Luis Pérez el gallego: History, Satire, Biopolitics

Luis Pérez el gallego is one of Calderón’s lesser-known dramas, and yet one of the most compelling ones when it comes to reflecting on personal and collective identity, on relations between power and the law, and on historical memory. The existing scholarship on this play has generally focused on the representation of violence and on the figure of Luis Pérez, defined by some scholars as an anarchist. However, there is much more to be said about this character when placed in a larger social and political scenario. This essay argues that Luis Pérez embodies the fi gure of the arraiano, of the liminal citizen located at the border between Galicia and Portugal, frequently depicted as a bandit or as a smuggler. By analysing the social standing and the literary trajectory of the Galician bandit in Calderón’s posterity, I frame the problem of banditry and the role of the arraiano within the political scene to which it belongs