As the editors of this volume note, Spain has been slow to recognize the human rights abuses, including slavery, resulting from its former empire, in part because of the urgent need to memorialize the victims of the Francoist repression in and after the Spanish Civil War. As Tsuchiya and Vialette remark in their introduction, Spain\u2019s Democratic Memory Law makes no mention of empire. This book\u2014unlike previous studies of slavery in colonial Spanish America\u2014focuses on its legacies (in the plural) in Spain from the nineteenth century to the present. The mix of scholarly essays and interviews aims to reach beyond academic circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The editors\u2019 introduction notes that the height of Spain\u2019s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade (principally to Cuba) was the mid-nineteenth century, when slave trading (but not slavery) had been declared illegal. As Vialette comments in her own essay, the banning of the slave trade raised the price of slaves, making slave trading more profitable. Those profits, the introduction notes, underpinned industrialization in Catalonia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While Catalonia features prominently in the book, the geographical coverage is broad. Part 1, based on archival sources, discusses Spanish colonial West Africa and the Philippines, the links with slavery of Spanish families based in Britain, and Catalonia. Part 2 explores today\u2019s memorialization of slavery in Catalonia, Madrid, C\u00e1diz, and the Canaries. Part 3 examines the legacies of Spain\u2019s involvement in slavery in literature, visual culture, and music, including interviews with Afro-descendant cultural workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Benita Sampedro\u2019s first chapter, \u201cThe Houseboys of Fernando Poo,\u201d reads two African personal narratives\u2014the semi-fictional Una lanza por el Boab\u00ed (1962) by Daniel Jones Mathama, son of the wealthy African plantation-owner on whom the protagonist is based, and the 1961-2 notebook and diaries of Nigerian Linus N. Gheme, houseboy to a Portuguese settler family in Fernando Poo\u2014to show how houseboys resisted, and in the second case legally challenged, their exploitation. The semi-servitude of houseboys in elite African as well as white settler households shows the complexity Kirsty Hooper\u2019s second chapter examines the links to slavery of three Spanish families (from C\u00e1diz, Havanna, and Puerto Rico) living in London during the nineteenth century, after Britain\u2019s abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Her research shows the ploys adopted by these slave-trading or slave-owning families to mask the source of their wealth. The chapter\u2019s fascinating historical detail reminds us of the repression of slaves in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the 1840s by Spanish liberal politicians General O\u2019Donnell and General Prim, respectively. Aur\u00e9lie Vialette\u2019s third chapter explores the role of the major Spanish slave trader Antonio L\u00f3pez y L\u00f3pez (knighted as Marquis of Comillas by Alfonso XII) as founder of the Philippine General Tobacco Company. Her focus is on how the company\u2019s archive whitewashes its links to the slave trade, in keeping with a sanitized official discourse that allowed the capture and enslavement of Muslims in the Philippines. Like Hooper in Chapter 2, Vialette reveals the intricate networks of kinship that consolidated slavery as a In Part 1\u2019s final chapter, Mart\u00edn Rodrigo-Alharilla and Juliana Nalerio argue that the decisive factor in the shift from Spain\u2019s early modern blood purity statutes, which targeted religious others (Jews and Muslims), to modern racism, based on skin color, was the Atlantic slave trade\u2019s equation of slaves with Blacks. They note that, in slave-owning eighteenth century colonial Spanish America, blood purity laws started to be used to bolster white privileges. Examining the links between nineteenth-century Catalonia and Cuba, they show how the equation of the terms \u201cnegro\u201d and \u201cslave\u201d persisted even when referring to free people of African origin in Barcelona. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Part 2 opens with Akiko Tsuchiya\u2019s chapter on the monuments in Barcelona to the previously mentioned slave trader Antonio L\u00f3pez y L\u00f3pez and to Columbus. She notes the Franco dictatorship\u2019s restoration of the monument to L\u00f3pez in 1944, after its demolition by anarchists at the start of the Spanish Civil War, and that its removal in 2018 left standing its pedestal, which celebrates L\u00f3pez\u2019s transnational business enterprises. She shows how the erection of the monument to Columbus in 1888, for the Barcelona Universal Exposition, coopted him to celebrate Catalonia\u2019s medieval empire, contributing to the reluctance, still today, towards removing it. Particularly interesting is Tsuchiya\u2019s account of art activists\u2019 interventions which have given both monuments new meanings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ulrike Schmieder\u2019s Chapter 6 is a mine of information about the extensive links to slavery of C\u00e1diz and Madrid, none of them commemorated in either city. C\u00e1diz\u2019s museums and tourist spots celebrate the city\u2019s past as the hub of Atlantic trade and it still has a monument to Antonio L\u00f3pez\u2019s son Claudio, who continued his father\u2019s business ventures (the Catholic Church considered canonizing him). The monument to the 1812 Constitution of C\u00e1diz says nothing about its exclusion of Afrodescendants from citizenship; local abolitionists are not honored. The account of Madrid details the many statues and street names honoring enslavers, and stresses the Spanish royal family\u2019s involvement in slavery, notably Carlos III (who owned 20,000 slaves) and Queen Regent Mar\u00eda Cristina (whose husband was involved in the slave trade). