Calafia: the Black warrior queen
Did you know California was named after a Black warrior queen named Calafia? I didn’t!
Rebecca Johnson of Atlas Obscura wrote about Calafia’s story last November and touched “the surprising complexity of medieval attitudes about race”:
Meanwhile, the novel of chivalry that spawned it [California’s name], Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandían, has been all but forgotten (despite being memorably cited by Cervantes as one of the books that turned poor Don Quixote’s brains to mush). Yet its portrait of California’s queen, the dark-skinned warrior Calafia, is worth revisiting—not just for its marvelous details, but for the light it sheds on medieval European attitudes about race.
I like the part where Calafia is described as “beautiful, strong, and courageous” and portrayed in an “unfailingly positive light”.
Other entities named after Calafia include:
- Calafia Airlines, a Mexican airline
- Calafia, a hard bop album by Gerald Wilson’s Orchestra of the 80’s
- The Cooperative Latin American Collection Development Group, better known as Calafia, a consortium of libraries in California, Oregon, and Washington
- Calafia, a hypertext novel by Marjorie Luesebrink
- Calafia Valley, a wine-growing region in Baja California, Mexico
- Califia, a genera of Orbiniidae worms
To all those fools who refuse to accept the existence of Black people in their fantasy universes, eat it.
See also: The origin and the meaning of the name California, Calafia: Re-appropriating the Amazon Queen and a list of Black superheroes.
