Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

Abstract

The Holy Office of the Inquisition in Lima arrested Manuel Bautista Pérez in 1635 on accusations that he was the leader of Peru's secret Jews and sentenced him to death in 1639. Bautista Pérez was a Portuguese converso merchant who had become one of Lima's wealthiest residents and who exerted significant influence and power in the city. Inquisitors arrested Bautista Pérez during investigations in the 1630s into some of Lima's most commercially successful residents, most of whom were conversos. How were Manuel Bautista Pérez and others able to operate as powerful players in international mercantile networks and settle in viceregal capitals when the Spanish crown had strictly prohibited conversos and other New Christians, such as Moriscos, from crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Spanish America? This is one of the important questions that animates Stuart B. Schwartz's Blood and Boundaries.Schwartz explores the limits of religious and racial exclusion in the Spanish American viceroyalties by focusing on the lived experiences of individuals and communities from three marginalized groups: Moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Schwartz explores how marginalized groups navigated laws and discourses that sought to exclude them, showing how “the restrictions and disadvantages were repeatedly circumvented, negotiated, ignored, and ultimately failed as policies of social marginalization—even though they were relatively successful in weakening those groups as corporate actors with political interests” (p. 10). Chapter 1 explores how the fear of Islam, Islamic practices, and Christian renegades who converted to Islam in captivity penetrated colonial anxieties in Spanish America, even though the number and proportion of Moriscos and Muslims in Spanish America were very limited. Schwartz analyzes the dynamic of this fear and anxiety about Islam in Spanish America by exploring how colonial subjects defended themselves against such accusations in Inquisition trials. The chapter convincingly shows that while not many Moriscos crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Castile to Spanish America, the fear of Islamic practices and beliefs remained ingrained in the imaginary landscapes of colonial authorities and the experiences of colonial subjects.In contrast, chapter 2 explores how conversos often crossed the ocean as merchants and entrepreneurs and settled in Spanish America in significant numbers with limited resistance from the crown, in spite of copious laws that prohibited conversos from traveling to the Indies. They often became wealthy and powerful residents in viceregal cities. Instead of focusing on the sporadic persecutions of conversos across colonial Latin America, Schwartz explores their lived experiences, especially of those who occupied prominent economic positions. Schwartz argues that many conversos were able to navigate and circumvent discourses and laws that sought to exclude them because, “in the context of the closed commercial economies of the Iberian empires, their mercantile skills and connections often made them not only useful but essential to local and regional economies, and that utility overrode the prohibitions on their residence and the suspicions about the sincerity of their Catholic piety” (p. 62). The third and final chapter explores how American-born mestizos, who faced significant legislation that sought to prevent their participation in higher echelons of colonial society, learned how to seek “legal relief and sometimes successfully challenged the system of restrictions and disadvantages by learning how to use legal representation, the law courts, appeals to viceregal authority, and direct petitions to the crown to defend themselves and their interests” (p. 106).This book is an important and welcome addition to the historiography of ideas about racial difference and exclusion in colonial Latin America. Schwartz shifts from a focus on how institutions of governance sought to marginalize and exclude particular groups and instead argues that individuals' and communities' lived experiences reveal how a broad array of colonial subjects negotiated and often circumvented ideas and rules that sought to exclude or marginalize them. In his own words, Schwartz eschews an analysis of “the laws and institutions that sought to enforce the exclusions and reinforce the social hierarchy or [of] the discourse and patterns of genealogical thinking that sought to distinguish between purity and infection” to instead focus on the agency and experiences “of those who lived under these constraints, and on how and why the attempts to marginalize them were limited, modified, ignored, or evaded—not only by the victims of the exclusions but also by other groups and individuals in their society, and at times even by the state or by ecclesiastical institutions as well” (pp. 4–5). This focus on how marginalized groups reacted to and navigated ideas and laws that sought to marginalize them is key “to understanding the role of race and other forms of social difference in these colonial regimes” (p. 4).