I continue rescuing condemned books from the library, and today I liberated this gem:
It explains why Iberian America isn’t obsessed with race like Anglo America.
I’m running out of space in the office but at least I’ve rescued some great books. You should see the recently published crap that was preserved instead of these wonderful older volumes.
My hero!
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“It explains why Iberian America isn’t obsessed with race like Anglo America.”
Now I am really curious. Could you tell us why? (Obviously, in very broad strokes.) Thank you!
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From the beginning of the conquest, the Spanish king and queen wanted to create a racially mixed society. They issued edicts in 1502-14 ordering to promote marriages between the Spaniards and the indigenous and grabt them full rights. They were successful, and today Latin America is mixed-race. It was completely normal for some duke to come back to Spain with his half-indigenous children and give them all his titles. Hernan Cortes, the conqueror of Mexico, came back with his indigenous son Martin and arranged playdates for him with the prince of Spain, the future emperor. As we can imagine, nothing like this was possible, for example, in the British, French, or Russian empires. The conquerors all had mixed-race kids but never acknowledged them. Faulkner’s great novel Absalom, Absalom speaks of the horror and stigma of having someone with “black blood” somewhere in the family tree. It’s a completely different approach.
The reason was that the Spaniards who arrived in this hemisphere in 1492 were already mixed-race. They’d had 700 years of intermixing with North African Arabs. So they tried to recreate what they knew in the Americas.
“Iberian America isn’t obsessed with race like Anglo America”
I understand the situation differently, they’re obsessed with race but in very different ways that are orthogonal to US patterns.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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