England and the Netherlands, Spain#s imperial rivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, imagined Spain as a land of cruel and degenerate barbarians of la leyenda negra (the Black Legend), in league with the powers of #blackest darkness# and driven by #dark motives.# In Spain#s Long Shadow, María DeGuzmán explores how this convenient demonization made its way into American culture#and proved essential to the construction of whiteness. Surveying a broad range of texts and images from Poe#s #William Wilson# and John Singer Sargent#s El Jaleo to Richard Wright#s #Pagan Spain# and Kathy Acker#s Don Quixote, Spain#s Long Shadow shows how the creation of Anglo-American ethnicity as specifically American has depended on the casting of Spain as a colonial alter ego. The symbolic power of Spain in the American imagination, DeGuzmán argues, is not just a legacy of that nation#s colonial presence in the Americas; it lives on as well in the #blackness# of Spain and Spaniards#in the assigning of people of Spanish origin to an #off-white# racial category that reserves the designation of white for Anglo-Americans. By demonstrating how the Anglo-American imagination needs Spain and Spaniards as figures of attraction and repulsion, DeGuzmán makes a compelling and illuminating case for treating Spain as the imperial alter ego of the United States. Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, ambitious in its chronological sweep, and elegant in its interpretation of literary and visual works, DeGuzmán#s book leads us to a powerful new understanding of the nature#and history#of American ethnicity.