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CHAPTER THREE ~ A Divided City, A Shared City Drawing and Crossing Ethnic Boundaries T he eventual expulsion of most of the city's "native" community in I 569-I 570 at the height of the second rebellion casts an imposing shadow over any examination of moriscoChristian immigrant relations in postconquest Granada. Given the tragic outcome, it is difficult to avoid the temptation to emphasize moments of confrontation, ignoring in the process the mostly peaceable ways in which the frontier city's two principal ethnic groups interacted with one another on a daily basis for nearly eight decades. As recently as I994, in fact, historian Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada characterized the nature of Christian immigrant-morisco relations in postconquest Granada entirely in simplistic terms of mutual hatred: "Their reciprocal rejection was profound-to accept nothing, or almost nothing from each other, convinced as they were of the superiority of their respective religions and their whole cultural worlds."l While such gross overgeneralizations make it easy to cast the Granada story as a central chapter in the master narrative of Spain's early modern transformation into a closed, exclusionary society, they obscure a much more complicated state of affairs revealed by detailed research in local archival sources. As we have seen, both the immigrant and morisco communities were complex and dynamic rather than monolithic and static. Moreover, despite repeated efforts on the part of leaders from both communities to segregate the city along ethnic lines, and despite the attempts by many moriscos to isolate themselves from the immigrants, Granada's ever-changing urban landscape continued throughout the period under study to provide ample opportunity for daily interaction and various forms of exchange between morisco and immigrant men and women of all socioeconomic classes. In exploring through the course of this chapter the complex ways in which physical and social boundaries between the two communities were both drawn and crossed, it is nonetheless critical to avoid painting too rosy a picture of immigrant-morisco relations. To Muslims as well as Christians throughout the peninsula, Granada had after all carried for more than two centuries before the I492 conquest enormous symbolic significance as the 50 A DIVIDED CITY, A SHARED CITY:: 51 very center of Iberian Islam. A triumphalist sense of a crusade brought to successful completion no doubt colored many immigrants' impressions of their morisco neighbors. Conversely, among the moriscos-especially those who privately clung to the faith of their ancestors-the legacy of conquest, broken treaty promises, and mandatory conversion embittered common attitudes toward the immigrants. One cannot ignore the obvious power relationships between conquerors and conquered. It is certainly not surprising under these circumstances that both the immigrants on the one hand and the moriscos on the other maintained a large degree of communal identity and sorlidarity vis avis the other up until the expulsion. Although incidents of actual ethnic and/or religious violence in the postconquest city itself were rare, members of both groups frequently voiced overt and subtle expressions of hostility. In short, the physical and social landscapes that provided the context for the creation of Christian Granada were characterized by daily interaction and exchange as well as by religious and ethnic confrontation. The general lack of intermarriage was the most visible evidence of the maintenance of boundaries between immigrants and moriscos.2 On both sides of Granada's ethnic divide, reluctance to marry across ethnic lines appears to have been an unwritten rule and a primary means of maintaining community identity. As we have seen in cases such as the Hermes and Granada Venegas families, this rule was certainly not absolute; some socially prominent and ascendant morisco and immigrant families did, in fact, forge important social and political ties through intermarriage. Crown policy , moreover, strongly advocated such intermarriage at all social levels as a practice that fostered the assimilation of the newly converted, and royal letters even at times specifically referred to these elite intermarriages as a model that should be imitated throughout local society) The broader morisco and immigrant communities, however, generally ignored such messages . Offspring of "mixed marriages" were thus rare, and most were born to families already well established in the local elite. Unlike early colonial societies in Mexico and Peru, in which the so-called mestizos constituted a large and visible component, frontier Granada produced no new perceived category or vocabulary of mixed ethnicity.4 Various factors from both sides of the morisco-immigrant divide contributed to this relative lack of miscegenation in Granada...

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