Stefanie Affelldt Mai 2017
uncorrected galley proof – watermark

Contents

Editorial

1

E XPOSÉS
Purity of Blood
Problems of Interpretation
Max S. Hering Torres

11

Race and Caste
Other Words and Other Worlds
María Eugenia Chaves

39

S TUDIES
Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹
The Case of João Baptista D’Este
David Graizbord

61

›Moro de linaje y nación‹
Religious Identity, Race and Status in New Granada
Karoline P. Cook

81

Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹
The Example of Colonial Mexico
Laura A. Lewis

99

Purity of Blood and Caste
Identity Narratives among Early Modern Goan Elites
Ângela Barreto Xavier

125

Beyond Race
Exclusion in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America
Tamar Herzog

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ii

Contents

Race in Retrospect
Thinking with History in Nineteenth-century Cuba
David Sartorius

169

›Blood Work‹
Fables of Racial Identity and Modern Science
Thomas C. Holt

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This book offers a historical approach to the topics of ›race‹ and ›blood‹
in the Spanish Atlantic world of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries,
with extended comparative glances toward other Iberian imperial contexts (Portuguese India) and periods (the modern). Why ›race and blood‹
in the Iberian World? Spain was precocious, among European powers,
in putting the vocabulary of ›blood‹ and ›race‹ at the center of discussions about the polity. Already in the mid-fifteenth century, some powerful Castilian Christians were developing ideologies of limpieza de sangre (›purity of blood‹) which referred to ›pure‹ Christian ancestry, and
that would lead to the gradual establishment of statutes meant to prevent
Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity (conversos and moriscos, respectively), heretics, and their descendants from accessing certain public
and ecclesiastical offices, professions, and honors. At the core of this
ideology was the belief that blood was a vehicle for the transmission of
not just physical but also cultural traits: moral, characterological, spiritual. ›Blood‹, as a powerful proxy for lineage or descent, acquired a kind
of religious-racial significance, expressed in (among many others) the
Castilian word raza, a word that began to emerge into common use during the late fifteenth century, the same period in which the statutes of
purity of blood spread. Spanish notions of ›blood‹ and ›race‹, in other
words, were strongly connected.1
1

For fifteenth century usages of the word ›raza‹, see David Nirenberg: Was there race before modernity? The example of ›Jewish‹ blood in late medieval Spain. In: The Origins
of Racism in the West, eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, pp. 232-264. For sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries usages of the word ›raza‹, see Max S. Hering Torres: Limpieza de sangre.
¿Racismo en la Edad Moderna? In: Tiempos Modernos Revista Electrónica de Historia
Moderna, 4, 2003, 9 (http: //www.tiemposmodernos.org/viewissue.php?id=9); id.: Rassismus in der Vormoderne. Die Reinheit des Blutes im Spanien der Frühen Neuzeit.
Frankfurt etc.: Campus Verlag 2006, pp. 217-250. And for its use in colonial Latin
America, see María Elena Martínez: The Language, Genealogy, and Classification of
›Race‹ in Colonial Mexico. In: Race and Classification. The Case of Mexican America, eds. Ilona Katzew, Susan Deans-Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009,
pp. 25-42; Max S. Hering Torres: Color, pureza, raza: la calidad de los sujetos coloniales. In: La cuestión colonial, ed. Heraclio Bonilla. Bogotá: Norma 2011, pp. 451470; Nikolaus Böttcher, Bernd Hausberger, Max S. Hering Torres (eds.): El peso de

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The idea that blood encoded cultural characteristics was by no means
exclusive to Iberia. On the contrary, it was closely linked to discourses
of nobility based on blood (for example, nobleza de sangre in Spanish or
noblesse de sang in French) that were so prevalent in the late medieval
and early modern periods that we may call them pan-European. But in
the Iberian Peninsula these discourses of blood were extended early to
more and more registers of culture – religious, political, economic – and
began to thicken into what we might with due caution consider a racial
concept. The social significance of blood and ›raza‹ grew first in Spain
and then in Portugal, which also witnessed the proliferation of requirements of purity of blood (limpeza de sangue in Portuguese) on its soil.
From Iberia the concept would travel to Iberian colonial possessions in
the Americas and to some extent also in Africa and Asia. In these contexts, it retained some of its original connotations but also acquired others, as notions of genealogical ›impurity‹ were gradually mapped on to
certain colonial populations to restrict their political, economic, and spiritual claims.2 The history of blood ideologies in early modern Spain and
the Iberian Atlantic world therefore belongs as much to the global history
of early modern colonialism as it does to that of race and racism.
One of the main objectives of the present compilation is to provide
theoretical and historical foundations through which to study the meanings, uses, and relationship of early modern Spanish concepts of race and
blood, their transplantation and adaptation to different cultural contexts,
and their role in producing and reproducing social hierarchies. But the
lens is of necessity wide. Racial constructs are not uniform or fixed and
they rarely work alone. Rather, they are the products of particular cultural traditions and social context and are linked to other social relations,
processes of exclusion, and systems of signification. The different contributions in this volume therefore approach Iberian ideologies of raza and
limpieza de sangre with careful attention to the grammars of difference
that constituted them, but always with an eye on the intellectual traditions, institutions, laws, social practices, symbols, colonial processes and
inter-regional transferences that shaped and re-shaped how those grammars generated meaning. Together the different chapters also stress the
importance of understanding the relationship of notions of race and blood

2

la sangre. Limpios, mestizos y nobles en el mundo hispánico México: El Colegio de
México 2011; Verena Stolcke: Invaded Women: Sex, Race and Class in the Formation of Colonial Society. In: The European Journal of Development Research, 6, 1994,
pp. 7-21.
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions. Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008 esp. pp. 142-264.

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to other key organizing concepts of early modern Spanish society, such as
casta (caste), linaje (lineage), honor, calidad (quality), vecindad (citizenship), and naturaleza (nativeness) as well as to social relations, religion,
and gender.
The volume opens with two conceptual and historiographic chapters
that provide a broad framework for understanding race and blood in the
Spanish Atlantic world. In Chapter 1, Max S. Hering Torres (Universidad
Nacional de Colombia – Bogotá) provides an overview of the scholarship
on limpieza de sangre, and engages the ongoing debate about whether
it is anachronistic to speak of race in studying early modern Spain and
Spanish America. He proposes that we treat race and racism not as a
monolithic and transhistorical phenomenon, but in plural form, that is, as
racisms that bear comparative study. To argue his case, the author draws
examples from Spain and New Granada of how limpieza de sangre, calidad, honor, casta, and raza worked discursively and in everyday practices
to construct social hierarchies and physical difference. It is through the
generation of such examples, and their comparison to different constructions in other times and places, that we can test and refine our sense of
what it is we mean by the term ›race‹.
In Chapter 2, María Eugenia Chaves (Universidad Nacional de
Colombia – Medellín) also addresses the question of whether it is analytically appropriate to apply the concept of ›race‹ to early modern Spanish
and Spanish American contexts. In dialogue with the works on race and
limpieza de sangre by Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and
others, she proposes that colonial difference should be conceptualized as
a »field of enunciation« that is, as a set of discursive domains and power
relations that involved various cultural principles and forms of creating
social hierarchies. Although their theoretical perspectives differ (Hering
Torres, for example, placing more emphasis on multiple racisms), these
chapters both urge us to recognize the existence of multiple Spanish notions of difference as well as to examine their culturally-specific meanings and interplay with each other.
The next section opens with two chapters on limpieza de sangre and
the discursive constructions of Jewish and Muslim difference. In Chapter 3, David Graizbord (The University of Arizona) examines the case of
João Baptista d’Este, a Jew who was born in Italy in the mid-1570s to a
family of Portuguese expatriates. D’Este returned to Portugal at the turn
of the century, converted to Christianity, and became a virulent polemicist against Jews, Judaism, and ›New Christians‹, that is, Christians descended from converted Jews. According to both Spanish and Portuguese

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definitions of limpieza de sangre, d’Este’s own Jewish ancestry made him
impure, and therefore a suspect or unstable Christian. Yet, as Graizbord
demonstrates, despite d’Este’s polemics against Jews and New Christians, he defended and celebrated his Sephardi pedigree both before and
after his conversion, and even argued that because of this pedigree he was
especially suited for Christianity. By making Jewish ancestry compatible
with, even ideal for, the adoption of the Christian faith, he turned the logic
of purity of blood on its head, even as he embraced some its genealogical
underpinnings – such as the conviction that cultural characteristics such
as faith are transmitted through blood lineages.
D’Este was not alone in arguing that Jewish descent could make a
converso a particularly pious and pure Christian (although in his case
he seemed to apply the logic mainly to himself). Indeed, starting in the
second half of the fifteenth century and well into the seventeenth, there
seemed to be a great deal of acceptance of the importance of blood in
determining Christian spirituality among both enemies and defenders of
conversos, even if the two camps marshaled that idea for radically different ends. As Graizbord notes, d’Este’s case vividly illustrates the prevalence of »genealogical mentalities« in early modern Iberian cultures, and
provides an excellent example of the creativity with which individuals
could attempt to put relationships among race, lineage, and religion to
new kinds of work.3 It also reveals the strong tension between, on one
hand, the idea of conversion and faith as transformative and, on the other,
the belief in the power of blood to determine any number of human characteristics.
The tension between notions of blood and faith is also discussed by
Karoline P. Cook (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) in Chapter 4, which analyzes the discourse of limpieza de sangre in relation to
Spain’s Muslims and moriscos. She focuses on the case of Diego Romero,
who thanks to his participation in the conquest of New Granada in the
mid-sixteenth century was awarded an encomienda (a grant of indigenous tributaries normally awarded to conquerors by the Spanish crown)
and became part of the local elite. Rivals seeking to strip Romero of his
encomienda accused him of being the son of a Muslim slave woman. If
the accusation were judged true, it would classify Romero as of impure
blood, disqualifying him from residence in Spanish America, and by extension from the royal grants and honors he had received. Romero was
imprisoned while royal officials investigated the charges, but he hired a
3

Cf. David Nirenberg: Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities. Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain. In: Past and Present, 174, 2002, pp. 3-41.

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lawyer to appeal to the Council of the Indies. In his defense he did not
challenge the idea that Muslim blood was impure. Nor did he attempt to
embrace that blood in order to make a case for his Christian credentials,
as d’Este did with his Jewish descent. Instead, Romero adopted a vastly
more common strategy, and argued that he was a pure Old Christian. His
defense emphasized his personal actions and achievements to bolster his
claim to honorable status. Whatever the truth of the matter (and in these
matters of genealogy truth was a highly flexible concept in both Spain
and its American territories) the prosecution failed to gather the necessary evidence within the two-year period granted for the task. The case
was closed, Romero’s freedom and encomienda reinstated.
Through Romero’s case we catch a glimpse of how accusations of
Muslim ancestry could be put to strategic use across the Atlantic, and
of some of the different legal and rhetorical strategies used by people
accused of having ›bad raza‹ to defend themselves. Cook’s chapter, together with Graizbord’s, also suggests that the issue of purity of blood
was far from a settled matter. It was, rather, a source of ongoing anxiety
and debate. Indeed, throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Iberians debated the best ways to make converted Jews and Muslims into good Christians, and these discussions reveal different views
about whether it was ultimately blood or practices and behavior that determined a person’s religious and limpieza de sangre status.4
The extension and adaptation of Iberian notions of raza, casta and
limpieza de sangre to different colonial situations is the subject of the
next two chapters. In Chapter 5, Laura A. Lewis (James Madison University) probes the meanings of the Spanish notions of casta and raza and
their relationship to gender in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New
Spain (colonial Mexico). The author argues that the concept of raza constitutes a more exclusionary system of marking difference than that of
casta, which she views as more strongly connected to lineage and kinship.
For Lewis, the former was more important in Spain, whereas the latter
dominated in New Spain, where a system of classification based mainly
on ancestry (the ›sistema de castas‹) emerged that connected members of
different ›castes‹ genealogically. She also stresses that, despite the system’s relative inclusiveness and recognition of mixed bloodlines, it built
on Spanish colonial discourses that feminized the indigenous population
4

For more on different definitions of limpieza de sangre (that is, as a status or condition
that was determined by descent or practices and behavior) and their manifestation in
blood-purity certification cases, see chapter 3 of María Elena Martínez: Genealogical
Fictions, esp. pp. 82 ff.

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and marked ›black blood‹ as irredeemable.5 Lewis ends with reflections
on how colonial notions of caste and mixture shaped twentieth-century
Mexican racial ideology, and in particular the elision of blacks from the
national historical imaginary.
In Chapter 6, Ângela Barreto Xavier (Universidade de Lisboa) discusses what casta, raza, and limpieza de sangre meant in Goa, a region
in India that became a Portuguese possession in the early sixteenth century. Through an examination of these terms in accounts and memorials
written in the early eighteenth century by Indian Goans (some of whom
were Christians), she asks whether their use amounted to an imitation
of Iberian ways of expressing identity and difference or, instead, was
inspired by ›indigenous‹ disputes about caste, blood, and purity taking
place in various parts of India at much the same time. Barreto Xavier’s
work not only opens up new lines of inquiry about the different trajectories that notions of ›race‹, ›caste‹, and ›blood-purity‹ could take in the
Iberian colonial world, but raises questions about how the Portuguese imperial experience in Asia might have influenced the meanings of raza and
casta in other colonial contexts, particularly the Spanish and British.
Tamar Herzog (Stanford University) returns us to early modern Spain
and Spanish America in Chapter 7. Her essay puts forward the suggestion – all the more valuable for being made in a volume as focused as
this one – that too great an emphasis on race limits our understanding of
metropolitan and colonial constructions of difference in the Early Modern. She proposes that we enrich our analyses of race by paying more
attention to other practices of exclusion. Specifically, Herzog discusses
the place of Gypsies, indigenous people, and blacks within discourses of
citizenship (vecindad) and nativeness (naturaleza), and more generally
within Spanish debates about how to make ›foreigners‹ into natives of
the Spanish nation. Her work calls attention to the ongoing tension of
5

Some of these points are illustrated in the images on the cover. They show four casta
paintings by Andrés de Islas in 1774: ›De español y negra, nace mulata‹, ›De español y
mulata, nace morisco‹, ›De español y morisca, nace albino‹, ›De español y albina, nace
torna atrás‹ (from left to right). Whereas in those pictures which depict intermixture of
Spaniards with native people the process leads in the third generation back to ›Spaniard,
the whiteness in the third generation intermixture with ›black‹ is followed, in the fourth
generation, by a relapse to sheer blackness. For more on the casta paintings see María
Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, chapter 9; Ilona Katzew: Casta Painting. Images
of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven etc.: Yale University Press 2004,
pp. 116 f. and Magali M. Carrera: Imagining Identity in New Spain. Race, Lineage, and
the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press
2003, pp. 88 ff.; also refer to Wulf D. Hund: Negative Vergesellschaftung. Dimensionen
der Rassismusanalyse. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot 2006, pp. 73-76.

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cultural and biological arguments in those debates. And it asks us to consider the possibility that at times definitions of citizens versus foreigners
collaborated with, added to, or replaced racial distinctions.
Questions of citizenship and nativeness were debated with increasing
intensity in the early nineteenth century, at much the same time that Spain
and Portugal lost most of their American territories. After the wars of independence of the early decades of the century, only Cuba and Puerto
Rico remained in Spanish hands. In these Caribbean islands, where slavery and the socio-racial order it had helped to create survived, struggles
over abolition and the extension of political rights to people of indigenous
or African descent continued for most of the century.6 David Sartorius
(University of Maryland) discusses this highly charged political context
in Chapter 8. Focusing on Cuba, he finds that the previous three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, and in particular royal policies regarding
the treatment of indigenous populations and people of African descent,
played an important role in discussions and writings about how to transform colonial subjects into citizens – incorporate them politically into
the Spanish nation – and more generally in proposals for sociopolitical
reform.
Sartorius focuses on written histories of Cuba by José Antonio Saco
(1797-1879) and Pedro José Guiteras (1852-1925), authors who were involved in movements of colonial reform. He argues that these authors
drew (selectively, of course) upon the history of Spanish colonial and
racial policies to advocate for their social agendas. Saco, for example,
critiqued Spain’s slavery policies primarily to support his argument about
the importance of increasing Cuba’s white population. Sartorius emphasizes that, in nineteenth-century Cuba, critiques of certain aspects of
Spanish colonialism and ›racism‹ could be accompanied by a vindication of others. What was chosen for praise or blame in the past often
depended on what type of political and racial order the author advocated
for the present and envisioned for the future.
The loss of Iberia’s American colonies and rise of new European imperial powers was only one product of the nineteenth century. Another
was the emergence of new polities (nation states), new discourses of
political belonging (citizenship and equality), and new epistemological
foundations for racial discourse (science). Within these new historical
contexts, the possible meanings and functions of the vocabulary of blood
within racial discourses were transformed. But although these vocabularies articulated new forms of subjectivity and social relations and signified
6

In Puerto Rico slavery was abolished in 1873 and in Cuba not until 1886.

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the body in new ways, they remained meaningful, indeed central to ideas
about difference and belonging. Blood, for example, was no longer linked
to lineage, kinship, and ties of vassalage to the king, as it had been under
the ancien régime. But its importance did not disappear. Rather, it was
translated into a national discourse of service and sacrifice. And even as
new sciences – such as genetics – of human difference emerged, important continuities between early modern and modern concepts of blood
and race persisted.
Some of these continuities are the subject of Thomas C. Holt’s
(University of Chicago) Epilogue. Holt discusses the works of Ludwik
Hirszfeld (1884-1954), and Dr. Charles Drew (1904-1950), two scientists of the interwar period whose research in different ways contributed
to what he calls »blood science«. Hirszfeld was a Polish Jew who converted to Catholicism and did fundamental work in serology, or the study
of blood types. One offshoot of that work was a project that attempted
to correlate the blood types of various national and ethnic populations,
with the goal of testing (but often reproducing) racial assumptions about
the existence of inferior and superior bloods. Charles Drew was the first
African American to receive a doctorate in medicine, producing a dissertation on »Banked Blood« that would later lead him to direct the Blood
for Britain project that sent liquid plasma to British soldiers in World
War II, and to set up the American Red Cross’s bank in New York City.
In 1950, after a terrible car accident in North Carolina and despite the
best efforts of the local doctors, he bled to death in a small rural hospital. The resulting rumours that his death had been caused by segregated
blood banks played a role in the subsequent de-segregation of the blood
supply.
Placing Hirszfeld’s work on blood in the context of the racial climate of Nazi Germany and that of Drew in the light of the Jim Crow
system of segregation and discrimination, Holt stresses what he takes to
be the ironies of their different contributions to »blood science«. His essay serves as a powerful reminder of the dynamic but enduring nature
of the vocabulary of blood, of racism’s capacity to re-articulate itself by
building on past notions while attaching itself to new social, cultural, and
scientific formations, and in general of the blood myths that have persistently grounded racial discourse, belief, and practice since the early
modern era.
(Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, David Nirenberg)

E XPOSÉS

Purity of Blood
Problems of Interpretation
Max S. Hering Torres

Abstract: The aim of this article is to present a historical approach and a
theoretical-methodological proposal for the analysis of pre-modern racialization
processes. To achieve this objective, the proposal enters into the debate about the
possibly racialized character of the concept of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), taking into account the power of discourse and of everyday practices. After
undertaking a historical survey, both in Spain and the Nuevo Reino de Granada
(fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), the essay concludes that the notion of purity of
blood which originated in a racial anti-Judaism on the Iberian Peninsula turned
into a colonial strategy of racialization, because it codified social relations in a hierarchical form by means of corporal and cultural symbols. On the basis of such
a historical study, this essay stresses the need to study racisms in the plural, open
up historical perspectives and analyze the variability of different regimes of truth.
Such an approach allows us to question racism as a linear process (from purity of
blood to the Holocaust) without historical differentiations (the racism of modernity is the same as colonial racism), and to avoid recurring to modern science as
an indispensable factor in defining racialization processes.

The Spanish idea of purity of blood has been interpreted from multiple
standpoints and there is a lack of consensus about its meaning within the
framework of the history of racism. This discrepancy in the arguments is
a reflection of a broader polemic, which revolves around the historicity
of racism and the following question: Is racism an exclusively modern
phenomenon or is it a trans-historical phenomenon? Putting the question
more generally, does the imagination of »race« and racial discrimination
manifest itself in historical terms in multiple forms or in one form only?
The aims of this article are, first, to clarify the problem through the presentation of certain historiographical debates; second, to develop a historical approach to the problem; and third, to present a conceptual and
I would like to thank María Elena Martínez and David Nirenberg for their insightful
editorial comments. I am also grateful to James Weisskopf for his invaluable linguistic
help, as well as to Patricia Simonson for her proofreading.

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Max S. Hering Torres

theoretical abstraction which sets forth ways to inquire into the problem
of interpretation.
The Problem
This chapter does not attempt to present an exhaustive historiographical
summary, but simply to review some polemics regarding limpieza de sangre in order to clarify the problem of its interpretation within the framework of race studies. These polemics are old, have only been partially
resolved, and have recently flared up again. In the 1940’s, Cecil Roth
called the Spanish notion of purity of blood a »racial anti-Semitism« and
a »fifteenth-century precedent for the Aryan legislation of the twentieth«.1 He was followed, in the 1960’s, by Albert A. Sicroff, who did not
hesitate to say that the 1391 pogroms were motivated by a »racist feeling«,2 a posture similar to that of the famous Spanish historian, Antonio
Domínguez Ortiz, who considered the doctrine of purity of blood to be
»pure racism«.3
However, another group of historians distanced themselves from the
above-mentioned position. In the 1940’s, Guido Kisch, contradicting
Roth, stated that »the racial concept and doctrine have no foundation
in medieval law either ecclesiastical or secular«.4 Along the same lines,
Francisco Márquez Villanueva denied that there was any racist significance to purity of blood, since it was not based on an unshakeable biological determinism; he pointed, rather, to its social and religious nature.5
In recent years these positions have been augmented by novel proposals
which have sought a more nuanced historical discussion of the early modern period. For example, Rainer Walz’s6 studies centered on the idea of
a genealogical racism; those of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who sets forth
the notion of proto-racism;7 David Nirenberg’s investigations, which recover the meanings of ›race‹ in the Late Middle Ages;8 and Sicroff’s new
interpretations, which use the term »religious racism«.9 I, for my part,
came up with the hypothesis of racisms as chameleon-like variables.10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Cecil Roth: Marranos and Racial Anti-Semitism, p. 243.
Albert A. Sicroff: Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, p. 47.
Antonio Domínguez Ortiz: Los judeoconversos en España Moderna, p. 138.
Guido Kisch: Nationalism and Race in Medieval Law, p. 73.
Cf. Francisco Márquez Villanueva: The Converso Problem, p. 324.
Cf. Rainer Walz: Der vormoderne Antisemitismus.
Cf. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Assimilaton and Racial Anti-Semitism.
Cf. David Nirenberg: Was there race before modernity?
Albert A. Sicroff: Spanish Anti-Judaism, p. 592.
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Limpieza de sangre; id.: Rassismus in der Vormoderne.

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13

While the above-mentioned theories open up new interpretative perspectives, their disadvantage lies in their exclusion of colonial Latin America,
a fault which has recently been partially remedied thanks to the studies
carried out by María Elena Martínez. But, while these historians have
ignored the transatlantic perspective, Latin American historiography has
similarly ignored that of the Iberian Peninsula.
Taking this fact into account, it becomes clear that it is not only necessary to develop a historical perspective which considers the processes of
circulation between the two continents, but also to apply this type of approach to questions regarding the historicity of racism. In a recent study,
Genealogías de la Diferencia, the editor María Eugenia Chaves encourages us to discuss the matter and asks whether it is possible to identify the
ideas about African slaves constructed in the colonial world with the concepts of race and race relations. Her answer is categorical: »If we accept
that the framework of meaning of the differences rooted in the concepts of
race and racial differences emerges in the mid-eighteenth century in the
context of the decadence of Iberian colonial power and the consolidation
of new colonial powers of northern Europe, the use of these concepts is
clearly anachronistic«.11 My views partly parallel those of Chaves in her
answer to that question; in fact, my work has set forth similar arguments
in other studies.12 In my opinion, it is inappropriate to project modern
concepts of race and racism onto the colonial past – as in the works of
Walter Mignolo13 and Aníbal Quijano.14 On the other hand, even though
I agree that the concept of race as a global ›scientific‹ idea began to
emerge strongly in Europe during the Enlightenment, I also recognize
that there had been previous manifestations of the idea of ›race‹. These
manifestations displayed different and independent historical meanings,
which may have contributed to the emergence of racialization processes.
Within the framework of purity of blood, both in Spain and Hispanic
America, there were other, previous conceptualizations about race and
they had other historically-situated meanings15 which encapsulated different ideas, linked to the notions of pureza (purity), casta (caste), color
and calidad (quality): a conceptual juncture which is evidenced in the
norms, discourses and daily life of the time.
After analyzing this historiographical panorama, it becomes evident
that the positions held by those engaged in this debate have become some11
12
13
14
15

Maria Eugenia Chaves: Introducción, p. 12.
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Limpieza de sangre.
Cf. Walter Mignolo: La idea de América Latina, pp. 42-52.
Cf. Anibal Quijano: Colonialidad del poder.
Cf. Michel-Rolph Trouillot: Global Transformations, p. 98.

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Max S. Hering Torres

what polarized. On the one hand, some academics deny any possibility of
racialization before modernity.16 On the other hand, some scholars postulate the existence of racism in both colonial Spanish America and early
modern Europe and project modern ideas of race and racism onto the
colonial past.17 Some have even set out to trace a linear history of racism
as something which began with purity of blood and eventually culminated
in the rise of the Third Reich.18 I propose to ask these questions in a new
way by using a historical perspective which not only permits comparisons
between the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish American colonial past,
but also avoids the supposed singularity of modern racism as a sine qua
non requisite for racialization. In the following essay, I present arguments
as to why it would be desirable to revise the above-mentioned opinions.
This revision of historiographical reflections on past processes of racialization should take into account both their diversity and flexibility, but
without evading diachronic parallelisms.
Historical Approach: Forms of Exclusion and Purity of Blood
In Europe, both in the Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Period, exclusion was part of everyday life. The system of estates operating in these
societies distinguished members in terms of a social rank determined by
birth and blood. While there were ways to scale the social ladder, it is safe
to say that such societies were hierarchical and that reputation and honor
were the main principles of inclusion or exclusion. Honor was a matter
of lineage, office and estate, and operated as symbolic capital. Even so,
honor was not innate, immutable or perpetual: it had to be guarded and
protected. Being honorable was not a closed category and the definition
of it was flexible: criminals, vagrants, sorcerers, executioners, gravediggers and prostitutes were all regarded as dishonored, as well as heretics
and Jews.19
Most European Christians regarded the Jews as followers of an irrational doctrine, a deicide nation, beyond salvation and condemned to
an eternity in hell. They also imagined that Jews were responsible for
epidemics, the profanation of sacramental hosts, and ritual murders; they
were even stigmatized as the embodiment of perfidy, usury and treachery.
16

17
18

19

Cf. Julio Arias, Eduardo Restrepo: Historizando raza: propuestas conceptuales y
metodológicas.
Cf. Anibal Quijano: Colonialidad del poder.
Cf. Jerome Friedman: Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation; Leon Poliakov: Geschichte des Antisemitismus, pp. 67, 84, 170, 206, and 150.
Cf. Richard van Dülmen: Der Ehrlose Mensch, p. 1.

Purity of Blood

15

In the Iberian Peninsula, medieval anti-Judaism flared up when numerous petitions to oust the hated Jewish financial elites were presented to
the cortes of Zamora (1301), Valladolid (1322) and Madrid (1329) and to
the Council of Salamanca (1335). Although the kings protected the Jews,
offering them refuge by defining them as part of their properties, this relationship of protection and dependence was considerably debilitated on
October 30, 1377, when King Enrique II (1334/1379) authorized a series
of anti-Jewish lawsuits in the cortes of Burgos. This was the first step
towards making the exclusion of the Sephardi Jews official, an aspiration
which later resulted in the riots of 1391. In brief, the Jews represented a
hated but visible and controlled minority. The above examples confirm
not only the existence of anti-Jewish legislation but also demonstrate the
attitudes towards Jews characteristic of the time.
Nevertheless, by the middle of the fifteenth century a doctrine had appeared in Castile that was unique in the European context: on the basis of
a linkage between genealogical thought and anti-Judaism, the principle
of purity of blood surfaced as a specific modality of exclusion, different
from other general methods of segregation during that period. As a consequence of the 1391 riots, and subsequent political and social developments such as the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, there began a wave of religious conversion among the Jewish minority. The aim of these converts,
in the late fourteenth century, had been to survive the medieval riots and,
in the late fifteenth century, to preserve their homes and avoid a Sephardi
diaspora. Due to this process of forced assimilation there ensued a process of socio-cultural camouflaging. The otherness of the Jews – visible
in their dress, housing, religious rites and dietary practices – was made
invisible. As happened with other persecuted minorities, this invisibility
meant that their cultural practices became illegal, went underground and
were shrouded in mystery. By means of the religious conversions carried
out between 1391 and 1492, Jews had become Christians, gaining new
privileges but also new obligations. They formed a new group, theoretically free of anti-Jewish restraints, which sought to achieve new structures of power. This process of acculturation roused suspicion, envy and
a profound fear in the rest of society. Consequently, a new legal definition
of the Jewish convert, the converso, was formulated, in order to make visible what was no longer visible: their past, i.e., their origin, which could
only be traced in terms of blood. Due to the attempts at Christian homogenization, religious affiliation was no longer the reason for exclusion;
religious origins instead became a new motive for discrimination.
This distinction is important because, despite their common points,

16

Max S. Hering Torres

the reasons for differentiation in one case followed a logic unlike that of
the other. The core argument was the following: despite their Christian
affiliation, the Jewish converts still bore Jewish blood in their bodies and
this continued to have a negative influence on their morality and conduct. According to some Old Christians, the influence of blood in the
neophytes was such that, while they were nominally Christians, they still
acted like Jews. To put it another way: the pseudo-causal relationship
between lineage and behavior had been perpetuated and inscribed in the
bodies of Christians with Jewish ancestry. It would be premature to speak
of a totally consolidated system of purity of blood in the mid-fifteenth
century, given that its foundations were only just beginning to be established. In accordance with the sentence-statute issued by the Council of
Toledo in 1449, fourteen Jewish converts were expelled from their offices. The decree, passed in the midst of an urban uprising against royal
taxes, laid down the following: »that the converts of Jewish lineage, for
their suspect faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, which they frequently spew forth lightheartedly while practicing Judaism, may not hold
public or private offices or benefices where they can cause injuries, insults
or ill treatments to pure Old Christians [christianos viejos lindos]«.20 As
the language of the decree illustrates, the concept of limpieza de sangre had not yet emerged, but that of lindos had. According to Ramón
Menéndez Pidal and Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, the term ›lindo‹ (normally, ›pretty‹ in Spanish) can be considered a conceptual antecedent of
›limpieza‹, considering that the words ›lindo‹ and ›limpio‹ derive from
the Latin ›limpidus‹ (clean or clear but meaning, in this case, impeccable, spotless or flawless).21 It is quite likely that ›lindo‹ became equated
with the concept of ›limpieza‹ in the last third of the fifteenth century.
It is worth pointing out that purity of blood was only an incipient
juridical concept at the time, as would be shown by the difficulties presented by its actual implementation at the Council of Toledo. However,
despite its juridical inconsistencies, an argument for exclusion began to
come into use that was not based on religious affiliation but on religious
lineage, and this argument gradually turned into a tool used to prevent
assimilation.
The statutes of purity of blood were disputed, but despite their weak
juridical foundations they progressively spread through a variety of institutions, with the consent of both the King and the Pope. In institu20
21

Antonio Martín Gamero (ed.): Historia de la ciudad de Toledo, p. 1037.
Cf. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz: La clase social de los conversos en Castilla en la Edad
Moderna, p. 13, footnote 9.

Purity of Blood

17

tions that implemented the limpieza de sangre statutes, candidates aspiring to enter them had to submit themselves to a genealogical investigation in order to demonstrate their purity of blood, i.e., to prove that
they had no Jewish or Muslim ancestors. Limpieza de sangre therefore
defined Christian neophyte minorities and their descendants as objects
of discrimination. As various scholars have demonstrated, the statutes
were implemented in a number of provinces in the Basque Country; in
religious orders; colegios mayores (major schools); cabildos (governing
councils); cathedral chapters; military orders; la Casa de la Contratación
(The House of Trade); and the Office of the Holy Inquisition.
In the middle of the fifteenth century, conversions were still a relatively recent occurrence, which made it easy to trace a person’s genealogical past. Two or three generations later, however, it was more difficult to
do that. Therefore, institutions, adapting to the change, realized that it
was indispensable to create a bureaucratic system of investigation which
would administer, oversee and control genealogical knowledge and also
make visible a difference that would go beyond the imaginaries about
blood, morality and the past.
Contagion, Heritage, Race: Discourses and Everyday Life in Spain
Although debates about religious truth arose many times in the framework of Christianity, the relation with judeoconversos and moriscos
which was established in the Iberian Peninsula meant that no deviations
from faith were accepted, in line with principles which declared that religious truth was unquestionable. The defenders of limpieza de sangre
converted this monopoly of truth into a justification for the norms and
practices of purity of blood. In the dogmatic spirit of the epoch, the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez (1450-1513) condemned the Jews for their »perpetual blindness«, which he said was the reason why they never »wished
to listen to the truth but, instead, were deceived by the false book of the
Talmud«. For that reason, he demanded that »sufficient wood [be piled
on] for the burning, until none is left, not even their children; those over
the age of twenty, and even those younger, if they were infected by the
same leprosy«.22
The imaginaries about the errors and treachery of the Jews were built
on the basis of Christian truth, and these deviations were metaphorically
compared to leprosy. Leprosy was no longer just a disease; it was also
turned into a metonymy referring to lack of belief. Furthermore, the
22

Andrés Bernáldez: Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos, pp. 103, 251 f.

18

Max S. Hering Torres

choice of metonymy was not gratuitous: it referred to the principle of
contagion and, thus, the idea that impurity was inheritable seemed real,
tangible and observable. The metonymy was both reality and fiction at
the same time. Impurity of blood was not leprosy – that was fiction –
but it was also reality, insofar as the logic which at that time explained
contagious diseases also held that impurity could be hereditary. The explanation of hereditary contagion went hand in hand with this principle
and found additional support in an erroneous interpretation of original sin
and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.23
Before the idea of purity of blood was developed, views on inheritance derived from theories about hereditary estate differences based on
blood. One is struck in this respect by the use of an imaginary about
›race‹ which operated as a synonym for ›lineage‹. In a book entitled Corbacho, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo (1398-1470) stated that the virtues
and vices of noble or plebeyan lineage were inherited, regardless of the
social context. The author inevitably concluded that a peasant will always
be a peasant and a knight always a knight, and that it had nothing to do
with their respective social or educational backgrounds: »Nature ensures
this; thus, every day in the places where you live, you will see that the
noble man is of a noble race and still shows his origins, and the unfortunate man is of a vile race and lineage; no matter how great he is or how
much he has, he will only show the wretchedness of his descent«.24 As
this passage reveals, not only was ›race‹ used as a synonym for lineage,
it was also related to the immutable inheritance of virtues or vices which
were believed to derive naturally from a person’s origins. Independently
of this discourse, the humanist Antonio Nebrija (1441-1522) gave a different twist to the idea in his Diccionario, referring to »panni raritas«, a
Latin term he translated as »race of the cloth«, that is, a strangeness or
defect in the material.25
Thus, while the word »race« had a number of meanings at that time,
it had still not been linked to the imaginary of ›purity of blood‹, but
it is important to note that, in the second half of the fifteenth century,
›race‹ meant both ›lineage‹ and ›defect‹. By the mid-sixteenth century,
these two meanings had become joined,26 in the discourse of purity of
blood, to express a conceptualization about a hereditary defect, that is,
23

24
25
26

For a more detailed discussion of the theological elements which upheld purity of blood,
see Max S. Hering Torres: Rassismus in der Vormoderne; id.: Limpieza de sangre en
España.
Alfonso Martínez de Toledo: Corbacho, pp. 59 f.
Antonio Nebrija: Vocabulario español-latino, f. LXXXVI.
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Limpieza de sangre; Verena Stolcke: Invaded Women, p. 11.

Purity of Blood

19

a genealogical impurity, an imperfection that was like a hereditary disease. In the debate on the implementation of the statutes of purity of
blood held at the Cathedral Chapter of Toledo in 1547, archbishop Juan
Martínez de Silíceo stated: »a statute was proposed by our Archbishop of
Toledo in this Holy Church which, from that day onwards, applied to all
the Benefice-holders of that Holy Church, and Dignitaries like Evangelical Canons [»Canonigo Razioneros«], Chaplains and acolytes who were
Old Christians without race of Jew, Moor, or heretics«.27 In line with
the above, we can see a ›conceptual symbiosis‹ between ›impurity‹ and
›race‹, because the concept of impurity could only exist if there existed
a genealogically inheritable defect in a person’s lineage. In other words,
›race‹ became a synonym for impurity, and when purity was proved, there
was no defect, no race.28
Once purity of blood was linked to the idea of the stain of ›race‹ it
expanded the meaning of impurity to the body. One finds assertions regarding how ›race‹ might stain a person.29 Examples of the transmission
of this hereditary impurity are found in the consumption of the breast
milk of Moorish or converted Jewish30 wet nurses, the tainted wombs
of converted Jewish mothers,31 as well as the notion that male menstruation and hemorrhoids were symptoms of an impure origin.32 Castejón
Fonseca even described the signs of »Jewish treachery«, evident in their
»noisy character, inclined to business deals«, which revealed their origin
and hereditary defects. He further argued that such characteristics could
be compared with transmissible poisons, stating that »these inclinations
27
28

29
30

31
32

Quoted in Max S. Hering Torres: Rassismus in der Vormoderne, pp. 220 f.
For additional empirical evidence refer to the following primary sources: »Raza in the
lineages is taken in a bad way, like to have some raza of a Moor or a Jew« (Sebastián de
Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 896); »Pure: is said
at times in Spain to refer to an Old Christian, who does not have raza, nor is descended
from Moor or Jew« (Lorenzo Franciosini Fiorentino: Vocabolario español, e italiano);
»that they are pure Old Christians, without raza, stain, lineage, and without evidence,
reputation or rumour of these« (Bartolomé Jiménez Patón: Discurso en favor del Santo
y loable estatuto de la limpieza, f. 8); »A minister of the king, Old Christian, without
raza, who deserved this quality« (Vicente da Costa Matos: Discurso contra los judíos,
p. 12); »In the lineages of old immemorial Christianity, as it is well-known there have
been many heretics, like those who have raza« (Gerónimo de la Cruz, Defensa de los
Estatutos, f. 139).
Cf. FranciscoTorrejoncillo: Centinela contra Judíos, p. 12.
Cf. Juan de Pineda: Treynta y cinco dialogos familiares de la agricultura cristiana, vol. 1,
f. 112.
Cf. FranciscoTorrejoncillo: Centinela contra Judíos, p. 22.
Cf. Pedro Aznar Cardona: Expulsión Justificada de los Moriscos Españoles, f. 20-21;
Juan de Quiñones: Al illvstrissimo y Reverendissimo Señor [. . . ] (B.N. V. E. 8/16).

20

Max S. Hering Torres

derive from bodily humors: these we receive from our ancestors, from
any of them we may receive this poison«.33
What all this suggests is that social relations were structured around
meanings attached to the body in theological and Aristotelian terms or
in terms of the pathology of humors, with the aim of differentiating one
social group from another. It is important to note that the concept of irrefutable Christian truth was amplified through the understanding of the
human body as a representation of orthodoxy. This allows us to differentiate between purity of blood and the traditional anti-Judaism of the
early modern period, but without attributing to this notion of purity all the
dimensions of nineteenth-and-twentieth-century anti-Semitism.34 Raza
meant a stain, a tainted lineage; it did not however represent a category
of a global order.
The deployment of purity of blood in discourse is one thing; its social meaning in everyday life is another. Examination of a specific case
from the beginning of the seventeenth century throws light on how these
theories regarding contagion, inheritance, ›honor‹, ›impurity‹ and ›race‹
manifested themselves in everyday practices. On August 11, 1612, the
presbyter Francisco Fernández de Ribera applied for the office of Inquisitorial Notary in Jodar, a town 40 kilometers east of Jaén, located
in the jurisdiction of the tribunal of the Inquisition of Córdoba. He therefore had to present his genealogy and pay 200 reales for the cost of the
genealogical investigations. The investigators (›informadores‹) traveled
to the region to investigate the candidate through an interrogation consisting of eleven questions, standard in such inquiries. Guided by this
document, they questioned multiple witnesses to find out whether they
knew the candidate and his family, and could tell them whether he was
a legitimate child or if he or any relative had been sanctioned by the Inquisition, as well as other details of his genealogy, in order to verify his
purity of blood. The latter point was determined by the following question: whether they knew that »the applicant and all and every one of his
family ancestors were and are pure Old Christians, of pure blood, without
race or stain, and not descended from Jews, Moors or converts, nor any

33
34

Diego Castejón Fonseca: Primacia de la Santa Iglesia de Toledo, vol. 2, f. 1026-1030.
According to Arendt, anti-Judaism constitutes religious hatred, while anti-Semitism is
a hatred partially distanced from theology, and which seeks to define Jews as an inferior
race, understanding race as a category of modern order. Hannah Arendt: Elemente und
Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, p. 19; cf. Peter Herde: Von der mittelalterlichen Judenfeindschaft zum modernen Antisemitismus, p. 31.

Purity of Blood

21

other newly converted sect, and are commonly spoken of and held and
reputed to be such«.35
Almost all of the first 26 persons who were questioned spoke out
against the candidate; only two abstained. According to their declarations, the ancestors of the candidate had practiced trades stigmatized as
vile and Jewish (tailoring, commerce and shoemaking) and some had
worn the sambenito36 (penitential garment) of those convicted by the Inquisition. The witnesses also gave the location of the home of Francisco’s
parents, in the calle (Hornos) Franco, near the chapel of San Andrés in
Jaén. This piece of evidence would have fatal consequences for the candidate’s parents, because the chapel had formerly been the synagogue
of the old Jewish quarter. Another witness, Diego de Orozco Godoy, recalled that he had heard that members of Francisco’s family used to travel
to Oran to visit a Jewish relative of theirs and that all of them were known
to be notorious converted Jews. Another witness stated that the maternal
great-grandfather, Alonso de Lucena, had been given the nickname of
»cariquemao« (branded face) after being punished by the Inquisition. On
the basis of this and other accusations, the case was closed on September
18, 1612. Investigator Martel de Viedna ruled against the candidate saying that »these witnesses [. . . ] say that these people are not pure and, according to public opinion in this city, they are reputed to be converts«.37
It was only a matter of waiting for the Holy Office to pronounce its
sentence. But, against all expectations, the candidate appealed the decision, citing the rancor and resentment against his family on the part of the
relatives of the witnesses. His main argument was that two hostile witnesses had asked for the hand of his daughter, but, though it was backed
up by gifts, the proposal had been refused. He also maintained that not
only the notary but the investigator in charge of the case also had ties
of friendship with his enemies. This accusation was apparently upheld,
because the investigator withdrew from the case. Thus, it seemed that
there would be a new investigation, but the candidate’s hopes were soon
dashed.
On October 9, the prosecutor (›fiscal‹) of the Inquisition declared that
the applicant was a »converted Jew, notorious in many parts and [. . . ] he
must be punished for his insolence, which one may presume is very bad,
because it seems impossible that he would not know that he cannot deny
such notoriety as a converted Jew, and for the sake of the authority of
35

36
37

Informaciones genealógicas de Francisco Fernández de Ribera, Jaén 1612, Archivo
Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Inquisición Córdoba, leg. 5245, caja nr. 1, exp. 4, fol. 3.
Ibid., f. 28-29; f. 35-37 and fol. 50-51.
Ibid., f. 56.

22

Max S. Hering Torres

the Holy Office we agree with this [conclusion]«.38 Francisco Fernández de Ribera did not give up and on December 8, 1612, expanded his
appeal: he formulated a number of critical questions which challenged
the versions of the witnesses, and even submitted an alternative genealogy compiled by the mayor of Jaén. According to the latter and forty-two
new witnesses, the candidate was of pure blood. His initiative was practically ignored, as were the additional probatory documents he submitted
four years later (certificate of baptism, wills, and so forth). Furthermore,
fourteen years later, on August 23, 1630, a notary stated that the file of
documents did not justify reopening the case.
This case shows that a person’s reputation was a malleable and even
arbitrary piece of evidence which might be given different meanings in
the course of witnesses’ declarations. It is clear that one group of witnesses thought the candidate was ›pure‹, while the other said he had
›race‹, i.e., was impure. The collective memory was not fixed or uniform,
insofar as its contents were variable, prone to manipulation and, in many
cases, shaped by the special interests of different groups. The tensions
among the system of norms, discourses and social reality formed new
fields of agency which did not necessarily correspond to the structures,
because as subject and norm interacted, new practices were deployed,
new meanings were constructed and different ideas were outlined. Individuals were subjected to a structuring normativity, but insofar as they
could come up with different significations, the system was likewise able
to develop new effects and impacts as it interacted with the individual.
In the framework we discuss, purity of blood is revealed as an antiJewish racism which operated on the basis of conceptual elements like
contagion, impurity, inheritance and race as a defect of lineage – discursive principles which, in everyday use, turned into a system for inclusion or exclusion that could be manipulated in accordance with the
public opinion which fabricated the impurity or purity of the candidate.
The system did not exclude on the basis of religious affiliation, instead,
it excluded on the basis of an origin, from which, it was feared, an immoral behavior might derive due to the impurity of blood, i.e., ›race in
blood‹. Purity of blood may be interpreted as an anti-Jewish racism in its
two facets. It is racist because, on the basis of imaginaries about the past,
inheritance, the body and the possibility of contagion, it excludes and
makes the subject inferior in operative terms, and it is anti-Jewish because
its Aristotelian and theological foundations belong to a period before the
age of modernity. After the conversion of the Muslims to Christianity,
38

Ibid., f. 96.

Purity of Blood

23

this device for scorning judeoconversos was extended to the moriscos
and acquired a clear tone of genealogical Islamophobia.
Impurities, Colors, Qualities: Discourses in America
In America, as in the Iberian Peninsula, the notion of impurity of blood
was employed against those who converted to Christianity. In both places,
purity of blood statutes were implemented in order to hinder access to
power by New Christians, who were considered to be impure.39 Despite
this normative analogy, there is no doubt that it acquired new dimensions, both practical and normative. The presence of indigenous groups
and African slaves, and the resulting mixing of all these groups (mestizaje), including the Spaniards, brought about a metamorphosis that extended to Spain itself.
The Benedictine priest and bishop of Pamplona, Prudencio Sandoval
(1533-1620) traced a resemblance between impurity of blood, the race of
New Christians and the black skin of the Africans. In his Historia de la
vida y los hechos del emperador Carlos V, he wrote: »There was issued in
this year of 1547 in the Holy Church of Toledo, by order of its Archbishop
Don Joan Martinez Silíceo, the holy and wise statute, [whereby] no one
who has the race of convert may hold a benefice in it [. . . ] because where
there is someone of such a wicked race, even though there rarely are,
these people are so malign that it only takes one to disturb many people.
I do not condemn the Christian piety which embraces all; which would
be a mortal error and I know that in the Divine observance there is no
distinction between the Gentile and the Jew; because the Lord of all is
only one. But who can deny that the ill will of their ancient ingratitude
and ignorance remains and persists in the descendants of Jews, as does
the inseparable accident of their blackness in the Negroes¿«40
In his historical analysis, Sandoval referred to the implementation
of the statutes on purity of blood in the Cathedral Chapter of Toledo,
championed by its archbishop, Silíceo Martínez, a fervent mid-sixteenthcentury Spanish apologist for purity of blood. It was in this period that
39

40

Therefore, the lack of discussions of purity of blood in the treatises of early evangelization is not surprising (Las Casas, Sepúlveda and Acosta): It is indisputable that the
conversion to Christianity conditioned the system of limpieza, and due to its specificity,
did not become the only organizing concept of difference. María Eugenia Chaves still
believes that I conclude that ›race‹ – one word – was the only concept which governed
difference in early modern Spain and Spanish Colonial America.
Prudencio Sandoval: Historia de la vida y los hechos del Emperador Carlos V, Segunda
Parte, lib. XXIX, § XXXIX, f. 635.

