For a Casa de América in Malaga

Spain conquered empires and kingdoms and considered them as such, until emancipation between 1810 and 1824. Kingdoms with the same consideration as the peninsular ones, with the viceroys being the highest hierarchy in these territories, representing and exercising the King's authority in Valencia, Navarre, Naples, ..., New Spain, Peru, New Granada and Río de la Plata.

Spain did not have, strictly speaking, colonies, but kingdoms, the inhabitants of which were considered free subjects of the Hispanic Monarchy. 

As an example, we can mention the "City of the Kings" or Lima, which was the second capital of the Spanish empire with the most titles of nobility and greatness in Spain, after the capital, Madrid.

When Ferdinand VII left Spain, by order of Napoleon Bonaparte, all the kingdoms of the Crown became "orphans". In all of them "sovereignty" was "royal", but the popular uprising that began in Madrid in May 1808, caused by the departure of part of the royal family for France, was to change the situation.

As a result, kingdoms and captaincies-general, i.e. the administrative division of the Spanish Crown, took over the King's powers, creating juntas which declared themselves "sovereign". On the mainland from May of the previous year and overseas a few months later, all the juntas governed and legislated in the name of Ferdinand VII, subordinate to the Junta Central y Gubernativa del Reino (Central and Governing Board of the Kingdom) based in Seville.

The French invasion of Andalusia (January 1810) forced the Central Junta to withdraw to Cadiz, dissolving it and setting up the Council of Regency, i.e. Ferdinand VII was declared incapable of governing and the Council assumed sovereignty and the title of "Majesty".

The Regency convened the Cortes in Cadiz, where all the kingdoms and captaincies were represented, including the "Indies", and after numerous debates, the first Spanish Constitution was approved in 1812, defining that "the Spanish Nation is the gathering of all Spaniards from both hemispheres", expressing in Article 3 that "Sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation", eliminating "royal sovereignty", whose legitimacy was of divine origin, to "national sovereignty", which was of popular legitimacy.

Among the deputies present, comprising more than 50 Americans, and approving the constitutional text, was Lieutenant Colonel Dionisio Inca Yupangui, a descendant of the Inca imperial family.

Between 1812 and 1814 the unity of the Crown of "Las Españas" seemed to be consolidated. Each kingdom, captaincy general and province maintained its self-government.

The return of Ferdinand VII, a veritable coup d'état, by bypassing the legality of the Cortes of Cadiz and the Regency itself, which would require the analysis of another column, led to the annulment of everything that had been legislated and developed since 1808, with the result that the monarch once again appointed the rulers of his kingdoms.

If in the Iberian peninsula it was accepted, albeit at the cost of purges and bloodbaths among those who did not like him, in the overseas kingdoms it provoked the open outbreak of a civil war between the "royalists" and the "patriots", with few ideological differences between them. The royalists included peninsulares and Americans, as did the patriots.

At a conference I gave in 2010 in Santiago de Chile, I told the audience that the liberator San Martín was as Malaga-born as the Colonel Vidal Delgado who was speaking to them, given that he lived in Malaga from the age of six to 34, serving as an officer in the city's regiment, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel and participating heroically in the battle of Bailén.

Precisely the Casa de América in Malaga, will provide an answer to many of the ignorances between the two Spains separated by the Atlantic Ocean, reaching the Philippines through the Pacific: "The Spanish Sea".

Rafael Vidal Delgado, with a diploma in General Staff and a doctorate in Geography and History from the University of Granada.