Even as the Trump administration deports undocumented and legal residents from Latin America in record numbers, Spain is currently witnessing a surge of arrivals from the region. Hailing Madrid as the Miami of Europe, the Economist recently noted that the city’s foreign population has grown exponentially since 2016, much of it from Latin America.Footnote 1 In stark contrast to the United States, the Sánchez government has made Spain an alternative destination for migrants from Latin America and other regions. Pedro Sánchez, who belongs to the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), announced that the Iberian nation will grant legal status to over 500,000 undocumented immigrants.Footnote 2 A newcomer to Madrid myself, I currently teach Latin American history and literature to undergraduates from my university spending their academic year abroad.
When I arrived in the fall of 2025, I encountered a city that defied my assumptions of Spain as a homogenous nation. Contributing to its cultural diversity, a significant number of people from Latin America now call Madrid home. On a walking tour I joined in September, a local colleague explained before a group of students that Madrid is the only European capital founded by Muslims. As we observed the city’s original Arab Walls, Madrid’s Royal Palace could be admired from behind. To the untrained eye, the city’s medieval Islamic origins can be easy to miss among its more prominent landmarks and monuments. First-time visitors are more likely to notice its renaissance, baroque, and neoclassical squares and palaces. To name just a few examples, the Plaza Mayor, the Museum of the History of Madrid, and the Royal Palace stand as emblems of these successive artistic movements—and capture Spain’s rise as the world’s first global empire across three centuries.
Friends and family members back home occasionally joke about their envy about my departure for Spain. Their lighthearted confession belies a shared discomfort about the current direction of the United States. And yet whether at home or abroad, there appears to be no escape from the daily barrage of alarming developments. The Trump administration recently abducted and extradited the president of Venezuela, threatened to annex Greenland, cut off oil and energy supplies to Cuba, and launched an unprovoked war against Iran. Meanwhile, reports of ICE agents terrorizing innocent civilians across American cities have become a staple of the daily news. Most notably, reports of ICE agents executing U.S. citizens Renee Good (a mother of three children) and Alex Pretti (an intensive care unit nurse) on the streets of Minneapolis made international headlines. Video footage of these apparent murders circulated widely on social media and in the European press for weeks.
While I lie in bed awake at night thinking about these alarming developments from a city replete with nostalgic reminders of the Spanish empire, I struggle to reconcile Madrid’s imperial past with its multicultural present. Even as the United States spirals into a seemingly never-ending abyss of lawlessness and elite impunity, Spain has emerged as a vocal critic of American intervention in the Middle East and Latin America. And while the Trump administration’s domestic and foreign policy challenge prevailing notions of the United States as a multiracial democracy and as a land of immigrants, these recent developments reveal a dark undercurrent in the nation’s history. Perhaps just as surprising, Pedro Sánchez’s defense of immigrants and Palestinian human rights have further made me question my own assumptions about Spain.
The Iberian nation’s shifting political fortunes during the twentieth century reveal another side to this story. A conspicuous monument located in its northwestern city limits (see Figure 1), Madrid’s Arco de la Victoria offers a timely reminder of the reactionary forces that once plunged Spain into a prolonged period of political repression (1939–1975). This triumphal arch celebrates the transformation of the country’s largest university into an ideological arm of its military dictatorship in the Battle of Ciudad Universitaria (1936) during Spain’s Civil War (1936–1939). Even today there is not a single memorial to the victims of Franco’s dictatorship in all of Spain, making this dark chapter in the nation’s history an unresolved trauma in its collective memory. And while it has thus far managed to keep these reactionary forces at bay, the rapidly rising cost of living and growing socioeconomic inequalities have enabled the far right to make inroads in Spain not unlike the United States.
Modesto López Otero, Arco de la Victoria (1956), with southeastern frontispiece, Madrid.
What can the twilight of past empires and dictatorships teach us about their present juncture and future direction? How do their monuments at once reveal and conceal their violent histories? What can the struggles against empire and fascism of previous centuries teach us about their re-emergence in new forms today?
