
So you have this dual talk
how great they were but at the same time
how dumb they were.
But overall Europeans came to regard the
Mexicans as the most depraved
of American aborigines. So for most
Anglo-Americans the greatest impact
on their views is that
the spanish mixed with the indigenous
population
and for them these mixed breeds
created an impulsive, unstable,
and an insane population that was not going to prosper.
So, by the time anglo-americans arrived
to texas
they already had all these racist
stereotypes and ideas about the Mexican
many historians believe that the war
with Mexico 1846
was racially motivated. That's all
for now and I'm looking forward to
another review
of another good chapter that you are
going to have
for this semester.
