The black Spanish legend that has spread Hollywood

[Carlos]

The black Spanish legend that has spread Hollywood

The Ministry of Defense awards a book that analyzes how cinema and Anglo-Saxon series ridicule the history of Spain

Arriving at the top of the hill, Theodore Roosevelt - Medal of Honor of the United States Congress and future North American president - "fired at the retreating Spaniards, seeing one fall and, although he was not sure if he had killed him, He boasted: 'I killed a Spaniard with my own hand like a hare. "The fact remains that 700 Spaniards had withstood the US attack of some 15,000 men on the hill of San Juan (Cuba) for 11 hours and that they lacked From the fearsome Maxim machine guns, Roosevelt arrived, moreover, when the Buffalo Soldiers - African-American military - had won the hillock and there were only machine-gunned bodies, however, in the American miniseries Rough Riders (1997) or the Hollywood production Night at the museum (Shawn Levy, 2006), Roosevelt is described as a hero who liberates oppressed peoples and deserves a distinction.This and other stories about the black legend are told in La ima gene of the presence of Spain in America (1492-1898) in British and American cinema, work awarded by the Ministry of Defense directed by Margarita Robles.


The captain and historian Esteban Vicente Boisseau recounts in his work how the black legend has been transposed into Anglo-Saxon cinema and, for geopolitical reasons, incorporates stereotypes against Spain. "Without a doubt, the African-American population would consider inadmissible that in the Disney parks there would be an attraction, set to the sound of a happy music, showing Africans captured by pirates." "The message conveyed in Pirates of the Caribbean is that stealing, torturing and killing Spaniards, selling, buying and abusing Hispanic women and looting is not only justified, but it is a joyous event, an authentic diversion," says Boisseau.


In the movie 1492: The Conquest of Paradise (Ridley Scott, 1992) shows a grim Castile that never ceases to execute heretics. Given that the Spanish Inquisition killed some 3,000 people in three centuries, according to Vinuesa in his work, it would be expected that, since Henry VIII murdered more than 50,000 Catholics, films about his reign showed continuous executions. But no.Years later, Felipe II decided to invade England by the continuous attack of the corsairs, the execution of Maria Estuardo and the persecutions against the English catholics. He organized a large armada that in 1588, after a meeting with the English fleet, ended up capsizing in a storm. Professor María José Rodríguez Salgado also revealed that "no Spanish ship was lost as a result of the combat". In the British film Elizabeth: the Golden Age (Shekhar Kapur, 2007), Walter Raleigh is shown directing an English ship in flames against the Spanish fleet, causing the gigantic explosion of numerous enemy ships, although the reality is that the Navy was It sank several days later because of the storm.


Hollywood films enhance the image of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of North America without reflecting its Spanish past. It shows the passage of the Spanish as a memory that left no trace. In Dancing with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), the protagonist, a lieutenant of the Union, makes friends with a Sioux tribe in which an old man teaches the helmet of a conqueror while saying that those who brought him came at the time of the grandfather of his grandfather, and that eventually overthrew them, giving the impression that for two centuries there was no continued Spanish presence in California, Florida, New Mexico or Texas.


The deed of Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Inca empire with less than 170 men, is undermined by pointing out that he was a traitor for killing Atahualpa, as in the British film The Royal Sun Hunt (Irving Lerner, 1969). On the contrary, the English and Anglo-Americans do not delve into how they betrayed, between 1787 and 1871, 389 treaties signed with the Indians, practicing methods of ethnic cleansing.The films never do justice to the protective role of the Spanish rulers, who introduced improvements in America and put an end to human sacrifice and cannibalism. The monarchs Isabel I, Carlos I and Felipe II developed a network of hospitals and universities that benefited everyone, whether Spanish or native. The Government of the United States did not recognize citizenship for all Indians until 1924, four centuries later.


Shortly after his arrival in Virginia in 1607, the English settlers committed crimes against the Indians. Although Captain John Smith stood out for his cruelty, he appears as a kind and kind character in Pocahontas (1995). The American professor Theodore Jojola, of Indian origin, commented that "the English governor Ratcliffe is transformed [by Hollywood] into a Spanish conqueror eager for gold".


These images have been used with a "political purpose" to justify the struggle against Spain for hegemony in the Americas. Once hostilities began in Cuba, films emerged that justified their invasion. The power of the misrepresentation of fictions like Rough Riders has had enough weight so that, more than a century after that war, "it was granted to the clumsy colonel of volunteers and then President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt a Medal of Honor of Congress that the US military commanders of the time considered that they did not deserve, "explains Boisseau. He killed a fleeing soldier in the back and whose detachment had 20 times fewer men than the attacker.


THE FIRST AMERICAN MOVIE OF HISTORY WAS ANTI SPANISH
Two friends, the Americans J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, filmed the one that is considered the first war film in history in 1897. It was called Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (Tearing down the Spanish flag) and showed the lowering of the badge national as it was hoisted the US over the castle of the Morro of the port of Havana.


It obtained a great success, as well as its sequel of 1899, Raising Old Glory Over Morro Castle (Raising the old glory on the castle of the Morro). The Phonoscope magazine made the criticism: "The Spanish flag lowers, and upwards floats the one of bars and the stars. The symbol of tyranny and oppression that has ruled the New World for four hundred years collapses, and the banner of freedom rises. In the distance are the towers and battlements of Morro, the last fortress of Spain in America. "


https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/05/0...97_837781.html

https://publicaciones.defensa.gob.es...ros-ebook.html

[Angela]

Well, at least they don't portray you all as Mafia criminals. Growing up, my parents didn't even know there was such a thing as the Mafia. Neither did I when I was in Italy. They vaguely knew of something called "the Black Hand", and they knew of bandits like "Bandito Giuliano" in Sicily. In fact, the old people used him to scare me into behaving well. Same thing with Barbarossa, actually. We have long memories. :) Anyway, when my father started in business here, do you know how many people assumed he was Mafia affiliated? It used to enrage me, but what's the point? Ignorance is universal it sometimes seems to me.

If it's any consolation, most Americans have no real knowledge of what you're talking about, and it certainly doesn't color their image of people from Spain. I doubt most of them even remember the U.S. fought a war against Spain and nobody has seen those movies. They absolutely don't know or care about the ethnicity of the people supposedly represented in "The Pirates of the Caribbean".

The way things are going on American college campuses, the English, Spanish, French are just all white, racist colonizers responsible for all the ills of the modern world. Columbus was Spain's stooge and is single handedly responsible for the genocide of the American Indians by "finding" them and the Americas, or at least finding the route which Spain and later the English would use.

History for most people is what teachers say it is, and it is now moving to this narrative. The one you're talking about is dead and buried, at least in the U.S. What they're teaching in Britain I don't know, but I would bet it's similar.

[Carlos]

Here they scared us with the bogeyman. A mature man who put you in a sack and took you and never heard from you again.



I think it comes from an infanticide that was committed in 1910 to cure a tubercular who had to drink the blood of a child and have on the chest the entrails and butters of the child. They kidnapped a child and put him in a sack followed the plan and then with a stone they crushed the child's head and buried him.


Here it is although in Spanish all the history with photographic documentation of the assassins. The man in the bag or the butter.