1. Enlightened renovation in the Hispanic world
Students these days take for granted the United States as a global empire. They are sometimes even familiar with the British Empire as a global enterprise during its nineteenth-century heyday. They are less commonly aware of Spain’s global reach in the previous century. As the German explorer Alexander Von Humboldt observed on the eve of the Continental Wars of Independence, “the dominions of the king of Spain exceed in extent the vast regions possessed by the Russian empire, or Great Britain, in Asia.”Footnote 3 And yet some of their first encounters in Madrid are reminders of the Spanish empire in its eighteenth-century maximum expression. From the Puerta de Alcalá to the Cybeles Fountain, some of the city’s most iconic monuments hark back to the Spanish empire during the Age of Enlightenment. To paraphrase the art historian Daniela Bleichmar, the Enlightenment in the Hispanic world was conceived less as a break with previous eras and more as an effort to renovate and restore the Spanish empire’s former prestige and grandeur.Footnote 4 This era of enlightened renovation reached its apogee during Charles III’s reign (1759–1788) as Barbara and Stanley Stein have similarly noted.Footnote 5
Often described as Madrid’s best mayor, a monumental equestrian statue of Charles III today greets locals and tourists in the city’s bustling Puerta del Sol Square (see Figure 2). The Bourbon monarch is celebrated for transforming Madrid into a modern European capital and for seeking to redress the continent’s balance of power in Spain’s favor. Perhaps no other work of art better captures Charles III’s ambitions for the Iberian nation than the Tiepolo fresco that adorns the ceiling of the throne room in Madrid’s Royal Palace, The Triumph of Spain (1760s). In this rococo fantasy of global supremacy, Spain is portrayed as a European goddess in the heavens, while Africa, Asia, and America gaze at her from below.Footnote 6 While she looks down at her dominions from above, Spain’s facial expression conveys mild contempt as Anthony Pagden once observed (see Figure 3). Perhaps Tiepolo sought to give his portrayal an irreverent and even subversive touch by implying that all that glory and power made Spain ill-tempered and despotic.Footnote 7
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Eduardo Zancada & Tomás Bañuelos Ramón, Charles III Equestrian Statue (1994), Puerta del Sol, Madrid. The statue is a replica of a model by Manuel Francisco Álvarez de la Peña (1790) found at the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.
Giambattista Tiepolo, The Triumph of Spain (1760s), Royal Palace, Madrid.
In the classroom, I ask my students to consider the city’s rococo and neoclassical monuments as visual representations of an imperial project with both intended and unintended consequences. What do these works at once reveal and conceal about the Spanish empire in an age of growing imperial competition? What do they suggest about how Spain perceived its European neighbors and overseas colonies? Finally, how do works from the colonial Americas offer an alternative perspective on the Enlightenment in the Hispanic world?
2. The Hispanic Enlightenment in an Iberian framework
As a scholar of the Hispanic Enlightenment, I strive to create a learning environment conducive to drawing connections between disciplines and across distinct regions of the global Spanish empire. More recently, the growing number of students hailing from different corners of the Americas and from Asia in my courses has prompted me to view my research interests from trans-imperial perspectives. For example, Brian Hamnett has persuasively demonstrated how both the Portuguese and Spanish crowns refashioned themselves as enlightened absolutists during the eighteenth century. Making the case that the Enlightenment took on an Iberian (rather than a Hispanic or Lusophone) expression, Hamnett demonstrates how the Bourbon (Spain) and Braganza crowns (Portugal) fashioned themselves as at once enlightened and absolutist rulers.Footnote 8
Rather than skipping over Portugal’s empire due to my own linguistic constraints, the growing number of students from Brazil in my courses has prompted me to teach the independence era in Latin America in a broader Iberian framework. As intellectual historians such as Jeremy Adelman and Gabriel Paquette have emphasized over the past two decades, Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula not only put an abrupt end to the Enlightenment in each kingdom but also led to the dissolution of Spain and Portugal’s American empires in distinct ways.Footnote 9 Thus whereas Napoleon effectively abolished the Spanish monarchy by deposing Charles IV and appointing his brother Joseph I as King of Spain and its empire, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil hours before the French arrived in Lisbon and declared Rio de Janeiro the new capital of its empire.
