Corrupting a Good Mix: Race and Crime in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Spain

Abstract

This article explores Spanish racial thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concentrating specifically on its application in criminological practice. Rather than accepting the more common dismissals of Spanish racial ideas as either non-existent or somehow non-racist for their reliance on mixture, this article demonstrates both how malleable the idea of race was in Spain and the variety of purposes to which it was put. This article also places the discussion of race and crime in Spain more broadly in its European context. It shifts the focus away from European historiography’s more typical assumption that the content of racial ideas was the motor force behind the shaping of actual criminal policies and jurisprudence. Instead, this article demonstrates that the context in which racial ideas were developed proved far more important in determining how ideas were applied than the content or definition of those racial ideas.