This is how Nacho Cano created the best musical of Spanish nationalism

The core of the story is the misrepresentation of the history of the taking of Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés and his allies, according to which Mexicans have been told the story wrong: "That after so much battle and so much tragedy, there are always winners and defeated. But in this case it was something different. There is a new breed with a lot of personality. " The quotes are from the sermon that Nacho Cano delivers in his living room to the performers of the musical with whom he has worked over the last few years.

It is the climax of the documentary, when the musician explains what the "message" of the musical is. There it goes: the encounter between Spaniards and Aztecs has one thing in common despite being two different worlds, "passion and emotion." "The Aztecs were very emotional. The Spanish too. That's why they merged into one." As a work of art, we will have to wait to know the result of the songs and choreographies, as a historical reconstruction it is a suspense.

If Ramón Serrano Súñer had used "passion" and "emotion" to build Hispanic propaganda, he would have been much more successful in his attempt to turn Spain into the axis of the world. He preferred to use "spirituality". The idea came from Ramiro de Maeztu, who in 1934 used Unamuno's Hispanic identity to claim it as the Spanish "spiritual reconquest" of America. Almost a century later, Nacho Cano proposes a passionate Spanish reconquest of America, making us believe that miscegenation was the fruit of love and not of rape. It is not difficult to imagine Ramón Serrano Súñer in the stalls of the Hortaleza pyramid clapping, shouting, vibrating with the dances and singing the songs.

Although Serrano Suñer did not have the hypnotic pectorals that Nacho Cano sports, it is likely that he also went to Miami to compose at dawn. The Mecano component has sought the same thing that the Hispanic Council did during the dictatorship: to build a founding legend of a new nation on which to support an ideological program to erase the murders, appropriations and cultural imposition. Nostalgia for the greatest military incident in the history of Spain returns to the present day whenever the homeland is left without a future.

From the battery of topics to which the creator of the musical has resorted, the idea of ​​adventure draws attention. The interpreters sing in a rehearsal: "For our queen, the flag and Jesus Christ our lord, we go in search of gold, adventures, we will go down in history for our honor." We already anticipated that Santiago Abascal does not appear among the members of the choir. Nacho Cano rebuilds America as an adventure park where the Spaniards went to entertain themselves, because in Extremadura in the middle of the 16th century there was not much to do.

The idea of ​​adventure has been a resource widely used by revisionists to wash away the invasion. However, it is nothing more than a euphemism with which men of letters hide the thirst for blood and battle that men-at-arms claim. Or the hunger for fame and glory that characters such as Pedro de Valdivia (1497-1553) recognized in their handwriting, whose dream was "to leave memory and fame of me." This must be the honor, a herd of adventurers who arrive in a land that does not belong to them with the intention of keeping it. They were simple guys who needed feats of war because they got bored ...

It is probable that in the musical the protagonist is Malinche - you already know the story of the slave who ends up serving Hernán Cortés as a translator to recruit allies - but in the documentary Nacho is the center (of the Spanish creative universe). He is the Christopher Columbus of Spanish music. As presented in the documentary, Nacho Cano is a rocker compared to a priest from Salamanca. What we did not expect was the epic and emotional intensity that he has managed to build with the fanfare of metal and string, the drums of drama and the heroism of the orchestra. The favorite ingredients of nationalism.

Malinche is the great victim of this whole shed, because it is used as a human shield that legitimizes the myth of Hispanicity. The leading actress, Melissa Barrera, sums it up in one of her speeches, when she assures that Malinche did not betray her people, but that her people betrayed Malinche. "It was the Spanish who treated her with respect for the first time," says Barrera about the slave who becomes a translator of the two worlds and helps the invader to communicate in Nahuatl and Mayan with the populations of central Mesoamerica. Thanks to her, Hernán Cortés mounted the army that destroyed the Mexica, enemies of the people of Malintzin or Malinche.

This is the Spanish legend that explains the creation of Mexico — after its independence two centuries ago — with the founding myth of "love" between the Malinche indigenous woman and the Extremaduran military Hernán Cortés. According to this, Mexicans are the children of Spaniards. It is the Mexican composer Armando Manzanero (who died of COVID on December 28) who discovers the thesis that is assumed to this feature film: "Malinche falls in love with Hernán Cortés and that is why the birth of the new culture occurs, a new a country like Mexico ". To turn a political alliance into love is to try to make us believe that throughout their history, the Bourbons have united for the same reason.