Let’s imagine the following scene: 16th Century. A person enters a bar or posada (a male most certainly) and asks the bartender for a glass of wine. With the wine comes a tapa (a culinary specialty to acompany the drink that dates from the Middle Ages). The tapa is in this case a slice of cured ham on top of the glass (tapa means lid in Spanish). A mechanism composed of hundreds of surveilling eyes is put into place after that gesture. Would the person eat the piece of pork before the wine? Would he even touch it with his hand? Would he put it aside while drinking, disimulating his contempt?

In the 16th Century, pork became an instrument to identify “fake” conversos. The Inquisición’s long arm reached all the tabernas, in which tapas served as a mechanism of control and subjectivation. The expulsion of Jews and Moors from the Iberian Peninsula meant the first epistemicide of modernity. This was translated into other epistemicides/genocides with the colonization and the creation of the first world-system. The Iberian surveillance state resided both in the individuals and the institutions, and was also translated into other contexts such as the American plantation. Tapas are those pequeñas píldoras de análisis, in which modern racism can be traced.