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ABSTRACT
This essay examines Luis de Góngora y Argote's poetic representation of black female beauty and humanness in the letrilla "En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramento" (1609). Góngora underscores the power of black beauty through cosmetics, fine clothing, and the allegorical exegesis of the Song of Songs's well-known message: "I am black but beautiful." The poet's staging of cosmetics' ideological and rhetorical formulations illustrates how black women construct their own racial identity. The African slave characters do this through the subversive assertion of their natural beauty and humanity, and specifically by reclaiming cosmetic practices and stylizations of the body typically available to European women.
In the spring of 1609, the city of Córdoba began preparations for its Corpus Christi festivities to commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist. In parish celebrations, street decorations were installed and lavish altars were erected in cathedrals and churches. The Corpus Christi monstrance-a 2 meter-high, 200 kilo creation in gold and silver crafted by German goldsmith Henry of Arfe nearly a century before-was polished once again in preparation for the procession. To contribute to the grandeur of the Corpus Christi celebrations that year, Córdoba Bishop Diego de Mardones, known for his devotion to the Santísimo Sacramento ("Blessed Sacrament"), commissioned Luis de Góngora y Argote to compose a number of letrillas. The letrilla is a short poetic composition that addresses themes of love, holy feasts, and satire. Primarily leisurely and satiric in tone, the letrilla is defined by Tomás Navarro Tomás as having an octosyllabic or hexasyllabic metric composition (530). At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, the letrilla was also called a villancico. The villancico can be characterized in the following three ways: (1) by its musical character; (2) by its popular origin and appropriation in part by learned poets; and (3) by its restriction to religious settings.1
The place of choice for performing these poems was the Cathedral of Córdoba, a dwarf religious structure within a massive mosque. A space illustrative of hyperbolic hybridity, the cathedral incorporated, on the one hand, the architectural design and remnants of the mosque that once belonged to the Umayyad Moorish dynasty and, on the other hand, extremely elaborate displays of Roman Catholic artwork and religious...