Inquisition records labeled enslaved Canary Islanders as moriscos based on skin tone.

Evidence

Numbers were very low: in 1525 there were only 190 negros and 123 moriscos. The exact sense of the latter term in this context is unclear. The inquisitors found almost all of them to have been baptized a few years before, mainly in the Canaries, but some (a dozen or so) in Spain itself. Does this mean that this small group of 123 was made up of two quite distinct subsets? Did those baptized in Spain belong, not to the category morisco (2); (“Spanish Morisco’’) but morisco (1) (i.e., North African)? Or were they perhaps some third category: pagan slaves from the Canaries, taken to serve their masters in the peninsula, and baptized while they were there and before they were shipped back home? And were they called “Moriscos” because of their swarthy complexion, rather in the way that “Morisco” was in use in some parts of the New World for some people of mixed blood? — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1889

Categorization

• DEFINE: The term ‘morisco’ had at least three distinct meanings in early modern usage: Spanish converted Muslims, North Africans, and (in the Canaries/Americas) people of mixed blood based on complexion.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing how ‘morisco’ as a complexion-based racial term in the Americas relates to peninsular usage — likely a genuinely separate semantic family.