In this episode, Lidia Hernández Tapia talks with Professor Karen Graubart, author of Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2022). Doctor Graubart, a historian specializing in race, gender, and law in colonial Latin America and the Iberian Atlantic, unpacks her latest findings on how marginalized communities, including Muslims, Jews, indigenous and enslaved populations, utilized legal tools and institutional structures to shape their identities and protect their interests.

34/5 [ES: Treinta y Cuatro y Quinta / PR: Trinta e Quatro e Quinta] is a CLACLS podcast that covers multiple conversations of our many activities with incredible speakers. Please follow us on Spotify. We also post on Instagram and Facebook.

Please find a slightly edited transcript of this conversation below:

Lidia Hernandez Tapia 

Hello!

I am Lidia Hernandez Tapia, PhD Candidate in Latin American, Iberian and Latino Cultures at The Graduate Center, and administrative director at the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, located, at 34th street and 5th Avenue, in New York City.

This is the CLACLS podcast and today’s guest is professor Karen Graubart, author of Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Doctor Graubart is a Historian of race, gender, and law in colonial Latin America and the Iberian Atlantic.

In our conversation, we discussed her research on power struggles and resilience in Spanish colonial societies during the early modern era, and how marginalized groups, from Muslims and Jews to indigenous and slave populations, navigated the tension between customary and royal law to maneuver within the colonial landscape to meet their needs.

Professor Graubart, you discuss how marginalized communities used legal tools, particularly the republic, to shape collective identities and gain recognition from imperial powers. Could you elaborate on how the concept of the republic evolved over time, involving a continuous process of both inclusion and exclusion, as you mention in the book?

Karen Graubart 

Okay, that’s a great question. It’s a little hard to talk about change over time, because of the particularities of my cases. But one of the things that really struck me in the Spanish cases was the way that, and this is actually common to both sides of the Atlantic, is the way that Royal and other authorities attempted to step in and to promote their own their own leaders, to promote judges or alcaldes, or caciques, that they thought would be better for their interests. And the collectives generally organized to oppose that, and there’s some really interesting cases of that with, like, muslims in southern Spain, where Muslims are not particularly powerful, but they were able to basically refuse. They needed to assert that they were the only ones that could name their own religious and legal leaders. We see this over and over again, in Spain with attempts by Jewish and Muslim communities to keep other authorities from intervening. But in the new world, it’s interesting, because that happens again. And it’s dealt with in two different ways. One is that indigenous communities are basically given a parallel set of governors. You might have a hereditary leader, a cacique or someone like that, who is then the leader of the community, but Spain requires that there be a second set of leaders who are annually elected, and they’re not the cacique was not supposed to be eligible for that kind of position. And so there’s an attempt to kind of create, you know, authorities that the state would be more comfortable with, which they had a very hard time implementing in Spain. But the other piece that’s really interesting is that the viceroy has changed the rules for who can become a cacique, for who can inherit the office. And there’s a lot of pushback against that in the 16th century, there are communities that literally kill the guy who outsiders have appointed, or who refuse in lots of ways. There’s a whole genre of literature on intrusive caciques, who are implanted into the communities. But what ended up happening in the late 16th century is that the viceroy basically created standards for who could inherit the office, which allowed them to have a lot more control over it. In the Andes, for example, because the cacique didn’t really inherit the office so much as they were elected to the office for life. And so there could be a lot of different candidates and some, somehow some mechanism we don’t know, was used to choose the ones who exercise it, but by creating a standard template, the viceroys enable themselves to have more control and less possibility of election. And the really weird case that comes out of that, that I wrote about in my first book is that women become much more likely to inherit the cacicazgo. Then they would have without this template, because it constrains the number it has to be a direct descendant of the outgoing cacique, or someone in his lineage. But in the end, in the absence of male heirs, women can then step in. And so you end up with a lot of female cacicas across the Americas, because of that, which I don’t think was anyone’s intention. But it made things much clearer for the Spaniards, like it’s got to be someone in the intimate family, it can’t be somebody from some more, you know, wider group of candidates.

Lidia Hernandez Tapia 

One of the most fascinating things I learned in your book is that sometimes customary law was actually more relevant than royal law. Can you talk a little bit about that tension and what was decided at the local level, what kind of decisions affected, you know, daily life in the small communities versus what was decided in their higher, highest spheres of power?

