Colonial societies in Spanish America were strongly influenced by transatlantic mobility and migration. The differentiation into social status groups (estates), typical of pre-modern societies, was linked to ideas of religious purity and ethnic attributions. What was the relationship between religion and ethnicity?
This project, which forms part of the CRC 1482 Human Differentiation, explores this question with a focus on four categories of mobile actors who were particularly targeted by the authorities’ migration and control regimes: Jews and Muslims who had converted to Christianity (conversos and moriscos), Protestants, and enslaved people from Africa.
The project examines the relationship between spatial and social mobility, practices of exclusion and inclusion, and the construction of belonging. How did distinctions between self and other relate to one another, and how were official classifications appropriated? What possibilities for status change existed? How did the relationship between religion and ethnicity change during the period under investigation?
- Thomas Weller
- Doménica Noboa Ramos
