'I being old christian justice proceeded against me...'. The instrumentalization of the moor image

Abstract

So much the expulsion of the from Granada Moriscos towards the interior of Castile and Andalusia, once controlled the revolt of the Alpujarras, as the definitive expulsion of the territories of the Monarchy arranged by Philip III they tell in his credit with a series of peculiarities and historical facts that they repeated themselves in both events.
Undoubtedly, one of the most important processes was the quantity of lawsuits that began to demonstrate the ancestry Christian old woman of hundreds, chance thousands, of Moriscos who tried with it to avoid the expulsion, already it was of the former kingdom nazarí or of Spain years later.
Nevertheless, the abundant historiography on the Spanish Moriscos has isolated, consciously or unconsciously, one of the most important administrative processes in the management of named by the contemporaries as “Moorish problem”. To underestimate or to minimize the importance of a favorable judgment or not to the Christian ancestry of those Moriscos who like that were defending it could manage to mean, not more not less, that the permanency in Granada or in Spain, the conservation of his heritage or the social peace for the inheritors of the pleiteante, among other things.
But those lawsuits on the ancestry of the litigators who remain in the different files of the Spanish geography served equally as an double-edged word, as a juridical instrument to explain a reason in favor of one or another pleiteante without the Morisco’s condition was happening in one of the parts. The racial accusation not only was effective but known between the population, especially for the competent authorities.