WAYFARING VISIONS: THE POLITICS OF PILGRIMAGE TO SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA (1879-1950)

Abstract

Wayfaring Visions strives to explain the cultural role of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in modern Spanish, Galician, and Trans-Atlantic political histories, beginning with the rediscovery of Saint James the Greater’s relics in 1879. By tracing the debates surrounding the authenticity of these newly found relics, this study outlines the often-contentious process of theorizing the modern relic. This soon transformed into an even bigger debate about the various political meanings of national histories, traditions, and popular cultures. I explore various political projects that engaged with pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela throughout its history, starting with Canon Antonio López Ferreiro’s excavations and eventual construction of a monumental reliquary that posited the relics as a locus to Spanish National Catholicism. At the same time, it shows how the return of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela mirrored the rise of the city as a political and economic seat for the cacique Eugenio Montero Río’s progressive scheme to promote domestic and international tourism. Writers and intellectuals related to Santiago de Compostela as a poetic engine to understand Spanish and Galician nationalisms. They included Emilia Pardo Bazán, Antonio and Manuel Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, Manuel Murguía, Ramón Cabanillas, Vicente Risco, and Ramón Otero Pedrayo. Other writers like Rosalía de Castro and Ramón del Valle-Inclán would turn toward spiritism that held Santiago de Compostela as a space for articulating modern existence. These positions become polarized in the context of the Second Republic, the Spanish Civil War, the Francoist dictatorship, and, for many, exile. Through the cultural production of Federico García Lorca, Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao, and Américo Castro, the poetics of Santiago de Compostela become key spaces of historical memory to reflect on Hispanism and its internal plurality. Ultimately the theologies ascribed to Santiago de Compostela translated to ever evolving political models of humanism that situated Spanish history within a global context.