Colonial mirrors: the criollos in the dispute of the social evil

Abstract

This article inquires about the way American intellectuals understood the concept of race at the end of the XVIII Century. It speciically analyzes how Francisco Jose Clavigero, Antonio Sánchez- Valverde and Eugenio Espejo responded to Jean Astruc's claims that the Americas were the origin of social evil and to the somatic deinitions created by Astruc’s text. The article points out that the analogy of optical igures such as mirror, relection and difraction are useful when discussing the problem of coloniality.