Forbidden Passages - Karoline P. Cook The Early Modern Americas

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considered bringing them to Spanish America to work on a number of projects. This was in sharp contrast to Crown policies. In 1537 the bishop of Mexico Friar Juan de Zumárraga requested that a group of married Moriscos be allowed to travel to New Spain to teach indigenous peoples the delicate art of raising silkworms and producing silk. Zumárraga hoped sericulture would provide both a civilizing activity and a source of income for the indigenous peoples congregated in the newly founded mission communities.93 However, the Crown rejected his request to grant Granadan Moriscos licenses. The intricate wooden ceiling and door carvings on churches in the new city parishes and countryside doctrinas also suggest the work of Morisco carpenters and artisans in Spain. However, recent art historians have found evidence that Amerindians trained by Spanish artisans and clerics, not Moriscos, participated in their construction in the Americas.94 If Moriscos ever did labor on these, they most likely would not have been officially listed as Moriscos in the records, after requests like those of Zumárraga were turned down by the Crown. The churches of the doctrinas were well inland, in close proximity to indigenous dwellings, unlike the fortifications that drew galley slaves who were bound by royal decrees to return to their ships in the more cosmopolitan ports such as Havana, Callao, or Veracruz.

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      Due to the concerns over title and dominion, the Spanish Crown sought to control and limit access to indigenous peoples to only devout Catholics who could prove good social standing, pious behavior, and eventually trace their lineage back several generations to old Christian families. While there was some demand for Moriscos and North Africans to labor in the Americas, primarily as slaves, but also as interpreters and artisans, due to their perceived linguistic abilities or skills as carpenters or silk workers in Spain, the Crown’s concerns with evangelization took precedence. Throughout the sixteenth century, Spanish monarchs issued a number of royal decrees restricting emigration. However, enforcement wavered during the early conquests, and free emigrants obtained false licenses or crossed the Atlantic in a variety of clandestine ways.

      Unfree emigration accounted for the presence of many Moriscos in Spanish America, and the status of slaves plays into the discussions over the social standing of suspected Morisco encomenderos and wealthy office holders. This is a very different dynamic from the one that conversos faced. Although Jews in medieval Iberia could in theory be enslaved under similar conditions as Muslims, no such cases in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain or Spanish America were uncovered during my research. As potentially enslaveable, Moriscos faced a very specific set of circumstances that defined their social status. Actions, dress, customs, and appearance mattered, and descriptions of individuals in the courts emphasized some elements over others in determining if someone had been a slave, whether someone could be enslaved, or whether they could possess honor and the accompanying benefits.

      CHAPTER 3

      Forbidden Crossings

      Emigration Legislation and Morisco Responses

      In 1577, Diego Herrador, a shoemaker residing in Mexico City, stood before inquisitors, charged with passing to New Spain with a false license. Inquisitor Licentiate Francisco Santos García accused Herrador that he, “being of the caste and lineage of Moriscos and the grandson of a quemado on his mother’s side, made a false report that he is an old Christian of pure blood and ancestry, and that no one of his lineage has been punished by the Holy Office.”1 During his trial, the shoemaker described how he obtained his false license. Herrador’s case was eventually dismissed because inquisitors learned that they no longer had the jurisdiction to prosecute cases of false licenses and had to restrict themselves to matters of the faith. It is unclear what happened to Herrador after this ruling, yet it reveals the openings in the legislation that allowed “new Christians” to reach the Americas despite prohibitions. Knowledge of the strategies that prospective emigrants could use to cross the Atlantic spread not only among those searching for false licenses but also across various sectors of colonial society, as royal decrees were read publicly and officials aired their complaints. The anxieties created by the frequent breaches of the restrictions on Morisco emigration paved the road for future conflicts over status in colonial society.

      Initially, the royal decrees were enforced only sporadically, as practical concerns with populating the islands and mainland of the Americas took precedence over religious imperatives. However, the situation changed by the end of the sixteenth century with the rising Spanish presence. Royal decrees demanding the policing of interior regions and the establishment of inquisitorial tribunals created a vigilant atmosphere that individuals could exploit in their competition over offices and encomiendas, as new generations of Iberians emigrated to the Americas and came into conflict with the self-styled first conquerors and settlers. Individuals banned from settling in the New World employed various strategies to evade the restrictions. There is ample evidence that despite prohibitions, Moriscos did have the means to travel freely to Spanish America, in the event that they or powerful sponsors desired to do so.

      Official policies, based on ideals that were couched in millenarian language, were difficult to carry out. Vast distances between both Spain and the Americas, and within the rapidly expanding empire, delayed the application of colonial policies. Competing jurisdictional claims also slowed the process, allowing individuals to slip through the cracks. The Spanish legal system was porous and diffuse, lacking a codified series of laws, especially before the Recopilación de Leyes de Indias (1681). Authorities constantly consulted one another and debated policies, providing many openings for individual action. Much if not most of Spanish civil and criminal law was applicable to the Indies, but there was also the question of its relationship to Amerindian customary practices. Expansion of the empire brought with it a host of new administrative questions. In theory, regulations for governing stemmed from the king, but in practice the royal councils reviewed the issues and made recommendations for the monarch to either reject or issue the appropriate decrees. Although the laws derived from the king and royal council, they were often initiated in response to local problems, resulting in legislation that was based on reactions to particular cases that could be applied to others and subsequently cited in new contexts. Royal decrees supporting and creating new laws proliferated, and officials on the ground would determine how and if to respond. In this sense, the formulaic acknowledgment of obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey, but I do not carry out the order) could allow for a degree of flexibility in colonial settings, so that peoples’ actions, lawsuits, and sense of identity became situational and fluid to adapt to the circumstances.2 Debates concerning one part of the Spanish world could have empire-wide repercussions, as they were cited in debates at court to define and restrict peoples living under Spanish rule. The cases of Moriscos in the Americas provide one such lens through which to examine the relationship between the formulation of legal identities through everyday negotiations and the debates at court to produce policies. The concurrent descriptions of seminomadic indigenous groups such as the Chichimeca, Chiriguanos, or Araucanos with those concerning alárabes and Moriscos following the Alpujarras uprising reveal how Spanish jurists and theologians were defining customary practices with policies in mind. Arguments about whether it was licit to enslave either Moriscos or Amerindians drew heavily from ethnographic descriptions.3

      Due to the gap between expected and real enforcement of the legislation, Morisco emigrants crossed the Atlantic and played a role in colonial society. Both enslaved and free Moriscos found in the openings in the legislation a way to pass clandestinely. But for Spanish authorities, even the possibility of their presence raised concerns and fears that were already inflamed by a preoccupation with justifying imperial rule and establishing a model Catholic republic. Bishops and inquisitors complained about the difficulty of policing frontier regions and invoked the specter of new Christian settlement at the edges of empire. They issued edicts stigmatizing Morisco practices that were preached publicly, conveying a broader sense of urgency to the local population. These fears entered denunciations arising from feuds over position in the colonial hierarchy, as the consequences of possessing a Morisco lineage involved material losses and could affect a family for generations. In a system that encouraged heated disputes over encomiendas, due to their nonhereditary nature, families had powerful incentives to exclude their rivals.4

      LEGISLATING EMIGRATION, A POROUS WEB: 1492–1548

      During

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