The history of migration has become a major area of study in the Mediterranean World.

The recent patterns of migration by North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans, and Syrians across the Mediterranean toward European nations has created a series of political crises in the European Union. Growing anti-immigrant sentiments and racial politics have greatly complicated efforts at alleviating the suffering of economic migrants and political refugees across the Mediterranean. Many migrants have lost their lives in shipwrecks and others have been detained in refugee camps.

Pre-modern historians have been working to set these current crises into a much longer history of migration that discusses expulsions, displacements, refugees, and exiles in complex ways. Mayte Green-Mercado’s work fits into this broader effort.

The Center for Renaissance Studies is hosting a Premodern Studies Seminar featuring Mayte Green-Mercado’s paper on “Mediterranean Displacements: Morisco Migrations in the Sixteenth Century.”

Graduate students interested in pre-modern History and Mediterranean studies will be interested in this seminar.

Here is the announcement from the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library:

Mediterranean Displacements:
Morisco Migrations in the Sixteenth Century

Mayte Green-Mercado, Rutgers University-Newark
Friday, February 4, 2022
1-3 pm Central Time
Zoom

CRS is pleased to announce the next meeting of the Premodern Studies Seminar.

This paper examines the phenomenon of migration and displacement of Moriscos—Iberian Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in the first two decades of the sixteenth century—before the expulsion of this community from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609. Taking a prosopographical and micro historical approach that focuses on the Izquierdos, a wealthy family of Morisco merchants who were at the center of a rebellion conspiracy in Valencia and Aragon in the 1570s and 1580s, the aim is to examine the experiences of displacement of Moriscos before the forced exiles. Some guiding questions that this paper will address are: to what degree did migrant and displaced Moriscos keep ties with their communities of origin? Did the mobility of Moriscos impact the lives of their coreligionists living in the Peninsula? This paper is part of a larger project that aims to consider the ways in which the fields of migration studies, diaspora studies, and critical refugee studies can contribute to our knowledge of Morisco history and identity.

For more information about the seminar and a link to register, please visit the seminar calendar page here: https://www.newberry.org/02042022-mayte-green-mercado-rutgers-university