We Are All Moors

Catholic Spain, with its political philosophy and treatment of minorities, gave shape to the modern world, but the unified nation could never exorcise the ghost of its own mestizaje, the genetic mixing that no myth of blood purity could eradicate. It was this anxiety about the perceived lack of purity, religious and political unity, and even orthodox Christianization that gave the Inquisition its frightening powers. Despite the “burning pile of the bigot,” in Musa Ben Abil’s words, Spain was never able to shake its Moorish heritage. Alexandre Dumas, the nineteenth-century French author of, among many other works, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, famously said that “Africa begins at the Pyrenees.” As late as 1908, Havelock Ellis, the British doctor and social reformer, could write, “Spain is a great, detached fragment of Africa, and the Spaniard is the first-born child of the ancient white North African,” and “the land of Spain and the physical traits of Spaniards lead us back to Africa. If we take a more penetrating survey we shall find that there is much in the character of the Spaniard which we may also fairly count as African.”1 “Everyone knows,” wrote the Brazilian historian Gilberto Freyre in the mid-twentieth century, that “Spain and Portugal, though conventionally European states, are not orthodox in all their European and Christian qualities, experiences, and conditions of life, but are in many important respects a mixture of Europe and Africa, of Christianity and Mohammedanism.”2 Even Oriana Fallaci explained Spain’s tolerance of its Muslim immigrants by referring to this indelible connection. “Too many Spaniards,” she complained before her death, in 2006, “still have the Koran in the blood.”3

Spain’s ambivalence toward the Moors and the way Spaniards use the Moors as a hidden text to describe any oppressive power or regime is best illustrated in the mock battles between Moors and Christians, called moros y cristianos, that now dot the calendar of fiestas in Spain. From the very start, even before 1492, fighting Moors was a complex affair. In Zaragoza, a mock battle had King Jaume of Aragon-Catalonia place “a kiss of peace on the face of the [defeated] Moorish captain,” thereby signaling the start of a festive dance joining Christians and converted Moors, an intriguing detail that led Max Harris, in his invaluable study of the genre, to suspect that “from the beginning, the Spanish moros y cristianos were more about a yearning for peace and convivencia than they were about war.” Sometimes, as in the festival at Sant Feliu de Pallerols, caballetes (sawhorses) are used to divide Christians and Saracens, who are almost indistinguishable and who don’t seem to care about who wins. In 1996, when Harris asked the performers who won, they replied, “No one, we just keep fighting.”4

In Mexico, ambivalence toward the Moor was displayed with great pomp in the 1539 pageant The Conquest of Jerusalem, “arguably the most spectacular and intellectually theatrical event in post-contact sixteenth-century Mexico,” which at the time was an Indian region governed by Indians loyal to the Spanish monarch. The armies of Spain (led by an Indian), European soldiers in the service of the Holy Roman Emperor, and the armies of New Spain (whose weakest elements were the Caribs) were arrayed against the Moors, led, most intriguingly, by “the Great Sultan” Hernando Cortés and his commander, Pedro de Alvarado. After a protracted battle during which each side tried but failed to break through the Moorish fortress, the archangel Michael appeared to give the Moors a final chance to repent and convert, sparing them a worse fate, because the Moors had “showed reverence for the Holy Places,” a view commonly shared by the Franciscans who preached in Tlaxcala and reported on the events of the play. Sultan Cortés and his people were thus welcomed into the pope’s fold “with great affection.”5