24

Max S. Hering Torres

the archbishop of Toledo first used the term »race« in the context of purity, when speaking of lineage and the denial of ecclesiastical offices
and benefices to Jewish converts. Prudencio Sandoval likewise pointed
to the deplorable morality of the converts, which, he claimed, was a constant throughout the ages. On the basis of this apocryphal deduction, the
author, by analogy, extended the principle of immorality to the Blacks,
whose skin color he described, in Aristotelian terms, as an »accident«.
From that, he concluded »that even when [the Blacks] mate with white
women a thousand times, the children are [always] born with the dark
color of their fathers. Thus, it is not sufficient for the Jew to be threequarters hidalgo, or Old Christian, since only a single race infects and
damages him, so that in their acts they are in any case Jews who are extremely dangerous in their communities«.41 By virtue of the above, the
color ›black‹ acted not only as a metaphor for servitude42 but also as a
signifier of immorality which enabled contagion, impurity and the vice
of lineage to be grouped as hereditary factors.
In line with this concept, the colonial authorities categorized the
Africans and the plebeyan natives as a source of ›impurity‹. They likewise deemed any mixture of the two between themselves or with the
Spaniards as a source of ›contagion‹ and ›impurity‹ or at least a source of
dishonor. An impurity which had been mostly invisible in the Iberian context began in the colonies to become visible in the body of its ›non-white‹
inhabitants. It is important to remember that the indigenous nobility was
declared ›pure‹, and in this sense, was equated with Old Christians. It
is evident that in the context of Hispano-America purity of blood went
through an important change since, in this case alone, it was linked with
the logic of an estate society. But it should not be forgotten that in New
Granada the indigenous nobility was a minority elite as well.43 In general, and with the exception of the above, it is clear that purity of blood
was linked to skin color and had an impact on the majority of the population which was ›non-white‹ and lacked privileges.
In colonial Spanish America, as in early modern Spain, the concept
of ›race‹ meant lineage, and implied having a defect or stain in one’s genealogy. But, in contrast with Spain, this blemish was not only proven
by the collective memory and condition of a person, but also on the basis
41
42
43

Ibid.
Cf. James Sweet: The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought, p. 150.
In New Spain the equation of the indigenous nobility with Old Christians clearly had
a stronger impact. Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 107-122; and
Norma Angélica Castillo Palma: Informaciones y probanzas de limpieza de sangre,
pp. 219-250.

Purity of Blood

25

of skin color (especially from the late seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century). In order to illustrate the previous point, it is not intended
to cover all of Hispanic America, but rather limited documentary references to the Viceroyalty of New Granada. For example, in 1766, Miguel
Gómez Carranza subjected himself to an investigation to prove that he
was »white«. One of the witnesses testified that he knew him, that he was
married to María Candelario Bernardo and that »both are clean of any
bad race, be it Indian, negro or Mulatto«.44 Antonio Pérez went through
the same procedure in the mid-eighteenth century. In the city of Neiva, a
witness testified in 1757 that he knew him »by sight, through dealings and
communication« and »since he came to this city [. . . ] he has been well
known and reputed to be a white man without stains or mixture of bad
race in his birth and for that reason admitted to the Colegio del Rosario
of the said city of Santafe«.45
The ›non-white‹ turned into a synonym for impurity; the ›white‹ for
purity and prestige. In historical terms, however, the hierarchical polarity between white and black was not obvious. In the logic of medieval
thought, whiteness did not have a positive connotation, because it was
associated with the feminine, castrati, the phlegmatic, and even moral
impurity.46 It is probable that Spaniards began to regard themselves as
being ›white‹ thanks mainly to their colonial experience. During the Middle Ages the ideal was to have ›balanced and mixed colors‹, an assertion
governed by the idea, found in Hippocratic medicine, that good health
and beauty depended on a balance between the humors.47
However, this logic began to break down in the colonial context. The
opposition between white and non-white began to be consolidated, although non-white covered a wide kaleidoscope of colors: pardo, negro,
bermejo, moreno, loro, leonado, membrillo cocho, triciado, amarillo etc.
Colonial authorities created social and phenotypic nomenclatures which
allowed for the creation of a hierarchical social order based on the concept of caste (this concept can also be seen in eighteenth-century casta
paintings).48
Furthermore, the same logic was applied to the payment of taxes,
which was determined by socio-economic standing and skin color.
Whereas the Indians had to pay tribute in kind (some exceptions existed), the Mestizos were exempt from tribute, although they were liable
44
45
46
47
48

AGN, Genealogías: II, caja 66, f. 901-913, 1766.
AGN, Genealogías: SC.28, 5, D.29, f. 680-681 r.
Cf. Wulf D. Hund: Die weiße Norm, p. 174.
Cf. Valentin Groebner: Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte?
Cf. Ilona Katzew: Casta Painting.

26

Max S. Hering Torres

to taxation. Similarly, while whites (whether Peninsular or Creole) were
theoretically allowed to hold any kind of office or benefice, and did not
pay royal tributes, they were liable to commercial taxes and paid ecclesiastical tithes. In addition, a segregationist cartography came into being,
similar to the one that had divided the Peninsular minorities into Jewish and Moorish quarters, thus establishing a spatial division between the
República de Indios and República de Españoles. Even though this mestizaje was regarded as ›impure‹ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the difficulty of giving precision to the different definitions of castes led,
in the late colonial period, to a dilution of all of these symbolic, economic, social and phenotypic delimitations and the different degrees of
purity and impurity of blood. In certain regions, including parts of Nueva
Granada, there thus came into use the expression libre de todos los colores (free of all colors), which grouped together those who had been freed
and were considered mestizos (of mixed groups), zambos (half-Black,
half-Indian), mulatos (half-White and half-Black) and pardos (of mixed
African, European and Indian descent). Freedom was an exclusive condition, originally reserved for Spaniards and their descendants, but also
acquired by those ›free of all colors‹ through prohibited interbreeding,
migrations, uprootings or the purchase from or granting of manumission
by the slave owner.49
It was this heterogeneous group which began, in the late colonial period, to demand participation in public affairs, access to education and
political power, privileges reserved for the Spaniards and Creoles (nativeborn but of European blood). However, these attempts at upward social
mobility were obstructed by social and economic barriers and notions of
prestige, some still based on the requirements of purity of blood. The
adherents of purity of blood held that the impure nature of non-noble
indigenous persons, Africans, Mestizos and others broadly categorized
as ›free of all colors‹ manifested itself in such vices as arrogance, greed
and laziness. Blacks were especially associated with impurity, vice and
immorality. In fact, women, whether slaves, free, indigenous or mestizas,
who suckled creole babies were regarded as a source of regression to savagery, since, according to the medical and theological beliefs of the age,
they transmitted moral inclinations through their milk.50
In Spanish colonial society, the most important symbolic operation of
everyday public life was the acknowledgement some gave to others. That
49
50

Cf. Margarita Garrido: Libre de todos los colores en Nueva Granada, p. 249.
Cf. Bernard Lavallé: Del indio criollo; Max S. Hering Torres: Saberes médicos –
Saberes teológicos, p. 117.

Purity of Blood

27

is why social standing (›calidad‹) should be added to the principles of purity, race and skin color. Calidad was the social valuation of an individual
as determined by, among other things, his or her appearance, reputation
and circumstances.51 These notions corresponded to the values of the estate society in Europe, based on honor, purity and lineage, and applied to
the colonial world. According to the jurist Juan Solórzano Pereyra (15751655), the criollos conserved their high rank in their blood,52 despite having been born in the New World; in other words, calidad was inheritable.
Although calidad was linked to imaginaries about heredity, it was not
limited to those imaginaries. It depended as well, for example, on social
performance, a dependence we can approach through the idea of culture
as theatrical representation.53
Calidad had to be staged through social conduct and good reputation.
The person had to have ›sound judgment and discretion‹, never have been
accused of ›irreligion or other serious vices‹, as well as being a man of
›good repute‹ and a ›property holder‹. The ranking of persons in colonial society was generally based on descent, and moderate and honest
public conduct, as evidenced by a shunning of ›vice‹ and ›lascivious‹
behavior. This rank was ›staged‹ or manifested through conduct, dress,
wealth, housing, profession and socialization, and even the consumption
of liquor, tobacco, or chocolate, as well as attendance at fiestas and funerals.54
With the emergence of new ideas arising from the Enlightenment, the
logic of differentiation acquired new nuances, conditioned by the ideals
of civilization and progress but integrated into the colonialist language.
In the Virreinato de la Nueva Granada, the Capuchin priest Joaquín de
Finestrad wrote a book entitled El Vasallo Instruido, which was published a few years after the Comunero uprising of 1781. With the aim
of illustrating the variety of inhabitants in the Vice-Royalty, he wrote that
»just as the birth of children is varied, so too is the character which enlightens or degrades them«. He also stated that the Spaniards and their
descendants »represent the most distinguished character in the American
people, priding themselves on their European origins«. In his view, there
was another class of people who »call themselves whites, because nature
itself did not want to degrade them with the ignominious stain which is
51

52
53
54

Cf. Magali Carrera: Imagining Identity in New Spain, pp. 4 f.; Juan Felipe Hoyos Joanne
Rappaport: El mestizaje en la época colonial, p. 302.
Cf. Juan Solórzano y Pereyra: Política Indiana, I, p. 609.
Cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte: Einleitung, p. 7.
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Color, pureza, raza, pp. 461 ff.; Santiago Castro-Gómez: La
Hybris del punto cero, pp. 81-89.

28

Max S. Hering Torres

borne in the blood of the negro, zambo, mulato and other castes of people, excepting the pure Indians«.55 Later, he described the category of
mestizaje, writing that there was »another caste of people, who nourish
themselves on an excessive drunkenness and laziness, friends of unbridled liberty, without any interest in cultivating the most fertile and fattest
lands. They resemble the Arabs and Africans who inhabit the meridional,
such are the indios, mulatos, negros, zambos, saltoatrás, tente en el aire,
tercerones, cuarterones, quinterones and cholo or mestizos. Those who
have black and white blood are called mulatos; those who have mulato
and black, zambos; those who have zambo and black, saltoátras; those
of zambo and zamba, tente en el aire; those of mulatto and mulatta, the
same; those of mulatto and white woman, tercerón; those of tercerón and
mulatta, saltoatrás; those of tercerón and tercerona, tente en el aire; those
of tercerón and white woman, cuarterón; those of cuarterón and white
woman, quinterón; those ofquinterón and white woman, Spaniard, who
is held to be outside of any negro race [que se reputa fuera de toda raza
de negro]«.56
The Capuchin priest proposed the establishment of economic programs to boost progress and make the Vice-Royalty of New Granada
flourish. In this context, he set forth a strategy to forge »useful men«,
by improving education, making mines more productive, rounding up
vagrants and holding censuses to exert more control over the colony. He
warned, however, that these measures would be insufficient if there were
no efforts to »civilize the Indians« and remove them from their »miserable state of uselessness«. In his view, it was necessary to »root out the
cause of their brutishness, inactivity and laziness«, which he called »a
perennial source of drunkenness and other vices«. Nevertheless, his remarks were not limited to these judgments. He also proposed »grafting
them, so that their caste insensibly expires and they pass to the state of
zambos and mulattoes«
The idea was to recommend a policy of mestizaje, so that they would
cease to be Indians and lose their »natural inclinations« towards promiscuous sexuality, sloth and drunkenness. Intermarrying with »whites« and
even, paradoxically, with blacks was encouraged in order to convert the
Indian population into mulatos and zambos. This constituted the first
stage – in an inconclusive sense – of an improvement in the quality of
the population which tended towards a process of ›whitening‹.
The idea was to recommend a policy of mestizaje, so that they would
55
56

Joaquín de Finestrad: El vasallo Instruido, pp. 134 f.
Ibid.

Purity of Blood

29

not forever remain Indians and live with their natural passions.57 As we
can see, in the late colonial period and under the influence of Enlightenment ideals, mestizaje had gone from being a source of impurity to a
mechanism of cultural assimilation whose objective would be to civilize
and domesticate the brutishness, idleness and laziness inscribed in the
body and character of the ›impure‹ people. It followed that ›whitening‹
(blanqueamiento), i.e., the search for a higher status through marriages
with ›whiter‹ persons, turned into a paradigm of the conduct that would
end the impurity of color or lineage. In this respect, in the colonial period
there was a change from the ›determinism of contagion‹ to a ›civilizing
determinism‹ which was intended to make the population homogenous
under the single standard of whiteness, civilization and progress. Nevertheless, this metamorphosis should not be understood as an absolute
change. The determinism of contagion did not disappear and civilizing
determinism was not the only kind which existed in the late-colonial period. The two undoubtedly coexisted and in some cases also overlapped,
but what did change was the reversal of their predominance. The former
prevailed in the early colonial period from the mid-sixteenth century to
the end of the seventeenth, and the second in the eighteenth century and
the following period.
Colonial society was characterized by the stratification of castes, with
a clear language of difference: a difference inscribed in the body and its
cultural staging. It would be misleading to say that late colonial thought
constructed a modern racial order, but there is no doubt that it is possible
to speak of a hierarchization of society based on the conceptual triad of
color, calidad and raza. In Spain, purity of blood had been a device to
oppose the cultural assimilation of Jewish converts and, later, moriscos,
based on the genealogical background and the significations of blood,
impurity and contagion. Although efforts were made to invent and apply
physical factors in Spain (circumcision, stench and menstrual flows), they
were not effective. In the colonies, on the other hand, the conceptual triad
of raza, calidad and color entailed the somatization and exteriorization of
impurity through blood and social performance. In Spain, purity of blood
had been a mechanism used to uphold economic privileges and limit social mobility and cultural assimilation, one which perpetuated religious
origins on the basis of the antinomy of purity and impurity. In America,
it had originally had the same function, but as mestizaje increased, these
phenotypical criteria became questionable and thus ›whitening‹ was chosen, but linked to the concepts of progress and civilization.
57

Ibid., pp. 167 ff.

30

Max S. Hering Torres

Despite the transatlantic differences, in both cases purity of blood represented a tool that could be manipulated by people in power, and which
conditioned social ascent and eligibility for public and ecclesiastical offices. Purity of blood was not only used to construct new axioms of honor,
it also laid down imaginary frontiers of a symbolic and imagined nature
between the ›pure‹ and the ›impure‹ and the superior and inferior groups.
Through the construction of these binary categories, the impact of the integration attained through baptism was undermined, to the extent that origin, inheritance and the body came to determine integration or inclusion.
Thus, to conclude, we note that the concept of purity of blood which originally arose in Spain as an anti-converso measure, became a strategy of
colonial racialization in the Americas, because it codified social relations
in a hierarchical way through the use of corporal and cultural symbols.
Theoretical and Methodological Considerations
Below, I present some theoretical and methodological considerations
aimed at grounding a number of reflections that may be useful for the
historical investigation of different kinds of racism.
The Difference between Racism and Exclusion: In a wide variety
of historical studies the difference between exclusion and racism is not
clear. Exclusion refers to a general mechanism for multiple forms of discrimination. Therefore, racisms are a specific feature of this mechanism.
Nonetheless, the particularity of racisms does not negate their inherent
link to exclusion: their relationship is established through a circular argument in which a general modality and a specific variant constantly feed
back into each other while differentiating themselves at the same time.
Racism is also a theory about biological differences,58 although the biological is also established through language, contexts and cultural meanings,59 and thus, the biological is likewise a culturally-imagined reality.
In the words of Essed, »racism must be understood as ideology, structure
and process in which inequalities inherent in the wider social structure
are related, in a deterministic way, to biological and cultural factors attributed to those who are seen as a different ›race‹ or ›ethnic‹ group«.60
One of its many characteristics is a biological-cultural valuation detrimental to the victim, and, in many cases, to the victim’s ancestors and/or
58
59
60

Cf. Albert Memmi: Rassismus, p. 165.
Cf. Donna Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 197-201.
Philomena Essed: Understanding Everyday Racism, p. 43.

Purity of Blood

31

descendents.61 Nevertheless, it must be clarified that the determinisms
may vary: there are determinisms of contagion, inheritance, climate and
even ›civilization‹, i.e., those which promise equality as long as corporal
and cultural characteristics are renounced, e.g., through ›whitening‹.
Racisms involve a combination of arguments which establish pseudocausal connections between real or fictitious corporal characteristics and
mental and social ones. Racisms are tools of inferiorization, but they are
also methods used either to prevent cultural assimilation or to promote a
forced assimilation.
During the processes of racialization, social relations are structured
by means of corporal and cultural codes in order to create differentiated
collectivities, which entails naturalizing differences. The adjective ›biological‹ becomes an element which enables one to restore the specificity
of racisms. However, it can also be a source of confusion with respect
to the historical study of racism, insofar as there is no clarity about the
meaning of the term ›biological‹. For some academics, ›the biological‹
may imply a modern referent, understood as a reference to a nineteenthcentury discipline or body of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, when
one uses the term ›biological‹, one may also refer to an idea about ›difference‹ as something which is inherited through the body, blood or spirit.
Thus, the ›biological‹ may point to a process whereby differential meanings are inscribed in the body. In this sense, the doctrines or imaginaries
about the human body may be based, of course, on the modern natural sciences, but they may also rely on theological, Aristotelian or pathologicalhumoral arguments; namely, on the fusion of theology and medicine that
was typical of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is not insignificant that, when referring to purity of blood, theologians would speak of
the contaminated and the contaminators: of impure wombs, of the impurity of the milk of wet nurses who were moriscas, conversas and mulatas,
and the act of conception as the moment when the child inherits its physiognomy and morality. Neither is it gratuitous that they would speak of
bodily stenches and deformities: corporal significations from which the
immorality of the impure, that is to say, those who had ›race‹, derived.
Truths and symbols: It is also important to note that racisms are not
operative without imaginaries about truth. In this light, it is clear that in
61

Basing his observations on gender studies, Peter Wade avoids a differentiation between
biology and culture, preferring to recognize their mutual relationship as cultural artefacts. Even though I share the previous approach, in many cases it can be useful to refine
the alleged motivations of racialization. In other words, does racialization occur on the
basis of cultural practices and/or through the imagination of innate characteristics of the
body? Cf. Peter Wade: Race and Nation in Latin America, p. 272.

32

Max S. Hering Torres

racisms the ›biological signification‹ turns into a synonym for truth, because it helps to justify processes of naturalization in a definitive way.
Truth needs axioms in order to be constructed, in many cases on the basis of authority and/or supposed evidence. These axioms rest, in turn, on
scientific empiricism, which led to the formulation of different modern
branches of science such as phrenology and eugenics, the theory of recapitulation and polygenism, and so forth. However, before the rise of
modernity there were other ›regimes of truth‹, above all, those based on
Biblical authority, Aristotelianism and genealogical theories, as well as
metaphysics, metaphors, imaginaries or symbols about the body which –
in their historical context – represented realities. In this respect, Paul
Tillich has made an important contribution by speaking of the »power
of being of the symbol« (Seinsmächtigkeit des Symbols) – an assertion
which may be analytically employed for the analysis of metaphors as
sources of truth. In this way, it is plausible to question the idea that
nineteenth- and twentieth-century science is a condition sine qua non for
a discussion of racialization and, thus, one can perhaps give due attention
to the ways in which supposed truths that were useful for racialization
had been formulated before the modern age.
Opening up Historical Perspectives: To investigate pre-modern
racisms does not imply that we should regard them as fixed categories
of an ahistorical nature which have been present throughout the history
of mankind. A historical analysis should try to do just the opposite, i.e.,
show their historicity with the aim of recovering their conceptual variability and polysemy. Race and racism are not anthropological constants; on
the contrary, they are polymorphous and are governed by supremely flexible systems, theories or practices. The conceptual and historical uniformity of racism is simply a teleological illusion. In this regard, it is advantageous to study racisms in the plural, in different time frames and social
spheres. Ruth Wodak and Martin Reisigl carry out this exercise based
on the findings of different disciplines: the racism of the everyday, institutional racism, scientific racism, biological racism, proto-racism, old
racism, neo-racism, differential racism, etc.62 Race as a social construction presents many shadings and significations in history, depending on
the social and geographical context. It follows that the multiple concepts
of ›race‹ and the flexibility of ›racisms‹ are not a mirror of nature but
the result of thoughts and practices which have inscribed biological, nat-

62

Cf. Ruth Wodak, Martin Reisigl: Discourse and Racism.

Purity of Blood

33

ural and cultural meanings in the body, culture being understood not as
something innocent but as an iniquitous device of power.63
To sum up, my epistemological proposal is the following: To study
racism in the plural helps to clarify not only its synchronic variability
but its diachronic variability as well. To avoid being misunderstood, I
would say that the aim of studying racisms in the plural is not to focus exclusively on similarities: such comparison must take into account
both differences and similarities. To achieve this, it may be useful to consider two closely-related methodological steps. The first does not make
sense without the second, and vice versa. (1) In the course of a historical
analysis of the ›racist phenomena‹ that are to be defined, it is important
to locate and grasp the common denominator in the operative character
of these phenomena. This means, for example, inquiring into how the
principles of racialization connected to determinisms – those based on
a regime of truth – function as factors which guarantee that otherness
will be inheritable and unchanging, thus in turn guaranteeing a society
that is stratified in superiors and inferiors. In this respect, the analysis
of operativity enables us to unveil the ›utility‹ of a system, doctrine or
practice. This step is applied for the purpose of investigating and reconstructing historical analogies and parallelisms in order to show links of
continuity, but only in terms of operativity. (2) On the basis of the above,
this common denominator should be differentiated in accordance with
its historical context in order to establish historically the discontinuities
and discrepancies among the ›racist discourses‹ which are being studied. The latter step implies studying their signification, the ways in which
they were constructed, the monopolies on truth which make them ›indisputable‹, the methods of proof used, and their effect on both social reality
and everyday life.
Through this method of historical inquiry, the processes of racialization which lie on an axis which in temporal terms, is a long one, allow
themselves to be reconstructed in a way that emphasizes their different
valences,64 variability and links with power relations.65 For the purpose
of grasping the problem of continuities and discontinuities, perhaps it
would be useful to recur to periodizations by employing the concept
of layers of meanings found in Reinhart Koselleck.66 Each ›conceptual
layer‹ may be thought of as a flexible and permeable historical, geograph63
64
65
66

Cf. Wulf D. Hund: Inclusion and Exclusion.
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, p. 11.
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Rassismus in der Vormoderne, p. 250.
Cf. Reinhart Koselleck: Vergangene Zukunft, p. 125; see also id.: Zeitschichten. pp.
19-26.

34

Max S. Hering Torres

ical and epistemological framework which includes a number of given
practices and imaginaries, without necessarily representing chronological units, in which one may find not only their meeting points, interdependences and links, but also their contradictions, gaps and missing links.
Like rhizomes, the layers of meaning display ruptures, represent multiplicities, have different dimensions, and may take on the form of open
or closed units with a life of their own. In conclusion, a study of racism
based on this approach may question the idea of racism as a linear process
(from purity of blood to the Holocaust) without historical differentiations
(the racism of modernism as equal to colonial racism), although it may
also enable us to revise the positions which deny any form of racialization
before the rise of modernity.
References
(All quotations from non-English sources have been translated. Emphases in the
originals are not included. All italics are mine).

Archival Sources
Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Bogotá-Colombia, Genealogías: II, caja
66, ff. 901-913.
Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Bogotá-Colombia, Genealogías: Sección
Colonia, legajo 5, documento 29, ff. 669-691.
Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN), Madrid-España, Inquisición Córdoba, leg.
5245, caja nr. 1, exp. 4, Informaciones genealógicas de Francisco Fernández
de Ribera, Jaén 1612.

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3rd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1995.
——: Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik. Mit einem Beitrag von Hans-Georg
Gadamer. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2000.
Lavallé, Bernard: Del indio criollo: evolución y transformación de una imagen
colonial. In: La imagen del indio en la Europa Moderna. Sevilla: CSIC 1990,
pp. 319-342.
Márquez Villanueva, Francisco: The Converso Problem: An Assessment. In: Collected Studies in Honour of Américo Castro’s Eightieth Year, ed. M. Hornik.
Oxford 1965, pp. 317-333.

Purity of Blood

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Martín Gamero, Antonio (ed.): Historia de la ciudad de Toledo. Toledo: Imprenta
de Severiano López Fando 1862.
Martínez, María Elena: Genealogical Fictions. Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and
Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008.
Martínez de Toledo, Alfonso: Corbacho, o reprobación del amor mundano.
Barcelona: Zeus 1971 [1438].
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Mignolo, Walter: La idea de América Latina. La herida colonial y la opción decolonial. Barcelona: Gedisa 2005.
Nebrija, Elio Antonio: Vocabulario español-latino. Madrid: Real Academia Española 1951 [1495].
Nirenberg, David: Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the
Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996.
——: Was there race before modernity? The example of ›Jewish‹ blood in late
medieval Spain. In: The Origins of Racism in the West, eds. Miriam EliavFeldon, Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Poliakov, Leon: Geschichte des Antisemitismus. Vol. 4: Die Marranen im Schatten der Inquisition. Worms: Verlag Georg Heintz 1981.
Quijano, Aníbal: Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In: La
colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas, ed. Edgardo Lander. Caracas: Unesco 2000, pp. 281-348.
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Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 1999, pp. 175-199.

Race and Caste
Other Words and Other Worlds
María Eugenia Chaves

Abstract: This article takes as its point of departure a critical reading of recent
publications dealing with the concept of race in colonial Spanish America in order to establish that notwithstanding authors’ efforts to deeply historicize the concept, it remains inadequate for signifying colonial identities and the technologies
of social closure which created them. I shall suggest that the dispersion which
characterized colonial identities in Spanish America would be better understood
by applying a theoretical framework to consider the discourses of purity of blood,
and its associated objects – such as race, caste, colour, honour, etc. – as a contested field of enunciation where discursive relations and power relations create
the conditions for some discursive objects to emerge and to be significant. I conclude this article suggesting that this theoretical turn could contribute to a critique
of the historical narrative on the concept of race which until recently has been totally centred on European enlightened tradition. In this sense, this article urges
for a ›genealogical‹ critique of hegemonic academic knowledge.

During the last decade, a group of scholars led by Robert Bernasconi
has identified the genesis of the concept of race in Western thinking in a
body of writings produced in the latter part of the eighteenth-century by
North European thinkers.1 In Bernasconi’s view, earlier history, coloured
by Iberian imperial dominance and its knowledges from the sixteenthcentury onwards, lacked any concept of »race« or any »rigorous system
of racial classification«. To Bernasconi, »[i]t was possible for the Spanish
or the English to exploit Jews, Native Americans, and Africans, as Jews,
Native Americans, and Africans, without having the concept of race, let
alone being able to appeal to a rigorous system of racial classification.
[. . . ] However, the introduction of that concept lent an air of apparent
legitimacy to these practices«.2
1

2

Cf. Robert Bernasconi (ed.): Race; Robert Bernasconi, Tommy L. Lott (eds.): The idea
of race.
Robert Bernasconi: Who invented the concept of race?, p. 11.

40

María Eugenia Chaves

Although the question about whether the notion of ›race‹ as a concept
could be applied to signify Spanish American colonial identities without
being anachronistic is a matter of debate, it is important to notice that for
several decades now, the historiographical production on Spanish colonial identities has shown the intricate and complex conditions which intervened in their definition.3 In so doing, these works have set an agenda
for understanding that knowledges, discourses, practices, and technologies developed during the colonial experience legitimated, in their own
terms, the imposition of a social structure as a means of domination and
exploitation. In this light, the idea that it was an experience of knowledge foreign to the Spanish colonial history which justified its practices
a posteriori, became unsustainable.
In this article I will build on a critical reading of historians María
Elena Martínez and Max Hering’s recent publications contributing to the
analysis of colonial difference, to oppose Bernasconi’s statement with
two hypotheses: The first one states that the knowledges and technologies developed during the colonial experience to signify difference could
be better understood as »enunciative functions« (»fonction énonciative«)
in the field of a »discursive formation«.4 This Foucauldian theoretical
tool is useful for understanding the enunciation of colonial difference as
emerging from a network of relationships within a domain of multiple
objects. The relation of signification is thus dependant on a series of conditions which allows for a statement to appear and to be significant in a
historically-defined context.5 In other words, it is not a concept from outside the domain of colonial experience which organizes its objects, and
3

4
5

Some examples of this are Magnus Mörner: The History of Race Relations in Latin
America; John Chance, William Taylor: Estate and Class in a Colonial City; Verena
Martínez Alier: Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba; Robert McCaa, Stuart Schwartz, Arturo Grubessich: Race and Class in Colonial Latin America;
Douglas Cope: The Limits of Racial Domination; Martin Minchom: The People of
Quito; Richard Boyer: Cast and Identity in Colonial Mexico; Juan C. Esstensoro: Los
Colores de la Plebe; Max S. Hering Torres: ›Raza‹; María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions; María Eugenia Chaves: La Creación del ›Otro‹ Colonial; Ilona Katzew:
Casta Painting; Magali Carrera: Imagining Identity in New Spain.
Cf. Michel Foucault: L’archéologie du savoir, pp. 116-138.
»I now realize that I could not define the statement as a unit of a linguistic type [ . . . ];
but that I was dealing with an enunciative function that involved various units [ . . . ];
and, instead of giving a ›meaning‹ to these units, this function relates them to a field
of objects; instead of providing them with a subject, it opens up for them a number of
possible subjective positions; instead of fixing their limits, it places them in a domain
of coordination and coexistence; instead of determining their identity, it places them in
a space in which they are used and repeated« – Michel Foucault: The Archeology of
Knowledge, pp. 119 f.

Race and Caste

41

neither is it the authority of an individual which defines this concept, as
Bernasconi has suggested.6
The second hypothesis asserts that the latest historiographical work
on the subject, in particular those I am going to analyze here, are paving
the way towards a ›genealogical‹ research on the issue of colonial difference. In his 7 January 1976 lecture, Michel Foucault highlights the
fact that the academic totalizing narratives were being opposed by the
impulse of a critique that has a local character which indicates a »sort
of autonomous and noncentralized theoretical production«, a production
that »does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its
validity«. According to Foucault, what makes this critique possible is
the emergence of particular historical contents: the »subjugated knowledges«. These, he said, »have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations«. In the case of the historical narrative
dealing with the concept of race, the »subjugated knowledges« are those
which reveal the fact that the construction of the colonial difference has
a historical substratum which begins with Iberian colonial history and
reflects the development of its knowledges. From the decline of the Hispanic empire, these knowledges were relegated by North European discourses to a realm of obscurantism in opposition to the idea of progress
and enlightenment. A »genealogy«, therefore, would seek to establish the
importance of those knowledges »against the unitary theoretical instance
that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy [. . . ]
in the name of a true body of knowledge«.7
The question as to the nature of the ›racial‹ in colonial social structure is not original and has been present in the thinking of several generations of historians since the 1960s.8 Back then, the debate moved between
those who argued that socio-racial criteria was not the dominant factor in
defining social structure, and proponents of the opposite view.9 Although
the debate was never resolved, it was evident that ›racial‹ identities were
6
7

8

9

Cf. Robert Bernasconi: Who invented the concept of race?, p. 11.
Michel Foucault: Society Must Be Defended, p. 7 (›subjugated knowledges‹); id.: pp. 9
ff. (›genealogy‹).
As early as the mid-1960s Mörner set an agenda which has since then guided debate on
the subject – see Magnus Mörner: The History of Race Relations in Latin America.
See John Chance, William Taylor: Estate and Class in a Colonial City, on the one hand,
and Robert McCaa, Stuart Schwartz, Arturo Grubessich: Race and class in colonial
Latinamerica, on the other. Both articles looked at the case of Oaxaca at the end of
the eighteenth century, although arriving at counter-opposed responses. Whereas for
Chase and Taylor, socio-racial criteria had ceased to be dominant in defining social
structure, McCaa and Schwartz found that the decisive factor, despite the development
of capitalism in Oaxaca, remained being that of race.

42

María Eugenia Chaves

unstable, difficult to define, and in many cases characterised by contradictory factors, whether socio-economic or of a more cultural kind, such
as social perception.10
The work of Verena Martínez Alier (Stolke) on Cuba in the
nineteenth-century inaugurated a new approach to the subject suggesting that ›race‹ had to be understood as a metaphor to signify other forms
of social inequality. In this sense, ›race‹ became historically contingent,
and as such, it was not only framed by legal discourses but also by public opinion. At the same time, Stolke draws attention to the relationship
set up between what is understood by race and the notion of purity. She
associated this notion with codes of honour, and also pointed to the farreaching consequences of that interaction on gender identities, highlighting the influence of slavery in those processes. In other words, identities
which are understood to be ›racial‹ in colonial historiography are in reality a complex cultural product.11
The question relating to the concept of race has been an elusive one
and the empirical strategies for addressing it, although they have revealed
important characteristics of colonial social stratification in specific contexts, have not, until now, been aimed at identifying the deep strata of
knowledges gestated during the colonial period and the historical conditions that made them possible. In what follows I shall refer to the works
of Martínez and Hering which are aimed in that direction. Placing the
concept of race under scrutiny, they have revealed it to be contingent and
fractured. I would like to suggest though, that notwithstanding these efforts, their historical narratives still concede an un-necessarily privileged
conceptual status to the term ›race‹ in their reconstruction of colonial
identities in Hispanic America.12
In what follows I will first concentrate on giving a critical reading
of the works of Martínez and Hering in the light of my own writings on
the topic.13 To conclude, I present some questions which I hope will be
of some help in expanding the debate towards an approach not trapped
in ascertaining whether or not the concept of race is the right one, but
10

11

12

13

Cf. Douglas Cope: The Limits of Racial Domination; Martin Minchom: The People of
Quito, pp. 62 ff., 201-234, 262 f.
Cf. Verena Martínez-Alier: Marriage, Class and Colour. Other works have also pointed
to this finding – see Patricia Seed: To Love, Honour and Obey; Richard Boyer: Caste
and Identity; Elizabeth Kuznesof: Ethnic and Gender Influence; id.: More Conversations on Race, Class and Gender; María Eugenia Chaves: Honor y Libertad.
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions; Max S. Hering Torres: ›Raza‹; id.:
›Limpieza de sangre‹; id.: Limpieza de sangre; id.: Color, pureza, raza.
María Eugenia Chaves: La creación del ›otro‹ colonial.

Race and Caste

43

instead oriented toward delineating the discourse of purity of blood as a
›discursive formation‹ inside a contested field of enunciation.14
Lineage, ›Race‹, and ›Blood Purity‹
In the introduction and the first two chapters of her book, Martínez outlines an agenda for an historical critique of the concept of race. For her,
the anachronism in applying the concept to sixteenth-century Spanish
history arises because it is erroneous to »elevate ›race as biology‹ to an
ideal type«. She points out that »there is no single, transhistorical racism
but rather different types of racisms, each produced by specific social and
historical conditions«. There would be no point then, in avoiding the use
of the concept in the early modern period. The task would be rather to
explain how it is produced by specific social and historical conditions.
In relation to this position, a second line of her argument turns out to be
crucial. She asserts that the concept of purity of blood and the concept
of race cannot be kept analytically distinct: »first, because the two concepts gained currency at about the same time [. . . ] and second, because
the former influenced the latter in no small ways [. . . ]. In the Hispanic
Atlantic world, Iberian notions of genealogy and purity of blood – both
of which involved a complex of ideas regarding descent and inheritance
(biological and otherwise) – gave way to a particular understanding of
racial difference«.15
Summing up, there is a concept of race developed during sixteenthcentury Spanish history that responds to specific historical conditions; it
is intimately related to and influenced by the contemporaneous concept
of limpieza de sangre. Finally, Martínez argues that both concepts »remain part of a grid of knowledge constituted not by scientific (biologistic) discourses but by religious ones and operated through an ›episteme
of resemblance‹«. In spite of the explicit reference to Michel Foucault’s
proposal to understand the different ›epistemes‹ within which European
knowledges were produced between the sixteenth and the nineteenth
century, the use of this theoretical framework is unclear in Martínez’s
work.16 The elusiveness of this reference becomes more evident once,
following Cornel West, she defines her project as »genealogical materialist« that is, a research performing »a deep and careful excavations of the
14
15

16

Cf. Michel Foucault: L’archéologie du savoir, p. 53 (›formation discursive‹).
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 11, 12 and 13 (quotations); pp. 58 f.
(for the anachronism of the concept of race).
Ibid., p. 13 (reference to ›episteme of resemblance‹); Michel Foucault: The order of
things.

44

María Eugenia Chaves

meaning of race within the particular cultural-historical context in which
it develops and of explaining its connections to different levels of existence«. However, as the author points out, she uses the concept of »genealogy« to signify two different things: the process of historicizing race
and what in the early modern Hispanic world was the foundation for practices and identities which »mold historical memory at both the individual
and collective levels«.17 Cornel West’s socialist theory of racism constitutes a critique of Marxist thought built on the path-breaking analysis of
Antonio Gramsci about the importance of culture in understanding social
structure. It is also influenced by a reading of Nietzsche’s genealogy.18
It is not clear to me in which way West’s proposal relates to Foucault’s
›genealogy‹. Bearing in mind that the latter is conceived as a step forward from the archaeological analytical procedures – as described in the
›Archaeology of Knowledge‹ and illustrated in ›The Order of Things‹ –
it is difficult to understand how the Foucauldian ›episteme‹ will function
with West’s ›genealogical materialism‹ in Martínez’s work.
Having established a theoretical outline, Martinez sets out to understand the way in which the Peninsular criteria of limpieza de sangre,
defined mainly in religious terms, was reformulated once translated to
Spanish America, and how it influenced the emergence of the sistema
de castas. Martínez shows that ›impurity‹, defined in religious terms, and
based up on a patrilineal genealogy underwent important transformations
during the sixteenth century. These transformations would have produced
a »more rigid dual-descent model of classification«. The crucial shift here
is that the criterion of purity of blood ceased to accept the »mutability
of natural traits over the generations – except that is through biological
mixture«, and mutated from being a »naturalistic« principle to an »essentialist« one: »The essentialist nature of the concept of limpieza de sangre
was reflected in the deployment of the Castilian word raza against the
Converts and their descendants«.19
At the same time, terms such as ›race‹, ›caste‹, and ›lineage‹ would
have formed a nascent lexicon associated with biological reproduction
in the natural world. In the Peninsula, points out Martínez, the words
›race‹ and ›caste‹ referred to lineage, and could thus be used interchangeably. However, she also establishes that they had very different meanings.
›Race‹, an infrequent term, denoted the »bad race« of Moors and Jews.
›Caste‹, conversely, concentrated several meanings »alluding to a system
17
18
19

María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, p. 3 (›genealogical materialism‹).
Cf. Cornel West: Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism.
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 46-54 (›essentialization of race‹),
pp. 52 f. (quotations).

Race and Caste

45

of social order centred around procreation and biological parenthood« to
perpetuate a noble caste, which is an Old Christian genealogy.20
The author then shows that the second important transformation of
the concept of purity of blood took place once translated to New Spain.
The complex reality of mestizaje, which in a society marked by slavery
included the influence of African ancestry, made the conditions for defining the concept move »farther and farther away from religious practices
and became embedded in a visual discourse about the body, and in particular about skin colour«, associating black colour with impure ancestry,
and whiteness with purity of blood. Changes in the meaning of the word
›caste‹ would have reflected this transformation as it started to be used
to identify colonial identities emerging from the mestizaje. At the same
time, the term »began to acquire negative connotations, but it remained
distinct from the concept of raza and its religious undertones«. Apparently, according to Martínez: »mestizos, mulatos and in a general sense
also Spaniards and Indians were considered castes, lineages, but not necessarily races. Or rather, not all of these categories were thought to have
›race‹«. What the author seems to imply is that the sistema de castas
was somehow more flexible, »more inclusive« than the concept of race.
However, the influence of the mestizaje including African ancestry would
have »racialized« the term caste.21
Lastly, Martínez finds that the caste system developed in colonial
society was fundamentally unstable because not only »what ›bad race‹
meant and who could claim purity and Old Christian ancestry were highly
contested issues in colonial Mexico«, but also the socio-economic development of colonial society would have made other criteria such as calidad, honour, occupation, wealth, etc., operative for establishing a person’s identity. As a result, multiple and even contradictory criteria for
›blood purity‹ operated in New Spain, producing a porous system within
which those whom the system was designed to exclude could appropriate
those practices and claim a status as ›clean‹ and ›pure‹ which was in principle denied them.22 What Martínez suggests is that »the multivalence of
the concept of limpieza de sangre stemmed from its definitional ambiguities as well as from the chameleonic and parasitic nature of race, from
its capacity to adapt to new circumstances and attach itself to new social
phenomena while retaining shades of its past incarnation«.23
20
21
22
23

Ibid., p. 162.
Ibid., pp. 248 (›skin color‹), 163 (›negative connotations‹ etc.).
Ibid., pp. 82 ff. and 269 (caste system as unstable), 223 (›bad race‹).
Ibid., p. 270; concerning the following see ibid., p. 264.

46

María Eugenia Chaves

The factual analysis Martínez undertakes allows us to appreciate that
›blood purity‹ is neither a specific nor a historically homogenous criterion, but a locus of constant negotiation and re-signification which tends
to generate fictions of social classification. ›Race‹, in turn, is defined
as having two contradictory characteristics. One is to express the essentialised characteristic of purity of blood acquired from the sixteenth century onwards; the second is the impossibility of fixing its meaning because the elements for signifying it are multifarious and susceptible to
being displayed and to have an effect, depending on individual and institutional interests and on the possibilities for manipulating, interpreting,
and deploying these elements. As expressing an essentialised characteristic, the concept of ›race‹, according to Martinez, gave meaning to a classificatory impulse in the sixteenth century. From the sixteenth century
onwards, and once transferred to New Spain, ›race‹ would have influenced – ›racialised‹ – a system of classification construed around another
contemporaneous word: ›caste‹.
Herein lies what seems to me a difficulty in her argument. Although
in the introduction to her work she announces, rightly in my opinion, that
the study of colonial difference should be conducted, following Michel
Foucault, as an analysis of »epistemes« – that is to say, the modalities
of order recognized by a culture in order to create the positive basis of
knowledge – she never explains how the contradictory characteristics she
establishes as defining the concept of purity of blood/race intervene in the
»episteme of resemblance«; or how her findings oppose Foucault’s theorization, and this being the case, what the consequences could be. This is
a central issue because it explains the difficulty of dealing with the dispersion that seems to characterize the discourses of colonial difference and
its related objects. The reason for this could be found in the nature of the
discursive formation of purity of blood and its conditions of existence. If
we take as a point of departure Foucault’s »episteme of resemblance« it
is important to bear in mind that this »episteme« functions as a play of
similitudes or ›signatures‹ speaking of an underlying condition of things.
As such, none of the objects that appear in this field of possibilities could
function as an all-encompassing organizing element, but only as another
similitude. Resemblance, says Foucault, »never remains stable within itself; it can be fixed only if it refers back to another similitude, which then,
in turn, refers to others; each resemblance, therefore, has value only from
the accumulation of all the others, and the whole world must be explored
if even the slightest of analogies is to be justified and finally take on

Race and Caste

47

the appearance of certainty«.24 In consequence, ›race‹, ›caste‹, or other
words which appeared inside this »episteme« have to be understood as
signatures in the interplay of similitudes and as similitudes themselves. I
have developed this argument in previous papers and will be expanding
on it further on in this article.
Martínez’s work constitutes a serious effort to conduct a critical reading of the concept of race and purity of blood in Spanish colonial history.
Although still trapped in the constriction of formulating an all-organizing
criterion for understanding colonial differences, her findings have the potential to direct future research efforts towards a serious critique of Foucault’s »episteme«. One can read her conclusions as a series of factual
proofs showing that, as early as in the sixteenth century, the set of knowledges which were possible in the context of the Iberian Peninsula had
started to develop, in certain circumstances, a ›classificatory impulse‹
for organizing social differences: an impulse which acquired particular
characteristics once applied in New Spain. How does this classificatory
impulse relate with the interplay of similitudes? Was this ›discursive strategy‹ a product of the relationship of its discursive field with other discursive fields? In short, what were the conditions for the emergence of this
discursive practice?
To formulate the aforementioned questions is to follow a path which
Martínez’s work is helping to construct: that of revealing the knowledges
produced by the Spanish colonialism to make sense of the world and justify the oppression of the colonized peoples. I suggest however, that in
order to follow this path it is important to outline a theoretical framework
to define ›purity of blood‹ and the words associated with its history such
as ›race‹ and ›caste‹, as discursive objects and signatures in an enunciative field. The conditions of positivity for these objects and signatures to
appear and be significant have to be analyzed as emerging from a space of
confrontation. Discourses of truth and power relations intervene to define
this enunciative field.
Max Hering, for his part, joins the debate through a series of articles
seeking to describe what I would refer to as the conditions of enunciation
of the concept of ›race‹. For Hering this is a concept that historically has
articulated the discourses of exclusion and difference from the sixteenth
century onwards. In that way he coincides with Martínez in various respects. First, he defines the concept of ›race‹ as historically malleable –
»chameleon-like«, despite having preserved its functionality to differen24

Michel Foucault: The order of things, p. x (›epistemes‹); id.: p. 29 (›signature and similitudes‹).

48

María Eugenia Chaves

tiate, to segregate, and to distort otherness. Secondly, he believes that
by means of biological determinism, the concept »racialised« social relationships. Thirdly, he seeks to demonstrate that the implementation of
›blood purity‹ edicts against Muslims, conversos, and heretics sets up a
relationship, for the first time in European history, between the idea of
›impurity‹ and the idea of ›race‹ since the expression »race of Moors
and Jews« meant not only a difference of religious belief, but a defect
transmissible down the blood line. For Hering, the transmissibility and
immutability of the impure condition and of the stain was defined on the
basis of imaginaries of blood and the body, something which can be interpreted as »biological determinism« of a theological kind. He then concludes that the concept of blood purity and its related practices came to
form a functional racism different from that which emerged in the nineteenth century: »for that reason qualification is needed: the principles of
blood purity come together in a functional racism, even though its theological and proto-scientific nature were dictated by lines of argument
based on theology and Aristotelian natural sciences, lines of argument
which are nowhere to be found in contemporary racism«.25
Another aspect which Hering explores is how the criteria of race,
colour, and purity interconnect. In his view, racial relations were rooted
in a complex system of values and a grammar of power, whereas social
values owed their existence to the power which set them up as such. He
demonstrates that colour is an imaginary which has since Antiquity been
read as a bodily mark which speaks of the nature of the being, and demonstrates how the meaning of this mark changes over time.26 In the New
World and as colonialism developed, the idea of purity/impurity, Hering
argues, dovetailed with the perception of colour as a mark of good or bad
moral characteristics, the population associated with black skin colour
being the least valued. He believes that the criteria of purity and colour
stand in relation to a concept of ›race‹ because language has developed
a way of referring to impurity, that is to say, a stain on the bloodline
expressed in colour, as a ›bad race‹. However, the author himself points
out that the term ›race‹ originally had two different meanings: lineage,
on the one hand, and a defect in the constitution of fabrics, on the other.
Applied to Muslims and Jews and then in the New World to individu25

26

Max S. Hering Torres: ›Raza‹, p. 16 (›racialised‹); id.: Limpieza de sangre, p. 60 (for
quotation and preliminary discussion); id.: ›Limpieza de sangre‹, p. 15 (›chameleonlike‹ metaphor).
For a similar argument and for the study of the meanings of race in the Medieval Iberian
Peninsula see also María Eugenia Chaves: Color, inferioridad y esclavización; id.: La
creación del ›otro‹ colonial.

