It’s worth noting that the “Black Legend,” in name, was not coined till the twentieth century. De las Casas’ “A Short Relation of the Destruction of the Indies – Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias” solidified the claims of torture, exploitation, and the general depravity of the Spanish colonists, who already had been acquiring a bad name in Europe with their enforcement of the Spanish Inquisition (1480- ca. Friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) who was personally acquainted with Columbus, and who was one of the original Spanish settlers in the New World, wrote an unsparing account of the abuses the Indians were subjected to under the rule of the Spanish. 1451-1506) discovered America (better known then as the Indies). La Leyenda Negra was already becoming a legend in the sixteenth century not long after Christopher Columbus (ca. The Black Legend is essentially a tired centuries-old Anglo/Protestant stereotype that cast the Spaniard’s as deceitful, sadistic, bigoted, dirty, bad-tempered, backwards, murderous, scoundrels, etc. “… the Black Legend had resulted in beliefs that Hispanics were inherently evil.” (Sanchez 1). We will not comprehend all that we avoid when we are ignorant of our own blithe avoidance unless we examine own thinking as the problem to be challenged, again and again. In our overbearing bias we indirectly avoid seeing those people whom we’re ignoring. We consistently accept the ridiculous notion that the un-white person is not regarded as from here and that the white man is unquestionably American. Hispanics in America are a people hated as much as their now undervalued past is forgotten. The Mexican artist Teresa Margolles has been selected to aesthetically critique a view of marginalized people who are ignored by our misunderstandings, and our over-insistent categorizations. If anything, the Black Legend is forgotten. The Black Legend isn’t just a banal Hispanophobic stereotype to be reduced to a sound-bite. This post examines La Leyenda Negra’s origins, its subsequent problems historically, and how echoes of the legend continue to implicitly resurface through the contemporary artistic practice of Teresa Margolles. One of Theodor de Bry’s illustrations for De las Casas’ “Brief Relation”
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