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Without Impediment: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Colonial Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2015

Jake Frederick
Jake Frederick*
Affiliation:
Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin
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Extract

On April 18, 1773, in the town of Teziutlán in the eastern mountains of Mexico, Captain don Raphael Padres participated in the baptism of his godson in the local church. He stood watching as Father Francisco Flandes leaned over the baptismal font to daub oil on the head of Joseph Philipe. As the priest performed the sacrament, reciting the script of baptism, the boy's parents, don Cristóbal Hernández and doña Isabel Pérez, followed along. After anointing the child, Father Flandes turned to the militia captain to inform him of his responsibilities as godfather, explaining the spiritual kinship that Padres now had with the boy. After the rite was completed, the priest recorded his actions in the church's book of baptisms. He noted the boy's age and that he had been legitimately born the previous day. He also listed the names of the boy, his parents, the godfather, and the godfather's wife, doña Josepha Fernández. The priest also pointed out that all the adults were españoles (of pure Spanish ancestry).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , April 2011 , pp. 495 - 515
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2011

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References

My special thanks to Peter Blitstein, Randall McNeill, Elizabeth Carlson, Kate Moody, and Matthew Restali for their careful readings and critiques of earlier versions of this article, and to Yanna Yannakakis for her suggestions on a version of this study presented as a conference paper. I am particularly grateful to the anonymous readers of The Americas who provided extensive and useful commentary and to Casey Rockwood for his elTorts in aiding my research process. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and the Lawrence University Excellence in History Fund. In reference to the article’s title, “No habiéndoles resultado ympedimento canónico” is standard phrasing from Teziutlán marriage licenses, indicating that the match was acceptable in the eyes of the Church. Canon law prohibited marriage for specific reasons generally confined to issues ofinsufficient age, consanguinity, or lack of freewill on the part of one of the participants. Church approval, however, did not necessarily equate to community approval. See Socolow, Susan, “Acceptable Partners: Marriage Choice in Colonial Argentina, 1778–1810,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Lavrin, Asunción (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 209–251.Google Scholar

1. The use of the word “race” in this study merits explanation. Casta terminology was based on racial back-ground. Words like mulato, mestizo, indio, español and pardo were in themselves based on the race of an individual’s parents. But the application of those terms was often shaped by broader criteria of social, economic, and cultural practice. For example, in the sixteenth century, a son of a conquistador and a native woman would, by genealogical definition, be mestizo, but by being raised in the community of Spaniards, speaking Spanish, and dressing like Spaniards and living among them, this individual could become nominally español. Conversely, should this child be raised among the native population, he would become indio. See Diggs, Irene, “Color in Colonial Spanish America” The Journal of Negro History 38:4 (October 1953), pp. 403–27;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mòrner, Magnus, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1967), pp. 54–56.Google Scholar Combinations that included Africans led to the same taxonomic constructions and to similar, if not equal, manipulation based on cultural factors. Articulating this distinction can be problematic. On its face the word “race” falls short of expressing the many criteria that made up the sistema de castas; yet to describe designations such as indio or pardo as “ethnicities” oversimplifies the definition of ethnicity and risks homogenizing the many ethnicities that existed within these groups. An excellent discussion of the terminology of racial and ethnic identity in the colonial era can be found in Schwaller, Robert C., “Defining Difference in Early New Spain,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 2010).Google Scholar

2. Bruce Castleman came to similar conclusions regarding Orizaba, where he found that racial movement from one category to another—particularly among mixed race groups—was often practiced by individuals seeking potential advantage. Castleman, Bruce, “Social Climbers in a Colonial Mexican City: Individual Mobility within the Sistema de Castas in Orizaba, 1777–1791,” Colonial Latin American Review 10:2 (2001), pp. 229–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Martinez, Maria Elena, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).Google Scholar See also Kamen, Henry, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

4. Schwaller, “Defining Difference,” pp. 50–56.Google Scholar

5. Diggs, , “Color in Colonial Spanish America,” passim; Susan Socolow, “Introduction,” in Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America, cds. Hoberman, Louisa Schell and Socolow, Susan Migden (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), pp. 3–18.Google Scholar

