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Max S. Hering Torres Maria Elena Martine PDF
Max S. Hering Torres Maria Elena Martine PDF
Editorial 1
E XPOSÉS
Purity of Blood 11
Problems of Interpretation
Max S. Hering Torres
Race and Caste 39
Other Words and Other Worlds
María Eugenia Chaves
S TUDIES
Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹ 61
The Case of João Baptista D’Este
David Graizbord
›Moro de linaje y nación‹ 81
Religious Identity, Race and Status in New Granada
Karoline P. Cook
Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹ 99
The Example of Colonial Mexico
Laura A. Lewis
Purity of Blood and Caste 125
Identity Narratives among Early Modern Goan Elites
Ângela Barreto Xavier
Beyond Race 151
Exclusion in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America
Tamar Herzog
ii Contents
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 con-
texts (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 discus-
sions about the polity. Already in the mid-fifteenth century, some pow-
erful Castilian Christians were developing ideologies of limpieza de san-
gre (›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, re-
spectively), 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, spiri-
tual. ›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 dur-
ing 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 be-
fore 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. Cam-
bridge: 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.: Ras-
sismus 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 Amer-
ica, 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 colo-
niales. In: La cuestión colonial, ed. Heraclio Bonilla. Bogotá: Norma 2011, pp. 451-
470; Nikolaus Böttcher, Bernd Hausberger, Max S. Hering Torres (eds.): El peso de
2 Editorial
3
Cf. David Nirenberg: Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities. Jews and Chris-
tians in Fifteenth-Century Spain. In: Past and Present, 174, 2002, pp. 3-41.
Editorial 5
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 neces-
sary 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, to-
gether 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 cen-
turies Iberians debated the best ways to make converted Jews and Mus-
lims into good Christians, and these discussions reveal different views
about whether it was ultimately blood or practices and behavior that de-
termined 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 Univer-
sity) 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 con-
stitutes 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 sys-
tem’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.
6 Editorial
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.
Editorial 7
6
In Puerto Rico slavery was abolished in 1873 and in Cuba not until 1886.
8 Editorial
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, impor-
tant 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 scien-
tists of the interwar period whose research in different ways contributed
to what he calls »blood science«. Hirszfeld was a Polish Jew who con-
verted 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 disser-
tation 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 hospi-
tal. 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 cli-
mate 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 es-
say 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 per-
sistently 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
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 pre-
sentation of certain historiographical debates; second, to develop a his-
torical 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.
12 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 san-
gre in order to clarify the problem of its interpretation within the frame-
work 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 twenti-
eth«.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 feel-
ing«,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 signifi-
cance to purity of blood, since it was not based on an unshakeable bio-
logical 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 mod-
ern 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 re-
cover 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
Cecil Roth: Marranos and Racial Anti-Semitism, p. 243.
2
Albert A. Sicroff: Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, p. 47.
3
Antonio Domínguez Ortiz: Los judeoconversos en España Moderna, p. 138.
4
Guido Kisch: Nationalism and Race in Medieval Law, p. 73.
5
Cf. Francisco Márquez Villanueva: The Converso Problem, p. 324.
6
Cf. Rainer Walz: Der vormoderne Antisemitismus.
7
Cf. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Assimilaton and Racial Anti-Semitism.
8
Cf. David Nirenberg: Was there race before modernity?
9
Albert A. Sicroff: Spanish Anti-Judaism, p. 592.
10
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Limpieza de sangre; id.: Rassismus in der Vormoderne.
Purity of Blood 13
11
Maria Eugenia Chaves: Introducción, p. 12.
12
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Limpieza de sangre.
13
Cf. Walter Mignolo: La idea de América Latina, pp. 42-52.
14
Cf. Anibal Quijano: Colonialidad del poder.
15
Cf. Michel-Rolph Trouillot: Global Transformations, p. 98.
14 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 pos-
tulate 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 racial-
ization should take into account both their diversity and flexibility, but
without evading diachronic parallelisms.
16
Cf. Julio Arias, Eduardo Restrepo: Historizando raza: propuestas conceptuales y
metodológicas.
17
Cf. Anibal Quijano: Colonialidad del poder.
18
Cf. Jerome Friedman: Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reforma-
tion; Leon Poliakov: Geschichte des Antisemitismus, pp. 67, 84, 170, 206, and 150.
19
Cf. Richard van Dülmen: Der Ehrlose Mensch, p. 1.
Purity of Blood 15
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 con-
duct. 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 estab-
lished. In accordance with the sentence-statute issued by the Council of
Toledo in 1449, fourteen Jewish converts were expelled from their of-
fices. 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 fre-
quently 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 san-
gre had not yet emerged, but that of lindos had. According to Ramón
Menéndez Pidal and Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, the term ›lindo‹ (nor-
mally, ›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, impecca-
ble, 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 pre-
sented 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 in-
stitutions, with the consent of both the King and the Pope. In institu-
20
Antonio Martín Gamero (ed.): Historia de la ciudad de Toledo, p. 1037.
21
Cf. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz: La clase social de los conversos en Castilla en la Edad
Moderna, p. 13, footnote 9.
Purity of Blood 17
22
Andrés Bernáldez: Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos, pp. 103, 251 f.
18 Max S. Hering Torres
23
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.
24
Alfonso Martínez de Toledo: Corbacho, pp. 59 f.
25
Antonio Nebrija: Vocabulario español-latino, f. LXXXVI.
26
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Limpieza de sangre; Verena Stolcke: Invaded Women, p. 11.
Purity of Blood 19
27
Quoted in Max S. Hering Torres: Rassismus in der Vormoderne, pp. 220 f.
28
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).
29
Cf. FranciscoTorrejoncillo: Centinela contra Judíos, p. 12.
30
Cf. Juan de Pineda: Treynta y cinco dialogos familiares de la agricultura cristiana, vol. 1,
f. 112.
31
Cf. FranciscoTorrejoncillo: Centinela contra Judíos, p. 22.
32
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 ir-
refutable Christian truth was amplified through the understanding of the
human body as a representation of orthodoxy. This allows us to differ-
entiate 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 so-
cial 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 In-
quisitorial Notary in Jodar, a town 40 kilometers east of Jaén, located
in the jurisdiction of the tribunal of the Inquisition of Córdoba. He there-
fore 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 con-
sisting 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 In-
quisition, as well as other details of his genealogy, in order to verify his
purity of blood. The latter point was determined by the following ques-
tion: 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
Diego Castejón Fonseca: Primacia de la Santa Iglesia de Toledo, vol. 2, f. 1026-1030.
34
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 Juden-
feindschaft 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 declara-
tions, 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 In-
quisition. 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 can-
didate’s parents, because the chapel had formerly been the synagogue
of the old Jewish quarter. Another witness, Diego de Orozco Godoy, re-
called 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 say-
ing that »these witnesses [. . . ] say that these people are not pure and, ac-
cording 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 deci-
sion, citing the rancor and resentment against his family on the part of the
relatives of the witnesses. His main argument was that two hostile wit-
nesses 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
Informaciones genealógicas de Francisco Fernández de Ribera, Jaén 1612, Archivo
Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Inquisición Córdoba, leg. 5245, caja nr. 1, exp. 4, fol. 3.
36
Ibid., f. 28-29; f. 35-37 and fol. 50-51.
37
Ibid., f. 56.
22 Max S. Hering Torres
38
Ibid., f. 96.
Purity of Blood 23
39
Therefore, the lack of discussions of purity of blood in the treatises of early evange-
lization 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.
40
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 pu-
rity, 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 con-
stant 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 three-
quarters 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 ex-
tremely 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 like-
wise 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 con-
text 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 gen-
eral, 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 popu-
lation 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 ge-
nealogy. 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
Ibid.
42
Cf. James Sweet: The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought, p. 150.
43
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 eigh-
teenth century). In order to illustrate the previous point, it is not intended
to cover all of Hispanic America, but rather limited documentary refer-
ences 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 polar-
ity 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 Mid-
dle 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, al-
though 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 con-
cept 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 ex-
isted), the Mestizos were exempt from tribute, although they were liable
44
AGN, Genealogías: II, caja 66, f. 901-913, 1766.
45
AGN, Genealogías: SC.28, 5, D.29, f. 680-681 r.
46
Cf. Wulf D. Hund: Die weiße Norm, p. 174.
47
Cf. Valentin Groebner: Haben Hautfarben eine Geschichte?
48
Cf. Ilona Katzew: Casta Painting.
26 Max S. Hering Torres
49
Cf. Margarita Garrido: Libre de todos los colores en Nueva Granada, p. 249.
50
Cf. Bernard Lavallé: Del indio criollo; Max S. Hering Torres: Saberes médicos –
Saberes teológicos, p. 117.
