Mercantilist legislation went beyond attempts at controlling balances of trade and encouraging shipbuilding. Good mercantilists recognized that people too were important to the economic power of the nation. These theorists held that large populations were good and that individuals, especially skilled, ‘useful’ individuals, were a valued national resource. It follows that the same kind of laws that strove to restrict the export of specie also tried to control the movement of people. The legislation of various European states aimed at keeping nationals, particularly skilled, valued nationals, at home while at the same time encouraging useful foreigners to settle. With certain restrictions, the British extended this policy to the New World, while the Spaniards, Portuguese, and French did not. Or so the colonial laws of these powers might seem to suggest.

Yet Spanish law in Europe complied fully with the mercantilist rationale. The Laws of Castile required a royal license for anyone planning to leave Spain ‘with his house and family’, while foreigners might immigrate freely and receive for a period of years exemption from certain taxes and service obligations. With the exception of some offices from which they were excluded, foreigners in Spain were otherwise equal to the native-born in all legal matters. This attitude remained in the minds of most Spanish administrators from the king downward, and they persisted in applying it to the Indies as well as Castile.

Following the collective foreigner from the potential threat that he represented to crown interests, over the various hurdles to acceptance, and on to his death reveals a great deal about both the immigrants and the Spaniards. In the first place, foreign residents of New Spain in the first half of the eighteenth century represented neither a major threat nor an indispensable asset to the viceroyalty. On balance their presence was more positive than negative. Many brought skills, established families, and became loyal subjects of the crown. They were, or they became, or, at least, they pretended to be good Catholics. They did not introduce subversive ideas, and their limited economic impact seems to have been largely internal to New Spain, consonant with the values of the society in which they had come to live, and devoid of direct links with their mother countries.

In most cases forbidden to be in the Indies at all, foreigners entered the official record for a variety of reasons. Some represented religious deviation or social problems, but almost as often they appeared as nothing more than witnesses or interpreters. In wartime, colonial authorities occasionally sought out natives of enemy countries, sometimes because of feared subversion, but more likely from a desire to seize their wealth. The same officials or their superiors, however, almost invariably released those aliens discovered in the round-ups. Real enemies were usually only a few poor prisoners of war captured elsewhere and interned in New Spain.

In addition to the consequences of their own deeds and the basic statutes calling for their arrest and expulsion, unnaturalized foreigners resident in the Indies had another major worry. The kings periodically issued decrees calling for special efforts to round up these illegal aliens and to send both the foreigners and their wealth to Spain at the earliest opportunity. These cédulas came, characteristically, when the crown was most worried about the potential dangers foreigners represented to the empire. Need for the money that might be forthcoming in the seizure of the wealth of these persons also played an important part in the timing of orders for direct action against foreign residents. These round-ups thus tended to come just before or during wartime when both the royal concern for imperial defense and the need for increased revenues were most in evidence. There were several such ‘reprisals’ (represalias) in the course of the eighteenth century. The last came in 1794 and 1795 when orders went out to arrest all Frenchmen and to sequester their holdings. Philip V directed the first roundup of the century during the War of Spanish Succession.

In a cédula dated 24 July 1702, Philip told Viceroy Alburquerque of New Spain that England, Holland, and the Hapsburgs had declared war. Alburquerque was therefore to take ‘appropriate measures to embargo all Germans, Dutchmen, and Englishmen’ in his jurisdiction. He was to allow absolutely none of these foreigners nor any goods or estates pertaining to them to escape.

Secular clergy and missionary religious, each operating under their own organizations, shared responsibility with the Holy Office of the Inquisition for maintaining the faith in Spanish America. While the missionaries aimed at the conversion of pagan Indians and the seculars ministered to the faithful, the inquisitors dealt with religious deviation. Philip II had transferred the Inquisition to the New World in the sixteenth century for this specific purpose. In an empire where religion was an aspect of citizenship at least as important as birth, this responsibility of the Holy Office was indeed a grave one. Non-believers might undermine the faith of Indians and other ‘ignorant persons’ and thus dilute the purity of America. The Laws of the Indies, accordingly, charged the governmental authorities and bishops to rid the Indies of foreigners and other persons ‘suspicious in matters of the faith’. The Inquisition stood as the first line of defense.

Regarding religious conformity, all persons in New Spain were subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office. The only exceptions were the Indians, and they came under the less formal and reportedly more lenient episcopal inquisition in the hands of the bishops and the secular clergy. Religious, chiefly Dominicans well schooled in canon law, made up the core of the Holy Office itself. Laymen and churchmen alike aided the inquisitors, and the whole functioned much like any other government agency. The main exception was that Inquisition records and proceedings were closed to inspection by viceregal authorities.

