Theoretical Spanish American Gothic characters and themes:
- The corrupt and avaricious provincial priest that invents a story to accuse you with the Inquisition when you complain about being fed only corn and plantains in the unfortunate occasion that you happen to be his guest;
- The Westernised mestizo poet writing about death and dryness and the decline and fall of Empires, about getting old though he’s only twenty-eight, dreaming of ruins and of Spain as a father that he hates;
- The Inca nobleman commissioning portraits in the European style of his ancestors all the way to the mythical Manco Cápac, and his sister, who sits for a portrait with a court dwarf, dressed in the indigenous style, simulating that she is holding up a severed head;
- The affable British diplomat secretly conspiring to smuggle out vitally important botanicals;
- The merchant of mulatto ancestry who through the acquisition of wealth gains the honour if not the legal right to be called a doña;
- The educated city-living mestizo who, though a son of the land, finds the provinces as strange as a foreign continent, and Europeans to be more familiar in custom than his own distant kinsfolk;
- A play, subversion or deconstruction of the ethnic stereotypes of the era: the merriment of the Africans, the melancholy of the Indians, and the hedonism and degeneracy of the Spanish creole elite;
- A transplanted relict of feudalism in the form of the highland hacienda, where indigenous serfs are tied to the land as the land is tied to a master, and they are those who must bow their heads and remove their hats to their father on horseback, who clothes them;
- Soldiers’ uniforms stolen from the government for the landowners or hacendados to clothe the serfs under their command as they wage petty wars against each other;
- The hacendado who becomes aindiado, that is, who adopts the customs of the folk, who learns about their dress and their language, who chews coca leaf and marries an indigenous woman to create in the next generation a class of regional mestizo elites;
- The tapadas, or covered women, whose entire upper body except for their eyes is covered with a cloak, presumably to preserve their modesty but in practice to give them freedom of movement, as their honour cannot be compromised if they are not identified in the first place;
- A white city broken by earthquakes, left in disrepair because of lack of funds, corruption and neglect, and a sickly white mist that contributes to the dirtiness and unclean air because here it never rains.