Race and Caste

49

als born of mestizaje, both meanings came together in the word ›race‹.
To my mind, however, this explanation cannot sustain the thesis that a
word not in common use became an organising concept for the differences which ›racialised‹ social relations. It is necessary to point out that
Hering demonstrates not only that the word ›race‹ could be replaced by
others such as stain or mark, but that the ›purity/impurity of blood‹ dichotomy could include other criteria such as perception of colour. All
those perceptions served to refer to the quality of an individual and once
sanctioned by public opinion, identified a person’s place in society.27 No
doubt his conclusions point to the impossibility of reducing colonial difference to one word or criterion. What remains unanswered is why should
we conclude that the word ›race‹ acquired an enunciative capacity to condense all of these dispersed ways of naming difference?
Thus far I have attempted to discuss the arguments which both
Martínez and Hering explore to establish that, since the sixteenth century
at least, there has been a relationship between ›blood purity‹ and ›race‹
as terms to signify difference and exclusion on the basis of both religion
and lineage, the latter term being associated with biological characteristics and with moral values. I have sought also to show how these two
writers conclude that in that relationship, ›race‹ became the organising
concept of difference, acquiring characteristic traits as a result of American colonisation and the slave trade and, as such, ›racialised‹ social relations and practices of exclusion. In what follows I shall summarise the
central tenets of my own work on the subject.
Colour, civility, and barbarism
I have in various articles cast doubt on the analytical effectiveness of
identifying colonial processes of differentiation with concepts and frameworks of signification belonging to the Northern European Enlightenment, as has occurred with the concepts of ›race‹, ›racial relations‹, and
›racism‹.28 My analysis shows that some of the most important Hispanic
scholars from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries while forming
ideas of the difference of indigenous and African populations used the
criteria of ›civility‹ and ›barbarism‹ to refer to the ›others‹ different from
the European world. This was the case in the work of Bartolomé de las
27
28

Max S. Hering Torres: Color, pureza, raza.
For the ideas in this paragraph and those in the next referring to analysis of the biblical
story of Ham’s curse see: María Eugenia Chaves: La construcción del ›otro‹ colonial;
id.: Color, Inferioridad y Esclavización.

50

María Eugenia Chaves

Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who in the mid-sixteenth century
defended opposing positions as to the legitimacy of waging war on the
indigenous population and the capacity of the latter to receive and accept
evangelization. The ›blood purity‹ criterion seems not to have any great
importance in either of their discourses. A similar case is that of the Jesuit
José de Acosta, author of two seminal works De Natura Novi Orbis and
De Procuranda Indorum Salute. Although in his De Natura Novi Orbis
he described in admiring terms the organisation, governance, and religion
of the Inca and Aztec peoples, he made it clear that their institutions were
barbaric, tyrannical, and inspired by the Devil. In the Procuranda Indorum Salute he accordingly set out a lengthy treatise in order to justify the
work of evangelisation. His strategy consisted of making a hierarchical
classification of all non-Europeans whom he defined in general as ›barbarians‹ on the basis of parameters such as the use of letters and of ›right
reason‹, the existence of non-tyrannical republics, the development of religious institutions not inspired by the Devil, and the existence of towns
where they lived with »polity«. Acosta’s barbarians were divided into
three groups in descending order: the Chinese and Japanese »although in
reality they are barbarians and in many respects deviate from right reason«; Mexicans and Peruvians who »are much lacking in right reason
and the civil manners of other men [. . . ] unless constrained by a higher
power, it is unlikely they will receive the light of the gospels«; and lastly
the third class of barbarians who, following Aristotle’s view »could be
hunted like beasts and tamed by force«.29
With the spread of colonization, African slavery, and mestizaje, those
criteria would give way to a discourse that took colour as a sign of difference as illustrated by the work of the Jesuit and evangelizer of slaves,
Alonso de Sandoval. In the two versions of his work (the first dates from
1627 and the second from 1647) his most important contribution was to
fix and radically naturalise the difference between »Ethiopians« and the
rest of the human beings. In the first chapters he clearly set out his theory of how »blacks« were different. To Sandoval »black colour« was not
an abstract explanatory concept, but a mark, a sign which had to be interpreted. To do so, he began with the Biblical story of the curse that God put
on Noah’s son Ham as a punishment for mocking his father. That curse
consisted of condemning Ham’s descendants to perpetual slavery. A patristic version identified Ham’s descendants with the peoples of Africa
and therefore established a relationship between divine malediction, enslavement, and dark colour. To Sandoval, the dark colour of the »blacks«,
29

José de Acosta: Procuranda indorum salute, pp. 104 ff. (my translation).

Race and Caste

51

although triggered by God’s curse, in reality originated in a pre-existing
intrinsic characteristic affecting the semen of Ham’s descendants: an »excess of heat« which enabled the curse to have a transformative effect that
took the form of a sign written on the body of the offender’s descendants.30
The sixteenth-century Hispanic scholars, in common with Sepúlveda
and Acosta, favoured criteria of civility expressed in political and religious institutions and the use of writing, which served as parameters to
make comparisons and to define hierarchical classifications of the peoples considered as ›barbarian‹. In the seventeenth century Sandoval’s discourse underwent a shift in the form of constructing knowledge. The Jesuit introduced forms of signifying difference based on the interpretation
of the sign of colour. In this system of signification, it was not imperative
to fix difference on the basis of generalising abstract terms, whether that
of race or any other.31 In Sandoval we do not find a need to classify, but
rather an attempt to explain a difference in the nature of being, of which
dark colour was a sign.
As the colonial process advanced, mestizaje ceased to be the exception and became an increasingly important characteristic of colonial society. Understood as the »mixing of bloods and nations«, mestizaje appears
frequently in legislation and legal texts.32 In his treatise Política Indiana,
the Spanish Jesuit scholar Juan de Solórzano y Pereira defined mestizaje,
in particular that involving African ancestry, as the product of a monstrous generation between different species.33
Although from the outset colonial juridical discourses regarded mestizos as elements anomalous to the ideal of colonial society and the legal
texts established rules in order to impose discriminatory practices, there
were at the time no scholarly treatises on the subject.34 During the seventeenth century and until the first half of the eighteenth, the word mestizo
was recorded in the dictionary as referring to crossbreeding between animals.35 In legal and judicial texts mestizo difference was established on
30

31
32

33
34

35

Cf. Alonso Sandoval: Naturaleza [. . . ] de todos los Etíopes; id.: De Instaurata Æthiopia
Salute.
Cf. Michel Foucault: The Order of Things, pp. 16-44.
Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias, Book. 9, title. 26, and Law 18;
id.: book 6, title 3, Law 21; id.: book 7, title 5, Law 1, 3; id.: book 7, title 5, Law 4, 28.
Cf. Juan Solórzano y Pereyra: Política Indiana, vol. 1, book 2, chap. 30, p. 612.
Cf. Juan Carlos Estenssoro: Los colores de la plebe, pp. 69-74, in particular his discussion of the lack of any systematic discourse to define mestizaje in Huaman Poma de
Ayala’s text.
Cf. Real Academia Española: Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana, vol. 5, p. 556; Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana Española, part 2, p. 548.

52

María Eugenia Chaves

the basis of various factors such as legitimate marriage and honour. However, these sources considered mestizos despicable because they carried a
›birth defect‹ expressed in the ›stain of indeterminate colour‹. This deficiency, which had its visible effect in colour, was thought to be transmitted to one’s descendants through breast milk. In that sense the reference
to colour falls within the enunciative space of the ›purity/impurity‹ discourse. It is interesting to note that although this discourse did not need
to be based on a difference of religious belief, as in the case of Moors
and Jews in the Peninsula since the sixteenth century, it was still being
constructed in the imaginary of ›blood‹. However, that population was
not identified as the ›bad race‹ of mestizos, as occurred with ›Moriscos‹
and ›conversos‹. As the eighteenth century advanced, the expressions
›castes of uncertain colour‹, ›castes of all colours‹, or the ›caste population‹ emerged to define the mestizo population.
By the eighteenth century, one can observe a transformation in the
conception of mestizaje. The disquiet around the ›mix of bloods‹ began
to produce a knowledge based on order and classification, frequently accompanied by pictorial representations showing hierarchical typologies
of mestizos following a logic based on their proximity or remoteness from
the white/Spanish trunk. The ordering principle of those typologies was
the attribute of whiteness.36 In 1729, the relationship between white skin
colour and superior moral and social attributes was already clearly defined in language: »A white man and a white woman is the same thing as
an honourable, noble person of known quality: because blacks, mulattos,
Berbers and other persons who amongst us are regarded as without value
and despicable, regularly lack white colour, which Europeans almost always have: being a white man or a white woman is held as a prerogative
from nature, which qualifies those who possess it as well born«.37
White colour, or its opposite, was no longer a signature in a system
of similitudes which had to be interpreted, but had become a discursive
object that could be used to make sense of a myriad of elements, to organize them. Whiteness was understood as an ordering factor in the system
of differences. In consequence, the discourse about mestizaje in the direction of whitening transformed it into the appropriate mechanism of
redemption. The casta typologies that started to appear in the eighteenth
36

37

Juan Carlos Estenssoro: Los colores de la plebe; María Eugenia Chaves: La creación
del ›otro‹ colonial. The iconographical and textual analyses of Ilona Katzew: Casta
Painting, pp. 39-61 and Magali Carrera: Imagining Identity in New Spain, pp. 44-105,
support this statement.
Real Academia Española: Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana, vol. 1, p. 616 (my translation).

Race and Caste

53

century in Spanish America, and the corresponding pictorial representations show that considerations about the soul and its function in defining
the identities of non-European ›others‹ and therefore the importance of
evangelisation as a technology for transforming the effects of the ›sin of
nature‹ expressed in dark colour, had lost the centrality it seems to have
had. Although it can indeed be argued that towards the eighteenth century mestizos were regarded as integrated into the Christian community,
which would explain why the idea of salvation had lost its currency, it is
also important to note that the need to cleanse the stain of colour had not
thereby ceased to be important. The idea of salvation was conceived of
first in religious terms as the evangelisation of barbarians or heretics or
their destruction. Later, ›purity‹ as a civilising aspiration sought to give
priority to acting on the body, understood as an individual body and as a
social body in the context, not of a universal Church as governor of the
relations between bearers of difference, but in the context of a political
nation as reductive of difference.38
Up to this point I have tried to discern other discursive relationships
underlying colonial difference to support my claim for defining it as
an enunciative field, which gradually acquired different characteristics
throughout colonial history and enabled various elements of signification
to emerge. It seems to me that applying a conceptual criterion such as that
of ›race‹, for the sake of a coherent explanation, when giving an account
of this complex genealogy, reduces the heterogeneity and dispersion of
the colonial enunciative regimes to an order which is fundamentally foreign to them.
However, as it has emerged from Martínez and Hering’s studies, it is
imperative to bear in mind that the discourse of ›purity of blood‹ in Spanish American colonial history underwent several transformations associated with a lexicon in which blood, ›race‹, and ›caste‹ were words which,
although condensing multiple (and sometimes seemingly incompatible)
meanings, appeared as important discursive objects. I shall now take up
this observation to delineate some final remarks.
The enunciative field of colonial difference
Max Hering proposes setting parameters for an interpretive model of
›blood purity‹ operating on three planes of definition: normative, social,
and discursive. The author suggests that in the concept of ›blood purity‹
there comes together not only the normative aspect, but everything oc38

Cf. María Eugenia Chaves: La construcción del ›otro‹ colonial.

54

María Eugenia Chaves

curring in the non-discursive field where interconnected and contradictory relationships occur. I fully share the view that ›blood purity‹ must be
regarded as the signifying space of difference.
However, I would propose that if considered as a discursive formation and as such, historically determined by a series of relationships – a
›system of dispersion‹ – the field of purity of blood not only enables the
emergence of associated objects, but these objects are themselves created
by discursive relations. It is important to underline that these discursive
relations are interstitial in nature in the sense that they are not part of the
discourse itself, nor of the objects. It is therefore imperative to discern
the realm of the non-discursive and its relation with the discursive formation. In Foucault’s Archaeology it is unclear what he meant by the »nondiscursive« or the »preconceptual« realms. I think this gap arises from the
fact that his analysis is inconclusive once it arrives at the explanation of
the »discursive strategies«. By this he meant the way in which different
groups of »discursive objects«, »concepts«, and »types of enunciation«
relate to each other in order to form »themes or theories«.39 In my view,
it is here where the interstitial nature of the discourse as a »practice« appears to be more evident in the sense that this non-discursive field can
be understood as the relation between power and knowledge. Although,
this is a relation Foucault does not develop in his Archaeology, it will
be of the utmost importance in his lectures published later on in English
under the title Society must be defended. It is also important to notice
that the relation between power and knowledge also marks the transition
in Foucault’s oeuvre from an archaeological research to a genealogical
critique.
Taking as a point of departure the inspiration one can obtain from
the Foucauldian theoretical tools, I have argued that colonial discourses
of difference emerge as a discursive practice, in a permanently-contested
field of enunciation. The task will therefore be to identify the conditions
of positivity – the power and knowledge relations – which allow for a set
of discourses to acquire the condition of truth; that is to say: to acquire
the authority to signify colonial identities and to impose social closure
over an important portion of the colonial population.
Martinez’s, Hering’s, and my own work have so far shown the contradictory features of different discursive objects which emerged to signify
colonial identities, their changing characteristics, and the possible relationships they maintain with each other. These works also explain how
39

Michel Foucault: Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 50 ff. (›the formation of objects‹);
pp. 71 ff. (›the formation of strategies‹).

Race and Caste

55

the colonial institutions acquired authority and justified their practices by
imposing discourses of truth. They have also studied the capacity of the
individuals to create and recreate their identities through the legal and
normative discourses and practices of purity of blood. These glimpses of
other worlds, worlds which existed in Spanish colonial history, and the
disperse historical narrative of its local realities revealed by the works
here analyzed, are pregnant with multiple signifying elements: the codes
of honour, the signature of colour, the dichotomy between civility and
barbarism, the symbolism of blood and mestizaje, the central role of gender differences, and others.
Even if we understand these complex dynamics as defining a ›discursive formation‹, several questions remain unclear: What were the conditions allowing for an object to appear? How did these conditions define
their relationships in the discursive formation of blood purity? Which
sets of knowledges entered into confrontation in order for a word to be
invested with signifying authority in a particular place and time? How
did this confrontation come to be resolved in favour of the dominant discourses? What happened to the ›subjugated knowledges‹? How did this
confrontation affect the practices of resistance set in motion by subaltern
populations? How was the distribution of power relations sustaining the
sets of knowledges in confrontation? What were its associated enunciative fields? How did the associated enunciative fields relate to the one of
purity of blood?
In this article I have tried to turn from discussing the pertinence of using the concept or race to signify colonial difference and to concentrate
on underlining the dispersion which characterized the emergence of the
multiplicity of discursive objects relating to purity of blood. I have proposed that an experimental use of Foucauldian theoretical tools would
help us to introduce this dispersion as a central element of the analysis.
Following this experimental path then, the discourse of purity of blood
should be understood as a ›discursive practice‹. The condition of truth
this discourse acquired under different historical conditions depends on a
relation between forms of power and sets of knowledge. To explain this
relationship is at the same time to initiate a critique of Foucault’s proposal
for understanding the way things and words were organized in European
history. Spanish colonial experience reveals another history, other worlds,
and other words as demonstrated by Martínez, Hering, myself and other
historians of Spanish American colonial history. What I have proposed
here may be of use in organizing our findings towards a theoretical construction and a genealogical critique.

56

María Eugenia Chaves

There is a final question though. I tried to argue that the important
thing is not to debate whether the concept of race is the adequate one
for signifying colonial difference in Spanish America, but to explain the
conditions of emergence of an enunciative field of purity of blood. However, the concept of race seems to have a relentless capacity to appear as
indispensable. This condition surfaced in Bernasconi’s statement on the
Spanish purity of blood. Although deeply historicized, it is also present in
Martínez’s and Hering’s work. Most probably it will also render my own
efforts somehow futile. Why is this so? Could it not be a condition of the
historical discourse itself? This question should be read against another
based on an argument of Dipesh Chakrabarty: »can one dispense with a
›universal‹ product of enlightened thought such as that of race in a social science which claims to address questions of modern social justice«?
To Chakrabarty this is a contradictory relationship which maintains the
primacy of European thought over other knowledges: that of being simultaneously both indispensable and inappropriate.40 I would like to believe
that an invitation to a genealogical critique is a challenge to unravel this
contradiction.
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40

Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing Europe, p. 31.

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S TUDIES

Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹
The Case of João Baptista D’Este
David Graizbord

Abstract: The contribution is a short case study in the intricate dynamics of ›race‹
and ›faith‹ as key notional elements contributing to the definition of Early Modern
Iberian discourses of ›Jewish‹ otherness. I sketch the role of racial and religious
motifs in the rhetoric of João Baptista D’Este, a Jew from Italy who converted
to Christianity in Portugal in 1600 and became a notorious polemicist against the
Jewish People, Judaism, and New Christians. I show that d’Este, who flaunted his
exalted Sephardi pedigree before and after his conversion, defined his identity as
a Christian Jew in Pauline terms, thereby bracing genealogical essentialism and
a belief in the transformative power of faith as elements of the same anti-Jewish
discourse, yet without wholly contradicting early modern discourses of limpieza
de sangre.
There is neither Jew nor Greek [. . . ] in Christ Jesus.
(Galatians 3:22)
Although he sins, he is Israel.
(Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, 44a)

Historians of antisemitism have observed that in modern times pseudoscientific concepts of ›race‹ replaced religious ideas as dominant
paradigms for expressing anti-Jewish hostility.1 Whether the shift truly
superseded older, religious notions of Jewish difference, and if so, to what
extent, where, and when, are questions that continue to engage the scholarly attention. The case of anti-Jewish animus in early modern Iberia is
similarly intriguing, yet the questions it raises are somewhat different.
This is in part because there Ibero-Catholic notions of Jewishness did
1

A recent treatment that touches on and at least implicitly joins attendant scholarly debates on modern and pre-modern variants of anti-Jewish hatred is Albert S. Lindemann,
Richard S. Levy (eds.): Antisemitism; a Hispanist’s meditation on other scholars’ exaggerated distinction between modern, racist antisemitism and pre-modern animosity
toward Jews is David Nirenberg: Was There Race Before Modernity?

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not give way to a hegemonic, secular essentialism. Rather, religious and
racial ideas of who and what is ›Jewish‹ coexisted.2 Sometimes, depending on the context and instance of their usage, these ideas were intertwined, mutually supportive, even coextensive, despite the undeniable
contradiction between the religious doctrine that true baptism changes
the soul, and the notion that a Jew is a Jew by nature, hence un-Christian
even if baptized before the age of discernment, signs of good Christian
character notwithstanding.
The present contribution is a short case study in the intricate dynamics of ›race‹ and ›faith‹ as key notional elements contributing to the
definition of Early Modern Iberian discourses of ›Jewish‹ otherness. I
will sketch the role of racial and religious motifs in the rhetoric of João
Baptista d’Este (b. ca. 1574), a Jew of Portuguese extraction from Italy
who converted to Catholic Christianity in Portugal in 1600 and became
an avid – one may say, quasi-professional – and notorious polemicist
against Jews, Judaism, and New Christians (I use the latter term here,
as d’Este’s Iberian contemporaries mostly did, to identify the Christian
descendants of Iberian Jews, also known as [judeo]conversos, and not
to refer to actual converts like d’Este). Relatively little is known about
d’Este’s personal life beyond what he disclosed in a few lines of his writing. Nonetheless, an examination of his case in its immediate and broader
historical contexts allows a view of key continuities and discontinuities
between ›racist‹ and ›religious‹ forms of Judeophobic ideation during a
pre-modern age of intense ethno-religious rivalry.
›Purity of Blood‹ in an Age of Confessionalization
From the mid- to late-fifteenth centuries, unstable, tightly crisscrossing
notions of genealogical cleanness (Sp., limpieza), defectiveness (mácula,
and the like), lineage (linaje), race (raza), stock (casta), origin (generación), nation or ethnicity (nación), nativeness (naturaleza), nature
(natura), and local civic membership (vecindad), emerged in Iberia as
key elements of popular and learned discourses on the subjects of community and human difference.3 The proponents of these concepts employed them in part to construct official and unofficial devices and prac2

3

The question of whether Iberian countries were unique in this respect deserves a far
more extensive analysis than I can provide here. The present work focuses mostly on
Spain and Portugal, and only tangentially on the Iberian empires. Suffice it to say that
the ways in which the cultural outcome obtained in Spain and Portugal was historically
unique, even if it reflected broader European trends.
On the four latter concepts, see for instance Tamar Herzog: Defining Nations.

Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹

63

tices of exclusion. Among the formal devices, perhaps the most infamous
were the Spanish ›Statutes of Purity of Blood‹. At their core was the
conviction that ancestry determines a person’s character; more specifically, that the power of blood rendered descendants of Jews and Muslims
morally and spiritually unfit for prestigious memberships, posts, titles,
and honors, not to mention sexual intercourse with people of Old Christian stock. Though the spread of the Statutes was limited and controversial, it contributed significantly to the shaping of relations among Old
Christians, New Christians, and Moriscos.4 Such statutes were largely
foreign to Portugal, yet racial consciousness and discrimination against
people of Jewish ancestry were common there as well. In colonial settings, the presence of various indigenous, non-Iberian peoples, as well
as of displaced Africans and their descendants, added many layers of
complexity to this already convoluted picture. Highly contested systems for classifying and stigmatizing otherness were fateful outcomes of
this racialization of people of various origins – Iberian, Ibero-American,
African, and Asian.5
Religion, however, continued to suffuse these selfsame cultures without yielding to empiricist models of knowledge, much less to any purely
secular notion of ›race‹. In that respect at least, no Weberian »disenchantment« occurred.6 Catholicism was at the heart of early modern Iberian
culture. It was the crux of Iberians’ role in international, intra-imperial,
and intra-Iberian conflicts. Spanish clerics with extensive pastoral and
administrative experience in the Peninsula often spearheaded Tridentine
reform. The latter provided ideological and practical building blocks for
the creation and institutionalization of new forms of socio-political and
economic organization and identity. Various processes of Catholic ›con-

4

5
6

›Old Christians‹ is the term used in late medieval and early modern Iberia to designate
Christians who had (or at least claimed to have) no Jewish and Moorish ancestry. Similarly, ›New Christians‹ was the term used to describe converts from Judaism and, inaccurately, their Christianized descendants. ›Moriscos‹ was the term used in medieval and
early modern Spain to refer to Christianized Muslims and their baptized descendants.
On the statutes, see the classic by Albert A. Sicroff: Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre;
the critique by Henry Kamen: The Spanish Inquisition, pp. 230-254, and the case study
by Ruth Pike: Linajudos and Conversos in Seville.
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions.
As Sung Ho Kim: Max Weber, explains, »Disenchantment« (Entzauberung) is Weber’s
term for phenomena of rationalization and secularization – especially the decline of
religious worldviews – that he associated with the rise of modernity. It is, of course,
possible to argue that no such disenchantment has occurred, at least where individuals
link nature and culture in a supposed cause-effect relationship for purposes of ›explaining‹ real or alleged human behavior.

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fessionalization‹7 were thus part and parcel of the coalescence of Spain
and Portugal as early modern states. To be sure, these countries’ political
consolidation, like their respective imperial endeavors, were partly reliant
on earlier, proselytizing models of belonging, as well as on crusading traditions dating back to the reconquista.8
Especially after the Protestant rupture in central Europe, religious
competition was a prominent part of life for the Iberian monarchies no
less than for several other European states. Such struggle entailed a strenuous contest for converts at the local, regional, and international levels.
Adriaen Petiersz van de Venne’s mordant painting, ›Fishing for Souls‹
(1614), captures this aspect of the religious landscape of Western and
Central Europe in his day (see image). The pictorial allegory, intended
as a commentary on the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the
Dutch Provinces (1609-1621), shows Protestant and (much less capable)
Catholic leaders pulling naked souls out of the river of life in order to
save them.9
The inter-denominational and interreligious contest for souls that Van
Der Venne depicts intensified in the sixteenth century and continued well
into the seventeenth. One of its features was the existence of a diverse,
ad hoc class of individuals who shuttled between religious communities,
adapting themselves according to immediate circumstance, level of conviction, and many other factors.10 In the Catholic strongholds of Spain,
Portugal, and Italy, new ›schools for catechumens‹ formalized and systematized various ways of indoctrinating and disciplining such religious
transients, not to mention other would-be neophytes who were less prone
7

8

9
10

Scholars of early modern Europe, in particular those who specialize in the study of the
Protestant and Catholic Reformations, employ the term ›confessionalization‹ to designate processes of confessional formulation, indoctrination and social disciplining that
allowed European rulers to establish their authority among the people they ruled. The
seminal term and many of its important historiographical uses originate in the scholarship of Heinz Schilling (cf. for instance id. (ed.): Religiöser Fundamentalismus) and
Wolfgang Reinhard (see for instance id.: Lebensformen Europas), which focuses primarily on Central Europe. A study that reconstructs processes of Tridentine confessionalization in the case of Castile is Sara T. Nalle: God In La Mancha. For the Catholic
world more generally, see R. Po-Chia Hsia: The World of Catholic Renewal.
The literature on this subject is vast. See for instance the essays collected in Harold B.
Johnson (ed.): Reconquest to Empire; an alternate reading of state consolidation based
on an institutional analysis is Aurelio Espinosa: The Empire of the Cities.
Thomas Bodkin: Adrien Van der Venne, p. 240.
On the subject of religious transients and border-crossers in the early modern world,
see for instance Mercedes García-Arenal (ed.): Entre el Islam y Occidente; id., Gerard Weigers: A Man of Three Worlds; Natalie Zemon Davis: Trickster Travels; David
Graizbord: A Historical Contextualization of Sephardi Apostates and Self-Styled Missionaries of the Seventeenth Century.

Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹

65

Fishing for Souls

to repeated border-crossing. Muslim and Jewish candidates for baptism
were among these schools’ principal trainees.11 Of course, the schools
did not exist in a vacuum. Indeed, their operation both dovetailed and
was largely overshadowed by the activities of the more powerful Papal,
Venetian, and Iberian Inquisitions, which handled cases of alleged religious deviance among the baptized and, very infrequently, among infidels accused of aiding and abetting the crime of heresy. In the Italian
Peninsula, various ghettos founded on a papal model first instituted in
Rome in 1555 existed primarily in order to pressure Jews to convert to
Christianity. These uncomfortable, would-be antechambers to salvation
did not occasion Jews’ mass defection to Christianity, yet significantly
exacerbated some inter-communal tensions, particularly those relating to
the fate of religious wafflers, malcontents, and kidnapped Jewish infants
and young children.12
The battle for converts in Europe had a trans-ethnic and transgeographic dimension as well. Sailing from the North African Coast,
Muslim corsairs kidnapped Christians, sometimes by the boatful, and
enslaved them, with the result that some of the captives adopted Islam.
11
12

On these schools, see for instance José Tavim: Educating the Infidels Within.
On the ghettoization of Jews in the Italian Peninsula and its cultural and political repercussions, see for instance Brian Pullan: The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of
Venice; Robert Bonfil: Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy; Kenneth Stow: Theater of Acculturation; Stefanie B. Siegmund: The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence. On
religious border-crossers of the ghettos, see for instance Kim Siebenhüner: Conversion,
Mobility and the Roman Inquisition in Italy Around 1600; Brian Pullan: The Inquisition
and the Jews of Venice.

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David Graizbord

Several Christian prisoners of war shared that fate.13 For their part, European Jewish communities, which had scarcely proselytized since the
Middle Ages, became aware of the possibility of competing for Jewish
souls among Iberian exiles of New Christian ancestry. This awareness
stimulated the development of a measured, but still polemical orientation
against Christianity and against religious recidivists of converso origin.
Rabbinic schools and legal mechanisms such as the herem (ban) served
to re-socialize Iberian ›New Jews‹ and keep them in line once these
newcomers had theoretically been absorbed into kehillot kedoshot (Heb.,
holy communities).14 Among the exiled conversos themselves in places
such as the Netherlands, southwestern France, England, Lower Saxony
(specifically, Hamburg), and Dutch Brazil, a new ethic of religious propriety, vigilance, and public decorum that one scholar has dubbed »moral
conformism« guided the construction of neophyte communities of »Hebrews of the Spanish and Portuguese Nation«.15 Recently Judaicized
polemicists who had earlier been immersed in the pugilistic culture of
Tridentine Catholicism as Iberian subjects and particularly as students at
universities such as those of Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca, articulated these communities’ polemical stances. Such men gave voice to a
staid religious conservatism that notionally defined their adopted social
enclaves.16
João Baptista d’Este may be regarded a product of this environment
of religious confrontation, controversy, border-setting, and disciplining.
In his role as an inquisitorial informant, recent catechumen, and missionary to his former coreligionists, and hence as a soldier in his age’s
polemical wars of religion, he may be said to have manned forward posts
that were situated at a precarious but crucial crossroads between Iberian
race-discourses and older religious discourses on Jewish danger. He navigated both sets of discourses with skill, yet probably with some anxiety
as well.

13

14

15
16

On converts to Islam among captured voyagers and soldiers, see for instance Bartolomé
Benassar, Lucille Benassar: Los Cristianos de Alá.
On this subject, see for instance Yosef Kaplan: Judíos Nuevos en Amsterdam; Miriam
Bodian: Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation.
On this ethos, see for example Yosef Kaplan: Bom Judesmo.
See for example the case studies of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: From Spanish Court to
Venetian Ghetto; Yosef Kaplan: From Christianity to Judaism.

Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹

67

A Jewish Convert in His Own, Calculated Words
Historians have known of João Baptista d’Este for centuries, chiefly via
his two principal works: Consolaçam Christãa, e Luz para o Povo Hebreo (Christian Consolation and Light for the Hebrew Nation, 1616), and
Dialogo entre Discipulo e mestre catechizante (Dialogue between Disciple and Catechizer, 1621). D’Este also produced a ›Summary of all the
Jews’ Festivals [pascoas], Feasts, and Ceremonies, of the Written Law
and of their Talmud and the Rabbis‹ (1630s), and a similar guide entitled,
›List of some of the Jews’ Feasts‹ (1637). Aside from these works in
Portuguese, D’Este wrote letters to actual and potential benefactors that
preserve some details of his life, as do a few fragmentary inquisitorial
records that include his testimony.17
We know that D’Este was born in Ferrara in 1574 or 1575 to a family of Portuguese Jewish expatriates who were related to the powerful
Ottoman functionary, Joseph Nasi (João Micas/Miques), Duke of Naxos
(1524-1579). Like the Duke, they were part of the extended Benveniste
family, an elite Sephardi constellation. D’Este’s Jewish name had been
Abraham Bendanan Serfatim.18 Before his Christianization, Bendanan
Serfatim had been a traveling merchant specializing in the sale of jewelry. He also claimed to have written and smuggled Jewish calendars into
Catholic Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula while conducting business
under an assumed Christian name. These guides to Jewish observance
were allegedly intended to promote conversos’ crypto-Judaism. D’Este’s
›Summary‹ and ›List‹ of Jewish religious observances had no such purpose, but echo the earlier writings. If nothing else, these later writings
suggest that d’Este wished to be regarded as a helpful expert on Judaism
among the Christians who formed his adopted community of faith.
It is reasonable to surmise that such expertise, deployed in the service
of Catholic Christianity, was especially attractive to those churchmen and
friars who were party to widespread prejudices according to which Lusoconversos were an agglomeration of crypto-Jews bent on controlling the
Habsburg realms and ruining the lives and souls of the Christian faithful.
In fact, Portuguese New Christians formed religiously diverse yet distinct
ethnic and economic group within the framework of Portuguese society.
The latter was largely stratified into to social groups with corporate or
17

18

On d’Este’s trajectory, see Michèle Janin-Thivos: Entre développement des affaires et
convictions personnelles; see also José Tavim: Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad in
the Mirror. My brief re-telling here is indebted primarily to Tavim’s treatment.
›Serfatim‹, as the name appears in the inquisitorial records, is probably a rendering into
Portuguese orthography of ›Serfati‹ (a Hebrew family name meaning, in ›from Tsorfat‹,
which is roughly equivalent to ›From France‹).

68

David Graizbord

semi-corporate legal status, and the cristãos-novos (Port., meaning ›New
Christians‹) were part of this system. The New Christian ethnic group
was characterized by strong economic and social networks that spanned
the overseas empires of Portugal and Spain. Built largely upon endogamous bonds, the sense of cohesion among New Christians as a mercantile
›nation‹ (nação) was partly sustained by the momentum of their commercial relationships as well as by the reality of endemic hatred and discrimination against the members of the group, especially within Portugal itself.
›Evidence‹ of Luso-conversos’ crypto-Judaism is notoriously unreliable,
given the coercive ways in which the Inquisition secured it, not to mention the fact that all inquisitorial trials were based on the presumption of
the guilt of the accused, and that the Holy Office had a vested interest in
securing convictions, since to a considerable degree the institution was
economically dependent on the goods it confiscated from the accused.
Still, a host of factors suggest that for some Portuguese conversos, probably more so than for Spanish conversos, behaviors and beliefs that the
Holy Office categorized as ›Judaizing‹ formed a part of the cultural cement that held the New Christian ›Nation‹ of Portugal together.19
To return to our primary subject, perhaps the most significant aspect
of d’Este’s profile and behavior as a Christian convert from the point of
view of this volume is that he flaunted his Jewish bloodline. At a time
when concealing one’s Jewish ancestry was often necessary to avoid social opprobrium in the Ibero-Catholic domains, it is significant that d’Este
chose to make of his familial roots – in Jewish terms, his exalted Sephardi
yichus, or pedigree – a matter of import when addressing his Christian
coreligionists. As José Tavim has recently underscored, Bendanan Serfatim/d’Este made strategic use of that Sephardi derivation, and hence of
his Jewish ethnic identity – which the polemicist presented as an innate
characteristic – »as a sort of exotic job qualification«20 even before he
became a Christian. Specifically, Bendanan Serfatim/d’Este let his sponsors in the Portuguese clergy, Inquisition, and upper nobility know that
he was a member not only of the commercially well-connected Abendana family of conversos, but of the Benveniste clan, and that he was
related by blood to the Duke of Naxos. D’Este even boasted that as a Jew
he had often stayed in the Nasis’ luxurious Kuruçesme Quarter during
business-related visits to Istanbul.
19

20

On the probable resilience of crypto-Judaism among Luso-conversos, as well as on the
cultural profile of the nação in general, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: From Spanish
Court to Venetian Ghetto, pp. 3-21.
David Graizbord, Claude B. Suczynski: Introduction, p. 126.

Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹

69

The convert’s point, it seems, was to emphasize what a marvelous
›catch‹ he was for the Church, and thus to promote himself as an ideal
battering ram against Jews and Judaism: as a newly-baptized subject
he was exemplary, he seemed to be saying, precisely because he was
of lofty Jewish extraction. To put it differently, d’Este claimed that he
was a uniquely gifted and hence unusually valuable Christian because he
was also a blue-blooded Jew, not to mention one with access to important political and mercantile networks. D’Este the Christian clearly had
no intention of transcending, much less occluding his physical and cultural origins. In this he was atypical of conversos in Iberia and in the
broader Iberian world who wished to ascend to positions of political,
economic, religious, and social prestige that were foreclosed to them by a
race-conscious chauvinism.21 Similarly, d’Este did not endeavor to blend
quietly into his new community of faith, as one might expect from an ordinary convert. Instead, he tried to heighten the genealogical element of
his Jewish identity and make it a buttress to his new religious and social
identity. He was, in this sense, not an unqualified convert, but a consciously Jewish one. D’Este’s self-presentation, then, flagrantly violated
the Christian notion – indeed, a core universalistic ethic of Christianity –
that »there is neither Jew nor Greek [. . . ] in Christ Jesus« (Gal. 3:22),
in other words, that faith ultimately trumps and obviates human variety
within the community of believers. The convert’s rhetorical recourse to a
supposedly irreducible Jewish distinctiveness, however, requires explication, for it did not simply mark the replacement of a fideistic, egalitarian
principle with an essentialist one fixated on corporeality and hierarchy.
Rather, it marked a particular combination of these principles.
Fideism and Genealogy Intertwined: The Pauline22 Option
Just as Old Christian proponents of limpieza argued that New Christians
were inherently distinct from and spiritually inferior to them as a matter
of casta y generación (»stock and origin«, to borrow a Spanish inquisitorial formula), so too Sephardic Jews since the Middle Ages had posited
21

22

The few, highly idiosyncratic individuals who made a point of publicly underscoring
their Jewish origins in the Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian Empires were usually selfstyled Jewish ›martyrs‹ such as Luis de Carvajal the Younger (1566-1596), or Jewish
immigrants to the Iberian Peninsula who, like Bendanan Serfatim, converted to Catholicism, such as Francisco de San Antonio (b. ca. 1578). On Carvajal, see for example
Miriam Bodian: Dying in the Law of Moses, pp. 47-78. On San Antonio, see David
Graizbord: A Historical Contextualization.
As I use it here, and as it is used elsewhere, the term ›Pauline‹ means ›relating to St.
Paul and his doctrines‹.

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David Graizbord

gradations of Jewish excellence and explained them in terms of differences in physical origin. In the twelfth century, for instance, the Sephardi
chronicler Abraham Ibn-Daud lauded his community’s ancestral leadership as being of royal descent (literally, of the ›seed of kingship‹ – zer’a
ha-melukhah). Ibn-Daud was not only echoing biblical phraseology (e.g.,
Jer. 41:1); he was also summoning a motif that was already a common device of self-legitimation within what one may call the ›classical‹ culture
of the Jewish elites of Al-Andalus.23 Partly in order to deflect accusations of deicide, Iberian Jews who lived under Christian rule elaborated
upon that same motif by constructing genealogies that located the origins of the Sephardi ethnos in the Judean, indeed Davidic nobility, conveniently leapfrogging over Jews who had lived in the Land of Israel in
the days of Jesus of Nazareth.24 D’Este’s self-presentation as an aristocratic Sephardi is partly reminiscent of this sort of Ibero-Jewish apologia
in that both he and his Sephardi counterparts of earlier eras had made
of their real or supposed yichus a tool for justifying themselves vis-à-vis
their non-Jewish neighbors. In this case, d’Este used his Jewish pedigree
to ›sanitize‹ his supposedly unchangeable identity, his so-called sangre
infecta (›infected blood‹), in the eyes of more powerful and ›pure‹ nonJewish counterparts, yet without denying the principle underlying the notion of limpieza, namely that blood, culture, and moral character were
fully congruent.
On one level, this strategy of legitimization may perhaps be understood as a generic response to stigma.25 But what interests me here is that,
paradoxically, it also resembled the rhetoric of reputed Ibero-Christian
›defenders‹ of Jews and conversos in key ways. A case in point is Father
António Vieira (1608-1697), an Old Christian who argued in patently
Pauline terms for the reintroduction of Jews to the Iberian Peninsula in
the full confidence that the grateful returnees would embrace Christianity. Vieira’s emphasis on the excellence of Jewish blood is striking: »We
know that from this [Jewish] nation there are and were in all ages of the
Catholic Church many holy and learned men [. . . ] and many who with
their blood helped to plant and defend [the truth of Christian doctrine],
because, in the end, the sacred apostles and the Most Holy Virgin were
of this [same] nation. This was the blood that the Son of God dignified

23
24

25

See David Graizbord: Religion and Ethnicity Among the Men of the Nation, pp. 47 f.
On these apologetic Sephardi genealogies, see for instance David Nirenberg: Mass Conversions and Genealogical Mentalities, pp. 28 ff.
On this phenomenon, see for instance Ervin Goffman: Stigma.

Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹

71

himself to assume as the price of our redemption and the unity of His
divinity«.26
Vieira’s argument, which sought to vindicate Jewish blood as such,
was hardly innovative in its Iberian context. In fact, his contention formed
part of a centuries-old tradition of pro-converso writings. Iberian scholars and churchmen had been among that tradition’s most forceful exponents. For example, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada’s own defense of New
Christians (1450) hinged largely on the notion that it was erroneous for
Christians to condemn the Jewish people categorically. If one were to do
so, the Cardinal argued, »one would blaspheme and condemn not just
the holy ancient fathers, the patriarchs [. . . ] but even our Savior, his [. . . ]
mother [. . . ], the glorious apostles and the evangelists, who derived origin from the nation of the Jews« (emphasis added).27 This was, in the
end, a Pauline argument.
Paul of Tarsus (ca. 5-67 CE), we must recall, had underscored that he,
like the Messiah himself, belonged to the »Israel of the flesh«, the Jewish People.28 For the apostle, Jews’ genealogy expressed their exalted
character as a physical and historical entity with a valid, divine dispensation and a tantalizing potential for fulfilling the unique, salvific role
that God had assigned to them. What Jews’ sterling genealogy did not do
for Paul, however, is legitimate the Israel of the flesh as the embodiment
of Judaism, a distinctly ethnic or tribal culture that in Paul’s eyes was so
corrupt, and had so »hardened« most Jews against God, that the carnal Israel deserved its own supersession by the »[New] Israel of the Spirit«. In
this view, the spiritual Israel of the »New Covenant« encompassed both
gentiles and enlightened Jews. Still, for Paul it was the conversion of the
hardened Jews, or at least the Christianization of a »Saving Remnant«
from their ranks, that would finalize Christ’s triumph among the nations
and bring about the Parousia.29 Far from being irrelevant to Paul’s universalistic teleology, then, the existence of a particularistic Israel ›according
to the flesh‹, and Israel’s operation on the earthly and spiritual plains as a
qualitatively unique blood-entity, was a sine qua non of world-salvation.
Iberian apologetic literature on Jews and conversos – groups which
Vieira often conflated – follow this basic Pauline understanding. So too, I
believe, does d’Este’s rhetoric, even though the formerly Jewish polemi26

27

28
29

António Vieira in Carlos Carvalho (ed.): Em Defesa dos Judeus, p. 49 (all quotations
from non-English sources have been translated).
Torquemada’s ›Tractatus Contra Madianitas et Ismaelitas‹, quoted in Thomas M.
Izbicki: Juan de Torquemada’s Defense of the ›Conversos‹, p. 201.
In some English translations this phrase is rendered as »Israel according to the flesh«.
See for example Rom. 9:3-5, 11:11, 25-26.

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cist was certainly not arguing that anyone should be tolerant of Jews qua
observers of Judaism – neither, for that matter, were Vieira and other
Christian ›defenders‹ of the carnal-genealogical Israel. In fact, d’Este was
adamant that even conversos, titular Christians all, endangered the spiritual integrity of the Portuguese realm with their propensity for heresy
and apostasy, and should be summarily expelled from that country. The
bottom line, however, is that for d’Este, as for supposed Judeophiles
like Vieira, with whose specific socio-political prescriptions the archmissionary sharply disagreed, Jewish blood was an undeniable asset;
only ›the Law of Moses‹ and its practitioners deserved opprobrium. That
›faith‹ was for d’Este worse than a liability – it was a recipe for perdition. Hence d’Este portrayed himself as the ideal, non-Jewish Jew, so to
speak – in other words, as a Jew by blood but not by faith – who embodied and fulfilled precisely the redemptive power of Paul’s »Saving Remnant«. D’Este’s polemical writings, to which I turn presently, articulate
this double valuation of blood and faith indirectly.
Religious Polemics as Apologiae
The Dialogue Between Student and Cathechizer (Lisbon, 1621) was the
apex of d’Este’s polemical work. Its foreword, »To the Prudent Reader«,
reveals that he began writing religious treatises at the insistence of high
officers of the Portuguese Inquisition. They had expressed, he wrote, how
much they would appreciate it if someone »of the Hebrew nation« would
demonstrate the Christian truth to other Jews through an elucidation of
»their own [Jewish] writings«.30 The inquisitorial entreaty to d’Este is
not surprising, given that the early seventeenth century saw the intensification of debates concerning the place of New Christians in Portuguese
society. At that time, converso businessmen lobbied the Habsburg crown
extensively for relief from legal disabilities and inquisitorial persecution.31 Partly in response, reactionary forces, including the Holy Office,
endeavored to push the Iberian monarchy in the opposite direction. This
reactionary trend culminated in an assembly of anti-converso prelates,
statesmen, and activists – d’Este participated as one the latter – held in
the city of Tomar in 1629. This junta recommended the expulsion of New

30

31

João Baptista D’Este: Dialogo entre Discipulo e mestre catechizante, unpaginated front
matter. See also José Tavim: Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad in the Mirror, p. 82.
On the political activities of the leaders of the Luso-converso nation, see Claude B.
Stuczynski: Christian Political Leadership in Times of Crisis.

Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹

73

Christians from the Portuguese realm.32 José Tavim raises the realistic
possibility, though it is impossible to prove, that d’Este was the one who
introduced the assembly’s expulsion proposal: The convert had already
articulated the idea nine years earlier, in a letter to Philip II.33
D’Este’s Dialogue belongs to a well-known genre of anti-Jewish
polemics. Specifically, the work is modeled, if rather loosely, after dialectical exercises first composed during the High Middle Ages by the likes
of Raymond Llul and Raymond of Peñaforte and deployed by, among
others, members of Peñaforte’s Dominican Order for purposes of converting Jews and Muslims.34 Structured as polite conversations on theological subjects between reasonable-sounding, fictitious representatives
of the three monotheistic systems, these works provided, inter alia, arguments that converts to Roman Christianity could employ to justify their
choices and attack those of their former coreligionists.
A characteristic feature of these learned attacks against Judaism was
the claim that rabbis secretly knew that the Christian interpretation of the
›Old Testament‹ was correct, but maliciously hid this from their less astute fellows in order to keep them ›blind‹. Corollaries of this claim had
it that even rabbinic literature (especially the Talmud) contained proof
of the messianic identity and role of Jesus, yet rabbis maliciously misrepresented that aspect of their treasured canon.35 True to this approach,
d’Este cites both classic and medieval rabbinic sources, including, among
many others, Tannaitic and Amoraic massekhot (chapter-like sections of
larger tractates), aggadic midrashim such as the Midrash Tehillim (the
Midrash on Proverbs), canonical translations of the Hebrew Bible, such
as the Targum Yonatan and the ›Chaldean Targum‹ (the Targum Onkelos),
as well as the opinions of Maimonides – here sometimes called »Harambam«, in a rare Judaic touch – David Kimchi, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and
»Rabbi Solomon« (Rashi). D’Este also makes occasional references to
rabbinic authorities probably less well known among learned Christians
than the men just listed, for example, »Rabbenu haccados« (rabbeinu hakadosh (›Our Holy Rabbi‹), an honorific of the mishnaic sage Yehuda
ha-Nasi (Judah the Prince)). Where d’Este’s treatise departs from medieval polemical patterns is perhaps in its limited use of Kabbalah, the
32

33
34
35

On the Tomar Assembly and its context, see Martin Cohen: The Canonization of a
Myth.
José Tavim: Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad in the Mirror, p. 186.
On this phenomenon, see for instance Jeremy Cohen: Living Letters of the Law.
For instance, according to a Jewish account, the convert Pablo Christiani made a similar
argument in his famous debate with Nachmanides (1263) – see Hyam Maccoby (ed.):
Judaism on Trial, pp. 103, 112 f.

