In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America by Karoline P. Cook
  • Max Harris
Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America. By Karoline P. Cook. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2016. Pp. x, 261. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4824-1.)

The history of Muslims and Moriscos in colonial Spanish America is an important topic. Considerably more scholarly attention has been paid to the history of conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity, voluntary or otherwise, and their descendants) than to moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity, voluntary or otherwise, and their descendants). This book goes some way to rectifying that imbalance. Moreover, Spanish and criollo attitudes to Moriscos during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries betray a disconcerting likeness to the twenty-first-century fears and prejudices of many established citizens of Western Europe and North [End Page 866] America toward Muslim immigrants and their descendants. Karoline Cook’s book is timely: not only does it illuminate past history, but it also sheds indirect light on current tensions.

Cook is both blessed and handicapped by her sources. She has combed archives from Mexico City and Lima to Seville, Granada, and Madrid, and has shaped a wealth of previously unpublished material into an invaluable resource for scholars of colonial Spanish America. Her archival sources, however, are predominantly legal. This has certain disadvantages. Sworn commitment to truth-telling notwithstanding, legal testimony is not a record of private opinion but of what plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses are willing to say to gain a desired result in court. Cook, perhaps, is not always sufficiently skeptical of the possible distance between what made it into the legal record and what actually happened. Moreover, legal records do not have the excitement of a John Grisham novel. This is not Cook’s fault, but it does mean that her readers too often get little sense of the personal dramas behind the records or even, in several cases where the records are incomplete, of the final outcome. Cook does her best to enliven her study with individual stories such as those of Diego Herrador, “a shoemaker residing in Mexico City,” who in 1577 was charged with concealing his Morisco heritage on his mother’s side to obtain a “false licence” (p. 53) to enter the New World, contrary to official bans on Morisco immigration (pp. 53, 63–66), or of Nicolás de Zamudio Oviedo, who in Lima in 1636 accused a local priest of publicly calling him a “Morisco, drunken dog,” but whose case collapsed “because of the lack of willing witnesses to testify against a priest” (pp. 139–40). Such is the nature of the legal record, however, that each individual story lasts only a few pages before it has to be abandoned.

The cumulative effect of a certain legal dryness is not helped by Cook’s thematic arrangement of her material. She marshals evidence to illustrate particular themes, rather than to build an overall chronological narrative or to develop much sense of place beyond broad distinctions among Spain, North Africa, and the Americas. Cook’s thematic approach may have been the best way of assembling so many fragments of evidence, but it limits the narrative appeal of her work. Nevertheless, her book remains a treasure trove of information for scholars willing to dig and wanting to know more about the ways in which cultural Moriscos (whose personal faith may have been Christian, Muslim, or somewhere in between) negotiated officially forbidden passage to the New World, protected their public identity as loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown and “old Christians” (heirs on both sides of multiple generations of Christians), and managed to build careers and families amidst the fears and prejudices of the dominant Spanish Catholic culture to which, of necessity, they themselves claimed to belong. Although Cook does not draw attention to the fact, hers is a book, mutatis mutandis, about the trials of immigrants of Muslim heritage both then and now. [End Page 867]

Max Harris
University of Wisconsin–Madison
...

pdf

Share