Purity of Blood 27
51
Cf. Magali Carrera: Imagining Identity in New Spain, pp. 4 f.; Juan Felipe Hoyos Joanne
Rappaport: El mestizaje en la época colonial, p. 302.
52
Cf. Juan Solórzano y Pereyra: Política Indiana, I, p. 609.
53
Cf. Erika Fischer-Lichte: Einleitung, p. 7.
54
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 peo-
ple, 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 unbri-
dled 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 pro-
grams 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 »miser-
able 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 re-
marks 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 promis-
cuous 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
Joaquín de Finestrad: El vasallo Instruido, pp. 134 f.
56
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 Enlight-
enment 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. Nev-
ertheless, 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 pe-
riod. 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 so-
cial 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 cho-
sen, but linked to the concepts of progress and civilization.
57
Ibid., pp. 167 ff.
30 Max S. Hering Torres
58
Cf. Albert Memmi: Rassismus, p. 165.
59
Cf. Donna Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 197-201.
60
Philomena Essed: Understanding Everyday Racism, p. 43.
Purity of Blood 31
61
Basing his observations on gender studies, Peter Wade avoids a differentiation between
biology and culture, preferring to recognize their mutual relationship as cultural arte-
facts. 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, be-
cause it helps to justify processes of naturalization in a definitive way.
Truth needs axioms in order to be constructed, in many cases on the ba-
sis 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 re-
capitulation 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 variabil-
ity and polysemy. Race and racism are not anthropological constants; on
the contrary, they are polymorphous and are governed by supremely flex-
ible systems, theories or practices. The conceptual and historical unifor-
mity of racism is simply a teleological illusion. In this regard, it is advan-
tageous 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, in-
stitutional racism, scientific racism, biological racism, proto-racism, old
racism, neo-racism, differential racism, etc.62 Race as a social construc-
tion 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 fo-
cus exclusively on similarities: such comparison must take into account
both differences and similarities. To achieve this, it may be useful to con-
sider 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 recon-
structing 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 stud-
ied. The latter step implies studying their signification, the ways in which
they were constructed, the monopolies on truth which make them ›indis-
putable‹, the methods of proof used, and their effect on both social reality
and everyday life.
Through this method of historical inquiry, the processes of racializa-
tion 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, geograph-
63
Cf. Wulf D. Hund: Inclusion and Exclusion.
64
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, p. 11.
65
Cf. Max S. Hering Torres: Rassismus in der Vormoderne, p. 250.
66
Cf. Reinhart Koselleck: Vergangene Zukunft, p. 125; see also id.: Zeitschichten. pp.
19-26.
34 Max S. Hering Torres
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.
Literature
Arendt, Hannah: Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. München etc.: Piper
2003.
Arias, Julio, Eduardo Restrepo: Historizando raza: propuestas conceptuales y
metodológicas. In: Crítica y Emancipación. Revista Latinoamericana de
Ciencias Sociales, 2010, 3, pp. 46-65.
Aznar Cardona, Pedro: Expulsión Justificada de los Moriscos Españoles. Divi-
dida en dos Partes. Huesca: Pedro Cabarte 1612.
Bernáldez, Andrés: Memorias del reinado de los Reyes Católicos, eds. Manuel
Gómez y Juan de Mata Carriazo y Arroquia. Madrid: CSIC 1962.
Carrera, Magali: Imagining Identity in New Spain. Race, Lineage, and the Colo-
nial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas
Press 2003.
Castejón Fonseca, Diego de: Primacia de la Santa Iglesia de Toledo. 2 vol.
Madrid: Diego Díaz de la Carrera 1645.
Purity of Blood 35
Sweet, James H.: The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought. The William
and Mary Quarterly, 54, 1997, 1, pp. 143-166.
Torrejoncillo, Francisco: Centinela contra Judíos. Madrid: Julián de Paredes
1674.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph: Global Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan 2003.
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim: Assimilaton and Racial Anti-Semitism. The Iberian
and the German Models. New York: Leo Back Institute 1982.
Wade, Peter: Race and Nation in Latin America: An Anthropological View. In:
Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, eds. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Ane S.
Macpherson, Karin A. Rosemblatt. Chape Hill etc.: The University of North
Carolina Press, pp. 263-281.
Walz, Rainer: Der vormoderne Antisemitismus: Religiöser Fanatismus oder
Rassenwahn? In: Historische Zeitschrift, 260, 1995, 3, pp. 719-748.
Wodak, Ruth, Martin Reisigl: Discourse and Racism: European Perspectives. In:
Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 1999, pp. 175-199.
Race and Caste
Other Words and Other Worlds
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 or-
der to establish that notwithstanding authors’ efforts to deeply historicize the con-
cept, 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 con-
tested field of enunciation where discursive relations and power relations create
the conditions for some discursive objects to emerge and to be significant. I con-
clude 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 to-
tally centred on European enlightened tradition. In this sense, this article urges
for a ›genealogical‹ critique of hegemonic academic knowledge.
1
Cf. Robert Bernasconi (ed.): Race; Robert Bernasconi, Tommy L. Lott (eds.): The idea
of race.
2
Robert Bernasconi: Who invented the concept of race?, p. 11.
40 María Eugenia Chaves
3
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 Mc-
Caa, 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: Genealog-
ical Fictions; María Eugenia Chaves: La Creación del ›Otro‹ Colonial; Ilona Katzew:
Casta Painting; Magali Carrera: Imagining Identity in New Spain.
4
Cf. Michel Foucault: L’archéologie du savoir, pp. 116-138.
5
»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
6
Cf. Robert Bernasconi: Who invented the concept of race?, p. 11.
7
Michel Foucault: Society Must Be Defended, p. 7 (›subjugated knowledges‹); id.: pp. 9
ff. (›genealogy‹).
8
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.
9
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
10
Cf. Douglas Cope: The Limits of Racial Domination; Martin Minchom: The People of
Quito, pp. 62 ff., 201-234, 262 f.
11
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 Conversa-
tions on Race, Class and Gender; María Eugenia Chaves: Honor y Libertad.
12
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions; Max S. Hering Torres: ›Raza‹; id.:
›Limpieza de sangre‹; id.: Limpieza de sangre; id.: Color, pureza, raza.
13
María Eugenia Chaves: La creación del ›otro‹ colonial.
Race and Caste 43
14
Cf. Michel Foucault: L’archéologie du savoir, p. 53 (›formation discursive‹).
15
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 11, 12 and 13 (quotations); pp. 58 f.
(for the anachronism of the concept of race).
16
Ibid., p. 13 (reference to ›episteme of resemblance‹); Michel Foucault: The order of
things.
44 María Eugenia Chaves
17
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, p. 3 (›genealogical materialism‹).
18
Cf. Cornel West: Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism.
19
María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 46-54 (›essentialization of race‹),
pp. 52 f. (quotations).
Race and Caste 45
20
Ibid., p. 162.
21
Ibid., pp. 248 (›skin color‹), 163 (›negative connotations‹ etc.).
22
Ibid., pp. 82 ff. and 269 (caste system as unstable), 223 (›bad race‹).
23
Ibid., p. 270; concerning the following see ibid., p. 264.
46 María Eugenia Chaves
24
Michel Foucault: The order of things, p. x (›epistemes‹); id.: p. 29 (›signature and simil-
itudes‹).
48 María Eugenia Chaves
25
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 (›chameleon-
like‹ metaphor).
26
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 differ-
ences 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‹ di-
chotomy 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 dif-
ference to one word or criterion. What remains unanswered is why should
we conclude that the word ›race‹ acquired an enunciative capacity to con-
dense 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 character-
istics 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 Amer-
ican colonisation and the slave trade and, as such, ›racialised‹ social re-
lations and practices of exclusion. In what follows I shall summarise the
central tenets of my own work on the subject.
27
Max S. Hering Torres: Color, pureza, raza.
28
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
29
José de Acosta: Procuranda indorum salute, pp. 104 ff. (my translation).
Race and Caste 51
30
Cf. Alonso Sandoval: Naturaleza [. . . ] de todos los Etíopes; id.: De Instaurata Æthiopia
Salute.
31
Cf. Michel Foucault: The Order of Things, pp. 16-44.
32
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.
33
Cf. Juan Solórzano y Pereyra: Política Indiana, vol. 1, book 2, chap. 30, p. 612.
34
Cf. Juan Carlos Estenssoro: Los colores de la plebe, pp. 69-74, in particular his discus-
sion of the lack of any systematic discourse to define mestizaje in Huaman Poma de
Ayala’s text.
