Navigating Identities: The Case of a Morisco Slave in Seventeenth-Century New Spain

Abstract

In 1660 Cristóbal de la Cruz presented himself before the commissioner of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Veracruz, Mexico, claiming to be afflicted by doubts about the Catholic faith. Born in Algiers and captured at the age of nine or ten by a Spanish galley force, he was taken to Spain, where he was quickly sold into slavery and baptized. Thirty years later, De la Cruz denounced himself to the Mexican inquisitorial tribunal and proceeded to recount to the inquisitors a detailed and fascinating story of his life as he crossed Iberian and Mediterranean landscapes: escaping from his masters and being re-enslaved, encountering Muslims and renouncing Christianity, denouncing his guilt remorsefully before the Inquisitions of Barcelona and Seville, and moving between belief in Catholicism and Islam. His case provides important insights into the relationship between religious identity and the regulatory efforts of powerful institutions in the early modern Spanish world.