Langston Hughes and Flamenco: Pan-African Kin

"In his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes affirms that he 'wouldn’t give up jazz for a world revolution' (1). Janheinz Jahn adds that Hughes 'always rated the African-American cultural heritage higher than any ideology' (2). This may have been the way Hughes viewed African-American culture, but I would add that he probably rated highly the cultural heritage of any people he saw as being part of the off-white world. Furthermore, Hughes didn’t do so without an ideological perspective; in fact, he desired to be what Edward Mullen called a 'spokesman for the downtrodden of the world' (3). In this paper I will seek to examine Langston Hughes’ use of images and stereotypes of a particular ethnic group, the Gitanos, or gypsies of Southern Spain, and demonstrate how he uses Blues and Flamenco to identify African-Americans with other racial groups."