The dispute between England and France for the domination of the seas throughout the 18th century is one of the essential epigraphs in all written Universal History, according to the hegemonic discourse of the centers of global power, incontrovertible until very recently. According to such discourse, this centennial dispute, which had been going on since the end of the 17th century, ended with the definitive defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, his subsequent confinement on the Island of St. Helena and the conversion of the oceans and seas of the planet into a British mare nostrum, throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century. However, suppose we respect the historical truth and not only let ourselves be carried away by the victor’s narrative. In that case, we must admit that the British domination of the seas was achieved a decade earlier, in Trafalgar, where not only the French and English navies confronted each other, but also the Spanish Empire, which in the second half of the 18th century, and until Trafalgar, was comparable to the French and only yielded to the English at a global level.

In truth, the Anglo-French dispute for the control of the seas, and consequently of the world, since the end of the 17th century, was superimposed on a previous one, which preceded it by a century, between London and the Spanish Empire. I cannot go into detail here, given the characteristics of the place from where I am writing this work, but the historical reality is that the Anglo-Saxon domination of the world, from the beginning of the 19th century until today, was not only achieved by defeating France, in the so-called Second Hundred Years’ War, but above all by managing to disintegrate the Spanish Empire, but above all by managing to disintegrate the Spanish Empire into a conglomerate of theoretically independent political entities (here I include Spain itself), highly unstable, which London and later Washington turned into their economic dependencies, or, as it was said some years ago, into neo-colonies. It was largely on these dependencies that the Anglo-Saxon world could rearrange the World System in its favor, and become its undisputed Center, by dragging behind it the remains of the Spanish Empire, and bringing them in as Periphery.

Today, by the way, we are still dependent on that Anglo-Saxon world, even in extreme cases such as Cuba, which has decided to stop being so, but at the price of renouncing to live as a nation of its time according to the standards of life of the same. In the end, the Cuban regime’s continuous lament that without normal economic relations with the United States (in spite of maintaining them with the rest of the planet) the country will not be able to achieve development, and its destiny is necessarily the present process of Haitianization in which we live, cannot be interpreted in any other way.

However, it must be recognized that times have changed, especially since the leap to development of the People’s Republic of China in the last 40 years. Although the Hispanic world, especially on this side of the Atlantic, continues in the role of dependency, of periphery of the World System born in the Italian cities of the Renaissance, the resurgence of China has allowed a certain freedom of movement to the Hispanic nations, being able to take advantage of the differences between the great powers that are competing for world hegemony. But that minimal advantage will only exist as long as the dispute continues. We Hispanics must ask ourselves what will happen to us, and our place in the world, if, as it seems, China ends up displacing the U.S. as global hegemon.

What has happened since the first decade of this century, when the commodities boom brought Latin America an era of relative prosperity, to the present, with industries such as the Latin American steel industry on the verge of disappearing in the face of its inability to compete with China’s gigantic industrial capacities, paints a dim picture. In their relations with China, Hispanic nations have returned to their old role of economic dependencies, as suppliers of low value-added products.

Something else has changed: demographics. If at the time the essay Our America South of the Rio Grande was written, there were fewer people living south of the Rio Grande than in France at the time, and much less than half the population of the United States, the population of the United States at the time of José Martí, today the human potential of the remnants of the Spanish Empire is clearly superior to that of the Anglo-Saxons in our hemisphere. If by 1889 the population of the U.S. was almost ten times greater than that of Mexico, almost ten times the Mexican population, made credible the possibility that the Anglo-Saxons would displace the Hispanic type from Mexico by flooding the former “New Spain” with “old Americans” and Anglicanized European immigrants, today, if we were to represent the typical human of the Western Hemisphere, the most common human type in it, the Anglo-Saxons would be the most common in Mexico, the most common human type in it, the fair and realistic selection would be the product of the first melting pot of modernity, that mixture of indigenous, African and European, especially southern, that was born in the American lands, and even Spanish lands of the Spanish Empire. Viceregal lands, or lands of Captaincies General, in which, unlike the Anglo-Saxon or French colonial world, the mixture was the norm.

At present, the “American”, the emigrant or descendant of the original Anglo-Saxon emigrants, and the continental European emigrant converted to Anglo-Saxon values and culture, do not represent a real danger to the Hispanic world, and it is no longer credible that they will ever displace the Hispanic from Quito, Mexico City or even Buenos Aires, as was potentially possible in José Martí’s time. It is the Hispanic who threatens to displace the Hispanic in the northern part of our hemisphere, especially in the U.S., where he has become no less than the first national minority.

If the survival of any culture is threatened today in the Western Hemisphere, it is not Hispanic, but Anglo-Saxon. Current U.S. attempts to return to nineteenth-century isolationism in order to maintain the purity of the Anglo-Saxon within the U.S. borders, and in order to avoid the growing influence of the Hispanic, are doomed to failure. At least if a dramatic turn of events, such as an unexpected increase in birth rates among the “white” community in the U.S., does not occur.

This realization of the unreality of returning to nineteenth-century isolationism has led to the emergence of other visions of the issue within U.S. Republicanism, which propose not the exclusion of Hispanics, but rather to win them over to their culture and values, at least in terms of monarchism and conservatism. This proposal is not so unrealistic in the latter, given the natural tendency of us Hispanics to be conservative, although somewhat more difficult in the case of monarchism, given our inclination towards paternalism and political clientelism. In any case, the advance of the Protestant churches in the traditionally Catholic Hispanic world during the last hundred years shows that transculturation from Hispanic to Anglo-Saxon is not impossible. Difficult, no doubt, but not unrealistic.

