Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present

Unfixing Race

Unfixing Race kathryn burns Race in lineage is understood to be bad, as to have some Moorish or Jewish race. —Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611) ‘‘We order and command that no one, of whatsoever quality and condition, be received into the said Order . . . unless he be a Gentleman . . . born of legitimate matrimony, and not of Jewish, Moorish, Heretic, nor Plebeian race.’’ —Real Academia Española, Diccionario de autoridades (1726–39) The word ‘‘race’’ has never been stable. Old dictionaries make this clear, while pointing up the persistent racism that avails itself of categories even as they change.∞ Covarrubias, for example, begins his definition of raza with ‘‘the caste of purebred horses, which are marked with brands to distinguish them,’’ and moves on to cloth, in which race denotes ‘‘the coarse thread that is distinct from the other threads in the weave.’’≤ Only then does he turn to lineage, mentioning Moors and Jews. Jews and Moors also appear in the Real Academia ’s Diccionario, in an embedded snippet of the rules of the prestigious Order of Calatrava, but in significantly augmented company: alongside the races of Heretics and Plebeians. Both definitions emphasize the term’s negative associations.≥ And each di√ers strikingly from modern usages rooted in scientific racism and the many ways it has been used and contested.∂ Such definitional drift, I’ll argue, bespeaks complex histories marked by very local struggles as well as far-flung imperial rivalries. Scholars in many fields increasingly put the term ‘‘race’’ in scare quotes. This is a welcome move to unfix race—to signal that the categories we recognize as racial are not 58 kathryn burns stable or panhistoric—but is only the beginning of a project we can take much further. The point of carefully historicizing racial usages is to better understand both early modern racisms and those of our time.∑ Consider, for example, that one of the most potent racial insults one could hurl in early seventeenth-century Peru was ‘‘judío’’ (Jew). Jews were stigmatized as la mala casta blanca, or ‘‘bad whites.’’∏ This is a historically specific frame of reference, one Albert Sicro√ calls ‘‘religious racism.’’π Its Iberian genealogy is quite involved and links together histories that exist on separate shelves of our libraries: the histories of Spanish Jews, many of whom converted under pressure to Roman Catholicism after the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1391 and were known as conversos, and Spanish Muslims who did likewise, known as moriscos. By the early fifteenth century, ‘‘Old Christians’’ increasingly regarded ‘‘New Christian’’ populations with deep suspicion.∫ A sincere convert could not, at a glance, be distinguished from a false or backsliding convert, and considerable anxiety centered on those Spaniards who allegedly still practiced in secret a faith they had publicly renounced. Spain’s monarchs created the Spanish Inquisition in the late 1470s primarily to discipline suspected ‘‘judaizers’’—people who were thought to practice Judaism clandestinely. And concerns began to fix on the supposed cleanliness of people’s bloodlines. More and more Spanish institutions and municipalities devised and enforced statutes that excluded those not descended from Old Christians.Ω In short, the Castilian politics of race circa 1492 hinged on the purity of one’s Christianity, increasingly defined as a matter not simply of belief and practice but of inheritance, or limpieza de sangre (purity of blood)— something that could not be changed at the baptismal font. The intensifying persecution of those believed to be of impure Christian lineage was intimately related to the consolidation of the lineage of the Spanish absolutist state.∞≠ A militant, intolerant Christianity drove both processes. As the inquisitorial policing of distinctions between correct and heretical Christians got underway, the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand were campaigning to defeat the last Iberian stronghold of Islam, the kingdom of Granada . The year they succeeded, 1492, was also the year in which they obliged Spain’s remaining Jews to convert to Christianity or emigrate. Ten years later, Muslims were given the same choice.∞∞ After another century of tensions, Philip III moved to expel all moriscos in 1609. From 1391 to 1609, the status of New Christians—who were not recognizable at a glance, but were considered by Old Christians to be ineradicably Unfixing Race 59 tainted in their blood—became a white-hot political and cultural issue in Spain. And militant Christianity, sharply...