As such plays adapted to local cultures, the outcome became less clear, almost deliberately suspended. Sometimes, as in the “carnival week of Huejotzingo” in Puebla, Christians were given no role whatsoever, even though a wide cast of characters, including “Chichmeca, Apaches, Turks, bandits, mountain Indians, and soldiers of North Africa,” took part. When Harris wondered about this curious omission, one performer explained that they were all Aztecs and that “the Spaniards have been defeated.” This sort of subversion may have been noted by Alonso Ponce, whose travels across Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua between 1584 and 1589 were recorded by his secretary, Antonio de Ciudad Real, in Tratado curioso y docto de las grandezas de la Nueva España. Not a single moros y cristianos, according to Real’s account, ended with a clear Christian victory: “Spaniards were absent, nightfall interrupted the play, the Moors had to finish their wine, or, in Tlaxcala, just four days before the Puebla moros y cristianos, whether by accident or design, the stage castle went up in flames and the performance had to be canceled.”6

Back in Spain, in 1561, the appointment of eighteen-year-old Luis Hurtado de Mendoza as mayor of the Alhambra, the Moorish palace in Granada, was celebrated by a moros y cristianos in which the mayor, the traditional protector of the Moriscos against the schemes of Granada’s twenty-six-member chancery that had jurisdiction over the province, played the role of a Moorish leader (thereby identifying with his Morisco subjects) and won. This would be the first—and only—instance in which Moriscos took part in such mock battles. This spirit soon faded and yielded to the persecutions, fed by fears of the depredations of Turks in the eastern Mediterranean. On Christmas Eve of 1568, a few Alpujarran Moriscos (residents of the high mountains), dressed as Turks, attacked the city of Granada. Soon the Morisco Revolt, “the most brutal war to be fought on European soil” during the sixteenth century, according to Henry Kamen, led to systematic ethnic cleansing and the eradication of all traces of Moorish civilization from the kingdom. The fear of the Turk became a staple of the festivals, and even today, “of the twenty festivals of Moros and Christians still staged in Granada, ‘fifteen allude to a landing of the Turks on the southern coast [although no real Turkish vessel had come to the Moriscos’ rescue].’” Yet even this tragic episode did not eliminate the kiss of peace, the implicit fraternal affection, or the yearning for convivencia, Harris suspects. “I am persuaded,” Harris writes, “that Spain’s festivals of Moors and Christians, by rewriting the country’s most prolonged ethnic conflict so that it ends not in exile but in reconciliation, express that yearning.” Tellingly, in Válor today, the play ends with the Moorish king telling his counterpart, “Yesterday you were my enemy, / Today you will be my affectionate brother.”7

Even more telling is the “Capture of Motecuzoma,” a dramatization of the conquest of Mexico and the capture of Motecuzoma, in which appears “Mawlay Muhammed, governor of Tetouan and Chechaouen, subject of the Sharif, king of Fez and of Morocco, to the lord high governor of Alcalá de los Gazules [near Tarifa],” who comes to participate in the play as a token of appreciation for his good treatment while a prisoner. In these two towns facing Morocco (both free of Moorish rule since the thirteenth century and therefore lacking a Morisco population), the mock battle “Capture of Motecuzoma” is the only “instance of a large-scale Spanish moros y cristianos being given over entirely to a Mexican theme,”8 as well as the only one unequivocally linking the Mexican and Moroccan leaders’ fates. Political reasons have been proposed for the strong and explicit Mexican motif, but one might also surmise that because Tarifa and its extension, Alcalá, almost touch Morocco, the notion of contact (and conflict) with a sovereign Moorish nation (whose mountains are visible from the coast) is more palpable here than in any other part of Spain. Contact with Moors/Moriscos in the rest of Spain may have generated a different effect (and imagination) based on the nature of existing power relations, but Spain’s southernmost point, which almost abuts Morocco, is a different matter. One cannot live on either coast of the narrow stretch of the Mediterranean known as the Straits of Gibraltar, as I did when growing up in Tangier, without constantly being reminded of the other side.

