Agustín Millares Torres’s El último de los canarios: a literary conversation with James Fenimore Cooper on indigeneity and mestizaje in the Atlantic world

Resumen

This article analyzes Agustín Millares Torres’s 1875 novel El último de los canarios in terms of its relation to U.S. author James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. Specifically, the article explains how Millares Torres modeled his protagonists after Cooper’s characters in a way that links colonial processes that occurred on opposite sides of the Atlantic, including the extermination and displacement of Indigenous people. Ultimately, while the plot of Cooper’s novel narratively prohibits ethnic mixing, I argue that Millares Torres rewrote Cooper’s narrative in a Canarian context to tout and celebrate mestizaje, presenting an authorial view of the Hispanic Atlantic as markedly distinct from the Anglo-Atlantic based on differing attitudes toward mestizaje.