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Enviado el: jueves, 21 de marzo de 2002 12:10 The story of how the dignified, venerable REAL of His Catholic Majesty, King of Aragon, Leon, Castile, etc, etc..., came to be the basis of that crude, profane filthy lucre known as the YANKEE DOLLAR is told in deadening detail by Earl Hamilton in _War and prices in Spain, 1651-1800_ [Cambridge, MA, 1947]. ¡Aviso! Caveat lector: This work is devoid of all gendered nuance, multi-cultural manifestation, ideologies of identity, subliminal sub-altern super-scripts, sensuality, sensitivity and sentiment. In other words, just plain UNSEXY, no doubt about it! Anyhow, back when the CCN [short for Capitalist Caliban of the North] was still a fresh-mouthed, post-colonial whipper- snapper, sound coinage whose inner worth could be counted on ["contante y sonante" and all that] was more a desideratum than a reality. The Brits had kept all the good money--£ Sterling, that is--in Perfidious Albion. So, when the colonials transfigured themselves into post-colonials by force of arms, they had to make do with those "Good Continentals," which were anything but good--funny money is an accurate though unflattering phrase to describe them. However, His Catholic Majesty's Western Indies, to the south of His Britannic Majesty's North American plantations, were comparatively awash in sound coin--you know, those renowned REALES DE A 2, 4 Y 8, not to mention doblones, escudos, ducados, along with sundry fractional denominations, like ochavos and cuartos. Thus, as truck between Yankee peddlers and Spanish criollos, be it legit. or no, waxed ever greater in the fullness of time, REALES minted from the fine plate of Zacatecas, Guanajuato, El Parral and Potosí, began to fill the monetary vacuum in British North America. Precisely because they lent themselves so well to making change, the lesser denominations, especially the real de a 2, which was the lowest common denominator, so to speak, were in greatest demand and circulated the most. These coins were known by the moniker "colunario," for the miniature, stylized rendition of the Habsburg coat of arms stamped on them--i.e., a columnar representation of the Pillars of Hercules, bound together by a band of ribbon. As many probably are aware, the notorious dollar sign was modelled from it. Now, when that ungainly gaggle of fringe-fanatic Yankee-Doodle freedom fetishists turned the world upside down on the Brits by bolting from the imperial fold, rather than adopting the £, which was the palpable symbol of royal tyranny, or creating sui generis some species of uniquely "American" coinage, they understandably appropriated for themselves the Spanish real, a coin of unquestioned value and nearly universal acceptance, and pegged American coinage to it; for the real was back then what Visa and MasterCard are today- -one didn't leave home without some in his poke. Accordingly, the real de a 2 became the American quarter-dollar--its sobriquet, "two- bits," derives directly from the Spanish name--and so forth, up to the real de a 8 or peso, to which the dollar's value was fixed. In fact, Spanish reales circulated alongside American coins until about 1857, when "Buck" Buchanan, notorious for the scheme to acquire Cuba he hatched while a diplomatic envoy in Ostend, moved into the presidential digs at 1600 Penn. Ave. And they continued circulating in the C.S.A. during the War Between the States. Even today in P.R. the quarter-dollar is commonly called "la peseta," because its really the step-child of the real de a 2, which is as well the forebear of the Spanish peseta. Not surprisingly, P.R.s also call the dollar "el peso" and the nickel "el vellón," after the Spanish real de vellón, which began as a copper coin, then became a silver one in the 1700s. The reason for its miraculous transmogrification is the stuff of another story. Numismatically, S. Homick Johnson State College
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