Ghostly Remains: Valencia, 1609

Ghostly Remains Valencia 1609 Georgina Dopico Black is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University . She is author o/Terfect Wives, Other Women. Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Duke U Press, 2001) and co-editor of Sebastián de Covarrubias's Suplemento al Tesoro de la lengua española (Polifemo, 2001). She has authored numerous articles on early modern Spain and cohnial Latin America. Pere Oromig, Embarque de los moriscos en el Grau de Valencia, detail (1612). Illustration 1 The scene appears, on the whole, benign, even sentimental. A man with indistinguishable features kneels before a young girl who opens her Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 92 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies arms to him: a father, perhaps, embracing his daughter as he departs on a trip, or greeting her as he returns home from one: an affectionate farewell, a warm welcome . Illustration 2 Stepping back from the detail we realize, however, that the scene is not quite what we imagined: that not only is this no homecoming but that the separation we are witnessing is both final and irreversible . A Spanish morisco father takes leave of his daughter for the last time. His words, whispered close, or shouted above the din, are somehow unimaginable, drowned by their finality: never again will But the tragedy of this separation is at once intensified and diminished by its virtual repetition, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, of similar partings that surround father and daughter, as the inscriptions at the top of the painting dutifully record. The cartouche at the top left corner documents the specific subject of the canvas, quite possibly the very first of all the morisco expulsions from Spain: the exile that began in the early days of October 1609 from the Grau de Valencia. The 1612 painting, by Valencian artist Pere Oromig, is titled Embarque de los moriscos en el Grau de Valencia; it is the first of a series of seven oil paintings depicting the most important scenes of the Pere Oromig, Embarque de bs moriscos en el Grau de Vakncia (1612). she hear her Arabic name, her mother tongue, her father's voice. Visually, he is already little more than a blur: red shirt, dark hair and dark eyes, by which his daughter may one day remember him. Valencia diaspora: the first and the largest of the morisco expulsions from Spain, accounting for somewhere between 120,000 to 130,000 of the 300,000 Spanish moriscos exiled between 1609 and Georgina Dopico Black 93 1614.l They are extraordinary paintings: radically ambivalent in their ideological charge, and teeming with visual anecdotes that demand a story as much as they tell one, like the poignant scene of parting between father and daughter.2 The anecdote is, in this case, historically accurate: in compliance with one of the most controversial provisions of the 1609 Edict of Expulsion, the young morisca girl in this painting, like all morisco children under the age of five, is to be left behind in Spain in the custody of the state, perhaps to be adopted by a family of cristianos viejos, more likely, to be made their servant.3 The language of the "Bando de expulsión," meant to quiet morisco fears and hence reduce the possibility of a mass uprising (about which there was tremendous anxiety on the crown's part), simply states: que los mochachos y mochachas menores de quatro años que quisieren quedarse, y sus padres, o curadores (siendo huérfanos) lo tuvieran por bien, no serán expelidos, (GarcÃ-a Arenal 254) as if the decision would be left up to two and three-year olds themselves. A document (not intended for public consumption ) simply titled "La orden que se ha de dar," accompanying a 1609 letter from Philip III to Valencia archbishop Juan de Ribera, more explicitly stipulates the terms of separation. Parents who resisted were to be put to death; children who resisted were to be imprisoned until the expulsion was complete. 1. Que se procure con todo cuydado que los niños y niñas de diez años abaxo se...