The epilogue caps off the book’s argument by examining two formative Catholic religious devotions that structured narratives about identity, community, and citizenship in both Old and New Granada. The narratives provided by the Virgin of Chiquinquirá (New Kingdom) and the Lead Books and relics of Sacromonte (Granada) reconstituted these two “kingdoms” as Christian spaces whose inhabitants, despite whatever pre-miracle ethnic markers they might have carried, were re-branded as native Christians. Those devotion-driven Christian identities made them constituents of a wider, circum-Atlantic community, even as the inclusion of native meanings and symbols molded and transformed Christianity in order to adapt it to fit local exigencies.

Chapter three turns to the recently conquered (1492) kingdom of Granada. In the late 1560s, the Crown began to use the Council of Trent as the justification to enact legislation that criminalized as heterodox facets of local culture. The native granadino community responded by launching a secessionist rebellion (the War of the Alpujarras, 1568-1571). The Crown eventually defeated the rebels, and as retribution forcibly removed the native community from Granada inland. Subsequently, those “moriscos” desiring to return to their homeland were required to petition and make the case that they would integrate with their “Old Christian” neighbors. Analyzing legal determinations made by the tribunal that assessed applications made by former residents, I show how the responsible magistrates incorporated standards of Christian citizenship defined in synods and councils in their decisions. I also reveal how in the battle over rights, early modern lawyers for dispossessed converts effectively employed legal arguments about prescriptive possession and therefore dominium over the identity category of Old Christian, which guaranteed society’s most extensive range of rights and privileges.

Spain is known for having multiple languages that coexist in different geographical regions with varying degrees of political and social recognition. At the same time, Spanish historiography, argues historian García Sanjuán (2012), has been dominated by the nationalist discourse that systematically distorts the past to construct a “Spanish” and an “Andalusian” identity predicated on the exclusion of anything associated with the Arabic language and Islam, all the while the tourism sector commodifies the “exotic” Arabic past. One of the key settings that distorts and reinvents the past are the festivals of moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians. Claiming to be true and faithful retellings of history, these festivals invoke a popular memory of the imagined past, while interlacing and mixing events from multiple time periods, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 to the so-called Christian reconquest, presented as an essential battle between Christianity and the Muslim invaders. In this article, I analyze one of the more popular and historically significant of these festivals, celebrated in the outpost village of Carboneras. I show that the festivals of moros y cristianos help engrain the legitimacy of nationalist ideas that seek to generate a specific hegemonic identity grounded in an affirmation of the Roman-Latin-Christian vision of the past. The language utilized in the festivals is purposefully selected to elevate and justify the actions and attitudes of the Christians and to amalgamate the identity of Moriscos, whose families had lived in these lands for centuries with that of moros from across the Mediterranean. The reenactments that skillfully play with, confuse, and obscure several periods in Spain’s history are a theatrical mirror of a real process of linguistic and social exclusion that reaches from the past to the present day.