Can AI Test for Limpieza de Sangre?


An auto-da-fe in the town of San Bartolomé Otzolotepec (now Toluca), Mexico in 1716 (source)

Haga clic aquí para ver una traducción automática en español.

Hopefully I'll be gaining some readers through my RootsTech talk, "How Full-Text Search Can Uncover Latin American Genealogy," which gives a window into the power of FamilySearch's Full-Text Search, an incredible search engine that can interpret ancient handwriting and find incredible stray references in documents stretched across centuries and the continents.


Full-Text Search is a game-changer. I have dedicated two episodes of the podcast I co-host, "Rediscovering Latinidad," to it: 

Full-Text Search has turned genealogy into a postmodern treasure hunt. What originally took deep strategizing to find the right resource can now be, within seconds, a glut of cached pages to sift through. Within a couple of days, I am able to piece together wildly cohesive stories that would have taken years of human-paced research to string together. 

So here's one more Full-Text Search and Google-fueled rabbit hole of fascinating family history!

FamilySearch.org has a user-generated Family Tree, which I initially contributed to more than a decade ago. Like any crowd-based genealogy resource, it became gummed up with dubious connections and information. I became frustrated and lost interest, much as I'd done before with Geni.com. Then recently I found, with surprise and gratitude, that researchers of Colombian descent had done an admirable job in the past couple years of attaching records to ancestors' profiles on my grandfather's side, the Rueda family and their neighbors of Santander Department, Colombia. I looked to see if any brick wall ancestors of mine had crowd-sourced documents.

Boy, did I luck out! For years, I had no idea about the family of my 6th-great-grandmother, Josefa de los Reyes (born c.1744 in San Gil, Colombia; died 1814 in Galán, Colombia), only that she was the wife of Manuel Joaquín Acevedo. No children's baptismal records listed maternal grandparents, and the marriage record listed no parents. Thanks to FamilySearch user Cristian Fernando Ortíz, her Family Tree profile has a record that proves her mother's identity!


Josefa de los Reyes, on the FamilySearch Family tree.

True to Josefa's time, it was the worst possible record: a slave sale. On April 29, 1805, in Barichara (now a notably Instagrammable tourist destination), Josefa de los Reyes sold an enslaved teenage girl, 14-year-old Francisca, described as "morena," who she had inherited from her recently deceased mother... Casilda Ferreira. I can only imagine what Francisca's life was like, being seen by colonial record-keepers as mere property to be inherited and sold. She was young enough to have potentially had children that benefitted from the Free Womb Law of 1821, which allowed children born to enslaved mothers to be free at age 18. Did Francisca live long enough to see Colombia's Manumission Act of 1852, which finally ended nearly 350 years of detestable slavery in Colombia? Or was her life cut short at a much earlier point? 


Francisca, age 14, sold by Josefa de los Reyes in 1805.

I must turn to the slave owners, Josefa's newly confirmed parents, Francisco Baptista de los Reyes and Casilda Ferreira. When they were betrothed in 1736, they revealed to the clergy that they were related in several ways, in a marriage dispensation. Francisco's great-grandparents (Luis Martínez de Ponte and Marcela de Rueda Sarmiento) were Casilda's great-great-grandparents, and another of Francisco's great-grandmothers (Francisca de Rueda Sarmiento) was the half-sister of Casilda's great-grandmother (Catarina Gómez Romano). As much as cousin marriage is stomach-churning, one record confirmed quite a bit of Josefa de los Reyes's family tree!

Colombians who can trace their families back this far have one more secret weapon in their genealogical arsenal: Las genealogías del Nuevo Reino de Granada by Juan Flórez de Ocáriz (First volume) (Second volume), a zealous Bogotá bureaucrat who sifted through generations of paperwork in the late 1600s to not only trace the families of Colombia's first conquistadors, but to trace their collateral relatives, in-laws, and in-laws of in-laws as well. It's with this incredibly wide net that many of Josefa's ancestors end up being mentioned: de los Reyes, Ferreira, Rueda, Sarmiento, and many, many more.

Privilege is frequently generational, and Flórez de Ocáriz notes with careful detail how the initial European murderers and looters of Colombia married into each others' families and set up a colonial elite whose descendants still largely rule the country. Flórez de Ocáriz wrote how in 1642 in Tunja, Josefa de los Reyes's great-great-grandfather, Juan Baptista de los Reyes, who was the son of a namesake Spanish-born governor, married Margarita Rincón Maldonado, the granddaughter of two conquistadors, Diego Rincón and Pedro Bravo de Molina. 