As the attraction of moros y cristianos started to decline for Spanish royalty, the pageants turned into popular festivals reenacting the country’s complex history for the masses. In places such as Valencia, or Alcoy and Villena in Alicante, they have never been more popular. And the themes of convivencia, the kiss of peace, the syncretism of Spanish culture, and the idea that the enemy is myself are still there to behold. The Moors in Villena (always better dressed than the Christians) now appear in several companies (comparsas) during the production, including Old Moors, New Moors, and Moroccan Moors, greatly outnumbering Christians. The patron saint of Villena, Our Lady of the Virtues, known as la morenica because of her dark skin, appears to popular acclaims of “Long live the Virgin! Long live la morenica!” (One thinks here of dark, Mexican Guadalupe, the patron saint of the Americas.) At the start of the fiesta, Christians lose control of the castle overlooking the town, and Mohammed (intriguingly feminized here as la mahoma) takes control. Now the devotees of la morenica and la mahoma face each other in battle. The Moors predictably lose and convert, and la morenica blesses all before she is escorted out of the town she has once again saved from destruction (or from secular fiestas, one of Harris’s friends told him at the scene, because a Christian defeat would mean a whole year of fiestas). What happens, in the end, is conversion and assimilation, an acknowledgment of Spain’s mestizo culture, if not the ineradicable presence of the Moor. Villena’s patron saint might as well be called la mora, or the Moor, which would make the fight between two Moorish armies, not between a Christian and a Moor. Moreover, people who attend this festival know that the Moors are not merely a symbol but part of their own identity. “They are something in us. Look at our faces. Many are Moorish,” one of Harris’s friends at the event said. “The Moors are not bad,” one festero (partaker in the fiesta) added. “We are all Moors,” confessed another.9

Although Muslims continue to protest the negative depictions of their faith and prophets throughout Europe, and managed to persuade Spanish authorities at Santiago de Compostela to remove the image of slaughtered Moors at the feet of one of Spain’s most revered saints, Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moorslayer) in 2004, the Villena festival has been perfectly acceptable to the local Muslim community, because mahoma is accorded the same reverence given the Virgin.10 Thus, the moros y cristianos has been transformed from an expression of Catholic triumphalism into a strategy of dialogue and coexistence. Eva Borreguero comments:

“Moors and Christians” captures the racial and cultural crossroads of contemporary Spain; it is a point of convergence where past and present, apprehensions and opportunities meet. Although the festival recreates an historical confrontation of the Cross and the Crescent and could be seen as an updated version of the clash of civilizations, the celebration has an essentially playful nature. From the psychological perspective, it helps cope with cultural anxiety through games and re-enactments. At the same time, it also endorses closeness to “the other” through the scenic representation of those fears. It is a catharsis for tensions and violent instincts, if any exist: a game in which, although there are champions and defeated, there are no winners or losers, no good guys or bad guys; above all, people identify with one another, as they all participate on both sides. What was yesterday’s conflict, has now been transformed into the celebration of an encounter, or, as a participant pointed out, “a war for friendship.”11

Spain’s ambivalence is sometimes echoed in other Mediterranean countries as well, including Italy, despite Oriana Fallaci’s claim to the contrary. Just as Spain recalls its history with the Moor in ominous expressions such as moros en la costa (Moors on the coast), Italy’s encounter with Islam is remembered in the popular expression of fear “Mamma, li turchi!”; games like giostre del Sarracino, in which the Saracen (Muslim) is the target of attack; and structures such as the Saracen towers (torri saracene) that dot the Italian coast, built to watch out for pirates and, presumably, sneaky Turks. But, like Spain, Italy has had an ambivalent attitude toward Islam, as when Mussolini, who liked to think of himself as the “protector” of Islam and even “liked to be represented with the ‘sword of Islam’ in his hand,” described Italy to the National Assembly in 1928 as a “great Muslim power.”12