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David Graizbord

influence of which had increased considerably in the Jewish Diaspora
by the seventeenth century. The Zohar, the Sefer Yetzirah, and a work by
Yosef Gikatilla that d’Este calls ›Hafereth Sephiroth‹ (Ateret Sefirot?) and
which I have not been able to identify, serve D’Este, in the voice of the
Catechizing Master, to ›demonstrate‹ to the Disciple that the three uppermost sefirot (divine potencies) are indeed references to the three Persons
of a triune deity.36
The sheer diversity of Jewish sources d’Este employs in his Dialogo
suggests the possibility that in his former life as the Jew Abraham Bendanan Serfatim, the convert had acquired at least a basic familiarity with
rabbinic textual culture. Of course, the possibility remains that he gained
or increased his knowledge of that culture as a Christian catechumen.
Faint echoes of d’Este’s Jewish life seem to come through in a comment
by d’Este’s ›Disciple‹ to the effect that when he (the Disciple) had been
»a Hebrew«, he had been taught in school to understand the Bible in ways
that he had found unsatisfactory (Chap. LIIII (sic.), p. 105). D’Este’s possible references to his Jewish past seem relatively insignificant, however,
compared to his constant highlighting in his career as a polemicist of the
value of his Jewishness to Christians via references to his Jewish learning, and, as we have seen, his familial pedigree.
As regards its substance, the Dialogo rehearses many, if not all of the
conventional exegetical arguments that had for long comprised the medieval church’s Christological readings of the Jewish canon – especially
of Genesis 49:10, and of various passages in Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel,
etc. – as well as the church’s categorical rejection of normative Judaism.
D’Este’s work is neither innovative nor otherwise remarkable in that
sense. The book is but a didactic exercise that depicts no real ideological
confrontation between master and pupil. The Disciple is not even a meek
foil to the Catechizer. He simply agrees with his master, encourages the
latter to continue his exposition, and occasionally exclaims in boilerplate
language how foolish Jews are (e.g., »Truly the Jews are very ignorant,
and go about blind; because they believe everything backwards that their
own scriptures teach them. Tell me, Y[our] P[aternity] of the miracles
that the Messiah would work« – p. 197, labeled ›92‹). Though the Disciple does present some »doubts« to his teacher, these never amount to
anything besides brief summaries of real or alleged rabbinic positions that
prompt the Catechizer to provide conventional (in d’Este’s words, »most
36

Cf. João Baptista D’Este: Dialogo entre Discipulo e mestre catechizante (all citations
are from the edition of the Dialogo published in Lisbon in 1621 by the printer Geraldo
da Vinha).

Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹

75

efficacious«) and lengthy Christological refutations. Again, the effect is
unoriginal and culturally hermetic despite the treatise’s supposed appeal
to Jews. The Dialogo is at base a statement of faith by an author who,
it seems, wishes to convey to fellow Christians, perhaps more so than to
Jews, that he is a true Jewish believer in Christianity.
Here and there, however, the author writes lines that, coming from
him, cause the Pauline argument for the qualified legitimacy of carnal
Jewishness to ring differently than if they had come from the pens of Old
Christians. For instance, d’Este has the Catechizer explain the doctrine
of the Incarnation to the Disciple as »conforming to what the Apostle St.
Paul ([who was] also a great Rabbi) says to the Philippians« (Chap.XXII,
p. 41; emphasis added). Later, d’Este has the Catechizer »prove« that the
Messiah was born in Bethlehem by having the Catechizer state simply
that one should believe the assertions as to Jesus’ birthplace of the evangelists Luke and Matthew, »who were also Hebrews« (Chap. XLV, p. 91;
emphasis added).
D’Este’s allusions to Paul’s self-identification as a rabbi and son of
a rabbi, and his implicit presentation of Luke and Matthew’s authority
as inherent in the supposed fact that they were Hebrews (Matthew was
indeed a Judean; it is at best unclear whether the same was true of Luke),
might seem out of place in a treatise that purported to equate Jewishness with error. Things make more sense, however, if we view d’Este’s
references to the Jewishness of these followers of Jesus as subtle ways
of likening himself to them. The parallel to Paul seems especially inviting: Both the apostle from Tarsus and the propagandist from Ferrara were
Jews, legitimate as Jews according to their own narrow genealogical and
historical criteria, yet both men took pains to define themselves against
the Jewish people inasmuch as they were zealous messengers of Christ.
We must also consider the obvious parallels between the Ferrarese
polemicist and his work’s protagonists: D’Este had once been in the position of the Disciple. Now, as a writer of polemical-didactic works, the
author was playing the role of Catechizing Master as well. The treatise
thus allegorized d’Este’s past as a neophyte and his present as a missionary, rendering both into a strident and unambiguous sermon – an apology
as much for Christianity per se as for himself in the role of a Jewish
Christian.
Converts often feel the need to recount – perhaps relive – their conversions in some public way. No less important Christian authors than
Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo recounted theirs in their respective writings. D’Este seems to have perceived the additional requirement

76

David Graizbord

that he justify himself not only in terms of confessional correctness as
dictated by the Church, but in terms of his stock, caste, origin, and nation
(linaje, casta, generación, and nación, to borrow from the early modern
Ibero-Catholic lexicon). The anti-converso discourse then prevalent in
Portugal and Spain, as throughout the period of the Iberian union (1580 to
1640), demanded such a genealogical justification. Perhaps that is the key
to understanding d’Este’s opposition to the Lusitanian New Christians.
D’Este’s strident lobbying for the expulsion of the allegedly subversive
conversos from Portugal allowed him to tacitly align himself with discourses of limpieza without necessarily declaring that conversos’ blood
rendered them unassimilable by the Luso-Christian community. Indeed,
we have no evidence that he took this racialist anti-converso position. It is
logical to suppose that he did not, for if he had done so he would have put
his own Christian bona fides in question. At the same time, and more importantly, he evidently felt the need to present at least a modified version
of those dominant racialist discourses, one that would allow him a safe
place in the Ibero-Catholic community of faith. His solution was a selfaggrandizing, Pauline reading of his own complex identity in relation to
his adopted community. To be specific, through his correspondence and
his religious treatises, Bendanan Serfatim-cum-d’Este managed to combine an old Judeo-Iberian trope (yichus) with a modified, Pauline version
of then-current notions of limpieza – which ›explained‹ Christian rectitude as a blood-borne attribute – and hence, simultaneously, to place himself at the forefront of anti-converso persecution. It is reasonable to suspect that he took this approach in order to cement a narrow and precarious
position as an ultra-Judeophobic Jewish Christian, so to speak. If nothing else, d’Este’s notoriety during his career as an anti-Jewish polemicist,
and his apologetic use of the Pauline conception of the promise and excellence allegedly inherent in the ›Israel according to the Flesh‹, suggest
that ›racism‹ and ›religion‹ were far from mutually exclusive categories
in early modern Ibero-Christian cultures.
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Janin-Thivos, Michèle: Entre développement des affaires et convictions personnelles: la conversion des marchands étrangers devant l’Inquisition portugaise à l’époque moderne. In: Commerce, voyage et expérience religieuse,
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›Moro de linaje y nación‹
Religious Identity, Race and Status in New Granada
Karoline P. Cook

Abstract: Through an analysis of an encomienda dispute involving a suspected
Morisco in sixteenth-century New Granada, this chapter examines the relationship among religious identity, race, and social status in the early modern Iberian
world. Because Spanish authorities prohibited converts from Islam and their descendants from emigrating to the Americas, accusations involving Muslim lineage proved damaging to individuals hoping to acquire status in Spanish America. Denunciations that individuals descended from Muslims arose in the context
of local disputes, and invoked a range of attributes that included lineage, purity of
blood, religiosity, reputation, customary practices, dress, and phenotype. Through
debates over the position of Moriscos at the imperial level, and through individual
negotiations of status in the courtroom, it becomes possible to identify competing conceptions of identity: some commentators advocated the immutability of
characteristics like blood, while others promoted more fluid conceptions of status
shaped by actions and reputation.

In 1554, Cristóbal de Monroy summoned witnesses in the Spanish city
of Alcalá de Henares to testify against Diego Romero, an encomendero
residing approximately five thousand miles across the Atlantic, in Santa
Fe, New Granada. Monroy had traveled to Spain to prove that Romero
was the son of a Muslim slave woman, hoping to dispossess him of
his encomienda, or grant of indigenous tributaries. Monroy’s efforts to
trace Romero’s lineage were not unique. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, profit-seeking Spanish genealogists called linajudos
attempted to cast doubt on the qualifications of aspirants to public offices and titles of nobility. The linajudos scoured archives for baptismal
records and found witnesses to testify that certain families descended
I would like to thank the other fellows at the John Carter Brown Library in March 2011,
especially Margaret Hunt, Heather Peterson, Allyson Poska, Cécile Vidal, and Anya
Zilberstein, for their thoughtful comments on an early draft of this chapter.

82

Karoline P. Cook

from Jews and Muslims.1 Genealogical searches assumed a dynamic of
their own in Spanish America, as new generations of Spaniards disputed
claims to lands, offices and encomiendas. Transatlantic trials invoking
purity of blood, such as Romero’s, reveal much about the nature of the
debate concerning social status in the early modern Spanish world. They
also illuminate how individuals could carve small spaces for themselves,
by altering their status through litigation.
Romero’s trial raises a number of questions about how individuals
conceived of and negotiated their position in colonial Spanish American society. Accusations leveled against Romero and other Moriscos
addressed a range of attributes that included lineage, purity of blood,
religiosity, reputation, customary practices, dress, and phenotype.2 Insults and racialized slurs, such as calling someone a ›Muslim dog‹ (perro
moro) in front of gathered witnesses, spurred ecclesiastical court cases
in both Spain and Spanish America. For example in 1636, in the Peruvian town of Huaura, Nicolás de Zamudio Oviedo took priest Juan de
Angulo to court for calling him »Morisco drunken dog« publicly, despite
his title of nobility (carta ejecutoria). Because Zamudio possessed papers
documenting his noble lineage or hidalguía, he sought to prove that Angulo’s demeaning words comprised a »grave crime worthy of exemplary
punishment«.3
Zamudio’s complaint shows how accusations concerning religious
identity and lineage were made public and disputed in the early modern Spanish world. Individuals who were accused of being descendents
of Muslims and Moriscos used the courts to create and maintain status
in a society in which purity of blood became increasingly relevant. Public statements that an individual descended from Muslims or Moriscos,
if proven in court, could lead to loss of land, offices and prestige. Conversely, through successful litigation resulting in a ruling that they possessed limpieza de sangre, individuals could gain social standing regardless of their actual background. The consequences could affect a family
for several generations. Insults that implied Muslim or Jewish ancestry
1

2

3

Cf. Ruth Pike: Linajudos and conversos in Seville; Albert A. Sicroff: Los estatutos de
limpieza de sangre; Enrique Soria Mesa: Los Linajudos.
Morisco was the term used by Spaniards to refer to Muslims who converted to Catholicism, either under duress or voluntarily. The term also could be applied to their descendants.
Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Causas Criminales, legajo 10, expediente 4, 5v. Angulo
called Zamudio a »morisco perro borracho« in front of »muchas perssonas en la dha
calle y paraxe«. Zamudio stated he was in fact an »hijodalgo notorio de executoria«
I would like to thank Peter Gose for making me aware of these cases at the Archivo
Arzobispal de Lima.

›Moro de linaje y nación‹

83

led to a proliferation of lawsuits across the Spanish world, because the
burden to restore personal reputations fell on the offended parties. Public reputations were shaped by both litigation and the publication and
circulation of manuscripts and printed works that cast families as old
Christians. These works could be, and were, carried into the courtroom
as tangible evidence of nobility and by extension, purity of blood.
In Diego Romero’s case, Monroy depicted him as a runaway North
African Muslim slave with dark skin and curly hair, whereas his defenders stressed his honorable comportment and heroic deeds during the
conquest of the New Kingdom of Granada. Monroy’s accusations, and
Romero’s responses, highlight the ways in which ideas about religious
identity and Islam could be mapped onto the body in discourses concerning purity of blood and lineage, and invoked in the courtroom in order to stake claims in colonial society. The range of factors that played
into Romero’s trial suggests the complicated nature of social standing
and legal status in early Spanish America. They paralleled contemporary discussions in Spain about whether honor and noble status could
be achieved through exemplary actions, or whether an individual’s social standing was determined primarily by blood and descent from old
Christian families. Through debates over the position of Moriscos at the
imperial level, and individual negotiations of status in the courtroom, it
becomes possible to identify competing conceptions of identity: some
commentators advocated the immutability of characteristics like blood,
while others promoted more malleable and fluid conceptions of status
shaped by exemplary public actions and reputation.
Diego Romero’s Trial
By 1558, Romero found himself embroiled in a lengthy dispute over his
encomienda. In a letter in 1568 to the Royal Council of the Indies, prosecutor Licenciate Gamboa emphasized the consequences of possessing a
Morisco lineage: »Because the said [Romero] is the son and the descendant of Muslims, in accordance with your laws and ordinances of the Indies, he should be cast out and exiled from them, and his Indians should
be [taken away] [. . . ] and he should be sentenced to lose his goods«.4
Accusations that targeted an individual’s religious identity and lineage were particularly damaging in a Spanish American context, due to
Spanish authorities’ concerns with restricting emigration to old Chris4

Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Justicia 509, N. 1, 2r., dated 9 September 1568 (All
quotations from non-English sources have been translated).

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Karoline P. Cook

tians. From the earliest voyages to conquer and settle the Americas, descendants of Muslims, Jews, and recent converts, were prohibited from
emigrating to the lands claimed by Spain in the Western Hemisphere. A
series of royal decrees or cédulas, reissued periodically during the course
of the sixteenth century, reinforced the initial prohibitions.5 The language
used in a number of these cédulas referred to persons of the »caste of
Muslims and Jews« and urged the extirpation of heresy from the body
politic.6 Medical imagery appears frequently in both the restrictions on
emigration, and policies toward the Moriscos in Spain, implying in both
cases transmission of heresy by blood, and fears about the symbolic pollution of the commonwealth.7 For example, when the first inquisitorial
tribunals were established in Lima (1570) and Mexico City (1571), Philip
II urged the royal courts to aid inquisitors in punishing heretics, until »by
divine clemency and grace our Kingdoms and lands have been cleansed
of all error, and this pestilence and contagion has been avoided«.8
The Crown and the Council of the Indies requested periodically that
viceroys, bishops and local authorities investigate whether there were
Moriscos and conversos living under their jurisdiction, and deport them to
Spain to face trial at the House of Trade in Seville.9 Despite repeated restrictions on the movement of new Christians overseas, individuals were
able to obtain false licenses, enlist as soldiers or sailors and jump ship,
or sail from ports in Lisbon and the Canary Islands which had fewer controls.10 Baptized North African and Granadan Morisco slaves were also
taken to the Americas in galleys, with the presumption they would stay on
board, and some individuals obtained licenses for their slaves to accompany them to the Americas for short periods of time, with the stipulation
that they would return to Spain after the period of time expired.11 Spanish officials complained that these regulations were extremely difficult to
enforce, given the long distances separating the American viceroyalties
from Spain and from each other. The presence of Moriscos and North
African Muslims spurred authorities’ fears that they would encourage in5

6
7

8
9
10
11

For a number of these royal decrees, see Cedulario Indiano Recopilado por Diego de
Encinas.
AGI, Indiferente 427, L. 30, 96r. (»de casta de moros y judios«).
Max S. Hering Torres provides an illuminating perspective on Spanish writers’ use of
medical imagery and ideas about circumcision in the construction of ›anomalous bodies‹ in political discourses justifying limpieza de sangre in: Saberes médicos – saberes
teológicos.
Cedulario Indiano Recopilado por Diego de Encinas, vol. 1, p. 47.
AGI, Indiferente 427, L. 30, 96r-v.
Cf. Karoline P. Cook: Forbidden Crossings.
Cf. David Wheat: Mediterranean Slavery, New World Transformations.

›Moro de linaje y nación‹

85

digenous peoples to practice Islam, thereby undermining the Crown’s justification for conquest. As a result, a number of accusations invoked the
presence of indigenous witnesses, or the accused’s failure at their duty to
oversee the catechization of the indigenous peoples laboring under their
supervision.
Diego Romero formed part of the first expedition to conquer and settle the region populated by the Muiscas, led in 1537 by Gonzalo Jiménez
de Quesada. Between 1537 and 1543 six expeditions traveled to the New
Kingdom of Granada. Jiménez de Quesada’s campaign originated in the
Canary Islands, under the military governor (adelantado) Don Pedro Fernández de Lugo, to whom Charles V had granted the governorship of
Santa Marta. Fernández de Lugo’s venture to explore the region bordered by the Magdalena and Amazon rivers, in search of a route from
the Caribbean to Peru may have been inspired in part by reports reaching
Spain of the riches of the Inca empire and the wealthy regions between
the Amazon and Orinoco rivers.12 These aspirations figured prominently
not only in the service reports or méritos y servicios of Jiménez de Quesada who compared himself to Francisco Pizarro and Hernán Cortés, but
also in some of the petitions of the men accompanying him.13 Romero
and most of the survivors settled permanently in New Granada.14 Many
acquired encomiendas, claimed hidalgo status and formed part of the
colonial elite.15
By the mid-sixteenth century, the right to hold encomiendas produced
increasing friction in Spanish American society. Originally granted by
the Crown to the first conquerors of a region, with the passage of the
New Laws in 1542, they were no longer hereditary, and were to remain
in the possession of those who had won them for only two generations.16
In the viceroyalty of Peru the application of the New Laws was met with
violence. In New Granada, by contrast, encomenderos turned to litigation
to attempt to secure their encomiendas in perpetuity. The circumstances
surrounding the initial distribution of encomiendas in New Granada are
murky. While Jiménez de Quesada granted them to the men participating
in the first expedition, he lacked full royal authority to do so. His brother
and successor Hernán Pérez de Quesada lacked similar authority, and was
12

13
14
15
16

Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, pp. 3,
6, 11 ff.; J. Michael Francis: Invading Colombia, p. xiv.
Cf. ibid., p. 1; Murdo J. MacLeod: Self-Promotion.
Cf. J. Michael Francis: Invading Colombia, p. 7.
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, p. 78.
Cf. Bernard Lavallé: Las promesas ambiguas, pp. 30-37; on the New Laws see Silvio
Zavala: El servicio personal de los indios de la Nueva España.

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careless in assigning encomiendas, granting them to three or four individuals at a time.17 When Alonso Luis de Lugo was appointed governor
of New Granada in 1543, he initiated legal action against wealthy encomenderos, and convinced them to surrender their titles so that he could
redistribute these in a more equitable and legitimate way. However, he
granted the encomiendas to members of his expedition and allies, rather
than returning them to their previous holders.18
Finally the Council of the Indies selected Miguel Díez de Armendáriz
to assume the post of governor and resolve some of these conflicts.19 His
arrival in New Granada in 1547 frustrated Jiménez de Quesada’s ambitions for the post of governor and created tensions with families who had
formed part of the Jiménez de Quesada expedition and considered themselves the »first conquerors« of the New Kingdom.20 These encomiendagranting practices sparked lawsuits over their possession, including denunciations that Romero was a Morisco. An examination of the dispute
over Romero’s encomienda reveals how his opponents attempted to cast
him as the son of a North African Muslim woman. Regardless of his
actual birth, testimonies from his trial reveal the arguments considered
plausible by contemporaries about how a North African slave could have
risen to the status of encomendero.
Prosecutor Licenciate Diego García de Valverde produced an account
of Romero’s life in Spain, based on evidence collected during an investigation of Romero’s background in Alcalá de Henares. According to García de Valverde, Romero was born the son of North African Muslims
in Oran, with whom he was enslaved by Cardinal Francisco Ximénez
de Cisneros during the conquest of that city in 1509. He was taken to Alcalá de Henares, baptized, and given the name Diego Hurtado. According
to the testimonies collected by Monroy in Alcalá, Romero had been the
slave of a royal accountant named Bañares, until he fled to Spanish America with a false license, and changed his name to Diego Romero. García
de Valverde pronounced Romero a Muslim »of lineage and of nation«.21
Witnesses summoned in 1554 in Alcalá testified about Romero’s enslavement, painting differing portraits of Romero. Their accounts followed implicitly the patterns of Mediterranean captive taking, which as17

18

19
20
21

Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, pp. 104,
119.
Cf. Jesús María Porro Gutiérrez: Venero de Leiva, pp. 12 f.; Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, p. 121.
Cf. ibid., p. 122.
Porro Gutiérrez: Venero de Leiva, p. 15.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 11r.; for quotation see ibid., 15v. (»moro de linage y nacion«).

›Moro de linaje y nación‹

87

sumed that he had been captured in just warfare. By the early sixteenth
century a number of Spanish cities had sizeable slave populations from
not only the Muslim world but also sub-Saharan Africa and eastern Europe, who engaged primarily in domestic labor or awaited their ransom.22
Physical appearance was initially less of a marker of slave status than religious and cultural difference, and slaves entering Valencia had to testify
that they were captured licitly, in just warfare. Over time, the skin color
of Africans and Guanches who did not speak Spanish came to stand in
for their testimonies that they were »from the lands and lineage of the
infidels, enemies of the holy Catholic faith«.23
Romero and his mother would have arrived in Spain at a time when
behavior was as indicative of status and lineage as other markers of identity. Pedro Martínez Mazuelo, who had sailed on the same boat with
Ximénez de Cisneros to conquer Oran, described how the infant Romero
and his parents had been captured by Bañares, baptized, and given Christian names. He added that it was »public and notorious« in Alcalá that
Romero had left for the Indies and was residing in Santa Fe. Another witness, Francisco de Salas, claimed that he knew Romero’s mother María,
a slave in Bañares’ house who was eventually freed. Salas had also seen
Romero »in the house of the said royal accountant, going about in the
clothes of a well-off man«.24 His mention of Romero’s clothing is significant, as one of the factors that individuals proving their freedom in
Spain had to testify to was whether they had been raised as slaves or
free.25 Salas later encountered Romero on the road to Seville, where
they »embarked together« to conquer Santa Marta and the New Kingdom of Granada. Salas returned to Spain, and received word from friends
who had participated in the conquest that Romero had remained in New
Granada as »one of the ones who won the said Kingdom and was given
a repartimiento as a conqueror. He is presently in the city of Santa Fe, a
very rich man«.26
Monroy also summoned witnesses in Santa Fe who had participated
in the conquest alongside Romero. One of the questions posed to witnesses was whether Alonso Tellez, the secretary of the Audiencia of
Santa Fe, had bought Romero from the heirs of Bañares, and had shown
the deed of sale along with the clause of Bañares’s will declaring Romero
22

23
24
25
26

Cf. Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars; Aurelia Martín Casares: La esclavitud
en Granada.
Cited in Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars, pp. 42 ff.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 9v-10r; for quotation see ibid. 11r.
Cf. Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars, p. 125.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, f. 11v.

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his property, to several gathered witnesses.27 Many of the witnesses in
this trial were prominent residents of Santa Fe, who held official posts and
comprised the elite. Governor of New Granada Licenciate Miguel Díez
de Armendariz testified it was held publicly that: »In Oran, [Bañares]
used the mother of the said Diego Romero, a Morisca and a Muslim
woman at the time. He wanted to bring her to Spain but because it was
forbidden that anyone take out in the ships any child, and that the mother
of the said Diego Romero left unwillingly with the said royal accountant
Bañares her master, who, to please her and not lose her, wrapped the said
Diego Romero, being of very little age, in certain clothing, and took him
to the ship [. . . ]. In this way [Bañares] took him covertly out of Oran and
brought him to Spain with his mother who bore the said Diego Romero
not by the royal accountant but by a Muslim man«.28
Alonso Tellez described how he had tried to buy a man named Diego
Sánchez in Alcalá from the heirs of Bañares, who was said to be the
son of a slave from Oran named María. Tellez was told that Diego had
been freed by Bañares and was shown his freedom papers (carta de libertad). Another witness, Pedro de Córdova, testified that it was hearsay
that Romero was the son of a Morisca from Oran, and that »he does
not know« if it was true. He had heard another man claim that Romero
carried his freedom papers (carta de horro), before losing them in Santa
Marta. García de Caveçon, alguacil mayor of the Audiencia of Santa Fe,
also claimed to have known Romero and Monroy since the conquest.
He described how he had journeyed from Santa Fe to the Panches with
Romero and Juan de Arevalo. Romero was supposed to remain behind
with the rearguard, and Caveçon and Arevalo confronted him when he
reappeared. Arevalo grabbed Romero by the shirt and demanded to see
his freedom papers. Romero allegedly replied, »he was the son of a Muslim woman or Morisca, one of the two things, and his father was the royal
accountant Bañares who was a fine gentleman [gentil caballero]«.29
Other witnesses provided a very different account of Romero. Captain Gonzalo Suárez, who claimed to know Romero and Monroy for over
thirteen years, said that in both Seville and Santa Fe, he »heard it said
publicly« that Romero was the son of Bañares, »whom he liked greatly.
Always during the said expedition, and for a long time after, the captains who were stationed under this witness had treated him [Romero]
like an honorable soldier and a free person and they honored him«.30 Pe27
28
29
30

AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 11v., 72r.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, f. 80r.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 82r., 84v., for quotation see ibid. 88v-89r.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 90v.-91r.

›Moro de linaje y nación‹

89

dro Brizeño recalled how he had once appealed to Tellez on Romero’s
behalf, saying that although »some people [. . . ] tried to say that he had
been bought«, Romero was in fact »honorable and held as such«.31 The
royal accountant Cristóbal de Sant Miguel cited a lack of evidence that
Romero had been enslaved: although Tellez claimed to have purchased
him, he never saw a deed of sale, the clause of any will, or any other
document that indicated Romero was not free.32 Because freedmen were
barred from ›honorable‹ offices and guilds in parts of Spain, the witnesses’ descriptions of Romero as either a runaway slave, a former slave,
or freeborn would each have implications for his ability to acquire status.33
For his part, Romero claimed he was one of the first conquerors of
New Granada, and he produced a report detailing his services to the king.
In his 1561 méritos y servicios, Romero described his deeds during the
conquest of Santa Marta, and laid claim to his encomienda.34 Romero
argued that regardless of whether or not he was an old Christian, he had
emigrated before the prohibitions were issued, and therefore should remain. His lawyer Pedro Calderón stated that the Council should exonerate
Romero, because the charges were leveled by his enemies. Furthermore,
Calderón argued that Romero was an »Old Christian of pure lineage, born
and raised in these kingdoms [Spain], and he passed more than thirty five
years ago to the said New Kingdom of Granada. He was among the first
conquerors of it, and he served your highness so that he should rather be
[. . . ] sustained by the land and not cast out and exiled«.35
By invoking his status as one of the first conquerors, and producing a document detailing his services to the Crown, Romero attempted
to secure his right to his encomienda. His emphasis on his ›clean‹ old
Christian lineage (de limpia generación) addressed prevailing notions of
inherited purity of blood that had enabled Monroy to produce a Muslim
lineage for Romero. It was also central to his self presentation as honorable.
Distinctions formed quickly between the men accompanying Jiménez
de Quesada, who styled themselves first conquerors, and the men who arrived in subsequent expeditions.36 Contemporary chroniclers commented
on the tensions between these groups, as the ›first conquerors‹ attempted
31
32
33
34
35
36

AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, f. 94r.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, f. 96v.
Cf. Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars, pp. 119-120.
AGI, Patronato 154, N. 3, R. 1.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, 3r.
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, p. 106.

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to establish their seniority. Tensions grew between the first conquerors
and the university-educated bureaucrats sent from Spain to assume posts
of governance. Some of the insults leveled by these men at the conquistador group targeted their claims to noble status in an attempt to reduce
their collective power.37
How people conceived of status, nobility and honor in sixteenthcentury Spain and New Granada is important to consider, especially because the number of hidalgos in the Jiménez de Quesada expedition increased dramatically, from four to twenty-seven. Except for the original four who possessed official papers proving their status (cartas ejecutorias), the rest of the men claimed to be notable (notorios) hidalgos
whose nobility was common knowledge, and legally proven by court testimony.38 Lacking official titles of nobility, many encomenderos had to
cultivate and maintain their honor publicly, through actions and possessions, because what was »public and notorious« became an index of their
social standing.39
Petitioners produced reports of méritos y servicios that emphasized
their noble qualities of character and services to the Crown. Although
›first conquerors‹ aspired to titles of nobility, coats of arms, lands and
public offices, the king was not forthcoming in granting the first two.
As a result they based their status as notable hidalgos on their activities
as local office holders and their control over land and indigenous tribute.40 They also emphasized exemplary behavior and religiosity, because
encomenderos assumed responsibility for overseeing the religious indoctrination of indigenous peoples laboring under their jurisdiction.41 This
made religious identity an important point of contention.
In his méritos y servicios, Romero stressed the qualities that made
him a notable hidalgo, qualities that included providing for his family,
dependents and guests, holding the prestigious office of chief constable in
Santa Fe, and professing loyalty to the Crown. Romero also emphasized
his military accomplishments in expanding Spanish territorial claims and
fighting indigenous groups on horseback. Romero insisted that he cultivated a household and lifestyle that was »very sumptuous and well-

37
38

39
40
41

Cf. Pilar Sanchiz Ochoa: La conquista como plataforma de ascenso social, pp. 85 ff.
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, pp. 142
f.
Pilar Sanchiz Ochoa: La conquista como plataforma de ascenso social, p. 83.
Cf. Ibid., p. 82.
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, pp. 119
ff.

›Moro de linaje y nación‹

91

maintained like any good hidalgo, for the cause of which he always went
about impoverished and in much debt«.42
For three years, Romero languished in jail, waiting for his transatlantic trial to be resolved. In 1558 prosecutor García de Valverde requested that a second investigation take place in Alcalá, and that Romero
be taken there to face witnesses. He also ordered that doctors inspect
Romero for evidence of circumcision, a sign that he had been born a
Muslim, and that he lose his encomienda until the matter of his lineage
was resolved.43 Vergara, Romero’s lawyer in 1558, contested each of
these points, arguing that this treatment was irregular: Romero should
not be examined by the doctors because this would shame him. Whatever they found would be inconclusive, as it could be the result of illness
or a birth defect rather than circumcision. Vergara also argued successfully that Romero should not be sent to Alcalá to face trial but rather wait
for the witnesses, or their declarations, to reach New Granada. This created complications for both Romero and his accusers, as the testimonies
in Alcalá took almost three years to compile and remit to the Audiencia of Santa Fe. After two years, Romero petitioned successfully that his
case be closed, because the two-year period granted to the prosecution
to collect evidence had expired. Because witnesses in trials were generally supposed to maintain their anonymity, Romero never came face to
face with them. He could therefore continue to argue that the physical
descriptions of him that the witnesses provided did not match his person, and he was a different man, an hijodalgo from Toledo, instead of the
slave with dark skin (moreno) and curly hair (crespo) from Alcalá they
claimed to remember.44 Despite the virulence of the accusations against
him, Romero was able to keep his encomienda.
Peninsular Discourses about Moriscos
Romero’s account, and those of the witnesses during his trial, forwarded
contrasting views about social advancement and achieving honor through
personal actions, as opposed to descent. These types of debates persisted
on both sides of the Atlantic, as Agustín Salucio’s 1599 critique of the
limpieza de sangre statutes chastised socially ambitious Spaniards for
believing they »do not need to show valour in his [the King’s] service
42

43
44

AGI, Patronato 154, N.3, R.1. On the association between nobility and military service,
see Pilar Sanchiz Ochoa: La conquista como plataforma de ascenso social, p. 88.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 28r.-31v.
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 30v. and 38v.

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but merely be of noble birth, be of pure blood«.45 The witnesses’ testimonies also presented a thought-provoking image of the ways that the
telling of personal histories in official documents and in the courtroom,
made knowledge public, and authenticated it for the community, albeit
temporarily if new suits were filed. They show how the concept of conquest, whether it occurred in a medieval Iberian, North African or New
World setting, imbued histories in ways that granted honor and status to
the participants.
What did the prosecutor mean in calling Romero a Muslim »of
lineage and of nation«? The various categories applied to suspected
Moriscos like Romero – ›lineage‹, ›nation‹, ›casta‹, and ›raza‹ – require
unpacking in order to understand the ways early modern Spaniards conceived of Moriscos, at both a juridical level, and in everyday interactions.
A number of historians have discussed how the early modern Spanish
concept of ›raza‹ differs from nineteenth and twentieth century definitions of race.46 Drawn from notions of horse breeding, raza began to be
applied to individuals possessing Jewish or Muslim blood (mala raza),
and in documents proving purity of blood for inquisitorial offices, individuals claimed to be ›without race‹, implying they had no Muslim
or Jewish ancestry.47 ›Casta‹ also initially had religious implications, as
applied in the royal decrees prohibiting the newly converted from emigrating to Spanish America. It was similarly a term with zoological associations, and appears repeatedly in Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozco’s
entries in the Tesoro de la lengua castellana discussing horse, dog and
falcon raising.48 The ways these terms were used in the debates over the
expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain are illuminating, and shed light on
Romero’s accusers’ conceptions of Muslim lineage.
The treatises debating whether it was justified to expel the Moriscos
from Spain, carried out by royal decrees in 1609-1613, applied racializing arguments to the Moriscos.49 Proponents of expulsion traced Morisco
45
46

47

48
49

Quoted in Grace Magnier: Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists, p. 287.
If properly contextualized, ›race‹ can be applied as an analytical category to early modern Iberian conceptions of difference, that combined arguments about biological and
religious difference in order to produce and maintain social hierarchies. For a discussion of these debates see David Nirenberg: Was there race before modernity?; Miriam
Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac Joseph Ziegler (eds.): The Origins of Racism in the West;
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions; Joanne Rappaport: Quem é mestiço?.
On the relationship between ›raza‹ and ›casta‹ see María Elena Martínez: The Language, Genealogy, and Classification of ›Race‹ in Colonial Mexico; Kathryn Burns:
Unfixing Race.
Cf. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana.
While the expulsion was by no means inevitable, Moriscos were increasingly seen as a

›Moro de linaje y nación‹

93

genealogies to Ishmael and invoked ideas about contagion in ways that
presented religious identity as intrinsic and transmitted to new generations by blood.50 The treatises on expulsion illustrate some of the ways
that Moriscos were being perceived by jurists and theologians at the level
of imperial policy, in ways that had repercussions on the ground across
the Spanish world. Writers on both sides invoked Divine Providence in
assessing the Spanish Empire, and used medical imagery in describing
the Moriscos, but to very different ends.51
In his Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España (1613), Pedro de
Valencia advocated the »mixture« (permixtion) or intermarriage between
Moriscos and old Christians in order to fully assimilate them.52 Writing
to advise Philip III against expelling the Morisco population, Valencia
proposed a series of measures to incorporate them into Spanish Christian
society and thereby decrease their threat to the Spanish Empire. Valencia
wrote that Spain should be very worried about Moriscos acting as spies
for the Turks, because they were enemies of Christians as a result of their
»lineage and nation that has professed and professes genuine hatred from
Ishmael [. . . ] toward all the children of Sara«. Valencia, as well as apologists for the expulsion such as Pedro Aznar Cardona and Jaime Bleda,
traced the genealogy of the Moriscos back to Ishmael, son of Hagar. Yet
Valencia argued that Morisco assimilation was possible if they were permitted entry into honorable public and ecclesiastical offices, because they
had lived in Spain for nine hundred years: »With respect to their natural
complexion, and by consequence their wit, condition, and spirit, they are
Spaniards like the rest«.53 If resettled in communities across Spain, adequately catechized, and married into old Christian families, the Moriscos
would become Spaniards, and »their lineage would be lost with their
name«. Otherwise, if Spanish families continued to be »stained by razas,
they would never lose the label and name of Moriscos [. . . ]. There would
be no more old Christians«. To Valencia, customs and education were

50

51
52
53

threat to the Spanish nation, as unassimilable and potential allies of the Ottomans. See
Leonard P. Harvey: Muslims in Spain; Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Bernard Vincent:
Historia de los moriscos.
María Elena Martínez discusses the impact of monogenesis on early modern Spanish
conceptions of race in: Genealogical Fictions, p. 53.
Cf. Grace Magnier: Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists.
Pedro de Valencia: Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, p. 131.
For the last two quotations see ibid. pp. 77, 78; Joseph Ziegler: Physiognomy, science
and proto-racism 1200-1500 p. 199 identifies a shift in the sixteenth century when complexion »established itself as a collective category« applied to Africans and Amerindians from an »invisible, internal blend of fluids in one’s body to something identifiable
on the skin«.

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more important than blood: »Thus, when you take away [. . . ] infamy, we
should not be afraid that Spanish blood is infected by mixture with that
of the Muslims; many have had this since ancient times, and it does not
harm them [. . . ]. The popular opinion to the contrary is ridiculous and
very damaging«.54
Conclusion
Widespread conceptions that Moriscos were unassimilable due to their
lineage or raza, a concept different from modern conceptions of race but
still steeped in notions of immutability and inherence of genealogy, perpetuated denunciations against Moriscos on both sides of the Atlantic.
It was a usage meant to strip individuals of honor and the potential for
noble status that was connected to material gain. These attitudes toward
Moriscos became increasingly polarized after the Alpujarras uprising of
1568-1570 and the resulting forced resettlement of Granadan Moriscos
across Spain. However, even up to the expulsion, individual Moriscos
presented arguments in favor of being allowed to remain in Spain, and
some petitioned successfully for old Christian status. Some Spanish commentators writing around the time of the expulsion became concerned
that the slur ›perro moro‹, applied frequently to Moriscos, prevented them
from fully assimilating, in response to a political struggle that was increasingly casting religious identity as an innate characteristic, transmitted by blood.55 As an insult, ›dog‹ also began to be applied to indigenous peoples, and according to Garcilaso de la Vega in his Comentarios
Reales, the word ›cholo‹ meant ›gazcones‹ or ›dogs‹ in the language of
the windward Caribbean islands, that Sebastián de Covarrubias notes in
his Tesoro de la lengua castellana as pertaining to once-noble dogs whose
line was »lost and bastardized«.56
As seen in Romero’s case, attacks on lineage called into question
not only an individual’s status and possessions, but also his or her very
presence in Spanish America. In order to uphold personal and familial
honor, the accused were responsible for defending themselves in court, in
lengthy and costly legal battles. The verdicts could be felt for generations,
and could have long-lasting implications for families. Among the more
54

55

56

For the last three quotations see Pedro de Valencia: Tratado acerca de los moriscos de
España, pp. 138 ff.
Cf. James B. Tueller: Good and Faithful Christians, pp. 130 f.; Pedro de Valencia:
Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, p. 131.
Cited in Kathryn Burns: Unfixing Race, p. 194 and p. 369 fn. 28. Cholo refers not to
»castizo« dogs but rather the »muy bellacos gazcones«.

›Moro de linaje y nación‹

95

fortunate, Romero ultimately won his case and kept his encomienda, regardless of whether or not he was a Morisco. He was able to garner convincing support that his behavior was honorable within his community, in
a way that was ›public and notorious‹. Actions demonstrating hidalguia
and service reports were displayed in the courtroom to support claims to
old Christian status. These attempts to define public status, in language
that was steeped in religious terms, were being redefined on both sides
of the Atlantic, as individuals, both in the courtroom and on the streets,
grappled with their position in colonial society.
References
Archival Sources
Archivo Arzobispal de Lima (AAL)
Causas Criminales, legajo 10, expediente 4, 5v.
Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Seville
Indiferente 427, L. 30, 96r-v.
Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 2r. 3r., 11r., 28r.-31v., 72r., 80r., 82r., 84v., 88v.-89r., 90v.91r., 94r., 96v., 1568.
Patronato 154, N.3, R.1.

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Rappaport, Joanne: Quem é mestiço? Decifrando a mistura racial no Novo Reino
de Granada, séculos XVI e XVII. In: Varia Historia Belo Horizonte, 25, 2009,
41, pp. 43-60.
Sanchiz Ochoa, Pilar: La conquista como plataforma de ascenso social. In: Proceso histórico al conquistador, ed. Francisco de Solano. Madrid: Alianza editorial 1988, pp. 81-94.
Sicroff, Albert A.: Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los
siglos XV y XVII. Madrid: Taurus 1985.
Soria Mesa, Enrique: Los Linajudos. Honor y conflicto social en la Granada del
siglo de oro. In: Violencia y conflictividad en el universo barroco, ed. Julian
J. Lozano Navarro, Juan Luis Castellano. Granada: Editorial Comares 2010,
pp. 401-427.

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Tueller, James B.: Good and Faithful Christians. Moriscos and Catholicism in
Early Modern Spain. New Orleans: University Press of the South 2002.
Valencia, Pedro de: Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España. Málaga: Editorial
Algazara 1997 [1606].
Wheat, David: Mediterranean Slavery, New World Transformations: Galley
Slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, 1578-1635. In: Slavery and Abolition 31,
Sept. 2010, 3, pp. 327-344.
Zavala, Silvio: El servicio personal de los indios de la Nueva España. México,
D.F.: Colegio de México: Centro de Estudios Históricos 1984.
Ziegler, Joseph: Physiognomy, science, and proto-racism 1200-1500. In: The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, Joseph
Ziegler. New York: Cambridge University Press 2009, pp. 181-199.

Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹
The Example of Colonial Mexico
Laura A. Lewis

Abstract: Colonial Latin American individuals were legally and socially classified using a number of different terms that today we think of as ›racial‹. During
the initial centuries of colonial rule, casta (caste) was among the most prominent
of those terms. This chapter analyzes its significance from the late sixteenth to
the late seventeenth centuries, a period during which the ›caste system‹ (sistema
de castas) was most stable and widely used. Above all the chapter is concerned
with the meaning of casta in context, and with the ways in which colonial subjects and colonial officials ›performed‹ it. Focusing principally on Mexico, the
chapter concludes with thoughts as to how casta remains a figurative model for
contemporary notions of raza (race).

This chapter addresses the colonial concepts of casta and raza (race), primarily analyzing the historical and contextual significance of the first
term. I focus on Mexico from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth
centuries, when the ›caste system‹ (sistema de castas) was most stable and widely used. I address casta in daily life, and the ways colonial subjects and colonial officials ›conversed‹ about it. Those conversations are available only in archival rather than in published documents.
Archival documents, especially the judicial ones that constitute my primary sources, must be interpreted as cultural texts produced in a colonial
context and by a colonial regime with its specific goals and possibilities.1
The chapter concludes with thoughts as to how casta remains a figurative
model for contemporary notions of raza. I particularly stress the flexibility of this contemporary raza, which is distinct from both the Northern
European-influenced concept of race and the colonial concept of raza.
The term casta originated in fifteenth-century Iberia, where it indicated breed, kind or lineage, and where it was applied to both people
1

For an interpretive discussion see Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, pp. 43 ff.

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and animals.2 Because Iberians brought the concept to parts of the world
inhabited by individuals with a variety of indigenous systems of classification, and because Iberians had diverse colonial projects in different regions, casta came to have several meanings. In Hindu India, for instance,
it referenced the endogamous socio-religious groups the Portuguese understood as ascribed ›castes‹, a term later adopted under the British, including for South Asian indentured laborers who replaced slaves in the
British Caribbean.3 Caste in this sense was an ascribed rather than an
achieved status, a ›breed‹ or ›kind‹ of thing.
In Latin America, however, casta referred to ancestry symbolized by
blood, descent, and color. Although scholars sometimes reserve casta for
those of ›mixed‹ ancestry, the term also applied to ›pure‹ populations.
The major categories were thus Spaniards (españoles in colonial texts),
Indians (indios), blacks (negros), mestizos and mulattoes. Due to colonial demographics, mestizos were usually the offspring of a Spanish man
and an Indian woman, while mulattoes could be the offspring of a black
man and an Indian woman (in which case they were sometimes called
zambaigos or zambos) or of a black woman and a Spanish man. In the
latter case, they were sometimes referred to as ›white mulattoes‹ (mulatos blancos). Here I follow the dominant colonial Mexican convention,
and refer to Spaniards, blacks, Indians, mestizos and mulattoes, although
regionally descriptive terms also came into play as, for instance, parish
priests recorded marriages and births, and people’s identities shifted over
time.4 Indeed all over Latin America local terms today often deviate from
national ones, a point I return to at the conclusion.
At least in judicial documents, casta in early colonial Latin America
seems to have been used mostly where large Indian populations survived
the conquest and retained indigenous identities, and where large numbers
of black slaves were also imported, such as in Mexico. Elsewhere, terms
such as generación (kind or class of thing) and calidad (social status) were
more common. As far as I can discern, then, casta was not widely used in
the Caribbean, where Indians died out within a generation of conquest to
be replaced with largely enslaved blacks, nor was it used in Portuguese
Brazil or in Colombia.5 Where populations were less diverse, distinctions
2

3
4

5

Cf. Julian Pitt-Rivers: On the Word ›Caste‹; Joan Corominas, José A. Pascual: Diccionario crítico etimológico. Vol. 1, pp. 913 ff.
Cf. Julian Pitt-Rivers: On the Word ›Caste‹; Madhavi Kale: Projecting Identities.
On Cochabamba, Bolivia and Sonora, Mexico see Robert H. Jackson: Race/Caste and
the Creation and Meaning of Identity in Colonial Spanish America.
Cf. Peter Wade: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, p. 29; see also Joanne Rappaport:
›Asi lo paresçe por su aspeto‹.

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were more easily made between the owners and the owned – for instance
between Iberians and African descended people – and few intermediary
categories existed. All ›race‹-based classifications nevertheless satisfied
the need for different kinds of labor, became the basis for rules about
individual privileges and obligations, and helped to maintain the fiction
of the religious and ancestral ›cleanliness‹ (limpieza) of Spaniards.6
Situations where large populations of Indians survived were also
more complex with respect to casta because with the New Laws of
1542, a Crown reaction to the demographic collapse of Mexico’s Indians, Indians were effectively freed from the possibility of enslavement,
while blacks and mulattoes – especially those whose mothers were black
slaves – were not. Moreover, Indian survival, the fact that most Spanish
colonists were men, and colonial power structures meant that ›mixture‹
took place immediately after conquest. Initially it occurred especially between Spanish men and Indian women from noble lineages. Slightly later
it occurred mostly between black women and Spanish men, and black
men and commoner Indian women. Often it was forced, not just by Spanish slave owners dominating African descended slaves and free women,
but also by African descended slaves and freedmen dominating Indians.
Casta, Raza and Lineage
The concept of lineage is useful for thinking through the meaning of
casta because of semantic linkages between the two concepts, the importance of descent in Iberian culture, and the genealogical/kinship and
more broadly social implications of casta. Even if we confine casta to immediate proven ancestry, people belonging to different castas were concurrently linked genealogically to one another. In its simplest sense this
meant that someone of the mulatto casta would have a parent belonging to the Spanish casta and one belonging to the black casta, or a parent
belonging to the black casta and one belonging to the Indian casta. As genealogical branches proliferated, so did casta terms, at least in the works
of colonial writers and the painters who produced the famous Mexican
casta paintings of the eighteenth century depicting mostly couples of different castas and their offspring.7 The genealogical implications of casta
thus convey a sense of kinship constituted by potentially infinitely traceable connections.
6

7

See María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, on the relationship between ›blood
cleanliness‹ (limpieza de sangre) and the sistema de castas in Spain and the New World.
Cf. Ilona Katzew: Casta Painting; María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions,
pp. 227-264.

