The Other: Conversos, Gypsies, Foreign Catholics, and Foreign Vassals
The Other: Conversos, Gypsies, Foreign Catholics, and Foreign Vassals
This chapter presents the book's hypothesis suggesting that the community of Spanish natives in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a highly complex social and legal construction, based not on cultural or linguistic traits nor principally dependent on birth. Instead, it was founded on the assumption that people who wanted to live together and who were willing to commit themselves permanently to the community had the right to consider themselves members, both as citizens and as natives. This organic community depended on natural processes of integration and was limited in only two respects. First, in order to be integrated, candidates had to be Catholics. Second, candidates were judged not solely by their individual behavior, but also by their inclusion in certain social groups.
Keywords: legal construction, linguistic traits, citizens, natives, organic community, integration
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