A handful of scholars have written about foreigners in other periods or in other parts of the Spanish American empire. A few authorities in dealing with their own topics have also touched on foreigners. Synthesizing these various views and applying them to colonial Mexico in the first half of the eighteenth century would suggest several things. The most important of these inferences are that Spanish law was reasonably effective in excluding foreigners, that there were a few exceptions such as prisoners of war, illicit traders, and Jesuits, but that even then their numbers were small. Since the kings of Spain and their advisers saw aliens as potential threats to imperial, religious, and mercantile security and since the crown legislated accordingly, it might also be assumed that the Spaniards were both xenophobic and intolerant. Reinforcing this view still further, surviving sixteenth-century Protestant and eighteenth-century Enlightenment prejudices about the Inquisition might exaggerate both the zeal of the Holy Office and the bigotry of Spaniards toward outsiders.

The laws were strict, but the documents, primarily from the Archive of the Indies (AGI) in Seville and the National Archive of Mexico (AGN) in Mexico City, suggest that the preceding assumptions misconstrue the situation in New Spain between 1700 and 1760. Prisoners of war often stayed to settle after their release, most foreign merchants had nothing to do with smuggling, and Jesuits were not the only foreign churchmen.

Cases tried by the various courts and autonomous tribunals of New Spain might or might not result in expulsion for foreigners caught up in the proceedings. An example of this varied treatment shows up in investigations relating to marriage. From the time of Charles V, Spanish law had encouraged residents in America to marry. The original intention of this legislation had been to secure permanence of settlement in the Indies and to promote the social stability of the new colonies. As communities developed, the settlers themselves undoubtedly adopted this royal concern with marriage, and for their own reasons. Churchmen, married women, and fathers of daughters, to name but a few, could all be expected to lend full support to the institution. Such persons might also aid the authorities in encouraging single men to marry. In addition, religion sanctified marriage in the Catholic world and demanded that it remain, without exception, permanent.

Royal legislation aimed not only at encouraging single men to marry, but also at keeping married men from immigrating without their wives. Yet a number of such men, foreigners among them, went to New Spain in the eighteenth century. Being in the Spanish New World while a wife remained in Europe was scarcely a very serious crime. And if the man had any sort of legitimate reason for having come without his wife, it was highly unlikely that the authorities would harass him.

So said the Laws of the Indies in 1681. Yet the Catholic Kings had said it much earlier. The instructions of Ferdinand and Isabella to their governor in Hispaniola in 1501, less than a decade after the discovery, forbade him to permit foreigners, Moors, Jews, or non-reconciled heretics to remain in America. Even after the publication of the Laws, the kings of Spain frequently and regularly repeated the dictum of their ancestors against foreigners being in the Indies. A cédula of Ferdinand VI issued in 1750 recognized the antiquity and importance of this position. In this decree the king said, ‘Since the conquest of the Indies it has always been one of the primary principles of their governance and protection that foreigners be forbidden to go there or reside there.’ Ferdinand threatened his colonial officials with disciplinary action should they be remiss in rounding up and sending to Spain any foreigners within their jurisdictions. The constant repetition of this theme by all the Spanish monarchs until after their American colonies achieved independence suggests at the very least that foreigners were constantly trying to enter the forbidden Spanish American empire, and that the kings wanted all of their officials to remain vigilant. Yet the kings and their advisers for colonial affairs, the minister and Council of the Indies, were not irrational xenophobes.

De-Hispanizing foreign names is a tricky, uncertain, but necessary procedure. Modern spellings for given names are preferred almost universally in the following appendices and are based on various dictionaries of non-English to English. For example, the modern Portuguese ‘Manuel’ is used rather than the archaic ‘Manoel’. One should approach dictionaries with caution, however, as the case of ‘Jacob’ illustrates. The name came into Latin from Greek as ‘Iacobus’. The French and the English transformed this to ‘Jacob’ and split off ‘Jacques’ and ‘James’, respectively, as separate names. The Germans adopted ‘Jakobus’, now shortened to ‘Jakob’. The Spaniards and the Florentines, beginning with the Latin ablative, used ‘Jacobo’. Variations in Spanish include ‘Diego’, ‘Santiago’, and ‘Jácome’. Evolution in Italian produced the dialectal ‘Giacob’ which most modern Italians now render as ’Giacomo’, the same name they use for ‘James’. The ‘Giacobbe’ of the dictionaries is a throwback to Hebrew, and Italians use this form almost exclusively in reference to the Bible. Generally, the appendices employ modern spellings for given names, except when there is no danger of confusion, as in using the Irish ‘Denis’ rather than the English ‘Dennis’. For Savoyards, Bohemians, and certain others from areas of mixed linguistic heritage, the form of the given name chosen as ‘best’ depended on the probable ethnic classification of the surname. Occasionally it was necessary to move beyond dictionaries to national histories and similar works in order to locate the proper spelling for a particularly unusual given name.