Forbidden Passages. Karoline P. Cook
under pain of one hundred lashes “for the damage and evils he does to [the Indians].”54 Romero was “blasphemous and amancebado with many Indian and mestiza women. He lives more like a gentile and according to the law of Muhammad than as a Christian, and his business and conversation was and is with Indians.”55
Although Spanish authorities attempted to keep the “Republic of Spaniards” and the “Republic of Indians” physically and jurisdictionally separate, recent studies have demonstrated that a great deal of interaction did occur. Royal officials developed and implemented urban spatial models such as the congregación, in which native communities were to be organized and settled under the care of priests who would see to their religious instruction. This idealized spatial arrangement was intended to keep indigenous peoples separate from the feared “vagabonds” and persons of mixed ancestry who were known as castas and generally deemed disorderly.56 In both viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, members of religious orders strived to create segregated settlements that would facilitate their efforts to evangelize indigenous peoples, establishing missionary village parishes (doctrinas). Viceroys such as Francisco de Toledo in Peru carried out programs of resettlement (reducción) to move indigenous peoples into small towns and villages on a Spanish model that would be easier to administer and control.57 However, by the 1550s in New Spain, this sometimes controversial project to maintain two separate republics was already being undermined by the movement of castas into indigenous settlements.58
The design of the new Spanish settlements echoed idealized images of Roman city plans, in the form of the traza, or grid pattern, that surrounded a central plaza, in ways that also followed the contours of early modern Spanish ideas about what constituted good government (buen gobierno, policia).59 In Nueva Galicia, the Spanish towns were also likely founded according to this orderly municipal model, with the cabildo (town council), church, public works, and governor’s house given their own blocks (cuadras) along neatly organized streets radiating from the main plaza. Residents, or vecinos, were assigned spaces for their homes, four to a block.60 The surrounding indigenous pueblos were then granted by the governor to the men who had participated in the conquest as encomiendas, or labor grants, to be exploited.61 The grid pattern layout of Spanish American settlements stood in sharp contrast to the Iberian towns and cities such as Granada, Córdoba, and Seville, their winding narrow streets mirroring the medinas across North Africa. Marcos Romero’s life “outside the traza” cast him as disorderly and unwilling to live a lifestyle associated with proper Spanish and Catholic mores. The traza established a deliberate spatial distinction from Muslim cities, a rupture from the Islamic past in a “New World,” as Spaniards increasingly looked back to ancient Rome for a model of imperial expansion, conquest, and settlement. Romero’s dwelling also put him in too-close proximity to the indigenous peoples whom authorities hoped to Hispanize and assimilate into colonial society, while still keeping them legally separate.
The question of trustworthiness also arises frequently in witnesses’ testimonies. A perceived lack of proper Christian comportment, or anything that would cast doubt on an individual’s piety, could call into question that individual’s credibility or loyalty in business ventures, especially in their role as interpreters. In the early Portuguese accounts by João de Barros and Eanes Gomes de Zurara, members of these expeditions expressed concern that a translator who was a Muslim captive would defect once among other Muslims, or translate in ways that would benefit his or her own precarious position.62 Go-betweens could assume the role of arbitrator, someone whose allegiance was crucial to the success of colonial projects, yet who ultimately ended up favoring a certain side in the encounter, or whose actions were aimed to benefit only themselves. Intermediaries were often shrouded with suspicion, due to their ability to speak multiple languages and inhabit two or more worlds.63 While members of these early Atlantic expeditions may have relied on Arabic speakers as cultural brokers, they did not entirely trust them.
In this context, labeling someone a Morisco and noting they did not attend Mass was sensitive in its connection with the Crown’s projects to evangelize indigenous peoples and professed concern to limit their exploitation by Spanish settlers. In their role as intermediaries, interpreters could easily fall under suspicion of manipulating translations for personal gain. This anxiety is reflected in Licenciado Lorenzo de Tejada’s charges against the interpreters accused of being Moriscos. The judge of the Audiencia of Mexico took aim at Triana’s trustworthiness, in what must have been an attempt to cast doubt on his reliability as an interpreter: Triana was “such a liar that he never, or only by mistake, tells the truth, and a very bad Christian who never enters any church, nor has anyone seen him confess.”64 Tejada claimed Marcos Romero took advantage of his role as translator in order to trick and mistreat the Indians. Romero’s frequent drunkenness also led him to lie and hurl insults, rendering him as dubious a figure as his cousin Triana.
Each of these charges amounted to an attack on the interpreters’ personal honor. The full list of charges presented by Tejada as he summoned witnesses against Triana noted that because he lived among Indians, took part in their dances, and “serve[d] them for pay and as watchman of their fields, which is the greatest cowardice, vileness and dishonor that a Spaniard can do in this land.”65 Triana also “eats with them [the Indians] on the ground” and is “so full of vices and bad customs that in these parts there is not known a man so vile … of so little honor and such a bad Christian.”66 Marcos Romero was also a “very poor man of vile roots (raiz) without honor or shame.”67 Clearly outraged, Tejada exclaimed, “even if one looked, I wager that there would not be found in all of New Spain or in any of the Indies three persons so vile, without honor, and bad Christians, so lacking in truthfulness and shame, nor in whom coincide so many ugly and enormous vices as in the said … naguatatos.”68
As seen in the denunciations against Triana, Romero, and Ortiz de Zúñiga, perceived new Christian presence added to already existing anxieties about the catechization of indigenous peoples and the infiltration into the Republic of Indians of non-Catholic beliefs and unorthodox behavior. Spanish authorities increasingly restricted Spaniards’ and Africans’ access to indigenous communities, and the recent converts from Islam fell in between these two categories. Some Moriscos did make their way to Spanish America during the early years of colonization, before greater attempts were made to enforce the royal decrees restricting emigration. In a few cases local authorities requested their participation in local projects, as interpreters or as artisans, occupations traditionally associated with Moriscos. A number also arrived as slaves.
MORISCO SLAVES
Many of the Moriscos arriving in Spanish America during this earlier period were slaves who accompanied their masters’ households as dependents. The royal licenses granted for them to emigrate placed strict limits on the length of their presence in Spanish America. However, a number of these Morisco men and women remained in Spanish America, either because their masters looked the other way, or because they were able to run away and forge new lives for themselves, in communities where they would presumably, although not always, go unrecognized. Traces of these individuals can be found in the records of the Casa de Contratación in Seville, which kept track of the length of time Morisco and North African slaves remained in the Americas. The license that Bartolomé de Anaya y Villanueva obtained for his berberisca slave María in 1624 to accompany him to New Spain, where he was to assume his post as secretary of the Consejo de Guerra, shows the process whereby slaveholders proved their slaves were qualified to enter the Indies. Anaya summoned witnesses who signed statements that María was commonly held to be “a Christian, because they see her go to Mass and pray, and she does Christian works.”69 The final portion of the document was her official royal license to emigrate without restrictions, “despite being of the berberisca nation,” and like most official licenses, it listed her identifying markers: María was “twenty-four years old, white, fat, branded on the chin and forehead.”70 While no limits were placed on María’s term in this license, earlier ones show that individuals of lesser status were subject to restrictions on the number of years their slaves could spend in the Indies, and could be prosecuted if they did not comply. For example, in 1578 the Crown issued a royal decree to the officials of the Casa de Contratación,