Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico by Amber Brian, and: Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America by Karoline P. Cook (review)

The two books under review here remind us that Spain's early modern history, because of its struggle to deal with diverse peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, has relevance to our own time as cultural differences and population movement have come to have high political salience. These books also remind us that despite Spain's efforts to impose fixity and control over both demography and transculturation, the early modern period saw intense cultural fusion as part of everyday life, intellectual endeavors, and underlay political debates within both church and state in which rigid policy positions frequently, but not always, carried the day.

Karoline Cook shines much needed light on the Moriscos and Muslims who made the trip from Spain to the Spanish Americas in Forbidden Passages. Despite their overall small numbers in the Americas, the Spanish Crown, especially later in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, repeatedly promulgated decrees trying to restrict immigration. Moriscos—a term referring to Islamic converts to Catholicism but which included varieties of conversion experience and levels of commitment—nevertheless did migrate. A religious, legal, and quasi-ethnic category, to be deemed a "Morisco" carried many legal and social implications on both sides of the Atlantic. Cook explores these implications thoroughly and adds to a small literature that has examined the Morisco experience in New Spain.

Grounding her study in an overview of Muslims and Moriscos in Spain over the late Reconquest period and the sixteenth century, Cook introduces a theme that recurs throughout the book in the first chapter, that of the clashing visions of Moriscos as converts who needed effective instruction but who could become a faithful Christians or as disloyal and unrepentant Muslims, potential traitors to Spain. Uprisings by Moriscos in the Sierra de Alpujarras of Granada, especially the second in 1568, reinforced the second more suspicious viewpoint and led to the expulsion of Granada's Moriscos in 1571. Despite efforts to restrict their emigration to the Americas, the expulsion actually led to more of it to a place where issues of identity and status were just as important as in Spain but where the debates, legal cases, and discourses over identity often played out differently because of the variable regional patterns of cultures, economy, and governance within the Spanish empire.

Chapters 2–4 provide legal, political, and religious context for understanding policies about Morisco migration, actual circumstances of migration (which show that preventing migration proved impossible because of demand for their skills and the inability of Spanish authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to contain population movement), and Morisco responses to religious and civil efforts to control migration and religious practices. While some individuals chose to migrate in clandestine circumstances, others came to Spanish America as slaves. Their forced migration accounts for the presence of a relatively large proportion of the Spanish Morisco population (though Cook cannot provide an estimate of the proportion or actual numbers, given extant source material, composed primarily of Inquisition court cases and royal decrees) and created ambiguities in the legal and social status of slaves and former slaves. These complexities as well as resistance to anti-Morisco policies, including their expulsion from Spain, fed growing fears on both sides of the Atlantic about their influence upon those among whom they lived.

Healing, in particular, became a contested issue on both sides of the Atlantic because of the Spanish crown's repeated attempts to suppress Islamic identity and practices and because both Spain and Spanish America provided spaces of intercultural contact that facilitated "ample opportunities for individuals to exchange remedies" (p. 110). Denunciation to the Inquisition could easily lead to investigations of heritage, belief (especially having to do...