Race and Classification

The Case of Mexican America

Ilona Katzew, Susan Deans-Smith

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780804772587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

This innovative and provocative volume focuses on the historical development of racial thinking and imagining in Mexico and the southwestern United States over a period of almost five centuries, from the earliest decades of Spanish colonial rule and the birth of a multiracial colonial population, to the present. The distinguished contributors to the volume bring into dialogue sophisticated new scholarship from an impressive range of disciplines, including social and cultural history, art history, legal studies, and performance art. The essays provide an engaging and original framework for understanding the development of racial thinking and classification in the region that was once New Spain and also shed new light on the history of the shifting ties between Mexico and the United States and the transnational condition of Latinos in the US today.

1

The Language, Genealogy, and Classification of “Race” in Colonial Mexico

María Elena Martínez

DURING THE PAST THREE DECADES, studies of race have tended to stress that the meanings and uses of the concept have varied across time, space, and cultures.¹ Indeed, the notion seems to derive some of its power from its very epistemological and historical instability, from what the historian Thomas C. Holt calls its chameleon-like and parasitic nature: “chameleon-like” because of its ability to transmute, “parasitic” because of its tendency to attach itself to other social phenomena.² Despite Holt’s emphasis on the cultural and historical specificity of racial ideologies, he and a number of other scholars anchor modern notions of race in the sixteenth century, if not before.³ During this period, the term began to appear with some frequency in the Romance languages and in English as European expansion to the Americas, the establishment of the transatlantic slave trade, and other “global” processes forged the Atlantic world—that metaphorical and physical space of cultural interactions and hybridity.⁴ But if the emergence of modern notions of race and the rise of the Atlantic world went hand in hand, the racial ideologies that surfaced in that “world” also differed in significant ways due to the particularities of European colonizing projects and the ways in which they confronted local conditions, peoples, and change in the Americas. In certain regions of Spanish America, for example, these particularities produced a system of classification based on African, European, and Native American descent, the sistema de castas, some of the underlying principles of which were depicted in the eighteenth-century Mexican pictorial genre now known as casta painting.⁵

This essay focuses on three sets of questions that the casta pictorial genre raises about the nature and history of classification in New Spain and more generally about colonial Mexico’s racial ideology. First, why is the language of social differentiation mainly one of casta (caste) and not raza (race)? What did these Castilian terms mean in the early modern period and how was their deployment linked to Spanish cultural-religious principles and notions of social order? Second, when and why did casta classifications emerge and in what institutional and social contexts were they used? Third, what implications did Hispanic definitions of “race” and “caste” have on central Mexican notions of mestizaje (“mixture”)? Did these notions change in the eighteenth century and if so how? Addressing these three sets of questions will help provide an overview of Mexican colonial racial ideology and explain in part why the casta pictorial genre took the form that it did.

“Race” and “Caste” in the Early Modern Hispanic World, 1400–1700s

Although the origin of the Castilian word raza is uncertain, perhaps dating as far back as the thirteenth century, its use started to become prominent in the 1500s. As was the case with its equivalents in other European languages, it generally referred to lineage.⁶ The strong belief in nobility as an essence transmitted by blood meant that the word was sometimes used to distinguish between nobles and commoners. This deployment did not necessarily contradict monogenesis, the potentially egalitarian idea of humanity’s common descent. As the historian Paul Freedman has argued, medieval Europeans often explained inequality and in particular serfdom through biblical myths about past ancestors who had sinned (such as Noah’s son Ham) or through more secular ones, in which, for example, the servile condition of a particular “national” or local group was attributed to descent from cowardly or conquered forefathers.⁷ The division of humankind into different lineages was thus perfectly compatible with the doctrine of a common creation. That Spain’s late medieval nobility was not a closed caste did not temper its belief in the superiority of its “blood” and its use of the concept of raza to distinguish itself from commoners. Indeed, some of Spain’s military orders only granted habits to persons whose ancestors had been of noble blood and without the “race or mixture of commoners” (“hijosdalgo de sangre, sin raza ni mezcla de villano”).⁸

Incubated in the estate system, the Castilian concept of race took a different direction in the sixteenth century as it attached itself, like a parasite, to religion and came to refer not so much to ancestry from pecheros (tax-payers) and villanos (commoners) but to descent from Jews, Muslims, and eventually other religious categories. This linguistic shift was largely the result of the limpieza de sangre statutes, requirements of “pure” Christian ancestry that various Spanish religious and secular institutions began to adopt in the mid 1400s.⁹ Initially passed amid a climate of deep social and political tensions and rising anxieties over the “true” religious commitments of the Jews who had converted to Christianity, the conversos (also called New Christians), the statutes spread during the next one hundred years. Their spread therefore coincided with the establishment of the Inquisition in Spain, the rise of Protestantism, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, and the Counter-Reformation, all of which, in different ways, heightened Spanish concerns with Catholic orthodoxy. By the end of the sixteenth century, the most important institutions with limpieza requirements—including the Inquisition, the three main military orders, and a number of university colleges and cathedral chapters—had extended the category of “impurity” to Muslim converts to Christianity, the moriscos, and developed genealogical procedures to distinguish “old” from “new” Christians. Furthermore, the term raza, whose meanings previously varied, had been displaced onto those who were considered impure and defined in unequivocally negative terms.¹⁰ Hence, in the early seventeenth century the Castilian linguist Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco wrote that when the term was used to refer to lineages, it had a pejorative connotation, “like having some Moorish or Jewish race.”¹¹ For this reason, cristianos viejos (Old Christians) seldom applied it to themselves. Jews, Muslims, and even Protestants were marked through the concept of “race,” but not the people with putatively long and unsullied ties to Christianity.

