What might Friar Juan de Sotomayor’s accusation against Catalina de Ibiza reveal about New Spanish attitudes toward bloodlines and their anxieties about Indigenous peoples?
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One of the goals of Spaniard colonization of America was to build New Spain in their image. To achieve this, the colonizing entity must cleanse indigenous populations of the customs, beliefs and behaviors divergent from normative Catholic Spanish society. When word from Sotomayor went around about Catalina de Ibiza and her family’s “scandalous,” “notorious,” and “public” nature of their conduct at Mass (Cook 101), fear was instilled within the Spanish authority. This wicked behavior was displayed by members of the very settler community that was tasked with assimilating the indigenous population “who believe that what they do is what is good and right, and as a result good customs are corrupted.” (Cook 90) Not only did ‘Morisco’ behavior threaten the nation-building of emerging New Spain and the socialization of its inhabitants, but it was argued that “the immutability of characteristics like blood” (Cook 97) rendered Muslims, Indigenous South Americans and other non-white groups unassimilable. “In Spain, inquisitors collected information about local beliefs and practices, in an attempt to identify signs of relapse” (Cook 90) of recent Muslim converts to Catholicism, but the growing popularity of the idea of religious identity as an innate blood-transmitted characteristic exacerbated fears surrounding the acculturation Indigenous populations.
In the context of a society where public behavior, everyday interactions, modes of dressing, occupation, and later, skin tone became social markers between native Iberians and Moors, purity of blood further fueled the ‘us vs. them’ rhetoric and trickled down to colonial Spanish America. However, depriving groups from full citizenship and societal participation creates connections between them, as displayed by the Muslims, Protestants and gypsies described in Cook’s narrations. Similarly, solidarity between non-whites in the context of a racist social system brought Latina/o and African-American communities together, and facilitated conversions to Islam among Latina/os in 20th century America (Bowen 166).