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Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. By Maria Elena Martinez. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv, 407. Illustrations. Maps. Appendix. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00 cloth.
Maria Elena Martinez has written an impressive monograph on the history of limpieza de sangre in colonial Mexico tracing its roots from sixteenth-century Spain. Through a persuasive analysis of a vast array of archival and published sources, she adds depth and complexity to our understanding of the religious, cultural, and social framework and of the tensions and contradictions the fiction of limpieza de sangre created in its Mexican setting.
Martinez divides her study into three parts. Section one includes three chapters dedicated specifically to unfolding the ideology of limpieza de sangre in Spain since its inception in mid sixteenth-century Castile and particularly its ramifications concerning issues of genealogy and race. The original definition of limpieza de sangre - freedom from any Semitic and heretical background - became an obsessive concern when me massive conversion of Jews occurred during a period of great social and political turbulence. Chapter one traces the hostility of the Old Christian community toward the New Christians, grounded upon what they perceived to be the latter's religious and cultural deficiencies. This included their lack of true commitment to Catholicism and their inability to assimilate into me dominant society, since allegedly "Jewishness" was transmitted in the blood.
Chapter two examines me transformation of me statute of limpieza de sangre from being used against converts to a more comprehensive prejudice against all Jewish and Muslim peoples. This move was related to issues of race and gender. Limpieza de sangre classified Jews and Muslims under the denomination of "bad races," which escalated me anxieties of Old Catholics about reproducing with these "stained" peoples. A new development was the targeting of non-Christian women as agents as who were transmitting cultural and biological "infection" through breast milk. This became a crucial concern among the Old Christians....