35
Cf. Real Academia Española: Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana, vol. 5, p. 556; Se-
bastián 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. How-
ever, these sources considered mestizos despicable because they carried a
›birth defect‹ expressed in the ›stain of indeterminate colour‹. This defi-
ciency, which had its visible effect in colour, was thought to be transmit-
ted to one’s descendants through breast milk. In that sense the reference
to colour falls within the enunciative space of the ›purity/impurity‹ dis-
course. 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 popu-
lation‹ 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 ac-
companied 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 de-
fined 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 al-
ways 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 orga-
nize them. Whiteness was understood as an ordering factor in the system
of differences. In consequence, the discourse about mestizaje in the di-
rection of whitening transformed it into the appropriate mechanism of
redemption. The casta typologies that started to appear in the eighteenth
36
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.
37
Real Academia Española: Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana, vol. 1, p. 616 (my trans-
lation).
Race and Caste 53
38
Cf. María Eugenia Chaves: La construcción del ›otro‹ colonial.
54 María Eugenia Chaves
39
Michel Foucault: Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 50 ff. (›the formation of objects‹);
pp. 71 ff. (›the formation of strategies‹).
Race and Caste 55
References
Acosta, José de: De Procuranda Indorum Salute o Predicación del Evangelio en
las Indias. Preliminary study and edition by Franciso Mateos S.J. Madrid:
Biblioteca de Autores Españoles1954 [1589].
——: Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, en que tratan los casos nobles del
cielo y elementos, metales, plantas y animales dellas: y ritos y ceremonias,
leyes y gobierno y guerras de los Indios. Seville: in Casa de Juan de León
1590.
Acosta, José de: De Natura Novi Orbis. Libri Duo et Promulgatione evangelio
apud Barbaros, siue De Procuranda Indorum Salute libri sex. Coloniae Agrip-
pinae: In officina Birckmannica, Sumptibus Arnoldo Mylij 1596.
Bernasconi, Robert (ed.): Race. Malden etc.: Blackwell 2001.
——: ›Who invented the concept of race?‹. In: Race, ed. id. Malden etc.: Black-
well 2001, pp. 11-36.
——, Tommy Lott (eds.): The Idea of Race. Indianapolis: Hackett 2000.
Boyer, Richard: Caste and Identity in Colonial Mexico. A Proposal and an Exam-
ple. In: Occasional Papers no. 7, Latin American Studies Consortium of New
England 1997, 17 pp.
Carrera, Magali M.: Imagining Identity in New Spain. Race, Linaje, and the Colo-
nial body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press
2003.
40
Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincializing Europe, p. 31.
Race and Caste 57
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.
1
A recent treatment that touches on and at least implicitly joins attendant scholarly de-
bates 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’ ex-
aggerated distinction between modern, racist antisemitism and pre-modern animosity
toward Jews is David Nirenberg: Was There Race Before Modernity?
62 David Graizbord
2
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.
3
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 specifi-
cally, 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 Chris-
tian stock. Though the spread of the Statutes was limited and controver-
sial, 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 set-
tings, 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 sys-
tems 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 with-
out yielding to empiricist models of knowledge, much less to any purely
secular notion of ›race‹. In that respect at least, no Weberian »disenchant-
ment« 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
›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. Simi-
larly, ›New Christians‹ was the term used to describe converts from Judaism and, inac-
curately, 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.
5
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions.
6
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 ›explain-
ing‹ real or alleged human behavior.
64 David Graizbord
7
Scholars of early modern Europe, in particular those who specialize in the study of the
Protestant and Catholic Reformations, employ the term ›confessionalization‹ to desig-
nate 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 schol-
arship of Heinz Schilling (cf. for instance id. (ed.): Religiöser Fundamentalismus) and
Wolfgang Reinhard (see for instance id.: Lebensformen Europas), which focuses pri-
marily on Central Europe. A study that reconstructs processes of Tridentine confes-
sionalization 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.
8
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.
9
Thomas Bodkin: Adrien Van der Venne, p. 240.
10
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., Ger-
ard Weigers: A Man of Three Worlds; Natalie Zemon Davis: Trickster Travels; David
Graizbord: A Historical Contextualization of Sephardi Apostates and Self-Styled Mis-
sionaries of the Seventeenth Century.
Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹ 65
11
On these schools, see for instance José Tavim: Educating the Infidels Within.
12
On the ghettoization of Jews in the Italian Peninsula and its cultural and political reper-
cussions, 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 Ac-
culturation; 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.
66 David Graizbord
Several Christian prisoners of war shared that fate.13 For their part, Eu-
ropean 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 pro-
priety, vigilance, and public decorum that one scholar has dubbed »moral
conformism« guided the construction of neophyte communities of »He-
brews 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, articu-
lated 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 mis-
sionary 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 nav-
igated both sets of discourses with skill, yet probably with some anxiety
as well.
13
On converts to Islam among captured voyagers and soldiers, see for instance Bartolomé
Benassar, Lucille Benassar: Los Cristianos de Alá.
14
On this subject, see for instance Yosef Kaplan: Judíos Nuevos en Amsterdam; Miriam
Bodian: Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation.
15
On this ethos, see for example Yosef Kaplan: Bom Judesmo.
16
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
17
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.
18
›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
19
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.
20
David Graizbord, Claude B. Suczynski: Introduction, p. 126.
Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹ 69
21
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 self-
styled Jewish ›martyrs‹ such as Luis de Carvajal the Younger (1566-1596), or Jewish
immigrants to the Iberian Peninsula who, like Bendanan Serfatim, converted to Catholi-
cism, 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.
22
As I use it here, and as it is used elsewhere, the term ›Pauline‹ means ›relating to St.
Paul and his doctrines‹.
70 David Graizbord
23
See David Graizbord: Religion and Ethnicity Among the Men of the Nation, pp. 47 f.
24
On these apologetic Sephardi genealogies, see for instance David Nirenberg: Mass Con-
versions and Genealogical Mentalities, pp. 28 ff.
25
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 schol-
ars and churchmen had been among that tradition’s most forceful expo-
nents. 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 ori-
gin 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 Jew-
ish People.28 For the apostle, Jews’ genealogy expressed their exalted
character as a physical and historical entity with a valid, divine dispen-
sation 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 Is-
rael 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 univer-
salistic 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 polemi-
26
António Vieira in Carlos Carvalho (ed.): Em Defesa dos Judeus, p. 49 (all quotations
from non-English sources have been translated).
27
Torquemada’s ›Tractatus Contra Madianitas et Ismaelitas‹, quoted in Thomas M.
Izbicki: Juan de Torquemada’s Defense of the ›Conversos‹, p. 201.
28
In some English translations this phrase is rendered as »Israel according to the flesh«.
29
See for example Rom. 9:3-5, 11:11, 25-26.
72 David Graizbord
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 spir-
itual 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 arch-
missionary 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 perdi-
tion. 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 embod-
ied and fulfilled precisely the redemptive power of Paul’s »Saving Rem-
nant«. D’Este’s polemical writings, to which I turn presently, articulate
this double valuation of blood and faith indirectly.
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 intensifi-
cation 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 persecu-
tion.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
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.
31
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 dialec-
tical 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 con-
verting Jews and Muslims.34 Structured as polite conversations on the-
ological subjects between reasonable-sounding, fictitious representatives
of the three monotheistic systems, these works provided, inter alia, argu-
ments 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 as-
tute 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 mis-
represented 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 »Haram-
bam«, 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 ha-
kadosh (›Our Holy Rabbi‹), an honorific of the mishnaic sage Yehuda
ha-Nasi (Judah the Prince)). Where d’Este’s treatise departs from me-
dieval polemical patterns is perhaps in its limited use of Kabbalah, the
32
On the Tomar Assembly and its context, see Martin Cohen: The Canonization of a
Myth.
33
José Tavim: Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad in the Mirror, p. 186.
34
On this phenomenon, see for instance Jeremy Cohen: Living Letters of the Law.
35
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.
74 David Graizbord
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
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Pike, Ruth: Linajudos and Conversos in Seville. Greed and Prejudice in
Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain. New York: Peter Lang 2000.
Pullan, Brian: The Inquisition and the Jews of Venice. The Case of Gaspare
Ribeiro, 1580-1581. In: Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 62,
1979-80, pp. 207-231.
——: The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670. Oxford:
Blackwell 1983.
Reinhard, Wolfgang: Lebensformen Europas. Eine historische Kulturanthropolo-
gie. München: Beck 2004.
Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, José: Jews in the Diaspora with Sepharad in the Mir-
ror: Ruptures, Relations, and Forms of Identity. A Theme Examined Through
Three Cases. In: Jewish History 25, 2011, pp. 175-205.
——: Educating the Infidels Within. Some Remarks on the College of the Cat-
echumens of Lisbon (XVI-XVII Centuries). In: Inquisizioni: Annali della
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1/2, 2009, pp. 445-472.
Schilling, Heinz (ed.): Konfessioneller Fundamentalismus. Religion als politis-
cher Faktor im europäischen Mächtesystem um 1600. München: Oldenbourg
2007.
