The Holy Office of the Inquisition in Lima arrested Manuel Bautista Pérez in 1635 on accusations that he was the leader of Peru's secret Jews and sentenced him to death in 1639. Bautista Pérez was a Portuguese converso merchant who had become one of Lima's wealthiest residents and who exerted significant influence and power in the city. Inquisitors arrested Bautista Pérez during investigations in the 1630s into some of Lima's most commercially successful residents, most of whom were conversos. How were Manuel Bautista Pérez and others able to operate as powerful players in international mercantile networks and settle in viceregal capitals when the Spanish crown had strictly prohibited conversos and other New Christians, such as Moriscos, from crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Spanish America? This is one of the important questions that animates Stuart B. Schwartz's Blood and Boundaries.
Schwartz explores the limits of religious and racial exclusion in...
