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From El Cid to El Che: The Hero and the Mystique of Liberation in Latin America
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13987 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
8,637 Words |
| Author
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Dolores Moyano Martin
Dolores Moyano Martin is a Washington-based writer who
specializes in Latin American affairs. |
Spain gave the world the hero incarnate in El Cid and the transcendent hero in Don Quixote. Much of Spanish destiny would unfold in their shadow, as affirmation and negation of their exemplary lives. The poem and the novel reflect and foreshadow the two great epics of Spanish history: the reconquest of Spain and the conquest of America.
For almost eight hundred years Spaniards were obsessed, consumed by the passion of the reconquest of Spain from the infidels, the Arabs who invaded in 710. The notion of lucha, struggle, which permeates much of the revolutionary poetry of Spanish America today, probably goes back as far as 1099, when it is said that El Cid, already dead but strapped to his horse Babieca, won his last battle at Valencia. The capture of Granada and the final expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian peninsula in 1492 was the epic feat of another Spaniard not unlike El Cid, Gonzalo de Córdoba, El Gran Capitán, whose tactics, training, and organization would make Spanish infantry invincible for almost two centuries.
The centuries devoted to warring against the infidel, an enterprise involving much the male population, resulted in plebeians who regarded themselves as noblemen, "fumo di fidalgo," according to the Florentine ambassador to Spain in 1513. A Frenchman who visited Spain in the seventeenth century was amazed to hear a poor squire boast that "I am as much a noble as the king, aye, and nobler, for he is half Flemish." And the nobleman's, or hidalgo's, chief occupations were to make war and attend mass; a knight's tasks, like Don Quixote's, were battle and prayer. The heroic life was, had to be, a quest, a gesta filled with adventure and longing, longing for honor, even death--anything but the ordinary. Otherwise one might as well be dead or worse, working with money, papers, or one's hands, like Jews and other infidels or, God forbid, women. The regard for leisure and aversion to ordinary work that existed in medieval Spain were exacerbated by the conquest of America. Saint Teresa describes how one of her brothers, having returned from America, refused to work the land. Why should he toil like a dirt farmer after having been a señor in the Indies?
The notion of a heroic life was propagated by the cantares de gesta, or chansons de geste, the heroic poetry of the Spanish Middle Ages, the popularity of which is exemplified by Don Quixote's reciting such a ballad to an innkeeper perceived to be the governor of a fortress:
Mis arreos son las armas
mi descanso el
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