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In the short skit that occupies Acts 2 and 6 of Feliciano de Silva's Segunda Celestina (1534), a black houseboy, most likely a slave, Zambrán, berates his fellow servant, Pandulfo, a notorious pimp, for not treating women with the prescribed modesty, thus endangering not only the reputation of young maidens, but also of their high-born ladies. Zambrán's intervention at the onset of Silva's novel voices the author's Christian humanist concerns around courtly love and how to represent the procurement in literature in the wake of Celestina, whose lewd and tragic excess Silva aims to rectify. In making Zambrán a spokesperson for the work's ethics, Silva goes against the grain of a long philosophical tradition of ethical white supremacy while at the same time performing a colonizing act that severs Blackness from its religious and cultural heritage in order to make it function as a role model for a non-black community. This article situates Segunda Celestina's portrayal of Zambrán and his beloved Boruca in a long tradition of philosophical and literary racial thinking spanning from the Middle Ages to contemporary Critical Race Theory to illuminate Silva's thorny construction of Blackness.
