The religious and cultural tolerance that the conquering Catholic monarchs promised their Islamic subjects ‘forever and ever’ in the 1491 Capitulations lasted but a decade, as Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros's policy of forced conversions replaced the patient evangelization efforts of Granada's first archbishop, Hernando de Talavera, at the turn of the century. The downward spiral into what Francisco Márquez Villanueva characterizes as religious persecution and cultural genocide stretching over more than a century is a tragedy of Spain's history both too complex and too well known to merit repetition in one more essay. My concern herein is with the question of how the trauma of that historical tragedy was negotiated in the dramatic tragedy Pedro Calderón de la Barca wrote on the 1568–70 rebellion of the moriscos, brutally put down by troops commanded by Don Juan de Austria. Events of the twenty-first century have propelled us to a point in time and space that invites us to salvage from the wreckage piled at the feet ofWalter Benjamin's angel of history a baroque pearl, Calderón's puzzling drama, El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra. This work (its title in the 1682 Vera Tassis edition is Amar después de la muerte) has long intrigued me. Why would Calderón – famous for his service to the Catholic faith in his autos sacramentales long before he was ordained a priest in 1651 – write a work that from its first lines conveys much sympathy for a rebellious Granadine morisco population, decades after their final expulsion from Spain between 1609 and 1614?