Tunja's criollos were famous for hanging their coats of arms on their lintels, and historian Magdalena Corradine Mora shared in her two-volume Los fundadores de Tunja that you can still see the house of Margarita's uncle, Antonio Bravo Maldonado, at Carrera 10 #20-15, complete with his father's Bravo coat of arms over the center of the front doorway and his mother's Maldonado coat of arms on the sides.

 


Pretentious Tío Antonio's coats of arms over his front door in Tunja. (Google Maps)

So the Bravo Maldonados were fancy, but the Rincóns had a bigger claim to fame: Diego Rincón, grandfather of Margarita, sailed to Santa Marta in 1536 with the flotilla of what largely became the expedition of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, founder of Bogotá. Diego accompanied Jiménez de Quesada on the slow trek up the Magdalena River, during which more than two-thirds of Quesada's men died of starvation and disease. At the end of 1536, Diego sailed back with the sickly members of Quesada's armies. Wade Davis, in his excellent book Magdalena: River of Dreams, writes: "...Quesada, having recruited most of Gallego's men to his cause, replacing his dead, wisely elected to dispatch the ships with skeletal crews back to Santa Marta, a journey that retraced in mere days what had taken the men weeks to achieve running against the current."

Diego Rincón finally came to the Andean highlands in 1540 with the expedition of Jerónimo Lebrón de Quiñones. While Rincón made his fortune fighting and killing Indigenous peoples and earning several encomiendas, Lebrón was appointed governor of Puerto Rico in 1544, and died there the following year. By utter coincidence, according to Spain's El Mundo, who is included among Lebrón's numerous Boricua descendants but rapper and global superstar BAD BUNNY -- Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio!!! -- who is about as anti-colonial as you can get with a mega-celebrity!  


Bad Bunny, who conquered the world, and Super Bowl LX, with love and rhythm.

While Diego was not among the 170-ish Spaniards who first defeated the Muisca Indians, murdered the Muisca Sipa Sagipa, and raided the gold and emeralds of Tunja, he is immortalized by the priest Juan de Castellanos's epic poem, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias. It's 150,000 lines of poetry recasting conquistadors as idealized, chivalrous defenders of the Holy Faith (as Bogotá was rechristened, "Santa Fe"). Diego and his family are described in the 13th Canto as (translation from Claude.ai): "this illustrious Rincón, whose exploits / do not deserve to be forgotten, / and whose estate was inherited by his son, / now the heir to his own name, / and Doña Catalina Rincón, a nymph / whom few surpass in beauty, / intelligence, discretion, and grace, both children of Doña Luisa / de Porras, a most noble lady, / renowned for her exceptional virtue."


I'll quote at length a passage in the 15th Canto concerning Diego Rincón killing an Indigenous opponent (translation from Claude.ai). The extravagent writing includes a Homeric simile comparing Diego to a cornered bull and includes name checks from classical and medieval epics:  

During the shouting and the fighting,
the rear guard finally arrived,
and seeing that only one combatant
was blocking their passage,
Diego Rincón said hastily:
“Is it possible that a single Indian
has so many Spaniards cornered,
as if they weren't all accustomed
to conquering a hundred thousand towering peaks?
Count me among the vile and cowardly,
and consider me worthless,
if I don't remove him from the ravine,
making him give us free passage.”

He, like a bull,
defeated by his competitor,
after having withdrawn to the mountains,
testing his strength in the groves,
rubbing his horned forehead
against insensitive rocks and tree trunks,
and confident in his powerful neck,
returns with more fury to the fight.
With similar courage, seeking revenge,
Diego Rincón returned to his adversary,
whom he found standing firm;
and as the Indian was about to strike,
with quick and admirable agility,
he slipped further beneath him,
kneeling on the ground,
covered by his shield, where the Indian
struck with the middle of his club,
not as squarely as if he had been
a little further away;
and then Rincón extended his hand
with lively and swift promptness,
burying the point of his sword
in the savage's left thigh,
who, feeling the sting, and seeing
the reddish flow of his blood,
and it is to be believed that he was already tired,
turned his back in great haste,
with Diego Rincón in pursuit,
both running with such swiftness
that it seemed more like flying than running;
for although the others climbed quickly,
they were unable to give them
pursuit with their eyes, nor provide help
to the daring and spirited young man,
because they did not know the path they had taken.
And while we were distressed by this matter,
he arrived with his sword stained with blood,
saying with swollen arrogance:
"I make a solemn vow this instant
to Hercules, and to Hector and to Morgante [the Greek hero, the Trojan prince, and a king in "Orlando Furioso" killed by the legendary knight Rinaldo],
that they will clear a wide path for me,
and flee from standing in my way,
for my shield and my fine steel
will terrify the fiercest giant,
and with the blows and thrusts of my arm
it is pointless for them to offer resistance.
The affair on the hill was of little consequence;
for as soon as I reached him, the good part was over,
because he came at me like a dog
that is full of rabid fury;
but I extended my hand with my sword,
and gave him a thrust through his guts.
He fell, and the earth trembled from the impact,
if perhaps it didn't tremble from fear of me."


