Negociaciones de sangre

In Negociaciones de sangre, historian María del Carmen Baerga carefully examines the institution of marriage in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico to unearth the complex production of racialized difference before narrow concepts of biology (phenotype, heredity, and genes) gained primacy in the conceptualizing of race during the late modern period.Instead of employing a modern optic to read the past (which sees race as a transmittable but contained essence), Baerga advocates for the contextualization of race making, which in these pages emerges as a dynamic, everyday, and multisited process.She masterfully illustrates how divergent attributes-occupation, behavior (integrity), color, sexuality, dress forms, education, demeanor, wealth, religiosity, piety, lineage, and reputation-were assessed together by common folk as well as people in authority to determine the racialized classification of families and individuals.Such assessments, and consequently racial classifications, could shift in the course of a few generations or in the lifespan of an individual given that the state of each attribute and their assembling together could also change.In sum, there was no one single, systematic way of categorizing race, which thus took on a mutable and flexible character.Baerga's entry point is the close reading of 138 civil court cases of individuals in Puerto Rico seeking the Spanish authorities' consent to marry and thus the overruling of their relatives' opposition to the liaisons, opposition argued on the basis of the unequal social condition-specifically racialized differencebetween partners.She also studies Catholic Church records (mostly baptism and marriage registers as well as petitions to amend them), requests for the recognition of out-of-wedlock offspring as legitimate, proofs of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood [lineage]), marriage dispensations, wills, and pastoral visits.These procedures led to extensive investigations and produced rich materials from and about peoples from all walks of life, which provide us with glimpses of the cultural logics and daily practices guiding the convoluted processes of racial classification.In the first chapters, Baerga offers a theoretically sound and well-informed analysis of the political conflicts, religious cultures, and colonial legal edifice that made necessary the production and maintenance of racialized difference in the Iberian-Atlantic world.The Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula and its corollary struggle for supremacy against Jews and Moors, the conquest and colonization of the Americas, the subordination of indigenous peoples, and the development of the African slave trade fueled the need for

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