ABSTRACT
This chapter studies several New York travelogues written by Spanish authors in the 1940s. Miranda Barreiro situates his analysis within the context of the evolving relations between Franco’s Spain and the USA, which required the dictatorship to distance itself from its fascist foundations in order to gain the support of Western democracies after the Second World War. Consequently, these authors avoided previous discourses of “scientific racism” to circumvent associations with Nazism, but also eluded direct criticism of American society, including the discrimination faced by African Americans. At the same time, Miranda-Barreiro examines the colonialist stereotypes that still dominated public discourse on Equatorial Guinea, a country that remained under Spanish rule until 1968, and influenced the depiction of black Americans in these texts. Condescension, fear of racial contamination, exoticism, and primitivism emerge as some of the main elements found in the representation of African Americans in these travelogues, colliding with the alleged Catholic principles of Hispanidad that defended racial equality.
