Americo Castro

Américo Castro y Quesada (1885 – 1972) 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 (1) 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 (2) 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 (1492). Castro was born on May 4, 1885, in Cantagalo, Brazil, to Spanish parents. In 1890...