Karen Graubart 

Yeah, and this is really interesting, because Spanish law is deeply local, in the medieval world, right. And so in the Spanish kingdoms, most communities ran themselves on the basis of what we think of as customary law, which is just basically local practices. And the king has jurisdiction over criminal acts, for the most part, and so there’s always some things that were taken away from the locals. But in general, when kings wanted to extend their rule into new spaces, they would send a group of people who would then act as the city council. And they will be given what’s called a “fuero”, which basically states that they can use their local practices, except in the following conditions and would give them special arrangements that the king felt appropriate, the king does have royal law. And this gets institutionalized under Alfonso the 10th, with what’s called the CLT partidas, which is a law code that he had his lawyers write for him that he believed he could implement across all His Kingdom of Castile, but he couldn’t, he never was able to actually implement it. So it remains the law that’s used in the king’s court and the Royal Court, but it’s not used locally, for a very long time. And that’s really just an attempt to make it convenient. For settlers to live in places, they want to have market days on the days that they like, they want to elect their leadership on the terms that they prefer, they want to have. Whatever these practices are, they can be pretty mundane, right? I mean, it’s like what days are the bathhouses open? And what days? Can Jews use the bath houses and Muslims and Christians? And what days do men versus women use the bath houses? What? Who, who’s in charge of weights and measures at the market? And these are all really important things, right? I mean, knowing that you can trust what’s being sold in the market is actually a very important thing to make your everyday life work. But it’s from the King’s perspective, it’s, it’s, it’s minor. And so there’s this real kind of tension between the quotidian, the everyday stuff, and this other type of law. But for the subordinate communities are communities like Jews and Muslims, or indigenous people, and sometimes African descent people. It’s also about customs that they have that are distinct from those of Spanish Christians. And so in Islam and Judaism, there are very clear ways that property is inherited. And they’re just different from the ways that Christians understand property being inherited. And what’s interesting there is that Christians and Jews and Muslims all agree what property is, and then it can be inherited and that can be sold, but they have different rules for how you leave your estate to somebody else. In the New World. Indigenous people not only have different rules for how you might inherit property, but they also think about property in distinct ways. And so those sorts of rules can be really important. It’s important to think about it How wealth travels, how wealth is passed from generation to generation, where one lives and who one’s neighbors are. And those are I mean, they seem to me to be particularly important things that may just be my, my stage of life where I think about these things, but they’re not it’s not about how you’re punished for murder, or, or how you’re punished for crossing, other types of, of lines. Those are those that are going to be dealt with on a different level.

Lidia Hernandez Tapia 

And another very important contribution of this book is that you present the perspectives of Muslims, Jewish people, indigenous and slave communities altogether, which usually are studied separately, and you juxtapose all of that.What can you tell us about what were the most surprising findings for you in this book, and the way that these communities organized or resisted colonial authority on both that on both sides of the Atlantic.

Karen Graubart 

I’ll start with what really helped me focus the project, which was discovering that free and enslaved people of African descent in Seville had their own alcalde, they had their own judge, who was named by the king, was part of the king’s royal household. And he was charged with knowing about all the marriages and all the complaints, and all the day to day concerns of people of African descent in Seville. And that’s not how we think about that kind of institutional structure in the Americas. And so that seemed to me really important to understand that this mechanism of the Republic, and the judge, was something central to the way that communities were organized, but also, was treated very differently in different locations. And so that made me think a lot about what the exclusion of people of African descent from that mechanism in the New World meant, that it was impossible, for example, to collect taxes from them. And so when, in 1573, the king said, all black people, people of African descent have to pay tribute, just as indigenous people do, it’s really hard to figure out who’s in charge of collecting that. And so the absence of that structure actually enables them to resist tax payment pretty successfully, which is in itself a funny thing. I think that acceding to the institutional structure, in itself undermines resistance in a lot of ways. Once you say, okay, yes, we’re going to function as a republic, you’re basically allowing the authorities to have control over you and over how you interact. And it also basically forces you to use law as your instrument of resistance. And so, in order to really resist colonialism, people would have to get up and refuse all of these things, saying I can’t accept these sorts of terms. So what’s interesting to me is to see how, in these different locations, people were able to carve out spaces for themselves, that aren’t really resistance spaces. We could think in the old language of my field, about accommodation. But accommodation with pushback. And so it invites people to occupy a certain space, but it doesn’t allow them to contest that space entirely. So in that sense, my book is not about resistance. It’s really about what people may do with that. The moment where we see resistance are the peoples who don’t form these communities. I’ve two examples of that, in the palenques of cimarrones, people who resisted enslavement and fled, became fugitives in the mountains. Those are self governed communities that exist in opposition to the state. They refused to play by those rules. And so there was a moment throughout the 16th and 17th centuries where Spanish authorities got tired of trying to force palenques to dissolve, they couldn’t actually do it. And so they basically say, Okay, if you come in and swear allegiance to the kings for loyalty, you can now be a pueblo de negros, you can now have your own free black town. But you have to be slave catchers. And so there’s always this cat, which is that you have to act as an arm of the state. The other interesting case, I don’t think is in the book is the Muslims in northern Spain, northern Spanish kingdoms, there’s a moment where a man comes before the Inquisition, and Inquisition says to him, Are you a mudejar, are you a Muslim living under Christian rule? And he says, No, I can’t afford to be a mudejar, because to be part of these communities, is to pay taxes. And so, the republics are always the group of people who are able and willing to pay taxes. And so we have to imagine that there are lots of Jews and lots of Muslims, and lots of indigenous people, for sure, who just don’t participate in this. And they attempt to live their lives on the margins, because they can’t afford it, or they don’t want to.