Hardwired prejudices, at least in Spain, are gradually being attenuated by official policies reversing centuries of conflict, animosity, and discrimination. On July 23, 1989, Spain’s Ministry of Justice recognized Islam as a national religion. “The Islamic religion,” wrote A. Fernández González and D. Llamazares Fernández on behalf of the Advisory Board for Religious Freedom of the ministry,

has been present in Spain since the 8th century, with significant diffusion in the earlier centuries, and a greater or lesser presence thereafter depending on the period and historical circumstances, and has remained so uninterruptedly to present times. The Islamic communities cover a great part of the Spanish territory. Their presence is especially significant in the lower third of the Iberian Peninsula and in the Spanish territories in North Africa. There is, in our opinion, a clear awareness among Spanish citizens that the Islamic religion is one of the spiritual beliefs that historically has had a presence in Spain, a presence which continues until present times.13

This ruling finally became law on November 10, 1992, five hundred years after the surrender of Granada, the last Islamic stronghold in Spain. In 2003, the Spanish city of Seville hosted the first world congress of an estimated 10 million Spanish-speaking Muslims. In October 2006, when alarm bells were ringing throughout Europe about the dangers of Muslim immigration, the Parliament of Andalusia, the southernmost state in Spain, started the process of establishing a law that could grant 5 million Moroccans of Morisco origin, as well as the descendants of Moriscos scattered throughout the Mediterranean, preferential access to Spanish citizenship.14

Perhaps in the fullness of time, such consciousness may spill over into the rest of Europe, which was first imagined as an anti-Muslim (and anti-Jewish) sphere. That French right-wing organizations would deliberately load their soups with pork products and call themselves “pig eaters” when feeding the homeless (as happened in 2006) shows that, despite their successful integration into European culture, Jews are still inadvertently connected to Muslims in the European “genocidal passion.” After reading about this form of culinary xenophobia, a woman from Chicago wrote that “French Muslims and Jews now have reason to unite and proclaim liberty, equality and fraternity, by opening a joint halal/kosher soup kitchen!”15 Comical as the soup incident may be to some, this act of exclusion is part of a larger and more systematic attempt by Europe to reclaim its heritage, including the Christian one. Who is to say that the current pope’s insistent calls for the re-Christianization of the continent in order to contain the Islamic menace and give Europe its historic identity could not bring back a new era of ethnic cleansing? When the European Union undertook to address the twin scourges of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia through the European Monitoring Centre, in 2002–2003, Robert Purkiss, the center’s management board chairman, was quite clear about the effects of the Christian heritage:

Our conceptions of European identity are significant drivers of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. One of the similarities between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is their historical relationship to a Europe perceived as exclusively Christian. Jews have of course suffered the most unspeakable crimes by European Christians. But it is true that all other religions, including Judaism and Islam, have been excised from Europe’s understanding of Europe’s identity as Christian and white. Both Islam and Judaism have long served as Europe’s “other,” as a symbol for a distinct culture, religion and ethnicity.16

Again, this is not to claim that European consciousness has not changed in the last few decades, or that Jews and Muslims occupy the same place in the new European order; but the patterns of European history have so often treated Jews and Muslims as part of a threatening difference that we simply cannot take the present conditions for granted. In fact, a Pew survey undertaken in early 2008 revealed that, although Muslims are viewed far less favorably than Jews across Europe, negative views of Jews rose in a number of European countries (with Spain in the lead) between 2004 and 2006. This survey draws attention to the fact that the social groups who have a low opinion of Muslims tend to be the same ones who don’t like Jews.17

To be sure, as odious as the policies and statements of right-wing xenophobes in Europe may sound, one must acknowledge that the sudden and massive irruption of difference within any community provokes legitimate concerns and anxieties about the future. Still, changing demographics could revitalize traditions even as they unsettle old social patterns. As Oriana Fallaci was expressing concern about the erosion of an authentic Italian way of life, Arab immigrants from Tunisia and Jordan were emerging as some of the best chefs of traditional Italian cuisine in the country. In 2008, the first prize for cooking Rome’s traditional carbonara (a pasta dish that includes eggs, pecorino cheese, and guanciale, or cured pig cheek) went to Nabil Hadj Hassen, an immigrant from Tunisia, and the second prize went to an Indian.18 So, instead of regressing to old and dangerous arrangements, hasn’t the time come, as Aristide Zolberg suggests, to wonder about the limits of inclusion and exclusion and to ask on what rational basis they are determined?19

