Historical records structurally conceal assimilated minorities and amplify failure narratives

Evidence

Our evidence, made up of documents of almost exclusively Christian provenance, is—and it is important to realize this—biased toward a view that the Moriscos were an unassimilated and unassimilable minority. Evidence adduced in sources like trials will tend not to show us fully integrated Moriscos living and working within the larger Christian community. This is because nobody on either side had reason to record the activities of the assimilated. And many people had some reason for suppressing such information. Besides which, at the end, at the time of the Expulsion, the received view on both sides was that the Moriscos were unassimilable. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1152

Categorization

• SEED: A method piece on how archival bias manufactures a narrative of minority unassimilability — parallel to how other records (court cases, criminal stats) overrepresent the non-integrated.
• XREF: connects to: Oral-history bias demands triangulation against others and records. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 127; Founding myths silently bury inconvenient facts of shared ancestry — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 73; Narratives of black invisibility legitimate land seizures by erasing prior claims — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 57