‘America Bad’ Isn’t the Right Theme for America’s 250th

By Brian T. Allen

Saturday, June 27, 2026

 

Today, with only two more stories to go before the Fourth of July and America’s 250th, I’ll write about an awful exhibition at the Hispanic Society — a first in my experience — and the oversized but little-known role of Spain in supporting the Patriot cause in the American Revolution. That’s the show the museum should have done instead of the wacko woke thing pushed on us.

 

The neighborhood around the Hispanic Society is thick with Revolutionary War history. A few weeks ago, I visited the nearby Morris-Jumel Mansion, the oldest house in Manhattan, Washington’s headquarters during the Battle of Harlem Heights, and the home of Eliza Jumel, her era’s hellion with a downright chromatic past, for a time New York’s richest woman, and briefly Mrs. Aaron Burr. Her house is a short walk from the Hispanic Society on Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets.

 

The Battle of Fort Washington, fought on November 16, 1776, was the Patriot army’s last but failed chance to keep at least a toehold in Manhattan after the draw at the Battle of Harlem Heights weeks earlier and the British occupation of what’s now the Financial District but what was then all of urban New York City. Some of the fighting unfolded on what’s now the uptown campus of Trinity Church, including its cemetery for moldering Episcopalians steps from the Hispanic Society. Jumel is buried there as is John Jacob Astor and lots of Astor kin and John James Audubon. Jerry Orbach and Ed Koch are there, too, a show of Episcopal inclusion and love of celebrity. I came, I saw, and I tipped my hat to the dead. Then, off to the Hispanic Society on whose land Patriots and the Brits also fought, historians think.

 

The Hispanic Society seems to think that the conquistadors, the Franciscans, 1776, and today are same old, same old oppression and violence. It could not be more wrong. Sandy Rodriguez, Choreography of Dissent No. 2, 2023–2025, hand-processed watercolor on amate paper with chalk.

Sandy Rodriguez: Tierra Insurgente is the first New York solo exhibition of work by the Los Angeles Chicana artist. Her paintings, maps, and sculptures connect early anticolonial uprisings with “contemporary struggles around migration, policing, racial justice, and the climate crisis,” which doesn’t exist. It’s a tin-eared shame that the Hispanic Society is giving this intellectual caca a platform during America’s Semiquincentennial. Praise the Lord this mind-polluter closes on Sunday.

 

Rodriguez (b. 1975) paints maps inspired by early Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch maps and globes. She challenges the conception of mapping as neutral and scientific and insists instead that it’s  political. Mapping splits land, so it’s defined by imperialist or “settler colonialist” boundaries and, more to the point, ownable. Rodriguez, not at all a bad artist, looks at maps as “a living archive shaped by violence and care, erasure and survival.” Oh dear. This is formulaic, reheated cant about how the hunt for power explains everything — race explains everything, too — and it’s so yesterday’s passive-aggressive yadda yadda yadda. You win by pretending to lose.

 

Installation view from theTierra Insurgente exhibition. (Photo courtesy of the Hispanic Society)

 

At the start of Tierra Insurgente, the Hispanic Society’s globes from the 1610s get the hook because they “overwrite and marginalize knowledge, memory, and tradition of long-established Mesoamerican and Andean societies.” Europeans, the museum forgets, had just emerged from thinking that witches caused acne, that rectal tobacco smoke could bring drowning victims back to life, and that the Earth was flat. How in the round world would mapmakers or explorers have known these long-established societies or even thought them worth knowing?

 

Suspended above the globes are Rodriguez’s Calavera Copters, from 2018, 3-D cut acrylic skeletal forms referencing Black Hawk helicopters used by the U.S. military “to hunt and capture residents across” the country, presumably the multitudes who are here illegally. From Eastport in Maine to La Jolla in California, we’re told, a “zone of surveillance” and a “militarized gaze” make the landscape into sites of violence. The globes are covered in amate bark paper, and the copters are acrylic, so “they connect colonial cartography to contemporary regimes of control and extermination.”

