Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures

by Stuart B. Schwartz, Yosef Kaplan (Foreword)

In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Genres: History

256 pages, Paperback

Published November 14, 2020

About the author

Stuart B. Schwartz is Professor of History at Yale University and the former Master of Ezra Stiles College.

He studied at Middlebury College, where he received his undergraduate degree, and the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico. He then went on to study Latin American History at Columbia University where he received his Ph.D. (1968).

He is one of the leading specialists on the History of colonial Latin America, especially Brazil and on the history of Early Modern expansion.

Reviews

[Sebastião Martins · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️. É sempre um prazer ler Schwartz. Como já li e reli o All Can Be Saved este acabou por não me dar muito, visto que se focava mais nas questões políticas da (in)tolerância ibérica do que propriamente as questões mais profundas, como o quotidiano e a própria vivência das pessoas com indígenas, muçulmanos, judeus, etc. Não obstante, foi uma excelente prenda da Dra. Mariana 🧎🏻

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars

Blood and Boundaries is set up in three chapters that could be read independently from each other and still make sense to the reader. The three chapters are on Moriscos, Conversos, and Mestizos. Stuart Schwartz does assume the reader is already knowledgeable about the basics so he does not coddle the reader at all. Blood and Boundaries is deceptively simplistic in its information; it's a little book that packs a big punch. Schwartz is covering the structure of race in Latin America, as well as cultural racism and phenom racism. He shows blood purity does not translate to the Americas very well. The structure of the book goes from political and religious exclusion to social and blood exclusion from chapter to chapter. Classification is a main theme throughout the book.

The amount of people in Latin American society changes how the government operates. Law versus practice is a major part of the book. It's hard to enforce. Identity: the public versus private and the bastardization of people is what Schwartz focuses on. He shows the reader that Spain and Portugal had different ways of dealing with Moriscos and Conversos in their respective societies across the Atlantic. It is a great read overall; a good discussion book.

[Charles Heath · Rating 4 out of 5]

Traces the history of exclusion and discrimination based on purity of blood (religion and genealogy) from Iberia to the Americas, and how there, exclusion and discrimination were transformed by the realities of indigenous, African, and mixed populations, and there transformed into a system of social ranking based on race or skin-color (phenotype). Originally purposed to exclude Muslims and Jews, limpieza de sangre was instituted to control non-Iberian colonial subjects in the Americas in order to "stabilize" European (white) identity.

By one of the deans of colonial Latin American history, emanating from a series of prestigious lectures, this book deserved a more careful editor to eliminated a serious number of minor, though interruptive, orthographic errors and typos.

[Madimichele99 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really nice succinct analysis of the racial, political, religious, and class based othering taking place in the early modern Iberian world. Schwartz reminds readers that the process of exclusion is far more complex than just miscegenation, emphasizing the importance of class formation and social mobility in categorizing difference.