On Friday, Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares inaugurated a sprawling exhibition titled “Half the World: Women in Indigenous Mexico,” with more than 400 works on loan from the Mexican government.
At a press conference at the Cervantes Institute in Madrid, one of the exhibition’s four venues, Albares said that the history between Spain and its former colony Mexico “like all human history, has its light and dark sides,” according to a report in El País.
He continued, “There has been pain and injustice toward the indigenous peoples. There was injustice, and it is only right to acknowledge and lament it. That is part of our shared history; we cannot deny or forget it.”
However, Albares, speaking on behalf of Spain, stopped short of offering a full apology for Spain’s three-century colonization of Mexico. That has been a point of contention in the two country’s relations since 2019, when former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wrote a letter to Felipe VI, the King of Spain, and Pope Francis demanding an apology for Spain and the Catholic Church’s role in the conquest of the Americas, as well as asking for forgiveness. At the time, Spain rejected the idea of an apology.
“It wasn’t just about the encounter of two cultures,” López Obrador said at the time, according to the New York Times. “It was an invasion. Thousands of people were murdered during that period. One culture, one civilization, was imposed upon another to the point that the temples — the Catholic churches were built on top of the ancient pre-Hispanic temples.”
At a press conference earlier this week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said that Mexico’s diplomatic relations with Spain had not broken down since the 2019, as has been reported by some media. “No relationship has been broken,” she said, according to the Diplomat in Spain, citing “economic relations, political relations, tourism relations.”
Sheinbaum, who excluded Felipe VI from the guest list of her inauguration last year for failing to reply to the letter, called her predecessor’s missive “very diplomatic” and said that it was “answered in an undiplomatic manner,” adding, “We never agreed with the way they responded, and furthermore, we agree with the letter that President López Obrador sent, and we are still awaiting this response.”
Earlier this month, Sheinbaum wrote a letter commending the “Half the World” exhibition, which is also being exhibited at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Casa de México in Spain, and the National Archaeological Museum. In it, she said, “The conquest was a brutal process of violence, imposition, and dispossession. The aim was to destroy not only territories, but entire cultures, ancient knowledge, languages, and ways of life. Indigenous women suffered especially from this onslaught: they were silenced, displaced, and subjected to violence. Nevertheless, they resisted. […] Honoring this legacy means acknowledging the abuses of the past and the present.”
At the press conference on Friday, Cervantes Institute director Luis García Montero said, “The involvement of both governments is proof of the efforts of two countries committed to culture and to what they do for mutual recognition. Diplomacy is conducted through words, memory, and shared expression.”
