The Spanish Dehesa is a 3,000-year-old agricultural system that is still in practice today which speaks to the heart of the southern European identity.
One small note: you mention a Reconquest from "the Moors" (la reconquista or reconquesta). There was no Reconquest in history, it only exists in the white supremacist imaginary of the Spanish state (and broader European historiography). When Muslims conquered most of the Iberian peninsula, Spain didn't exist, and unified Catholic rule didn't exist. Most of the peninsula's population stayed, with Muslim aristocratic and clerical classes replacing the Germanic Arian and Catholic ruling classes that had previously divided up the peninsula after the overthrow of Roman authority. Several centuries later, Christian monarchs began a genocidal process, not just replacing the contemporary ruling class of the peninsula, but slaughtering, forcibly converting, or enslaving all of the Muslim, Jewish, and non-Catholic Christians of the peninsula. There was no "Reconquest" because those institutions and peoples had never held power over the whole peninsula, and because it was a genocide that greatly informed the invention of the white race in the Iberian experience (in parallel to how the English invented the white race in part through their genocidal campaigns in Ireland).
And the idea of being Spanish as an ethnicity, uniform language, or national identity didn't arise until several centuries after that. Additionally, the fascists in the Spanish Civil War frequently used "Reconquista" imagery, whereas the antifascists (Socialists and Communists) sabotaged the possibility of Moroccan independence, which national liberation organizations and Catalan anarchists were trying to coordinate... Racists today also talk about a Reconquest and "Moors", so in general it's just best not to feed into that mythology.
Thanks Peter! The conventional historical side of these episodes is often a bit beyond my scope of research and I rely on the information at least being in broad strokes correct. I'll make an update to this!
Thanks for this one! I love these deep-dives.
One small note: you mention a Reconquest from "the Moors" (la reconquista or reconquesta). There was no Reconquest in history, it only exists in the white supremacist imaginary of the Spanish state (and broader European historiography). When Muslims conquered most of the Iberian peninsula, Spain didn't exist, and unified Catholic rule didn't exist. Most of the peninsula's population stayed, with Muslim aristocratic and clerical classes replacing the Germanic Arian and Catholic ruling classes that had previously divided up the peninsula after the overthrow of Roman authority. Several centuries later, Christian monarchs began a genocidal process, not just replacing the contemporary ruling class of the peninsula, but slaughtering, forcibly converting, or enslaving all of the Muslim, Jewish, and non-Catholic Christians of the peninsula. There was no "Reconquest" because those institutions and peoples had never held power over the whole peninsula, and because it was a genocide that greatly informed the invention of the white race in the Iberian experience (in parallel to how the English invented the white race in part through their genocidal campaigns in Ireland).
And the idea of being Spanish as an ethnicity, uniform language, or national identity didn't arise until several centuries after that. Additionally, the fascists in the Spanish Civil War frequently used "Reconquista" imagery, whereas the antifascists (Socialists and Communists) sabotaged the possibility of Moroccan independence, which national liberation organizations and Catalan anarchists were trying to coordinate... Racists today also talk about a Reconquest and "Moors", so in general it's just best not to feed into that mythology.
Thanks Peter! The conventional historical side of these episodes is often a bit beyond my scope of research and I rely on the information at least being in broad strokes correct. I'll make an update to this!