As the categories of “new” and “old” Christian imply, temporality was central to the concept of limpieza de sangre. Just as time produced vintage wine, generations of devotion to the faith seasoned and aged Christian lineages. Some of the first statutes stipulated that the “stains” of Jewish and Muslim ancestry were to be traced only to the four grandparents (the cuatro costados, or four corners), hence implying that it took three, sometimes four, generations for a convert’s descendants to be considered Old Christians. But by the 1550s most of the key institutions with purity requirements did not place a limit on the investigations. The condition or status of limpieza de sangre thereafter referred to lineages that claimed to be Christian since “time immemorial,” that is, for which there could be no memory of a different religious past. The more obscure one’s ancestors, the better. The witnesses in the purity information of Pedro de Vega expressed this sense of religious genealogical time (made especially significant by the Peninsula’s long struggle with Islam) when in 1585 they declared before an inquisitorial tribunal that he was pure because he derived from “simple, plain people, aged Old Christians” (“gente boba, llana, christianos viejos, ranciosos”).¹² That their Old Christian ancestry could imbue peasants and common tax-payers with a sense of superiority over some nobles seemed a “monstrous” situation to some of the proponents of reforming the statutes. Spain was the only country in history, observed Diego Serrano de Silva, an early seventeenth-century inquisitor and author of a memorial about the statutes, to have produced not just a division between nobles and plebeians, but one based on limpieza de sangre, which he claimed was undermining the prestige and privileges of the noble estate. The purity statutes, he claimed, were placing aristocrats with converso ancestors in a lower social place than peasants and people who practiced mechanical trades, and in general making Old Christian commoners believe that they were more important than patricians.¹³

However, the growing importance of the concept of limpieza de sangre did not destroy the more “feudal” or estate-based notion of purity of (noble) blood, nobleza de sangre.¹⁴ During the second half of the sixteenth century, the traditional aristocracy, anxious to dispel the popular perception that intermarriages with converso families had made many noble lineages impure as well as to enhance its exclusivity, made purity of blood a requirement for noble status.¹⁵ Helping to precipitate a “refeudalization” of Castilian society, the merging of the two discourses of purity—one referring to the absence (or remoteness) of commoner ancestry, the other to the lack of Jewish, Muslim, or heretic ancestors—heightened the Spanish obsession with lineage.¹⁶ By the late seventeenth century, key Spanish institutions—including the Consejo de Órdenes (Council of Orders)—tended to verify not only purity of religious ancestry (limpieza de sangre) and of noble blood (nobleza de sangre), but of occupation (limpieza de oficios). The multiplicity of limpiezas and manchas (stains) enhanced the symbolic capital of genealogies, turning them into veritable fetishes.

Spanish society’s obsession with genealogy was manifested not only in the rise of the linajudos, experts in genealogies who devoted themselves to policing lineages for signs of “impure” ancestry (and to trying to profit from their knowledge),¹⁷ but in the pervasiveness of a language of blood that in the seventeenth century became increasingly baroque. Terms such as sangre (blood), casta (breeding), generación (lineage), raíz (root), tronco (trunk), and rama (branch) figured prominently in Castile’s social and legal vocabulary and continued to be important well into the eighteenth century.¹⁸ For example, when members of the Calleja family of Placencia submitted proof of their purity and nobility, they included genealogical information for brothers and uncles, because they were all of the same “stock and trunk” (cepa y tronco).¹⁹ The persistence of this vocabulary in the Iberian Peninsula was sustained by internal dynamics—by the refeudalization of Castilian society and spread of the limpieza statutes—but it was also influenced by events in Spanish America, which generated a plethora of transatlantic genealogical investigations for the secular and religious administration and which also produced a language of blood.²⁰ This language, however, was not fundamentally one of raza but of casta. How did the second term differ?

Both part of a lexicon of blood that had been influenced by common understandings of how reproduction functioned in the natural world (especially in the realm of horse breeding),²¹ the terms casta and raza could refer to breed, species, and lineage. At times they were used interchangeably to describe groupings of animals, plants, or humans.²² Casta, however, had a series of other connotations. If as a noun it was usually linked to lineage, as an adjective it could allude to chastity, nobility (“good breeding”), and legitimacy, and more generally to an uncorrupted sexual and genealogical history.²³ Casta was thereby able to give way to the term castizo, which referred to a person of notable ancestry and legitimate birth.²⁴ By implication the mother of a castizo would have been casta, virginal before marriage and faithful as a wife. When applied to humans, then, the sixteenth-century Spanish word casta and its various connotations were clearly alluding to a system of social order centered around procreation and biological parenthood, one in which reproducing the p...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: - The Alchemy of Race in Mexican America
• 1 - The Language, Genealogy, and Classification of “Race” in Colonial Mexico
• 2 - “Dishonor in the Hands of Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks”
• 3 - “That This Should Be Published and Again in the Age of the Enlightenment?”
• 4 - Moctezuma Through the Centuries
• 5 - Eugenics and Racial Classification in Modern Mexican America
• 6 - Hispanic Identities in the Southwestern United States
• 7 - Race and Erasure The Hernandez v. Texas Case
• 8 - Reconfiguring Race, Gender, and Chicano/a Identity in Film
• 9 - Pose and Poseur The Racial Politics of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Photo-Performances
• Notes
• Index