Between the lines, Cervantes critiqued the Catholic church, and lamented over the systematic destruction of Islamic culture in Spain.

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is a professor and the director of the Humanities Department at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. In 2022, he will be Obama Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University. His books include Decolonizing American Spanish (forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press), After American Studies (2018), Paris in American Literatures (edited with Vamsi K. Koneru, 2013), and In Paris or Paname (2011). He holds a PhD from the Universidad Pompeu Fabra.