Cervantes encoded sympathy for expelled Moriscos into Don Quixote

Evidence

One thinks of the way that in Don Quixote Cervantes showed Sancho Panza as very sympathetic to his old Morisco neighbor Ricote. Cervantes had Ricote reenter the country under the guise of being a German pilgrim. One rather gathers that Ricote was going to leave again to join his wife and daughter, who were in Algiers. But these womenfolk are represented as being fundamentally Christian, so that one wonders about his real intentions. The name Ricote, which in Don Quixote is a personal name, must surely have been intended to recall the place name of the Ricote Valley, Val de Ricote. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1535

Categorization

• SEED: A literary-reading essay angle: how a canonical comic novel smuggles in tacit sympathy for a dispossessed minority via a pilgrim disguise that the historical record (the Val de Ricote clearing) confirms as deliberate naming.
• XREF: Links to the reader’s interest in how writers process historical trauma obliquely, as in Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. — connects to: Don Quixote’s madness matched a real residue of medieval ritual worldview — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 361; Cervantes portrayed expelled moriscos sympathetically during mass expulsion; Cervantes could sympathize with an expelled morisca while denouncing Muslim lands