Juan Miguel Zunzunegui He is full of energy at 49 years old. The Mexican historian, smiling in the wind, arrives at the Antezana Foundation jovial; And he has already participated in nine activities since landing in Spain a day and a half ago. Today he steps into Alcalá de Henares, and he does so proudly: “It is a privilege to visit the place where Miguel de Cervantes was born.” It is not a trivial fact, since the ingenious gentleman was the writer who championed like no one else that language that was born between Cantabria and Burgos, grew in the Iberian Peninsula and then spread throughout Latin America. Because dying has not died nor will it die, damn it. “In a world in which there are six thousand languages, Spanish is spoken by 550 million people,” he says.
That’s why the title of the conference he gives: ‘Dreaming in Spanish’. Because, as he explains to the audience, the history of a people can be understood from their language. He already said it Jorge Luis Borges: “Words are symbols that postulate a shared memory.” Although the truth is that the talk of the Mexican historian, author of twenty books that attack the Black Legend, could be summarized in many other ways. Perhaps, ‘arguments against the lies that have been told about the Spanish Empire and the Conquest of America’. And it comes loaded from far away with dozens of them: from those that destroy the myth of barbarism, to those that debunk the fallacy of colonization.
The data does not add up
Zunzunegui starts hard. Armed with a microphone, he maintains that, no matter how much we have been told, “the arrival of the Spanish to America was not a story of genocide and shame.” For this reason, he maintains, it is absurd for the King to apologize to Mexico, as the President Sheinbaum. «There was no such thing as the conquest of Mexico because you could not conquer what did not exist. Hernán Cortés did not arrive in a country called Mexico, nor even in a complete geographical area known in that way. What was found was “a territory in which, in a very violent way”, an infinite number of peoples “who were enemies of each other” coexisted.
These peoples – Totonacas, Tlaxcalans… – were the ones who, suffocated by Moctezuma, united around the few Spaniards who had arrived to the Mainland on April 21, 1519 against an oppressive empire. «There is talk of the invasion of America, and it is absurd. Courteous It arrived with 400 people – most of them adventurers, builders and craftsmen – and it barely had a dozen cannons, horses and harquebuses,” explains Zunzunegui. And, so that the public understands how ridiculous it is to call that contingent ‘army’, he puts the figures in context. «Philip II sent 150 ships and tens of thousands of men and weapons to invade England. And, despite this, he did not succeed,” he says.
The true architects of the fall of Tenochtitlán on August 13, 1521 were, in short, “the 100,000 indigenous warriors who accompanied Cortés” and who, as Zunzunegui explains to the audience, “celebrated the next day, the 14th, the fall of a tyrannical empire that oppressed them. Nobody cried, he affirms; That was a day of revelry in which “Castilian began to spread across the continent.” And, as if that were not enough, the Mexican historian charges head-on against the fallacy that that original Spain strangled, during the following century, the natives. «You can’t call it an invasion! To maintain an invasion you must have an occupation army, and there have never been contingents of that caliber in New Spain,” he adds.
Imposed language
But the historian has come today to talk about language; and he is not without reason, since in him there is a strong argument to combat the Black Legend. «Spain never imposed its language on the natives. He never forced anyone to communicate in Spanish,” he confirms. The data is devastating; In 1821, when Mexico’s independence was achieved, New Spain had six million inhabitants. “Of them, 60% did not speak Spanish, but Nahuatl or some other indigenous dialect,” he confirms. And he adds that it was the supposed conquerors who adapted to their new brothers. “That language was the one spoken by the Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado and many other original conquerors,” he completes.
In this he is more than blunt. “A conquering people does not adopt the language of the people it conquers,” he explains. In the end, the reality is that “the Spaniards arrived, married local women and adapted their way of speaking” because they had a daily relationship with the natives. And as an example, the one he offers us: «There are languages that are spoken by 3,000 people. Ours, 550 million. We must reflect on it, because it is what makes up Hispanidad. The icing on the cake is that, according to studies, in 2050 there will be ten percent more people who will master it. “The bad news for you is that 90% of the speakers are there,” jokes the expert.
And all this thanks to the fact that, a October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus He set foot on land as part of a trip that, unfortunately, has been maligned. «In Mexico, Columbus Day was commemorated. I agree that it doesn’t sound too good, but the idea was that that day began miscegenation and a new race was born: the American,” he adds. In the peninsula, remember, until recently they had opted for the name Hispanic Heritage Day. «I have always liked it more. I know that many Spaniards do not agree, but it was the day in which their language began to spread throughout the New World,” he completes. What saddens him is that “we have spent the last 25 years covering that fact with ignominy.”
Middle Ages
The best is still left for the Mexican. To support his statements, he gives the audience a date: 1503. The year in which Queen Isabel la Católica claimed the governor Nicolas Ovando who promoted mixed marriages because, in his words, “they are legitimate and recommended” because “the Indians are free vassals of the Crown.” Next to nothing. «They came to the conclusion that all those who lived there were people. Thanks to that we are the same people,” he completes. And he adds a fact that seems curious to him: “It is curious that we Mexicans say mother to the Spanish in Spanish and that, later, we go to mass to pray to a god that the Spanish brought.”
And it ends, as it could not be otherwise – the Antezana Foundation has its headquarters in the oldest university hospital in Europe –, listing the benefits that the Hispanic Monarchy brought to the other side of the Atlantic: «Spain in the 16th century meant humanism , universities, renaissance and medical centers. “It was not a medieval country, as we have been told, nor dedicated to robbery.” Zunzunegui invites his compatriots to turn around every time they accuse the peninsula of being a thief. «When they ask me where the gold is, I always say that in the buildings that were built in America. He didn’t come out of there,” he explains. Because, don’t forget, when England settled in the New World, back in 1609, “there was already a Spanish university in Mexico.”
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