In the APSA Public Scholarship Program, graduate students in political science produce summaries of new research in the American Political Science Review. This piece, written by Ewa Nizalowska, covers the new article by Isaac Gabriel Salgado, “Rethinking the Coloniality of Race: Blood Purity and the Politics of Periodization.”
In 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched The 1619 Project, a collaborative historiographic work that sought to recenter the role of slavery and anti-Black racism in the American founding and the country’s subsequent history. The project faced almost immediate backlash, prompting legislation that banned teaching it in schools in dozens of states. In response to the project’s publication, the Trump administration established the 1776 Commission—an advisory committee to promote a “patriotic education” in American schools. Other, less hostile critics observed that marking 1619 – the date of the first arrival of African slaves to the British colony of Virginia—as the moment of “the country’s original sin” downplayed the role of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the making of the United States. The attention and backlash to The 1619 Project illustrate a key point: how we demarcate the origins of our shared concepts matters. When and where we begin our stories shapes our understanding of our political world. Although any project of periodization inevitably produces its own exclusions and silences, interrogating origin stories casts familiar political narratives in a new light.
In a recent article in the APSR, “Rethinking the Coloniality of Race: Blood Purity and Periodization,” Isaac Gabriel Salgado puts this insight to work to examine the origins and development of the concept of race. He does so by interrogating a set of policies typically viewed as precursors to the “properly modern” account of race: limpieza de sangre or “blood purity” statutes in fifteenth-century Spain. In particular, Salgado considers the Sentencia-Estatuto of 1449—the first recorded blood purity statute, which limited the rights and privileges of Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity. Salgado develops a “prismatic” approach to the study of race’s development, one that recognizes how various historical moments influence each other in the formation of race.
The dominant account of racialization situates the origins of race in the colonization of the Americas, arguing that the concept of race emerged as a tool for legitimating colonial domination. According to this view, race did not exist before 1492—any pre-colonial efforts to classify people based on difference are, on these accounts, considered “proto-racial.” By contrast, Salgado refuses to pinpoint a singular origin for the emergence of race, attending instead to the continuities between colonial and pre-colonial forms of racialization. Salgado’s method involves inquiring into what naming a particular form of difference “racial” helps us see about its historical function, and its relationship to modernity and capitalism.
The Sentencia-Estatuto was a proclamation issued in 1449 by Pedro Sarmiento, the leader of a rebellion against conversos—Jews who had converted to Christianity—in the Spanish city of Toledo. It declared that all conversos were unworthy and incapable of exercising the offices and benefits they enjoyed, casting doubt on the sincerity of Jews’ conversion. By proclaiming that any persons with Jewish ancestry were barred from the full privileges afforded to Christians, the document suggested that they possessed some Jewish essence that remained even after conversion. For this reason, for Salgado, sixteenth-century blood purity statutes should be understood as racial.
“For Salgado, the concept of race did not function solely to justify social and labor hierarchies in the colonies. Rather, racialization in the New World also responded to anxieties about the effectiveness of religious conversion.”In the latter half of the fifteenth century, blood purity statutes spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula and eventually across the Atlantic, limiting access to institutions like universities and religious orders to Old Christians. Yet the transport of blood purity statutes to the New World posed a challenge: although Indigenous peoples were classified as New Christians and thus denied access to various posts and institutions, the Spanish Crown’s conversions to Christianity in the Americas was in tension with blood purity statutes’ implicit assumption that New Christians’ conversion was unreliable.
As Salgado argues, understanding the history of 1449 Sentencia-Estatuto changes how we understand the emergence of race in the New World. For Salgado, the concept of race did not function solely to justify social and labor hierarchies in the colonies. Rather, racialization in the New World also responded to anxieties about the effectiveness of religious conversion. Racialization was not solely a process of denying the humanity of the racialized, but opportunistically avowed the humanity and convertibility of Indigenous peoples to justify the violence and exploitation of colonialism that emerged with the conquest of the Americas. Attending to the multiple origins of race helps us better understand the concept’s complex history.
- Ewa Nizalowska is a PhD candidate in political theory at Cornell University with research interests in American political thought, feminist theory, and theories of political economy and empire. Her dissertation examines how early to mid-twentieth-century radicals theorized the organization of economic power in the United States and strategized for its rearrangement. Her work has been supported by, among others, the American Political Science Association, the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University, and the Yan P. Lin Centre at McGill University
- SALGADO, ISAAC GABRIEL. 2024. “Rethinking the Coloniality of Race: Blood Purity and the Politics of Periodization.” , American Political Science Review, 1–13.
- About the APSA Public Scholarship Program.