摘要：Este trabajo examina la historia en los Estados Unidos del siglo XIX del concepto de América Española —la denominación más común en ese período para aquellos pueblos y países al sur de los EEUU. A comienzos de aquella centuria, la América Española era definida ante todo en términos culturales, como lo opuesto a las buenas costumbres e instituciones norteamericanas. En torno a mediados de siglo, durante la independencia de Tejas y la Guerra mejicana, los Spanish Americans empezaron a ser descritos como inferiores desde el punto de vista racial hasta el punto que la doctrina del Destino Manifiesto los consideró incapaces de ser agentes de su propia historia. En resumen, para finales del xix el campo semántico del concepto estaba repleto de connotaciones culturales, temporales y raciales, que constantemente definían la América Española como algo antagónico a todo aquello que los norteamericanos atribuían a su propio carácter: un pueblo protestante, disciplinado, blanco y lleno de historia.
其他摘要：This text examines the history of the concept of Spanish America in the nineteenth-century United States —the most commonly used designation in that period for the peoples and countries south of the US border. In the early ni neteenth century Spanish America was defined mostly in cultural terms, as the opposite of American good habits, customs, and institutions. Around the middle of that century, during Texas’ independence and the Mexican War, Spanish Americans started being described as racially inferior; also during that period Spanish America was described by Manifest Destiny ideologues as incapable of being the agents of their own history. In sum, by the end of that century the se mantic field of the concept was pregnant with cultural, racial, and temporal meanings, which consistently defined Spanish America as the opposite of everything Americans deemed praiseworthy in their self-image as a protestant, disciplined, rational, white, and fully historical people.
