Blackness in the Black Legend: How narratives of race and slavery in the Amistad affair shaped anti-Hispanicism and "American Exceptionalism"

Abstract: This article examines Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad, which depicts a slave rebellion and mutiny on a Cuban slave ship in 1839, as a lens through which to view the origins of the Black Legend. The Black Legend emerged in 1830s in the U.S. to depict Latin American instability as the result of Spanish oppression, violence, cultural inferiority and Catholicism. The narrative served to benefit the ideology of white supremacy and the myth of American (read U.S.) "exceptionalism" by drawing global attention away from the maintenance of slavery in the U.S. and highlighting Spanish and Cuban involvement in the clandestine slave trade in the nineteenth century. The article analyzes a variety of secondary and primary sources that place blackness at the center of the construction of the Black Legend, from contemporary accounts of the Amistad revolt to subsequent references to blackness in histories of U.S.-Latin American relations in the 1830s and 1840s. The article shows how Spielberg inserts Christianity as a force for racial equality and holds up the judicial branch of the U.S. government as a model for Latin America to follow, echoing the inherent contradictions of the Black Legend in the late twentieth century. Ultimately, the article argues that U.S. history must be examined in relation to the history of Latin America, and narratives of blackness in the Atlantic world shaped national mythos and identities in similar ways. Examining the African Diaspora in the Americas, as well as the subsequent national narratives of race and national identities, helps to deconstruct narratives of exceptionalism and reveal political motivations and contradictions in the Black Legend narrative.