Ayuso's Hispanidad is the same one the right has always defended

The Spanish right has not historically defended an ethnic or racial idea of Spain, but rather a "hispanidad" based on the mixture of Catholicized and Castilian-speaking peoples. Therefore, it cannot be accused of betraying something it never upheld.

The discussion about whether **Isabel Díaz Ayuso** or **Vox** betray a supposed Spanish racial essence starts from a mistaken premise. The Spanish right has never defended a Spain defined by ethnicity, but by religion and language.

## The Francoist "race" was mixture, not purity

Francoist propaganda used the word race to refer to the set of peoples mixed with each other that formed the Spanish Monarchy and its domains in America and, partly, in Asia. The Dominican **Isidro Gomá Tomás**, in his "Apología de la Hispanidad", wrote that Hispanidad had a single spirit, that of God, which informed the Mother in her conquests and the aboriginal races of America when they were incorporated into God and the Fatherland.

That text does not speak of purity, but of incorporation. The "race" was the result of catechized mestizaje. The graphic propaganda of the time showed that mixture of Amerindians and Spaniards as part of the national narrative.

## Peronism copied the same vocabulary

The early Peronism, of evident fascist inspiration, used an almost identical imaginary. Its propaganda showed a multiracial and multicolored race, with indigenous women with antiestéticathers and Spanish women, as part of the same Hispanic family. There was no defense there of an ethnically homogeneous Spain.

That similarity is not coincidental: both regimes drank from the same ideological repertoire, which understood the Hispanic as a cultural and religious community, not as a closed lineage.

## An accusation that does not hold up

If the Spanish right never defended a racial idea of Spain, neither Vox nor Ayuso can be traitors to something that never existed. The accusation of wanting to "sudaquizar" Spain presupposes a previous purity that Francoist propaganda itself denied.

The hispanidad that Ayuso claims is, in that sense, the same one that Francoism upheld: mixture, Catholicism and Spanish as a language. Another thing is to discuss whether that narrative is correct, but no one can be accused of betraying a doctrine that was never defended.