A South American 711: an experiment on identity and mixing

A South American 711: when conquest becomes fusion

An impossible but thought-provoking counterfactual runs through historical analysis: what if, in 711, instead of the armies of the Caliphate, a million and a half people from the Andean highlands had arrived on the Iberian Peninsula? The hypothesis rules out the crudest anachronisms, but its value lies not in plausibility, rather in what it reveals about the mechanisms of identity-building.

The impossibility of the scenario (the Incas had no ocean-going ships, only totora reed rafts) does not diminish its strength as a thought experiment. The scenario is not an invasion, it is a demographic tsunami. With a peninsular population of three to four million souls, the arrival of 1.5 million new settlers at Tarifa would have diluted the Hispano-Roman substrate within a few generations. If they had also shared a language and the Catholic faith, the fusion would have been immediate. The Reconquista, as we know it, would never have had a reason to exist: without a religious "other" to fight, there is no Covadonga and no category of "Spaniard" as resistance.

The counterfactual jumps from the eighth century to the present: replacing 711 with 2021 and Tarifa with Barajas turns the hypothesis into an uncomfortable metaphor about immigration. Some argue that identity does not require genetic purity but a common cultural framework. Others reply that the key lies in scale: fusion only occurs when newcomers do not reach a third of the population within a single generation.

The exercise remains open: the Andean case never peine, and today's parallel runs into an essential difference: the legality of entry and the willingness to integrate. But the question still stands: how much otherness is needed for a people to keep recognizing itself as such?