Sicroff, Albert A.: Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre. Controversias entre los
siglos XV y XVII. Trans. Mauro Armiño. Madrid: Taurus 1985.
Siebenhüner, Kim: Conversion, Mobility and the Roman Inquisition in Italy
Around 1600. In: Past & Present, 200, August 2008, 1, pp. 5-35.
Stow, Kenneth: Theater of Acculturation. The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth
Century. Seattle: The University of Washington Press 2001.
Pauline Christianity and Jewish ›Race‹ 79
Karoline P. Cook
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
1
Cf. Ruth Pike: Linajudos and conversos in Seville; Albert A. Sicroff: Los estatutos de
limpieza de sangre; Enrique Soria Mesa: Los Linajudos.
2
Morisco was the term used by Spaniards to refer to Muslims who converted to Catholi-
cism, either under duress or voluntarily. The term also could be applied to their descen-
dants.
3
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
4
Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Justicia 509, N. 1, 2r., dated 9 September 1568 (All
quotations from non-English sources have been translated).
84 Karoline P. Cook
tians. From the earliest voyages to conquer and settle the Americas, de-
scendants 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 pol-
lution 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 re-
strictions 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 con-
trols.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 accom-
pany 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 Span-
ish 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 in-
5
For a number of these royal decrees, see Cedulario Indiano Recopilado por Diego de
Encinas.
6
AGI, Indiferente 427, L. 30, 96r. (»de casta de moros y judios«).
7
Max S. Hering Torres provides an illuminating perspective on Spanish writers’ use of
medical imagery and ideas about circumcision in the construction of ›anomalous bod-
ies‹ in political discourses justifying limpieza de sangre in: Saberes médicos – saberes
teológicos.
8
Cedulario Indiano Recopilado por Diego de Encinas, vol. 1, p. 47.
9
AGI, Indiferente 427, L. 30, 96r-v.
10
Cf. Karoline P. Cook: Forbidden Crossings.
11
Cf. David Wheat: Mediterranean Slavery, New World Transformations.
›Moro de linaje y nación‹ 85
12
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, pp. 3,
6, 11 ff.; J. Michael Francis: Invading Colombia, p. xiv.
13
Cf. ibid., p. 1; Murdo J. MacLeod: Self-Promotion.
14
Cf. J. Michael Francis: Invading Colombia, p. 7.
15
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, p. 78.
16
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.
86 Karoline P. Cook
17
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, pp. 104,
119.
18
Cf. Jesús María Porro Gutiérrez: Venero de Leiva, pp. 12 f.; Avellaneda: The Con-
querors of the New Kingdom of Granada, p. 121.
19
Cf. ibid., p. 122.
20
Porro Gutiérrez: Venero de Leiva, p. 15.
21
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 11r.; for quotation see ibid., 15v. (»moro de linage y na-
cion«).
›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 Eu-
rope, who engaged primarily in domestic labor or awaited their ransom.22
Physical appearance was initially less of a marker of slave status than re-
ligious 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 iden-
tity. 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 Chris-
tian 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 wit-
ness, 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 sig-
nificant, 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 King-
dom 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 wit-
nesses 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
Cf. Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars; Aurelia Martín Casares: La esclavitud
en Granada.
23
Cited in Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars, pp. 42 ff.
24
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 9v-10r; for quotation see ibid. 11r.
25
Cf. Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars, p. 125.
26
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, f. 11v.
88 Karoline P. Cook
27
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 11v., 72r.
28
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, f. 80r.
29
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 82r., 84v., for quotation see ibid. 88v-89r.
30
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 90v.-91r.
›Moro de linaje y nación‹ 89
31
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, f. 94r.
32
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, f. 96v.
33
Cf. Debra Blumenthal: Enemies and Familiars, pp. 119-120.
34
AGI, Patronato 154, N. 3, R. 1.
35
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, 3r.
36
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, p. 106.
90 Karoline P. Cook
37
Cf. Pilar Sanchiz Ochoa: La conquista como plataforma de ascenso social, pp. 85 ff.
38
Cf. José Ignacio Avellaneda: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada, pp. 142
f.
39
Pilar Sanchiz Ochoa: La conquista como plataforma de ascenso social, p. 83.
40
Cf. Ibid., p. 82.
41
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 transat-
lantic trial to be resolved. In 1558 prosecutor García de Valverde re-
quested 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. What-
ever they found would be inconclusive, as it could be the result of illness
or a birth defect rather than circumcision. Vergara also argued success-
fully 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 cre-
ated complications for both Romero and his accusers, as the testimonies
in Alcalá took almost three years to compile and remit to the Audien-
cia 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 gener-
ally 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 per-
son, 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.
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
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.
43
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 28r.-31v.
44
AGI, Justicia 509, N. 1, ff. 30v. and 38v.
92 Karoline P. Cook
45
Quoted in Grace Magnier: Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists, p. 287.
46
If properly contextualized, ›race‹ can be applied as an analytical category to early mod-
ern Iberian conceptions of difference, that combined arguments about biological and
religious difference in order to produce and maintain social hierarchies. For a discus-
sion 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?.
47
On the relationship between ›raza‹ and ›casta‹ see María Elena Martínez: The Lan-
guage, Genealogy, and Classification of ›Race‹ in Colonial Mexico; Kathryn Burns:
Unfixing Race.
48
Cf. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana.
49
While the expulsion was by no means inevitable, Moriscos were increasingly seen as a
›Moro de linaje y nación‹ 93
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.
50
María Elena Martínez discusses the impact of monogenesis on early modern Spanish
conceptions of race in: Genealogical Fictions, p. 53.
51
Cf. Grace Magnier: Pedro de Valencia and the Catholic Apologists.
52
Pedro de Valencia: Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, p. 131.
53
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 com-
plexion »established itself as a collective category« applied to Africans and Amerindi-
ans from an »invisible, internal blend of fluids in one’s body to something identifiable
on the skin«.
94 Karoline P. Cook
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, per-
petuated 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 com-
mentators 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 in-
creasingly casting religious identity as an innate characteristic, transmit-
ted by blood.55 As an insult, ›dog‹ also began to be applied to indige-
nous 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
For the last three quotations see Pedro de Valencia: Tratado acerca de los moriscos de
España, pp. 138 ff.
55
Cf. James B. Tueller: Good and Faithful Christians, pp. 130 f.; Pedro de Valencia:
Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, p. 131.
56
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, re-
gardless of whether or not he was a Morisco. He was able to garner con-
vincing 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
Literature
Avellaneda, José Ignacio: The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada. Al-
buquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1995.
Blumenthal, Debra: Enemies and Familiars. Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-
Century Valencia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2009.
Burns, Kathryn: Unfixing Race. In: Rereading the Black Legend. The Discourses
of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. Mar-
garet R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, Maureen Quilligan. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press 2007, pp. 188-202.
Cedulario Indiano Recopilado por Diego de Encinas, Oficial Mayor de la Escrib-
anía de Cámara del Consejo Supremo y Real de las Indias. 4 vols. Madrid:
Ediciones Cultura Hispaìnica 1945-1946 [1596].
Cook, Karoline P.: Forbidden Crossings. Morisco Emigration to Spanish Amer-
ica, 1492-1650. (Ph.D. dissertation) Princeton: Princeton University 2008.
Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española.
Madrid: Iberoamericana 2006.
Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, Bernard Vincent: Historia de los moriscos. Vida y
tragedia de una minoría. Madrid: Alianza Editorial 2003.
Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler (eds.): The Origins of
Racism in the West. New York: Cambridge University Press 2009.
96 Karoline P. Cook
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 Ori-
gins 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 classi-
fied 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 sub-
jects 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), pri-
marily 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 sta-
ble and widely used. I address casta in daily life, and the ways colo-
nial subjects and colonial officials ›conversed‹ about it. Those conversa-
tions are available only in archival rather than in published documents.
Archival documents, especially the judicial ones that constitute my pri-
mary 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 flexibil-
ity 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 indi-
cated 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.
100 Laura A. Lewis
and animals.2 Because Iberians brought the concept to parts of the world
inhabited by individuals with a variety of indigenous systems of classifi-
cation, and because Iberians had diverse colonial projects in different re-
gions, casta came to have several meanings. In Hindu India, for instance,
it referenced the endogamous socio-religious groups the Portuguese un-
derstood as ascribed ›castes‹, a term later adopted under the British, in-
cluding 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 colo-
nial 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‹ (mu-
latos 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
Cf. Julian Pitt-Rivers: On the Word ›Caste‹; Joan Corominas, José A. Pascual: Dic-
cionario crítico etimológico. Vol. 1, pp. 913 ff.
3
Cf. Julian Pitt-Rivers: On the Word ›Caste‹; Madhavi Kale: Projecting Identities.
