Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico / Edition 1

by María Elena Martínez

Overview

María Elena Martínez's Genealogical Fictions is the first in-depth study of the relationship between the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and colonial Mexico's sistema de castas, a hierarchical system of social classification based primarily on ancestry. Specifically, it explains how this notion surfaced amid socio-religious tensions in early modern Spain, and was initially used against Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity. It was then transplanted to the Americas, adapted to colonial conditions, and employed to create and reproduce identity categories according to descent. Martínez also examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the notion of purity of blood over time, arguing that the concept's enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings and the archival practices it promoted came to shape the region's patriotic and racial ideologies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804756488
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	07/17/2008
Series:	Cultural Memory in the Present Ser.
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

María Elena Martínez is Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Read an Excerpt

Genealogical Fictions

Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico

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By María Elena Martínez

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5648-8

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Chapter One

The Emergence of the Spanish Statutes of Limpieza de Sangre

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The emergence and spread of the Spanish statutes of purity of blood was a complicated, contested, and drawn-out process. They appeared on a gradual, piecemeal basis and, for one hundred years after the first municipal statute was issued, received only sporadic support from the crown. Some statutes were vigorously challenged, others rescinded only to be reinstated, and yet others were not rigorously implemented. Nonetheless, during the sixteenth century, numerous religious and secular institutions established limpieza de sangre requirements, and these continued to be an integral feature of Spanish society for centuries to come. What implications did the proliferation of the statutes precisely at the time of Iberian expansion to the Americas have on Spanish colonial society? How did they influence religious thought and social dynamics after the conquest? What genealogical beliefs and practices did the requirements of limpieza de sangre bequeath to the Americas? Answering these questions first requires an examination of the meanings of the concept of purity of blood in Spain andthe context in which it gained importance. This chapter and the following two (which make up Part 1) provide such an examination.

Specifically, the chapters trace the development of the ideology of limpieza de sangre from its initial appearance in the middle of the fifteenth century to its crystallization one hundred years later and subsequent merger with notions of nobility. The main objective is to discuss general social, religious, and political developments in Castile that help to explain when and why the idea of purity of blood acquired importance and the ways in which it was related to notions of genealogy and race. Although they deal strictly with the discourse of purity of blood in Iberia, Chapters 1 through 3 focus on those dimensions that would also characterize it in Spanish America. These dimensions include the idea that blood was a vehicle through which all sorts of characteristics and religious proclivities were transmitted, the deployment and reification of the categories of Old Christian and New Christian, the reliance on female sexuality and reproduction to the maintenance of the social order, the link between bloodlines and the honor system, and the establishment of limpieza status through juridical procedures.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the social and religious circumstances that prompted the first major waves of Jewish conversions to Christianity in late medieval Spain, the older Christian community's increasingly negative attitudes toward the converts from the 1430s onward, and the passage of the first purity requirements in the middle of the fourteenth century. It then delves into factors that helped give the statutes momentum in the second half of the fifteenth century, including the growth of a discourse about secret or "crypto-Judaism," the revival of a crusading spirit during the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand (monarchs of Castile from 1474 to 1504), and the establishment of the Inquisition. In addition to drawing attention to the political, economic, and institutional dynamics that contributed to the growing significance of the principle of limpieza de sangre, this section stresses that growing social anxieties over conversion, shifting community boundaries, and religious loyalties also played a crucial role in turning lineage into a mechanism for promoting order, fixity, and hierarchy.

MASS CONVERSIONS, ANTI-SEMITISM, AND THE RISE OF THE STATUTES IN LATE MEDIEVAL SPAIN

One current of scholarship on medieval Spain paints the region as a kind of Garden of Eden that for centuries allowed the "coexistence" (convivencia) of Christians, Jews, and Muslims and that fostered the rise of a Jewish "Golden Age." According to this current, the convivencia, which was at its peak from the eighth century to the middle of the twelfth, came to a definitive end in the 1400s, when the first statutes of purity of blood were passed and the Spanish Inquisition was established to deal with the supposed problem of crypto-Judaism. Certain scholars also claim that with the systematic use of ancestry against Jewish converts to Christianity, racial, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism emerged for the first time in history. Although the notion of convivencia with its lingering connotations of tolerance has been challenged by a number of historians, among them David Nirenberg, scholars generally agree that during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, violence against Jews increased in Iberia, as it did in broader Europe, and that it was accompanied by their increasing demonization in Christian popular mythology, folklore, and iconography. These developments occurred in the context of heightened social tensions resulting from the transition to a monetary economy and the devastation wrought by the Black Death. The latter struck western Europe between 1347 and 1351 and had several subsequent phases, including one in the years 1388-90. The Spanish purity statutes did not appear until later, but their history is usually traced to that turbulent period and in particular to the mass conversions that anti-Jewish movements catalyzed at the end of the fourteenth century.

In 1391, a wave of anti-Semitic attacks that started in Seville spread to other cities (including Toledo, Valencia, and Barcelona), resulting in the deaths of thousands of Jews. Violent incidents of the sort had occurred before, but the late-fourteenth-century pogroms, which occurred amid a severe economic depression, were particularly significant because they produced the first major wave of Jewish conversions to Christianity, the first community of conversos. Faced with the possibility of becoming the targets of angry Christian mobs once again and subject to a growing number of professional, economic, residential, and sumptuary restrictions, tens of thousands of Jews felt compelled to accept baptism. Conversion implied assimilating into the dominant society, for it made them eligible for public and ecclesiastical offices and allowed them to live outside of Jewish quarters (juderías) and to stop wearing distinctive clothing. It also granted the converts the freedom to marry other Christians. Although the sudden conversions en masse created the impression among contemporaries that they had been insincere, the church for the most part accepted them and regarded the conversos as Christians. During the early fifteenth century, it concentrated mainly on proselytizing in Jewish communities and maintaining the boundary between Christians (including those who converted from Judaism) and Jews, historically the main basis of Christian identity.

Aggressive missionary activities by the Dominicans and Franciscans led to more Jewish conversions to Christianity, especially during the years 1412-15, but efforts to make the conversos sever their residential, social, and cultural ties with their former community were generally unsuccessful. Various towns, particularly Valladolid, issued laws aimed at limiting all kinds of interaction between the two groups, but they apparently did not have the intended results because anxieties over policing religious boundaries continued to escalate. By the mid-1430s, these anxieties were being manifested in ever-more-disturbing ways. The more traditional Christians-"Old Christians" (cristiano viejos), as they later called themselves-were not only beginning to express serious doubts about the conversos' commitment to Christianity but were increasingly relying on genealogy to think about and determine identities. The growing concern with lineage was not exclusive to Christians. The conversions of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were followed by disputations, apostasies, and migrations (sometimes involving various shifts in faith) that posed new classificatory challenges for Spain's three main religious communities. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all responded by turning to new and mutually informed forms of communal identity that privileged ancestry.

Among Old Christians, the newly invigorated concern with lineage was rooted in the idea that "Jewishness" was transmitted in the blood, that it was a natural, inheritable condition. Some therefore came to believe that having even partial Jewish ancestry compromised Christian identity, values, and understandings. This naturalization of a religious-cultural identity coincided with the emergence of a lexicon consisting of terms such as raza (race), casta (caste), and linaje (lineage) that was informed by popular notions regarding biological reproduction in the natural world and, in particular, horse breeding. It was also accompanied by an emergent Old Christian preoccupation with avoiding sexual, reproductive, and marital relations with the converts and their descendants-with protecting "pure" Christian lineages from converso (understood as "Jewish") blood. As the middle of the fifteenth century approached, Spanish genealogical concepts were acquiring particular contours, and social and religious anxieties were beginning to constitute New Christians as a particular type of convert.

The reasons for the dramatic shift in Spanish attitudes toward the conversos remain a mystery. Historians who believe that the majority of conversions occurring after the 1391 massacres were not sincere and that at least a portion of the converts' descendants continued to "judaize" (to practice Judaism) tend to argue that religious factors played a role or that worries about the need to safeguard the Christian faith were real. On the other hand, scholars who contend that most conversos became devoted Christians, especially if they had converted before 1492, generally view religion as a pretext. They attribute the hardening of Old Christian views toward that community either to social factors-particularly, resentment of the converts' rapid socioeconomic advancement, ability to secure public and ecclesiastical appointments, and integration into patrician oligarchies-or to sheer racism. Whether the incipient anticonverso movement (whose impetus is identified sometimes more with the noble estate and at others with the Old Christian "masses") was propelled by religious, social, or anti-Semitic factors or all three, by the mid-fifteenth century, the image of the "secret Jew," so central to early modern Spanish thought, was starting to appear alongside a strident Old Christian identity rooted in the traditional military nobility and in the idea of Christian superiority over Jews and Muslims. At the same time, charges of crypto-Judaism were beginning to play a role in political struggles between the crown and nobility, in conflicts over taxation and local autonomy, and in factional competition over control of municipal government. As events in central Castile demonstrated, the confluence of these trends provided the momentum for exclusionary policies that singled out the conversos.

Toledo, seat of the Primate of Spain and host to the most numerically and socially prominent population of conversos, was the site of the first major struggle to establish purity-of-blood policies. In early 1449, as the city's religious and secular leaders encouraged resistance against the repressive tax policies of King Juan II (1406-54) and converso tax collectors were made into the scapegoats of new fiscal impositions, a series of riots erupted that mainly targeted the judería and New Christians. When royal forces arrived to reestablish order, the city found itself in a virtual civil war. Pero Sarmiento, the city's ambitious alcalde mayor (chief magistrate) and leader of a group of rebels who accused Alvaro de Luna (the king's minister) of being partial to the conversos, took advantage of his control of the government and, along with other local officials, drew up a decree that made converted Jews and their descendants permanently ineligible for public offices and all municipal appointments. Some political and religious figures raised their voices against the proposal, but they could not prevent the town council from approving it. Historians of early modern Spain consider this decree, the Sentencia-Estatuto, one of the earliest statutes of limpieza de sangre, if not the first. Its supporters, who clearly resented the conversos' prosperity and role in municipal government, claimed that the New Christians could not be trusted because of the insincerity of their conversions; deep hatred of christianos viejos lindos ("clean/beautiful Old Christians"); and crimes against God, king, and the public good. The city, they argued, had to protect itself and the Catholic faith by ensuring that only people with unsullied Christian lineages were in positions of power and authority. Pope Nicholas V and a number of Spanish writers, some of whom were Old Christians, strongly condemned the Sentencia-Estatuto for violating the principle of the unity of the church and undermining the redemptive powers of baptism, but to no avail. Juan II, apparently in an effort to gain support at a time of great social instability in Castile, approved it in August 1451, about five months after he had granted a general pardon to the residents of Toledo for their insubordination.

Toledo's Sentencia-Estatuto had powerful forces behind it, and its language was indicative of the extreme levels that anti-Jewish and anticonverso rhetoric was reaching in Spain in the middle of the fifteenth century. Jewish people were increasingly depicted as a hybrid and corrupted lineage, sometimes even as the outcome of monstrous mixtures-of crosses with monsters, demons, and animals-and their supposed traits were being projected onto the conversos. As anticonverso hostility spread from Toledo to other cities (including Ciudad Real, Córdoba, Jaén, and Seville) during the 1460s and 1470s, claims about the treachery and heretical tendencies of the descendants of Jewish converts to Christianity were repeated again and again, and different institutions began to adopt exclusionary measures based on the same genealogical and naturalizing logic as the Sentencia-Estatuto. During these decades, the discovery of cases of (alleged) crypto-Judaism in some religious orders and other establishments, including the Jeronymites, helped to undermine the arguments of the opponents of the Sentencia-Estatuto and to cast suspicions on all conversos. It also convinced a number of church officials that the converts' religious beliefs were still being corrupted by their ongoing contact with Jews, and they therefore called for more intense efforts to separate them. Frustrations over the failure of similar efforts had of course been expressed before, but in the politically and religiously charged climate of the last third of the fifteenth century, they would have extremely grave consequences for both groups.

POLITICAL CENTRALIZATION, CHRISTIAN MILITANCY, AND THE FOUNDING OF THE INQUISITION

The worsening plight of Spain's conversos and Jews occurred during a period of great social and political turmoil and heightened religious zeal. In Castile, the decades between the Sentencia-Estatuto and the establishment of the Inquisition were marked, among other things, by the weak leadership of kings Juan II and his successor Enrique IV (1454-74), royal efforts to curb the political power of the upper nobility, and a crisis of succession that led to a civil war. The nobility included descendants of soldiers who during the period of the Reconquista (the Christian "reconquest" of Iberia from Islamic rule) had received land and status for providing military service to the monarchy. This estate consisted of three main categories: hidalgos, who mainly enjoyed local prestige and exemption from certain taxes; señores, owners of small territorial possessions, or señoríos; and grandes, the titled nobility. In the mid-century, wealth, land, titles, and political posts were concentrated in the last category and, more concretely, in the hands of about two dozen noble families. In a Spain that was still predominantly rural, their economic and political power rested primarily on their control over large tracts of territory.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................1
1. The Emergence of the Spanish Statutes of Limpieza de Sangre....................25
2. Race, Purity, and Gender in Sixteenth-Century Spain....................42
3. Juridical Fictions: The Certification of Purity and the Construction of Communal Memory....................61
4. Nobility and Purity in the República de Indios....................91
5. Nobility and Purity in the República de Españoles....................123
6. The Initial Stages and Socioreligious Roots of the Sistema de Castas....................142
7. The Probanza de Limpieza de Sangre in Colonial and Transatlantic Space....................173
8. Religion, Law, and Race: The Question of Purity in Seventeenth-Century Mexico....................200
9. Changing Contours: Limpieza de Sangre in the Age of Reason and Reform....................227
Conclusion....................265
Appendix: Questionnaire Used by the Spanish Inquisition....................279
Glossary....................281
Abbreviations....................285
Notes....................287
Bibliography....................361
Index....................391

Editorial Reviews

"This book provides detailed information about how ideas and information circulated across the Atlantic. Throughout the text, Martinez uses primary documents judiciously and well; particularly fascinating are the descriptions of the processing of probanzas in both local and transatlantic contexts."

Magali Carrera American Historical Review

"Genealogical Fictions is the first serious treatment in English of the origins of the sistema de castas and racial ideology in colonial Mexico. It problematizes unquestioned assumptions about limpieza de sangre—purity of blood—the foundation of the sistema de castas, through a reconstruction of the concept's transformations from its origins in early modern Spain to its adaptations in colonial Mexico. Martinez also has much to say about the development of Mexican society in the seventeenth century, a largely neglected period that is only now beginning to attract the attention of contemporary historians. This is an important and original work and a first-rate addition to the existing literature."

Susan Deans-Smith

"This book provides detailed information about how ideas and information circulated across the Atlantic. Throughout the text, Martinez uses primary documents judiciously and well; particularly fascinating are the descriptions of the processing of probanzas in both local and transatlantic contexts."

From the Publisher

"This important and meticulously researched work takes on the historiography that argues that the modern Western conception of race had its origins in nineteenth-century scientific constructions of race as a biological category . . . This is an engaging and important work that is sure to attract the attention of historians and scholars from other fields working on issues of race, religion, gender, and colonial empires in Latin America, Europe, and the Atlantic World."

Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe - Martha Few

"Through a persuasive analysis of a vast array of archival and published sources, [Martinez] adds depth and complexity to our understanding of religious, cultural, and social framework and of the tensions and contradictions the fiction of limpieza de sangre created in its Mexican settings . . . Martinez's tour de force gives a new meaning to an important subject not seriously addressed previously and should be of great interest to scholars and students."

The Americas