Abstract
Jews of Latin America, from the colonial period to the present, have been branded heretical, inauthentic, or treasonous and perceived as threats to the colonial domination of Spain's Counter-Reformation and modern iterations of nationalism in the region. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's El divino Narciso (1689) and Jorge Luis Borges's "El milagro secreto" ([1944] 1993) indicate the salience and pervasiveness of the figure of the Jew, experientially and conceptually, in the region's literary conversations about power, collectivity, and legitimacy vis-a-vis colonial and modern Europe. The two works reflect a transatlantic, multigenerational, and multigendered conversation that approaches the elimination of the Jew as a bargain that involved a simultaneous loss of American agency on a world stage. Sor Juana emerges not only as Latin America's first female intellectual; she is Borges's precursor in demanding an American regional identity and global agency apropos of the metropole's exclusionary violence toward the Jew within.