But whether it is possible to convert Hispanics to the values of Anglo-Saxon freedom, in today’s world, unless there is a radical change in present circumstances, isolationism and the pretense of maintaining ethnic purity will lead nowhere. Today’s world, although not entirely abandoning the previous globalizing trend, is moving, in the context of the struggle for world hegemony, towards the integration of supranational economic blocs and the maintenance of fairly exclusive zones of influence by the three or four great powers that are vying for global hegemony (China and the U.S.), or at least seeking to maintain their sovereignty at the highest possible level (Russia).

To this impossibility of the U.S. to turn in on itself, and to preserve the Anglo-Saxon ethnic-cultural purity, must be added the impossibility of the Hispanic peoples to reach a minimally effective political or economic union. Neither the dreams of reviving the Spanish Empire, from the right, meaningless after Spain preferred to become European, and much less those of the left, of uniting Latin America in the Bolivarian one, have any reality in the present and in the immediate future.

As more than one attentive observer of reality has written since the end of the 19th century, there are “Latin Americas”, but not something like a Latin America. Let us be disillusioned, what united the Hispanic world was its belonging to the Spanish Empire. Originating in the will of a foreign place, the Spain of Isabel and Ferdinand, and established on a variety of previous geographical and cultural realities, after its separation from Spain the Hispanic world could only move towards disintegration, and in general towards a divergent evolution. Once the Spanish Empire was conceived as an economic unit, its parts, converted overnight into “independent” units, could only look for another supra-national system to which to integrate and subordinate themselves, arriving last and without much to offer.

Even today there is not much in common between a Bolivian from the altiplano, a Uruguayan, or a Dominican. What there is in common among them comes from their previous belonging to the Spanish Empire, but also, why deny it, from the unifying influence of the Anglo-Saxon world, especially the United States, especially since the 50s of the last century.

There is no such thing as a “Latin American civilization”. This eighth civilization, Huntington’s term, only serves one purpose: to justify the isolationist position of the author of Conflict of Civilizations, at least with respect to the Southern Hemisphere. Had he been consistent with his interpretation, Huntington, who recognizes religion as a fundamental factor in delimiting civilizations, would have had to speak of Christendom, such a civilization would include his West, his Latin America, and orthodox Christendom, as he has no problem in doing with the Islamic world, in whose civilization he unscrupulously brings together Sunnis and Shiites. It is more than evident Huntington’s intention to reserve the West as a civilization tailor-made for the U.S., in which he has included nations that do not represent a migratory danger for his country, not so much those that share with them (as Huntington claims), for a long time, certain common values and characters. If this were true, if, for example, it were the common values of democratic government that have drawn the delimitation of the West, Costa Rica, with more than 80 years without authoritarianism, would deserve to belong to it with much more reason than Spain, or Portugal, where democracy has not yet reached half a century. Let alone the forced inclusion in the West of the United States or Great Britain, with centuries of established democratic tradition, alongside Germany or Austria, where democracy has not yet reached the century mark, and was imposed from outside, after the defeat of National Socialist Germany in 1945.

The United States, especially the conservatives, are obliged by historical necessity to look towards Hispanic America, which in turn is obliged to look towards the U.S. The latter because, in the “brave new world” that seems to be taking shape, their idiosyncrasy, their being, at a more or less superficial level, would no longer be in danger, as is the case today with Hispanics, although as Christian as they are, and with whom they share so many other values, customs or interpretations of reality, for example conservatism or the scarce affinity for the Woke movement, but in a fundamental way, by threatening to turn them into a secondary power, and even penetrated in a radical way by the very different Far Eastern civilization, up to the levels imagined in “Blade Runner” or “The Man in the Castle on the Hill”. For its part, Hispanic America needs to look to the U.S. because only by becoming the barbarian peoples of the 21st century who come to bring new blood to the old “American” Empire can it realistically aspire to overcome the state of chronic dependence, and consequent limitation of its capabilities, left by its hasty disconnection from the political and economic system, in which it was constituted as a unit in any case: the Spanish Empire.

All that remains for us Hispanic Americans is to penetrate and merge with American culture to create a new human being who more properly deserves to be called “American,” although with its natural variations according to the latitude or the historical development of its particular geographic location. A Christian, bilingual American who adopts as his own many of the virtues and values ​​of the Anglo-Saxon that we lack, such as in politics or work, but without losing the best and essential of the culture of our elders.

It has already happened: this is how the Germans positioned themselves and rose in the hierarchies of global power, even dominating the World System, centuries after merging with the remnants of the Western Roman Empire. What would have happened to that collection of tribes and hordes of blond, light-eyed humans if they had not come into contact with the declining Empire to the south, and with the rising religion there, Christianity? It is very difficult to define it, but in any case their chances of reaching the position that they have come to enjoy as Western Europeans would have definitely been much smaller. The last open war between Anglo-Saxons and Hispanics, that of the Malvinas, or Falkland Islands, ended more than forty years ago. It is true that there are still open fronts of conflict, of medium or low intensity, as is the case of Cuba, where a stale political class clings to irredentism, because it knows that only in this way can it survive, and that on the American side the old idea of ​​isolationism is still popular. But the winds blow in the opposite direction to the pretensions of the isolationist, Bolivarian elites and those who dream of restoring the Spanish Empire. Not in vain, from the left, the last two Mexican presidents have elevated the immigrant to the status of hero, to the level of the old anti-imperialist fighter or guerrilla of past decades, thanks to whom Mexico recovers, for the Hispanic type, the lands that the U.S. snatched from that country in the mid-nineteenth century.