Américo Castro

Who was Américo Castro?

Américo Castro y Quesada was a Spanish cultural historian, philologist, and literary critic who challenged some of the prevailing notions of Spanish identity, raising heated controversy with his conclusions that Spaniards didn't become the distinct group they are today until after the Islamic conquest of Hispania of 711, an event that turned them into an Iberian caste coexisting among Moors and Jews, and the history of Spain and Portugal was adversely affected with the success in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries of the "Reconquista" or Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula and with the Spanish expulsion of the Jews.

Castro was born on May 4, 1885, in Cantagalo, Brazil, to Spanish parents. In 1890 his parents returned with him to Spain where he then grew up. In 1904 he graduated from the University of Granada, going on to study at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1905 to 1907. After returning to Spain he organized the Centre for Historical Studies in Madrid in 1910 and headed its department of lexicography. In 1915 he became a professor at the University of Madrid.

Later, when the Spanish Republic was declared, he became its first ambassador to Germany in 1931. But when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 he moved to the United States, teaching literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1939, at the University of Texas from 1939 to 1940, and at Princeton University from 1940 to 1953.