The more one thinks about the networked world we live in, the more difficult it is to believe that we can still inhabit the nations and adopt the ideologies bequeathed on the world by Spain in the sixteenth century. Identities of any sort are often more fictional than real. “Identity,” wrote Stuart Hall, “far from the simple thing we think it is (ourselves always in the same place), understood properly is always a structure that is split: it always has ambivalence within it. The story of identity is a cover story. A cover story for making you think you stayed in the same place, though with another bit of your mind you do know that you’ve moved on.” It is a “process of identification . . . something that happens over time, that is never absolutely stable, that is subject to the play of history and the play of difference.”20 Just as identities are unstable, so is the concept of race. As Mae Ngai, following Paul Gilroy, reminds us, race and racism are “historically specific” notions that change with time. Moreover, as Arjun Appadurai notes in Fear of Small Numbers, his insightful treatise on the “geography of anger,” as globalization intensifies the incompleteness of national unity and diminishes the power of traditional citizens, minorities become “the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of a few megastates, of unruly economic flows and compromised sovereignties.”21

Barring more genocides and episodes of ethnic cleansing, there is no doubt at all that the identity structures of old must yield to a new consciousness of the Other. In such a consciousness, as in the mock battles of moros y cristianos, the enemy would appear as oneself, not the Other; or, even better, the Other would finally emerge as oneself, eliminating the need for devising elaborate but futile mechanisms of social exclusion and persecution. Needless to say, Muslims in their home countries would be obligated to reciprocate in kind, to see their cultural identity as part of an initial act of religious differentiation from previous monotheistic religions, and so to do away with the anxiety over Jewish, Christian, and even Western influence once and for all.

The same would apply in the United States in regard to its non-Anglo-Saxon and nonwhite populations. (Although the Irish and Mexicans constituted the largest national groups of illegal immigrants from the 1960s to the 1980s, the apprehension and deportation of the former was laughably negligible compared to that of the latter. Commenting on the forty-seven deportable Irish aliens the government captured in 1997, Roger Daniels writes that “it could have found more than that in a Saturday night surveillance of one of the more popular Irish bars in New York or Boston, or at an Irish or Irish American soccer game.”)22 Just as Spain eventually came to accept that Islam, introduced into the Iberian Peninsula in 711, is part of its legacy, the United States must face the even more poignant fact that the Iberians (including Moors) explored and settled parts of the United States long before the Anglo-Saxons—credited by Samuel Huntington, Patrick Buchanan, and others for being uniquely able to devise liberal systems of freedom and prosperity—ever dreamed of reinventing their biblical land of promise on a continent pacified for them by hardened Spanish conquistadors. I remember being told by patrons in a sushi bar in San Diego in the early 1990s that illegal immigration from Mexico was a major threat to the state. When I casually observed that I found it interesting that Mexicans were trying to get access to places with Spanish names—such as San Diego, Los Angeles, and, of course, California itself—the group made no attempt at serious reflection. Such questions, like the topics of slavery and Native Americans, are often met with a “here we go again” attitude, an impatience with bringing up issues considered to be long gone (perhaps even resolved) and no longer applicable in America’s here and now. One could find innumerable cases to illustrate the paradox of Spanish-speaking people immigrating illegally into lands once part of their national heritage. In any case, my question shows that Mexican culture cannot possibly be alien to the United States, for it was in the country before there was even an Anglo-Saxon tradition, let alone a nation called the United States. Mexican and Hispanic cultures are part of the fabric of Americanness; to pretend otherwise is to invite more confusion and to fuel the xenophobic tendencies that have given strength to nativists and sanctioned violence.

