This project uses cartoons to examine a period in Spanish history when the forces of a developing Spanish national identity met with the challenges of war and decolonization. I argue that fear of an uncertain future combined with the disaster of a collapsing empire were projected onto the images of the enemy and are preserved in the many editorial cartoons of the age. By deconstructing the iconology in these cartoons, and by exploring the dialectic of otherness present in these images, I reconstruct the turn-of-the-century Spanish identity that emerged during a period of rapid transition.