Politicians are sparring over colonial history in Latin America

WHEN SHE was young, Constanza de Luxán moved from Vizcaya in northern Spain to Peru, where in 1668 she married a colonial official. Later she had her portrait painted dressed in black with Spanish lace ruffs. But she is kneeling on a luxurious carpet of brightly coloured geometric design derived from pre-Columbian Peruvian culture. The painting hangs in “Tornaviaje” (Return Journey), a thought-provoking exhibition at the Prado museum in Madrid, whose subject is the art produced in Spanish America from the 16th to the 18th centuries. It argues that this art, in the words of an 18th-century Spanish friar, featured “Spanish forms dressed in American clothing” and thus formed part of a culture of mestizaje (mixing).

The exhibition comes as Spain’s colonisation of the Americas is generating political polemic. Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is still smouldering after Spain rebuffed his request in 2019 that its king should apologise for the conquest 500 years ago. Conservative Spanish politicians have stoked resentment. The conquest “brought civilisation and freedom to the American continent”, said Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the Madrid regional president, in September. This overlooks the sophisticated civilisations of pre-Columbian Peru and Mexico, the fact that the conquest meant death by disease for millions of native Americans and that “freedom” would come only after independence from Spain three centuries later.