Lidia Hernandez Tapia 

How did you approach the challenge of understanding the experiences of marginalized communities in historical archives, considering the limitations of reconstructing voices?

Karen Graubart 

So I’ll start by saying that I’m not sure I reconstructed any voices. I mean, I think that that’s kind of a dead end, in a lot of our archives is to think that one can, you know, return voice to silenced people, what I do instead, because of the nature of my sources, which are all either notarial records or litigation or censuses, things like that, is I attempt to locate institutional structures where I can see them act. And I don’t think that’s equivalent to voice. I don’t think that I know what anyone is thinking, in the archives, and none of it’s unmediated. It’s all very, very heavily mediated, at the very least by scribes, and notaries, and probably lawyers, who manage all these things. But so instead what I tried to do, and I’ll give you an example, in Seville, I have these notarial records for Muslim and Jewish men and women who go to a Christian notary and fill out some kind of a contract, and sign it. And they do that in order to be able to have it enforced at a later date or to use it in court records. So if you want to sell me something, you want a receipt for me. And what you want to do is go to a notary and have it officially made up and signed. So one of the things I discovered was that a lot of Muslim men who are artisans often Bootmakers and make the specialized boot, a little soft boot that was used to horseback riding actually, that you can put your in the stirrups and these were very fashionable for a period in the 15th century, the king liked them. Also, Muslim makers of these booths were very highly sought after and so they made a fair amount of money on them. But a lot of the Bootmakers found themselves branching out into other industries in order to make ends meet, or perhaps as a strategy to hedge against crises, and they started buying properties. And so there are a lot of them who own multiple homes and rented houses to other people. So sometimes to Jews or other Muslims, sometimes the Christians, and that enabled me to kind of think about all these connections between the different communities. But it also made me think about why they would do that, why this group thinks, and come up with the strategy. Ceramicists aren’t doing this, and construction workers aren’t doing this. And those are the major occupations. So that allowed me to think about the fact that these Bootmakers, were understanding themselves as, as in living in a world in an economy that required them to be fairly strategic, and fairly thoughtful about how they could pay their own rent the next month. And so that kind of thing, those kinds of patterns, let me see into their world in ways that I found really insightful, without being able to make a claim that I’ve discovered their voices.

Lidia Hernandez Tapia 

And my final question, how does this book help us understand the early modern idea of racial and ethnic difference on both sides of the Atlantic? And how did that notion affect the way that these communities articulated their needs?

