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they cut his head off"
"Things are bad; there is a lot of unemployment. All we
need is a bit of work, and this would be the best place
to live in Spain. The shipyards have all but closed
down, and the container ships go to Algeciras. There's
no money and people are having a hard time," says a
fisherman down on the quayside. "Let's hope the
celebrations liven things up a bit," he adds.
Over at a small shop by the Cathedral, the owner is
franker still: "The Constitution can go to hell! They
have better things to spend money on, like creating
jobs," says the owner.
The Popular Party's Teófila Martínez, who was elected
mayor for the fifth time last year, says that she could
have done with some financial support from the
Andalusian regional government, as well as from
Madrid. Sipping on an aperitif in a local bar, she
explains:
"We have been preparing the city for this for years.
The place was very run down. We are aware of our
responsibility, but let me tell you that in my opinion,
this is a celebration that has more to do with the
government, with the state, than with just the city. A
city can't do something like this on its own, however
hard it tries. This goes beyond the local realm,"
Martínez says.
"We put in a bid for European Capital of Culture, but
there was no joy there, so we asked to be the
Iberoamerican capital of culture, and we were awarded
that. We have put together a program which is modest
and within our means. We always understood that this
wasn't something we could or should do without Latin
America, and the region will be represented over the
year through all of the arts," the mayor continues. She
says that she wants this year to provide an opportunity
not only to put Cádiz on the tourist map, but also for
the city to host conferences on the wider implications
of the Constitution.
"We want Cádiz to be a place where ideas are
discussed. We are hosting a conference organized by
young people from eight different Latin American
countries and where they will discuss their
constitutions and the process by which their countries
became independent, and the role that the
Constitution of 1812 actually played in these
questions."
The government's objective is the happiness of the
nation: Article 13
What to do with Spain's empire in the Americas was a
El País/ - Internacional, Sex, 30 de Março de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
key issue for the men who wrote the 1812
Constitution. Representatives from what is today
Mexico and Peru were present, but there were no
delegates from the regions now known as Venezuela
and Argentina. Most of the delegates were criollos,
people of Spanish ancestry born in the Americas, and
some wanted to grant the vote to the black and
mixed-race population, a decision that would have
granted the Americas a majority in future Cortes.
Predictably, the Spanish deputies wished to limit the
weight of the Americans in any future Cortes and
opposed these proposals. Nor were the peninsular
Spanish inclined toward any kind of federalism, which
would have granted greater self-rule to the American
possessions; most peninsular deputies, therefore,
shared the absolutists' inclination toward centralized
government.
The importance of the Americas was clear from the
start: Article 1 of the Constitution reads: "The Spanish
Nation is the collectivity of the Spaniards of both
hemispheres."
The Constitution defined the Spanish Monarchy as
the union of all the Spanish possessions around the
world and defined as Spaniards all white or native
persons born in both hemispheres or naturalized there.
This changed the legal status not only of Spaniards in
Spain, but also of people of Spanish ancestry and the
indigenous peoples of the Americas from being
subjects of an absolute monarch to the citizens of a
nation rooted in the doctrine of national, rather than
royal, sovereignty.
Nevertheless, the authors of the Constitution wanted
to avoid giving American citizens any chance to create
political structures in any way proportional to their
population numbers.
The question of what to do with the Americas raised
the issue of race far beyond those of peninsular Spain.
Article 22 explicitly recognized the civil rights of free
blacks and mixed-race people. But Article 29 deprived
them of automatic political rights.
It is ironic that the century and a half that followed was
so violent and unhappy"
Events in the Americas were already moving quickly:
after several decades during which its influence waned
over its colonies, Spain soon found itself up against a
well-organized coalition of landowners and locally born
merchants and professionals in Latin America able to
rally the masses to its calls for independence. Within a
decade, the region would have shaken off Spanish
rule.
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