Saints, sinners, and songs: the rehabilitation of the indiano in contemporary spanish culture

This dissertation analyzes twenty-first century depictions of indianos, Spaniards who made a fortune in the Americas from the colonial period until the twentieth century and returned to Spain. By examining heretofore neglected historical documents, oral histories, popular music, and performance traditions, I reveal a corpus that shifts traditional representations of indianos, usually portrayed as white, Spanish males, to women (indianas), Black people, drag performers, and multicultural, multilingual figures. I argue that these representations are interventions in hegemonic cultural heritage and repertoires that refigure histories of transatlantic slavery, feminism, and immigration. My project demonstrates how art in its many forms (plays, novels, performance, music) creates a literary-fictional indiano vastly different from the historical indiano. The contrast between historical indianos, representative of the newly wealthy, privileged classes, and literary-fictional indianos, representative of the marginalized, lower socio-economic classes, allows underrepresented and subaltern voices to be heard. My first chapter argues that indiana fiction turns to melodrama to respond to contemporary debates about Spain’s role in transatlantic slavery. This chapter analyzes Àngels Aymar’s 2007 play La Indiana as well as María Teresa Álvarez’s novels La indiana (2014) and La hija de la indiana (2018). These indiana melodramas reflect the few recent efforts in Spain to denounce the colonial past, but they also mythologize Spanish colonial women as saviors. The second chapter postulates two literary biographies, Roser Burgués’s La indiana (2015) and Silvia Grijalba’s Contigo aprendí (2011), as a feminist rewriting of colonial history. In both novels, the immigration journey enables the indiana to sever feminine identity from traditional motherhood, the homeland, and patriarchal institutions such as the church and marriage. Chapter Three examines the indiano in public festivals in Northern Spain and the Canary Islands as well as a literary representation of the Canary Island festival in Luis León Barreto’s novel Carnaval de Indianos (2013). I explore how performances at these festivals dislodge the indiano from its traditional colonial significance and reconfigure the indiano as a symbol of regional identity.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference