Early Modern Spanish Empire: Racial Purity of Blood vs New Ideologies of Pan-Ethnic, Ecumenical Christian Citizenship
Max Deardorff. A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
The scholarship on early modern imperial Spain has long emphasized the racial dimension of citizenship. Jews were expelled or forced to convert and so too were Muslims. Forced conversion led to deception, concealment, and an epistemic apparatus to uncover dissimulation by tracing community genealogies to apostate family lines. Early modern Iberia was a society that policed quasi racial boundaries between Old and New Christians as blood purity. We have also been told that these ideologies of purity were transferred to the Americas as “genealogical fictions” to create racial types. Indians, mestizos, Blacks, and castas were bound by blood to a perpetual status of inferior Christian neophytes. Max Deardorff focuses on the two Granadas (Andalucía and Colombia) to offer an alternative narrative of Christian citizenship.
Along with the Old and New Christian racializing divide, an alternative classification emerged in the second half of the sixteenth century that classified people according to ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviors. Anyone could aspire to the franchise of Christian citizenship regardless of family, ethnic origins. Deardorff traces the rise of the new ideology of ecumenical Christian citizenship to Philip II who not only wholeheartedly embraced Trent’s reforms but also promoted dozens of local and regional council and synods to legislate minute change. Deardorff documents some eighty years of endless Church reflection and legislative reorganization to meet the pedagogical demands of a new model of ecumenical, pan ‘ethnic’ Christian citizenship.
The new legislation and activist Church first emerged in areas heavily populated by moriscos who faced exile and forced relocation after the Alpujarras Rebellion. Deardorff traces a cache of petitions by moriscos requesting return to their original ancestral homelands in Granada. Both moriscos and magistrates drew on a new discourse of Christian citizenship to judge the merits of the petitions. Deardorff shows that these Christians gained the right to return as they demonstrated sterling Christian credentials despite their morisco background.
The bulk of the book, however, centers on the New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia) that according to Deardorff witnessed in the second half of the sixteenth century the confrontation between two models of Christian citizenship, one that excluded natives and mestizos as racially inferior neophytes and the other that enfranchised them as vecinos and priests.
Like many other regions of Spanish America, Nueva Granada experienced profound demographic changes due to pandemics and mestizaje. By the 1570s the new kingdom had thousands of mestizos, the offspring of conquistadores and indigenous mothers, vying for positions of authority in both Indian and Spanish communities. Deardorff studies the well-known case of the cacique of Turmequé, Diego de Torres, the son of a conquistador and noble Muisca woman, who led a vast political movement of reform to curtail the power of encomenderos and pagan Muisca caciques, an alliance that brought together mestizos and Indian commoners to create a new pious, post-Trent Christian republic of sodalities, pilgrimages, and miraculous religious images.
Deardorff offers an insightful, complex reading of this movement that took the cacique Torres twice to Spain to petition Philip II. Torres’ complaints led to two royal visitas and the ultimate removal of all the judges of the Audiencia of Nueva Granada. The movement did not follow clear ethnic, racial, and political lines as the new archbishop of Nueva Granada, Luiz Zapata de Cárdenas, heavily promoted Philip II new pan-ethnic model of enfranchising Christian citizenship while also adamantly opposing the rise of mestizos to the highest positions of ecclesiastical and secular authority. Zapata conferred priesthood to dozens of mestizos, triggering a backlash among those local Spanish factions supporting the disenfranchisement of New Christians. Zapata used his office not only to enact new laws, catechisms, and schools to create confessional uniformity but also to attack cacique indigenous wealth to finance the church via plundering anti-idolatry campaigns. These nakedely instrumental extirpation campaigns further mobilized caciques like Torres in disgust. Zapata allowed the new Christians to stake claims of citizenship while also limiting their rise.
Deardorff suggests that the movement spearheaded by Diego de Torres ultimately succeeded. Many mestizos continued to be appointed caciques and many became parish priests. Despite all staunch opposition, many mestizos did become regidores, cathedral canons, encomenderos, notaries and scribes, and corregidores.
Deardorff further explores the rise of ecumenical, non-ethnic, post Trent Christian citizenship in the new Kingdom of Granada by studying the case of Indians who claimed the status of vecinos, citizens, in Spanish towns like Santa Fe and Tunja. These Indian vecinos rose to wealth, property, and status both cornering trades as artisans and participating as pious cófrades in urban sodalities.
This is an important new book that offers a different, novel, and thoroughly documented perspective on new early-modern, Iberian forms of Christian citizenship that have long been ignored by the historiography on race and purity of blood.