Even though Spain’s American colonies declared their independence from Madrid in the aftermath of Napoleon’s invasion (1808–1810), it was Portugal’s crown prince who severed formal ties with Lisbon from Rio over a decade later (1822).Footnote 10 In so doing, Pedro I gave Brazil’s birth as a nation a royalist rather than a republican form. As I similarly demonstrate in my recently published book on the role of exiled Jesuits in the emergence of a discourse of continental emancipation from Spain, not all revolutionaries in the Americas were avowed republicans. Some saw empire and monarchy as more desirable pathways of political modernity as the case of Agustín de Iturbide of Mexico also confirms.Footnote 11
3. Rethinking Spanish imperialism in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia
A trip to the recently re-opened Museo Naval with my students further convinced me to rethink the boundaries of Latin American history and literature in the classroom from other regional perspectives. Several of my students noted how the museum conveys nostalgia for Spain’s former empire despite its recent and much vaunted renovation. Among its most prominent works of art on display, José Santiago Garnelo y Alda’s First Homage to Columbus greets visitors upon entering the museum’s permanent exhibit. Created to celebrate the 400-year anniversary of the Genoese explorer’s arrival in the New World (1892), Garnelo y Alda’s monumental painting is perhaps the most obvious example of imperial nostalgia on display. In the artist’s portrayal of the colonial encounter between Spain and the New World, the Genoese explorer holds a sword with one hand and gestures toward the sky with the other. Presumably planted shortly beforehand, a large wooden cross appears behind him. He is surrounded by a crowd of armored Spanish soldiers and semi-nude Native Americans offering these recently arrived strangers gifts (see Figure 4).
José Santiago Garnelo y Alda, First Homage to Columbus (1892), Museo Naval, Madrid.
A week after our visit we discovered that two activists splashed red paint on Garnelo y Alda’s work on Spain’s controversial national holiday: El Día de la Hispanidad. Celebrated each year on the day that Christopher Columbus first made landfall in the New World (October 12), Spain’s national holiday celebrates its cultural influence across the world as its very name suggests.Footnote 12 Belonging to the climate emergency group Futuro Vegetal, the two activists involved called for an end to “glorification of colonization and genocides, both historical and current.”Footnote 13
Curiously, Spain’s Día de la Hispanidad is a relatively recent invention. It was first celebrated as a national holiday on the 400-year anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Bahamas (1892), well after Spain had lost the majority of its New World territories and merely six years before it gave up its last remaining colonies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia (1898). When viewed through the prism of the holiday’s relatively recent invention, Garnelo y Alda’s First Homage to Columbus expresses less of a triumphalist vision of Spanish colonial history and more of a melancholic attachment toward an empire that was about to slip from its grasp for good.
Paradoxically, the Museo Naval’s portrayal of the Spanish-American War of 1898 as a national tragedy deepened my desire to teach the consequences of this event from trans-oceanic (Pacific versus Atlantic), trans-imperial (Spain versus the United States), and trans-disciplinary (literature versus history) perspectives. This military conflict between the United States and Spain over the latter’s remaining colonies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia profoundly shaped the political thought of nineteenth-century authors José Martí (Cuba), Eugenio María de Hostos (Puerto Rico), and José Rizal (the Philippines).Footnote 14 All three writers made the emancipation of their respective homeland their lifelong cause and spent time as exiled dissidents in Madrid (see Figure 5). By examining Martí’s, Hostos’, and Rizal’s works together, I endeavor to foster a learning environment that underscores the overlapping colonial histories of Southeast Asia and the Americas. Just as relevant, the common presence of students of Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Asian heritage in my classes has further convinced me of the need to place Hispanophone Caribbean and Filipino literary traditions in conversation with one another.Footnote 15
Marble Plaque dedicated to José Martí, Calle del Desengaño 10, Madrid. The plaque states: “In this house lived José Martí (1853–1895), National Hero of Cuba. The people of Madrid on the CXXXIII Anniversary of his birth, January 28, 1986.”
