The Legacy of al-Andalus in the New World
I was recently watching a video by the channel LangFocus on Mexican Spanish and an incredibly interesting point was raised. Apparently, a significant portion of Latin American Spanish contains grammatical rules derived from a specific region of Spain: Andalusia. This region is the southern most portion of the Iberian Peninsula and we can see the heritage of this in phenomena like seseo and yeismo. Terms like alhaja, derived from the word Arabic word al-haja (jewel), are common in the Latin American lexicon. I’m not a linguist and my grasp on non-Classical Arabic grammar is tenuous at best, especially English grammar.
However, as I dug deeper into this, it became apparent just how close the relationship between Andalusia and the New World was. Sizeable numbers of migrants from Andalusia made the arduous journey across the Atlantic Ocean to settle on the shores of Mexico and other New World colonies. Andalusia, although referring to the southern end of Spain, once represented an even larger portion of the peninsula. Known as al-Andalus, it was originally the Arab-Muslim controlled portion of Spain, and constituted a multicultural polity with Jews, Muslims, and Christians living side-by-side. Because of the Reconquista, al-Andalus gradually lost territory until it became a small territory known as the Emirate of Granada, which is analogous to modern day Andalusia.
As more and more of these settlers entered the New World, they brought along their cultures, their customs, and their language.
Source: WikiCommons.
The conquistador framing.
1492 CE is an important date in understanding the connections between al-Andalus and the Americas. On January 2, 1492, the last vestiges of al-Andalus fell. The Emirate of Granada, which lasted for over 200 years after the fall of the Almohads, had fought tooth and nail for survival. Using the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, the Nasrid dynasty had been relatively successful in this endeavor. However, internal divisions and a united Catholic front eventually led to the fall of this final Muslim force in the Iberian Peninsula.
Fun fact, Christopher Columbus had petitioned the Spanish monarchs of Isabella and Ferdinand for some time to sponsor a voyage to China. On April 1492, in the city of Granada (which was the Nasrid’s capital city), the monarchs agreed to this request and sent Columbus on his merry way to cause an unimaginable amount of destruction and turmoil. In the years that followed Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World, Spanish adventurers and conquistadors would rush over and try to both metaphorically and literally strike gold.
What is interesting is the lens that these conquistadors would use when trying to describe the Americas. In the letters of Hernán Cortes, he describes the various peoples of Mesoamerica with terminology that seems a bit out of place. We have rather colorful lines like: “The men wear breechcloths about their bodies, and large mantles, very thin, and painted in the style of Moorish draperies.” When talking about the various temples of Mesoamerica, Cortes describes them as mosques, claiming that “they offer up to their idols all the blood which flows, sprinkling it on all sides of those mosques.” One might be confused as to why Cortes and other conquistadors would use Muslim terminology to describe the New World.
For many of these individuals, the idea of an “other” was rooted deeply in an anti-Islamic position. Throughout the Reconquista, al-Andalus and its descendants were the most direct forms of antithesis to the Catholic Europeans of Spain. For this reason, we find many descriptions of the Americas framed with Muslim, Arab, and “Moorish” terminology. Lacking the words to accurately describe how alien this environment was, Spanish Conquistadors would default to references of their older and closer enemy, the Muslims.
Inquisition jokes aren’t funny.
This particular framing is just one side of the Andalusian story. As the years passed by, the New World would actually come to host a sizeable number of migrants from the lands that had once been the Emirate of Granada. As such, these descriptions of the New World with Arab-Andalusian terminology would actually have some prophetic sense to them.
Source: GettyImages.
You see, the Spanish Inquisition was pretty fucking awful. In the aftermath of the Granada War and the completion of the Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabella would instigate a rather terrible sociocultural movement. Were you Muslim or Jewish? Had your family been so for hundreds of years during the days of al-Andalus? Were you really happy with your religious status? Tough. Luck.
Many of these minority groups were given a choice. They could either convert or face worse consequences. Mass deportations and executions of non-Catholics are, well, not nice things to do. A large number of Jews and Muslims fled Spain, heading to Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. According to some sources, anywhere from 40,000 to several hundred thousand Jews migrated out of Spain and Portugal. Even larger numbers of Muslims followed suit. These Jewish groups would form Sephardic communities in the places they settled, many of whom would continue to speak their own Romance-Semitic language known as Ladino.
Some families would find refuge in the New World. Rather than deal with the pogroms of the Inquisition, several migrant families fled Spain and headed to the Americas. According to a study conducted by Professor Israel Sanz and Professor Daniel J. Villa, families from the Andalusian region constituted the largest population by the 17th century. In fact, of 138 documented settlers, the professors found that 24 were from Andalusia. Migrants of other provinces numbered in the single digits.
Source: Israel Sanz and Daniel J. Villa, “The Genesis of Traditional New Mexican Spanish: The Emergence of a Unique Dialect in the Americas.”
It is important to remember that despite the vast distances, the Spanish Inquisition did not just stay in Spain. By the late 1500s, members of the Inquisition had arrived to the New World. In 1591, a governor named Don Luis de Carvajal, who was secretly Jewish, was executed by the Inquisition. In1596, over 46 individuals, including members of de Carvajal’s family, were killed. As a result, many conversos in the New World eventually converted and assimilated into the dominant Catholic culture. We do know that there were thriving communities of Jews in Portuguese colonies, such as in Brazil, but it seems likely that these were few and far.
At the end of the day…
The Reconquista and the Spanish Inquisition resulted in a massive loss of life and culture. The cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic fabric of al-Andalus that had lasted for several generations was extinguished and replaced by a fiercely xenophobic, Catholic identity. Sure, similar problems emerged under the Berber dynasties of the Almoravids and Almohads, with anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish pogroms erupting in those eras. Furthermore, the cultural prosperity of al-Andalus may in large part be romanticized and overemphasized. However, its abundantly clear that it was a whole lot better than the era that followed. Spain would do little to rectify its abuses during the Spanish Inquisition. In 2015, the Spanish Parliament agreed to grant citizenship to any Sephardic Jews that had family affected by the Inquisition. However, this is simply a token policy, with stringent requirements blocking many individuals from being able to actually use the offer.
Despite the attempts at silencing Jewish and Muslim minorities, the influence of these groups would permeate into the New World. From their impacts on early Spanish-American contacts to their linguistic contribution to Latin American Spanish, the conversos of Spain would play an instrumental role in shaping a new era in world history. In fact, the experiences of Muslims and Jews in the Inquisition would help aid Bartolomé de las Casas in his own work in defending Native American groups. As Spain, Portugal, and other nations entered the Age of Exploration, the vestiges of their past would continue to haunt them and reverberate for the years to come.
Sources:
Hernan Cortés, Cortés Describes the Country.
Israel Sanz and Daniel J. Villa, “The Genesis of Traditional New Mexican Spanish: The Emergence of a Unique Dialect in the Americas.”
Ricardo E. Quevedo, “The Inquisition and Judaizers in Spanish America (1569–1649): Cartagena in an Era of Networking.”
José C. Moya, “Migration and the historical formation of Latin America in a global perspective.”
Karl W. Butzer, “Spanish Colonization of the New World: Cultural Continuity and Change in Mexico.”
Rich Tenorio, “When the Spanish Inquisition expanded to the New World.”
Kiku Adatto, “Spain’s Attempt to Atone for a 500-Year-Old Sin.”