If you travel to Spain, especially to the southern part of the country, you will hear extensively about the Moors, a term used to describe the Muslim inhabitants of Spain during the Middle Ages. The Moors first entered the Iberian Peninsula in 711 CE and remained in the country until the Christian kings reconquered the peninsula primarily in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, Muslims remained in the country until 1492, when the infamous King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella conquered the last Muslim kingdom of Grenada and subsequently expelled the remaining Muslims who refused to convert to Catholicism from Spain.
For this reason, the year 1492 is regarded as a critical year in the creation of modern Spain; however, this year remains significant for another, often overlooked, reason (and no, it’s not because of Columbus). As a part of their mission of creating a Catholic country, Isabella and Ferdinand also had to determine what to do with another religious minority, the Jewish people living in the peninsula, who are referred to as the Sephardic Jews. At this time, the king and queen launched the Spanish Inquisition, a body whose goal was to find Muslims and Jews who continued to live in Spain without converting to Catholicism. Because the majority of the Muslims had left the country by this time, the Inquisition primarily targeted the Jews. The Inquisition, which didn’t formally end until the nineteenth century, essentially eliminated the Muslim and Jewish populations of Spain.
Until the early twenty-first century, there were very few immigrants to Spain, and the vast majority of its inhabitants were Spanish and Catholic. However, over the course of the past decade or so, there have been high influxes of immigrants from Morocco, China, and Eastern Europe, making Spain an increasingly diverse country, both ethnically and religiously. Although Spain has not seen the rise of a far-right nationalist political party like many other European countries, immigrants remain labelled by where they come from and have yet to be accepted as truly “Spanish.” When 1492 is often pinpointed as the birth of Spain, how do immigrants of different colors and creeds integrate into a country whose national identity in part rests on the expulsion and erasure of Muslim and Jewish minorities? Will Spaniards learn to accept the shifting demographics of their country, or will they instead turn inward and become xenophobic as so many other nations have in recent years?
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