Emigrants from the Atlantic world came to the Americas for various reasons, with many motives, and precipitated by myriad circumstances. Some were forced, some came to escape an old society or to build a new one, others came to acquire riches or set-up shop. Yet, as J.H. Elliott wrote in his tome Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830, “they all faced the same challenge of moving from the known to the unknown, and of coming to terms with an alien environment that would demand of them numerous adjustments and a range of new responses.”
Furthermore, as Elliott continues, “to a greater or lesser degree, those responses would be shaped by a home culture whose formative influence could never be entirely escaped, even by those who who were most consciously rejecting it for a new life beyond the seas.” While the local context with its diverse ecological, material, political, socio-cultural, and religious environments shaped the contours of American colonization and conquest, the colonial world was simultaneously defined and influenced by its transatlantic nature. Significantly, the historical and legal dimensions of imperial statecraft conditioned the experience of various constituencies in even the most far-flung reaches of the American empires.
It is within this transatlantic imperial nexus that Dr. Karoline P. Cook situates the narrative of Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America.
The following is an interview with Dr. Cook, lecturer in the history of the Atlantic world at Royal Holloway University of London about her previous and current work that provides multiple insights into the state of study on Islam and Muslim communities in Latin America and the Caribbean over the longue durée.
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Why did you set out to write Forbidden Passages? Where did the process begin?
I became interested in Moriscos in the Americas when I was still an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr College, researching my senior thesis on enslaved Moriscas who were tried by the Spanish Inquisition for practicing Islam. The summer before my senior year, I received a grant from Bryn Mawr to conduct research for my thesis at the Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) in Madrid, but first spent a couple of weeks in Seville with my family. In Seville I stopped by the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) to apply for an ID card that was required at the time for all researchers who wanted to consult Spain’s national archives. The archivists told me that I wouldn’t find information about Moriscos at the AGI because during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they had been prohibited from emigrating to the Americas. Because I was already familiar with the rich historiography on conversos who faced the same travel restrictions as the Moriscos, and who nonetheless settled in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, I began to wonder whether the same might have been true of the Moriscos. This knowledge and the questions it raised prompted my interest in whether Moriscos emigrated to Spanish America and if so, what implications their presence could have for our understanding of colonial society. Upon graduating from Bryn Mawr, I was granted a Fulbright Fellowship to spend the following year in the Spanish archives to determine whether I could answer these questions. I found more sources than I had anticipated amongst the Inquisition records at the AHN and the Royal Audiencia records at the AGI, and I began applying to PhD programs to continue researching the topic.
In your opinion, how much tactical thought was behind the accusation of being a Morisco?
Accusations that someone was a Morisco or had Muslim ancestry were very tactical, often aimed at discrediting an opponent. They drew upon understandings of limpieza de sangre (blood purity) that could be invoked to prevent a rival from holding prestigious offices, practicing certain professions, or emigrating to the lands claimed by Spain in the Western Hemisphere. The reality was much more complex, and the accused could go to court to assert their status and negotiate their position in colonial society. This allowed for degrees of fluidity in the ways that individuals presented themselves. But it was also about access and the persistent vulnerability to accusation that would result in lengthy and expensive litigation.
Are there any implications for today’s political landscape that we can draw from the colonialist’s fear of Moriscos undermining their agenda and the subsequent failure to exclude the latter from the ‘New World’?
The discourses invoked by colonial officials against Muslims and anyone they perceived to be a Muslim finds a great deal of resonance with Islamophobia and anxieties about emigration today. Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ is one of the most recent examples, but this goes back much farther. My Fulbright year in Madrid coincided with September 11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan – when I returned home each evening after reading denunciations of Moriscos in the archives, I continued to read the newspapers full of reports of hate crimes against people perceived to be Muslims and generally heightened anxiety about Muslims who were viewed with suspicion and associated with terrorism in the media. These images have a much longer history, and it was one of the points I wanted to write about in my book.