Fiction
The romantic land of flamenco and Don Quixote and exotic-looking senoritas with tortoiseshell combs in their hair is also the land of Torquemada, The Spanish Inquisition, and one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.
My father was a bullfighter. He was one of the great matadors. He was the toast of Spain. Everyone adored him. My mother was a beautiful flamenco dancer. They were married but he was killed one day by a huge, dangerous bull. My mother was forced to give me up.
— Sister Megan, same sourcenote
"A españolada"! And what should Spanish films do? Hungaradas? Alemanadas? Americanadas?
—Blas Fontiveros, La Niña de tus Ojos
The other [agent] was Luis García de la Vega, the commander of Interpol's office in Madrid. Luis was a dark-skinned, black-haired, bear-large, two-fisted Andalusian Gypsy who taught flamenco dancing in his spare time. Like the dance style, the thirty-seven-year-old Luis was spontaneous, dramatic, and spirited.
María nodded. "And that is why I'm here [back in Spain]. It's like love," she said. "You can't give up because it doesn't work the first time. You learn the rules, you learn about yourself, and you get back in the arena for another run at the bull."
—María Corneja, quoting a non-existent Spanish proverb in the same book
The lieutenant looked offended in the only way a Spaniard can be offended. 'You mean you are not going to experience Seville?
'I was here years ago. Beautiful city. I'd love to stay.
'So you've seen La Giralda?'
Becker nodded. He'd never actually climbed the ancient Moorish tower, but he'd seen it.
'How about the Alcazar?'
Becker nodded again, remembering the night he'd heard Paco de Lucia play guitar in the courtyard - flamenco under the stars in a fifteenth-century fortress. He wished he'd known Susan back then.
'And of course there is Christopher Columbus.' The officer beamed. 'He's buried in our cathedral.'
Becker looked up. 'Really? I thought Columbus was buried in the Dominican Republic.'
'Hell no! Who starts these rumors? Columbus body is here in Spain! I thought you said you went to college.'
Becker shrugged. 'I must have missed that day.'
'The Spanish church is very proud to own his relics.'
The Spanish church. Becker knew there was only one church in Spain - the Roman Catholic Church. Catholicism was bigger here than in Vatican City.
'We don't, of course, have his entire body,' the lieutenant added. 'Solo el escroto.'
Becker stopped packing and stared at the lieutenant. Solo el escroto? He fought off a grin. 'Just his scrotum?'
The officer nodded proudly. 'Yes. When the church obtains the remains of a great man, they saint him and spread the relics to different cathedrals so everyone can enjoy their splendor.'
'And you got the...' Becker stifled a laugh.
'Oye! It's a pretty important part!' the officer defended. 'It's not like we got a rib or a knuckle like those churches in Galicia! You should really stay and see it.'
Becker nodded politely. 'Maybe I'll drop on my way out of town.'
'Mala suerte.' The officer sighed. 'Bad luck. The cathedral's closed till sunrise mass.'
Manolo: And I, who has been to America, my friends; I, who know their noble but childish minds, I tell you that Spain is known to America through [the image of] Andalusia. Oh, but understand me correctly! It's not that they don't value these Castilian villages of exemplary roots!
Don Pablo, the Mayor: That's right, roots.
Manolo: It's that the fame of our bullfights, our bullfighters, our Gypsies, and above all, our Flamenco song, has erased the fame of everything else, and they want the folklore from us.
Lumi Vega is well known in the Catalan underworld, both for her expertize as a thief, and for her work as a Flamenco dancer.
—Wheelman
Non-Fiction
[The Sands of Time] is a true historical absurdity, in spite of the author claiming to have researched the Spanish reality. It is the Spain of [the] tambourine, recycled in The '80s. Sheldon, in a note of supposed historical value, writes that "the romantic land of flamenco and Don Quixote and exotic-looking senoritas with tortoiseshell combs in their hair is also the land of Torquemada, the inquisition, and the bloodiest civil war in history."
The question of how such secondary manifestations of Spanish life [bullfighting and flamenco] came to assume such prominence in the United States is worth pondering. [...] As the reader will discover, our image of Spain was created by a Protestant intellectual and social elite centered in Boston and New York in the first half of the nineteenth century. United by time, place and outlook, the creators of the American image of Spain - William H. Prescott, George Ticknor, Washington Irving, Henry Washford Longfellow - largely agreed that Spain had been frozen in time by its slow pace of modernization. Spain continued to live in the past even as the United States was moving at full speed into the future. This American future, whatever its advantages, was also a frightening place; progress was threatening to compromise, even if it did not destroy the ideals in which these New Englanders and New Yorkers had a huge moral investment. Spain, where the past seemed alive and the present mostly absent (especially in the rural areas), provided an escape where romantic fantasies could be brought to life. [...] Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) [...] had more influence on the U.S. perception of Spain than any literary endeavor since Prescott's History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837). Yet just beneath Hemingway's steely prose lurk the old American verities about Spain; its quaint, picturesque image was shifted from Andalucian pueblos, redolent of the Moorish past, to the contemporary plaza de toros and the tablao flamenco. Every year, as the bulls thunder down the streets of Pamplona, the ghost of Hemingway smiles with satisfaction and Washington Irving, standing in the background, nods approvingly.
—Jonathan Brown, Foreword to Spain in America: The origins of Hispanism in the United States
Spain is indeed different than I had expected and Oh Rummy! so fascinating, [...] Castile, all I know anything about (and that just a radius of thirty miles about Madrid) - is a dry dun-brown land of rolling hills. [...] In the mountains it's very cold and even here in Madrid it goes down to freezing very often - is always chilly - And I had expected to lie in orange-gardens!
—John Dos Passos, November 1916
Few American citizens, on the other hand, are aware of, or value, Spain's contribution to US history or the democratic achievements of the former dictatorship since the mid-1970s. Many Americans, in fact, still think Spain is located in the Western Hemisphere, and they imagine the country to be a romantic land of beaches, bulls and flamenco. In Spain, meanwhile, the main stereotype of the typical American is a rich, uncultured warmonger worried only about the buck.
—Richard Gillespie & Richard Youngs, Spain: The European and International Challenges
They think Spain is a country of bullfighters and bandits, and they will not take the trouble to find out if some province of Spain has a developed industry, if we do not tell it to them and show them the product of our factories.
—Arturo Cuyás, Catalan journalist in Philadelphia, 1876
Sacred songs, blood and sand, whitened farmhouses of sharp whiteness, the white ribbon of the highway — ancestral path of the transhumant gypsies —, olive groves, sun: Andalusia. Vast scenery of neverending horizons.
—Spanish film critic Florentino Hernández Girbal, about El Gato Montés (1936)
Hollywood has a very traditional vision of Spain, they think we live a bit like in a postcard.
—Carlos Leal, Spanish-Swiss actor
Perhaps no other country in Europe has been, to such a degree, the victim of foreign perceptions. There is the Spain of the “Black Legend"—Inquisition, intolerance, counterreformation—promoted by the synonymity of Protestantism and modernism. There is the Spain of English travelers and French romantics: bullfights, flamenco and Carmen. There is the Spain of Hemingway’s sanguinary tourism. And there is the Mother Spain as seen by her colonial offspring in the Americas: the ambiguous Spain of the cruel conquistador and the saintly friar.
—Carlos Fuentes
