This collection of ten essays, prefaced by an introduction coauthored by the volume’s editors, originated as a colloquium convened at El Colegio de México in 2007. In keeping with María Elena Martínez’s recent study of limpieza de sangre, the volume traces how a set of religiously grounded hierarchies established in Spain was transformed in Spanish America into more overtly racial (or proto-racial) systems of difference based increasingly on phenotype. Although the book opens with an excellent overview of late medieval and early modern Iberian history by Max S. Hering Torres and concludes with a discussion of twentieth-century formulations of mestizaje by Guillermo Zermeño, it is firmly anchored in early Latin American history with a slight emphasis on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Likewise, a few of the chapters adopt a transatlantic framework, but the volume’s overall focus is New Spain with an occasional nod to the Andes.Several overarching questions and approaches hold the collection together. While proof of purity of blood was necessary to procure a wide range of offices, honors, and appointments, the authors highlight ecclesiastical institutions (mainly the Inquisition, but also confraternities, Jesuit-run schools, and the Franciscan order). They also emphasize disparities between policy and practice. Solange Alberro reminds us how genealogical inquiries were hampered by a host of challenges that beset early modern society, including faulty family and community oral histories that rarely extended beyond three or four generations, the ease and frequency by which individuals adopted new surnames and identities, and communication difficulties. Present in Spain, these obstacles were far more detrimental in the New World, where growing racial intermixture required an institutional and social recalibration of the meaning of purity and nobility. Churchmen and jurists recognized that these flaws not only enabled candidates to conceal their ancestral stains, but the spirit of the process itself could be undermined by attempts to sully a rival’s reputation through innuendo or false accusations. The volume showcases numerous instances of probable or definitive concealment. Yet more interesting, perhaps, is Javier Sanchiz’s suggestion that a great many of those found to have converso ancestry in sixteenth-century Mexico were likely as surprised as the Inquisitors themselves.The contributors accord as much attention to the men who headed ecclesiastical institutions as they do to those they vetted. The Inquisition, we learn, responded to evolving local social and political circumstances, evidencing, in the words of Nikolaus Böttcher, a “slow but effective modernization” to safeguard its continued relevance (p. 204). While this flexibility originally entailed overlooking the Jewish ancestry of influential colonial functionaries and later shifted to a concern over racial impurities of indios, mestizos, and castas, it ultimately involved a recognition that genealogical investigations had become “a mere formality” in a society as thoroughly intermixed as late colonial New Spain (p. 215). Alexandre Coello de la Rosa and Norma Angélica Castillo Palma highlight a similar willingness among some clergy to open educational opportunities to capable candidates of plebeian and uncertain racial stock, even if such tolerance proved fleeting (in one instance prompted by the need to fill Indian parishes with bilingual priests following a wave of secularization).The volume is best at revealing the attitudes and mores of colonial society’s elite and middle sectors. Even within these groups, however, our view is somewhat circumscribed. As Sanchiz points out, scholars working with official inquiries into purity of blood confront an unfortunate filter effect in that these processes excluded those who did not bother to submit to an investigation knowing full well what authorities might uncover. Castillo Palma extends her analysis the furthest down the social hierarchy, showing how late colonial mulattoes and Indians began producing their own proofs of descent that omitted ignoble branches of the family tree, thereby contributing to an ongoing process of social whitening (a point seconded by Böttcher). Such interpretations may suggest a top-down acceptance for the meaning of race, although Bernd Hausberger’s intriguing essay on the Basques moves in a different direction. Reminiscent of David Nirenberg’s study of the dialogical process at play in the rereading of lineage among fifteenth-century Jews, Christians, and conversos, Hausberger traces how Basque identity was shaped by a creative refashioning of Castilian notions of purity and nobility. By favoring language and a biblical forefather (Noah’s grandson Tubal) over religion, the Basques claimed to be the direct descendants of the original Iberians, untainted by subsequent influxes into the peninsula. This imagined past bolstered claims of a universal nobility (hidalguía universal) that extended even to those who practiced base occupations.Scholars of race and religion will welcome this fine collection. As is often the case with anthologies, some of the essays are more ambitious and fully developed than others, but on the whole they work well together, offering intriguing points of comparison concerning the function and meaning of purity of blood and nobility across the Spanish Atlantic.
Read full abstract
Feb 19, 2018
Fernando Martínez Rueda 
Open Access