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Raza was also used in colonial Latin America, but its history is shorter
than that of casta and its meaning, at least during the period considered
here, differed from what we would consider to be the idea of race ushered
in with the advent of the Enlightenment and scientific racism. Although
scholars of colonial Latin America often use casta and ›race‹ interchangeably, casta was not the equivalent of race in the sense that the latter has
come to be understood – above all in Northern European-influenced regions of the world – as the unambiguous separation of the peoples according to alleged biological differences. Although it is beyond the scope
of this chapter to parse the meanings and histories of these terms, it is
useful to cover some minimal ground.
By one account, raza first appeared in Spain in 1438 in the phrase
»good raza«.8 As applied to people it seems to soon have adopted negative connotations when a Spanish national identity began to build around
Catholicism and Castile in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 1478
the Spanish Crown established the Spanish Inquisition specifically to target converted Jews (conversos), who were widely thought to be heretics
hiding behind a thin veneer of Catholicism. Through genealogical proof
before the Inquisition, Old Christians distinguished themselves from such
conversos, as well as from converted and equally secretive Muslims
(moriscos). As the social community came to be defined around Spanish Catholics, status and wealth-seeking individuals became obsessively
concerned with their own blood cleanliness (limpieza de sangre) in order
to take up certain occupations and to maintain certain privileges.
Spanish writers then began to link raza explicitly to genealogy and to
blood. After 1492 raza came to refer to Jews and then to Muslims, both
groups posing financial as well as religious challenges to Catholic dominance. By the early seventeenth century, raza must have fully taken on
a negative sense, for the Spanish lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias
defined it as »possessing the raza of a Moor or a Jew«.9 As Deborah Root
writes with respect to Spanish Muslims, »orthodoxy, heresy, dissimulation [were] all collapsed into the physical body, into the ethnicity that
could not be changed by any action or belief«.10 By this time, the Spanish state had also forced conversions and expulsions of both converted
and unconverted Jews and Muslims, while forbidding them from settling
8

9
10

Joan Corominas, José A. Pascual: Diccionario etimológico, vol. 4, p. 800 (all quotations
from non-English sources have been translated); see Audrey Smedley: Race in North
America, pp. 37-41 for a broader discussion of the term’s Old World etymology.
Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, pp. 896 f.
Deborah Root: Speaking Christian, p. 132; see also Mary Elizabeth Perry: The Politics
of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Making of the Spanish State.

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103

in its New World colonies. As raza became associated with Jewish and
Muslim ›blood‹ – an immutable and undesirable substance – it thus also
challenged the consolidating Spanish Catholic state.
During the early colonial period, Spain expelled from the metropole
Jews and then Muslims with their ›evil‹ (mala) raza, and forbade their
entry to the New World. At the same time, however, in that New World
the colonial state was inculcating a sistema de castas. In order to understand the difference, it is crucial to distinguish between the state project
in Spain and the colonial project in the New World, especially in Mexico, the ›jewel‹ of the Spanish colonies. In the New World, all castas
were essential to prosperity and to a functioning political economy; in
the Old World Jews and Muslims threatened the same. As a result, the
colonial state initiated systems of inclusion through similarities while the
Old World state rid itself of the contamination of difference. In the New
World, any hint of Judaism or Islam still retained a kind of ineradicable
otherness that religious conversion could not erase, but colonial officials
went to great lengths – with varying degrees of optimism and success –
to make Catholics of all non-Spanish castas, including black slaves and
Indians. Some came to be more Catholic than others. Indeed, the colonial
Mexican evidence strongly suggests that blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos
were on the whole more Catholicized and Hispanized than Indians were,
in great part because non-Indians operated within Spanish spheres of influence and power in ways that Indians did not.11 But by stressing the
possibility of conversion and concurrently generating an inclusive system based on distinctions, colonialist ideologies made differences work
through the sistema de castas while national ones largely expelled differences by targeting raza.
Covarrubias defined casta as both a »noble and pure-blooded lineage;
one of good line and descent« and, in the vernacular, as referring to people of »good« or »bad« casta.12 But according to the Spanish etymologists Joan Corominas and José Pascual, while raza was unambiguous,
casta had a »neutral sense that did not affirm or negate the purity of the
kind [of thing]«.13 While raza was initially reserved for Jews and Muslims, who threatened the Spanish empire, the archival evidence, at least
from Mexico, suggests that casta was a more impartial category applicable to any other kind of person, including to Spanish Christians. The two
terms coexisted throughout Mexico’s colonial period, but during the time11
12
13

Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors.
Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 316.
Joan Corominas, José A. Pascual: Diccionario etimológico, vol. I, pp. 914 f.

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frame in question here they remained distinct, as indicated by archival evidence pertaining to the case of a Spanish woman suspected of witchcraft
by the Mexican Inquisition in 1593.14 In the course of undergoing questioning, she was asked whether her blood was »clean« (limpia). Her reply
is telling, for she said that she did not know if there was any »evil raza«
in her »casta«. Her response therefore separated raza and casta. If we are
to understand the semantic difference we must try to grasp this woman’s
thought processes, for what did it mean to say that casta could contain
evil raza? Clearly the Inquisitors wanted to know if any Jewish or Moorish blood contaminated her Spanish casta. Although she could not answer
their question, likely because she was not fully familiar with her own heritage, her casta was clearly understood to be different from, and possibly
tainted by, raza.
Although casta was more neutral than raza, any given ancestry
couched as casta could still be desirable or not. Each casta category was
therefore accompanied by a set of assumptions about behavior, infamy,
morality, religiosity and citizenship. In this respect, Covarrubias offers
another clue to the meaning of casta when he locates the nature or disposition (naturaleza) of a person in his or her casta.15 This might correspond
to the dispositions that in the colonial context made Spaniards attribute
good behavior and reason to themselves (hence, they were gente de razón
or people of reason), weakness to Indians (who were also known as gente
sin razón, or people without reason), and assertiveness and belligerence
to blacks.
Weakness and its opposite posed ongoing threats to colonial order,
for the first quality feminized Indians, making them susceptible to devilish seductions and idolatrous practices: blasphemy, witchcraft and superstition in the understandings of colonial officials. Belligerence, however, masculinized blacks and mulattoes, which threatened Spanish male
hegemony but also gave Spaniards convenient tools to control Indians.
Mestizos, excluded from tribute laws and accorded a higher status than
blacks and mulattoes, also extended Spanish dominance.
Although Spaniards went to great lengths to maintain casta separation, the colonial situation inevitably brought subalterns into close and
sustained contact, which resulted in both violence and in camaraderie.
The sistema de castas was therefore replete with contradictions, as was
the colonial project itself, since the ideal of separation was consistently
14

15

Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico City, Inquisición, vol. 206, dossier 5,
1593.
Cf. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 824.

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undermined by the relationships formed between individuals of different
castas who, as I have noted, were often genealogically related. Generated
by – even as they maintained – colonization processes, the qualities of
reason, weakness and aggression thus became central to the politics and
the political economy of casta.
Casta in Practice
Because casta was transmutable, casta taxonomies had a complex segmentary effect, through which operated a principle of achievement culminating in Spanishness. I model this system as a fluid pyramid, with Spanishness/reason associated with the elite, Indianness/weakness associated
with the masses of commoners at the bottom, and the interstitial spaces
most fully inhabited by blacks, mulattoes and mestizos at various points
in between. This might seem counter-intuitive, especially with respect
to blacks and mulattoes, given that Indian legal status was technically
higher than that of African descended people due to Indian freedom and
black/mulatto slavery or the infamy of slave ancestry, Spaniards’ overriding concern with Indian Christianization, and the Crown’s paternalistic
attitude that decreed Indians their own ›republic‹ – communities that by
law were not to be breached by blacks, mulattoes and mestizos, or even by
Spaniards. Yet legislation was only sporadically enforced because labor
needs coupled with the expense of black slaves made Indians indispensible to certain industries, where they mostly performed unskilled labor.16
For pragmatic reasons, newly enslaved blacks (bozales),17 who lacked
Spanish language skills, were also initially incorporated into the colonial
political economy as unskilled workers, thereby entering into immediate
contact with Indians.18
The Spanish elite (peninsulares or ›creoles‹ born in the New World)
owned virtually all estates, plantations and mines, held all high-level offices, and ran the legal system. Spaniards also owned most black and
mulatto slaves19 and employed free blacks and mulattoes, as well as mestizos. All mestizos and many mulattoes had family ties to Spaniards. Together these castas – including black slaves – acted as skilled workers or
16

17

18
19

Cf. Jonathan Israel: Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, ch. 1; Colin Palmer:
Slaves of the White God.
Bozales (›brutes‹ or ›savages‹ – see Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán: La población negra
de México, p. 157) were African-born blacks, creole blacks (negros criollos) were
Mexican-born blacks, and ladinos were blacks born elsewhere in the Hispanic world.
Cf. Colin Palmer: Slaves of the White God, pp. 34 f.
Because offspring took on the legal status of the mother, an irony of the system was that
enslaved mulattoes were almost always the children of Spanish men and black women.

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supervisors, as majordomos and deputies of Spanish officials, and as assistants and servants of Spaniards. In these capacities, they had sustained
contact with the Indians on whom Spaniards depended for their material
prosperity. They often oversaw Indian workers and other unskilled laborers directly.20 And they guarded and benefited from Spanish political
and economic interests. In such capacities, they drew ›weak‹ Indians into
spheres of Spanish influence.21 The sistema de castas was thus an integrated system of relations and dispositions rather than a series of distinct
stations, and colonial society was something akin to a fluid pyramid, in
which individuals could gain or lose prestige depending on their social
networks. Status as it related to casta therefore has to be analyzed in context.
Spaniards might have held power, but non-Spaniards vastly outnumbered them. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were approximately three times as many blacks, mulattoes and mestizos, and ten times
as many Indians, despite the sixteenth century demographic collapse that
ushered in the New Laws. As a result, the colonial pyramid of successive and interpenetrating strata ordered each layer inversely related to its
volume. Prestige and authority flowed from the relatively small Spanish
top to the vast Indian base, wending its way through interstitial mestizos, mulattoes and blacks. The result, as one seventeenth century Indian
noble lamented, was that »from the priests and corregidores [tribute collectors] to the vilest black and mestizo [everyone] beats [the Indians] and
mistreats them«.22
Because behavior and other qualities were central to what constituted
casta, ›Spanishness‹ or ›Indianness‹ could be attributed to almost anyone, regardless of lineage. Indeed, in practice we might say that people
bounced between these extremes, including Spanish women who consorted with Indian witches, and Spanish men who took mulatto women
as lovers. Because of the fluidity of casta, Claudio Lomnitz argues that
almost everyone in colonial Mexico was ›redeemable‹ over the course
of several generations. He and other scholars except blacks from this
20

21

22

Cf. Patrick Carroll: Afro-Americans and Colonial Social Development, p. 10; Jonathan
Israel: Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, p. 73; Herman Konrad: A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico, p. 246; Cheryl Martin: Rural Society in Colonial Morelos,
pp. 138 f.; Colin Palmer: Slaves of the White God, pp. 65-83.
Not all Spaniards were elite and not all non-Spaniards were poor. Nevertheless, the
upper end of the lower classes was Spanish, while non-Spaniards who achieved the
greatest economic success were mostly mestizo and castizo (mixed Spanish-mestizos) –
see R. Douglas Cope: The Limits of Racial Domination, pp. 24, 19.
Anthony Pagden: Identity Formation in Spanish America, p. 69, n. 25.

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107

scheme23 but the ›fact‹ of the irredeemableness of black ›blood‹ did not
mean that blacks and mulattoes did not attempt to attain status – including
Spanishness – in creative ways. As María Elena Martínez notes, during
the later colonial period blacks and mulattoes tried to prove that they too
were Old Christians as they petitioned for privileges that came with that
status.24 Earlier in the colonial period they were equally resistant to a
system that made them ›less than‹, and they tactically tried to circumvent it, often with success. For instance, if we expand casta to include
kinship claimed through pseudo-genealogical ties, as did a free black
woman accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century,25 blacks did
argue during this period that they were ›Spanish‹ by association and by
deed. Although the connections that established official casta identities
always included biological parents, such connections might also have included social parents or ritual kin, such as the Spanish couple who raised
this black woman. Indeed, she was found innocent after months in an Inquisition dungeon despite the fact another free black woman had accused
her of sustained contact with Indian witches.26 Her casta therefore depended in a figurative sense on whether she was closer in comportment
to upstanding Spaniards or to base Indians.
The concept of casta can be even further extended to embrace a more
abstract sense of social connectedness people developed with others they
did not necessarily claim as any kind of kin. Thus, the accused black
woman associated her moral qualities not just with the Spaniards who
raised her but also with the entire Spanish community of Vera Cruz, including the Spanish priests who defended her from the witchcraft accusation. As another example, although mulattoes were barred from carrying arms by decree (unless they were members of the pardo or black
militias established throughout the mainland in the seventeenth century
to protect Spain’s New World territories)27 they nevertheless petitioned
to carry arms, again by alluding to their Spanishness and hence to their
morality.28 ›White‹ mulattoes mentioned their Spanish fathers. Other mu23

24
25
26

27
28

Cf. Claudio Lomnitz: Exits From The Labyrinth, pp. 273 f.; María Elena Martínez:
Genealogical Fictions, pp. 158 f.; Ilona Katzew: Casta Painting.
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 222, 272.
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, pp. 1 ff.
While Indians were removed from the Inquisition’s jurisdiction by the late 16th century,
their presence is nevertheless prominent in Inquisition documents. They do not appear
on the frontispieces of those documents, but their presence is deep and pervasive in the
stories told within, including by Indians themselves.
Cf. Paul Lokken: Useful Enemies; Ben Vinson III: Bearing Arms for His Majesty.
As Max S. Hering Torres: Color, pureza, raza, points out, with colonialism and imperialism, white became »normalized« in a way that it had not previously been. It came

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lattoes claimed Spanishness through social markers of superior comportment, the dispositions assigned to the Spanish casta. They were »quiet
and calm«, »not noisy and virtuous«, »well-liked and loved«, and gainfully employed or married.29 In other words, behavior and social status
(calidad) could outweigh the penalties of birth, and casta could essentially be achieved. Spanishness might also work laterally, as it did for the
son of a Spaniard and a woman of »dark color«. In petitioning to bear
arms, he declared that he was married to a Spanish woman and therefore
had »Spanish children«. His claim indicates that lineage and therefore
casta was based on expediency and context rather than on normative descent principles. Indeed, while this man’s father was Spanish, he thought
it best to mention that his children were Spanish by descent from his
wife.30 Always and everywhere the positive qualities of one’s persona
were buttressed through real or alleged connections to Spanishness.
Above all, then, casta was a situational signifier that classified people and was simultaneously a malleable tool. It was not a set of stratified
legal rankings based on pseudo-biological distinctions. Because casta involved comportment as well as lineage, gender entwined with it to produce stereotypes and behaviors that individuals manipulated in order to
gain status and power.
Casta and Gender
One can look at the relationship between casta and gender in two ways:
first, discrete castas were gendered insofar as the qualities I mentioned –
particularly passivity and aggression – were considered feminine or masculine. Second, analogies can be drawn between the qualities ascribed to
people by sex and the subsequent laws that pertained to them, and those
ascribed to people by casta, who were often subject to similar laws. From
both angles gendering was the subtext of a colonial system based ostensibly on casta difference but one that also put gendered differences to work

29

30

to connote morality, Christianity and civilization while not-white became synonymous
with its opposites.
Examples include AGN, General de Parte vol. 6, dossier 155, p. 158, 1602; vol. 6,
dossier 643, p. 333, 1603; AGN Reales Cédulas Duplicadas, vol. 5, dossier 511, p. 123,
1607; vol. 5, dossier 815, p. 200, 1607; vol. 16, dossier 267, p. 136, 1620; vol. 48,
dossier 408, pp. 296-296v, 1644; vol. 20, dossier 46, p. 35, 1654; vol. 20, dossier 127,
p. 81, 1660; vol. 67, p. 7, 1688.
AGN, Reales Cédulas Duplicadas, vol. 20, dossier 47, p. 36, 1654.

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in order to make that system functional.31 Like casta, however, gender
was also ›performed‹.32
As I examine the multiple intersections of gender and casta I begin
with analogies between women and Indians and, by extension, between
men and Spaniards. I then look at how the colonial state masculinized
male and female blacks and mulattoes, as well as mestizos. Such masculinization of course presented an overt threat. But it also allowed the
colonial state to function because it empowered mestizos, mulattoes and
blacks in their dealings with Indians. Since femaleness and Indianness
were most closely associated with witchcraft, this combination presented
a more subliminal threat, but one that was mildly punished as it was attributed to ›seduction‹ by the devil, and as Indians were not subject to
Inquisition oversight by the end of the sixteenth century.
Indians were feminized in the writings of theologians, such as Juan
Ginés de Sepúlveda who, despite failing to convince the Crown that Indians should be enslaved, nevertheless articulated a pervasive view of their
nature and status in European intellectual thought by blending Christian
and Aristotelian notions of humanity with the doctrine of natural law and
the divine origins of Spanish social norms in order to prove Indian inferiority. Although the Crown rejected his arguments in favor of those
of Bartolomé de Las Casas, the ›defender of the Indians‹, Sepúlveda’s
position quickly found favor with colonists because it confirmed their
subversion of Crown decrees protecting Indians.33
Like other theologians of the day, Sepúlveda wove together analogies
between Indians and children as both virtuous and defective.34 He also
likened the differences between Indians and Spaniards to those between
women and men, and children and adults, narrowing these analogies by
focusing on Indians’ ›female‹ qualities, such as their second-rate minds
and their cowardice.35 Although such explicit use of woman as symbols
for imperfect Indians was highly unusual, scholars have suggested that
beginning with Columbus’ letters and diaries, feminizing discourses were

31
32
33

34

35

Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors.
Cf. Judith Butler: Gender Trouble.
Cf. Anthony Pagden: The Fall of Natural Man, pp. 110, 145; John Leddy Phelan: The
Problem of Conflicting Spanish Imperial Ideologies in the Sixteenth Century, p. 63.
Cf. Louise Burkhardt: The Slippery Earth, p. 17; Inga Clendinnen: Disciplining the Indians, p. 43; John Leddy Phelan: The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the
New World, p. 66.
Cf. Juan Gínes de Sepúlveda: Tratado sobre las justas causas de la guerra contra los
indios, pp. 85, 101, 107.

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written into many Spanish accounts of Indians.36 In turn, women in Spain
were »indianized« or »primitivized« in sixteenth century »conduct manuals«.37
Colonial authorities described women and Indians as ignorant (de
poco saber), weak (flaca) and sinful (pecadora). Under Spanish law,
women were legally prohibited from litigating on their own behalf. Instead, they were to be represented by men (guardians or husbands), their
parents and other male relatives, or (male) tutors. Independent decisions
were reserved for grown women without male superiors, notably widows,
who acquired control over their dowries when their husbands died, and
could continue to run their husbands’ businesses, receive loans and bequeath their own property.38 Although Indian women initially enjoyed
greater autonomy than Spanish ones, by the seventeenth century they
too had become legal minors, placed under the protection of their husbands.39
›Security‹ was also accomplished through enclosure conventions that
ideally kept all women – but especially Spanish ones – at home, where
they were charged with performing or overseeing domestic chores like
spinning, weaving and, most importantly, food preparation.40 Upstanding
women also carried domesticity beyond home as they did charitable work
for hospitals and focused on church activities, such as Mass and religious
sisterhoods, where men could also supervise them.
Domestic confinement was the ideal, but many women had no other
means of subsistence than »the power or skill of their hands«.41 Women
compelled by economic circumstances to leave the home were mostly
non-Spanish or poor Spanish women. They labored at domestic tasks
such as dressmaking and cooking, worked in mines and sweatshops, and
ran small commercial enterprises. Unable to comply with enclosure etiquette due to their economic and casta statuses, they inevitably lost honor
and value as they entered the male public sphere.42 Yet just as castas cir36

37
38

39

40

41
42

Cf. James D. Fernández: The Bonds of Patrimony; Margarita Zamora: Reading Columbus, 152 ff.; Louis Montrose: The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery.
James D. Fernández: The Bonds of Patrimony, p. 977.
Cf. Asunción Lavrin: In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico, pp. 40 f.; Ruth Behar: Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late Colonial Mexico, p. 35; Peggy Liss:
Mexico Under Spain, pp. 98 f.
Cf. Susan Kellogg: Hegemony Out of Conquest; id.: Law and the Transformation of
Aztec Culture.
Cf. María Elena Sánchez-Ortega: Women as a Source of ›Evil‹ in Counter-Reformation
Spain, p. 197; Mary Elizabeth Perry: Magdalens and Jezebels in Counter-Reformation
Spain.
Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru: Las mujeres de la Nueva España, p. 114.
Cf. Ibid, ch. 6; Asunción Lavrin: In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico, p. 30.

Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹

111

cumvented their legal status, men and women bent their gender to circumvent theirs. Brief examples include a Spanish widow who habitually
dressed in men’s clothing in order to – as her mestiza servant testified –
go out in public at night, and two men – both free mulattos accused of
sodomy – who reportedly stayed home to make tortillas.43
Like women, Indians had their ›appropriate‹ place in the moral economy. When not laboring under Spanish supervision they were also subject to forms of enclosure: echoing women’s domestic spaces, they were
expected to remain in the villages of the Indian Republic. Just as husbands, fathers, and priests were to teach women right from wrong, so
too were Spaniards to teach Indians. Enclosed Indians could be protected
from the dissolute. They could also be organized for efficient prayer and
production by the priests who morally guided them, and by the Spanish
officials who supervised them and made them available for tribute and
labor drafts.
While women of all castas performed most of the domestic labor for
the benefit of men, Indians (including women) performed most of the
public labor for Spaniards. Although not all women were removed from
public life, nor did all or only Indians labor for Spaniards, ideals of honor
made men like Spaniards by distancing them from manual production inside and outside the home as colonial labor became the domain of women
and Indian producers. Because the producer/consumer relation between
women and men parallels the one between Indians and Spaniards, the
casta/gender analogies under consideration here can be extended to include the idea that Indians were ›feminized‹ and women were ›indianized‹ through the dishonor of production.44
Enclosure was meant to increase productive domestic capacities and
to cultivate moral qualities. But women and Indians had to be coerced
into focusing on their appropriate tasks, and both were constantly on the
verge of moral escape. Indians were »such loafers«, Archbishop Montúfar wrote in 1554, that they did not even want to »work for themselves«.45
43

44

45

AGN Bienes Nacionales, vol. 596, dossier 20, 1684; AGN Inquisición, vol. 498, dossier
16, 1691; Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Seville, México, file 38, no. 57-B, 27
September 1658; see Laura A. Lewis: From Sodomy to Superstition.
Nancy Leys Stepan: Race and Gender, convincingly demonstrates that 19th century
scientists used gender analogies to confirm their notions about race. She also notes that
the history of such analogies has yet to be explored, as I suggest that they should be
here. See also Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, pp. 60-63 and id.: The Weakness of
Women and the Feminization of the Indian in Colonial Mexico.
Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (BNAH), Archivo Histórico, Colección
Francisco de Paso y Troncoso, Leg.113, no. 418; AGI Seville, Correspondencia Virreinal, Leg. 25, no. 26-A, 1603; cf. Guillermo de la Peña: Apuntes de un antropólogo a

112

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Later a viceroy described Indians as »enemies of work« who »cannot
be persuaded in any way nor are they inclined [to do] what is so opposite their nature«.46 As husbands disciplined their straying wives »within
reason«,47 Indian »laziness« was also met with force, to which Indians
responded by fleeing to the hills and hiding, thereby eluding Spanish control.48 The hills were extra-domestic wilderness spaces where the sedentary Indians of colonial Mexico, on whom Spaniards depended for labor, lived without appropriate supervision like runaway slaves, nomadic
›Chichimec‹ Indians, and women who escaped their homes. In the wilderness witchcraft and devils – often described as dark-skinned men – also
flourished, as Indians readied the herbs and powders used for witchcraft,
which they provided to women – including Spanish ones – to use in food
and drink to ensorcel their husbands and lovers.
Women and Indians were not generally regarded as evil. Nor was
their disobedience interpreted as resistance. Instead, disobedience and
evil were deeply enmeshed in issues of power, and therefore in the imputed qualities that rendered women and Indians subordinate in the first
place. The metaphor of the child made women and Indians capricious,
ignorant, and weak; they were ›pre-social‹ creatures vulnerable to the
devil’s influence. The task of men and Spaniards was to ›civilize‹ them.
Thus, secular and religious officials tried to maintain Indians in their villages in order to teach them Christian ideals of work and prayer, while the
Inquisition often punished women accused of myriad infractions by, for
instance, confining them to their homes, which they were to leave only
to attend mass. Because Spanish women routinely had contact with nonSpanish ones, including the female slaves and servants they employed,
black and mulatto women in particular became important conduits for
introducing disorder into domesticity by purchasing for their mistresses
witchcraft remedies from Indians.49
Indian complaints of abuse by blacks, mulattoes and mestizos began
to surface in the courts by the middle of the sixteenth century. Although
these complaints reveal that Spaniards – including clergy – were ›a powerful hand‹ (una mano poderosa) bidding their employees and slaves to
discipline Indians, the authorities responded by carrying out a protec-

46
47

48

49

propósito de la Política Indiana de Juan de Solórzono y Pereyra, p. 188.
AGI, Seville, Correspondencia Virreinal, p. 25, no. 26-A, 1603.
Richard Boyer: Women, La Mala Vida, and the Politics of Marriage, pp. 252 f.; on the
later colonial period see Steve J. Stern: The Secret History of Gender, pp. 60-69.
Cf. Silvio Zavala: La libertad de movimiento de los indios de Nueva España, p. 209;
AGN Indios, vol. 6, dossier 1, 1672.
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall or Mirrors, p. 154 and 69 for the following.

Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹

113

tive role, holding inquiries and mostly punishing black, mulatto and mestizo perpetrators, rather than their Spanish bosses. These castas thus took
on mediating roles in the political economy of conquest. Indian complaints against them included beatings, sexual assault, theft, home destruction, imprisonment, forced labor, and the symbolic (but sometimes
violent) emasculation of Indian men, who were unable to protect their
own women from the marauders.50 Mestizos, in particular, could claim
Indian lineage and often illegally took up positions as governors in Indian
villages with the implicit backing of local Spaniards. As Indians were
feminized, blacks, mulattoes and mestizos were thus masculinized in different capacities, as they aggressively wielded power over Indians.51
Black and mulatto females were in an especially liminal position, for
as females they were expected to maintain their domestic place, yet they
were also considered to have something of the assertiveness of their castas. Black women marketers were seen as particularly adept swindlers
who easily parted Indians from their market goods and resold them at
higher prices.52 In 1599, the Spanish mother of the mayor of Tetepango
in central Mexico sent her black female slaves to capture »rebellious«
Indians and take them to jail. In another incident south of Mexico City a
Spanish man’s mulatto slave »companion« allegedly incited her dogs to
attack an Indian man, who was severely injured.53 In virtually all of the
scenes of the eighteenth-century casta paintings that portray violence and
reverse the traditional relationship of male dominance and female submission, black females tyrannize their Spanish or mestizo husbands, as
well as their own offspring, onto whom the infamy of blackness appeared
to therefore not have rubbed off.54 Again, descent appears situational to
the viewer, as such offspring seem more temperate due to their non-black
fathers.
Casta Alliances
As Spaniards controlled Indians through intermediaries, they concomitantly created possibilities for affiliations. Blacks, mulattoes and mestizos were never, after all, fully integrated into the colonial system
50

51
52
53
54

For examples see AGN Indios, vol. 6 (1), dossier 177, 1592; AGI México Correspondencia Vierreinal, file 20, no. 29, 1579; file 25, no. 26-A, 1603; AGN Criminal, vol. 46,
dossier 11, 1648; vol. 12, dossier 6, 1646; AGN Inquisición, vol. 517, dossier 13, 1674.
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall or Mirrors, pp. 67-94 and passim.
AGN Civil, vol. 75, dossier 9, 1599.
AGN Criminal, vol. 34, dossier 13, 1639; vol. 235, dossier 33, 1655.
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, p. 74; see also María Elena Martínez: Genealogical
Fictions, p. 235.

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as Spaniards per se. By forcing contact between them and Indians,
Spaniards undermined the delicate balance necessary to serving their own
ends. There is scant evidence that groups of Indians and blacks – slave or
free – formed lasting alliances that threatened Spanish control. Spaniards
in fact often used bands of Indians to aid them in spotting and catching
runaway slaves. Yet colonial officials also raided Indian villages looking for hidden slaves, indicating empathy between blacks and the Indians
who might shelter them.55 Casta mixing and poverty were also endemic
to Mexico City, the site of several large-scale multi-casta riots prompted
by food shortages.
While policies implemented in cities were aimed at keeping
Spaniards safe, those implemented in the countryside were ostensibly
aimed at protecting the integrity of Indian communities and at avoiding
mixed casta proximity that might undermine Spanish efforts to ›improve‹
Indians. Yet colonial authorities had to contend with the sentimental and
kinship ties many non-Indians had to Indians, for Church marriage took
precedence over casta separation. Thus, many blacks, mulattoes and mestizos, as well as Spaniards, married or otherwise partnered with Indians.
Indeed, the mothers of many mulattoes, and of many more mestizos, were
Indian.
At least some mulattoes and mestizos were brought up in Indian villages. A friar spoke to this issue in a 1625 letter to the Inquisition. He
defended the rights of mulattoes and mestizos residing in an Indian village who had confessed to eating meat on days prohibited by the Church.
They spoke and dressed like Indians, he wrote, and because they were
like Indians he believed they should be treated as such. Indians would
not have been prosecuted for violating dietary laws, and neither should
their sons and daughters even if, strictly speaking, they were not Indians themselves. Emphasizing shared cultural practices, and social and
kin affiliations, rather than legal status, the friar further warned that if the
mestizos and mulattoes were prosecuted, there would be trouble in »each
of the villages«, a clear indication of sentimental bonds between Indians
and non-Indians.56
In another example, a mulatto woman illegally operated a tavern in an
Indian village. Accused of »tricking« and misleading Indians, she testified that her mother was a village Indian, that she had grown up there, that
its residents »supported her« and that she lived among them »peacefully
and quietly«, even contributing money to their celebrations. Her father
55
56

AGN Criminal, vol. 643, dossier 2, 1619; vol. 132, dossier 2, 1647.
AGN Inquisición, vol. 510, dossier 38, 1624.

Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹

115

was a slave from a nearby hacienda, whose owner wanted to see to her
release if he could claim her as his own.57 The evidence from these cases
and others that I do not have the space to describe here, suggests that
attempts to isolate Indians were motivated in part by efforts to stem the
multi-casta revolts that might occur if ›weak‹ Indians were corrupted by
non-Indians.
In the indianized and feminized domain of witchcraft, Indian contact – especially with blacks, mulattoes and mestizos – led to a kind
of dispersed rebellion, an ›open secret‹, as legislation separating Indians
from others failed in its goals. In one case a Spanish man reported to the
local Inquisitor about a female Indian witch roiling the silver mining town
of Zacatecas, »infecting« it with herbs and powders that fomented blasphemy and discord among male and female mestizos, mulattoes, blacks
and »slaves«. Those who found the Indian women helpful were clearly
not those who found her dangerous. One might, in fact, say that an Indian
woman’s love magic was especially a Spanish man’s hell.58 While intercasta love alliances – including same sex ones – appear to have been
significant to many people’s everyday lives, some ended with Spanish
men, especially, denouncing their non-Spanish lovers to the Inquisition
for witchcraft.59 One distraught Spanish man threatened to kill the mulatto mistress he was sure was colluding with Indian women in an effort
to bewitch him, unless her master put her in a convent.60
The Demise of Casta and the Rise of Raza
Although we can see continuity in casta practices from the sixteenth to
the late seventeenth centuries, by the time the mid-eighteenth-century
casta paintings appeared, the nature of racial thinking was also changing. Indeed, the two were likely linked as the paintings depicted »colonial life« for the metropole and reflected on creole Spaniards seeking
their own power in the colonies. The term ›white‹ applied to Spaniards
became more common around this time, the importance of phenotype increased, elites became more preoccupied with blackness, and the Crown
imposed the Pragmatic Sanction in 1778, giving marriage authority that
once belonged almost solely to the Church to parents of single people
57

58
59
60

AGN Criminal, vol. 187, pp. 276-287, 1645; under Spanish colonial law this mulatto
woman, whose mother was Indian and therefore free, was legally free as well.
AGN Inquisición, vol. 360, f. 31, 1627; see Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, ch. 6.
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: From Sodomy to Superstition.
AGN Inquisición, vol. 530, dossier 6, 1695.

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under 25.61 The Pragmatic Sanction targeted with threats of financial
penalties and disinheritance anyone who married a social inferior, with
»black ancestry [. . . ] isolated as the fundamental determinant«.62 As Patricia Seed notes, most cases of social inequality were couched in the
language of economic class as social difference. Moreover, the financial
penalty was something of a change from the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, when such penalties were regarded as morally reprehensible.
In her estimation, »changing attitudes toward the enterprise of making
money« legitimized such disinheritance.63
Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Inquisition also explicitly barred anyone of African descent from its employ. In short, blood
purity – which once applied only to Jews and Muslims – also applied
to blacks and mulattoes.64 At the same time, scientific racism emanating
from Europe clashed with creolisms trying to establish themselves as the
inheritor of ›mixed‹ nations, most of which would become independent
and free their remaining slaves within decades.
In the Pragmatic Sanction decrees, the words casta and raza appear
almost interchangeably. This contrasts with judicial texts not specifically
concerned with limpieza, at least from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The introduction of raza into the blurred lines of casta suggests not
so much that ›blood‹ took on an importance in the colonies that it did not
previously have as it suggests that blood might have become synecdoche
for wealth, as it was in fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain. During the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, economic competition in
the colonies increased, capitalist relations of production expanded, and
new routes to affluence developed.65 In the waning days of the colonies,
›whites‹ were threatened by the presence and potential demands of the
impure. Mechanisms like the Pragmatic Sanction developed to preserve
inherited wealth, as well as to preserve some people as labor.
Following independence in the early nineteenth century, Africandescended people all but disappeared from official Mexican records and
from popular consciousness as blackness came to be seen as an undesirable quality for new, and later for post-revolutionary renewed, Mexicans.
Indeed, few are aware that the nationalist sentiments ushered in and following independence explicitly contrasted black ›degeneracy‹ to white
61
62
63
64
65

Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 243-248.
Patricia Seed: To Love, Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico, p. 206.
Ibid., pp. 206 ff.
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 243-248.
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, pp. 178-182; Patricia Seed: To Love, Honor and
Obey, pp. 200-225.

Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹

117

and Indian value. The late-eighteenth century Jesuit Francisco Javier
Clavijero accompanied a defense of Mexico’s Indians from European
racism with the exclusion of the »vile Black slave and his descendants«
from what would be the Mexican nation.66 Blacks have »damaged blood
and a disorderly physical constitution«, he wrote.67 »What could be more
contrary to the idea we have of beauty and human bodily perfection than
a pestilent man, whose skin is dark like ink, head and face covered with
black wool in place of hair, eyes yellow or the color of blood, thick, blackish lips and flattened nose«?68
The same processes denigrating blacks to establish the nation’s racial
identity later coincided in the writings of José Vasconcelos, who, in 1925,
promoted a »cosmic race« of »constructive miscegenation« based on
white/Indian mixing (mestizaje), while anticipating that the »black race«
would vanish from the Mexican social body. »The inferior types of the
species«, he wrote, »will be absorbed by the superior type [. . . ] little by
little, by voluntary extinction, the ugliest races will make way for the
most beautiful«.69 Thus, mestizaje did not just exclude blacks. It erased
them from the face of the nation.
With the addition of Indianness, the nineteenth-century mestizo differentiated Mexican elites from their European counterparts. Yet with the
exception of revolutionary indigenism (indigenismo), the figure of the
mestizo retained whiteness as the future ideal and Indians as icons of the
past. The mestizo crafted Mexicanness – anchored in Aztec heroism –
as an important site of opposition to the European racializing discourses
that made even elite Latin Americans ›impure‹ and therefore inferior to
white Europeans.70 But the mestizo also provides the most conspicuous
evidence of colonialism’s ability to duplicate itself, for nations to develop
out of »the fabric of European conquest«,71 as it again establishes Indian
and Spanish castas as cornerstones of social, political and cultural identities.72
Today’s morenos (black-Indians) on Mexico’s southern Pacific
66
67
68

69

70
71

72

Cited in Jacques LaFaye: La sociedad de castas en Nueva España, p. 82.
Cited in Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán: Introducción, p. 26.
Cited in ibid., p. 27; see also Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán: El negro esclavo en Nueva España, p. 19.
José Vasconcelos: La raza cósmica, p. 30; cf. Nancy Leys Stepan: ›The Hour of Eugenics‹, p. 150; Taunya Lovell Banks: Mestizaje and the Mexican Self, p. 219; Marco Polo
Hernández Cuevas: African Mexicans and the Discourse on the Modern Nation.
See the essays in Richard Graham (ed.): The Idea of Race in Latin America.
Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, Cristina Szanton Blanc: Nations Unbound, p. 38; cf.
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities.
Cf. Nicholas B. Dirks: Introduction, p. 15.

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coastal belt recognize that Mexican mestizo identity privileges qualities
nationally associated with Indians and whites. Yet just as blacks and mulattoes subverted the sistema de castas, morenos subvert mestizo identity by uniting black and Indian in opposition to white.73 In this regard
Norman Whitten and Rachel Corr note that for Ecuadorian white elites
›moreno‹ is the most dangerous category because it closes off the possibility that whiteness has any place in ›civilizing‹ blacks or Indians.74
Indeed, moreno privileges subalternness: during the early colonial period
Spaniards brought mostly male blacks and mulattoes to Mexico’s southern Pacific coastal belt to work their cattle ranches. From local Indians,
blacks and mulattoes learned to grow food, build houses, celebrate rituals and took wives. From African ancestors they later adopted stories
of maroonage as positive qualities of their own agency. Upwardly mobile, morenos still claim aspects of whiteness, but they do not want to
be white. Instead, black-Indianness combines aesthetics, ritual, kinship,
memory and history. Morenos share with their Indian kin social arenas,
saints, villages, rituals and the burden of migration to the U.S.
In some respects we come almost full circle as Mexican colonial casta
models – if not precise terminologies – are reproduced, including in regions where African descended people live. Moreno, like mestizo, is a
›mixture‹. But it is not referred to as a casta. Instead, moreno is a raza
that looks like a colonial casta. Because moreno is a raza but also ›mixed‹,
one could argue that, like casta during the colonial period, raza today, at
least on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, retains aspects of colonial conceptions of
›race‹ but not in the colonial sense of raza. Thus, one cannot make a linear
argument that raza during the colonial period has the same meaning that
raza has today. Instead, and perhaps ironically, casta – the more fluid and
flexible of the two terms – became the model at least for Mexican notions
of race, and, indeed, for race in other parts of Latin America. As a result,
race in the Latin American world is quite distinct from the northern European and American historical and intellectual processes that base race
on the ›one drop rule‹ or the social rule of hypodescent. While this rule
makes someone ›black‹, or not, ›white‹, or not, ›Native American‹, or
not, in Latin America a different history holds. That history has produced
other ways to think about race.

73
74

Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Chocolate and Corn Flour.
Norman Whitten and Rachel Corr: Imagery of Blackness.

Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹

119

References
Archival Sources
Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico City
Bienes Nacionales, vol. 596, dossier 20, 1684.
Civil, vol. 75, dossier 9, 1599.
Criminal, vol. 34, dossier 13, 1639; vol. 235, dossier 33, 1655; vol. 643, dossier
2, 1619; vol. 132, dossier 2, 1647; vol. 187, pp. 276-87, 1645; vol. 12, dossier
6, 1646; vol. 46, dossier 11, 1648.
General de Parte, vol. 6, dossier 155, p. 158, 1602; dossier 643, p. 333, 1603.
Indios, vol. 6 (1), dossier 177, 1592; vol. 6, dossier 1, 1672.
Inquisición, vol. 206, dossier 5, 1593; vol. 510, dossier 38, 1624; vol. 360, p. 31,
1627; vol. 517, dossier 13, 1674; vol. 498, dossier 16, 1691; vol. 530, dossier
6, 1695.
Reales Cédulas Duplicadas, vol. 5, dossier 511, p. 123, 1607; vol. 5, dossier 815,
p. 200, 1607; vol. 16, dossier 267, p. 136, 1620; vol. 48, dossier 408, pp. 296296v, 1644; vol. 20, dossier 46, p. 35, 1654; vol. 20, dossier 47, p. 36, 1654;
vol. 20, dossier 127, p. 81, 1660; vol. 67, p. 7, 1688.
Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Seville
México, file 38, no. 57-B, 27, 1658.
Correspondencia Villareinal, file 25, no. 26-A, 1603; file 20, no. 29, 1579.
Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (BNAH) (Mexico City), Archivo
Histórico, Colección Francisco de Paso y Troncoso, Leg.113, no. 418.

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Purity of Blood and Caste
Identity Narratives among Early Modern Goan Elites
Ângela Barreto Xavier

Abstract: This essay analyses the roles played by purity of blood and caste in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century identity narratives of Goan elites. Goa and
its population are usually excluded from the mainstream literature of Indian social history, and seldom related to the early-modern Atlantic world, making this
case study all the more valuable as a place to think the topic of blood and caste.
The early establishment and the longevity of the Portuguese imperial presence
(1510-1961) in Goa, its location at the crossroads of multiple cultural geographies (Iberian and Indian, and later, also Dutch, British and French), as well as
the systematic process of religious conversion of its inhabitants and the questions
of legal equality that conversion entailed, all intensified the types, textures, layers and meanings of experiences of social differentiation in this colonial context.
This mapping of the experiences of purity of blood and caste in early-modern
Goa therefore illuminates from a new angle the role of European imperial powers
in the multiple expressions of racial classification.

This essay analyses the roles played by purity of blood1 and caste2 in
identity narratives of Goan elites, between the seventeenth and the eigh-

1

2

I am very grateful to Maria Elena Martinez, Max Hering Torres and David Nirenberg
for their editorial comments, to Nuno Monteiro for discussing with me the meanings
of blackness in the Portuguese early-modern world, to Manuel Campos de Magalhães,
for research assistance, and to Steffen Hörnig for reviewing. This essay is part of the
project ›The Government of Difference. Political Imagination in the Portuguese Empire
(1496-1961)‹, funded by FCT(Referência/PTDC/CS-HST/101064/2008).
The semantic field of the phrase purity of blood in Hispanic cultures has been the object
of a vast bibliography, among which I stress the works of Albert Sicroff: Los Estatutos
de limpieza de sangre; Maria Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions; Nikolaus Böttcher,
Bernd Hausberger, Max S. Hering Torres (eds): El peso de la sangre. For the Portuguese
case, see Maria Fernanda Olival: Rigor e interesses; João Figuerôa Rego: A honra alheia
por um fio. My use of this expression refers to its uses in the mainstream literature.
Caste is used in this essay both as a metahistorical concept – referring to its still more
or less undisputed use in social sciences as the best social category available to describe
Indian social grouping, namely the links between endogamy and occupation – and as
an object of research: its early-modern uses in the context of the Portuguese imperial
presence in India. The bibliography on the word is too extensive to reference here.

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teenth centuries. The setting is particularly interesting: Goa is a place
where western imperial domination lasted for 451 years; where different migrant communities were in daily contact; at the cross-roads of the
Iberian imperial worlds and of the Indian political, social and cultural
contexts;3 and a region where an important demographic inversion took
place. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, the majority of Indian people living in Goa (whom today we would call Hindus) converted to Christianity.4
In contrast with the legal and physical separation that characterized
the first decades of Portuguese imperial presence,5 the systematic conversion of the Indians from 1530 onwards entailed, from a strictly legal
point of view, an equal status for the newly converted and the people of
Portuguese origins. This legal equality was based on the analogy established between the principle of generation, ›natio‹, and the principle of
regeneration (›regeneratio‹ through baptism). From a cultural perspective, it supposed the lusitanization of the local populations, based on the
idea that the true values of Christianity were intertwined with the civility
of the European principalities.
If fully practiced, this potential equalization of colonizers and colonized would have entailed the dissolution of the imperial relation. Instead, it led to a reconfiguration of the colonial order that pre-dated the
conversion of the Indians, and to an increase of social differentiation.
After conversion, the Christian Indians fought for better positions on
the imperial stage. Eventually, their power acquisition strategies reduced
the distance that separated them from the casados, many of whom, on the
other hand, were already half-Indian.6 But these strategies also affected
their relation with the non-converted Indians, many of whom had held,
until that moment, an enviable position in the local imperial court.7
3

4

5

6

7

On these connections, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Explorations in Connected Histories;
Serge Gruzinski: Les quatre parties du monde.
The bibliography on conversion in Goa is also vast. See most recently Délio Mendonça:
Conversions and Citizenry and Ângela Barreto Xavier: A Invenção de Goa.
Until that moment, Portuguese and Indians living at Goa were separate communities in
the lines of the medieval Iberian experiences with Jews and Moors (Luis Filipe Thomaz:
Goa: uma sociedade luso-indiana), something similar, albeit not identical to the separation that organized the relation between Spanish and Indians in the Spanish colonies of
the Atlantic.
Casados were the descendants of the marriages between Portuguese men and Indian
women that had taken place during the viceroyalty of Afonso of Albuquerque, in the
second decade of the sixteenth century. On the characteristics of this group see Ângela
Barreto Xavier: Nobreza per Geração; Andrea Doré: Os casados na Índia portuguesa.
Cf. Catarina Madeira Santos: Goa é a chave de toda a Índia.

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127

The characteristics of Goan society were represented in a powerful
way in the text and images of the ›Itinerario‹ of Jan Hugues van Linschoten. For Linschoten – as for other travellers like Pietro della Valle
and Pyrard de Laval – it was evident that Goan society was very hierarchic;8 but it was also patent that the Portuguese born in India were becoming more and more similar to the Indians. The offspring of marriages
between Portuguese and Indians, for example, were, he stated, »Indians
in color and in physiognomy«.9
In the following pages I will suggest that the writing of identity narratives increased in the context of social anxieties created by these ›tensions of empire‹. These writings competed with each other (while also
sometimes referring to each other), thereby creating a discursive space in
which the criteria for social primacy were openly discussed.
The groups participating in these discursive contests took one of two
strategies. One defended the purity of their group’s blood and its transmission of virtues – a strategy discussed below in the first section, Purity of blood, quality and skin color, through the cases of the Portuguese
friar Miguel da Purificação and of the Brahman bishop Mateus de Castro. The other championed the atemporality of caste – discussed in the
second section, Caste as natural difference, through the writings of the
Charado priest João da Cunha Jaques10 and of the Smarta and Vaishnava
Brahmans of Goa.11 It is worth noting that although all of these writers belonged to the clergy, they nevertheless textualized social difference
as more dependent on natural differences than on religious ones. Moreover these modalities of naturalization of difference (which, in Goa, had
singular expressions) are located somewhere in-between older discourses
on purity and modern discourses on race, sharing traits with both, in the
sense put forward by María Elena Martínez that »the former influenced
the latter in no small ways«.12 Or, to put it differently, Goa is, perhaps,
8

9

10

11

12

Housing, dress, the presentation of self in public space, but also the color of the skin,
were markers that would increasingly organize and visually differentiate these groups
in local society.
Jan Hugues van Linschoten: Itinerário, p. 178; see Edward Gray (ed.): Travels of Pietro
della Vale in India; id., Harry C. P. Bell (eds.): The Voyage of Francois Pyrard of Laval.
Charado (or charodo) was the word used by the Portuguese to designate a social group
belonging to Goan elites. This group was constituted primarily of landowners, people
engaged in military professions, and in business activities.
The Smarta Brahmans claimed descent from the first Brahman migrants, a group established in the territories of Goa since the seventh century whose settlement was clustered
in the villages of Kushasthali and of Keloshi, and whose members were followers of
Siva. Vaishnava Brahmans resulted from the conversion of followers of Siva to followers of Vishnu, after the coming to Goa of Madvacharya, in the thirteenth century.
Maria Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, p. 12.

