Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (review)

Maria Elena Martinez has written an impressive monograph on the history of limpieza de sangre in colonial Mexico tracing its roots from sixteenth-century Spain. Through a persuasive analysis of a vast array of archival and published sources, she adds depth and complexity to our understanding of the religious, cultural, and social framework and of the tensions and contradictions the fiction of limpieza de sangre created in its Mexican setting.

Martinez divides her study into three parts. Section one includes three chapters dedicated specifically to unfolding the ideology of limpieza de sangre in Spain since its inception in mid sixteenth-century Castile and particularly its ramifications concerning issues of genealogy and race. The original definition of limpieza de sangre—freedom from any Semitic and heretical background—became an obsessive concern when the massive conversion of Jews occurred during a period of great social and political turbulence. Chapter one traces the hostility of the Old Christian community toward the New Christians, grounded upon what they perceived to be the latter’s religious and cultural deficiencies. This included their lack of true commitment to Catholicism and their inability to assimilate into the dominant society, since allegedly “Jewishness” was transmitted in the blood.

Chapter two examines the transformation of the statute of limpieza de sangre from being used against converts to a more comprehensive prejudice against all Jewish and Muslim peoples. This move was related to issues of race and gender. Limpieza de sangre classified Jews and Muslims under the denomination of “bad races,” which escalated the anxieties of Old Catholics about reproducing with these “stained” peoples. A new development was the targeting of non-Christian women as agents as who were transmitting cultural and biological “infection” through breast milk. This became a crucial concern among the Old Christians. The section concludes with the examination of the probanzas de limpieza, requirements of the proof of pureza de sangre essential to holding religious and public offices that escalated into a national obsession. Martinez demonstrates that that the pressure to hide any blood linkages with Jews, Muslims, or conversos contributed to the ongoing definition of collective Spanish identity, which included the fiction that Spain was a pure Christian nation.

In section two, Martinez deepens our understanding of the transfer and adaptation of the notions of purity to the “Indian Republic” and the “Spanish Republic” of early colonial Mexico and particularly, the development of the sistema de castas. In chapter four, Martinez examines the principles that motivated this dual form of social organization that implied different rights and duties, separate living spaces, divided legal and religious institutions for the Indian and Spanish communities, as well as dual standards of limpieza de sangre. She affirms that the seemingly equivalent status of the two republics rested in two bases. First was the recognition by the Crown of the pre-Hispanic dynasties that allowed the native nobility to retain a degree of political and economic power. Second was the acceptance of the faith by the indigenous people that made them an untarnished population. She claims that the Spanish colonial ideology influenced native notions of purity and race, as well as their historical and genealogical narratives.

Chapter five deals with the concept of limpieza de sangre as it developed in the “Spanish Republic” of the conquered territories. As noted by Martinez, the fiction of purity acquired a different profile in the colonies. Initially, the discourse of purity was tied to the Christianization project. In order to keep the new land free from the nefarious influence of the heretics, the emigrants to America had to present certificates of pureza de sangre that proved their status of Old Christians. In Mexico as elsewhere in Hispanic America, probanzas de servicios and probanza de limpieza de origen—requirements to claim social status and economic rewards—contributed to the formation of the aristocracy. The discourse of limpieza de sangre in Hispanic America...