Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico
December 1, 2008 11:30 AM
by María Elena Martínez
Stanford University Press, $65
This book by María Elena Martínez, associate professor of Latin American history at USC College, is the first in-depth study of the relationship between the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and colonial Mexico’s sistema de castas, a hierarchical system of social classification based on ancestry. She explains how this notion surfaced amid socio-religious tensions in early modern Spain, where blood purity was defined as the absence of Jewish and heretical roots, and then traveled to the Americas, where it was used to create identity categories according to a person’s line of descent.
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