Karen Graubart 

This book started out a very long time ago, as an attempt to think about race. That was the initial idea. And in the many, many years since I had that first thought, some wonderful works have come out that do a better job than I could do. And so I really wanted to think about structure, about institutions, self governance, and all those things. And what these what the the work told me is that, differences always with us, and people who have more power, have a lot of ability to turn difference into something more threatening: race, which is a construct that’s that’s about power and, and who has access to resources, and who has the ability to name things. And so those mechanisms exist in lots of ways on both sides of the Atlantic. But what became really useful for me for thinking about this is the ways that communities by using the the form of the Republic, participate in either calming those notions of race or sometimes exploding them. And so the one major example of this I could think of offhand is property. And so, in the Americas, there’s a myth that circulated in the 16th century, that indigenous people don’t understand property. And a lot of conquistadors say this, jurists, legal advisors say this, that they don’t understand property, they don’t own anything themselves, that they don’t understand ownership at all. And this leads to laws basically, that say that indigenous people can’t be you can’t sell things to them without having an adviser present. If they bought something, and they discovered that they were fooled that they cannot annul the decision. And so there’s all sorts of really funny things that happen around this there. There are wonderful cases in Lima where somebody, an indigenous person buys a piece of property, and then decides that they didn’t buy that piece of property because they are too ignorant and foolish to have made that sale properly. And of course, the sellers are really furious. Spanish sellers are like, you’re really smart. You’re a great businesswoman. How can you say that? And it’s like, well, the law says that I’m an ignorant, ignorant person, and therefore, I can’t be held responsible for this purchase. And this, this happens, in lots of different ways, such that indigenous communities get to start making claims on collective property because that’s another myth is that if indigenous people don’t understand private ownership, they must understand collective ownership. And that means there are all these kinds of stories about how they divide property up every year or how they redistributed it, but that enables indigenous communities to claim that part of being an indigenous community is controlling collective property. And we see that to this day in Mexico and other places, where communities say, to be indigenous, to be a property owner, is to be a collective property owner. And that’s a protective mechanism. And it’s tied into these sort of racialist notions of difference and not being modern and not being smart and all these things, but it also becomes a really powerful tool for indigenous communities to protect what they have and to protect their resources.

Lidia Hernandez Tapia 

Okay, I said that was the last question, but now I want to ask you about what you’re working on right now. Any follow up projects that will derive from this book?

Karen Graubart 

Yes, it actually derives directly from this book. So there’s a chapter in the book where I think about these black alcaldes, black judges in Seville, and what happens to them, why they disappear in the new world. And this brought me to a really fascinating case in Panama, where in 1573 black people were told they had to pay tribute. But that is put on hold for a little bit. Because there are all these palenques of Cimarrones in the mountains that are disrupting the movement of silver from Potosi in South America, to back to Spain. And so everything is put on hold while they use the free black community to try and attack the Cimarrones and to also convince them to come in and to become pueblos de negros, which many of them do. And we ended up with I think, five different pueblos de negros established there. But what’s really interesting in the case I’m working on now is that that free black community in Panama, is then asked to pay tribute now that everything is under control. And they don’t want to, they individually filed petitions asking to be exempted from tribute. Most of those fail, there’s some interesting ones that don’t fail. But they collectively petition. So all of the free, black and Mulero people, men and women of the of Panama City, but also the larger region come together and with the help of the Spanish Procurator, who supports them, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute, they basically write a joint petition to the king and asked to be exempted. And the king’s Council says, Okay, I’d like to hear witness testimony on this. And so they present 20 witnesses, all Spanish men, who give depositions about this. And what’s interesting is that the black community says we should be exempted, because we have served as your militia for decades. And they go through every different moment. When they organized, they fought to stop Pizarros, rebels, or these other rebels that were in Panama, or they attack the palenque, or they helped keep the pirates at bay. And they go through continents, all these incredible stories of their bravery, and their loyalty to the king. And they say we should now be, exempted because we’re such loyal people. And we’ve never been paid for this. But the witnesses tell a really different story. They say these black soldiers black, and we allow soldiers have been very brave, and very vicious. And we’re afraid that if we force them to pay us tribute, that they will join with the palenques and the pirates, and who are the people of their same color, and casta, and they will then attack us. Panama’s a city of a few hundred white men and a few thousand Black people. And so they actually win, the king exempts them from tribute, but he exempts them from tribute because of fear of what they might be rather than the loyal service they’ve given. And so I’m writing a book now that thinks about those different narratives and how we can understand how we spool out those stories, but how we can think about how this community understood its own contribution to Spanish colonial rule through this military service.

Lidia Hernandez Tapia 

Wow, sounds very exciting. I look forward to reading your next book. And thank you so much for joining us on The CLACLS podcast.

Karen Graubart 

It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for asking.

Lidia Hernandez Tapia 

That was 34th and 5th, the CLACLS podcast. This time with professor Karen Graubart, and me Lidia Hernandez Tapia.

I hope you enjoyed listening. And if you did, please share it. Follow CLACLS GC on Social media, subscribe to our mail list and join us in person or online for our events. Thanks for tuning in. Hasta la próxima!