España Transfetana: Writing the Protectorate and the Patria in La llamada del Almuédano and El tiempo entre costuras

Beginning in the 1950s, the Spanish African Empire slowly began to dismantle. Spain and France recognized Moroccan independence and returned their protectorates in 1956 (minus the enclaves of Ceuta, Melilla, and Ifni); Equatorial Guinea was granted independence in 1968; Ifni was returned to Morocco in 1969, and Spain withdrew from the Spanish Sahara in 1975. In the few decades between the Spanish Civil War and the relinquishment of the colonies, there was significant migration from Spain to Africa. A census of the Spanish Sahara shows that in 1950 there were 1,320 Europeans in the colony; by 1974 that number had risen to 20,126. In Equatorial Guinea the European population grew from 3,937 in 1950 to 9,137 in 1966. The Spanish Protectorate of Morocco experienced the highest European population; between 1935 and 1955 the expatriate population doubled from 44,379 to 90,939 (Gozálvez Pérez). From the very end of the nineteenth century, with the loss of the American colonies, Spain’s renewed focus on Africa brought about almost seventy-five years of intense interaction with and colonization of the Spanish African territories. Long before the frenetic immigration of the twentieth century, from as far back as the Moorish invasion in 711 ACE, Spain has defined itself both through and against its relationship with Africa. The almost eight centuries of convivencia2 on the Peninsula left enduring architectural legacies on the countryside and psychic impressions on Spanish collective memory. Indeed, Isabel la Católica was not content with ending the Reconquista in Granada, but hoped that her successors would continue “la conquista de África” across the Strait (28). In 1860, Antonio Canovas del Castillo, invoking the Roman legacy, affirmed that “[e]n el Atlas está nuestra frontera natural, que no en el canal estrecho que junta al Mediterráneo con el Atlántico; es lección de la antigua Romana” (77), and in 1884, José de Carvajal y Hué expressed that “[m]írandonos en Africa percibimos nuestra imagen como en clarísimo espejo” (119). Spain’s expansion into North Africa, therefore, was not simply a colonizing move to compete with other European powers; Heriberto Cairo explains that