 

Purple prose, sloppy history, and plenty of fibs define Tierra Insurgente. (Photo courtesy of the Hispanic Society)

Quite a leap, aside from being disingenuous since the artist and curator — and the museum — are blaming what Spain did hundreds of years ago on the U.S. Having roped us through the Looking Glass, Rodriguez takes us to her Tear Gas Map of the United States of America, 2020, updated in 2024, and a 4-foot watercolor map showing sites of “national protest against police violence and public executions in 2020.” Is she delusional? The map draws on traditions of ancient scribes who used color to symbolize power. Cochineal red means blood. It’s made from mashed bugs. Cadmium red, a modern, synthetic, carcinogenic color plots the sites of tear gas attacks and those fictional public executions: Pittsburgh, though I’m not sure why, and Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., obviously, and Los Angeles. Maybe in the movies.

 

Virtuous and evil colors figure in Rodriguez’s work.(Photo courtesy of the Hispanic Society)

 

Looking at my notes, I can’t recall how the climate change hoax figures in Tierra Insurgente. Figures unicorn-like, I suspect. Franciscans take a hit. Alas for the show, the notion that they were all meanies is a myth. There’s a good section on Rodriguez’s materials, since she dives deeply into old natural pigments and paper. She’s a top-notch watercolorist, technique-wise. I don’t think she’s naïve or ignorant or malicious, but she seems to be a fantasist, which good artists have to be, and it’s why an accountant is probably not going to become our next Picasso. Still, the show’s goal is to leave viewers, especially impressionable young ones, resentful and victimized. And there’s no nuance and no elasticity. Rodriguez supplies only one way to interpret her art.

 

Ryan Pinchot, who curated the show with Rodriguez, is the Hispanic Society’s museum educator and not an art historian. He’s a specialist in “decoloniality” and “environmental humanities.” Are these serious academic enterprises? I wonder. He oversees classes of neighborhood school children, mostly Hispanic since that’s the neighborhood, filling their minds with junk history and encouraging them to believe that every personal shortcoming or failure or setback is always the fault of society, the country, and the generic gringo. The other anchor audiences of Tierra Insurgente — let’s face it — are the Mamdani Gen Z types educated beyond their intelligence and the guilty white liberal crowd gentrifying the northern tip of Manhattan.

 

The Hispanic Society did a small exhibition for America’s 250th called Goya and the Age of Revolution. It’s never a waste of time to see things by Goya, but the art points to the Peninsular War from 1808 to 1812, not the Revolution. I don’t think Goya had much if any awareness of 1776 anyway. What’s the point? The show feels tossed on the walls following a directorial order to “do something upbeat” for the Semiquincentennial. It might have been a task that curators were too clueless or too embarrassed to tackle.

 

They should have come to me. Few Americans know the rich, deep, nuanced role of Spain in supporting the American Revolution. We know about the massive French role and Lafayette, of course. In 1789, as the royal treasury stood nearly emptied by its Patriot support, Louis XVI convened the Estates-General for the first time since 1614, looking for money that nobles and especially commoners weren’t willing to give. This prompted a tax revolt that led directly to the French Revolution.

 

Spain’s own harrowing revolution came a generation later, but in the late 1770s the Spanish Empire — then at its geographic peak and enjoying a second  political and economic wind — commenced its intrigues to push the Patriot cause over the line while in public claiming strict neutrality. It’s a fascinating story with plenty of art potential and real, relevant history rather than invented, dispiriting trash. A good look at the Hispanic Society’s own collection and what other New York museums have would uncover lots of treasures, enough for a show and more gripping than model helicopters and a stick-figure drawing of Alligator Alcatraz.