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a place that helps us to think about the connection between »instances of
›premodern‹ difference« with the »supposedly ›modern‹ forms of racism
with which they are routinely contrasted«.13 And the Goan case is also
a relevant place to test David T. Goldberg’s ideas about transforming expressions of racism, for it too demands to be connected with other colonial experiences.14
The connections between race(s) and caste(s) in the Indian context
have mainly been studied with an eye fixed on the racial contexts of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Among others,
the classic books by Govind Sadashiv Ghurye and Louis Dumont stressed
the distinctiveness of the social history of India, turning it into a history
of competition between races, expressed through caste.15 After the seminal work of Bernard S. Cohn,16 the role of the censuses, namely those
of 1891, by J. A. Baines, and of 1901, by Herbert Risley, in the fixing of
these categories and the connections between them has been widely discussed.17 In these two censuses, the relation between race and caste were
explicitly established:18 the pale-skinned castes (the Aryans) appeared as
dominant, in particular those that had martial qualities (claiming to descend from the Kshatryas) and those that were intellectual (claiming to
descent from the Brahmans), while the darker castes were presented as
dominated. The same type of interpretation would be reassessed in the
works by Ghurye, Dumont, and others.
These connections between races (Aryans, tribal, and so forth) and
castes (Brahmans, Kshatrya, and others) were seldom questioned until
(de)constructivism presented caste as a colonial invention,19 and the his13
14

15

16
17

18

19

Ania Loomba: Race and the Possibilities of a Comparative Critique, p. 503.
Cf. David T. Goldberg: Racist Culture. Among historians, similar views can be found at
Pierre H. Boule: Race et esclavage; and more recently Ronald Raminelli, Bruno Feitler:
Apresetação.
See Govind Sadashiv Ghurye: Caste and Race in India; Louis Dumont: Homo Hierarchicus.
See Bernard S. Cohn: Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge.
Cf. Ronald Inden: Imagining India, pp. 56-66 (›Caste as Race‹); Susan Bayly: Caste
and ›Race‹ in the Colonial Ethnography; Thomas Trautmann: Aryans and British India;
Tony Ballantyne: Orientalism and Race.
For example, in the Census of 1891, the occupational criterion that was previously
used to classify the different castes was now combined with a criterion of descent, or a
racial criteria. And the Census by Risley, critical of the one of Baines, was even more
ambitious, and provided an overwhelming theory that went back to the Aryan invasion
and to the endogamous practices of the Aryans. On that, see Samarendra Padmanabh:
Between Number and Knowledge, and bibliography.
The works of Bernard S. Cohn: Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge and Ronald
Inden: Imagining India are paradigmatic of this approach.

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129

toricization of caste became a new trend in the scholarship.20 The scholarship of the last decades has shown that social dynamism and conflict in
early-modern India were very intense. The competition between Kshatryas and Brahmans, each group arguing for social supremacy; and the
increasing agency of the Brahmans, with their growing presence in places
of governmental and political importance: these have been themes attracting more and more attention. In a classical study, Veena Das showed that
identity narratives were already produced by Brahmans and Baniyas of
Gujarati in the context of the Muslim domination, because of the need
that such groups had, in that context, to assert difference and social primacy.21 Nevertheless, Susan Bayly and Nicholas B. Dirks argue that the
spread of the values of royalty (due to Kshatryas) preceded the exaltation
of the Brahmans, and can be identified across the sub-continent during
the pre-British period, while Brahman traditions were privileged mainly
during the British rule.22 Other literature has demonstrated, however, that
the two dynamics co-existed and can be identified in different parts of
early-modern India. From north to south, several communities claimed
to be of the descent of the mythical Brahmans, while others tried to link
their collective memory to the mythical Kshatryias.23
In all these contests for supremacy, groups argued for the antiquity
of their lineage (frequently enlisting genealogies), their endogamy, and
frequently the fairness of their skin, claiming direct descent from the old
varnas24 already present in the vedic literature: Brahmans, Kshatryas,
Banyas, and Sudras. In other words, not only endogamy, but also color,
played a role in pre-colonial and colonial India. A quick look at earlymodern Indian portraits suffices to demonstrate the importance of skin
color in the presentation of the self within these highly charged Indian
political settings.25
20

21
22

23

24

25

Susan Bayly: Caste, Society and Politics, is probably the best example. See the excellent
review of this book and its genealogy by Jackie Assayag: La caste entre l’histoire et
l’anthropologie.
Cf. Veena Das: Structure and Cognition.
Cf. Susan Bayly: Caste, Society and Politics; Nicholas Dirks: The Hollow Crown; id.:
Castes of Mind.
On these processes also see Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Penumbral Visions; Velcheru
Narayna Rao, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Textures of Time; Richard
Maxwell Eaton: A Social History of the Deccan pp. 184 and following; Kumkum Chatterjee: History as Self-Representation; Sumit Guha: Serving the Barbarian; Prachi Desphande: Creative Uses of the Past.
In Sanskrit, Varna meant color, and was initially used to distinguish and separate the
Aryan invaders from the Dasas (the original inhabitants of India).
Cf. Rosemary Crill, Kapil Jariwala (eds.): The Indian Portrait, 1560-1860.

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In general, the caste experiences taking place under Portuguese imperial rule have been absent from this field of research of Indian history,26 but a 2008 article published by Rosalind O’Hanlon and Christopher Minkowski has demonstrated that the Brahmans of Goa (mainly
Smarta Brahmans from the village of Kunshastali) were also involved in
these larger-scale Indian identity processes, namely through family networks that spread throughout the Indian Deccan.27
The recent literature on Goan territories has also shown that disputes
over caste primacy were intrinsic to social dynamics in the region, and
preceded the Portuguese presence.28 Parallel and connected to these discursive disputes on caste, disputes on nobility took place in Goa, too,
from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards. The connections
of these disputes with the Indian contexts they belong to are becoming
more and more visible in current scholarship, but we should not let these
connections blind us to the equally important Spanish and Portuguese
roots of these conflicts. For example, through this literature the role
played by the Portuguese in the discursive ›invention of Indian caste‹
becomes more evident,29 more or less at the same period when a very
different system of castes was emerging in colonial Mexico.30
Purity of Blood, Quality, and the Color of the Skin
»The children from India, friars of that Province are not negroes, as the
rival faction states; neither are they mixed-bloods. Instead, they are well
born, from Portuguese mothers and fathers, nobles by generation. And
the reason for this is that in this Province, because of the Apostolic rules
and General Statutes of the Franciscans, there are no children from India
that are mixed-blood, or sons of mixed-blooded people, and absolutely
none is negro«.31 We find these words of friar Miguel da Purificação, a
26

27
28
29

30

31

The classical book by Frank Conlon: A Caste in a Changing World deals with Brahman
migrations from Goa and is mainly concerned with contemporary issues.
Cf. Rosalind O’Hanlon, Christopher Minkowski: What makes people who they are?
Ângela Barreto Xavier: A Invenção de Goa.
Ibid., and João da Cunha Jaques: Espada de David contra Golias; Ines !upanov, Conversion historiography; Patricia Faria de Souza has also published on these matters,
drawing on my propositions.
Literature on these dynamics in the Atlantic world is too vast to map here. For an
overview of the Mexican case see Maria Elena Martinez: Genealogical Fictions and
the bibliography quoted there; for the Brazilian case, see the recent collection edited
by Rodrigo Bentes Monteiro et. al: Raizes do Privilegio, as well as the special issue of
Tempo organized by Bruno Feitler and Ronald Raminelli.
Miguel da Purificação: Relação defensiva, f. 22v (quotations from non-English sources
have been translated).

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131

Portuguese born in the town of Tirapur but living in Goa, and member of
the Franciscan Province of Saint-Thomas, in his ›Relacion defensiva dos
filhos da Índia Oriental‹.32
The ›Relacion defensiva‹ was published in Barcelona, in 1640, some
few months before the political separation of Portugal from the Hispanic
Monarchy. Miguel da Purificação had gone to Madrid and Rome to defend the rights of his Franciscans against those of Portugal, in a dispute
over which group was better suited to hold positions of governance within
that religious order’s Goan Province, and the Province’s right to continue to be autonomous from the Province of Portugal. Purificação argued
that the members of the Province of Portugal did not allow those of the
Province of Saint-Thomas of Goa and of the Province of the Mother of
God to be superiors of the Order, against the General Statutes that had
been approved in the last General Council.
Behind these particular goals, the more general tension reflected in
this text was the opposition between the Portuguese born in India (the
casados), and those born in Portugal (known as reinóis). The reinóis
accused the casados of being mixed-blood (i.e, of degraded blood, and
therefore of lower quality), indeed almost negroes, because they were of
Indian descent. The accusation was a serious one, since to be of mixedblood signified exclusion from access to important offices, especially
since the statutes of purity of blood had been adopted by many of the
imperial institutions.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, to be of pure blood in
the kingdom of Portugal meant, first of all, to be an Old Christian: without stain of Jewish or Moorish (meaning Muslim) blood. The children
of marriages between Old Christians and New Christians (with Jewish
or Moor blood), and their descendants were considered contaminated.33
When transferred to India, this principle included the Indians, too. To say
that someone had ›race of Indian‹, for example, was almost equivalent to
saying that he or she was like a Jew or a Moor. Moreover, there were Indians that were of Jewish descent, and there was also a school of thought –
or perhaps better, a rumor – that claimed that the Brahmans were of the
same tribe of Israel from which the Jews descended.34
32

33

34

At the same period friar Miguel da Purificação was writing his book, Bonaventura de
Salinas y Cordoba, a Franciscan from Lima, was writing treatises defending similar
ideas – already analyzed by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra: New World, New Stars.
Cf. João de Figueiroa-Rêgo: A honra alheia por um fio; Maria Fernanda Olival: As
Ordens Militares e o Estado Moderno; id.: Rigor e interesses.
See Ângela Barreto Xavier: From Conversos and Novamente Convertidos; on the connections between the colonial discourses of racism and anti-semitism, see Étienne Balibar: Racism and Nationalism; Maria Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, Introduc-

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Because of that, for a Portuguese of pure blood to marry an Indian
contaminated, in principle, the couple’s issue, degrading the quality of
any children. This degradation of quality was openly expressed in a royal
letter of Philip II of Spain (I of Portugal), of 1596, expressing his annoyance over the fact that Portuguese men were still marrying Indian lowcaste women. In order to avoid these unwanted unions, the king established that the men that were marrying those women should be prevented
from holding offices in the royal administration.35 This letter confirms
that already in the sixteenth century, the emphasis on purity of blood was
well established in Portuguese India, and affected the Portuguese born
there who were suspected of being of Indian descent.36
Already in 1558, the Portuguese Franciscans had been forbidden from
accepting New Christians into their order, following the decisions that
the friars of the Holy Cross had adopted in 1540,37 themselves part of a
more general process that had spread throughout the Spanish world beginning with the Sentencia-Estatuto of Toledo of 1449. The Franciscans
had themselves been keen to associate purity of blood with purity of faith,
and played an important role in the dissemination of this discourse in the
Iberian world, even if among them there were also those that questioned
the theological validity of this policy.38 Still, the mainstream Franciscans
were against the acceptance of mixed-bloods, and the General Statutes
of 1622, which were also applied to India, were very explicit about the
prohibition on accepting »modern gentiles« into the novitiate.39
It is possible, too, that due to the experiences of the Portuguese friars
in Africa,40 prejudices towards people of black color were combined with
the ones against mixed-bloods of Jewish, Moorish and Indian origins,
helping to stereotype the population of Indian descent.

35
36

37

38
39
40

tion.
Cf. Carta do rei de Portugal ao vice-rei da Índia, 1596, pp. 620-628.
An enquiry to the uses of the word blood in the Portuguese theatre of the sixteenth
century is, in that respect, very suggestive. Although it is not always associated with
purity, blood is frequently described as »noble blood«, »real blood«, »fair blood«,
»good blood«, »gentle blood«, »polished blood«, a semantic family that easily communicates with »pure blood«. These expressions had a wide audience in the Portuguese society, contributing to the shape of their social imagination (results from CETQuinhentos, a database of the Portuguese theatre of sixteenth century, http://www.cete-quinhentos.com/info, on 14th of January 2012).
Cf. Maria Fernanda Olival: Rigor e interesses, p. 154; João de Figueirôa-Rego: A honra
alheia por um fi, pp. 65-68, 84-90.
Cf. Albert A. Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, chapter 1 and pp. 203-209.
Estatutos Generales, p. 1.
For example, they were the missionaries sent to convert the king of Congo, already in
the end of the fifteenth century.

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For Purificação, for example, it was evident that to have mixed-blood
was worse than to have a pure blood, and that to be a black Portuguese
was less than to be a white Portuguese. But if the inferiority of black to
white seemed evident to this Franciscan and to many of the Portuguese
born in India,41 it was less evident (for his audience, at least) how these
colors were acquired and transmitted. Was skin color a product of blood
or a product of climate? Were the people born and brought up in certain
regions of the world (just by chance, the Iberian colonies) normally negro? Were the Portuguese born in India, because of that very same reason,
black? Could the offspring of a white Portuguese couple become negro,
if born in India? And if so, how did the vices of the blacks attach to them?
These questions are not addressed directly in Purificação’s text, but they
animate much of his argument.
First, Purificação openly argued against those who believed that the
weather and the land cause changes to people’s bodies and minds. The
different skin colors were the result of blood and not of environment or
climate: »to be a negroe or a mixed-blood does not depend on the land, or
the place where one is born, but on the mixture of generation: if one has
the mixture of negro, it can be said that he is similar to a negro, that is to
say, that he is a negro, or a mixed-blood«.42 Consequently, the child of a
Portuguese couple could not look like an Indian, but would be necessarily
a Portuguese and a white.
Second, vices and virtues were not transmitted by breastfeeding, as
some still believed. The friar recalled that Lisbon was the mother of negroes (»mãe de negros«). Not only were many blacks established in the
capital of the empire,43 but black women were breastfeeding the majority
of the children of the Portuguese nobility!44 In Lisbon, no one argued that
this widespread practice contaminated the blood of the children of Portuguese nobility. Although exclusion based on the color of the skin is difficult to map within the Portuguese legal structure, Purificação’s claims
show that a discussion on blackness was taking place in the Asian extensions of the Portuguese empire. This discussion oscillated between a
41

42
43

44

The early-modern Portuguese theatre is very suggestive of how widespread these
meanings were (results from CET-Quinhentos http://www.cet-e-quinhentos.com/info,
on 14th of January 2012).
Miguel da Purificação: Relação defensiva, f. 38.
There are no precise numbers, but more than 10% of the population of Lisbon was of
African origin, see Alastair C. de C. M. Saunders: A Social History of Black Slaves
and Freedmen in Portugal; Jorge Fonseca: Escravos e Senhores; id.: Black Africans in
Portugal; Didier Lahon: O negro no coração do Império.
Annemarie Jourdan: Images of Empire, refers to the important presence of black slaves
in the households and urban palaces of Lisbon, performing different domestic duties.

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typical frame of reference based on blood, and another one closer and
closer to racial thinking. Purificação believed that to complement words
with the visual and sensorial experience of a negro in flesh would help the
Pope, the cardinals (among whom was the powerful cardinal Barberini,
the protector of the Franciscans), and the ministers at Rome and Madrid
to understand the difference between the white body of a descendant of
a Portuguese and the black body of an Indian negro. Consequently, he
always walked with »a negro from India«, demonstrating that, to a Portuguese born in Goa, the color of skin did matter,45 as it most probably
did in Rome and in Madrid, as well.46
To sum up: for Purificação, blood was the most important criterion for
determining social hierarchy. However, it was not any type of pure blood
that mattered for occupying the top of the society. It was the combination
of Portuguese blood, along with the fair skin color and the good qualities
of the Portuguese that blood entailed, which justified that the Portuguese
born in India should occupy, like any other pure Portuguese, superior
power positions in the imperial order.47
Ironically, this same purity of blood was also invoked by Brahman
converts to Christianity, who accused the Portuguese group to which friar
Purificação belonged of being mixed-blood and of black descent, and
therefore of lesser quality than themselves, and thereby questioned the
social hierarchy operating in Goa.
One member of this group who did so was Mateus de Castro, son
of Brahman converts to Christianity, himself educated among the Franciscans of Goa and therefore probably a colleague of Miguel da Purificação at some point of his education. Castro was also the kind of man
who could have played the role of the ›negro‹ that Purificação took with
him to Rome in order to provide visual proof of the difference between
Portuguese and Indian bodies. Castro, however, anticipated the future he
could expect if he remained in Goa, and chose instead to travel to Rome
in search of more opportunity.
45

46

47

Even if the recent articles of Francis A. Dutra: Ser mulato em Portugal, João de
Figueiroa-Rêgo, Maria Fernanda Olival: Cor da pele, distinções e cargos, show that
the color was not always a barrier in the access to certain benefits of the Crown, the
discourses were more and more ›white‹.
Kate Lowe: The stereotyping of the Black Africans, pp. 19 and 47 is of the opinion
that the negative stereotyping of Black Africans in Europe was probably related to the
dissemination of a »Renaissance white, European culture and civilization«. Where was
this culture better disseminated than in Rome itself?
In that sense, I disagree with the interpretation proposed by Jean-Paul Zuñiga: La voix
du sang, on the absence of languages of race in the early-modern period, considering
all these languages, instead, languages of blood.

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135

In fact, the Goan Franciscans in the first decades of the seventeenth
century would not allow him to enter the College of Saint Bonaventure
in order to pursue the studies necessary to become a priest.48 The Franciscans pointed to the prohibition in the Statutes, and added that the Indians did not have the intellectual qualities needed to perform the sacred
duties of the Christian religion. They could only access, therefore, subaltern positions, like singing in the choir. Echoed in the letters written
by the Colector of Portugal49 to cardinal Oriulzi, in 1629 and 1630, at
Rome the beliefs of the Franciscans (and the ›racialized exclusion‹ they
entailed) were considered a menace to the expansion of Christianity.50
Castro arrived at Rome in 1625, after an eventful journey. There he
was helped by Secretary Ingoli, of Congregazione della Propaganda Fide,
an institution that was particularly sensitive to the demands of the native
clergy of the Iberian empires, and by the same cardinal Barberini that
would receive Purificação a decade later.51 In Rome, Castro was accepted
to study in the college of the Oratorians of the Order of San Filippo de
Neri. Later, he would become priest and Bishop. Finally, he would be
sent to India with the mission of reporting to the Pope on the state of the
missions in those territories.
When Purificação arrived at Rome, in 1639, Castro had already been
back to India for some years, presumably to perform the duties the Pope
had asked him to do. But Castro was ill-received by the majority of the
clergy in Goa, dominated by the Portuguese, who prevented him from
exercising his duties. After various adventures, which included returning
to Rome and once again to India, he decided to write a memorandum
about the relations between the Crown of Portugal and the Brahmans of
Goa.
In this memorandum called ›Espelho de Brâmanes‹, Castro accused
the Portuguese missionaries of disseminating false images of the Indians
in the Portuguese metropolitan world, calling them »gente vil« (people of
very low condition), not humans, worse than goats. These images circulated in Rome, where he recalled being asked whether the Brahmans were
human or not. Calling the Brahmans a nation – a nation like any other nation of the world – Castro questioned the superiority of the Portuguese,
whom he openly accused of being sons and daughters of low-caste Indian
48
49

50
51

Cf. Giuseppe Sorge: Matteo di Castro; Patricia Souza de Faria: Mateus de Castro.
The papal officer that had the function of receiving the tributes payed by the Portuguese
crown to the Pope.
Cf. Lettere Spagna, Portogallo, Indie, Svizzera e Colonia, 1630, no 98, f. 85.
Charles R. Boxer: The Portuguese Seaborne Empire; Carlos Merces de Mello: The
Recruitment and Formation.

136

Ângela Barreto Xavier

women and downgraded Portuguese men. For Castro it was unquestionable that the Portuguese established in India were »sons of Goan marketwomen, Malabars, Bengalis and blacks«, and very inferior to the noble
Brahmans, the group to which he belonged.52 In other words, Castro reproduced the same accusations made by metropolitan Portuguese against
the Portuguese born in India, and evoked the Portuguese discourses of
purity of blood – which probably matched perfectly his own Brahman
beliefs – in order to question the colonial social hierarchy established in
Goa.
Already at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Duarte Barbosa had
no doubt that the Brahmans »were all of the same lineage; they are not
made of different peoples, like us, but the son of a Brahman is a Brahman«.53 Barbosa also insisted on the obsession of the Brahman caste with
cleanliness and purity, an image of Brahmin culture that was transmitted
by the majority of texts produced by the Portuguese or in the context of
the Portuguese imperial rule.54 Castro was probably aware of these and
other representations produced about the Brahmans, in particular the frequent reference to their endogamy and their concern with cleanliness and
purity, and he evoked them on the behalf of his group.55
Instead of using the word caste, Castro preferred to refer to criteria
used by the Portuguese in order to define nobility.56 In order to complement his argument about the civil nobility of the Brahmans, he noted that
the Brahmans of Goa were of the descent of king Gaspar, one of the Magi
who recognized Christianity at its very beginning. Through this rhetorical
device, the Brahmans of Castro added to purity of blood an immemorial
Christian lineage (disrupted by the arrival of Islam), thereby becoming
equivalent, if not superior, to Old Christian Portuguese nobility.
The propositions of Castro and of other Brahmans like him would
in turn be contested by a rival group, the Charados of Goa, who also
vindicated their primacy in the Indian caste hierarchy, appealing to their
direct descent from the Kshatryas.

52
53
54
55

56

Espelho de Brâmanes, cited in Giuseppe Sorge: Matteo di Castro, p. 78.
Maria Augusta de Veiga e Sousa (ed.): O Livro de Duarte Barbosa, vol. 2, pp. 115 ff.
See, for example, Ines !upanov: Disputed Mission.
Cf. Ângela Barreto Xavier: O lustre do seu sangue, and the richer bibliography on this
subject quoted there.
Cf. José Guillén Berrendero: Los mecanismos del honor y la nobleza; João FigueirôaRego: Honra por um fio, pp. 491-511.

Purity of Blood and Caste

137

Caste as a natural difference
»It is well-know that caste is a natural difference, specific and inseparable, that allows the differentiation between nations. Therefore, a person who has been born Portuguese will always be a Portuguese, and
will never be an Italian, even if he wants to, because the nation and the
Portuguese caste that differentiates him from the Italian, is inseparable,
and he can never leave or lose it«.57 These words belong to the treatise
›Espada de David contra o Golias do Bramanismo‹, written by João da
Cunha Jaques in the first decade of the eighteenth century. He aimed his
sword at a number of earlier works, refutating a lost book by an unknown
author, the ›Epithome da Geneologia dos Bramanes‹, as well as Antonio
João Frias’ ›Aureola dos Indios, Nobiliarchia Bracmanica‹, published in
Lisbon in 1702, and a memorandum written by the Brahmans alleging
the low ancestry of the Charados.
Amplifying Castro’s template, the anonymous treatise, of which the
only known references are the excerpts contained in the treatise of Jaques,
explained that the Brahmans and the Jews had different genealogies, and
that the Brahmans were the true descendants of Abraham. The proofs
were primarily linguistic: replicating an idea already present in Arabian
writers, for the author of the anonymous treatise, Abraham and Brahma
were essentially the same word. In the second, a genealogical history,
Frias defended the claim that the Brahmans were the most noble among
all the castes of India. And in the memorandum, finally, some Brahmans
argued that the Charados, instead of descending from the Kshatrya, as
they claimed, were the result of the union of a concubine with four different men.
Jaques could hardly accept any of these propositions. Born in the second half of the seventeenth century, he was priest of the church of St.
Stephen in the village of Cuncolim, and had received, on 5 March 1701,
the important title of chaplain of the king. Probably he felt that his own
privileges were at stake. And he believed that his group was being denied
its rightful place in the Portuguese imperial order because of the images
the Brahmans had disseminated in Lisbon and Rome, accusing the Charados of being of lower quality. Instead, it was evident that »[w]ho was
born brave, warrior and soldier, as the brave Rajput Charodos in India,
will always be brave, warrior and soldier, and it could not be differently,
because in him the value is natural and inseparable«.58
57
58

João da Cunha Jaques: Espada de David, f. 10v
Ibid., f. 10v.

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Ângela Barreto Xavier

By natural and inseparable, Jacques meant that it came from the
»utero matris«, and not from the external world of education and culture.
Consequently, the question »de qua progenite es tu?«, that is, the inquiry
into genealogy, was the most relevant question in order to locate someone
in a precise caste. Similarly, blood and generation were the basis of the
meaning of nation. Like the caste of the Kshatryas, there was the caste
of the Portuguese, the caste of the Italians, and so forth. Or, alternatively,
one could speak of the nation of the Portuguese, of the Italians, of the
Kshatrya, of the Charados. But one could not speak in similar terms of
the Brahmans. For Jaques, Brahmanism was a matter of culture, and not a
matter of nature. In other words, one was not born a Brahman, but could
become, during his life, a Brahman. The rites the Brahmans had to perform during their lives to see their Brahman identity socially recognized
proved this.
Later in his treatise, and somewhat inconsistently, Jaques would argue
that the Brahmans were, in fact, a caste, but an inferior one. Using now as
a methodological tool of enquiry the identification of the place of origin,
he stated that the Brahmans came from the hills of the Caucasus, a region
whose populations – according to Strabo and other classical authors –,
were extremely base and cruel. Megasthenes, for example, had described
these people as having sex in public spaces, feeding themselves with the
bodies of their companions, and behaving like beasts and monsters.59
The Brahmans were, if not monsters, in any case people of low quality, performing forbidden activities like magic and divination. And their
ancestors were fishermen – according to Jaques –, belonging to the social
category of craftsmen: people unqualified to hold offices of government
in the Portuguese imperial order. Since fate »did not change the caste
and the origins« of any person, the Brahmans were still like fishermen.
And given that virtues and vices were connected with the caste people
belonged to, and that the lower the caste, the greater the tendency of its
members to lie, it was not surprising that the Brahmans were liars and
false people. As a demonstration, Jaques gave the example of the Brahmans of the village of Kushasthali, location of one of the oldest religious
centers (matha) of the Brahman Smartas of that region, a people he considered extremely cruel and violent.
In contrast to the base qualities of the Brahmans, the noble traits and
military virtues of the Kshatryas had been transmitted by blood to the
Charados. These had been consistently expressed through the two cen-

59

Cf. ibid., f. 28r.

Purity of Blood and Caste

139

turies of Portuguese domination, during which the Charados of Goa had
sacrificed their lives and their blood in order to defend it.60
Even if the position of João da Cunha Jaques was somewhat extreme,
especially when compared to the texts written by most Portuguese and
other Europeans on matters of caste, and on Brahmanism in particular, this treatise belongs to the another discursive trend that considered
the Kshatryas (therefore the Charados) at the top of Indian social hierarchy. The trend was noticeable not only in the rest of India, but also
in metropolitan Lisbon. An example was the ›Promptuario de Deffinicoes Indicas‹ of the Charado priest Leonardo Paes, which dedicated 287
pages to proving the supremacy of the Charados. And perhaps more importantly, the widespread ›Vocabulario‹ of the father Raphael Bluteau explained, under the definition of the word ›casta‹, that the Kshatryas were
the first of the four principal castes of India, replicating the arguments of
men like Jaques and Leonardo Paes.61
These texts acknowledge the multiple understandings of caste which
circulated in Goa at the beginning of the eighteenth century, meanings
that were simultaneously shaped by Portuguese imperial encyclopedias,
as well as by the Indian ones; meanings that had important impacts in the
social practices and on the organization and distribution of power in the
local society. The aim of Jaques and Paes – similar to the aim of their rival
Brahmans – was to present the Charados as the better prepared to hold
important offices in the Portuguese imperial order. In order to achieve
this, they used arguments that circulated in Goa and in the broader Indian
world and which were also present, as we have seen, on the discursive
stages of Lisbon and Rome.
The Indians that had not converted to Christianity were not excluded
from these contests for social primacy in the Goan (and outside) world.
The conflict between Smarta Brahmans and Vaishnava Brahmans in the
first decades of the eighteenth century, more or less the same years when
the Charados were writing their own identity, is another case of the multiple expressions of Goan social dynamism during Portuguese imperial
rule: »No one is ignorant of the fact that the first prerequisite for marriage is the equality of blood and nobility of husband and wife; if there is
difference between them concerning blood, the superior one refuses the
alliance. This is a practice around the world and especially among the

60
61

Cf. ibid., f. 28r.
Cf. Rafael Bluteau: Vocabulario, vol. 2, p. 184.

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Ângela Barreto Xavier

natives of this land who belong to different castes, and do not mix with
those that do not belong to the same caste«.62
This statement belongs to a memorial written by the Smarta Brahmans of Goa and sent to the Portuguese king, part of a conflict that
opposed them to the also non-Christian Brahmans Vaishnava. In Portuguese, and utilizing a completely westernized structure and argumentation, the Smartas argued for the union between the different Brahmans
of Goa, justifying their position on the basis that they were all sons
of Brahma, of the same ancestry and of the same blood.63 They were
equal, and their ability to intermarry and eat together was premised on
this equality. Inequality, the Smartas added, »proceeds from humble generation or from the performance of a low office«, and neither of these
conditions bore on these two groups of non Christian Goan Brahmans.
Referring to Aristotelian physics, the Smarta contended that the original nature of the Vaishnavas was also Smarta, and that only by accident
had they become Vaishnavas. Therefore, in accord with (Portuguese) natural law, they should not be separated from their final cause and original
nature.64 But in fact the Vaishnavas wanted to separate from the Smartas,
whose swami (main priest), until then considered superior to their own
swami in matters relating to the rites of caste concerning marriage and
commensality, they no longer wanted to obey.
The reasons given by the Vaishnavas to justify their claim for separation were explained in a memorandum sent to the viceroy of India,
João Saldanha da Gama, in 1725.65 In this memorandum, the Vaishnavas
argued that an intrinsic difference existed between the two groups, expressed »in the different signs they bear on the face and on different
parts of the body«. These signs were the lines that all the Brahmans wore
across the shoulder (and arranged differently, depending on their Smarta
or Vaishnava identities), but also paintings on the face that could have different shapes and colors, again depending on identities. This was clearly
another case where external signs of distinction were necessary in order
to make visible inner differences between seemingly very similar bodies.
In contrast with the Vaishnavas’, this memorandum informs us that
the Smartas had previously accused the Vaishnavas of »horrible defects«,
62
63
64

65

Memorial que os Bramanes Cortalos fizeram, ff. 738-740v.
Cf. ibid., f. 747.
Drawing from Portuguese philosophical and legal culture, biblical examples, as well
as literature produced by the Portuguese about the social order of Asian societies this
memorandum is a good example of how non-Christian Brahmans of Goa appropriated
the languages of empire.
Cf. Memorial que oferecem, f. 823.

Purity of Blood and Caste

141

namely »many mixtures with white people« (that is, marriages with Portuguese). These mixtures made it »improper to communicate [i.e., eating together and have social intercourse] with them«. Consequently, the
swami of the Smartas had threatened to exclude from the Brahman caste
some Smartas who had eaten at the home of Suia Naique, a Vaishnava
accused of this transgression.66
The Vaishnavas refuted all the accusations, and counter-attacked with
similar claims. They argued that it was the Smartas, rather than they, who
had mixed, but this time with the Narvalhos do Norte,67 accepting them
as real Brahmans from Salcete.68 The swami of the Smartas of Goa, they
said, had participated in a dharmasaba (a Brahmanical assembly where
disputes of caste were settled) of the Narvalhos do Norte, at Mumbai, in
exchange for a huge amount of money and other gifts. In this way the
swami tried to expand his power »with any type of people, since nowadays there are lots of people that are not Brahmans but look similar to
them«. The Vaishnavas were disgusted with these attitudes and refused
to mix with »any type of people«.69
Indeed, just as the Smartas claimed, the Narvalhos do Norte were
descents of Brahmans of Goa who had migrated to different regions of
Maharashtra from the twelfth century onwards, some of them known as
Rajapur Saraswats. This means that the accusations of the Vaishnavas
were either rhetorical, counting on Portuguese ignorance of the details of
the local history of migration; or they expressed their true disgust. It is
possible that the Vaishnava Brahmans knew that the Narvalhos shared a
similar blood and the same ancestry. However, the fact that, in the meantime, the Narvalhos had mixed with other people, meant, for the Vaishnavas, that they had lost their older caste status.
In the context of identity disputes that were taking place in Maharashtra at this time, the Narvalhos were forced to find a real swami, a swami
willing to accept the role of their spiritual leader and to perform the rites
necessary to recognize them as Brahmans, in order to defend their former
positions. It may well be true that their old connections to the Brahmans
of Goa, coupled with gifts of money, had facilitated the relations recently
established between them and the swami of the Smartas.70
66
67
68

69
70

Ibid., ff. 824v.-825.
Brahmans established at Narvan, a village at Rajapur, Ratnagari, in Maharastra.
The region south of the town of Goa, belonging to the territories usually known as Goa,
where a majority of the population of Brahman origins was concentrated.
Memorial que oferecem, ff. 831v.-832.
On these identity disputes involving people from Goa see Rosalind O’Hanlon, Christopher Minkowski: What makes People who they are?; Frank Conlon: A Caste in a Changing World.

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Ângela Barreto Xavier

Independently of the practical reasons behind this conflict, in their
memorandums the Smartas and the Vaishnavas oscillated between two
different identity regimes. On the one hand, blood was the main criterion of identification for both groups. However, for the Smartas, common
blood ancestry prevailed over cultural ›accidents‹ that might occur across
historical time (such as conversion to another religion, for example: according to this view, Christian Brahmans remained Brahmans). In that
sense, there was an intrinsic Brahman identity that was immutable. The
Vaishnavas had a different understanding. For them, cultural accidents –
like their own conversion to Madvacharya, or the cultural adaptations
of the Narvalhos – changed the status of the groups involved. Among
these changes, physical mixing was, perhaps, the one most to be avoided.
Hence, the Vaishnavas included genealogies with their memorandum, in
order to prove the quality and purity of their blood.
These conflicts among the Vaishnavas and Smartas of Goa are even
more interesting if we locate them in the more general disputes on Brahmanism that were occurring throughout the Indian world during the same
period (a world to which the Brahmans of Goa belonged culturally and
socially through the family networks that connected them with other
Brahman groups). It should be remembered, too, that a manuscript version of the Sayadhri Khanda, which claimed to be part of the Skanda
Purana, had been produced in Goa, probably in the village of Kushashtali, in the year of 1700. This version, which served as the basis for an
›official‹ version of this text published in the nineteenth century by the
Mumbai based Goan orientalist Gerson da Cunha, presented the Brahmans of Salcete as among the best Brahmans of all India.71
Conclusion
In Goa, the generalization of the concept of purity of blood was not only
achieved by imposition, i.e. by its adoption by institutions in order to
restrict access to imperial careers, but also by juxtaposition, since the
Iberian concept of purity of blood encountered analogous concepts in
the Indian world. The ideal of purity that circulated in the early-modern
Indian world not only included various forms of purity (not only of blood,
but also of body, food, and so forth), but it also preceded, in many ways,
the Iberian one. It was, in other words, already an internal concept in
Goa before its translation from metropolitan Portugal to the colony. In
part because of this factor, the adoption of purity of blood as an imperial
71

Cf. J. Gerson da Cunha: The Sahyâdri-Khanda of the Skanda Purâna.

Purity of Blood and Caste

143

tool for social differentiation also served as a vehicle of empowerment
for the colonized.
This empowerment of the colonized, and its potential to reduce (and
dissolve) differences between them and the Portuguese, increased the
anxieties of the latter, especially of those born in India. These needed to
assert the purer quality of their blood compared with that of Indians. The
threat that converted Indians embodied (evidenced in complaints like that
of a mid eighteenth century viceroy of India who opined that it was unfair that in Goa the colonizers were poor, while the colonized were rich)72
obliged Miguel da Purificação to link good blood to Portuguese descent,
downgrading all the other groups that had good blood but were not Portuguese. To associate blood with the Portuguese nation, along with the
virtues and whiteness that Portuguese blood (and bodies) entailed, was a
strategy for (pro)claiming supremacy, stimulating formulations of identity that were closer and closer to the concept of race. Simultaneously,
men like the Brahman Mateus de Castro had no difficulty in accusing
the Portuguese of not having pure blood, even insinuating that the Brahman Christian lineage was older than the Portuguese one! The colonized
easily manipulated the Portuguese vocabulary of nobility for their purpose, and the impact of their rhetoric stimulated discourses like the one
of Purificação.
These two cases also demonstrate that the recognition of the status
in the interior of the Portuguese empire depended not only on the Portuguese crown, but also on other transnational institutions, such as the
Papacy (Rome), which might have their own ›imperial‹ strategies.
If the concept of purity of blood had a singular history in the Goan
setting, the same can be said, for different reasons, of the concept of caste.
The Portuguese word ›casta‹ was mainly used in the Indian context to
identify social groups where endogamy was linked with the transmission
of occupation. Soon, the logic of casta produced names for various and
diverse social groups, names that would become both a descriptive and
a prescriptive concept, providing the imperial grammar (first Portuguese,
then British) of differentiation with a new object of discourse. In this
purely discursive sense, the Portuguese did invent Indian caste. Moreover,
the spread of the word caste as a tool of identification of Indian ways of
grouping was parallel to the growing presence of purity of blood in the
kingdom of Portugal. In Foucauldian terms, we might say that both are
objects of the same system of classification.
72

Colecção de manuscritos originais acerca do Estado da India. Biblioteca Nacional de
Portugal (Lisbon) ms. 4180.

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Like purity of blood, caste was also an expression that Indians converted to Christianity easily imported into their own vocabulary. We can
map such usages in the treatises written by Christian Charados like João
da Cunha Jaques and Leonardo Paes, and Christian Brahmans like António João Frias, Francisco do Rego or Sebastião do Rego. More surprising, is the fact that the word became a tool of self-identification among
non-Christian Brahmans as well. Particularly suggestive is the conflict
that opposed the Smarta Brahmans and Vaishnava at the very moment
when the same groups were arguing, in Sanskrit, for the importance of
Goan Brahmans within the broader Indian world. It is not yet possible
to map how the formulations of caste in Portuguese circulated within
the broader Indian context, outside the contours of Portuguese-speaking
communities: a project that calls for new itineraries of research.
If a better integration of the Goan experiences in the Indian history
is needed, another suggestive itinerary for research is the comparison
between the Portuguese-Indian concept of caste (closely related to endogamy and purity) and the Hispanic-Atlantic concept (also closely related to purity, but in quite different ways). There is, I think, much to be
learned from the different historical fates of this singular word in these
geographies that were so closely connected during this particular period
of history.
References
Archival Sources
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (Lisbon):
Colecção de manuscritos originais acerca do Estado da India, ms. 4180.
Archivio della Sacra Congregazione della Propaganda Fide
Lettere Spagna, Portogallo, Indie, Svizzera e Colonia. Rome: Archivio della
Sacra Congregazione della Propaganda Fide, Scritture Originali, no 98 1630.
Historical Archives of Goa (India)
Memorial que offerecem a presença de Vossa Excellencia os Bragmanes chamados vaisnavos oriundos de Salcete e das lhas de Goa. Livros das Monções.
Vol. 101.
Memorial que os Bramanes Cortalos fizeram. Livros das Monções. Vol. 101.

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Beyond Race
Exclusion in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America
Tamar Herzog

Abstract: After briefly reviewing the debates concerning Spain’s responsibility
for the invention of classificatory systems based on race, this article suggests that
focusing on race may sometimes limit our understanding of practices of exclusion
as these also included additional discourses susceptible of explaining, legitimizing and even naturalizing the displacement of the ›other‹. Among such discourses
was the classification of individuals as members or non members, citizens or foreigners, which in early modern Spain and Spanish America collaborated with,
added to, or replaced, racial distinctions. By examining how categories of social
and political belonging were applied to Gypsies, Native-Americans, and individuals of African descent making them both native and foreign, the goal would be
to consider what the inclusion of debates on membership in the study of ›race‹
may add to our understanding of the past.

Historians have often identified Spain as the site in which racism first
emerged. For some, this distinction was tied to the purity of blood statutes
that from the fifteenth century sought to establish a permanent discrimination against individuals of Jewish (and eventually Muslim) descent.1
Others linked it to what they identified as the emergence of a new type of
anti-Semitism, mainly exercised by the Inquisition that, in the aftermaths
of mass conversions, concentrated on persecuting the New Christians,
whom it accused of heresy.2 While these mainly focused on the relationship with Jews and Jewish conversos, other historians envisioned Iberian
contribution to racism as the elaboration and distillation of Muslim protoracism that gradually distinguished Africans from ›whites‹ and that, even
before the beginning of the Atlantic slave-trade, attributed different char1
2

Cf. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism, pp. 11 ff.
Cf. Benzion Netanyahu: The Origins of the Inquisition. Reviewing this book, Henry
Kamen: The Secret of the Inquisition contested these affirmations, arguing instead that
Converso Jews were persecuted because of their heretic practices, not their origins.

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acteristics to the members of each cluster.3 For yet others, Iberians developed their racial thinking in the Americas as a byproduct of both colonialism and large scale dependence on African slaves.4
Although scholars debated what the precise contribution of Spain
may have been, when it happened and why, many agreed that the »immediate foundations of racism in modern western thought« was Iberia5
or they sustained that »sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain is critical
to the history of Western racism because its attitudes and practices served
as a kind of segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages
and the naturalistic racism of the Modern era«.6
Spain’s responsibility for the emergence of racism also attracted the
attention of scholars of both Spain and Spanish America. In their response to generalists, these scholars searched to either deny or confirm
these affirmations. Those denying the connection between Spain and
racism drew a line between late medieval and early modern practices
on the one hand, modern racism on the other. They sustained that modern
racism was intimately tied to the emergence of scientific explanations that
distinguished among peoples according to their origins,7 or they stressed
the different semiotic meaning of race (raza) in Spanish, arguing that
early modern discussion were in reality debates on culture and religion,
not biological makeup.8 Complicating the direct link between Spain and
racism, some noted that despite ›Iberian antecedents‹ racism was a panEuropean phenomenon, with inspirations that were partially Spanish, partially not.9 Other members of this group, stressing that earlier forms of
distinction-making may have persisted to modernity, demonstrated that
despite apparent continuities their meaning and extension may have radically changed.10 Meanwhile, those agreeing with the Iberian origin of
racism were willing to see in Spanish modernity a darker side that may
have contributed to the horrors we witnessed during the nineteenth and
twentieth century.11
3

4

5
6
7
8

9
10
11

Cf. James H. Sweet: The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought, pp. 145, 159 and
162.
Cf. Charles W. Mills: The Racial Contract, pp. 3-11; Giuliano Gliozzi: Adamo e il
nuovo mondo.
James H. Sweet: The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought, pp. 143 f.
George M. Fredrickson: Racism, p. 40.
Cf. Francisco Márquez Villanueva: The Converso Problem, p. 324.
Cf. Thomas Glick and Oriol Pi-Sunyer: Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept,
p. 144.
Cf. Jerome Branche: Colonialism and Race, pp. 12-17.
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions.
Cf. Irene Silverblatt: Modern Inquisitions, pp. 3 ff., 16 ff.

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An important component of these debates was the way notions of
race contributed to the formation of Spanish identities. Perhaps to pardon
Spain of the responsibility it may have had in inventing racism, many
scholars pointed out that, even as early as the eighteenth and nineteenth
century, Spanish theorists referred to Spain as a melting pot, made of
different people who had merged together. According to this portrait, by
that time, if there was a ›Spanish race‹ at all, it was made of individuals
of mixed descent, indeed mestizos as these would be termed in the Americas.12 And, because Spanish identity allowed for biological mixing (according to some, most famously Américo Castro, also cultural mixing),
by the late nineteenth and in the twentieth century, it could be common to
both Spaniards and Spanish Americans through the invocation of a shared
›Hispanity‹.13 Contesting them were other historians who sustained that,
although the vision of Spain as the result of a long miscegenation was extremely powerful in some sectors, it coexisted with theories that upheld
the single origin of all Spaniards and that classified all other elements in
Spanish history (Jews, Moors, Indians, Africans, Gypsies, and so forth)
as foreign.14
Recognizing the importance of these debates, in what follows I would
like to propose that their centrality often overshadowed the omnipresence
and enormous weight of other means for stereotyping, marginalizing, or
excluding the ›other‹. Such means existed alongside, added to, and at
times replaced, a discourse on race and it is only by integrating them into
our analysis that we can come to understand fully the ways by which
early modern individuals understood both similarities and differences.
Natives, Citizens and Foreigners
One of the most powerful means of making distinctions in early modern Spain and Spanish America was the conceptual divide between community members (called vecinos when referring to the local community,
naturales when referring to the various Iberian kingdoms) and foreigners.
From as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the local level,
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the level of various Iberian kingdoms,
12

13

14

Cf. Joshua Goode: Impurity of Blood, pp. 48 f., 57. Latin American intellectuals may
have responded in similar ways – see Jerome Branche: Colonialism and Race, pp. 2231.
Cf. Maite Jou: Gabriel García y Tassara, p. 535. According to some, the image of
Spaniards (and Hispanic) as mixed was also held by foreigners – see María Deguzmán:
Spain’s Long Shadow, pp. xxviii-xxix.
Cf. José María Olmos: Historia del racismo en España, p. 125.

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and as a result of the growing competition for resources, different actors
in different fora fought to restrict the enjoyment of certain benefits to
those classified as belonging to the community. As a result of these legal
efforts/petitions, a new discriminatory regime gradually emerged, first in
the Peninsula, then in Spanish America, distinguishing members from
non-members and allocating each a different set of rights and obligations – only vecinos could pasture in municipal property and be elected
to the local council, only natives could hold public office or immigrate to
the Americas, and so forth. Easier to envision than to apply, despite common sense assumptions that it would be simple to distinguish members
from non-members, the emergence of these new legal categories (vecino,
natural and foreigner) produced lengthy debates as to who was who and
who should benefit of which treatment.
Separating vecinos from forasteros, and naturales from extranjeros
often proved difficult because these conditions were established by interpreting behavior rather than observing ›hard facts‹.15 Described in the
legislation by the juridical doctrine and in everyday practice as consisting of a bundle of elements (one had to consider the place of birth, the
identity of parents, place of residence, economic, social, fiscal, military,
civic and religious performance, among other things), this combination
of elements required contemporaries to measure different factors against
one another, giving each its proper weight, before a viable conclusion on
the status of each individual could be reached. Thus, while it was clear
that a person born in the community to local parents, who continuously
resided in its territory, paid taxes, prayed in the local church, participated
in local holidays, was a member in the local militia (where such existed),
spoke the local dialect, and so forth, was a member; and that a person
that had none of these characteristics was not; between one extreme and
the other were many intermediary situations. Among these could be, for
example, a person born outside to foreign parents who had settled locally
and exhibited all the other enumerated traits; or on the inverse, a locally
born individual to local parents who had left the community; or any such
mixtures.
Because the allocation of rights and duties was at stake, many individuals, groups and communities took part in these debates. Some wanted to
ensure their access to rights such as the ability to participate in local elections (only granted to vecinos), or to immigrate to Spanish America (only
open to naturales). Some, on the contrary, wanted to ensure that others
would not be allowed to do so, by declaring that they were foreigners.
15

Cf. at length Tamar Herzog: Defining Nations.

