The Scholar
María Elena Martínez is a historian of colonial Latin America and the African diaspora. She earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of Chicago. She currently serves as Professor of History at the University of Southern California, where her research focuses on race, religion, and genealogy in the Spanish empire.
Martínez approaches history as genealogical archaeology. She traces how ideas traveled across oceans, mutating as they landed, until religious categories became racial ones and spiritual purity hardened into bodily descent.
Purity Translated
Genealogical Fictions: Limpeza de Sangre, Religion, and Race in Colonial Latin America (2008) traces the transatlantic journey of limpieza de sangre – purity of blood- from Spain to the Americas. In Iberia, this doctrine excluded Conversos and Moriscos from social standing based on their Jewish or Muslim ancestry. Martínez shows how colonizers transplanted this logic to the New World, adapting it to govern Indigenous and Black populations whose difference was not primarily religious but phenotypic and ancestral.
Her central insight is that race did not emerge in a vacuum. It arrived fully formed, carrying with it centuries of European anxiety about lineage, marriage, and social order. She reveals how genealogy became a weapon – used to police boundaries, create artificial categories of belonging, and justify the permanent enslavement of Black bodies. The Catholic Church’s obsession with blood purity provided the intellectual scaffolding for the one-drop rule that would later harden in U.S. law.
The Bridge to the Archive
Martínez gives the Archive its understanding of race as imported technology. Before she, the origin story often began with the first slave ship. She pushes that beginning further back, to the Inquisition, to the Reconquista, to the moment Spain decided that purity could be measured in blood and that some bloodlines were inherently suspect.
Her work anchors the Archive’s narrative on the legal construction of race. When the Archive asks how bondage became racial rather than universal, Martínez supplies the answer: the categories were already in the luggage. They crossed the Atlantic alongside the settlers, the clergy, the conquistadors.
She also connects directly to Ibram X. Kendi. Where Kendi traces how racist ideas justified discriminatory policy in the United States, Martínez shows the older transatlantic machinery that made those ideas thinkable in the first place. Together, they form a continuum: Spain’s purity of blood becomes Virginia’s partus sequitur ventrem becomes the one-drop rule.
She threads into Kathleen Brown and Edmund Morgan, who examine how gender and class anxieties shaped colonial Virginia’s labor laws. Martínez provides the European genealogy of those laws’ ideological underpinnings – the moment religious exclusion became racial subordination.