Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

Lehel Vadon: Spanish Roots of American Literature

3 LEHEL VADON SPANISH ROOTS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE* When one of his best friends told Enrique Hank Lópsz, the distinguished Chicano novelist and politician that despite his long, comical name and Iiis birth he was not really a Mexican but an American through and through, he answered: "That is a minority view and totally devoid of realism. One could just as well say that Martin Luther King was not a Negro, that he was merely an American. But the plain truth is that neither I nor Martin Luther Kings of our land can escape the fact that we are Mexican and Negro with roots planted so deeply in the United States that we have grown those strong, little hyphene that make us Mexican-American and Negro-American."^ The Spanish roots in the United States can be traced back to the scattered, miscellaneous but ever growing economic, historical and cultural contacts of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century colonies with Spain and Spanish America. In the seventeeth century the hatred of Spain was burning in the minds of English colonists. The pioneers feared the nation whose colonies in America were many times the area of their mother country They hated her Catholic tyrannies and were frightened of the legends concerning the terrible Spaniard, his cruelty and barbarism in the colonies, his fanaticism in his dark religion of the Inquisition, and his prosperous presence in the rich South. Race, religion, economic rivalry sharpened animosity. Cotton Mather described the differences between the English and Spanish colonies: "Gentlemen!" he cried. " It is the War of the Lord which you are now Engaged in: and it is the Help of the Lord, that we are at Home affectionately imploring for you. We have made a fair and just purchase of our Country from the Natives here: not encroaching on them after the Spanish Fashion, in any of their Properties and Possessions."^ Although allusion has been made to an increasing understanding of the Spanish civilization, this attitude persisted long after the colonial period. Julián Juderias, in his book, La leyenda negra, in tracing the persistence of this distrust and these old prejudices, attacks Ticknor, Prescott, Motley , and George Bancroft for perpetuating *This paper was presented by the author at the session on American and English literature and culture at the University of Pécsin 1985.

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