A solid line of research makes a compelling argument that the very category of race can be traced to the Iberian Peninsula of the Christian Middle Ages, where different religious groups, namely Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, came into intercultural contact with one another. ${ }^{2}$ The southern region of the peninsula, known as Al-Andalus, was a border zone between the Maghreb (a region of north and north-western Africa) and southern Europe and was a central gate in the Mediterranean world. Evidence shows that the kind of discursive practices of hierarchical naturalization of difference that we now call racial had existed in the Iberian Peninsula since the fifteenth century (Nirenberg, Hering Torres, and Martínez, 2012). The accusations of a lack of blood purity levelled by the Inquisition against Jews and Moors and the sentences subsequently imposed on them in order to consolidate Christian power were a key component of this process of racialization. ${ }^{3}$ The year 1492 was a crucial moment, not only because of Columbus' so-called discovery, but also because the Spanish conquest of Granada established Spain as the first absolutist state for which the mass expulsion of Sephardic Jews and Muslims was a foundational act. ${ }^{4}$  
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[^0]:    1 I elaborate these arguments in Laó-Montes (2007). For analytical explorations of the interplay of biological and cultural elements in racial significations and the interweaved meanings of race and ethnicity see, among others, de la Cadena, Goldberg, Hall, Poole, Stoler, and Wade.
2 There is a large body of scholarly literature on the Iberian Peninsula as a key site for the invention of race as a historical category and, therefore, of racial discourses and racism as regimes of power and knowledge in late medieval and early modern times. See, in particular, Eliav-Feldon et al. (2009), Fredrickson (2003), and Hering Torres and Nirenberg (2012). For the concept of 'contact zone', see Buscaglia (2003), LaóMontes, and Pratts (1992).