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Chapter 7, by Jeffrey K. Coleman, is a fascinating critique of the Museo Atl\u00e1ntico off the coast of Lanzarote, whose underwater sculpture garden, comprising over 300 human statues, calls attention to Africans drowned in the middle passage as well as in trying to reach Spain in recent decades. While conceptually interesting, the installation repeats the invisibility of those it honors (the statues can be seen only by those with scuba-diving training) and condemns them to a second death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Part 2 ends with the editors\u2019 interview with the coordinator of the European Observatory on Memories (EUROM), Oriol L\u00f3pez Badell, and historian Celeste Mu\u00f1oz Mart\u00ednez, who heads EUROM\u2019s colonial memories section and the Spanisg branch of the Trans-Atlantic Redress Network. They outline the successive stages of EUROM\u2019s investigations into colonial memory, noting that the impulse has come from Afro-descendants and activists, with institutional recognition lagging behind. Despite the Catalan Generalitat\u2019s 2021 apology for the crimes of colonialism, they feel that Spaniards still largely view empire as a positive feature of Spain\u2019s past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Part 3 starts with Gustau Ner\u00edn\u2019s analysis of literary and cinematic representations of early nineteenth-century slave trafficker Pedro Blanco, owner of a vast slave factory in today\u2019s Sierra Leone. Ner\u00edn shows how the many novels about him from 1860 on depicted him as a heroic adventurer, until David Pesci\u2019s 1987 English-language novel Amistad, followed by Steven Spielberg\u2019s 1997 film version, spawned a succession of literary representations in English, Spanish, and Catalan that damned Spain\u2019s involvement in global slavery networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Chapter 10, Rosal\u00eda Cornejo-Parriego explores artistic and literary representations of the Black child Luz adopted by the 13th Duchess of Alba, the possible model for Goya\u2019s La maja desnuda. She sets Goya\u2019s painting and drawing of Luz in the context of a European vogue for portraits of Black children as luxury possessions, and notes the stress on the Duchess\u2019s magnanimity in Enlightenment poet Quintana\u2019s poem to the child. Carmen Posadas\u2019 2016 novel La hija de Cayetana is seen as parodying the white savior narrative but ultimately buying into the myth of a benevolent Spanish colonialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chapters 11 and 12 comprise interviews with Afro-descendant cultural workers. In the first, Tania Safura Adam, director of Radio Africa and curator of many exhibitions on the African diaspora, rejects the term \u201cactivist\u201d and expresses skepticism about use of the term \u201cdecolonial\u201d. Her focus is on showcasing the musical scene across the African continent, creating awareness of African cultural creativity rather than on redressing victimization. In the second, Black British flamenco practitioner Yinka Esi Graves, of Ghanaian and Jamaican descent and since 2013 resident in Seville, describes how flamenco has helped her articulate the erasure of Black women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The final chapter continues this stress on Black creativity with the exploration of Africans\u2019 contribution to flamenco by Miguel \u00c1ngel Rosales, director of the 2016 documentary Gurumb\u00e9. Canciones de tu memoria negra<\/a><\/em>. Rosales rejects prevailing assumptions that flamenco\u2019s African elements derive from the late nineteenth-century Hispanotropicalist assimilation of Caribbean rhythms, arguing that such assumptions erase the centuries old Afro-descendant presence in Spain thanks to slavery. He traces the history of Black Andalusian performers in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, The book offers a wealth of information about Spain\u2019s involvement in slavery as well as about present-day Spanish attitudes towards it. Its structure\u2014leading from stories of abuse to accounts of Black creativity\u2014has been well thought out. The overall message is that much work remains to be done in Spain to produce public awareness of the country\u2019s slaveowning and slave-trading past. It is good to know that the volume will appear in Spanish translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2025\/12\/1.cultural-legacies-of-slavery-in-modern-spain-1-742x1024.jpg\")
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of colonial structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
global business enterprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/europeanmemories.net\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2025\/12\/Photo_of_Colombus_Monument_taken_with_iPhone_13_Pro-624x1024.jpg\")
Columbus monument, Barcelona, July 2023. Source: RayAdvait,<\/em> CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
suggesting similarities with (but not origins in) musical expressions of the Afro-American diaspora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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