4
On Cochabamba, Bolivia and Sonora, Mexico see Robert H. Jackson: Race/Caste and
the Creation and Meaning of Identity in Colonial Spanish America.
5
Cf. Peter Wade: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, p. 29; see also Joanne Rappaport:
›Asi lo paresçe por su aspeto‹.
Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹ 101
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 Indi-
ans, 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 be-
tween 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 Span-
ish slave owners dominating African descended slaves and free women,
but also by African descended slaves and freedmen dominating Indians.
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‹ interchange-
ably, casta was not the equivalent of race in the sense that the latter has
come to be understood – above all in Northern European-influenced re-
gions of the world – as the unambiguous separation of the peoples ac-
cording 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 nega-
tive 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 tar-
get 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 Span-
ish 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 dom-
inance. 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, dissimula-
tion [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 Span-
ish state had also forced conversions and expulsions of both converted
and unconverted Jews and Muslims, while forbidding them from settling
8
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.
9
Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, pp. 896 f.
10
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.
Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹ 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 under-
stand the difference, it is crucial to distinguish between the state project
in Spain and the colonial project in the New World, especially in Mex-
ico, 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 in-
fluence and power in ways that Indians did not.11 But by stressing the
possibility of conversion and concurrently generating an inclusive sys-
tem based on distinctions, colonialist ideologies made differences work
through the sistema de castas while national ones largely expelled differ-
ences 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 peo-
ple of »good« or »bad« casta.12 But according to the Spanish etymol-
ogists 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 Mus-
lims, who threatened the Spanish empire, the archival evidence, at least
from Mexico, suggests that casta was a more impartial category applica-
ble to any other kind of person, including to Spanish Christians. The two
terms coexisted throughout Mexico’s colonial period, but during the time-
11
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors.
12
Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 316.
13
Joan Corominas, José A. Pascual: Diccionario etimológico, vol. I, pp. 914 f.
104 Laura A. Lewis
14
Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico City, Inquisición, vol. 206, dossier 5,
1593.
15
Cf. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco: Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, p. 824.
Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹ 105
Casta in Practice
Because casta was transmutable, casta taxonomies had a complex seg-
mentary effect, through which operated a principle of achievement culmi-
nating in Spanishness. I model this system as a fluid pyramid, with Span-
ishness/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’ overrid-
ing 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 indispensi-
ble 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 of-
fices, and ran the legal system. Spaniards also owned most black and
mulatto slaves19 and employed free blacks and mulattoes, as well as mes-
tizos. All mestizos and many mulattoes had family ties to Spaniards. To-
gether these castas – including black slaves – acted as skilled workers or
16
Cf. Jonathan Israel: Race, Class and Politics in Colonial Mexico, ch. 1; Colin Palmer:
Slaves of the White God.
17
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.
18
Cf. Colin Palmer: Slaves of the White God, pp. 34 f.
19
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.
106 Laura A. Lewis
20
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 Ha-
cienda 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.
21
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.
22
Anthony Pagden: Identity Formation in Spanish America, p. 69, n. 25.
Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹ 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 circum-
vent 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 in-
cluded social parents or ritual kin, such as the Spanish couple who raised
this black woman. Indeed, she was found innocent after months in an In-
quisition dungeon despite the fact another free black woman had accused
her of sustained contact with Indian witches.26 Her casta therefore de-
pended 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, in-
cluding the Spanish priests who defended her from the witchcraft accu-
sation. As another example, although mulattoes were barred from car-
rying 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 mu-
23
Cf. Claudio Lomnitz: Exits From The Labyrinth, pp. 273 f.; María Elena Martínez:
Genealogical Fictions, pp. 158 f.; Ilona Katzew: Casta Painting.
24
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 222, 272.
25
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, pp. 1 ff.
26
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.
27
Cf. Paul Lokken: Useful Enemies; Ben Vinson III: Bearing Arms for His Majesty.
28
As Max S. Hering Torres: Color, pureza, raza, points out, with colonialism and impe-
rialism, white became »normalized« in a way that it had not previously been. It came
108 Laura A. Lewis
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 mas-
culine. 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 ostensi-
bly on casta difference but one that also put gendered differences to work
31
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors.
32
Cf. Judith Butler: Gender Trouble.
33
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.
34
Cf. Louise Burkhardt: The Slippery Earth, p. 17; Inga Clendinnen: Disciplining the In-
dians, p. 43; John Leddy Phelan: The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the
New World, p. 66.
35
Cf. Juan Gínes de Sepúlveda: Tratado sobre las justas causas de la guerra contra los
indios, pp. 85, 101, 107.
110 Laura A. Lewis
36
Cf. James D. Fernández: The Bonds of Patrimony; Margarita Zamora: Reading Colum-
bus, 152 ff.; Louis Montrose: The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery.
37
James D. Fernández: The Bonds of Patrimony, p. 977.
38
Cf. Asunción Lavrin: In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico, pp. 40 f.; Ruth Be-
har: Sex and Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late Colonial Mexico, p. 35; Peggy Liss:
Mexico Under Spain, pp. 98 f.
39
Cf. Susan Kellogg: Hegemony Out of Conquest; id.: Law and the Transformation of
Aztec Culture.
40
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.
41
Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru: Las mujeres de la Nueva España, p. 114.
42
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 cir-
cumvent 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 econ-
omy. When not laboring under Spanish supervision they were also sub-
ject to forms of enclosure: echoing women’s domestic spaces, they were
expected to remain in the villages of the Indian Republic. Just as hus-
bands, 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 in-
side 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 in-
clude the idea that Indians were ›feminized‹ and women were ›indian-
ized‹ 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 Montú-
far wrote in 1554, that they did not even want to »work for themselves«.45
43
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.
44
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.
45
Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (BNAH), Archivo Histórico, Colección
Francisco de Paso y Troncoso, Leg.113, no. 418; AGI Seville, Correspondencia Vir-
reinal, Leg. 25, no. 26-A, 1603; cf. Guillermo de la Peña: Apuntes de un antropólogo a
112 Laura A. Lewis
tive role, holding inquiries and mostly punishing black, mulatto and mes-
tizo perpetrators, rather than their Spanish bosses. These castas thus took
on mediating roles in the political economy of conquest. Indian com-
plaints against them included beatings, sexual assault, theft, home de-
struction, 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 dif-
ferent 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 cas-
tas. 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 sub-
mission, 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 concomi-
tantly created possibilities for affiliations. Blacks, mulattoes and mes-
tizos were never, after all, fully integrated into the colonial system
50
For examples see AGN Indios, vol. 6 (1), dossier 177, 1592; AGI México Correspon-
dencia 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.
51
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall or Mirrors, pp. 67-94 and passim.
52
AGN Civil, vol. 75, dossier 9, 1599.
53
AGN Criminal, vol. 34, dossier 13, 1639; vol. 235, dossier 33, 1655.
54
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, p. 74; see also María Elena Martínez: Genealogical
Fictions, p. 235.
114 Laura A. Lewis
55
AGN Criminal, vol. 643, dossier 2, 1619; vol. 132, dossier 2, 1647.
56
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 con-
tact – 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 blas-
phemy 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 inter-
casta 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 mu-
latto mistress he was sure was colluding with Indian women in an effort
to bewitch him, unless her master put her in a convent.60
57
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.
58
AGN Inquisición, vol. 360, f. 31, 1627; see Laura A. Lewis: Hall of Mirrors, ch. 6.
59
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: From Sodomy to Superstition.
60
AGN Inquisición, vol. 530, dossier 6, 1695.
116 Laura A. Lewis
61
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 243-248.
62
Patricia Seed: To Love, Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico, p. 206.
63
Ibid., pp. 206 ff.
64
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 243-248.
65
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
66
Cited in Jacques LaFaye: La sociedad de castas en Nueva España, p. 82.
67
Cited in Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán: Introducción, p. 26.
68
Cited in ibid., p. 27; see also Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán: El negro esclavo en Nueva Es-
paña, p. 19.
69
José Vasconcelos: La raza cósmica, p. 30; cf. Nancy Leys Stepan: ›The Hour of Eugen-
ics‹, 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.
70
See the essays in Richard Graham (ed.): The Idea of Race in Latin America.
71
Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, Cristina Szanton Blanc: Nations Unbound, p. 38; cf.
Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities.
72
Cf. Nicholas B. Dirks: Introduction, p. 15.
118 Laura A. Lewis
73
Cf. Laura A. Lewis: Chocolate and Corn Flour.
74
Norman Whitten and Rachel Corr: Imagery of Blackness.
Between ›Casta‹ and ›Raza‹ 119
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City: El Colegio de México 1988 [1954].
Purity of Blood and Caste
Identity Narratives among Early Modern Goan Elites
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 so-
cial 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 geogra-
phies (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, lay-
ers 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-
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).
