Jonathan Correa-Reyes (The Pennsylvania State University)
Juan Latino, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Wolff demonstrate (Gates and Wolff 1998), was the first poet of African descent whose work was published in a Western language – in his case, Latin. Born into slavery in 1518, Latino eventually attained freedom and became a Professor of Latin Grammar at the Cathedral School in Granada. Latino’s prominence was not restricted to his tenure of this position in Granada, since, as a poet, he also enjoyed the patronage of prominent figures in early modern Spain, among which we find King Philip II. In this paper, I look at Latino’s neo-Latin epic the Austriad, a poem in praise of John of Austria, Philip’s brother, for his victory against the Ottoman navy in the Battle of Lepanto.
In my paper I approach a rich point of criticism: Latino’s self-proclaimed Ethiopian origins. This claim peppers some of Latino’s epigrams and what has been denominated by Elizabeth Wright as “his only autobiographical statement” in the preface to his second published book, De translatione:
"Joannes Latinus, Ethiopian follower of Christ, taken out of Ethiopia in infancy, slave of the most excellent and invincible Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, duke of Sessa, grandson of the great Gonzalo of Hispania, by him nourished with the same milk of infancy, with him from untamed mind instructed through liberal arts, and taught, and finally given liberty."
Latino’s claim to Ethiopian ancestry has been a rich point of contention because some of his contemporaries (Diego Ximénez de Enciso; and Bermúdez de Pedraza 1608) as well as other historical documents, as interpreted by Wright herself (Wright 2016), Aurelia Martín Casares (Martín Casares 2016), and Mira Seo (Seo 2011), to name a few, suggest that Latino was born elsewhere, possibly in Guinea, although scholarly consensus leans towards our poet having been born in Baena, Spain. Why then make a claim to Ethiopian ancestry? While there are contending points of view on this respect, most scholars suggest that claiming Ethiopian origins would have allowed Latino to better navigate Granada during a time of increasing racial and religious prejudice. Identifying as a Christian himself, by claiming Ethiopian origins Latino fashions himself as an Old Christian (Martín Casares 2016; Seo 2011), as opposed to the conversos of his time whose status as New Christians often made them the object of discrimination (although Wright argues that Latino’s goal was to present himself as a different type of New Christian (Wright 2016).
I revisit the rhetorical significance of the poet’s claim to Ethiopian origins without reducing it to an act of self-preservation by Latino. Based mainly on one of Latino’s epigrams and his “autobiographical statement,” these interpretations fail to provide a full account of the importance of the Ethiopians as meaning-making figures throughout Latino’s poetic oeuvre. More specifically, I look at Latino’s portrayal of the Ethiopians within the Austriad, a presence that has thus far gone unremarked in the scholarship of Latino’s most ambitious poem. My argument is that through his treatment of the Ethiopians in this epic, Latino proposes an alternative narrative that he has chosen for himself, one that is grounded on a sense of pride in his racial alterity and conviction in his personal merit. Indeed, Latino self-identifies as an Ethiopian, but this is not only a self-serving move, since the narrative not only allows but encourages the imagining of a glorious future for the Ethiopians. Thus, any interpretation of Latino’s claim to Ethiopian ancestry that fails to take this into account remains incomplete.