 

The doings of heavy hitters would have been more compelling than those of whiners, grifters, and psychos. Left: Gilbert Stuart, Portrait of John Jay, 1794, oil on canvas. (National Gallery of Art) Right: Francisco de Goya, José Moñino, 1st Count of Floridablanca and Francisco de Goya, 1783, oil on canvas. (Bank of Spain/Wikimedia Commons)

And the cast of fascinating, heavyweight characters: John Jay; the Count of Floridablanca, who was King Charles III’s reformist prime minister; Charles III himself since the Bourbons usually make for good copy; and Sarah Livingston Jay for charm and ornamentality. She was a diarist and the only wife of a hotshot Patriot diplomat to accompany her husband abroad. Lesser figures include Bernardo de Gálvez, who was Spain’s governor of Louisiana — yes, during the Revolution, Spain owned what became the Louisiana Purchase — and Diego de Gardoqui, Spain’s first envoy to the U.S. but, more effectively, launderer of Spanish money and supplies sent to the Patriots and Patriot goods embargoed by the Brits, all through his Bilbao company. People like that are handy.

 

Gálvez’s uncle, José, was the chief strategist of Spain’s military policy. He said he wanted both sides, Brits and Patriots, “to annihilate each other,” but he had to work in stealthy silence. Nothing would have pleased Spain more than a British quagmire from Portsmouth and Quebec in the north to Savannah and Pensacola in the south. Juan de Miralles, Spain’s secret envoy to the Patriots during the Revolution, became one of George Washington’s closest friends.

 

Anna Hyatt Huntington, El Cid, 1927, bronze equestrian statue, outside the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. (“Hispanic society, ext., statua del cid.JPG” by Sailko is licensed under CC BY 3.0)

Aren’t these more enticing, more consequential, more big-screen than George Floyd, BLM’s petty grifters, the bores and charlatans taking the knee, and atrocity porn?

 

Putting personalities aside, big and not-so-big issues abound. British presence in Florida and the Caribbean threatened shipments of New World silver to Spain, then 20 percent of the royal treasury’s annual income. As part of Spain’s alliance with France, the Spanish navy pried the Brits from these sunny climes, leaving them postwar with Jamaica and little else. Spain opened its colonial ports to the Patriots, no questions asked. Colonial Spain wasn’t poor. Havana alone was richer than New York, Philadelphia, and Boston combined. Wartime access to markets in Latin America helped keep Patriot businesses solvent.

 

Spain didn’t get everything it wanted after tacitly supporting the Patriot cause, but it got a lot. (Public domain/via Wikimedia)

More issues are meaty, few more so than Spain’s wish to protect its immense and lucrative slave trade. “Whoa,” you might say, “wasn’t slavery invented in Anglo America?” To which I’d say, “Absolutamente no.” Around 90 percent of African slaves went to Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and slavery, of course, is nearly as old as humanity.

 

And lots of surprises figure, such as the creature called Spanish Illinois, the establishment of the California fort system in — guess the date — 1776, and the start of the mission system in 1769. Spain’s presence in what became the United States ranged widely, not only in California but as far north as British Columbia.

 

Madrid proceeded on tiptoes, understanding that what happened in Boston, Philly, the Battery, and Yorktown — a mammoth rebellion — might very well not stay there. The natives south of the border were watching, too. So entangled were the issues among the many combatants that three treaties — one between the British and Americans ending their war, one ending the war between Britain and France, and the third ending hostilities between Spain and Britain — were all signed on the same day, September 3, 1783, in Paris and Versailles.

 

Left: Black Legend propaganda is no different from Tierra Insurgente’s. Right: Let’s focus on real history, like the last-minute infusion of Spanish cannons and ammo to help tip the balance at Yorktown. (Public domain/via Wikimedia)

The founding of the Hispanic Society in 1904 was a crucial moment rehabilitating Spain from the 400-year-old Black Legend, that Anglo view of Spaniards, refined but never abandoned, as uniquely treacherous, greedy, cruel, degenerate, exploitive, lazy, and irrational. Today, it’s the perfect place to tell Spain’s 1776 story. Too bad it wasted the moment on the dinky Goya and the Age of Revolution show and Tierra Insurgente, a gimmick show. “Tomorrow is another day,” though, as Scarlett O’Hara put it. The 250th anniversary of the Treaty of Aranjuez, the closest Spain came to a formal alliance with the Patriots, is in 2029. Go for it. And do it right this time.