1
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.
2
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.
126 Ângela Barreto Xavier
3
On these connections, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Explorations in Connected Histories;
Serge Gruzinski: Les quatre parties du monde.
4
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.
5
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 separa-
tion that organized the relation between Spanish and Indians in the Spanish colonies of
the Atlantic.
6
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.
7
Cf. Catarina Madeira Santos: Goa é a chave de toda a Índia.
Purity of Blood and Caste 127
8
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.
9
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.
10
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.
11
The Smarta Brahmans claimed descent from the first Brahman migrants, a group estab-
lished 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 follow-
ers of Vishnu, after the coming to Goa of Madvacharya, in the thirteenth century.
12
Maria Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, p. 12.
128 Ângela Barreto Xavier
13
Ania Loomba: Race and the Possibilities of a Comparative Critique, p. 503.
14
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.
15
See Govind Sadashiv Ghurye: Caste and Race in India; Louis Dumont: Homo Hierar-
chicus.
16
See Bernard S. Cohn: Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge.
17
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.
18
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.
19
The works of Bernard S. Cohn: Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge and Ronald
Inden: Imagining India are paradigmatic of this approach.
Purity of Blood and Caste 129
20
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.
21
Cf. Veena Das: Structure and Cognition.
22
Cf. Susan Bayly: Caste, Society and Politics; Nicholas Dirks: The Hollow Crown; id.:
Castes of Mind.
23
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 Chat-
terjee: History as Self-Representation; Sumit Guha: Serving the Barbarian; Prachi De-
sphande: Creative Uses of the Past.
24
In Sanskrit, Varna meant color, and was initially used to distinguish and separate the
Aryan invaders from the Dasas (the original inhabitants of India).
25
Cf. Rosemary Crill, Kapil Jariwala (eds.): The Indian Portrait, 1560-1860.
130 Ângela Barreto Xavier
26
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.
27
Cf. Rosalind O’Hanlon, Christopher Minkowski: What makes people who they are?
28
Ângela Barreto Xavier: A Invenção de Goa.
29
Ibid., and João da Cunha Jaques: Espada de David contra Golias; Ines !upanov, Con-
version historiography; Patricia Faria de Souza has also published on these matters,
drawing on my propositions.
30
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.
31
Miguel da Purificação: Relação defensiva, f. 22v (quotations from non-English sources
have been translated).
Purity of Blood and Caste 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 de-
fend 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 con-
tinue 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 mixed-
blood 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: with-
out 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 Indi-
ans 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
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.
33
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.
34
See Ângela Barreto Xavier: From Conversos and Novamente Convertidos; on the con-
nections between the colonial discourses of racism and anti-semitism, see Étienne Bal-
ibar: Racism and Nationalism; Maria Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, Introduc-
132 Ângela Barreto Xavier
tion.
35
Cf. Carta do rei de Portugal ao vice-rei da Índia, 1596, pp. 620-628.
36
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 com-
municates with »pure blood«. These expressions had a wide audience in the Por-
tuguese society, contributing to the shape of their social imagination (results from CET-
Quinhentos, a database of the Portuguese theatre of sixteenth century, http://www.cet-
e-quinhentos.com/info, on 14th of January 2012).
37
Cf. Maria Fernanda Olival: Rigor e interesses, p. 154; João de Figueirôa-Rego: A honra
alheia por um fi, pp. 65-68, 84-90.
38
Cf. Albert A. Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre, chapter 1 and pp. 203-209.
39
Estatutos Generales, p. 1.
40
For example, they were the missionaries sent to convert the king of Congo, already in
the end of the fifteenth century.
Purity of Blood and Caste 133
41
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).
42
Miguel da Purificação: Relação defensiva, f. 38.
43
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.
44
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.
134 Ângela Barreto Xavier
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 Por-
tuguese 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 Fran-
ciscans of Goa and therefore probably a colleague of Miguel da Purifi-
cação 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
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‹.
46
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?
47
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.
Purity of Blood and Caste 135
48
Cf. Giuseppe Sorge: Matteo di Castro; Patricia Souza de Faria: Mateus de Castro.
49
The papal officer that had the function of receiving the tributes payed by the Portuguese
crown to the Pope.
50
Cf. Lettere Spagna, Portogallo, Indie, Svizzera e Colonia, 1630, no 98, f. 85.
51
Charles R. Boxer: The Portuguese Seaborne Empire; Carlos Merces de Mello: The
Recruitment and Formation.
136 Ângela Barreto Xavier
52
Espelho de Brâmanes, cited in Giuseppe Sorge: Matteo di Castro, p. 78.
53
Maria Augusta de Veiga e Sousa (ed.): O Livro de Duarte Barbosa, vol. 2, pp. 115 ff.
54
See, for example, Ines !upanov: Disputed Mission.
55
Cf. Ângela Barreto Xavier: O lustre do seu sangue, and the richer bibliography on this
subject quoted there.
56
Cf. José Guillén Berrendero: Los mecanismos del honor y la nobleza; João Figueirôa-
Rego: Honra por um fio, pp. 491-511.
Purity of Blood and Caste 137
57
João da Cunha Jaques: Espada de David, f. 10v
58
Ibid., f. 10v.
138 Ângela Barreto Xavier
59
Cf. ibid., f. 28r.
Purity of Blood and Caste 139
60
Cf. ibid., f. 28r.
61
Cf. Rafael Bluteau: Vocabulario, vol. 2, p. 184.
140 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 Brah-
mans of Goa and sent to the Portuguese king, part of a conflict that
opposed them to the also non-Christian Brahmans Vaishnava. In Por-
tuguese, and utilizing a completely westernized structure and argumenta-
tion, 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 gen-
eration 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 orig-
inal nature of the Vaishnavas was also Smarta, and that only by accident
had they become Vaishnavas. Therefore, in accord with (Portuguese) nat-
ural 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 sep-
aration 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, ex-
pressed »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 dif-
ferent 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
Memorial que os Bramanes Cortalos fizeram, ff. 738-740v.
63
Cf. ibid., f. 747.
64
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.
65
Cf. Memorial que oferecem, f. 823.
Purity of Blood and Caste 141
namely »many mixtures with white people« (that is, marriages with Por-
tuguese). These mixtures made it »improper to communicate [i.e., eat-
ing 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 nowa-
days 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 mean-
time, the Narvalhos had mixed with other people, meant, for the Vaish-
navas, that they had lost their older caste status.
In the context of identity disputes that were taking place in Maharash-
tra 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
Ibid., ff. 824v.-825.
67
Brahmans established at Narvan, a village at Rajapur, Ratnagari, in Maharastra.
68
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.
69
Memorial que oferecem, ff. 831v.-832.
70
On these identity disputes involving people from Goa see Rosalind O’Hanlon, Christo-
pher Minkowski: What makes People who they are?; Frank Conlon: A Caste in a Chang-
ing World.
142 Ângela Barreto Xavier
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
72
Colecção de manuscritos originais acerca do Estado da India. Biblioteca Nacional de
Portugal (Lisbon) ms. 4180.
144 Ângela Barreto Xavier
Like purity of blood, caste was also an expression that Indians con-
verted 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 An-
tónio João Frias, Francisco do Rego or Sebastião do Rego. More surpris-
ing, 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 en-
dogamy and purity) and the Hispanic-Atlantic concept (also closely re-
lated 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.
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Feitler, Jorge Flores. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira 2011.
Dumont, Louis: Homo Hierarchicus. Essai sur le système des castes. Paris: Gal-
limard 1966.
Dutra, Francis A.: Ser mulato em Portugal nos primórdios da modernidade por-
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Eaton, Richard Maxwell: A Social History of the Deccan: 1300-1761. Eight In-
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Faria, Patricia Souza de: Mateus de Castro: um bispo brâmane em busca da
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sangue nos espaços de expressão ibérica (sécs. XVI-XVIII). Lisboa: CHAM
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——, Maria Fernanda Olival: Cor da pele, distinções e cargos. Portugal e es-
paços atlânticos portugueses (séculos XVI a XVIII). In: Tempo, 15, 2011, 30,
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——: Escravos e Senhores na Lisboa Quinhentista. Lisboa: Colibri 2010.
Goldberg, David T.: Racist Culture. Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning.
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Ghurye, Govind Sadashiv: Caste and Race in India. London: Routledge and
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Gray, Edward (ed.): Travels of Pietro della Valle in India from the Old English
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——, Harry C. P. Bell (eds.): The Voyage of Francois Pyrard of Laval: To the
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Gruzinski, Serge: Les quatre parties du monde. Histoire d’une mondialisation.
