Impurity of Blood

Book excerpt: Impurity of Blood analyzes the proposition of Spanish racial thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that racial strength came from a fusion of different groups, rather than from a kind of racial purity. By providing a history of ethnic thought in Spain in the medieval and early modern era, and by studying the formation of racial thought in Spain's nascent human sciences and its political and cultural manifestations leading into the Franco regime, it provides a new view of racial thought in Europe and its connections to the larger twentieth century formation of racial thought in the West.