Stuart Schwartz's Blood and Boundaries renders his three Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures (2019) in print. Seasoned readers of the surrounding, still-largely separate historiographies of the Iberian peninsula and of Spain's and Portugal's extra-European realms will savor the author's integration of Iberian and Mediterranean realities with those of the Americas. While this intervention most pointedly joins cross-spatial conversations and comparative sketchings across the subjects of religion, difference, and race—contributed to by Mercedes García Arenal, David Nirenberg, and María Elena Martínez—it also follows up on still older lines, larger wholes perceived by the likes of Robert Ricard, Pierre Duviols, and Charles Gibson. Blood and Boundaries carries forward with admirable concision significant lines of inquiry that Schwartz began, not only in his prize-winning All Can Be Saved (2008) but also in the brilliant and sprawling essay on “New Peoples and New Kinds of People” he co-authored with Frank Salomon in the Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
It has taken time and courageous thought not to treat Europe and the Mediterranean as wholly or mostly precedent, and the Americas (and rest of the world) as consequences—time and thought to address two of the most enduring questions about the late medieval and early modern Iberian world. To what extent did peninsular Iberian policies of exclusion and discrimination, projects of conversion, and experiences of coexistence shape the social, religious, and political hierarchies that would emerge in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas and beyond? And what difference, if any, do the Americas (and their own cultural and ethnic milieux arising from large numbers of people of indigenous, African, and “mixed” as well as other descents) make to transforming Iberian notions of capacity, dreams of universal Christendom, and lived hierarchies of differentiation?
Schwartz's study unfolds over three chapters organized around the starting points of “Moriscos,” “Conversos,” and, most innovatively, “Mestizos.” Because of its timeliness for readers in the early twenty-first century, many of whom will be more familiar with the entanglements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialisms and race-thinking, I suspect that Schwartz's broadest point will resonate; for here is a clear vision of the religious origins of the clamberings after markers of difference and status from which vicious enslavements and exclusions on the basis of “race” and phenotype, profession and class would emerge. Yet across each of the chapters, and culminating in his third about “Mestizos,” Schwartz's case evidence drums home (what for this reader is) an ultimately more challenging and telling set of points.
He demonstrates just how vast the dreams of religious uniformity and expulsion—and principles of social order and legal incorporation—were and shows how they were elaborated and set in motion in precise contexts. Then, instead of leaving the designs and their ramifications in (local and regional) place, Schwartz follows them, charting their movement and, more crucially, their adaptations in other Iberian settings and across the seas in the Americas. The inclination to seek quick-sliding parallels between Granada and Oaxaca, Toledo and Arequipa, Cádiz and Cartagena de Indias, is for the most part avoided. Schwartz shows, rather, how these recognizable distinctions and orderings of difference transformed and did damage, even as they failed, even as they were ultimately out-run by the very shifting cascade of differences they had been morphing to contain. The human carriers, officials bent on enforcing the cleavages and distinctions are very much “in” on the system's failures and overspills, joining the still more diverse people who, on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, lived within and beyond their constraints.
It is mind-stretching to move, over the course of this book's 110 pages, between so many co-productions of social and ethnic complexity, between so many “old Christians” and “new” ones. It is salutary to recognize in new garb and quotidian contexts the same salvific projects and anxieties, related notions of contagion and backsliding, the all-too-human predicament of futility. Even when the collective interests of people and groups were demonstrably marginalized and harmed by the policies of “colonial” systems honed to exclude and disadvantage them, Schwartz envelopes power and looks round its edges. He illuminates the ways in which all kinds of people, across the Iberian world, shape-shifted, and how they negotiated and circumvented not only these systems' multiple fissures and inconsistencies but also prescribed understanding of themselves.
