Diaspora EDU Spotlight, Vol. 1, No. 2
In sixteenth-century Granada, people did not call him by the name he was given. They called him Latino, because no one there commanded the Latin language the way he did.
Juan Latino lived from about 1517 to about 1594. He was born into slavery, or sold into it young; the records disagree on where. One account places his birth in Baena, in southern Spain, to parents from Guinea. In his own writing, he says he was born free in Ethiopia and enslaved later. What is not in dispute is where he ended up: in the household of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the third Duke of Sessa, grandson of the famous general known as "the Great Captain."
The two boys were close in age and grew up together. Both received an education. Only one of them would become a professor.
From the household to the university
The Duke paid for Juan Latino's education at the University of Granada. In 1546 he earned a bachelor's degree in arts. He went on to teach, and the Archbishop of Granada, Pedro Guerrero, appointed him to a professorship in the arts.
By then a freedman, he became a schoolmaster at the university, teaching Latin in a city still shaped by its Muslim past, a little more than half a century after the Christian conquest of 1492.
He married Ana de Carleval, a woman from a noble family. They had five children and are counted among the first legally recognized mixed-race couples in Spain. Slavery had not gone anywhere: a 1561 census recorded 51 enslaved people in their parish alone. Juan Latino, born enslaved, was raising a family and teaching at the university in a neighborhood where others were still held in bondage.
The poem of Lepanto
On October 7, 1571, a Catholic alliance of Spain, Venice and the Papacy defeated the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto. The commander of the alliance was Don John of Austria, half-brother of King Philip II.
Less than two years later, in 1573, Juan Latino published a Latin epic in his honor, the Austrias Carmen, printed in Granada by Hugo de Mena. A second collection followed in 1576. Scholars describe him as the first Afro-European to build a literary career writing in Latin, and the University of Toronto Press, in describing a 2016 study of his work, calls him Renaissance Europe's first Black poet.
His reputation reached the top. Philip II commissioned a portrait of him for the royal palace in Madrid. After his death, Cervantes referred to him as "Ladino" in a satirical poem at the start of Don Quixote (1605), and the playwright Lope de Vega wrote that he wanted to be the Duke of Sessa's "white Juan Latino." In 1652, the playwright Diego Jiménez de Enciso published a comedy about his life.
Legend and record
Even his origins are contested. One account says Baena, another says Ethiopia, and another makes him the illegitimate son of a member of the Duke's family. Cambridge University Library, summarizing the research of historian Aurelia Martín Casares, points out something striking: in the documents written during his lifetime, he is never described as Black or as a freed slave. He appears simply as Juan Latino, the master.
Much of what we know about him today comes from recent scholarship, including books published in 2016 by the University of Granada and the University of Toronto Press.
The lesson for us
Juan Latino did not choose the name he was born with. He did choose what he became, and the city renamed him for it. "Latino" was not a family name or a title someone handed him. It was a credential he earned, one lesson at a time, until the people around him could not say his name without naming his mastery.
He built that standing in a society that kept the categories of slave and free, Christian and convert, close to the surface. He did not wait for those categories to disappear. He became so good at the thing the elite valued most, their language of learning, that they had to make room.
He also refused to erase where he came from. In the preface to his poems, he describes himself as the Duke of Sessa's former slave, "finally given liberty," and he claimed Ethiopian origins. Some scholars have read that claim as self-protection in a city wary of converts. Jonathan Correa-Reyes of Penn State argues it was self-definition: pride in his difference, written into a poem honoring one of the most celebrated Catholic victories of the century, a poem that also imagines a glorious future for Ethiopians.
What would people call you if they named you for what you have mastered? And what are you building, quietly, that will one day speak your name for you?
From many roots. One bloom.
Sources
- Manuel del Campo, "Juan Latino, 16th-century Afro-Spaniard freed slave, poet and Latin professor," Cambridge University Library, 2020
- Maxim Rigaux, "From Slave to Poet: The Schoolmaster Juan Latino in Sixteenth-Century Granada," RELICS research group, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2020
- University of Toronto Press, publisher's description of The Epic of Juan Latino (2016)
- Jonathan Correa-Reyes, "Alternative History and Future Fantasy in Juan Latino's Austriad" (abstract), Society for Classical Studies annual meeting
Further reading: Elizabeth R. Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2016); Aurelia Martín Casares, Juan Latino: talento y destino (Universidad de Granada, 2016), in Spanish.
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