Date: December 16, 2025
For the next two months, the Dean’s Commentary will feature text by VTS & GTS faculty members writing about what they are currently teaching, reading, or writing about.
In January 2026 at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, I will be giving a paper titled “The Nominalization of ‘Morisco’: Discursive Othering and the Justification of Expulsion in Early Modern Spain.” This conference paper emerges from my interest in how the labeling of communities contributes to processes of othering and exclusion.
The paper examines how the term Morisco, originally used as a descriptive term—easily translatable into English as Moorish—evolved across the sixteenth century into a fixed identity for baptized descendants of Muslims, and marked all in these communities as permanently suspect. Through legal, political, and ecclesiastical discursive processes, Morisco came to signify not just religious background but a deeper sense of unassimilable difference—making the eventual expulsion of these communities (1609–1614) both imaginable and theologically defensible.
I argue that this transformation was not inevitable. Earlier terms like nuevo cristiano (New Christian) and nuevamente convertido (newly converted) reflected a more fluid view of baptism and assimilation. Yet both early modern officials and later historians often conflate this progression, collapsing a century of discursive processes into a single, static label: what I call the eternal Morisco.
The research also follows the term across the Atlantic, where in the colonial Sistema de Castas, Morisco reemerged—not as a religious marker, but as a racial one, designating individuals of mixed African and Spanish ancestry. In Spain, Morisco meant deficient Christian; in the Americas, not-Spanish, not-white. What began as a theological boundary became a racial one.
Studying these discursive processes can also help the contemporary reader understand how language processes take the description or labeling of communities and make these labels into indelible characteristics marking some communities as other, and perhaps as inassimilable into the “American” culture as the Moriscos were to the Spanish.
Rev. Carla E. Roland Guzmán, PhD
Assistant Professor of Church History
The General Theological Seminary