The knight Rinaldo in battle: how some conquistadors must have envisioned themselves. (source)


What conquistadors were actually like: woodcut from Bartolomé de las Casas's "Destruction of the Indies" (source)

So Diego Rincón was remembered as a gallant, brave conquistador, but what of his wife, Doña Luisa de Porras, "a most noble lady, / renowned for her exceptional virtue"? Flórez de Ocáriz wrote that she came from suitably renowned stock, having been born in Sevilla to (translation from Claude.ai): "Pedro de Porres and Catalina Fernández de Fonseca y Montemayor. And Pedro de Porres [was] a native of Madrid, and originally from the Mountains [northern Spain?], who came to Seville with his brother Martín de Porres, city councilman (Veinticuatro) of [Seville]... Doña Catalina Fernández de Fonseca y Montemayor was the legitimate daughter of Juan Fernández de Montemayor, Captain in the wars of Granada, and of his wife Juana Tamayo, sister of Fray Juan de Santa María, Dominican Religious in San Pablo of Seville... Commonly they say this lineage [is] Porras, but it is not called [anything] except Porres: there have always been good knights in the Kingdom of León." (Volume 2, Arbol 14, Section 43).

Flórez de Ocáriz precedes that passage by insisting again that the proper surname is "Porres (which vulgarly and corruptly they called Porras)," and one might wonder if he doth protest too much. I suspect that something could be awry with Flórez de Ocáriz's account... because even before his time, the origins of the Porras family were hard to prove! Looking through Full-Text Search for Pedro de Porras and his family turned up transcriptions of the 1558 permits allowing Luisa de Porras and her siblings to emigrate to South America. The surname always appears as Porras, not Porres... 

Most Full-Text Search results about the Porras family come from a 1648 application to join the Knights of the Order of Santiago, made by two well-connected brothers in Bogotá, Don Francisco Félix Beltrán de Caicedo and Don Fernando Leonel Beltrán de Caicedo. The Order of Santiago was one of the highest honors for nobility in Spain, and the Inquisition-plagued empire demanded that applicants submit pruebas y diligencias (tests and diligences) proving their limpieza de sangre -- "purity of blood" that was solely derived from "Old Christians," with no ancestors who were recent converts from Judaism or Islam, let alone non-European ancestors.

One of their great-great-grandparents, Margarita de Porras y Fonseca, lacked the proper church documents, so the Beltrán de Caicedo brothers funded an investigation into the parish records of Sevilla, and uncomfortable secrets were uncovered. 

The baptisms of the Porras siblings, all children of Pedro de Porras and Catalina Fernández, were found among the parish records of San Pedro in Sevilla: amazingly, it seems that Luisa de Porras was baptized on February 22, 1540 and Margarita de Porras was baptized in 1547! Several decades later, in the same church on June 6, 1599, a baby boy named Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was baptized... and he grew up to be Diego Velázquez, one of the greatest painters of all time!!!!

Velázquez and the font in the Church of San Pedro where he was baptized!

However, the public notaries in Sevilla could not locate a dowry letter for Pedro de Porras and Catalina Fernández from circa 1527, which would have listed their parents. The investigators also collected local testimony that Catalina Fernández de Porras's family were well-known conversos -- converted Jews! Witnesses claimed that Catalina's real parents were named Gonzalo Fernández and Ana Bazo, and they appeared in the 1510 farda, a list of converted Jews in Sevilla whose parents or grandparents were punished by the Inquisition, and who had to pay a discriminatory tax to be "reconciled" with the state. One witness claimed that Gonzalo Fernández paid a fine of 800 ducados to royal officials, and another said Ana Bazo "was the daughter of Manuel Bazo, who was burned and is on the first page of the burned in the Corral of the Orange Trees..." (Manuel Baço, que fue quemado, y está en la primera página de los quemados en el Corral de los Naranjos). 


El patio de los Naranjos at the Cathedral of Sevilla, as seen from the famed La Giralda tower (source)

This is incredibly heavy information that is hard to process. Was a Jewish ancestor burned at the stake by the Spanish Inquisition, right by the cathedral, in what is now a charming patio with orange trees? It's awful to think that such a horrendous death would be treated as a shameful secret, that somehow it reflected on the "tainted" reputation of Manuel's descendants, rather than the oppressive state that killed him.