6. According to Magnus Mòrner, Alejandro LipschCitz coined the term “pigmentocracy” in his 1944 El indoamericanismo y el problema racial en las Americas to illustrate the primacy of racial identity in defining one’s position in the colonial social hierarchy. Mòrner, , Race Mixture, p. 54.Google Scholar In 1946, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán wrote of “una sociedad dividida en castas” to describe the role of racial identity in colonial Mexico. Beltrán, Gonzalo Aguirre, La población negra de México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econòmica, 1946), p. 153.Google Scholar Mòrner referred to the “bewildering and complex social structure known as the sociedad de castas” in 1967, and used sociedad de castas and régimen de castas as cognates signifying the correspondence between racial and social position. Mòrner, , Race Mixture, p. 61.Google Scholar By the 1970s, sistema de castas had become common parlance.

7. For a sample of recent literature on race and the sistema de castas see Schwaller, “Defining Difference”; Bennett, Herman, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009);Google Scholar Restali, Matthew, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009);Google Scholar Maria Elena Martinez, Genealogical Fictions; and “Interrogating Blood Lines: ‘Purity of Blood,’ the Inquisition, and Casta Categories,” in Religion in New Spain, eds. Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), pp. 196–217; Althouse, Aaron P., “Contested Mestizos, Alleged Mulattos: Racial Identity and Caste Hierarchy in Eighteenth-Century Patzcuaro, Mexico” The Americas 62:2 (October 2005) pp. 151–75;Google Scholar Katzcw, Iiona, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004);Google Scholar and Carrera, Magali, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).Google Scholar

8. SeeMartínez, , Genealogical Fictions, p. 7.Google Scholar

9. Seed, Patricia, “Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753,” Hispanic American Historical Review 62:4 (November 1982), pp. 569–606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Anderson, Rodney, “Race and Social Stratification: A Comparison of Working-Class Spaniards, Indians, and Castas in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1821,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 68:1 (May 1988), pp. 209–43, 212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Cope, R. Douglas, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).Google Scholar

12. Katzew, Casta Painting; Carrera, Imagining Identity. See also Carrera, Magali Marie, “Locating Race in Late Colonial Mexico” Art Journal 57:3 (Autumn 1998), pp. 37—45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Katzew, , Casta Painting, p. 201.Google Scholar

14. Chance, John K. and Taylor, William B., “Estate and Class in a Colonial City: Oaxaca in 1792,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19:4 (October 1977), pp. 454–87, 482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. SeeMaramo, Alfredo Martinez, “The Afromestizo Population of Coyolillo,” Callalo 27:1 (2004), pp. 142—49;Google Scholar Vinson, Ben III, “The Racial Profile of a Rural Mexican Province in the ‘Costa Chica’: Igualapa 1791,” The Americas 57:2 (October 2000), pp, 269–82;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Pavón, Guillermina del Valle, “Transformaciones de la población afro–mestiza de Orizaba según los padrones de 1777 y 1791,” in Pardos, Mulatos, y Libertos: Sexto Encuentro de Afromexicanistas, ed. Chávez-Hita, Adriana Naveda (Xalapa, Ver.: Universidad Vcracruzana, 2001), pp. 79–97;Google Scholar and Matthew Restali, The Black Middle.

