So-called Moors in the Americas
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Reading Cook's article is obviously impossible to divine Maria Ruiz's exact motivations, but it seems that she was influenced by her mother's profession of Islam, her own relationship with God (as simplistic as her own practices were), and societal pressure and the threat of persecution or death. It seems to me that the belief in a unitary God was comforting to her, perhaps connecting her back to her family, but at some point it became too nerve-wracking to keep a secret. Whether she began believing in a Trinity instead of a unitary God I cannot say. About Catalina de Ibiza and her family it was said that the "dissonance of their customs, being so ancient and customary and never before seen in that town, only in the said people, who carry within them a deformity so scandalous that the remedy of this holy tribunal is necessary." (90) Here we may note the preoccupation with bloodlines, and the idea that religious infidelity is a physical "deformity" passed on through generations. They also believed that this perceived infidelity could be spread like sickness to the apparently impressionable Indigenous population. Taking on a paternal role in the indoctrination of Indigenous people, the purity of their religious influences was of paramount importance. It also goes the other way, with Catalina de Ibiza being scandalized for living "among the Indians and other miserable people," situating the value of the Indigenous community solely in their potential to become Catholic, but otherwise considering them to be a drain on Spanish Moriscos' social standing. Centuries later in the United States, Bowen shows us a very different side of the word "Moor." Used by African-Americans starting during slavery, identification with the term "Moor" allowed some Black Americans to escape association with slavery and thus receive better treatment. Once African-Americans formed organizations such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, Latines were enticed to join through a vision of racial solidarity which did not reach towards whiteness, but rather organized against it.