Some modern Colombians could be disturbingly glad to hear this story and be deluded into thinking that because of this possible distant ancestor they qualify for Spanish "law of return" citizenship -- but even when Spain and Portugal considered such citizenship applications (which they don't anymore), these rumors and conjectures would not have been sufficient evidence of Sephardic descent. 

There are potential hints at the truth of these possible ancestors -- Manuel Bazo, Ana Bazo, and Gonzalo Fernández. The article on the 1510 farda that I linked to above transcribes the document in question, and there was indeed a converso named Gonzalo Fernández who paid 800 ducados, the second-highest fine on the list. Another quoted letter from 1516 says Gonzalo once again helped collect a steep fine of 5,000 ducados from the converso community for the royal coffers.


Part of the 1510 farda listing Gonzalo Fernández (source)

One more Full-Text Search result may share a clue about Manuel Bazo. Another application for the Knights of the Order of Santiago, this time for the sevillano Juan de Espinosa Salvago in 1619, raised suspicions about the applicant's maternal grandmother, another supposed descendant of Manuel Bazo. Juan's pruebas and diligencias reference a record about an alleged house of Manuel Bazo! 

It says (translation from Claude.ai): "It appears that the said houses were granted by Diego de Deza and Doña Leonor de Guzmán his wife, residents of Seville in the parish of San Román ... in the year [1457] to Francisco González Bazo and Francisca González his wife. The deed passed before Manuel López, public notary of Seville, by whom the deed is signed. And afterward it appears that these buyers, Francisco González Bazo and his wife, fell into heresey, and their properties were confiscated by order of the Holy Office [Inquisition] and the Council of the Catholic Monarchs, with their power, [the houses were] sold to Alonso Fernández de Santillán, resident of Lugo... in the year [1486]." Historian Ruth Pike further clarifies in her book Linajudos and Conversos in Sevilla that the Bazo family home in question was in Santa Cruz, a former judería (Jewish neighborhood) in Sevilla. 

Searching Full-Text Search one more time turns up what appears to be a transcript of that 1457 deed! Only the names are slightly different: Francisco González Bazo and his wife Francisca González  are indeed described as "vecinos de la collación de Santa Cruz" -- residents of the parish of Santa Cruz! Claude.ai struggled with Full-Text Search's transcription, but Francisco and Francisca entered a "perpetual rent agreement" with Juan de Deza and his wife Leonor de Guzmán, buying houses to reside in, rent, or sell, but agreeing to pay 1,000 maravedís every year, forever. Apparently Francisco paid 48,000 maravedís upfront. 


By coincidence, Calle Lope de Rueda is in the Santa Cruz neighborhood of Sevilla, named after the Golden Age playwright who shares my last name!

I have yet to find other sources about the Bazos' persecution by the Spanish Inquisition in 1486, and it's unlikely that any trial records from those years have survived. The priest Andrés Bernáldez left a general description of the early days of the Spanish Inquisition, quoted in Spanish Inquisition 1478-1614: An Anthology of Sources: 

"They began to sentence people to death by fire. The first time, they took out six men and women to the Plaza La Tablada to be burned, and so they were burned....  Within a few days three of the most prominent people in the city, and the richest, were burned.... Favors and riches never helped them. After this burning, all the conversos who had confessed were terrified... and they fled the city and the archbishopric.... And over the next eight years, until 1488, they burned more than six hundred people and reconciled more than five thousand, whom they put into perpetual prisons. Some people were in those prisons for four or five years or more. And the inquisitors would take people out of prison and put sanbenitos on them—with red crosses in front and behind—and they had to walk around in those sanbenitos for a long time. Afterward the sanbenitos were removed. Among those burned in those eight years were three ordained clerics and three or four monks, all of converso lineage. The inquisitors also burned a doctor, a monk of the Trinitarian order called Savariego, who was a great preacher and a great liar, a trickster heretic.... They burned an infinite number of bones from the yards of the Trinity, San Agustín, and San Bernardo neighborhoods, where the conversos were buried one on top of another, in Jewish fashion. They publicly proclaimed and burned in effigy many fugitives who were found to be condemned...."

Despite the documented rumors, Juan de Espinosa Salvago and the Beltrán de Caicedo brothers would become knights of Santiago. In their time these men would have been known as great "hijosdalgo," but roughly four centuries later, the pretenses of nobility and "purity" are laughably false. What my search results turned up were the horrors of prejudice and hatred left unchecked.

Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut (at) gmail.com.

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