Just as racial categories can no longer justify discrimination (one might imagine what could happen if we all checked our DNA for genetic lineages), one must now wonder whether the national paradigm established by Spain in the sixteenth century is still a viable model for the twenty-first century, particularly when people are not infrequently joined together by forces beyond their control. In 2006, when Mexicans and Hispanics were protesting the draconian bill to criminalize illegal immigrants and their supporters, Moisés Naím, the editor of Foreign Policy magazine and author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy, commented that it was absurd to still peg the increasingly antiquated notion of sovereignty to physical barriers: “Traditional borders are violated daily by countless means, and virtual borders seem even more permeable and misunderstood. ‘Closing the border’ may appeal to nationalist sentiments and to the human instinct of building moats and walls for protection. But when threats travel via fiber optics or inside migrating birds, and when finding ways to move illegal goods across borders promises unimaginable wealth or the only chance of a decent life, unilateral security measures have the unfortunate whiff of a Maginot line.”23

One might more accurately talk about boundaries (in Arabic, hudud) in the sense explored by the Moroccan feminist and civil rights activist Fatima Mernissi, in her book Dreams of Trespass, for, despite the rise of new technologies that make the notion of walls and fences seem obsolete, the current model of globalization has maintained, if not intensified, the segregation between those with access to resources and those without.24 Still, Naím is right to point out that the physical shape of nationalism looks hopelessly out of sync with global realities today. What this approach to preserving a people’s identity and sovereignty does is reflect the gradual collapse of the old world order through the inexorable march of globalization. That American politicians, for instance, spent a considerable amount of time introducing bills about English-language-only policies and mandating the construction of fences in the single year of 2006 is proof that Samuel Huntington and Oriana Fallaci were speaking to deeply entrenched anxieties about the nature of nation-states and sovereignty in an age when neither unity of faith nor racial homogeneity—the twin pillars of sixteenth-century Spain’s nationalism—could be sustained. Moreover, one-language-only policies contravene the 1996 Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, which affirms that “everyone has the right to carry out all activities in the public sphere in his/her language,” and the 1992 European Union charter mandating the protection of minority languages across the continent. (By 2007, the number of official European languages, written in three alphabets—Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic—reached twenty-three.) The pillars of Spanish nationalism—linguistic, religious, cultural, and racial—no longer hold in a world of strangers. The real discussion is therefore about the mounting tension “between the nation-state and Babel’s growing tower,” as Edward Rothstein, the New York Times cultural observer, puts it.25

Aristide Zolberg has noted that not only do borders (and, one might add, boundaries as well) serve to affirm state sovereignty and maintain democracy, but, as “economic modeling suggests,” they also guard against the redistribution of wealth and an empowered international labor movement. Although the inequalities of the global economic system will continue to drive immigration, Zolberg warns, nativist responses pose “a more immediate threat to liberal democracy,” for “the elimination of unauthorized immigration would require no less than the transformation of the United States and other affluent democracies into police states, protected by a new iron curtain or a Berlin wall.” As a “steel curtain” stretching from the Pacific to the Rio Grande descends on America, Americans and their nation are inviting more trouble, not less, according to two searing editorial indictments by the New York Times in March 2008. Listing the various ruthless and self-defeating measures being considered in Congress to punish illegal immigration, the Times commented thus: “Maybe some people do not mind that immigration zealotry is sending the country down a path of far greater intrusion into citizens’ lives, into a world of ingrained suspicion, routine discrimination and economic disruption,” but this prospect, in the end, would be quite “frightening.” There is, therefore, no option other than “the maintenance by the affluent democracies of relatively open borders” if they want to live in a “more liberal world.” Put another way, it’s preferable to live with the “imperfections” of “unauthorized immigration” (it is, after all, the unskilled and persecuted poor who are forced to move away from their local environments for better prospects elsewhere) rather than to condemn one’s society to a dark future of illiberalism.26 A liberal, cosmopolitan approach that allows people to “vote with their feet” is a better option than locking up people behind border fences. We know what happened when countries refused to admit Jews in the 1930s. Moreover, this cosmopolitan approach helps raise questions about the suitability of the European state system worked out in the seventeenth century (known as the Westphalian model), including whether “national sovereignty as the dominant principle of international organization is in keeping with our dawning awareness of the interdependence of all the segments of the human species, arising from the global nature of the thermonuclear threat and of environmental degradation.”27

