UCLA

From the thirteenth century onward, Italian merchants were ubiquitous in the economic activities of the Iberian Peninsula, largely underwriting the success of Iberian expansion and imperial ambitions. They took part in the incursions into North Africa and contributed to the conquest of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. Italian merchants also became enmeshed in the administration of empire, serving as aldermen and notaries in the Spanish bureaucracy, which necessitated proving their nobility (hidalgu�a) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). They participated in civic and religious processions, joined and established confraternities, supported and requested burial in local religious institutions through generous bequests. All of this contributed to their integration into Iberian communities while reinforcing Genoese identity.

Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have studied the hybrid identities of foreign merchants for decades. Much of this scholarship has demonstrated Genoese ability to integrate into their host communities but has described this as a process of assimilation that displaced Genoese identity. The cases in this dissertation contribute nuance to these long-standing debates about hybridity and the extension of multiple identities and communal membership across time and space. Looking outward from the Iberian Peninsula, these cases played out across larger Mediterranean and Atlantic contexts, since these merchants were extensively involved in the processes of medieval and early modern European expansions, from North Africa to the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, Mexico, and beyond.

Notarial and inquisition records, petitions for nobility (hidalgu�a) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), literary narratives, polemical treatises, and funerary monuments demonstrate how Genoese merchant families integrated themselves into Iberian communities while maintaining their foreign connections. Examining both merchants residing in Seville and their relatives across the Atlantic, this dissertation shows how they capitalized on an approach that mobilized their diasporic identity and ties to carve a space within Iberian society. This is what I call ambiguous integration. Their approach to integration had many parallels in the culture of the Mediterranean and Atlantic, but over time it became increasingly difficult to mobilize as a sixteenth-century anti-foreigner discourse associated these merchants with greed, deception, and an effeminacy not unrelated to their identification as “white moors” (moros blancos). As a result, many families dissimulated and even renounced this foreign identity and ties from the end of the sixteenth century forward.