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While on occasions vecinos and naturales fought to classify their fellowmen as foreign, on others they struggle to assert their condition as community member, mainly, in order to compel them to comply with duties
such as tax payment or service in the militia. As a result, whenever the
need to fix the rights and duties of membership arose, a debate was unleashed among interested individuals, and between municipal and royal
institutions regarding who was who, and who could benefit from which
treatment.
Because membership condition depended on daily manifestations,
because it was constructed by reference to an accumulation of traits (as
well as their validation by outside observers) and because it could potentially change overtime as these traits mutated, deciding who was who was
extremely difficult. Contemporaries complained constantly about this reality. Individuals, local and royal authorities who wanted to impose duties such as tax payment on certain people, argued that they pretended
to be natives and foreigners alternatively according to what best suited
their interests.16 The same happened in local municipalities where some
claimed membership when invoking their right to vote at the council,
but refused to join the militia claiming to be foreign. Yet projects elaborated mainly in the eighteenth century by merchant communities (who
were particularly sensitive to the privileges foreign merchants enjoyed in
Spain) or royal authorities (who wished to subject foreigners to Spanish
law) – envisioning a permanent classification that would ensure that each
person would get the treatment he or she deserved, repeatedly failed.17
On these occasions it became clear that no formal definition of members
and non-members could even be adopted. What was needed instead was
a soft definition that would require evaluating specific circumstances and
would permit constant revisions.18
Although focused on social and political membership, these debates
are important to the study of »race« as an analytical category because
they were employed not only to measure the degree of belonging to a political community but also as a generic discourse against any group whose
16

17
18

Letter of the Junta de Comercio y Agricultura de Valencia, 3.4.1773, Archivo Histórico
Nacional (hereby AHN), estado, 629-3/66. These complaints reproduced what local
agents experienced: Letter of theMarquis de Croix tothe Junta de Comercio, Moneda y
Dependencias de Extranjeros, 16.3.1765, AHN, estado 647/21 and the debates in AHN,
estado 629-1/4 y 629-3/63.
Cf. Tamar Herzog: Defining Nations, pp. 130-140; id.: Communities becoming a nation.
Legislators in Cádiz in the early 1810s will encounter the same problem. Elaborating
the first written constitution of Spain, they found it impossible to adopt a regime of
legality, which would define once and for all Spanish nationals and citizens – see Tamar
Herzog: Defining Nations, pp. 154 f.

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members, because of their cultural, social or ethnic belonging, could be
considered external to the Spanish community. The Gypsies (gitanos),
native-Americans (indios or naturales), and Spaniards of African descent
(as they would be called in the Constitution of Cádiz of 1812) may serve
as examples.
Gypsies
Anti-Gypsy measures were common in Spain during the fifteenth to the
eighteenth centuries. They ordered Gypsies to change their ways of life
and admonished them that unless they did they would be persecuted, incarcerated, or even sentenced to death.19 Although the stereotyping of
Gypsies was clear in these measures – they were portrayed as nomads
who engaged in illegal activities and who lived separately from ›ordinary‹ Spaniards – what was absolutely missing was a clear vision of who
Gypsies were. During the early modern period, many anti-Gypsy measures insisted that there was no Gypsy nation (nación).20 Gypsiness, they
sustained, was a designation taken on voluntarily by people who wanted
to misbehave. Although such people were ›normal‹ Spaniards, not foreigners, they pretended to be different so to gain certain benefits, which is
why they needed to be reduced to conformity. Yet, the legislation that assured of their sameness also stressed their distinction. Connecting Gypsiness to a voluntary (bad) behavior, it also confessed that Gypsies spoke a
different language and had different customs and it did not devise ways
by which Gypsies could become non-Gypsies, for example, by behaving
well.21
That anti-Gypsy legislation was incoherent is perhaps less surprising
than that the same legislation repeatedly produced indications that although Gypsies were Spaniards they were also foreigners. Not only were
19

20

21

Some of this legislation can be found in Archivo de la Chacillería de Valladolid (hereby
ACV), Secretaría del Acuerdo (hereby SA), cédulas y pragmáticas, C.8-66, C.8-88,
C.10-88, C.10-139, C.12-8m C.12-18 y C.12-53 and in Archivo General de Simancas
(hereby AGS), Gracia y Justicia (hereby GJ), 1004. It was partially reproduced in the
Novísima Recopilación, book 12, title 16.
During this period, the term ›nación‹ mainly referred to a common origin. Petition of the
Cortes de Castilla dated 1619, reproduced in cédula of 11.11.1692, ACV, SA, cédulas
y pragmáticas C.8-66; chapter 1of the pragmática de 19.9.1783, cited in the pragmática
of 28.2.1784, AGS, GJ 1004 and Antonio Gómez Alfaro: La gran redada de gitanos,
p. 13.
Petition of 16.12.1745, cited in the pragmática of 19.7.1746, ACV, SA, cédulas y pragmáticas, C.12-18. On these issues also see Richard J. Pym: The Gypsies, pp. 36, 75
f., 130 f., 141 f. who identifies the incoherence of anti-Gypsy measures but does not
pursue it.

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they foreign in language and customs, not only could they be identified
on the basis of phenotypes (as was often the case), the measures the legislation dictated would, ideally, lead to their naturalization. These measures
would ensure that they would reside in the territory for a sufficient length
of time and in the ›correct way‹. According to Spanish legal doctrines,
this would transform Gypsies into members of local communities (vecinos) first, of the kingdom community (naturales), second.22
The Gypsies who appealed to the authorities and the courts understood this reality. In the eighteenth century, at least, they argued that they
were Castellanos viejos rather than nuevos (and thus Gypsies – the term
castellanos nuevos apparently designated Gypsies locally). They insisted
that it was a mistake to consider them Gypsies because »they were not
foreigners« but instead »originals of the kingdoms and not of the Gypsy
nation« or they outright requested their naturalization.23 At stake, they
explained, was their ability to enjoy the »constitutions, exemptions and
privileges of the natives of these kingdoms«. Foreign observers agreed.
Writing in Cádiz in 1749, the French consul remarked that, although
Spanish Gypsies could be considered natives, they were usually treated
as foreigners.24
Indians
The treatment of Indians in Spanish legislation, and administrative and
social practices was equally incoherent. Quintessential ›natives‹ and constantly identified as such, the question of whether their nativenness also
transformed them into Spaniards (as would happen on the Iberian Peninsula) was unclear. In their condition as vassals and non-foreigners, were
they members also of the Spanish community? Did they enjoy the rights
of Spanish natives such as the right to immigrate freely? To hold offices?
To enjoy benefits? This question, rarely discussed by historians either because it seemed clear to most that Indians were ›natives‹ because born in
the Americas, or because many of them were unaware of the importance
of ›nativeness‹ in Spain and the debates, doctrines and rights associated
with it, nevertheless loomed large in the imagination of contemporaries.
22
23

24

Cf. Tamar Herzog: Defining Nations, pp. 130 ff.
Petition of Baltazar Vargas, dated 1797, Archivo de la Villa de Madrid, Secretaría 2348-62 (quotations from non-English sources have been translated); see María Elena
Sánchez Ortega: Documentación sobre la situación de los gitanos españoles en el siglo
XVIII, pp. 248 ff.; id.: Los gitanos españoles, pp. 159 f., 163 ff.
Cf. François Vaux de Foletier: La rafle des gitans, pp. 6 f.

158

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In 1568, for example, two indios principales from New Spain requested to return to the Americas after visiting the Peninsula. In their
request, they registered that they were naturales of the Americas yet,
despite their vassalage, extranjeros in Spain.25 Insistence on Indian vassalage, so common in Spanish American documentation, could thus be
read not only as a positive affirmation that they were vassals but also as a
negative affirmation that although vassals they were not natives.26 While
some sources indicate in this direction, others do not. In 1598, Baltasar
de Álamos argued that two types of natives existed in the New World:
Indians, who were »native by origin«, and Spaniards, who were »natives
by birth«.27 Both, he sustained, formed part of the same community and
were thus worthy of the same treatment. Agreeing with him, some early
modern authors suggested that tax payment (tributo) was a sign of such
membership28 or they affirmed that Indians recognized the king as their
master (señor) as all other Spaniards did.29 It is therefore possible that
making Indians ›natives‹ was not an automatic, common-sense, measure
as most historians have assumed in the past but instead a means to deethnicize them, forcing them to insert in the new political community
that was forming in the Americas.30 Like all communities in Spain, this
community too depended on insertion in the local sphere and obeyed the
same tests as it would in Iberia. As in the Gypsy case, it required that all
differences in dress, manners and customs between Spaniards and Indians immediately cease to exist.31
The first objection most historians would invoke against thinking
about Indians as ›natives of Spain‹ would of course be the two republics.
But, as is well known, not only did these never fully exist (they were
said to have ›fallen‹ before they were ever instituted) but it is also unclear whether the two republics were instituted as a permanent or only
a temporary measure, until natives would conclude their civil and religious conversion.32 Furthermore, the inability to answer who exactly
were Indians and what was their relationship to the kingdoms of Spain
25
26

27
28

29
30

31
32

Cf. José Luis Rojas: Boletos sencillos, p. 188.
The difference between these two categories is described in Tamar Herzog: Defining
Nations, pp. 133-139.
Cf. Baltasar Álamo de Barrientos: Discurso político, p. 14.
Cf. Carlos Baciero: Juan de Solórzano Pereira y la defensa del indio en América, p. 300,
citing José Zapata y Sandoval.
Cf. Juan Solórzano Pereira: Política Indiana, book 3, chapter 1, nos. 14.
Cf. Carmen Beatriz Loza: ›Tyrannie‹ des Incas et ›naturalisation‹ des Indiens, pp. 377,
389-394, 405.
Cf. Juan Solórzano Pereira: Política Indiana, book 2, chapter 26, no. 40.
Cf. Tamar Herzog: Indiani e cowboys, pp. 9-17.

Beyond Race

159

(versus their relationship to the king, which was clear because they were
declared vassals) allowed some native-Americans to affirm their Spanishness. Such, at least, was the case of indigenous nobles who, because like
Spaniards living in Spanish America they did not pay taxes, could consider themselves Spanish rather than Indian.33 The same conclusion was
reached by the elites of Tlaxcala who, by virtue of their Alliance with
Spaniards and their colonization of the Mexican North, could perceive
themselves as conquistadors (rather than conquered people), colonizers
(rather than colonized), Spanish (rather than Indian).34 And, if on the
one hand, these claims could indicate that perhaps in the Americas the
opposite of Spaniard was no longer the foreigner but instead the Indian,
on the other, the question of whether Indians were or were not natives
of Spain clearly referenced the debate on nativeness and foreignness as
it developed in the Iberian Peninsula. It examined who was who by asking whether Indians could hold public offices and ecclesiastical benefits,
two of the issues that were central to the distinction between community
members and foreigners in Spain.35
The importance of these questions came to light in the early nineteenth century when deputies to the Cortes de Cádiz had to decide
whether native-Americans were both nationals and citizens. On that occasion, they noted what we have already observed, that is, that colonial
laws considered Indians both nationals and citizens because they allowed
them to hold public offices. Furthermore, as natives of a territory now
integrated into Spain, they were necessarily original members of a community. Yet, in Cádiz too, some delegates went a long way to insist that
despite their nativeness, Indians were the quintessential foreigners. After
all, they were different from Spaniards in language, culture, and capabilities.36

33
34

35

36

Cf. Ruth Hill: Teaching the Pre-History of Race, p. 105.
Patricia A. Ybarra: Performing Conquest, pp. 9 f., 19, 56, 138 refers to the ambiguous position of Tlaxcala and local requests to access rights reserved to »citizens« or
Spaniards (and denied to »Indians«).
Cf. Juan Solórzano Pereira: Política Indiana book 2, chapter 29, nos. 25-34; cédulas
of 19.12.1696, 26.3.1697, 27.11.1703, 21.2.1725 and 11.9.1766, reproduced in Richard
Konetzke: Colección de documentos, vol. 3(1), pp. 64-69, 93 f., 186, 333 f.; see Antonio
Muro Orejón: Cedulario americano del siglo XVIII, vol. 1, pp. 602-660; id.: La igualdad
entre indios y españoles.
Cf. Tamar Herzog: Defining Nations, pp. 157 f.

160

Tamar Herzog

Africans
»Spaniards of African descent« (a term coined in the discussions in Cádiz
in the 1810’s) were also equally native and foreign. During the colonial
period, certain individuals and institutions insisted that blacks (negros)
were members of foreign nations and subjects of foreign kings.37 As
long as they were slaves, they could not change their civic adhesion and
become Spaniards through their naturalization and, as freed individuals,
their actions did not necessarily indicate what their wishes were. Brought
to Spanish domains against their will, their presence on it gave no assurance that they had chosen to remain among Spaniards, a condition
necessary for their naturalization. But how could one sustain that freed
Africans (the use of this term became prevalent in the late eighteenth
century) who had been living in Spanish domains for generations and
were inserted in local communities were foreigners? And what would be
the status of Africans who purchased »their whiteness«?38 Was this purchase also an instrument of naturalization? Did it make Africans, as some
of them had argued, »members of the nation« (del cuerpo de la nación)?
Did it make them eligible to the rights of Spaniards? After all, whiteness gave access to offices reserves not only to the »pure of blood« (such
as admission to colleges and universities or gilds) but also to »natives«
(public offices and nobility titles).
The question of whether Gypsies, Indians and Africans were natives
or foreigners was not a theoretical one. Their classification not only stigmatized them socially, but also led to their legal discrimination, adjudicating to them, instead of the rights of natives (which they deserved) the
burdens of foreigners. Nonetheless, examining debates on their nativeness or foreignness had not been on the forefront of research. But what
happened if it had been?
In a paper presented some time ago I observed – as many perhaps did
before me – that although we now have sufficient information regarding
the presence of African slaves in Peninsular Spain – in some places they
formed as much as 5 to 15 % of the population39 – hardly anyone ever
attempted to explain why by the eighteenth and nineteenth century (if not
earlier), most Spaniards assumed that African slavery was a colonial, not
37

38

39

Cf. John H. Parry: The Age of Reconnaissance, p. 317; Carmen Bernand: Negros, esclavos y libres en las ciudades hispanoamericanas, pp. 9 f., 50 f.
Rodolfo Santos: El régimen de las ›gracias al sacar‹ en Venezuela durante el período
hispánico, vol. 1, p. 534, vol. 2, p. 359. Although these subjects are described in Santos,
the framing of the questions is mine.
Cf. Alessandro Stella: Histoire d’esclaves dans la Péninsule Ibérique, pp. 51 f., 57, 76;
Françoise Orsoni-Avila: Les esclaves de Lucena, pp. 51 ff.

Beyond Race

161

a domestic, affair.40 How could contemporaries living in Spain ignore
the presence of Africans if fifteenth-century Seville looked like a Chess
board, its inhabitants alternating between White and Black?41
Because African presence in peninsular Spain was understood by
most scholars as a racial problem, the few historians who had studied
this paradox were mainly interested in uncovering how and why traces
of Africans disappeared. For the proponents of a white legend, because
Spain was not a racist society, Africans could fully integrate into it, leading to their disappearance from both records and memory.42 For the
proponents of a black legend, Africans were constantly discriminated
against and their disappearance could only be explained by biological
extinction.43 Simply put, slaves rarely reproduced and rates of mortality among them were exceptionally high.44 But whether we accept one
explanation or the other, the question remains: how could early modern
Spaniards who were living among so many Africans consider the presence of Africans a colonial affair?
One obvious answer would be that African descent stigmatized its
bearers more clearly in the New than the Old world. Indications that this
may have been the case could be found in discussions regarding purity of
blood. Although in sixteenth-century Spain some institutions may have
added to their purity statutes the exclusion of Africans, this, apparently,
was the exception, not the rule.45 Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence
40

41

42

43

44

45

›The Antecedents: How did Early Modern Slavery in Spain Disappear?‹, a paper presented in the conference ›Tratando la Trata/Treating the Trade‹, organized by professor
Lisa Surwillo and held at Stanford University on April 9-10, 2010. That the presence of
Africans was a colonial affair was clear, for example, in the speeches given by Argüelles
on January 9, 1811 and Morales Duárez on February 7, 1811 – see Diario de las discusiones y actas de las Cortes de Cádiz, vol. 2, p. 323 and vol. 3, pp. 281 f., respectively.
Cf. Antonio Collantes de Terán Sánche: Contribución al estudio de los esclavos en
la Sevilla medieval p. 121, citing the municipal council on September 18, 1461. This
situation may have continued into the eighteenth, perhaps early nineteenth century – see
Vicente Graullera Sanz: La esclavitud en Valencia en los siglos XVI y XVII, pp. 179183; Pedro Parilla Ortíz: La esclavitud en Cádiz durante el siglo XVIII, pp. 18 and 154.
Cf. Ruth Pike: Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth century, p. 359; Aurelia Martín
Casares: Freed and Freed Black Africans in Granada in the Time of the Spanish Renaissance, pp. 251 f; Antonio Domínguez Ortíz, who classified the purity of blood statutes
as »racist« nevertheless argued that there was no racism vis-à-vis-the African population – see id.: Los judeoconversos en España moderna, p. 138 and id.: La esclavitud en
Castilla en la Edad Moderna y otros estudios de marginados, p. 29.
Cf. José Luis Cortés López: La esclavitud negra en la España peninsular del siglo XVI,
pp. 18-24, 89-97; Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars, p. 5.
Cf. Alessandro Stella: Histoire d’esclaves dans la Péninsule Ibérique, pp. 28 179;
Manuel López Molina: Una década de esclavitud en Jaén, pp. 173-174.
Cf. Baltazar Fra Molinero: Ser mulato en España y América, p. 124; María Elena
Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, p. 207.

162

Tamar Herzog

that in the Peninsula individuals of African descent could successfully
argue against these extensions, demonstrating that their origin was not
necessarily indicative of impurity.46 Nonetheless, during the same period
in the Americas Castilian concepts of limpieza de sangre were habitually,
indeed mostly, applied to persons of African descent, eventually producing a classificatory system that would systematically discriminate against
all blacks.47
As its predecessors, this account would be based on race and racial
analysis. But what would happen if we tried to imagine other types of
explanations? One such explanation could come from art history and it
would sustain that the existence of things does not make them necessarily visible. Africans were habitually depicted in Spanish American
art, yet they were mostly absent from Spanish European Golden Age
paintings.48 This did not happen because Africans were absent from
Spain – they were present in great numbers – but because the way they
were inscribed in these works led to their invisibility. Because European
Spanish Golden Age paintings were pedagogically orientated, they portrayed conversion as a transformative event. Depicting African subjects
as Christians meant for artists that they also had to be described as ›normal‹ Spaniards and, thus, as ›whites‹. In Spain, portraying free, converted
Africans as white may have also served to demarcate the distance separating them from slaves. This, however, did not happen in Spanish America,
where Africans were depicted as blacks, and were distinguished from all
other social members as is evident, for example, in casta paintings.
Taking these suggestions seriously, we can perhaps argue that at stake
was not only reality but which parts of what reality were meaningful.
The disappearance of Africans from peninsular consciousness, as a result,
may have not been tied to data (how many were they, have they integrated
or were extinct) but to what contemporaries made of their presence. Precisely because representations of alterity could be manipulated, it is more
than possible that Africans may have left in Spain traces we still fail to
recognize. One of these could be the distinction between natives and foreigners. Recognizing that Africans were discriminated against not only
because of their skin color and origin, not only by using racial designations, but also by making them foreigners and, as a result, barring their
46
47
48

Cf. Alessandro Stella: Mezclándose carnalmente, p. 175.
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 158 f., 167 ff., 202 ff., 225.
Cf. Carmen Fracchia: (Lack of) Visual Representation of black Slaves in Spanish
Golden Age Paintings; id.: La problematización del blanqueamiento visual del cuerpo
africano en la España imperial y en Nueva España; id.: Representación de la esclavitud
negra en la España imperial y la problematización del par original-copia.

Beyond Race

163

access to important privileges of membership, could potentially make the
reading of the past more complex and thus more interesting.
Depicting Africans as ›white‹ could thus be interpreted as a racial remake, but it could also be conceived as a move to make them natives
rather than foreigners. In a society that greatly depended on external
cues, perhaps naturalizing Africans required ensuring that all traits possibly identifying them as foreigners would disappear. Following this logic,
perhaps making them appear similar because on some levels they were,
was more important than denoting their differences. That Spanishness inferred being white could therefore be read on one level as confirming the
importance of ›race‹ and, on another, as confirming its irrelevance. Rather
than making Spain African, as some twenty-first century observers have
requested, it made Africans Spaniards.49
Thinking about Africans as foreigners may thus supply additional
horizons through which to examine their discrimination and exclusion.
It could sustain, for example, that perhaps in Spanish thought Africans
and Spaniards were not binaries, but instead formed part of a continuum.
Rather than Africans being non-Spaniards, or Spaniards non-African, as
with all natives and foreigners, what existed were two opposite poles
linked by an enormous amount of intermediary situations of those more
African than Spanish, more Spanish than Africans, or equally African
and Spanish. Such a vision would support the evidence we currently have
that the classification of individuals into one group or the other was highly
complex, that it depended on a wide variety of elements and that the result
was conditioned by who was asking, where, and for what reason. Last but
not least, it would also help explain why colonial authorities, wishing to
marginalize Africans, insisted on their lack of patriotism and why those
contesting these claims attempted to prove the contrary by joining the
militia and paying taxes or why debates regarding the status of Africans
in Spanish America often coincided with a confrontation between Peninsulares and Creoles over office holding.50 After all, besides being traits
of good citizens, these activities and distinctions were also part of what
distinguished natives from foreigners.
49

50

Cf. Antumi Toasije: The Africanity of Spain, pp. 350, 354; the ›Madrid Declaration of the Black Community‹ (http://www.documentalistas.com/projects/notalone/
declaration.php); Blog posted on January 24, 2009 (http://theblacklistpub.ning.com/
profiles/blogs/spanish-parliament-admit-to – 28.4.2010).
The city council of Caracas on 28.11.1796, reproduced in José Félix Blanco (ed.): Documentos para la historia de la vida pública del libertador de Colombia, vol. 1, pp. 267275, Rodolfo Santos: El régimen de las ›gracias al sacar‹ en Venezuela durante el
período hispánico, vol. 1, pp. 518 f.

164

Tamar Herzog

References
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Letter of theMarquis de Croix to the Junta de Comercio, Moneda y Dependencias de Extranjeros, 16.3.1765, AHN, estado 647/21 and the debates in AHN,
estado 629-1/4 y 629-3/63.
Archivo de la Chacillería de Valladolid (ACV)
Secretaría del Acuerdo (SA), cédulas y pragmáticas, C.8-66, C.8-88, C.10-88,
C.10-139, C.12-8m C.12-18 y C.12-53.
Petition of 16.12.1745, cited in the pragmática of 19.7.1746, SA, cédulas y pragmáticas, C.12-18.
Archivo General de Simancas (AGS)
Petition of the Cortes de Castilla dated 1619, reproduced in cédula of 11.11.1692,
cédulas y pragmáticas C.8-66; chapter 1of the pragmática de 19.9.1783, cited
in the pragmática of 28.2.1784, GJ 1004.
Archivo de la Villa de Madrid (AVM)
Petition of Baltazar Vargas, 1797, Secretaría 2-348-62.

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Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2009.
Yerushalmi, Josef Hayim: Assimilaton and Racial Anti-Semitism. The Iberian
and the German Models. New York: Leo Back Institute 1982.

Race in Retrospect
Thinking with History in Nineteenth-century Cuba
David Sartorius

Abstract: This essay discusses how the history of Spanish colonialism and racial
ideology provided a vocabulary of political critique for Cubans in the nineteenth
century. The island’s continued loyalty to Spain was linked to a shared identification with Spanish history, even as movements for independence criticized its
history of racial inequalities. Some of the island’s first written histories reflected
on an inclusive colonial project whose fair treatment of Indians, and to a lesser extent of Africans, had been betrayed by nineteenth-century policies that excluded
even Cubans of Spanish descent from political rights. Some Cubans of African
descent also looked to a benevolent colonial past to argue for inclusion as citizens, while others looked instead to histories of Spanish American independence
and the Haitian Revolution for examples of political experiments that attempted
to end racial inequalities. The essay revises an image of nineteenth-century thinking about race and politics as guided by future-looking principles of progress and
modernity. Many Cubans conceived of a future as citizens through examples in
the Spanish colonial past.

By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the racial logic of political rule in the Iberian world was in rapid transition. The short-lived
1812 Cadiz Constitution had redefined Spanishness, made indigenous
men citizens, and offered a narrow window to citizenship for free men of
African descent who could demonstrate ›virtue and merit‹. Independence
movements in mainland Spanish America cautiously embraced republican ideas in order to cultivate the support of non-Spanish populations
and ultimately forged national states that nominally affirmed racial equality. And despite the continuity of colonial rule in Cuba and Puerto Rico,
the ›sugar revolutions‹ on those islands made slavery and race the critical issues in almost any discussions of reform or revolution – especially
those discussions that sought to steer change away from the model of the
Haitian Revolution. Change appeared ubiquitous: as Louis A. Pérez, Jr.,

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David Sartorius

has remarked, it was »the condition around which most Cubans routinely
organized their daily lives«.1
If forward-looking orientations like these have bolstered narratives of
national identity, whether Spanish or Latin American, they have also obscured reckonings with the colonial past that happened simultaneously.
To what extent did the experiences of nearly three centuries of Spanish rule inflect the conversations about race in the nineteenth-century? In
Cuba, the time was ripe for reflection: as the rest of Spain’s empire crumbled, an elite minority made active decisions to remain loyal based in part
on aspirations to a productive sugar economy driven by African slave labor and anxieties about the experiments with racial equality taking place
in the rest of Spanish America.2 Many other Cubans continued to support
Spanish rule as well, and identifying with an illustrious history of Spain
positioned them to claim the benefits of Spanish citizenship. In contrast,
independence-minded Cubans found in the Spanish past the origins of
racial ideologies that conflicted with a race-transcendent expression of
Cuban nationalism developing within the anticolonial insurgency.
In his wide-ranging exploration of Spanish imperial histories and national identities, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has demonstrated how the
history of colonial rule provided fertile ground for nineteenth-century debates about the nature of the contemporary empire, for example, when
writers invoked Bartolomé de las Casas as both a symbol of imperial harmony and colonial critique.3 Following that approach, this essay examines how Spain’s colonial history, as well as the history of racial ideologies within Spain, provided a vocabulary for discussing race and rule in
nineteenth-century Cuba. By no means an exhaustive account of Cubans’
reckonings with the history and memory of race and colonialism, it offers
a glimpse at how Cubans (and some Spaniards) made meaning with the
past in historical scholarship, policy debates, and a public sphere that expanded dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century.4 The work that
race performed in nineteenth-century Cuba was not limited to structuring
a plantation economy and enforcing social hierarchies. Because political
discussions had to reckon with the continuation of Spanish rule, Cuban
politicians, intellectuals, and activists found the history of Spain and its
1
2

3
4

Louis A. Pérez, Jr.: Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society, p. xi.
Cf. Marixa Lasso: Myths of Harmony; Franklin W. Knight: Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century.
Cf. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara: The Conquest of History.
Despite its limited scope, this essay takes inspiration from broader considerations of
memory and history – cf. Carl E. Schorske: Thinking with History; Paul Connerton:
How Societies Remember.

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171

empire to be a shared point of departure with their audiences when they
made arguments about rights, inclusion, and citizenship – terms whose
meanings had been closely associated with the language of blood, ancestry, calidad, and physical difference that also infused the meanings of
race.
Given what many of those observers saw (and what many others still
see) as a dismal record of Spanish brutality and exploitation constituted
by, and constitutive of, ideologies of racial difference, the stakes of historical thinking about race and the Spanish empire were quite high in
the nineteenth century. New configurations of state and race in Spanish
America and beyond took their place in line with other imaginaries that,
according to Irene Silverblatt, »made Spain and the Spanish Inquisition
into foils against which modern successes could be judged«.5 A Spanish national state comprised of a constitutional monarchy and political
parties; Northern European supremacy in a moment of imperial expansion; the political struggles of African descendants throughout the Americas: all of these projects drew on harsh assessments of the Spanish past
that had gathered momentum during the eighteenth century and shaped
much thinking during the nineteenth century.6 For Cubans still within the
Spanish orbit, constructing historical narratives of colonization and racial
ideology posed a politically fraught problem. Finding support for arguments to maintain slavery and ideas of racial difference appealed to some,
while looking back at humane ideals and protective policies grounded arguments for abolition and expanded political rights. With nothing close
to consensus, Cubans thought with history as a way of moving forward.
Activating the Past
As they witnessed the flourishing of a slave society, observers of
nineteenth-century Cuba sometimes put more stock in the present and
future of Cubans than their past, especially when increasing numbers
of people identified with an African past than a Spanish one. Fears
of ›Africanization‹, as the slave and free colored population grew to
just over half of the island’s population by 1840, heightened pressure
among intellectuals and politicians to deny a beneficial influence of the
non-Spanish past on Cuban life. For Juan Bernardo O’Gavan, a signer
5
6

Irene Silverblatt: Modern Inquisitions, p. 222.
Cf. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra: How to Write the History of the New World; Ruth
MacKay: ›Lazy, Improvident People‹; Stephen G. Hall: A Faithful Account of the Race,
pp. 24 ff., 57, 76. On myths of Spanish imperial greatness, see Henry Kamen: Imagining
Spain, ch. 4.

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David Sartorius

of Spain’s 1812 Constitution, the history of Africans offered little inspiration. He wrote in his 1821 defense of slavery that »their history
presents only cruelties, disorder, barbarity, crimes, misery, depopulation,
with no redemption whatsoever«.7 Even antislavery intellectuals such as
Domingo del Monte, who amassed an extensive collection of documents
related to the history of Spanish colonialism, concluded in 1848 that the
»unhappy race« would never advance at the same pace as Europeans –
a charge being leveled against Latin Americans and even Spaniards with
increasing frequency.8 For these figures, forward-looking white Cubans
and their descendants therefore had the responsibility of transcending the
burdens of the past and shaping Cuban society as they saw fit.
For other mid-century intellectuals such as José de la Luz y Caballero,
who viewed slavery as »our true original sin«, looking to the past was as
essential to understanding the »sin«‹ of slavery as to defining the »our« as
Cuban, Spanish, African, or some mixture thereof.9 As nationalist visions
in the Spanish American republics reimagined links to the indigenous and
Spanish past, Cuban thinkers struggled to create an image of the island
as both the ever-faithful ›Key to the New World‹ and a patria unto itself.10 Foreign proponents of independence for Cuba optimistically tried
to persuade Cubans that they could leave in the past the abuses commonly endured under colonialism. In one of the most visible challenges to
colonial rule in the early nineteenth century, Havana-born José Francisco
Lemus, a coronel in the Colombian army, attempted to foment rebellion
in 1823 by working through masonic lodges and other secret societies.
The Soles y Rayos de Bolívar, as the leaders called themselves, circulated
printed calls to action throughout Havana and neighboring cities, mostly
addressed to ›Españoles‹. Broadsheets condemned the abuses of authorities who for »three hundred years have not wanted to give up the most
false and monstrous politics« and implored Cubans to join with mainland
patriots, »united with us through the tightest bonds of flesh, the social
spirit and the life«, unless they wanted to remain pawns of European politics – »humble serfs and vile slaves«.11 Thus the Soles y Rayos made a
7

8
9
10

11

Juan Bernardo O’Gavan: Observaciones sobre la suerte de los negros del Africa [. . . ],
p. 5. Of course, Africans transplanted to Cuba (and their descendants) may have viewed
their history differently, albeit in ways that escape the archive. On the creative reconstruction of history and memory within the African diaspora, cf. Andrew Apter, Lauren
Derby (eds.) Activating the Past; David Brown: Black Royalty.
Domingo del Monte: Escritos, vol. 1, p. 231.
José de la Luz y Caballero: Aforismos, vol. 2, p. 117.
Cf. Rebecca Earle: The Return of the Native; José A. Piqueras: La siempre fiel isla de
Cuba, o la lealtad interesada.
Certificación relativo del sumario de conspiración que le actua en la Habana y prin-

Race in Retrospect

173

racially-specific appeal by adding social factors to the affinities of flesh
and encouraging Cuban ›Españoles‹ to identify more with other American creoles than with the peninsulares who had historically subordinated
them.
Recognizing the leadership of free men of color in Cuba’s segregated
militias, the conspirators sent a completely different broadsheet to members of Havana’s pardo militia. It reminded the soldiers that since the
Golden Age, the actions of the ›sons of Pelayo‹ (those who claimed kinship or affinity with the eighth-century Reconquista hero) had only aggravated Spanish savagery and ambition, and that three hundred years
of slavery still had not »sated the Spanish cannibal«. It was time, the
patriots announced, to »hold our swords to his throat«.12 While this separate message to the free colored milicianos made a surprisingly bold
call to violence, it exemplified the unforgiving critiques of Spain’s imperial project and racial ideology lurking in much anticolonial rhetoric.
Pro-independence discourse at the time of the wars in mainland Spanish America commonly, if uneasily, defined racial inequality as a legacy
of the longue durée of Spanish rule.13 But given the separate broadsides,
the Soles y Rayos understood racial distinctions to have continuing value,
even if they encouraged the pardos to make enemies of their white leaders and inverted the language of barbarity by attributing cannibalism to
Spaniards. Like the Soles y Rayos conspiracy itself – which the militia
members themselves, as well as a handful of slaves, had helped uncover –
the contradictory historical visions of the broadsides were unsuccessful
in catalyzing a movement for Cuban independence.
While the impressionistic critiques in the Soles y Rayos broadsheets
likely enjoyed a wider and more diverse circulation, however briefly, than
early published histories of the island, the authors of those volumes were
no less engaged in the politics of their day. Government censors, however,
did their best to curtail any writings or performances that fell within their
broad definition of sedition. Given steady concerns about slave rebellions
and other social unrest, how far could Cuban intellectuals and politicians
go in critiquing Spanish rule, and how could they use its history to press
for change?

12

13

cipio en 2 de agosto de 1823. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Sección Ultramar,
(herafter AHN, SU), Leg. 6367, Exp. 51.
Testimonio del incidentes o ramo separado del sumario de conspiración actuado en la
Habana en lo conferente al Br. Dr. Francisco Correa natural y vecino de esta ciudad por
el tral. del señor alcalde 3o constitución Don Juan Agustin de Ferrety. 13 August 1823,
AHN, SU, Leg. 6367 Exp. 51 No. 3.
Cf. Marixa Lasso: Myths of Harmony, pp. 57-67.

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David Sartorius

Writers often submerged political critiques in the details of the pasts
they reconstructed – or at least used those details to make reasoned arguments that appeared less inflammatory. José Antonio Saco’s Historia de
la esclavitud (1875-1879) and Pedro José Guiteras’s Historia de la isla
de Cuba (1865-66) the two most prominent works of historical scholarship in nineteenth-century Cuba, recognized conflicts in the relationship
of race and the politics of colonial rule, but they did not advocate national independence as the solution. Saco and Guiteras were leaders in
distinctive locations – Saco often in exile and Guiteras, usually, from the
thriving port city of Matanzas – of movements for colonial reform. In
fact, Saco had been chosen to represent Cuba in the Spanish Cortes in
1835, and two years later, when Spain excluded Cuba from the Spanish
constitutional system, he began researching what would become a series
of multivolume histories of slavery published in the 1870s.14 Saco and
Guiteras embraced a mission of many historians in the nineteenth century who, in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, »saw their very practice of the
craft as constituting a certain kind of ethics«.15 History, for each of them,
could enable claims about the just treatment of colonized subjects. Neither one, however, embraced dominant visions of historical theory that
emphasized progress and optimism. For Saco and Guiteras, Spain had
fallen from its once noble principles.16
Saco’s history directly linked the rise of African slavery to Spanish
prejudices against Jews and Muslims. Suggesting that expelled Jews and
Muslims might have been targets for enslavement in the new American
colonies, Saco characterized a different strain of Iberian racism, as well
as fears of obscuring the religious mission of colonization, as a deciding factor in the preference for African slavery. Blacks »from Guinea and
other African points«, unlike Jews and Muslims, had »caused nothing bad
for Spain« and posed no political threat. Moreover, in terms of religion,
Africans seemed to have none, except for »superstitions so ridiculous
that they did not practice them after being transported to America«. The
conversion of natives, then, was less complicated by an African presence
than a Jewish or Muslim one. Although Spanish slave laws dated back
to the Siete Partidas, the specific mechanisms of the sub-Saharan slave
14

15
16

On Saco and his historical writing, cf. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara: The Conquest of
History, p. 144-160. Saco also published a history of Indian slavery and a history of
African slavery in the French Caribbean. Luis Miguel García Mora discusses Saco’s research and publications in the introduction to a recent edition of the volume on African
slavery in Cuba. Cf. José Antonio Saco: Historia de la esclavitud, pp. 22 f.
Dipesh Chakrabarty: Empire, Ethics, and the Calling of History, p. 63.
On European historical theory in the nineteenth century, cf. Hayden White: Metahistory,
ch. 1.

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175

trade to the Americas developed as a result of Charles V’s declining fortunes. Beset by costly wars, his »hardships turned his eyes to the sale of
licenses to bring blacks to the New World«.17 As a leading proponent of
increasing the white population of Cuba, Saco was a longtime opponent
of the transatlantic slave trade and thus explained its origins as a product
of necessity.
To center Cuba in the history of slavery in Spanish America, Saco
drew on Las Casas’s descriptions to argue that sugar cultivation was the
»principal cause that encouraged the introduction of blacks into the Antilles«, as Columbus himself had brought the plant to the Caribbean.18
Otherwise, he viewed racial ideology and slavery as being shaped by noble Spanish principles as much as by local contexts. He drew on Juan de
Torquemada’s Monarquía indiana, first published in 1615, to illustrate
the good conditions slaves enjoyed in New Spain. He reviewed the legal
provisions that stipulated the humane treatment of slaves: limits placed on
punishment, guidelines for slaves’ marriages and self-purchase, and minimum requirements for food, clothing, and shelter. And he applauded the
decrees in 1680 and 1682 that reaffirmed the expectation that all slaves
be baptized, which had long been ignored even as »America was filling
up with disloyal blacks«.19 Saco cited a royal decree that slave owners
would not be compensated for the value of their runaway slaves because
they had acquired their freedom legitimately, and he identified in it the
spirit of an earlier era: »These magnificent words will eternally honor the
memory of Charles V, for looking through the history of slavery of the
African race in the New World one does not find in the eighteenth century
a resolution so liberal and so humanitarian«.20
For Saco, the nineteenth century in which he lived was no better
than the eighteenth in upholding the protective and paternalistic ideals
of the past, and this point linked his history of slavery and his critique
of contemporary Spanish colonialism. Just as declining fortunes had led
to the creation of the slave trade, declining fortunes were prolonging
it, and he saw the Spanish government’s active disregard for the 1817
treaty banning the slave trade as a blight on its benevolent reputation.
Saco lamented that the movement to abolish slavery had not originated
in Spain but was a foreign import from northern Europe. In suppressing opposition to the slave trade, Spanish politicians had silenced men
17

18
19
20

For the last two quotations see José Antonio Saco: Historia de la esclavitud, pp. 260,
277.
Ibid., pp. 267, 269.
Ibid., pp. 281, for the quotation see p. 294.
Ibid., p. 208.

176

David Sartorius

who sought to »fight in defense of the rights of humanity«, including
Felix Varela, the Cuban deputy to the Cortes in 1822 who proposed the
gradual abolition of slavery. »For a long time«, Saco estimated, fear of
economic ruin led the government in Madrid to oppose any resistance to
extinguishing the slave trade. With the independence of most of its American colonies, new motivations intervened as white Cubans stood well
positioned to challenge Spanish rule. The fear that Cuba would proclaim
independence, Saco argued, led Spain to encourage even more the illegal
importation of Africans, »not so much as agricultural workers but as instruments of domination«.21 In other words, Cuban desires for freedom –
namely, the freedom to import and own slaves and to voice their concerns
in the Cortes – had been shaped by historic Spanish values but stifled by
timeless Spanish greed. Coming from someone who had experienced the
denial of parliamentary representation firsthand in 1837, Saco’s history
made political fodder out of Spain’s ability, from the earliest moments of
colonization, to manipulate racial fears to the disadvantage of colonists.
From exile in Spain, Saco and his writings attracted the disdain of
government censors in Cuba and of Miguel Tacón, the strict captain general of the island during the 1830s. In 1837, Tacón accused the Matanzas
writer Pedro Juan Guiteras of being in contact with Saco when they had
lived in Madrid several years earlier. Throughout their careers, both men
found themselves targeted by colonial authorities and exiled in various
moments. In New York City in the 1860s, Guiteras published perhaps
the first comprehensive history of the island, a densely footnoted study
explicitly committed to excavating the historical foundations of the contemporary Cuban patria. In that history, Spanish policies attempting to
manage racial difference placed in relief the fractures and fissures Guiteras observed in the pact between Spain and some of its colonial subjects.
According to Guiteras, Spanish success in Cuba during the first
decades of the sixteenth century derived from its emphasis on collapsing, rather than producing and sustaining, categories of difference. He
claimed that one elder Lucayo Indian had apparently found in Catholic
teachings the insight that even Columbus, a great and powerful man, »was
no more than a vassal«.22 Guiteras did little to question how racial distinctions came into being in the first place, but insisted on a harmony
between »white men« and Indians that did not exist in the rest of Spanish
America. Unlike the mainland, where bold and valiant conquistadores
21
22

Ibid., pp. 340, 345, for the quotation see p. 346.
Pedro José Guiteras: Historia de la isla de Cuba, vol. 1, pp. 188 f. On the origins and politics of the term ›Lucayo‹ cf. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara: The Conquest of History,
p. 110.

Race in Retrospect

177

faced off against great indigenous empires, the more »peaceful inhabitants« of Cuba developed »feelings of love and benevolence« that took
their most noble form in the figure of Las Casas, claimed by Guiteras as a
Cuban hero whose time on the island took priority over his later activities
in Spain or the mainland.23
Compared to Saco, Guiteras had precious little to say about slavery
except to suggest that whatever fundamental laws governed slavery were
African, not Spanish, in origin. He repeated well-worn references to the
prevalence of slavery in Africa and the marginal social backgrounds of
Africans who found themselves enslaved, so marginal, in fact, that »[t]he
loss of personal freedom is not, then, a great sacrifice for the blacks«.24
On an island with a negligible indigenous population, Guiteras could
safely praise the Spanish for the legal rights and ›equality‹ granted to
Indians, but took care not to retrace a legacy of rights to African ancestry. Echoing the logic of the 1812 Constitution, Spanish principles of
inclusion and equality, for Guiteras, did not seem to overcome the inherent impediments to freedom that slaves had apparently faced even before
their arrival in the Iberian world.
Spanish law and political organization reinforced those bonds of
reciprocity with Indians, for out of Spain’s early experiments in Cuba
emerged »the principle of an equality of rights with the naturales of
Castile«. The political and administrative system that Guiteras described
was a marvel of representative government: popularly elected alcaldes,
city councils that enjoyed »privileges of great importance«, and »the right
to name deputies to go to Castile and explain to the king and Council [of
the Indies] the needs of the pueblos and to complain about any abuses on
the part of the authorities and clerks«.25 Guiteras praised the 1508 decision to extend the same privileges to indigenous municipalities as evidence of Spain’s commitment to equality at the same time that he admired
Charles V’s loosening of the limits that Isabel had placed on the »rights
of colonization« – namely, the exclusion of Jews, Muslims, New Christians and unconverted African slaves from coming to the New World in
order to avoid »perverting« the Indians and hindering conversion, and
23

24
25

Pedro José Guiteras: Historia de la isla de Cuba, vol. 1, p. 238. Guiteras was not alone
in claiming Las Casas for the pantheon of Cuban heroes based on his early residence
there. In the 1860s, a history manual for schoolteachers identified Las Casas as a hero
of the island and the object of Indian veneration as early as the 1510s, when he clashed
with Pánfilo de Narváez during an expedition in eastern Cuba – cf. Ramón Franciso
Valdés: Compendio de la historia Antigua de la isla de Cuba, dispuesto en forma de
dialogo para uso en las escuelas.
Pedro José Guiteras: Historia de la isla de Cuba, vol. 1, p. 341.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 299 f.

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David Sartorius

to preserve »buenas costumbres«.26 Because the evangelizing project in
Cuba had been minimal compared to mainland Spanish America, with
its populous indigenous groups, Guiteras gave the Church a minor role
in his vignettes of sixteenth-century Cuba. Thus, the moral decency of
the early colonial period appeared largely as an achievement of royal authority, which kept the historical critique trained on the state. Rather than
advancing a White Legend to counter unfavorable comparisons to other
empires, Guiteras, like Saco, plotted his comparisons on a temporal axis
to cast the present as a betrayal of longstanding Spanish values.
These rosy images of local electoral practices, Cuban representation
in the Cortes, and the right to decry bad government laid the foundation
of Guiteras’s blistering critique of the repressive regimes of nineteenthcentury Cuba. The denial of constitutional rights to Cubans in 1837 remained a sore spot almost three decades later, and Guiteras recounted that
moment with incredulity. »Strange speeches« by Spanish politicians had
argued that there had never been a mechanism through which abuses of
authority could be challenged. Consequently, »vices introduced into the
system« remained hidden from officials in Madrid.27
The long history of Spanish rule exonerated Manuel Lorenzo, the
provincial governor of Santiago de Cuba who incurred the wrath of Spanish troops and the captain general in 1837 when he attempted to implement the 1812 Constitution. For Guiteras, Lorenzo’s actions honored the
island’s oldest political traditions of elections, representation in Madrid,
and inclusive institutions such as a national militia, even »admitting the
clase de color into it«.28 Moreover, he rejected Spanish arguments that
Cuba’s large slave population made extending rights and freedoms risky
and difficult to contain; in fact, he argued, a cluster of slave rebellions in
1835 had quickly been put down and did not warrant the alarm raised by
Miguel Tacón.29 The 1837 Spanish commission to explore the question
of the constitution in the colonies, for Guiteras, existed less »to remove
the example to blacks of conceding political rights to whites that as to
suffocate the spirit of freedom that reigns in these provinces«.30 Guiteras
thus marshaled history in support of his reformist politics. By making
a dramatic contrast between a golden age during the Golden Age and a
subsequent departure from cherished ideals, he looked with envy on the
political inclusivity of early Cuba.
26
27
28
29
30

Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 300 f.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 399.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 405.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 369.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 402.

