Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire

by María DeGuzmán

England and the Netherlands, Spain's imperial rivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imagined Spain as cruel and degenerate barbarians of la leyenda negra (the Black Legend), in league with the powers of "blackest darkness" and driven by "dark motives." In Spain's Long Shadow, Maria DeGuzman explores how this convenient demonization made its way into American culture - and proved essential to the construction of whiteness. DeGuzman's work reaches from the late eighteenth century - in the wake of the American Revolution - to the present. Surveying a broad range of texts and images from Poe's "William Wilson" and John Singer Sargent's "El Jaleo" to Richard Wright's "Pagan Spain" and Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, Spain's Long Shadow shows how the creation of Anglo-American ethnicity as specifically American has depended on the casting of Spain as a colonial alter ego. The symbolic power of Spain in the American imagination, DeGuzman argues, is not just a legacy of that nation's colonial presence in the Americas; it lives on as well in the "blackness" of Spain and Spainards - in the assigning of people of Spanish origin to an "off-white" racial category that reserves the designation of white for Anglo-Americans.By demonstrating how the Anglo-American imagination needs Spain and Spainards as figures of attraction and repulsion, DeGuzman makes a compelling and illuminating case for treating Spain as the imperial alter ego of the United States. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, ambitious in its chronological sweep, and elegant in its interpretation of literary and visual works, DeGuzman's book leads us to a powerful new understanding of the nature - and history - American ethnicity.

Genres: History

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Francisco De Aldana · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book is based on a false premise: That the popularized vision of Anglo-Americans of Spain is the product of a direct contact with native Spaniards. In fact, the idea of Spain and of "Spanish people" in the US is that of persons of mixed race in the American Spanish Empire, i. e. of Amerindian or African descent, not of native Spaniards. This vision and the misnomer "Spanish people" applied to Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Central Americans, etc. has constructed a false stereotype of Spaniards in the USA, as seen in many Hollywood movies, already from the early XX cent. In many of these movies Mexican or Cuban actors of mixed race play the role of Spaniards. Hollywood also has predilection for "ethnic" Spaniards; Penelope Cruz of gypsy origin, or Cuban Canary Islander Javier Bardem.

This should have been the honest base of the De Guzmán´s book.

Spaniards have migrated to USA and have integrated seamlessly into the "white" majority because native Spaniards are a mix of Nordic and European Mediterranean (CIA Factbook), and hence phenotypically indistiguishable from so called "white" Americans.

Gypsies are a separate minority group that migratred from India to Spain in the XV cent, that that has very seldomly migrated to other countries. Moors and Christian of moorish descent were expelled massively in the XV and early XVII cent. as proven by anthropology and population genetics Eupedia map of Haplogroups; Autosomal map of Europe: U. of Rotterdam, 2008. See also:

http://anthrospain.blogspot.com.es/20...

http://anthrospain.blogspot.com.es/20...

http://anthrospain.blogspot.com.es/20...

De Guzmán writes that "Spaniards come in different skin tones". Not more than so called so called "white" americans, many of whom have obvious African and Native American ancestry, and many of whom have a quite dark phenotype (for example, a G. Clooney looks ethnically dark in many regions of Spain: León, Valladolid, Asturias, Gerona, Navarra, etc).

Only gypsies and Canary Islanders have a dark skin tone; the Spaniard skin tone is within the European white parameters, and not infrequently sometimes fairer than Central and Northern Europeans: see: "The evolution of human skin coloration" by Jablonski NG1, Chaplin G.

De Guzmán quotes a source that reads that "Latin Americans" have migrated to Spain in the past 400 years. False: Until the last 30 years, with globalization and MASS immigration from Latin America to Spain, "Latin Americans" of Native or African descent did not migrate to Spain. This is in line with laws passed by the Catholic Kings that forbid Native Americans from being moved from their native territories, in order to protect them. The ultimate Proof? Genetic population studies: no Amerindian DNA traces in native Spaniards.

Furthermore, the readings are many times forced to suit the main thesis announced in the title. For instance, Melville´s Benito Cereno, whose protagonist is studied by De Guzmán as another example of an "off white" character, displays a clear case of white solidarity in the face of the dangers posed by the mysterious African character.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an extremely intriguing and informative book about American authors' obsession with Spain as a romanticized and inferior other that has contributed to the US's current marginalization of Latinos in the 21st century.