Cultural Memories of the Expulsion of the Moriscos

Violins are weeping over the Arabs leaving al-Andalus,Violins are weeping over lost time which will never come back(Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish1)In 2009 it will have been 400 years since Philip III expelled the Moriscos from Spain. It is therefore time to consider what remains of this tragedy in present-day Spanish collective memory. As opposed to the history as written by the victors it is necessary to also listen to the voice of the descendants of the victims, recovering their own historical memory. As a symbol of the reparation of an historical injustice the present-day Spanish state may grant the descendants of the expelled Moriscos the right to Spanish citizenship, as has already happened with the descendants of the Sephardim or Spanish Jews. In this article I consider four forms of memory of the expulsion of the Moriscos, embodied respectively in History, Literature, Art and Popular Culture. In the section on History, I analyze the works of Gregorio Marañón and Henry Kamen. Literary memory will be represented by the figure of the Morisco Ricote in Part II of Cervantes’ Quixote. For Art, I will look at a series of paintings commissioned by Philip III and at a painting competition held in Madrid under Philip IV. Popular culture is represented by the celebrations of ‘moros y cristianos,’ or ‘Moors and Christians,’ an old tradition that is still alive.