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Guha, Sumit: Serving the Barbarian to Preserve the Dharma. The Ideology and
Purity of Blood and Caste 147
Tamar Herzog
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 discrim-
ination 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 relation-
ship with Jews and Jewish conversos, other historians envisioned Iberian
contribution to racism as the elaboration and distillation of Muslim proto-
racism that gradually distinguished Africans from ›whites‹ and that, even
before the beginning of the Atlantic slave-trade, attributed different char-
1
Cf. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi: Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism, pp. 11 ff.
2
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.
152 Tamar Herzog
acteristics to the members of each cluster.3 For yet others, Iberians devel-
oped their racial thinking in the Americas as a byproduct of both colo-
nialism 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 »im-
mediate 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 re-
sponse 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 pan-
European phenomenon, with inspirations that were partially Spanish, par-
tially 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 rad-
ically 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
Cf. James H. Sweet: The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought, pp. 145, 159 and
162.
4
Cf. Charles W. Mills: The Racial Contract, pp. 3-11; Giuliano Gliozzi: Adamo e il
nuovo mondo.
5
James H. Sweet: The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought, pp. 143 f.
6
George M. Fredrickson: Racism, p. 40.
7
Cf. Francisco Márquez Villanueva: The Converso Problem, p. 324.
8
Cf. Thomas Glick and Oriol Pi-Sunyer: Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept,
p. 144.
9
Cf. Jerome Branche: Colonialism and Race, pp. 12-17.
10
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions.
11
Cf. Irene Silverblatt: Modern Inquisitions, pp. 3 ff., 16 ff.
Beyond Race 153
12
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. 22-
31.
13
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.
14
Cf. José María Olmos: Historia del racismo en España, p. 125.
154 Tamar Herzog
15
Cf. at length Tamar Herzog: Defining Nations.
Beyond Race 155
16
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.
17
Cf. Tamar Herzog: Defining Nations, pp. 130-140; id.: Communities becoming a nation.
18
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.
156 Tamar Herzog
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, in-
carcerated, 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 ›ordi-
nary‹ Spaniards – what was absolutely missing was a clear vision of who
Gypsies were. During the early modern period, many anti-Gypsy mea-
sures 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 for-
eigners, they pretended to be different so to gain certain benefits, which is
why they needed to be reduced to conformity. Yet, the legislation that as-
sured of their sameness also stressed their distinction. Connecting Gypsi-
ness 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 al-
though Gypsies were Spaniards they were also foreigners. Not only were
19
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.
20
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.
21
Petition of 16.12.1745, cited in the pragmática of 19.7.1746, ACV, SA, cédulas y prag-
máticas, 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.
Beyond Race 157
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 legis-
lation 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 (veci-
nos) first, of the kingdom community (naturales), second.22
The Gypsies who appealed to the authorities and the courts under-
stood 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
22
Cf. Tamar Herzog: Defining Nations, pp. 130 ff.
23
Petition of Baltazar Vargas, dated 1797, Archivo de la Villa de Madrid, Secretaría 2-
348-62 (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.
24
Cf. François Vaux de Foletier: La rafle des gitans, pp. 6 f.
158 Tamar Herzog
In 1568, for example, two indios principales from New Spain re-
quested 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 vas-
salage, 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 de-
ethnicize 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 Indi-
ans 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 un-
clear whether the two republics were instituted as a permanent or only
a temporary measure, until natives would conclude their civil and re-
ligious conversion.32 Furthermore, the inability to answer who exactly
were Indians and what was their relationship to the kingdoms of Spain
25
Cf. José Luis Rojas: Boletos sencillos, p. 188.
26
The difference between these two categories is described in Tamar Herzog: Defining
Nations, pp. 133-139.
27
Cf. Baltasar Álamo de Barrientos: Discurso político, p. 14.
28
Cf. Carlos Baciero: Juan de Solórzano Pereira y la defensa del indio en América, p. 300,
citing José Zapata y Sandoval.
29
Cf. Juan Solórzano Pereira: Política Indiana, book 3, chapter 1, nos. 14.
30
Cf. Carmen Beatriz Loza: ›Tyrannie‹ des Incas et ›naturalisation‹ des Indiens, pp. 377,
389-394, 405.
31
Cf. Juan Solórzano Pereira: Política Indiana, book 2, chapter 26, no. 40.
32
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 Spanish-
ness. Such, at least, was the case of indigenous nobles who, because like
Spaniards living in Spanish America they did not pay taxes, could con-
sider 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 ask-
ing 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 nine-
teenth century when deputies to the Cortes de Cádiz had to decide
whether native-Americans were both nationals and citizens. On that oc-
casion, 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 com-
munity. 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 capabil-
ities.36
33
Cf. Ruth Hill: Teaching the Pre-History of Race, p. 105.
34
Patricia A. Ybarra: Performing Conquest, pp. 9 f., 19, 56, 138 refers to the ambigu-
ous position of Tlaxcala and local requests to access rights reserved to »citizens« or
Spaniards (and denied to »Indians«).
35
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.
36
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 as-
surance 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 pur-
chase 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, white-
ness 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 stig-
matized them socially, but also led to their legal discrimination, adjudi-
cating to them, instead of the rights of natives (which they deserved) the
burdens of foreigners. Nonetheless, examining debates on their native-
ness 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
Cf. John H. Parry: The Age of Reconnaissance, p. 317; Carmen Bernand: Negros, es-
clavos y libres en las ciudades hispanoamericanas, pp. 9 f., 50 f.
38
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.
39
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
40
›The Antecedents: How did Early Modern Slavery in Spain Disappear?‹, a paper pre-
sented 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 discu-
siones y actas de las Cortes de Cádiz, vol. 2, p. 323 and vol. 3, pp. 281 f., respectively.
41
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. 179-
183; Pedro Parilla Ortíz: La esclavitud en Cádiz durante el siglo XVIII, pp. 18 and 154.
42
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 Renais-
sance, 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 popula-
tion – 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.
43
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.
44
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.
45
Cf. Baltazar Fra Molinero: Ser mulato en España y América, p. 124; María Elena
Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, p. 207.
162 Tamar Herzog
46
Cf. Alessandro Stella: Mezclándose carnalmente, p. 175.
47
Cf. María Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions, pp. 158 f., 167 ff., 202 ff., 225.
48
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
49
Cf. Antumi Toasije: The Africanity of Spain, pp. 350, 354; the ›Madrid Declara-
tion 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).
50
The city council of Caracas on 28.11.1796, reproduced in José Félix Blanco (ed.): Doc-
umentos para la historia de la vida pública del libertador de Colombia, vol. 1, pp. 267-
275, Rodolfo Santos: El régimen de las ›gracias al sacar‹ en Venezuela durante el
período hispánico, vol. 1, pp. 518 f.
164 Tamar Herzog
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Martín Casares, Aurelia: Freed and Freed Black Africans in Granada in the Time
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Martínez, María Elena: Genealogical Fictions. Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and
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Mills, Charles W.: The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999.
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——: La igualdad entre indios y españoles: La real cédula de 1697. In: Estudios
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Netanyahu, Benzion: The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain.
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Olmos, José María: Historia del racismo en España. Cordoba: Almuzara 2009.
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206.
Beyond Race 167
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 identifi-
cation 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 ex-
tent 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 citi-
zens, 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 think-
ing 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 polit-
ical 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 repub-
lican ideas in order to cultivate the support of non-Spanish populations
and ultimately forged national states that nominally affirmed racial equal-
ity. And despite the continuity of colonial rule in Cuba and Puerto Rico,
the ›sugar revolutions‹ on those islands made slavery and race the criti-
cal 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.,
170 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 ob-
scured reckonings with the colonial past that happened simultaneously.
To what extent did the experiences of nearly three centuries of Span-
ish 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 crum-
bled, an elite minority made active decisions to remain loyal based in part
on aspirations to a productive sugar economy driven by African slave la-
bor 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 na-
tional identities, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has demonstrated how the
history of colonial rule provided fertile ground for nineteenth-century de-
bates about the nature of the contemporary empire, for example, when
writers invoked Bartolomé de las Casas as both a symbol of imperial har-
mony and colonial critique.3 Following that approach, this essay exam-
ines how Spain’s colonial history, as well as the history of racial ideolo-
gies 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 ex-
panded 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
Louis A. Pérez, Jr.: Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society, p. xi.
2
Cf. Marixa Lasso: Myths of Harmony; Franklin W. Knight: Slave Society in Cuba dur-
ing the Nineteenth Century.
3
Cf. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara: The Conquest of History.
4
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.
Race in Retrospect 171
5
Irene Silverblatt: Modern Inquisitions, p. 222.
6
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.
172 David Sartorius
7
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 recon-
struction of history and memory within the African diaspora, cf. Andrew Apter, Lauren
Derby (eds.) Activating the Past; David Brown: Black Royalty.
8
Domingo del Monte: Escritos, vol. 1, p. 231.
