The Salience and Pervasiveness of the Literary Figure of the Jew in Latin America: From Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

Jews of Latin America, from the colonial period to the present, have been branded heretical, inauthentic, or treasonous and perceived as threats to the colonial domination of Spain's Counter-Reformation and modern iterations of nationalism in the region. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's El divino Narciso (1689) and Jorge Luis Borges's "El milagro secreto" ([1944] 1993) indicate the salience and pervasiveness of the figure of the Jew, experientially and conceptually, in the region's literary conversations about power, collectivity, and legitimacy vis-à-vis colonial and modern Europe. The two works reflect a transatlantic, multigenerational, and multigendered conversation that approaches the elimination of the Jew as a bargain that involved a simultaneous loss of American agency on a world stage. Sor Juana emerges not only as Latin America's first female intellectual; she is Borges's precursor in demanding an American regional identity and global agency apropos of the metropole's exclusionary violence toward the Jew within. Jews of Latin America, in colonial and modern times, have been branded heretical, inauthentic, or treasonous, perceived as threats to Spain's Counter-Reformation empire and to multiple iterations of nineteenth-and twentieth-century nationalism in the region. 1 At the same time, from the colonial period to the present, high-profile non-Jewish writers have adopted the figure of the Jew in literature to challenge the regional or national paradigms that have consistently defined Latin America as peripheral to Europe. In this manner, Jews have been written into Latin America's literary conversations of collective identity in a region consistently defined in relation to Europe. 2 Writing as either conversos or non-Jews, literary figures from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, including