between Muslims and Christians. Muslim power in Spain also began to gradually decline via battle and treaty. Iberia as a source of servile labor slowed, forcing Europe to turn elsewhere, and by the end of the fourteenth century the demand was largely met by captives from the Black Sea. But with the struggle for Byzantium ending in 1453, and the Reconquista in Iberia culminating in 1492, the northern Mediterranean found itself in need of workers, occasioned in part by the cultivation of sugarcane. Spreading from Southeast Asia to India in antiquity, sugarcane was introduced to Persians and Arabs during Islam’s early years. They transferred its production to Syria and Egypt, and later to North Africa, southern Spain, Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete. European crusaders first came into contact with sugar in the Holy Lands, developing their own sugar plantations in Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily by the early thirteenth century. Europe gradually acquired a taste for sugar [(although expensive until the nineteenth century and frequently used for medicinal purposes)], having known only honey as a sweetener. Given this 800-year context for the Mediterranean, it would have been a challenge for Juan Latino to understand his enslavement principally as a consequence of racial difference, nor would he have experienced “racism” in the way that we currently employ the term. And yet, the sixteenth century, the dawn of Spain’s cultural siglo de oro (“Golden Age”), was also a moment of transition into something very different. Moving forward, the world would no longer be solely occupied by the same sets of concerns that previously animated the politics of the Mediterranean, but by new circumstances and realities. Juan Latino stood at the cusp of that new world, one that would greatly expand in scope. The mechanism by which that new world came into being constitutes the second interlocking sphere of human interaction.
trade with the American colonies), had in sixty years contributed to the population and was a factor in Seville becoming both a “thriving metropolis” and Spain’s largest city.17 Juan Latino, or more precisely his mother was a casualty of that trade, as she would have been the main target of capture. But though subsaharan African slavery in Spain was on the rise in the sixteenth century, Juan Latino could never have imagined that by the late nineteenth century some 15 million people would have been exported from Africa via the slave trade. Though noticeable, the rate of increase in enslaved Africans in the sixteenth century would not have been sufficient reason for him to conclude that the sources and reasons for enslavement in the Mediterranean – religious difference and economic exigency – were being replaced by an exclusive association with Africa. Indeed, for the whole of the sixteenth century, Spain imported less than 1 percent of the total of the transatlantic slave trade, a cumulative estimate that under no circumstances anticipates the trade’s subsequent exponential expansion in scope and volume.18 And of course, there is no clue as to how Latino viewed his relationship to Africa – he may have celebrated it, he may have disdained it. In claiming to be “originally from Ethiopia,” he could have simply been acknowledging obvious phenotypic difference, adopting the term “Ethiopia” to emphasize his love and mastery of Greek (as the term derives from Greek). Or perhaps, like others who would be enslaved in the Americas, he gravitated to Ethiopia as an idea, a cipher for all Africa, having learned through his studies of antiquity, and possibly sacred scripture, that it enjoyed a level of prominence and respect among world civilizations.
plotted to escape by sea with “Turkish” slaves “Antônio” and “Pedro”; and the 1564 attempt of the gelofe “Antônio” and two other “Turks,” equally unsuccessful.23 So when Bermūdez de Pedraza says that Juan Latino was born in Berberia (“Barbary”), this is entirely possible. The Portuguese and Spanish were of course well acquainted with Muslims, a diverse assembly of differentiated unequals that included Arabs, Berbers, Arabo-Berbers, and West Africans. Together, they comprised the unwieldy and heterogeneic category referred to as “Moors” by Europeans. Spanish use of the term Moor in the sixteenth century, therefore, was not necessarily a reference to “race” as it is currently understood or employed. Indeed, Berbers and Arabs had had such extensive “contact with Negroes” that they had “absorbed a considerable amount of color,” and at times a dark-skinned Muslim presumed to have hailed from subsaharan Africa would be referred to as a negro alárabe. Rather, it is more productive to view the term Moor as referring to a casta (as opposed to nación), a designation that “did not intend to imply a racial factor but rather a cultural characteristic - Islam.”24 But foreigners could occupy other cultural identities, as was the case with the author of the Austrias carmen, who transitioned from his identity as Juan de Sessa, which emphasized his servile status, to that of Juan Latino, in recognition of his linguistic achievements and as initiated by classmates. But the term ladino was commonly used to refer to individuals, especially of African descent, who had acquired facility in Portuguese or Spanish, but who also often had connections to Senegambia or Islam, or both. It was therefore not uncommon for the descriptive term of ladino to occupy the place of a surname, distinguishing the individual from Moors and moriscos but also from
the African-born who were neither Muslim nor speakers of Spanish or Portuguese, the bozales or “raw” Africans. This widespread use of ladino may help explain the author’s subsequent adoption of Joannes Latīnūs. As an act of self-definition, has no parallel, and in that vein the author’s expression of re-creation is powerful. His new name clearly communicates a total identification with his intellectual passions, and with the status and recognition derivative of his expertise. But in reinventing himself on the basis of what he does, of his value and utility to the larger society; indeed, in drawing attention to the fact that his new persona is premised on how others “see” him, and at the “place” where he is even “seen,” his exercise in reconfiguration demonstrates its limitations. Joannes Latīnūs is, after all, a cultural affectation, unmoored to any land mass or specific location on the planet, or for that matter to any clan or family. In Joannes Latīnūs, therefore, we have the essence of the diasporic condition. He is free to re-imagine himself and his world, but only certain trajectories are possible for him. Let us be clear: in Joannes Latīnūs we do not have the necessary elements for an interaction between African and European cultures and perspectives; his is not a test case for the thesis of enculturation or notions of hybridity, as per every indication he was just a child, if not an infant when taken into captivity. Therefore, unless he remained in intimate connection with his mother, or was in vital contact with groups of Africans in the area, he had no access to a collective past, he had no personal memory of African antecedents upon which to draw in his self-refashioning. “Johannes Latīnūs, originally from Ethiopia,” is an imagined subjectivity based almost entirely on achievements and limitations experienced in a context in which his claims were quite tenuous. He is without question privileged – he receives a wonderful education, he is able to make a
living teaching the subject he loves, he enjoys the esteem of his fellows, he marries and has a family with a desirable woman of patrician bearing – all of which would seem unattainable for a foreigner, an ex-slave, an African. It is a delicate, contingent condition, a contradiction of sorts, as is arguably his very name. As an anomaly, he joins the ranks of other exceptional individuals, such as Phillis Wheatley (d. 1784), who in all likelihood originated in Senegambia and therefore may have shared that distinction with Juan Latino; as well as her contemporary Olaudah Equiano (d. 1797) who, if indeed he was born in southeastern Nigeria and not South Carolina, also experienced slavery only to surmount it.25 Like Latino, Wheatley distinguished herself as a poet, while Equiano would go on to become a leading abolitionist and labor leader in England, where he also wed a local woman and produced a family. There is no gainsaying that these and others who achieved various levels of notoriety were exceptional, including Muslims who astounded their captors with their literacy in Arabic, often escaping their intended destinies via entirely serendipitous circumstances. Although aberrant, the Juan Latinos and Phillis Wheatleys are part and parcel of the inconsistencies and contradictions that can be found in the annals of western slavery. Their visibility is explained by the fact that they managed to avoid the fate of so many others “of their kind,” but in so doing their accounts serve to draw attention to, rather than deflect from the catastrophe that was the transatlantic slave trade. And in that trade are the seeds of modernity; that is, the dawn of relations and hierarchies of power and privilege across race, class, and gender that begin locally, but through colonial and imperial expansion become increasingly more global and entrenched through the tireless