Race in Retrospect

179

In his benchmark study of Cuban slavery, Franklin Knight argued
for a minor role for racial ideology in structuring the plantation society.
Aside from appeals to racial purity and justifications of slavery based on
African cultural inferiority, arguments about race had »none of the theological and philosophical justification found in the famous Las CasasSepúlveda debates of the sixteenth century concerning Indian slavery
and the Spanish attitude toward non-Spanish peoples«.31 As we see, the
sixteenth-century debates were quite present in nineteenth-century Cuba
in arguments about race and colonialism. In drawing on Las Casas and the
conditions of Cuban natives, juxtaposing early modern prejudices against
Jews and Muslims to those against Africans, and idealizing the early institutional framework of colonial rule, Guiteras and Saco demonstrated
the durability of what Rolena Adorno has called the polemics of possession, the sixteenth-century debates about the justifications of colonization and the subordination of populations that would come to be categorized racially. For centuries, writers have returned to these polemics not
for the »history of the practice of colonialism but [for] the history and
practice of its questioning«.32 These polemics continued in nineteenthcentury Spain as well. Debates within the Madrid Athaneum and the
Royal Academy in the 1870s about the legitimacy of the expulsion of
the Moriscos led to counterfactual arguments about whether they could
have belonged to the Spanish nation.33 The fusion between Iberians and
the populations they had encountered since the Middle Ages provided
what some Spaniards hoped would lay the ideological groundwork for a
homogenized Spanish citizenry.34
While Saco and Guiteras shared this concern with political inclusion, they shied away from championing a homogenized or mixed Cuban
citizenry and instead emphasized the historical structures of difference
and sameness that gave varying degrees of political rights to colonials
of Spanish, indigenous, and African descent. Lying just below the surface of Saco and Guiteras’s histories was questioning about the political subordination of white Cubans. After all, it was the continued slave
31

32

33
34

Franklin W. Knight: Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century, p. 190. Indeed, political and intellectual discussions specific to the plantation economy were usually filtered through the language of progress and modernity, not history or tradition.
Rolena Adorno: The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative, p. 124.
Another early history of Cuba that takes up the early years of Spanish settlement is
Pedro Santacilia: Lecciones orales sobre la historia de Cuba pronunciadas en el Ateneo
democrático cubano de Nueva York.
Cf. Susan Martin-Márquez: Disorientations, pp. 30 f.
Cf. Joshua Goode: Impurity of Blood, chs. 1, 5, and 8; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara:
The Conquest of History, pp. 38 f.

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David Sartorius

trade and population of color that for Saco impeded white Cubans’ claims
to representation, and Guiteras saw in that distant example of extending
equality to Indians a model for reform that would give white Cubans a
louder voice in colonial politics and keep Cubans of African descent on
the margins.
Subaltern Histories and National Futures
The narratives of dominant and subordinated groups in nineteenthcentury historical writing about Cuba and the Spanish empire replicated
the fault lines of Spanish colonial hegemony itself, placing social hierarchies front and center. Alongside images of the superiority of Spaniards
over Indians, whites over blacks, and Spaniards over criollos, the historical imagination of lettered Cubans and Spaniards also included sedimented and overlapping narratives of subalternity: white Cubans denied
political representation and Spaniards’ exclusion from ›the West‹ and
well-intended protective Indian policies eclipsed by the Black Legend.
In each of these critical narratives, subjects of African descent occupied
pivotal roles. Their treatment in the Americas was frequently measured
against that of Indians, their large numbers in Cuba justified curtailing
open discussions of freedom and citizenship, and their historical presence
in the Iberian world raised questions about the racial purity of Spaniards.
The contributions of African-descended Cubans themselves to the
public discussion of the history of race and colonialism largely became
visible only after the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878) with Spain, when the
peace that ended the war extended laws of free press and association to
Cuba along with liberal and conservative parties that mirrored those in
Spain. This was a moment when many Cubans resumed a conversation
about constitutional rights that had been suspended during wartime and
nearly silenced in earlier decades.35 There appeared to be ample support among African-descended Cubans for the new Partido Liberal Autonomista because it championed the cause of slave emancipation, but
there was nothing close to unanimity in their opinions. By the end of
the nineteenth century, a robust public discussion by and for Cubans of
color had taken root in newspapers and associations, and participants in
the conversation spoke frankly about the persistence of inequality and
35

Rafael Montoro published a ›constitutional history‹ of the island chronicling the deliberations of and public debates about Cuba’s representatives to the Spanish Cortes after
the promulgation of the 1812 Constitution – an era of constitutional rights that Montoro
and other founding members of the Liberal Autonomist Party hoped to recreate (cf. id.:
Los antiguos diputados de Cuba y apuntes para la historia constitucional de esta isla).

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181

racial discrimination, all the while rebutting persistent public accusations
of disloyalty and barbarity.
Indeed, the discourse of many participants in these debates sought to
put the past behind them – a past with direct ties to slavery and African
culture and religion.36 Thus their particular rhetoric of respectability emphasized readiness for citizenship and thus a willingness to locate themselves within a narrative of Spanish political history. That location, they
believed, would position them well for inclusion in Spain’s political future. But citizenship claims had their limits. Articles in Minerva, a periodical founded in 1888 and dedicated to women of African descent,
encouraged readers to pursue virtue, education, and civil marriage to ensure a better future, but backed away from explicit demands for citizenship. Affirming this auxiliary role for women became a common gesture
within respectability discourse that was careful to avoid associations with
movements for radical change – even though leaders of those movements
rarely advocated women’s citizenship themselves. In imagining a fraternity of citizens, claims to honor and inclusion frequently rested on an
erasure or dismissal of women as well as the African past.37
If white supporters of colonial rule most feared change through rebellion and race war, some of them found an assuaging voice in Rodolfo
de Lagardère. Born in Barcelona to a Spanish father and a mother of
African descent, Lagardère strongly identified with Spain and supported
colonial rule, frequently to the consternation of other black and mulatto
Cuban leaders.38 Despite his preference for Cuban autonomy, he enjoyed
ample support from the government. Banned, like all Cubans of color,
from the pro-Spanish Casinos Españoles that emerged during the Ten
Years’ War, Lagardère founded the Casino Español de la clase de color
in Havana in the early 1880s, the predecessor of satellite clubs founded
in cities throughout the island. In 1879 he started the newspaper El Ciudadano and later La América Española, newspapers intended for the raza
de color and which advanced a pro-Spanish agenda basing claims for citizenship, an end to racial discrimination, and political autonomy for the
island on the loyalty that Cubans of African descent had manifested for
36

37

38

On race and the post-Zanjón public sphere, cf. Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux: El negro
en el periodismo cubano en el siglo XIX; Carmen V. Montejo Arrechea: Sociedades
de negros en Cuba; Phillip A. Howard: Changing History; María del Carmen Barcia:
Capas populares y modernidad en Cuba; Ada Ferrer: Insurgent Cuba, Ch. 5; Jill Lane:
Blackface Cuba, ch. 3.
On forms of subjection enabled by discourses of abolition and political emancipation,
cf. Saidiya V. Hartman: Scenes of Subjection ch. 4.
In 1882, Martín Morúa Delgado published a scathing attack on Lagardère – cf. id.:
Biografía de dos langostas que parecen hombres.

182

David Sartorius

Spain throughout the history of colonial rule. As he told the crowd gathered in 1882 for the re-opening of the Casino, »[o]ur history is the history
of loyalty«.39
Lagardère’s writings made the case for autonomy and racial integration based on a historical vision that tacked between assimilative practices in Iberia and race mixture in Cuba. This optimistic narrative overlooked a history of Spain (the date 1492 comes to mind) that was distinctly non-assimilative. Like Saco and Guiteras, however, emphasizing
the openness of the past grounded Lagardère’s critique of the exclusions
of the present, namely those that accompanied the advent of nominally
race-blind male suffrage and political party membership.40 In 1887, he
published a wide-ranging analysis of comparative politics, La cuestión
social de Cuba, subtitled ›Cuba no es Venecia‹, arguing that Spanish traditions held better promise for offering political equality to Cuba and
Puerto Rico than English traditions offered for Ireland, for example, or
the relatively new Italian state offered for Venice. Spain’s success, he
argued, derived from its ability to accommodate difference, mostly admirably in managing regional differences on the peninsula.
Lagardère chose these differences carefully: by defining Spain’s
provinces by distinctions of race, interests, custom, dialects, climate, and
history, he made room to argue both for respecting regional autonomy
under the Spanish political umbrella as well as including people of diverse origins. Thus the gardens of the Alhambra, »silent witnesses to so
many Arab romances«, could be as Spanish as the people with »peculiar physiognomy« in Asturias.41 As the language of blood and lineage
ebbed in arguments for limiting citizenship, Lagardère responded in kind,
asserting that »mulatos, mestizos, hybrids« all descended from Spaniards
dating back to fifteenth-century navigators and the soldiers of Granada,
and were thus »heirs to their name and their glories«. To deprive Cubans
of color of citizenship rights, then, would be to negate their history and
tradition and »to remove the blood from our veins«. Being Spanish, however, was not only a matter of blood to Lagardère, and he clarified that
language, religion, and, »above all and more than all«, loyalty factored
as much in embracing Spanishness. He thus avoided excluding Cubans

39

40
41

A high-ranking officer attended and transcribed the speech given by Lagardère and
wrote to the captain general that the speaker was »intimately linked to the Peninsula«
and his »erudition and well-being can be trusted«. El Gobernador General de la isla de
Cuba to Sr. Ministro de Ultramar, 15 March 1882, AHN, SU, Leg. 4884 Exp. 140.
On this critical period, cf. Rebecca J. Scott: Degrees of Freedom, ch. 4.
Rodolfo de Lagardère: La cuestion social de Cuba, p. 41.

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183

of color who could claim no Spanish ancestry.42 Although he acknowledged the horrors of slavery and called for abolition, Lagardère rarely
fashioned narratives of subalternity that foregrounded the exploitation of
Cubans of color. He understood race in the context of the many markers
of social difference in the Iberian world and believed that the loyalty of
black and mulatto Cubans merited the same rights historically enjoyed
by other Spaniards of varying regions and backgrounds.
Cubans of color advocating for more distance from Spain, including
independentistas, articulated a less celebratory relationship to the colonial past, especially when the recent history involved armed insurgency
that fueled popular fears of black rebellion. Even as some intellectuals
and activists sought revolutionary solutions, they still pressured the current government to combat racial discrimination. Assuring watchful officials of their nominal loyalty to Spain did not always prevent their repression. Juan Gualberto Gómez, an insurgent veteran of the Ten Years’ War,
the Guerra Chiquita, and the head of the umbrella organization formed
in 1886 of the island’s sociedades de color, was imprisoned in 1890 after publishing ›Por qué somos separatistas [Why we are separatists]‹ in
La Fraternidad, a newspaper he directed.43 Despite what appeared to be
an attack on Spanish sovereignty, Gómez’s critique implored the government to live up to the promise of its constitution. Responding to conservative newspapers accusing Afro-Cubans of hating Spain, Gómez clarified:
»We do not hate Spain; we do not even fail to love and appreciate it«. But
Spanish »tradition and custom« weighed more heavily on the peninsula
than on the island. With the unity imagined by Isabel illusory and industry stalled since Carlos III, the »land of the Cid« could not overcome its
differences or reliance on »principles of hierarchical obedience«. Yoking
creole nationalism to the race-transcendent vision developing in the independence movement, Gómez explained that Cubans, as »an American
people«, were greater than the sum of their origins: »neither the son of a
peninsular is Spanish nor the son of the negro is African«.44 Unlike Lagardère, who advocated for extending Spanish traditions of inclusiveness
42
43

44

Ibid., pp. 50 f.
On the Directorio, cf. Oilda Hevia Lanier: El Directorio Central de las Sociedades de la
Raza de Color.
Juan Gualberto Gómez: Por qué somos separatistas. In pointing to Spanish backwardness, Gómez reproduced depictions that proliferated throughout the Atlantic world,
even within Spain. As Ruth MacKay has recently argued, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury ilustrados drew on the medieval and early modern past to advance arguments
about Spaniards’ inherent laziness and penchant for failure – cf. id.: ›Lazy, Improvident
People‹, chs. 5-6; Louis A. Pérez: On Becoming Cuban, pp. 89 f.

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David Sartorius

to include Cubans of color, Gómez saw those traditions, predicated on
inequality, as an impediment.
To the extent that popular support for Spanish rule depended on an
imagined link to the Spanish colonial past, especially for figures like Lagardère, separating from Spain politically accompanied separating from
it historically. While Gómez acknowledged that racial difference had
been produced by material inequalities for over three centuries, he looked
less to the past to understand race than to contemporary racial science.
He cited Herbert Spencer and Cesare Lombroso to explain the »psychological phenomenon« of the Spaniard who could value the fundamental
rights of men until arriving in Cuba, where he used racial distinctions
to justify slavery, racial inequality, and political disenfranchisement.45 In
La Igualdad, a newspaper Gómez directed in the 1890s that was affiliated
with the Directorio Central, articles generally held back in their critiques
of Spain and made more specific targets of policies and politicians rather
offering than a wholesale assessment of the Spanish dimension of Cuba.
Instead, the historical imagination articulated in the articles drew lessons
and inspiration from other places and traditions than the ones to which
they were tethered by colonial rule. When the mainstream, conservative
daily Diario de la Marina made the case in 1893 that Cuban independence would amount to a race war leading to another Haiti, the writers in
La Igualdad realized the stakes of making a reasoned defense of struggles for equality as anything but a race war. This required knowing the
history of the Haitian Revolution, a history, one article pointed out, that
had been written by white Europeans who »had no consideration of the
negro«.46 It was thus the responsibility of the activists of color behind the
newspaper – Gómez foremost among them – to deny plans for a race war
by clarifying the relationship between the history of Haiti and the future
of Cuba.
On this important point, La Igualdad took two approaches in a
lengthy essay, ›Lo que pasaria en Cuba‹. One was to try to differentiate eighteenth-century St. Domingue from nineteenth-century Cuba. Certainly, Cuba did not have the black majority population of the French
colony, but it did, the author admitted, face similar racism from a colonial government. »Will they never run across colonial tradition?« asked
the author of the authorities who dithered on questions of racial inequal45
46

Juan Gualberto Gómez: Programa del diario ›La Fraternidad‹ pp. 253, 260 f.
›Lo que pasó en Haiti‹. La Igualdad, 25 May 1893. Martín Morúa Delgado attempted
to address this paucity of scholarship in his 1882 ›Ensayo político, o Cuba y la raza
de color‹, approximately one fifth of which was devoted to a narrative history of the
Haitian Revolution – cf. Martín Morúa Delgado: Integración cubana.

Race in Retrospect

185

ity. Noting that »every regime rests on its antecedents«, the author argued that Cuba’s political antecedents were »pro-slavery [esclavista] par
excellence«, offering little contrast to French St. Domingue. The second approach involved emphasizing a different historical inspiration than
Haiti or Spain: the Latin American movements for independence earlier
in the century. Cuba, according to La Igualdad, would not become another Haiti but would instead resemble Colombia and Venezuela, »where
the genius of Bolívar erased the differences of races, with such luck that
there are as many blacks as whites in the political parties that debate
the triumph there«. Certainly, the article acknowledged, color differences
were emerging yet again in »the current life of the Spanish colony«, but
the »memory of the former brotherhood« resided in the independence
movement as black and white soldiers fought together.47
Ultimately, for most Cubans it was this concept of cross-racial solidarity through Cuban nationalism that won out over hope for Spanish
progress toward including Cubans of color in its national project. This
race-transcendent vision had been advanced in theory and practice by
José Martí and revolutionary leaders of color such as Gómez, Antonio
Maceo, Quintín Banderas, and Rafael Serra. The victory over Spain in
1898, complicated by the intervention of the United States and its subsequent occupation of the island, shuffled the deck of historical narratives
to be celebrated, marginalized, or simply forgotten.48 Lagardère, for example, made a final to appeal to the colonial past, this time acknowledging the historical subordination of Cubans of color. As Spain and the
United States negotiated peace without representation from the Liberation Army, Lagardère wrote to a Spanish lieutenant colonel to remind
him of the »virtuous history of loyalty of the long-suffering black race«,
citing »our conduct in Chile, in Buenos Aires, in San Juan, in Cartagena,
in the past and in the current war«. He requested public recognition of
this history, including dispatches to Madrid documenting »that we were
fine Spanish soldiers [. . . ] during this century of so many revolts«.49 Lagardère offered a curious postscript on a war that had imposed so great
a distance between Cuba’s future and the Spanish past, and after which
statues of Columbus, Antonio Maceo, and José Martí were all floated as

47
48

49

›Lo que pasaría en Cuba‹, p. 1.
On the question of ›minority history‹ and subaltern pasts, cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty:
Provincializing Europe, ch. 4.
Rodolfo de Lagardère to Luis Fontana, 25 August 1898. Servicio Histórico Militar,
Madrid, Fondo Capitanía General de Cuba, Caja 1383.

186

David Sartorius

possible replacements for the statue of Isabel II that had been removed
from its pedestal on Havana’s Paseo del Prado.50
Conclusion
When nineteenth-century Cuban writers and political activists looked
back in order to assess the continuity and change they experienced during
the final decades of Spanish colonial rule, what many of them noted had
changed dramatically were the relationships between racial ideology and
the state, namely the gap between experiments with liberal citizenship
and racialized strategies of exclusion. Even when they perceived those
changes as working against them, the images of the colonial racial past
that they brought to bear on their present-day politics varied well beyond
the uncompromising attacks on the Spain’s record of racism found in
critiques beyond the island. Within a heavily surveilled colonial public
sphere, that variety proved key to widening the field of political debate
and accommodating multiple perspectives on continued support for colonial rule, even when to many observers Cubans appeared to be swimming
against the nationalist currents of history. As old racial classifications still
helped maintain social and political order, their material legacies were
never far from view. But in what Steve Stern calls the dynamic reconstitution of entrenched legacies, Cubans found in the supposed principles of
equality and inclusivity in early Spanish rule, and in the diverse origins
of a unified Spain, the evidence they sought to challenge racial discrimination and exclusion from constitutional rights as Spanish citizens.51
In the transition from colonial rule to national government, lessons
drawn from the long history of Spanish colonialism continued to inform ideological struggles, especially as new racial classifications gained
currency. Martí had warned in 1891 that the »predominant element in
the United States« believed in the »incontrovertible superiority of ›the
Anglo-Saxon race over the Latin race‹« and, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, »that the nations of Hispanoamerica are primarily made up of Indians and Negroes«.52 Despite hopes that racial difference would become a curiosity of the colonial past, Cubans felt the
weight of distinctions between Latin and Anglo-Saxon peoples. And so
did Spaniards: two years after the ›disaster‹ of 1898, Spanish journalist Joaquín Costa acknowledged the failures of old racial categories and
50
51
52

Cf. Marial Iglesias Utset: Las metáforas del cambio en la vida cotidiana, pp. 46-51.
Cf. Steve J. Stern: The Tricks of Time, p. 149.
José Martí: Selected Writings, p. 306.

Race in Retrospect

187

called for a new Spanish raza »as a counterweight to the Saxon race, to
maintain the moral equilibrium in the infinite game of history«.53 That
game had now relocated to new imperial formations and new (pseudo-)
sciences of race, and making sense of the newness drove what appeared to
be the continuous rediscovery of Spanish colonial history throughout the
twentieth century. Long before Fernando Ortiz would link the archetype
of the street-smart Cuban negro curro to the mala vida in early modern
Spain, and long before Alejo Carpentier would dig deep into Haitian and
Spanish American history to consider the presence of the past, Cubans
in the nineteenth century had thought with history to adapt to a political
system often perceived as anachronistic, resolute in their conviction that
history would absolve them.54
References
(All quotations from non-English sources have been translated. Emphases in the
originals are not included. All italics are mine).

Archival Sources
Archivo Histórico Nacional de Madrid, Sección Ultramar, (AHN, SU)
Certificación relativa del sumario de conspiración que le actua en la Habana, Leg.
6367, Exp. 51, 2 de agosto de 1823.
Testimonio del incidentes o ramo separado del sumario de conspiración actuado
en la Habana en lo conferente al Br. Dr. Francisco Correa natural y vecino de
esta ciudad por el tral. del señor alcalde 3o constitución Don Juan Agustin de
Ferrety, Leg. 6367 Exp. 51 No. 3, 13 August 1823.
El Gobernador General de la isla de Cuba to Sr. Ministro de Ultramar, Leg. 4884
Exp. 140, 15 March 1882.
Archivo del Ministerio de Defensa, Madrid
Servicio Histórico Militar, Rodolfo de Lagardère to Luis Fontana, Madrid, Fondo
Capitanía General de Cuba, Caja 1383, 25 August 1898.

Literature
Adorno, Rolena: The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative.
New Haven: Yale University Press 2007.
53

54

Quoted in Gumersindo de Azcárate: Educación y enseñanza según Costa, p. 69; see
Frederick B. Pike: Hispanismo 1898-1936, p. 57.
Cf. Fernando Ortiz: Los negros curros, chs. 5 and 6. Carpentier’s novels ›Los pasos
perdidos‹ (1953) and ›El siglo de las luces‹ (1962), about the Haitian Revolution, best
exemplify this engagement with history.

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Apter, Andrew, Lauren Derby (eds.): Activating the Past. History and Memory in
the African Diaspora. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
2010.
Azcárate, Gumersindo de: Educación y enseñanza según Costa. In: Boletín de la
Institución Libre de Enseñanza 720, 1920, p. 69.
Barcia, María del Carmen: Capas populares y modernidad en Cuba, 1878-1930.
Habana: Fundación Fernando Ortiz 2005.
Brown, David: Black Royalty. New Social Frameworks and Remodeled Iconographies in Nineteenth-Century Havana. In: id., Santería Enthroned. Art, Ritual, and Innovation in Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press 2003, pp. 25-61.
Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge: How to Write the History of the New World. Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.
Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh: Empire, Ethics, and the Calling of History. Knowledge in
the Postcolony. In: Unsettling History. Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, eds. Sebastian Jobs, Alf Lüdtke. Frankfurt etc.: Campus 2010, pp. 6388.
——: Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
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Connerton, Paul: How Societies Remember. New York: Cambridge University
Press 1989.
Del Monte, Domingo: Escritos. 2 vol. Havana: Cultural 1929.
Deschamps Chapeaux, Pedro: El negro en el periodismo cubano en el siglo XIX.
Havana: Ediciones R. 1963.
Earle, Rebecca: The Return of the Native. Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish
America, 1810-1930. Durham: Duke University Press 2007.
Ferrer, Ada: Insurgent Cuba. Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1999.
Gómez, Juan Gualberto: Por qué somos separatistas. In: id., Por Cuba Libre. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales 1974, pp. 277-281.
——: Programa del diario ›La Fraternidad‹. Nuestros propósitos. In: id., Por
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Goode, Joshua: Impurity of Blood. Defining Race in Spain, 1870-1930. Baton
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Guiteras, Pedro José: Historia de la isla de Cuba. 2 vol. New York: J. R. Lockwood 1865-1866.
Hall, Stephen G.: A Faithful Account of the Race. African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North
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Hartman, Saidiya V.: Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press 1997.
Howard, Phillip A.: Changing History. Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of

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Color in the Nineteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press 1998.
Hevia Lanier, Oilda: El Directorio Central de las Sociedades de la Raza de Color
(1886-1894). Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales 1996.
Iglesias Utset, Marial: Las metáforas del cambio en la vida cotidiana. Cuba, 18981902. Havana: Ediciones Unión 2003.
Kamen, Henry: Imagining Spain. Historical Myth and National Identity. New
Haven: Yale University Press 2008.
Knight, Franklin W.: Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1970.
Lagardère, Rodolfo de: La cuestión social de Cuba. Cuba no es Venecia. Havana:
Tipografía La Universal 1887.
Lane, Jill: Blackface Cuba, 1840-1898. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
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Lasso, Marixa: Myths of Harmony. Race and Republicanism during the Age of
Revolution. Colombia, 1795-1831. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press
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›Lo que pasaria en Cuba‹. La Igualdad, 30 May 1893. Havana: Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, p. 1.
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MacKay, Ruth: ›Lazy, Improvident People‹. Myth and Reality in the Writing of
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Martí, José: Selected Writings, ed. Roberto González Echeverria. New York: Penguin Classics 2002.
Martin-Márquez, Susan: Disorientations. Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the
Performance of Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press 2008.
Montejo Arrechea, Carmen V.: Sociedades de negros en Cuba, 1878-1960. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales/Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de
la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello 2004.
Montoro, Rafael: Los antiguos diputados de Cuba y apuntes para la historia constitucional de esta isla. Havana: Imprenta El Telegrafo 1879.
Morúa Delgado, Martín: Biografía de dos langostas que paracen hombres. In:
id., Obras completas. Vol. 3. Havana: Edición de la Comisión Nacional del
Centenario de Martín Morúa Delgado 1957, pp. 11-44.
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Comisión Nacional del Centenario de Martín Morúa Delgado 1957, pp. 48107.
O’Gavan, Juan Bernardo: Observaciones sobre la suerte de los negros del Africa,
considerados en su propia patria, y trasplantados á las Antillas Españolas:
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Pérez Jr., Louis A.: On Becoming Cuban. Identity, Nationality, and Culture.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1999.
——: Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society. Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899.
Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources 1992.
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Ateneo democrático cubano de Nueva York. New Orleans: Imprenta de Luis
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Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1973.

›Blood Work‹
Fables of Racial Identity and Modern Science
Thomas C. Holt

Abstract: Contrary to the notion that modern science is inherently opposed to
racist thought, its actual historical role has been mixed and inconsistent. A notable example of this phenomenon are the early twentieth-century scientists who
promoted the ostensibly archaic notion that racial identity could be defined by and
transmitted through the blood even as some of their scientific colleagues worked
to debunk such ideas. Two scientists, Ludwik Hirszfeld and Charles Drew, engaged roughly simultaneously in research on the characteristics of human blood,
reflect the multiple ironies and paradoxes of the relations between scientific and
racial knowledge.

There is a persistent, yet unexamined bias in our historical analyses of
racism: we are convinced that the fables and mythologies sustaining notions of inherent, transmittable biological differences within the human
species – that is race – are fictions fashioned in the deep dark past, of
which modern science is not only innocent but will eventually disabuse
us. Given its controlled, objective observations and analyses, modern science, we reassure ourselves, is an implacable enemy to popular notions
of racial difference. Moreover, traumatic events like the Holocaust have
driven home the social dangers to which ignorant, unscientific notions
about race can lead us. In the lore of racial studies, therefore, the early
twentieth-century work of anthropologists like Franz Boas and his students is credited with reversing a century of racist thought, and the fundamental anti-racist premises of their labors were later underscored by the
horrors of National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s.1 Racism appeared
to be on the road to extinction, surviving only in pockets of ignorance
and irrational prejudice.
1

Cf. Ruth Benedict: Race Problems in America, pp. 73 ff.; George W. Stocking, Jr.: Race,
Culture, and Evolution.

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Thomas C. Holt

We may concede, of course, that the scientific project has not always
been free of the taint of racist ideas. After all, Boas was responding to the
half-century reign of ›scientific racism‹, whose Darwinian-inflected ideas
about human development had been seconded in many of the early ethnographies of ostensibly primitive peoples written by many of Boas’s colleagues. In fact, racist ideas had advanced in tandem with human enlightenment, beginning in the eighteenth-century and finding ample support
thereafter in ›cutting-edge‹ medical, ethnographic, and linguistic studies. Indeed, some of the western world’s most prominent and accomplished scientists, past and present, have actively promoted racist thinking.2 Given that history, twentieth- and twenty-first-century advocates of
an anti-racist science must ignore their predecessors’ roles in reproducing racism, chalk it up to unprofessional musings, or relabel it as simply
›pseudo-science‹.
It is possible, however, that the assumption of ever-increasing human
enlightenment obscures a far more complex, less linear, and convoluted
relationship between ›science‹ and racial thought than is usually realized.
If one views science in historical perspective, that is the rational (even if
misguided) attempts that humans have undertaken – with the tools and
knowledge available at a given historical moment – to make sense of
the cosmos and their place within it, then scientific thinking might well
be viewed as occupying a corner of the same epistemological field as
race. After all, racial thinking also reflects humans’ efforts (even if misguided) to explain and order their world.3 Such a perspective should not
conflate the two domains, of course, for modern scientific methods are
surely far more efficacious in accounting for and explaining our world
than the superstitious and theologically-inflected popular musing of earlier eras. Nonetheless, a healthy skepticism about scientists’ ability to
inoculate themselves against the superstitions and cultural biases of their
day might better prepare us to explain why many aspects of premodern
racial thinking have survived into, and even thrived in, our ostensibly
more scientific age.
The purpose of this brief essay, therefore, is not to indict modern science but to explore the social and historical contexts in which presumably
2

3

On the history of nineteenth-century polygenesis, of which Harvard University’s
renown biologist Louis Agassiz was a prominent adherent, see George M. Fredrickson: The Black Image in the White Mind, pp. 76, 161 f., 228-255. Recent scientists
expressing racist convictions, purportedly based on scientific evidence, include the codiscoverer of DNA, Nobel laureate James D. Watson (see Tom Abate: Nobel Winner’s
Theories Raise Uproar in Berkeley; Wulf D. Hund: Ein Traum der Vernunft).
Cf. David Theo Goldberg: Racist Culture.

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193

well-meaning scientists might reproduce the idea of race, even as others
among their temporal cohort strived to disabuse racist thinking. For example, some leading scientists of the interwar period – Boas’s contemporaries – promoted the idea that physical and characterological traits were
transmitted through the blood – a premodern idea – even as the lives
and work of other scientists undermined that racist premise. Juxtaposing the similar lives and contrasting careers of two pioneering scientists
engaged in ›blood work‹, Dr. Charles Drew and Ludwik Hirszfeld, illuminates the complex interplay between scientific thinking about race and
its biographical and socio-political context. Both Hirszfeld and Drew did
their most important work on blood during the interwar period, each of
them was either racially ambiguous or negotiated a racially liminal space,
and each was profoundly affected by racial policies that were ultimately
grounded in scientifically-endorsed racist thought – most notably the idea
of racial blood. That Hirszfeld and Drew responded very differently to the
myth of racial blood, however, suggests some of the limitations of science
in the struggle against racist ideologies.
Blood Fables, Past and Present
The notion that blood has a racial identity and character emerged most
prominently with the early modern Spanish idea of limpieza de sangre,
perhaps the earliest and certainly the most direct articulation of a link
among blood, race, and national character. Although initiated in the context of a religious crisis, purity of blood soon came to form an essential
aspect of an imagined endogamous community and promoted elaborate
bureaucratic procedures that would reach into every corner of civil society. The idea had an independent but similar career in sixteenth-century
France, where the traditional aristocracy sought to secure its primacy over
an upstart bourgeoisie that the monarchy had allowed to purchase noble
rank in order to solve the state’s fiscal crisis. It would take root in and
profoundly shape as well the social and political order of the American
colonies of Spain and France.4 Although some early modern specialist
insist that these are examples of either religious or class differentiation
rather than race, central to both was the idea that physical corruption of
the blood would lead to corruption of the social order, that such corruption could be transmitted from one generation to the next via procreation,
4

Cf. Maria Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions; Guilluame Aubert: ›The Blood of
France‹.

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and that moral character could be physically embodied. By most measures, these are core features of racial thinking.
From the eighteenth-century Enlightenment until the late nineteenth
century, scientists, jurists, and ordinary folk sought other ways to make
sense of racial difference, but they retained the powerful metaphor of lineages defined by blood, with the degrees of purity denominated in fractional units. In an Atlantic World dependent on slave labor, where genealogical records were absent or unreliable and racial mixture rendered
physical features like skin color and hair texture equally unhelpful, the
accurate determination of race proved to be a problem. Throughout the
nineteenth century, North American courts struggled to determine who
was of African origin and thus a fit subject for enslavement? Who could
legally marry? What offspring were legitimate, and thus eligible to inherit
property? Who had been slandered by an erroneous accusation of possessing African ancestry in excess of the racial minimum? Since people
of African descent constituted a majority of the population in many Latin
American and Caribbean (Spanish and otherwise) societies, the problem of racial determination took on a substantially different character
and social significance, but the core idea of racial blood remained crucial nonetheless to the national imaginary. Immigration controls aimed at
›whitening‹ the population and social projects influenced by the ›science‹
of eugenics shaped state policies in the southern as well as the northern
hemisphere. In all of the Americas, therefore, debates about racial bloodlines were not subjects for mere idle intellectual speculation. Literally as
well as figuratively, the issue was deadly serious.5
By the late nineteenth century, traditional measures of racial determination that had been tried and found wanting; skin color, hair texture,
and anthropometric measures of the facial index (determined by the slope
of the forehead) or the cranial index (the ratio of skull width to length):
all proved unreliable and sometimes produced downright embarrassing
results. For example, the prominent French race scientist Paul Broca,
cursed with a wide brow, vehemently rejected the cranial index because
5

The literature on race determination in nineteenth-century North America is voluminous, but for seminal examples, see Ariela Gross: What Blood Won’t Tell; Peggy Pascoe: What Comes Naturally; Randall Kennedy: Interracial Intimacies; and Walter Johnson: The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the
1850s. Although racial identities were configured differently in Latin America and the
Caribbean than in the United States, there were comparable tensions over definitions of
race and its social significance – see María Elena Martínez: The Black Blood of New
Spain; Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (eds.):
Race and Nation in Modern Latin America; Alejandra Bronfman: Measures of Equality;
Nancy Leys Stepan: ›The Hour of Eugenics‹; Thomas E. Skidmore: Black Into White.

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195

by that criteria he would have been classified as of an inferior race. Cranial measurements and other aspects of the human body’s morphology
were simply too imprecise or incapable of grouping human kind into distinct, consistent categories, much less the racial hierarchies on which theorizing depended.6 By the early twenty century all of the diverse modes
for determining and categorizing race had proved useless to science as
well as suspect at law, producing the intellectual crisis that made Franz
Boas’s methodological and conceptual critique effective.7 But that crisis
also provided an opening for the newly emergent science of blood studies
– serology – that seemingly provided tools to meet the challenge. Ironically, this new science would reprise an early modern imaginary; racial
knowledge would once again literally depend on the presumptive ties of
blood to procreation and thus to racial character.
The establishment of those links would come from an unlikely source
during the First World War. A lull in the fighting on the eastern front enabled two doctors, Ludwik Hirszfeld and his wife Hanna, to take blood
samples from the thousands of allied troops languishing at the Greek port
of Salonica. After the war, with Hannah assistance, Hirszfeld analyzed
this data and published the findings in a French journal, L’Anthropologie,
hoping to demonstrate the utility of the new field of serology for ethnographic work.8 The Hirszfelds found strong correlations between the
types of blood (A, B, AB, and O) and the various national and ethnic
populations they encountered at the front. Western Europeans were more
likely to be type A, Indian and Slavic groups less likely to be A and more
B, and so on. Several years before the war, Hirszfeld had determined that
one’s blood type was genetically transmitted, that is, a child inherited the
blood type of one or the other of its parents. His work built in turn on
Austrian scientist Karl Landsteiner’s discovery at the turn of the century
that there were four different types of human blood: A, B, AB, and O.
Landsteiner’s discovery had a very powerful impact on surgical practice
because it made the transfusion of whole blood much safer, since mixing
different types of blood can be fatal.
The Hirszfelds’ blood work took a very different course, however.
Their article pushed the earlier research toward different ends and with
different implications – not toward better medical practice but a more
6

7
8

Cf. Claude Blanckaert: Of Monstrous Metis? (›wide brow‹); William H. Schneider:
Quality and Quantity, chap. 8 (›cranial measurements‹).
See for example, Franz Boas: Eugenics.
Ludwik had collaborated earlier with Emil von Dungren, a German colleague – see
Ludwik Hirszfeld: The Story of One Life, pp. xx-xxxv; 58 f.; Peter Keating: Holistic
Bacteriology.

196

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precise and scientific determination of racial identity. The import of their
findings, they declared, was that one could now construct what they called
a bio-chemical index of race. Their index measured the relative proportion of type A blood, which was found more frequently among western
Europeans (and which Landsteiner had named ›A‹ simply because of its
preponderance among Austrians), to type B, which was found more frequently among Slavic peoples, Asians, and Africans – all of whom were
considered then to be among the lesser races. And, indeed, since the proportion of A-blood formed the numerator of Hirszfeld’s index, higher
numbers were associated with western Europeans, with ›the others‹ necessarily falling lower on the scale. Despite its arbitrariness (or rather,
because of it), the number reinforced the impression that the lesser types
were indeed – ›lesser‹. Once again ›science‹ had cast the ›lesser races‹
lower on civilization’s scale.9
Hirszfeld’s blood work was subject to the same critical defect as anthropometry and other ›scientific‹ means of racial classification, however.
Both began with the conviction that there was something to measure,
that is, that races existed, and then moved on to find effective ways of
identifying them – a sort of reverse scientific method. Neither method of
identification, moreover, could account for all the individuals purported
to belong to a given racial category; they merely estimated the probability of membership. Consequently, while the identification of blood types
proved to be an essential tool for medical science, it was no more useful
in racial identification than skin color or cranial measurements had been.
Although the incidence of the various types (A, B, AB, and O) did, in
fact, correlate to a degree with broad population distributions, those correlations are not sufficient to actually allow an individual to be reliably
classified into any given racial group. Since we now know, for example, that sixty-three percent of the world’s population is type O, it is not
possible to map blood types onto particular ›races‹, notwithstanding the
clustering of A and B within certain geographic patterns.10
Hirszfeld’s association with the socially regressive uses of medical
science research was highly ironic. First, Ludwik Hirszfeld was born of
Jewish parents in Poland, but converted to Catholicism as an adult. He
received his early professional training in Germany. Like many people
of Jewish origin, however, he would discover during World War II that
9

10

Cf. Ludwik Hirszfeld, Hanna Hirszfeld: Essai d’application des méthodes sérologiques
au problème des races; William H. Schneider: Quality and Quantity, chap. 8.
This is, of course, the general and enduring problem confronted by all racial identifiers
– including more recently, as noted below, DNA markers (see Jonathan Marks: The
Legacy of Serological Studies).

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197

the Nazi regime was unimpressed with his religious conversion, preferring to classify him by his blood ties rather than his cultural choices.
Thus Hirszfeld was stripped of his medical practice and confined to the
Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War, along with roughly two
thousand other Christians of Jewish origins. Hirszfeld emerged from this
traumatic experience a fierce critic of racist thinking, particularly the use
of science to support racist policies. In 1938, he wrote an article rejecting the racist, anti-immigrationist uses to which his ideas had been put
during the preceding decade, a critique he would repeat in his postwar
autobiography.11
Before his death in 1954, Ludwik Hirszfeld enjoyed an illustrious
career in medical science. Celebrated as a survivor of the Holocaust, his
contributions to racial science during the interwar period were largely
obscured. Despite his subsequent repudiation of racist ideas, the earlier
work would find disciples in other fields. Indeed, some of those disciples
would cause a major falling out among anthropologists in the early 1960s,
when they drew on the alleged racial implications of serology to support
southern segregationists’ arguments against school integration.12
Coming at the end of century-long quest by intellectuals and pseudoscientists to find the Holy Grail of racial determination, the Hirszfelds’
work appeared to establish scientifically reliable criteria for classifying
human populations by race. The irony of that accomplishment, however,
is that Jews did not fare too well on his biochemical index, which put
them at the level of the despised Slavs. Thus did his work feed the very
fires of anti-Semitism that nearly consumed him. And notwithstanding
his subsequent recantation, others invoked that work decades later to further the racist oppression of other devalued and despised groups. Perhaps
Hirszfeld’s motives can be traced to his conversion; at the time he published his call to anthropologists to adopt blood science in ethnographies,
he no longer identified with Jews. But then that underscores the most profound irony of all: that Hirszfeld’s own religious conversion implied the
belief that putative racial identities are in fact matters of human choice
and social performance – that is, matters of culture rather than biology
11

12

Ludwik Hirszfeld: The Story of One Life, pp. 255 ff. For the broader question of Jewish
assimilation during this period, see Todd M. Endelman: Jewish Converts in NineteenthCentury Warsaw; Marius Turda, Paul J. Weindling: Health, Race and German Politics.
For the diverse responses of Jewish intellectuals to the notion of a ›Jewish race‹, see
Mitchell B. Hart: Jews and Race. An Introductory Essay.
Hirszfeld’s work was still being cited approvingly by physical anthropologists as late
as 2002, while ignoring its racist implications and his implicit self-critique – for an
example, see Marta Aleksandra Balinsky: Ludwik Hirszfeld.

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– even as the import of his scientific work sustained just the opposite
proposition.
Charles Drew and the Challenge to Racial Blood
Although his role in the debate over racial blood was the opposite of
Hirszfeld’s, Charles Drew’s life course bears striking similarities to his
Polish predecessor. Exactly twenty years Hirszfeld’s junior, Drew finished his medical studies on the eve of America’s entry into the Second
World War, at roughly the same time as Hirszfeld was being confined to
the Warsaw ghetto. A product of Washington’s elite black high school
and Amherst College, Drew studied medicine at McGill in Montreal.
Upon graduation, however, he was rejected by all the major U.S. hospitals for residency training. At that time black doctors were systematically discriminated against in the profession, excluded from membership
in the American Medical Association, and denied the advanced training
opportunities that would allow them to attain certification in medical specialties. Drew took a position at Howard University’s medical school and
hospital complex before continuing his studies at Columbia University,
where in 1940 he became the first African American to receive a doctorate in medicine.13
After completing a dissertation on ›banked blood‹, a subject that had
attracted his interest at McGill, Drew was chosen to direct the ›Blood for
Britain‹ project, an emergency operation to send liquid plasma to British
soldiers in France. In the spring of 1941, he set up the American Red
Cross’s first blood bank in New York City, a pilot program that became
the model for the national effort to supply blood plasma to military and
naval forces overseas. Shortly after America entered the war, however,
the Army decided to exclude black donors from its blood collection program, ostensibly because white southerners would object to having ›black
blood‹ in their veins. After significant protests from African American
civil rights organizations, they amended the policy to allow blood donations from blacks but keep them separate from whites’ supplies, a policy
that remained standard practice for the Red Cross and American hospitals
long after the war.14
The irony that Charles Drew, a central figure in the development of
the blood banks, would not now be eligible to donate his own blood to
those banks was not lost on black and white commentators at the time.
13
14

Cf. Spencie Love: One Blood; Charles E. Wynes: Charles Richard Drew.
See Spencie Love: One Blood, p. 49.

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Although Drew registered a protest against this policy, he had already
returned to teaching at Howard University and had also become chief of
surgery at Freedmen’s Hospital. Drew’s life’s work advancing blood science had little effect on the myth of racial blood, but the circumstances of
his death in an automobile accident on April 1, 1950, sparked a powerful
symbolic challenge to that idea. Drew bled to death in a small hospital
in Burlington, North Carolina, despite the best efforts of the white surgeons attending him to save his life. The denial of emergency medical
care to African Americans in similar circumstances was a common occurrence, however, and this led many to believe that Drew had also been
the victim of the Jim Crow medical regime. Though erroneous, such a
narrative was irresistible in Drew’s case, given the compelling irony that
his scientific and administrative achievement was credited with saving
thousands of other victims of bodily trauma by making blood transfusions more viable. Thus Drew’s death became emblematic of the racial
injustices of Jim Crow America more generally. »The rumor [of Drew’s
death] grew«, writes Spencie Love, one of his biographers, »because it
expressed not only a psychic truth but also a larger social and historical truth«.15 The myth of racial blood that had persisted since the early
modern era and grounded both popular and learned racial discourse and
practices was now discredited, not by the modern scientific thought to
which Drew himself had devoted his life but by the powerful popular
myth surrounding his death. It would, moreover, fuel the postwar movement against Jim Crow.
Drew’s scientific achievement was the virtual mirror image of
Hirszfeld’s; the one challenging notions of racial blood that the other
had reinforced. What is most striking about their juxtaposed lives and
careers, however, is how similar was the interplay of their respective life
stories, social contexts, and work, and how pointedly those conjunctures
underscored the historically contingent relationship of science and race.
Although their opinions eventually converged in a rejection of the archaic
notion of racial blood, the idea proved resistant to reasoned argument and
in one way or another both men would fall victim to it.
Charles Drew was born into a family of obvious and substantial white
ancestry, which made his physical appearance racially ambiguous. Indeed, so much so that, as his wife, Leonore, revealed, he developed a
set of conversational tricks to alert strangers that he was actually a black

15

Ibid., p. 44.

200

Thomas C. Holt

man, despite the evidence of their eyes suggesting the contrary.16 In an
odd way, therefore, the respective lives and works of Drew and Hirszfeld
frame an enduring tension in racial thinking, and may in some measure
help explain the tenacity and continued efficacy of the racial idea. Race
science assumes that racial identity is a cluster of biological and character traits that can be isolated. For long stretches of human history it has
been imagined that those traits were in or carried by the blood. But, in
fact, that racial imaginary has been embedded in social life and in everyday practice by laws, ideologies, and caricatures – all of which were
often intensified during periods of political and social contestation. The
anxiety over the mixing of bloods or, inversely, preserving the purity of
one’s blood, have from its earliest inception been a biological image fashioned in spaces of social contestation. This was ultimately a social, not a
biological, phenomena.
Just as early modern thinkers, drawing on ancient Greek and medieval
notions of human physiology, conflated the properties of bodily fluids like
semen, mothers’ milk, and blood,17 making them the carriers of moral as
well as physical characteristics and values from one generation to another, so did early twentieth-century scientists and ethnographers wield
scientific findings to achieve social ends – like anti-immigration, segregation, and extermination. Given that world view, they moved almost
seamlessly to embrace the notion that one’s religious choice or social
status could materialize as something manifest in the blood, and that it
was transmissible across generations, a lineage. These ideas would have
a powerful influence on the racial regimes that emerged in the Americas,
where the fractional tallies of one’s blood lineage became fundamental
features of social and national formations in both hemispheres and the
Caribbean. Despite the differences between the racial regimes of Latin
America and the United States, they all turned to science at one time
or another to support policies of differentiation and subordination, especially in the aftermath of revolutionary conflicts or when confronting
the task of building or sustaining a nation. Thus did white Cubans turn
to race science to delegitimize the racial democracy their independence
had seemed to promise; and thus did many other American nation-states
draw on eugenic theories to fashion ›whitening‹ strategies designed to
reconstitute the racial character of their citizenry.18
16

17
18

Interview with Mrs. Leonore Drew by author and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Washington,
D.C., June 20, 1975; also see Spencie Love: One Blood.
Cf. María Elena Martinez: Genealogical Fictions.
Cf. Alejandra Bronfman: Measures of Equality, pp. 6 ff.; Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne
S. Macpherson; Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (eds.): Race and Nation in Modern Latin

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201

Race proved to be a relatively arbitrary construct, however, dependent
on a thing unseen, and ultimately indeterminate, its ostensible precision
a chimera. In a racially ordered society, markers of race – whether skin
color, blood, or other physical features – are of use only as a kind of
short-hand for character, values and predispositions. It is the moral and
social valence that mattered; biology could not provide reliable indicators of how an individual or a group would act in the world. But the latter
idea is perhaps as fragile as the notion of racial blood is persistent. In the
early twenty-first century, for example, we find the essential implications,
if not tenets, of that early modern idea surviving in or being revived by
various application of the science of DNA.19 Despite its many variations,
therefore, the human species continues to be imagined as being differentiated by ›racial blood‹. Despite our best hopes, science has not saved
us.
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Aubert, Guilluame: ›The Blood of France‹. Race and Purity of Blood in the
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19

America.
Though initially heralded as the ultimate deconstruction of the racial imaginary, the
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Skidmore, Thomas E.: Black Into White. Race and Nationality in Brazilian
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