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Chapter 6 - The Spanish–Indigenous Binary and Anti-Blackness as Literary Inheritance

from Part II - Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2025

John Alba Cutler
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Marissa López
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

This chapter examines ideological underpinnings of the Spanish–Indian binary in Mexican and Mexican American indigenism and mestizaje. In a reassessment of Chicanx literary history, it looks at the life and writings of sixteenth-century Dominican cleric, Bartolomé de las Casas, and twentieth-century Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa. Las Casas has long been considered a literary precursor to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican American literature, as well as Latinx literature more broadly. Gloria Anzaldúa remains one of the most celebrated and influential late twentieth-century Chicana writers. More specifically, this analysis urges a reconsideration of las Casas’s founding influence, foregrounding his almost lifelong support for the enslavement of African people, as it also explores contemporary vestiges of the anti-Blackness strategically at the center of las Casas’s defense of Indigenous people of the Americas.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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