When the Irish, fleeing the Great Hunger in the nineteenth century, were met with intense xenophobia and nativism on the American side of the Atlantic, Herman Melville, who had served as a sailor on an immigrant ship, called for their more enthusiastic welcome and, indeed, for welcoming anybody who wished to come to America: “Let us waive the agitated national topic, as to where such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores; let us waive it, with the only one thought that if they can get here, they have God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world; there is no telling who does not own a stone in the Great Wall of China.”28 Melville was expressing the optimism of post–Civil War America, when the country was still imagined as a cosmopolitan refuge welcoming all the world’s races and ethnicities. “We are the heirs of all time,” he wrote in Redburn, “and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and peoples are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearthstone in [an American] Eden. . . . The seed is sown, and the harvest must come.”29

Other Americans, in twentieth-century America, shared Melville’s optimism. In 1915, the philosopher Horace Kallen, thought to have coined the phrase “cultural pluralism,” imagined the United States not as a melting pot but as an “orchestra,” a “democracy of nationalities.” Louis Adamic, author of the 1945 book A Nation of Nations, expressed a similar sentiment when he wrote, “The United States is great. . . . Its greatness consists of two elements: the idea it brought into government—that all men are created equal and have a voice in how they are governed—and the variegated texture of its makeup. . . . Such an interplay was in line with the major direction in which the world has been moving—from the clan through the tribe, through the nation and race toward denationalization, Americanism (democracy), internationalism, humanity.”30 Adamic’s cosmopolitan spirit, however, was dampened by the cold war. As in our own time, political conflicts and war invariably took America back to its most unproductive social instincts.

What Zolberg calls the “Melville principle” is an excellent expression for the fundamental human right to free movement, shifting the burden onto unrepentant nativists, for one surely needs to explain what is natural about state structures, in rich and poor countries alike, that confine the movements of billions of people worldwide while giving unrestricted access to a select group of people to live and play anywhere they want. Melville’s vision, echoed in Walt Whitman’s poetry, is a far better prospect to imagine than the persistence of a primitive form of nationalism based on exclusion and expulsion, or a social model of gated communities antagonizing the poor by keeping them out of bounds. These are simply not rational long-term solutions for an already besieged planet. If Moors or Moriscos are the residual prototype of Gypsies, Native Americans, Africans, Jews, Hispanics, and, in general, the West’s undesirables since 1492, we might as well avoid the tragedies that dogmatic concepts of national identities have engendered—the expulsion of Jews in 1492; the expulsion of Moriscos in 1609; the scapegoating of minorities as infidels in the nation’s holy body politic; and the horrors of genocide visited on various non-Europeans and on Jews in Nazi Germany—by accepting our true nature as mestizos in a world where national, racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries are dangerous illusions.

Should we make a conscious effort to attain a state of irreversible mestizaje, there is no better group than the Mexicans to lead the way. It is not insignificant that it was a Mexican intellectual who coined the expression “cosmic race” early in the twentieth century. As the reliably insightful Los Angeles Times columnist and author Gregory Rodriguez has shown in his masterful study Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America (2007), although Mexicans are the “largest immigrant group in the history of the United States,” the Mexican culture of mestizaje impels them toward inclusion through intermarriage and adaptation. “There is no private Mexican American college in the United States. In Los Angeles, there is no ethnic-Mexican hospital, cemetery, college, or broad-based charity organization,” Rodriguez notes.31

