The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora: Ethnogenesi ...

A biracial son is the result of the union between Zaide and Lazarillo's mother. Lazarillo finds his half-brother to be quite attractive—“mi madre vino a darme un negrito muy bonito” [“my mother presented me with a beautiful little black boy”]—and shows him brotherly love and affection without any hint of racial prejudice. The brother, though, finds his father's black color to be intimidating (“Madre, coco” [“Momma, the bogeyman”]) and gravitates more favorably toward his white mother and white half-brother Lazarillo. Lazarillo, however, comments that the brother should look at himself first before denigrating his father's color. He also understands that his brother probably shares this tendency with others in the ethnoracial environment of his sixteenth-century Spain:

Lazarillo's observations concerning racial differences and the psychological dilemma of the mixed-race individual serve to confirm the historical fact of the early presence of blacks on the Iberian Peninsula, which precedes the appearance of the African in the Americas. Some researchers allege that many of the Moors that invaded the peninsula and stayed between the eighth and fifteenth centuries were black. Regardless of whether the term “Moor” has ethnic or racial connotations, research has proven and rendered indisputable that both Spain and Portugal made incursions into Equatorial Africa prior to the sixteenth-century context of Lazarillo's anecdotal reference to his time and space, as the following comment makes clear: