The history of the moriscos has remained a contested part of Spain’s self-understanding. This paper examines how nineteenth-century intellectuals, artists, and politicians reframed the catastrophe in response to pervasive anxieties of their own era. As Spain struggled to define its national identity two hundred years after the expulsion of the moriscos, internal conflict, political instability, the loss of the American colonies, economic crisis, and war with the Moroccan protectorate transformed the “morisco problem” into an ideological point of reference. Accounts of the expulsion became a national exercise in historical revisionism, stimulated by Isabel II and subsequently Alfonso XII. This paper analyzes the nationalistic thrust apparent in nineteenth-century historiographies of the morisco expulsion. It takes into account both written accounts by Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, María Sangrador y Vitores, Manuel Danvila y Collado, and Florencio Janer y Graells and visual depictions of the expulsion by painters Edwin Long, Francisco Domingo Marqués, and Gabriel Puig Roda. These tendentious historiographies, in both written and visual forms, invite reflection on Spain’s longstanding struggle to come to terms with the violence and intolerance of this chapter in its history.