Spanish colonizers projected their existing fears of Moors onto New World peoples

Evidence

As mentioned earlier, when Spanish explorers reached the “New World” they transferred existent fears and anxieties about Moors onto the inhabitants of the Americas, whom they called “New Moors.” In Barbara Fuchs’s study of Maurophilia, she documents the “Spanish racial hysteria” that, while “almost impossible to determine in any authentic fashion,” was nonetheless part of the story of early modern Spain. The obsession with limpieza de sangre (blood purity) is but one of the ways in which Spanish anxieties surrounding Muslims was in force, and it became part of the habitus of Spanish explorers. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 576

Categorization

• DEFINE: Limpieza de sangre (blood purity) is implicitly defined here via its racial-anxiety context.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thesis about image preceding contact — the New Moors transfer shows fear projected onto peoples with no Islamic contact at all.
• FICTION: The theatrical reenactment of Moors played by Indians is a striking image of manufactured identity.