4. Rediscovering Spain’s past critics in Madrid
Beyond its nostalgic paeans to the Spanish empire, Madrid also bears remnants of some of its most eloquent critics. Not unlike its medieval Islamic origins, this anti-colonial history can be easy to miss yet emerges in unexpected moments. For example, on the corner of Avenida Filipinas and Parque Santander, a bronze statue of José Rizal appears before pedestrians, joggers, and cars passing by. The spiritual father of Filipino independence stands before an obelisk surrounded by three allegorical figures representing education, motherhood, and progress (see Figure 6). Written shortly before his execution by Spanish colonial authorities (1896), his most celebrated poem, “Mi último adiós,” appears below in its Spanish original and Tagalog translation.Footnote 16 The Rizal Monument is said to be a near exact replica of the same memorial found in Manila near the site where he was executed and serves as a powerful reminder of Madrid’s past as an exilic home of anti-colonial dissidents.Footnote 17
Florante “Boy” Caedo, Rizal Monument (1996), Madrid. Near exact replica of the Rizal Monument in Rizal Park in Manila by the Swiss sculptor Richard Kissling (1912).
In another unexpected reminder of Madrid’s history as a home of exiled dissidents, the son of the eighteenth-century Andean revolutionary leaders Tupac Amaru II and Micaela Bastidas is belatedly commemorated in the Church of San Sebastián on Atocha Street. Fernando Tupac Amaru was deported to Spain for his parents’ revolutionary activities after being forced to witness their gruesome execution in Cuzco at the age of 13 (1781). A plaque inside the church indicates that he was buried there in a common grave (1798). Upon inquiring further, I learned that he died in Madrid at the young age of 30 due to poverty and medical neglect.Footnote 18 Perhaps nowhere else in the city is the absolutist nature of the Hispanic Enlightenment better captured than in this modest plaque (see Figure 7). Revealing what Madrid’s more famous eighteenth-century monuments conceal, it stands as a belated acknowledgement of Fernando Tupac Amaru’s cruel punishment and death.
Commemorative Plaque devoted to Fernando Túpac Amaru (2025), Church of San Sebastián, Madrid. The plaque states that he was buried there on July 30, 1798 and that he was the son of Túpac Amaru II and Micaela Bastidas as well as a descendent of the Incan dynasty.
I recently learned that the Spanish empire’s most celebrated critic received his last rites and passed away in Madrid (see Figure 8). Fray Bartolomé de las Casas is best remembered for fighting tirelessly to put an end to sixteenth-century Spanish atrocities in the New World. Greg Grandin notes in his new history of U.S.–Latin American relations from their colonial origins to the present how Las Casas lamented not having sufficiently defended the indigenous peoples of the Americas as he lay dying in Madrid’s Atocha Convent (1566).Footnote 19 Appearing to speak to us across the chasm of centuries, his Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies resonates with renewed urgency today. As harrowing reports of the deliberate killing of innocent civilians, journalists and humanitarian workers in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere confirm, Las Casa’s Short Account remains as relevant now as it was during his lifetime.Footnote 20
Commemorative Plaque devoted to Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (1990), Atocha Church and Convent, Madrid. The plaque indicates that he died and was buried there in 1566 and describes him as “the Apostle of the Indies.”
When I take students to the Museo de América to examine its colonial Latin American art collections, we sometimes catch glimpses of the Arco de la Victoria’s southeastern frontispiece from a distance. Its Latin inscription affirms Franco’s vision of the Universidad Complutense as a Catholic and nationalist institution (see Figure 1).Footnote 21 As previously noted, it was built to commemorate Franco’s victory over his secular and progressive adversaries in the aftermath of Spain’s Civil War (1950–1956). When viewed in light of the Trump administration’s assault on higher learning in the United States, Madrid’s Arco de la Victoria illustrates how universities are not merely centers of knowledge. They are also sites of violent struggle between competing futures during periods of civil strife and social unrest.
The courage and tenacity of the city’s inhabitants during the Siege of Madrid (of which the Battle of Ciudad Universitaria was a part) offer a poignant reminder that collaboration and appeasement were not an option for those who made the ultimate sacrifice for social and political democracy. As shifting geopolitical headwinds further suggest, there is no better time to rediscover Spain’s past critics in Madrid than today. We can begin by finding the hallowed ground where Las Casas rests and conclude with the campus buildings where students joined workers in the city’s defense. May their past struggles illuminate our present. May their memory pierce through our darkness.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: L.R.; Writing - original draft: L.R.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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