"We want this to stop, to let people know that the conquistadors are long gone, Franco is dead, and Spain has become a modern nation." "There has been this predominant Anglo-Saxon world culture that has tended to ignore Spain, with a lot of cliches about our ruthlessness and backwardness," says Ion de la Riva, Spain's former assistant secretary of state for international cooperation. Officials in Madrid hope to be able to erase this persistently negative image once and for all, during the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, in 1992.
A diplomat formerly in the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C., recently prepared a report published in Spain lamenting the tenacity of anti-Spanish biases in America, and concluding, "There is not much difference between the Black Legend and racism." The diplomat listed percepciones that he believes are shared by the American people with respect to Spain and Spaniards: Anyone who has read a Zorro comic book or watched Errol Flynn and Claude Rains in The Sea Hawk cannot help noticing that Spaniards, or their leaders, seem to come in for routine vilification. La Leyenda Negra, the Black Legend, endures to this day in the stereotyping of Hispanics in Europe and the Western Hemisphere as lazy, uneducated, corrupt, and cruel. Alfred Lord Tennyson deemed them "inquisition dogs" and "children of the devil." Montaigne accused the Spanish of indiscriminate butchery as of savage beasts." These charges were repeated and embellished over the subsequent four centuries of rivalry between the Spanish and other Western powers: the English, Dutch, Germans, Italians, French, and Americans. They accused Spain of atrocities in its conquest of the Americas, and in the conduct of the Inquisition. In the years leading up to and following the Spanish Armada, in 1588, pamphleteers from London to Wittenberg put out the word that Spaniards were an uncivilized, greedy people who reveled in bloodshed and destruction. DURING THE sixteenth century the enemies of imperial Spain, hopelessly outgunned by its armies, struck back using words.
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