Forbidden Passages. Karoline P. Cook

      Introduction

      During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish authorities restricted emigration to the Americas to long-standing Christians, individuals who could prove they descended from families that had been Catholic for at least three generations. Due to the Crown’s preoccupation with maintaining religious orthodoxy across an expanding empire, frequent royal decrees prohibited Moriscos or Iberian Muslims, many of whom had been forcibly baptized at the beginning of the sixteenth century, from settling in Spanish America. But these laws, like so many others during the period, faced uneven enforcement. The extensive legislation prohibiting Morisco emigration has led many historians to assume that no or very few Moriscos settled in Spanish America. However, the rich parallel historiography concerning Spanish and Portuguese conversos in the New World, who were subject to the same legislation as Moriscos, suggests that individuals evaded the restrictions by a variety of means and settled in the forbidden territories. That the royal decrees were reissued on a regular basis also indicates that controls on emigration were not so tight in practice and that individuals discerned openings through which to slip unnoticed.

      Moriscos, both free and enslaved, traveled clandestinely from Spain to Spanish America. Colonial sources reveal their mobility both geographically through the crossing of the Atlantic and socially as they forged new lives for themselves. While the numbers of Moriscos appearing in the archives are relatively low, representing only the denounced, their presence had a significant impact on colonial Spanish American society and the everyday workings of empire. Indeed, even small numbers could induce powerful anxieties about defining nation.¹

      Understanding the attitudes projected onto Moriscos and North African Muslims by sixteenth-century Spaniards can reveal how Spaniards were coming to understand empire and their place within it. For some commentators, the presence of Muslims and Moriscos in Spanish America challenged prevailing notions that Spain was a Catholic empire whose goal and justification rested on the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity. Some Spanish officials were actively defining their role as members of a nation on the verge of acquiring preeminent status through conquests overseas and the incorporation of a new continent and its inhabitants into its sphere of influence. Spaniards brought with them definitions of conquest and colonization drawn from both their experiences with non-Christians on the Peninsula and in the Mediterranean, and their interpretations of Greek and Roman texts. The role that Muslims played in these understandings of “Spanish” nation and identity, and by extension empire, was crucial. In creating their global empire, Spanish authorities drafted and debated a series of policies that were informed by their interactions with peoples in various parts of the world and at home. They aimed to create a Catholic empire, and in doing so, they focused their attention on molding the religiosity and customary practices of peoples in the Americas.

      Moriscos inspired extraordinary fears among many Spanish imperial authorities, who associated Muslims with rebellion and disloyalty. These officials conflated religious and political loyalty, and they viewed Moriscos as a fifth column that would ally with the Ottoman Turks or with North