The Mestizo Identity of the Spaniards: the Memory of Ethnic Intermixture in Early Modern Spain

Abstract:

In the historiographical account that has prevailed so far, the Spanish early modern age has been presented as a period in which national identity would have been constructed on a unitary, homogeneous, and unanimously defended conception of the genealogical origins of the Spanish nation. A common origin, based on the idea of a pure and uncontaminated “Tubalist” or Gothic heritage, would have provided a common identity, and this identity would thus have become national. According to this vision, the Spaniards of the time would have ignored, hidden, rejected, or forgotten any trace of intermixture with other peoples. This dominant historiographical account has ignored, or tended to undervalue, other, far from marginal, views of the genealogical origins of the Spaniards. In this article we will show that, although that vision of the Spanish people certainly existed, many Spaniards thought otherwise. Many, including some members of the upper strata of society, considered the Spanish “nation” to be the product of a mixture of different peoples, to which Jews and Muslims would also have contributed significantly. For them, far from being a people that had been kept “pure” since antiquity, Spaniards were a mixed people, a nation that was the result of a long process of intermixture.

Extract:

Intermixture among ethnically diverse groups appears to have been socially frowned upon in early modern Spain, where it was identified as a form of degeneration, as a diminution of the “quality” of a lineage. Thus, for example, in the famous seventeenth-century dictionary by Sebastián de Covarrubias, we read, in the entry mestizo: “El que es engendrado de diversas especies de animales, del verbo misceo, es, por mezclarse” (One who is engendered from different kinds of animals, from the verb misceo, for mixing); and, among the meanings given for “mix” (mezclar), we find: “Mezclarse los linajes, quando se confunden unos con otros, que no son de una misma calidad; y dezimos estar una cosa sin mezcla, quando está pura” (To mix lineages, when they are con-fused with each other, which are not of the same quality; and we say a thing is unmixed, when it is pure). “Mixed” is, then, the opposite of “pure,” and, in this sense, its meaning is based on the idea that there are lineages of different quality, some better, some worse; and the better ones, when mixed with the worse ones, lose their quality. Hence, intermixture was understood as a stigma and was associated with terms denoting dirtiness, such as mancha or macula (stain); defect, such as raza; or infamy, such as nota. Thus, continuing with Covarrubias’s dic-tionary, in the entry mancha, we read: “Mácula, qualquiera que cae sobre la ropa, o superficie, la qual muda y estraga su propia color. Por alusión significa todo aquello que estraga y desdora lo que de suyo era bueno, como mancha en un linage” (Stain, whatever falls on the clothes, or surface, which changes and spoils its own color. By extension it means everything that destroys and ruins what was good in itself, as a stain in a lineage).

By contrast, a lineage without mixture was associated with cleanliness and purity, hence the very name of the statutes of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness or purity of blood), that were approved in many Spanish institutions during the early modern age in order to ensure that only those whose lineages were not “tainted” could gain access to positions in them…