Miscegenation, or, rather, mestizaje, characterized the birth of modern Mexico, from the moment Spanish conquistadors encountered the Aztec empire. Malinali, better known as Doña Marina, Hernán Cortés’s translator and lover (who was reviled as a traitor after Mexican independence from Spain), was emblematic of this period of conquest. More than bilingual, she delivered Mexico to a new nation of mixed offspring and a mestizo destiny.32

If racial purity was difficult in Mexico, it was even harder on the northern edges of New Spain, in outposts such as New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, and California. As early as the eighteenth century, Spanish authorities in Florida welcomed slave refugees from the Carolinas and Georgia, leading to the establishment of the town Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, in St. Augustine, “the first legally sanctioned free black community in what is now the United States.”33 By 1821, the 200,000 Africans who had come—mostly as slaves—to Mexico were blended into the mestizo population; their children, if born to indigenous women, were born free, as stipulated by law. In Mexican Texas, free blacks enjoyed equal rights with whites, a fact often noted and condemned by white Texans who found ways to circumvent the Mexican law and introduce slaves. In February 1836, Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna complained about the fate of such enslaved blacks. “Shall we permit those wretches,” he wrote to Mexico’s minister of war, “to moan in chains any longer in a country whose kind laws protect the liberty of man without distinction of caste or color?”34 When Texas became independent, slaves often dashed across the Rio Grande into Mexico, where some rose to positions of prominence. So widespread was this perception, especially north of the border, that a common saying in Texan bars had it that “a nigger in Mexico is just as good as a white man.”35 Still, many, like present-day migrants crossing the border in the opposite direction, died or starved on their way to freedom.36

Like other Latinos, Mexican Americans remain a hopeful lot. The great contemporary Mexican American writer Richard Rodriguez expressed his cosmic identity best when he wrote, “I take it as an Indian achievement that I am alive, that I am Catholic, that I speak English, that I am American. My life began, it did not end, in the sixteenth century.”37

Given the persistence of our identity structures and deeply entrenched fear of change, one suspects that strangers will continue to suffer the wrath of nativists, the self-appointed or popularly acclaimed defenders of the purity of nations and guardians of exclusive ways of life. Even as globalization continues to spin its wheels, sublimating what Richard Sennett calls the “specter of uselessness” into “ethnic or race prejudice,” one doesn’t yet see any attempt to question the legacy that Spanish crusaders handed down to an expanding Europe, or the insecurities generated by the global economic system. “The fear of loss of control,” Sennett writes in The Culture of the New Capitalism, “now has a target close at hand [i.e., immigrants]. And in that perverse work of the imagination, it does not register that persecuting these close-by weak outsiders does little to make one’s job secure.”38

In 1883, the poet Emma Lazarus, a descendant of Sephardic Jews, composed two poems that bridge the historical gaps between 1492, when the contours of the modern world were being shaped by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, and the late nineteenth century, when the United States was emerging as an industrial powerhouse. In both historical periods, Jews, whether in Spain or in Russia, were the undesirable lot in Europe. In the poem “1492,” Lazarus gave a greeting to immigrants entering the New World that welcomed all without distinction to race: “Ho, all who weary, enter here! / There falls each ancient barrier that the art / Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear / Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!” America, alas, was nevertheless soon imprinted by the worst prejudices of the Old World. But the poet was undaunted by history. In “The New Colossus,” she continued to imagine America as a refuge to the “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” and “the homeless, tempest-tost” approaching our “golden door,” words that are now immortalized on the Statue of Liberty.39 Politicians and ideologues may continue to appeal to national essences based on imagined ethnicities or races to exclude new groups of undesirables, but there is, in the end, no escaping the fact that “we are all Moors,” that we are all minorities in a world of diversities. It is high time we banish the specter of the Moor from our consciousness and embrace the differences that enrich us all. It is far more sensible to start preparing for a new golden age when every human being on earth and every cultural tradition will be embraced with the love and care now accorded to any species threatened with extinction. For the margin between life and death seems to have narrowed considerably in the last few years.