9
José de la Luz y Caballero: Aforismos, vol. 2, p. 117.
10
Cf. Rebecca Earle: The Return of the Native; José A. Piqueras: La siempre fiel isla de
Cuba, o la lealtad interesada.
11
Certificación relativo del sumario de conspiración que le actua en la Habana y prin-
Race in Retrospect 173
14
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 re-
search 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.
15
Dipesh Chakrabarty: Empire, Ethics, and the Calling of History, p. 63.
16
On European historical theory in the nineteenth century, cf. Hayden White: Metahistory,
ch. 1.
Race in Retrospect 175
17
For the last two quotations see José Antonio Saco: Historia de la esclavitud, pp. 260,
277.
18
Ibid., pp. 267, 269.
19
Ibid., pp. 281, for the quotation see p. 294.
20
Ibid., p. 208.
176 David Sartorius
21
Ibid., pp. 340, 345, for the quotation see p. 346.
22
Pedro José Guiteras: Historia de la isla de Cuba, vol. 1, pp. 188 f. On the origins and pol-
itics 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 inhab-
itants« 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 an-
cestry. Echoing the logic of the 1812 Constitution, Spanish principles of
inclusion and equality, for Guiteras, did not seem to overcome the inher-
ent 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 de-
cision to extend the same privileges to indigenous municipalities as evi-
dence 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 Chris-
tians and unconverted African slaves from coming to the New World in
order to avoid »perverting« the Indians and hindering conversion, and
23
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.
24
Pedro José Guiteras: Historia de la isla de Cuba, vol. 1, p. 341.
25
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 299 f.
178 David Sartorius
26
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 300 f.
27
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 399.
28
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 405.
29
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 369.
30
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 402.
Race in Retrospect 179
31
Franklin W. Knight: Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century, p. 190. In-
deed, political and intellectual discussions specific to the plantation economy were usu-
ally filtered through the language of progress and modernity, not history or tradition.
32
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.
33
Cf. Susan Martin-Márquez: Disorientations, pp. 30 f.
34
Cf. Joshua Goode: Impurity of Blood, chs. 1, 5, and 8; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara:
The Conquest of History, pp. 38 f.
180 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.
35
Rafael Montoro published a ›constitutional history‹ of the island chronicling the delib-
erations 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).
Race in Retrospect 181
36
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.
37
On forms of subjection enabled by discourses of abolition and political emancipation,
cf. Saidiya V. Hartman: Scenes of Subjection ch. 4.
38
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 gath-
ered 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 integra-
tion based on a historical vision that tacked between assimilative prac-
tices in Iberia and race mixture in Cuba. This optimistic narrative over-
looked a history of Spain (the date 1492 comes to mind) that was dis-
tinctly 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 tra-
ditions 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 ad-
mirably 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 di-
verse origins. Thus the gardens of the Alhambra, »silent witnesses to so
many Arab romances«, could be as Spanish as the people with »pecu-
liar 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, how-
ever, 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
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.
40
On this critical period, cf. Rebecca J. Scott: Degrees of Freedom, ch. 4.
41
Rodolfo de Lagardère: La cuestion social de Cuba, p. 41.
Race in Retrospect 183
42
Ibid., pp. 50 f.
43
On the Directorio, cf. Oilda Hevia Lanier: El Directorio Central de las Sociedades de la
Raza de Color.
44
Juan Gualberto Gómez: Por qué somos separatistas. In pointing to Spanish backward-
ness, Gómez reproduced depictions that proliferated throughout the Atlantic world,
even within Spain. As Ruth MacKay has recently argued, eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century 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.
184 David Sartorius
45
Juan Gualberto Gómez: Programa del diario ›La Fraternidad‹ pp. 253, 260 f.
46
›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 ar-
gued that Cuba’s political antecedents were »pro-slavery [esclavista] par
excellence«, offering little contrast to French St. Domingue. The sec-
ond 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 an-
other 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 sol-
idarity 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 subse-
quent occupation of the island, shuffled the deck of historical narratives
to be celebrated, marginalized, or simply forgotten.48 Lagardère, for ex-
ample, made a final to appeal to the colonial past, this time acknowl-
edging the historical subordination of Cubans of color. As Spain and the
United States negotiated peace without representation from the Libera-
tion 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 La-
gardère 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
›Lo que pasaría en Cuba‹, p. 1.
48
On the question of ›minority history‹ and subaltern pasts, cf. Dipesh Chakrabarty:
Provincializing Europe, ch. 4.
49
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
50
Cf. Marial Iglesias Utset: Las metáforas del cambio en la vida cotidiana, pp. 46-51.
51
Cf. Steve J. Stern: The Tricks of Time, p. 149.
52
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).
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53
Quoted in Gumersindo de Azcárate: Educación y enseñanza según Costa, p. 69; see
Frederick B. Pike: Hispanismo 1898-1936, p. 57.
54
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.
188 David Sartorius
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.
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Brown, David: Black Royalty. New Social Frameworks and Remodeled Icono-
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Chakrabarty, Dipesh: Empire, Ethics, and the Calling of History. Knowledge in
the Postcolony. In: Unsettling History. Archiving and Narrating in Historiog-
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——: Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.
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——: Programa del diario ›La Fraternidad‹. Nuestros propósitos. In: id., Por
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›Blood Work‹
Fables of Racial Identity and Modern Science
Thomas C. Holt
1
Cf. Ruth Benedict: Race Problems in America, pp. 73 ff.; George W. Stocking, Jr.: Race,
Culture, and Evolution.
192 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 ethno-
graphies of ostensibly primitive peoples written by many of Boas’s col-
leagues. In fact, racist ideas had advanced in tandem with human enlight-
enment, beginning in the eighteenth-century and finding ample support
thereafter in ›cutting-edge‹ medical, ethnographic, and linguistic stud-
ies. Indeed, some of the western world’s most prominent and accom-
plished scientists, past and present, have actively promoted racist think-
ing.2 Given that history, twentieth- and twenty-first-century advocates of
an anti-racist science must ignore their predecessors’ roles in reproduc-
ing 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 mis-
guided) 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 ear-
lier 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 sci-
ence but to explore the social and historical contexts in which presumably
2
On the history of nineteenth-century polygenesis, of which Harvard University’s
renown biologist Louis Agassiz was a prominent adherent, see George M. Fredrick-
son: 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 co-
discoverer 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).
3
Cf. David Theo Goldberg: Racist Culture.
›Blood Work‹ 193
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 con-
text 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 soci-
ety. 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 corrup-
tion could be transmitted from one generation to the next via procreation,
4
Cf. Maria Elena Martínez: Genealogical Fictions; Guilluame Aubert: ›The Blood of
France‹.
194 Thomas C. Holt
5
The literature on race determination in nineteenth-century North America is volumi-
nous, but for seminal examples, see Ariela Gross: What Blood Won’t Tell; Peggy Pas-
coe: What Comes Naturally; Randall Kennedy: Interracial Intimacies; and Walter John-
son: 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.
›Blood Work‹ 195
6
Cf. Claude Blanckaert: Of Monstrous Metis? (›wide brow‹); William H. Schneider:
Quality and Quantity, chap. 8 (›cranial measurements‹).
7
See for example, Franz Boas: Eugenics.
8
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 Thomas C. Holt
9
Cf. Ludwik Hirszfeld, Hanna Hirszfeld: Essai d’application des méthodes sérologiques
au problème des races; William H. Schneider: Quality and Quantity, chap. 8.
10
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).
›Blood Work‹ 197
the Nazi regime was unimpressed with his religious conversion, prefer-
ring 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 reject-
ing 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 pseudo-
scientists 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 fur-
ther the racist oppression of other devalued and despised groups. Perhaps
Hirszfeld’s motives can be traced to his conversion; at the time he pub-
lished his call to anthropologists to adopt blood science in ethnographies,
he no longer identified with Jews. But then that underscores the most pro-
found 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
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 Nineteenth-
Century 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.
12
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.
198 Thomas C. Holt
– even as the import of his scientific work sustained just the opposite
proposition.
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 fin-
ished 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. hos-
pitals for residency training. At that time black doctors were systemati-
cally 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 spe-
cialties. 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 doctor-
ate 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 pro-
gram, 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 dona-
tions 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
Cf. Spencie Love: One Blood; Charles E. Wynes: Charles Richard Drew.
14
See Spencie Love: One Blood, p. 49.
›Blood Work‹ 199
15
Ibid., p. 44.
200 Thomas C. Holt
16
Interview with Mrs. Leonore Drew by author and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Washington,
D.C., June 20, 1975; also see Spencie Love: One Blood.
17
Cf. María Elena Martinez: Genealogical Fictions.
18
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
›Blood Work‹ 201
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19
Though initially heralded as the ultimate deconstruction of the racial imaginary, the
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