The quincentenary in 1992 of Columbus’ first voyage revealed the extent to which historical consciousness had transformed in many countries over the past decades. The Washington-based Spain ’92 Foundation spurned more lucrative offers and accepted $1.6 million to lend the fleet to Corpus Christi. This reception, along with enthusiastic lobbying, convinced Spanish authorities that “the citizenry’s pride in its Hispanic past” qualified Corpus Christi as a long-term home for the replicas. In March 1992, during a 10-day stay in Corpus Christi, Texas’ official quincentenary city, the fleet drew an estimated 106,000 people, its largest U.S. After visits to European ports, the Spanish sent las carabelas under sail across the Atlantic, where they toured North American ports in conjunction with an estimated 1,500 quincentenary events held throughout the United States. Among its activities, the Spanish commissioned reconstructions of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, meticulously researched and magnificently crafted at a cost of over $6.5 million. The Spanish government, on the other hand, used the event to attract positive attention. Attentiveness to the disease, destruction, and conquest that Columbus set in motion made it no longer possible to celebrate the explorer unabashedly.
For two decades starting in the 1990s, Spanish-built replicas of Christopher Columbus’ 1492 fleet, the most generic representation imaginable of the Spanish presence in the Americas, carried the burden of dramatizing the Hispanic role in Corpus Christi. This was fitting, since Corpus Christi had no pre-Texas Revolution structures or places-no missions, presidios, courtyards, or plazas-with a direct, powerful association with the Spanish or Mexican past. The most agonizing episode in Corpus Christi’s convoluted politics of ethnic commemoration involved a set of borrowed reconstructions of long-destroyed artifacts lacking any concrete connection with Corpus Christi and South Texas.
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