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John Beusterien
LET’S GIVE A STANDING OVATION to Baltasar Fra-Molinero, Nelson López, and Manuel Olmedo Gobante for their bilingual edition of a classic play. Before its publication, a reader combing through the existing translations or bilingual editions of Spanish Golden Age plays might have concluded that Blacks rarely appear in the corpus, if at all.
The landmark publication of The Valiant Black Man in Flanders with the series Aris & Phillips Hispanic Classics sheds light on the complex history of Black Spain as portrayed in early modern theater. Some West Africans and West-Central Africans and their descendants had remarkable military careers fighting as soldiers in European armies. One noteworthy example is Alonso Venegas, a Black man of West African descent who fought as a captain under the Duke of Alba in Spain’s Flemish wars in the early 1580s. Andrés de Clara-monte’s El valiente negro en Flandes is loosely based on accounts about Alonso Venegas.
My first reading of this play in graduate school three decades ago led to my later analysis of how racial conflict—specifically between characters racialized as White and Black—evolves into political rhetoric. In An Eye on Race: Perspectives from Imperial Spain (Bucknell UP, 2006, pp. 114–23), I noted how this evolution manifests most clearly in Juan’s symbolic renaming: his abandonment of ‘Juan de Mérida’ in favor of ‘Juan de Alba,’ a change that aligns him with the Spanish army’s Duke of Alba. Throughout the play Juan calls himself perro de Alba, equating himself with the dog protagonist from a popular Spanish ballad who purportedly could smell out hidden Jews. I argued that Juan, [End Page 139] aware of his dark skin color and the connotations between the word alba and whiteness, uses the status as the “White’s” dog to achieve high military rank and the King’s favor. I was reminded again about that interpretation of the play again in 2024, after a segment of African American voters chose to back the MAGA movement. Their support of President Donald Trump, who praised his “beautiful” white skin at a political rally in my home state of Michigan (The Daily Beast, 2 November 2024), resonated with parallel ideas about white aesthetics voiced by Juan de Mérida in El valiente negro en Flandes.
Most readers will not interpret the main protagonist as pro-White, but as displaying Black pride. Set against the backdrop of the first phase of the trans-Atlantic slave trade spearheaded by Iberia (ca. 1450–ca. 1600), the play dramatizes various meanings of freedom. For instance, similar expressions of loyalty to the Spanish Monarchy as expressed by the fictional Juan de Mérida are found in real petitions written by free Black men across the Americas. Both the main character in the play, Juan, and the comic minor character, Antón, achieve freedom after a lifetime of enslavement. Indeed, before Juan leaves Spain to fight on its northern frontier, Doña Juana, his owner who he marries at the end of the play, hands Juan a letter of freedom. Juan folds up the letter and hangs it around his neck as a pendant, proclaiming that with it, he will drive “a spike / into Fortune’s evil axle” (un clavo / al eje vil de la Fortuna, vv. 390–91).
The play has held entertainment value across the centuries. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, El valiente negro en Flandes has been adapted by directors in Spain and beyond. For instance, it was performed in Alcalá de Henares (1997), Madrid (2018), and Cuba (1938). The genre of the quick pace and intrigue of many Golden Age plays known as “cloak and sword” (capa y espada) dramas (a term that derives from the typical fashion of men on the streets in the period) portray complicated plots around Spanish honor and a nobleman’s frustrated love for a lady. Although the authors of this edition do not classify it as such, El valiente negro en Flandes shares cloak and sword conventions hurriedly across time and space: action begins with Juan’s brawl in Mérida (in southwest Spain) with white soldiers when he enlists (Act 1, vv...
