“Moros de Naturaleza y Nación”: Rhetorical Terminologies and the Racialization of Religion in Justifications for Enslavement in the Philippines, 1560s–80s

It is no accident that the historical paper trail of early modern Spain and the Spanish Empire is littered with terminologies that activate associations with Islam. Many scholars have argued that one form of race-making in the early modern period grew out of Iberian notions of limpieza de sangre (blood purity), which construed religion as a bodily trait that passed from one generation to the next. Such understandings were mobilized to uphold practices of social and economic marginalization, and in some cases, the enslavement and expulsion of converts and their descendants. Karoline Cook has recently demonstrated that practices of difference-making that attached religion to the body extended beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula and played a role in the argumentation for the enslavement of nomadic indigenous groups in Northern Mexico. This presentation extends the scope of inquiry into the Pacific.

Around 1565, Spanish officials in the Philippines addressed a letter to King Felipe II in which they requested permission to enslave Muslims who entered the area around Cebu for commercial purposes. This letter, as well as other examples of correspondence between officials and the Crown drafted between the 1560s and 1580s, sought to draw distinctions between Muslim and non-Muslim indigenous people in the Philippines in order to argue in favor of the enslavement of the former (despite repeated prohibitions of the enslavement of indigenous people). By paying special attention to the terminological choices made by colonial officials as they crafted their arguments, I demonstrate that those in favor of enslavement sometimes drew on vocabularies and descriptions that mobilized naturalized understandings of religious inheritance. In this way, I show that Iberian concepts of racialized religious difference could influence how Spanish officials drew lines between indigenous people in the Philippines as they sought to justify practices of enslavement.