Island Baptisms: The Canary Islands and the Earliest Archives of Race in the Spanish Atlantic

The Christian ritual of baptism has been regularly practiced since the very earliest Christian communities. However, the practice of keeping baptismal records emerged only as European Catholic monarchies such as Spain and Portugal began to explore, conquer, and colonize Africa and the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Canary Islands are particularly important for understanding the development of the baptismal archive because they were one of the first locations in the Spanish Empire in which enslaved Africans were regularly baptized and where those baptisms were regularly recorded. Using sources that include some of the earliest baptismal registers in the Spanish Empire, as well as a series of pastoral visits by Bishops, this paper traces the development of baptismal record-keeping in the Canary Islands, particularly Gran Canaria and its capital, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and shows how the Canary Islands set precedents for baptismal record-keeping that influenced the Spanish Empire as it expanded into the Atlantic and the Americas. Understanding the development of the baptismal archive in the Canary Islands is essential to understanding the development of race in the Spanish Atlantic because it was through the baptismal archives that race was assigned, tracked, and verified.