16. Althouse, Aaron, “Contested Mestizos,” p. 155.Google Scholar

17. Population figures from the colonial period, especially from rural communities, often challenge attempts at precision. Peter Gerhard’s A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain normally offers numbers of families or tributaries. Neither of these figures (families or tributaries) allows an exact count of the number of individuals in a community. Calculations for converting numbers of tributaries or families to numbers of individuals vary; five people per family is often used as a very rough estimate. Gerhard recorded for Teziutlán 159 families of Spaniards, 224 families of mestizos and mulattos, and 1,102 families of natives in 1743. The 5:1 ratio described above would give the town a population somewhere around 7,500 people. Gerhard, Peter, A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), pp. 219, 257.Google Scholar See also Alcedo, Antonio de, Diccionario geográfico-histórico de las Indias Occidentales o América, vol. 5 (Madrid: Emprenta de B. Cano, 1787), p. 59.Google Scholar In Teziutlán, native sacraments (including burials) were recorded separately from those of all other ethnic groups; hence, population ratios can be assessed only by comparing the average number of sacraments conferred during periods for which there are overlapping native and non-native records. By examining the extant baptismal and burial records of Teziutlán, I have found that roughly two thirds of the population was native, while españoles, mestizos, castizos, and pardos made up the remaining third. Specifically just over 67.1% of baptisms were conferred upon natives and 32.9% were conferred on gente de razón between 1772 and 1778. Archivo de la Parroquia del Sagrario de Teziutlán, Puebla, Diócesis de Papanüa (hereafter APST), Bautismos, 1766–1778, microfilm roll 0609016, and Bautismos de Castas, 1756–1789, microfilm roll 0609010, both courtesy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Between August 1794 and May 1799, 63.2% of burials were native, and all other groups composed the remaining 36.8%. APST, Defunciones, 1788–1813,microfilm roll 0708335; courtesy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

18. In the sample there were 112 children identified as foundlings. Of those children, 85 (or 76%) were listed with a racial descriptor. Of the 85, 52 were labeled as mestizo, 27 as español, 3 as indio, and 1 as mulato. A total of 586 children had known parents; just 22 (or 3.7%) of these children had racial descriptors. Nine were labeled as mestizo, 10 as español, 4 as indio, 1 as mulato, and 2 as pardo. APST, Bautismos de Castas, 1756–1789, microfilm roll 0609010.

19. Of the 107 children with casta titles, 62 (or 57%) were mestizos and 38 (or 35%) were españoles. In the marriage records, the ratio of mestizos to españoles is quite close to that found in the birth records, 62% and 29% respectively.

20. See also Chance and Taylor, “Estate and Class.”

21. For a discussion of covert marriage strategies, see Boyer, Richard, The Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).Google Scholar

22. The significance of casta as a criterion for acceptable marriage is illustrated by the fact that it was recorded much more often than other criteria, such as occupation.

23. See Borah, Woodrow, New Spain’s Century of Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951);Google Scholar Cook, Shelburne F. and Borah, Woodrow, The Indian Population of Central Mexico, 1531–1610 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960);Google Scholar Cook, Shelburne F. and Borah, Woodrow, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 180;Google Scholar and Sánchez-Albornoz, Nicolás, Tfje Population of Latin America: A History, trans. Richardson, W.A.R. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974);Google Scholar Martinez, , Genealogical Fictions, pp. 99–105. Google Scholar

24. Cope, , The Limits of Racial Domination, p. 18.Google Scholar

25. Ward Stavig has noted this closure of native communities in the Andes in the eighteenth century, while Sonya Lipsctt-Rivera has pointed out the same process in seventeenth–century Puebla. Stavig, Ward, “Ambiguous Visions: Nature, Law, and Culture in Indigenous-Spanish Land Relations in Colonial Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 80:1 (February 2000), pp. 77–111;Google Scholar Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya, To Defend Our Waters with the Blood in Our Veins: The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).Google Scholar The resistance of native communities to the admission of outsiders was particularly significant to persons of full or partial African ancestry living in the colonies, who had ready welcome into neither the world of españoles nor the native communities. Carroll, Patrick, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).Google Scholar

26. APST, Información Matrimonial, 1751–1777, microfilm roll 712772. As records for natives’ unions with other natives do not exist for this period in Teziutlán, one can only speculate on how many unions actually took place. If one assumes that natives, who represented more than 65% of the Teziutlán population, married with the same relative frequency as non-natives, one would expect 679 native marriages during the period from 1751 through 1768, or roughly 40 per year. The pattern of native marriages between 1771 and 1798, for which native records do exist, supports this conclusion.

27. Peter Blau offers an interesting discussion of the tendency of “small groups strongly committed to a distinctive ideology” to avoid marriage outside the group. This commentary closely parallels the commitment of the Spanish elite to racial purity. Blau, Peter M., Inequality and Heterogeneity: A Primitive Theory of Social Structure (London: Collier Macmillan, 1977), pp. 137–40.Google Scholar

28. Twinam, Ann, “Honor, Sexuality, and Legitimacy in Colonial Latin America,” in Sexuality ani Marriage, ed. Asunción Lavrin, pp. 118–55.Google Scholar See also Sweet, James, “The Iberian Origins of American Racist Thought” The William and Mary Quarterly 54:1 (January 1997), pp. 143–66;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Castleman, “Social Climbers in a Colonial Mexican City”.

29. Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Contratación, 5524, Ν. 4, R.3/1/12 v. Testimony of don Manuel Cornejo, March 27, 1779.

30. See also Diggs, , “Color in Colonial Spanish America,” pp. 404–05.Google Scholar

31. See Socolow, , “Acceptable Partners,” and Latin American History and Culture: An Archival Record, Series 1, Google Scholar The Yale University Collection of Latin American Manuscripts. Part 2, Unit 1, 19/20/229, “Royal Decree by the King, June 3, 1782.” Courtesy of the Lamont Library at Harvard University. An extensive examination of the Royal Pragmatic on marriage can be found in Saether, Steinar A., “Bourbon Absolutism and Marriage Reform in Late Colonial Spanish America,” The Americas 59:4 (April 2003), pp. 475–509.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Patricia, Seed notes in To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 205–25,Google Scholar that the pragmatic allowed parents to prevent a marriage based solely on “substantial social inequality,” which quite clearly was intended to mean “racial disparity.”

32. Castleman, “Social Climbers in a Colonial Mexican City.”

33. Germeten, Nicole Von, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2006), p. 223.Google Scholar See also Bristol, Joan Cameron, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).Google Scholar

34. See Frederick, Jason, “Pardos enterrados: Unearthing Black Papantla in the Eighteenth Century” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5:2 (2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. “Passing” in colonial Mexico has been examined by a number of scholars. Traditionally, passing was understood to be the movement of individuals from one nonwhite racial category to a “more white” racial category, but individuals at times chose to move into the indio or pardo category. For passing as pardos, see Frederick, , “Pardos enterrados,” p. 9;Google Scholar Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty. For passing as native, see Kanter, Deborah, “‘Their Hair Was Curly’: Afro-Mexicans in Indian Villages, Central Mexico, 1700–1820” in Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds, eds. Miles, Tiya and Holland, P. Sharon (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).Google Scholar An excellent discussion of contestation of native identity can be found in Chambers, Sarah, “Little Middle Ground: The Instability of a Mestizo Identity in the Andes, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, eds. Applebaum, Nancy, Macpherson, Anne, and Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 32–55.Google Scholar In recognition of the degree to which significant numbers of people moved toward a non–white racial grouping, Patricia Seed chose to employ the term “variability” over “passing,” which implies only movement into the white racial group. Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race,” p. 561.

36. Cope, , The Limits of Racial Domination, p. 57.Google Scholar

37. The legitimacy of the title don in these cases can also be brought into question. During the conquest era, there was a substantial expansion of the use of the honorific among the conquerors. For Spaniards, the term was associated with birth and background, but many conquerors had won the title as a resuit of their efforts in the name of the crown. The crown also recognized the title for many native nobles. Natives then began to issue the title on their own, considering it a sign of personal achievement. As the number of dons expanded, and the native population took up the term, considerable “don inflation” took place, and the title was used with questionable authority. See Lockhart, James, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 125–27.Google Scholar

38. These normally were recorded on a single sheet of paper. The document included the name of the groom, his marital status (single or widowed) his ethnic title, and his parentage if known (the race of the parents is not recorded); the same data was given for the bride. Some records also include the occupation of the groom. The licenses also include formulaic phrasing to the effect that no conflict had been found that should prohibit the wedding. The back of each form then records the date of the actual ceremony. A small number of the documents vary from this pattern. In cases in which one of the betrothed had recently moved to the Teziutlán parish, the back of the license records a testimony from the curate of the betrothed’s last residence assuring that there is no prohibition against the marriage. Typically, there is then inserted a copy of the license with the wedding date recorded on the back of a second sheet. APST, Información Matrimonial, 1751–1777, microfilm roll 712772.

39. The available records of native marriages cover 1692–1697, 1697–1704, and 1771–1798.

40. McCaa et al. reached the same conclusion regarding a lack of endogamy among eighteenth-century mulattos and mestizos in Oaxaca: “The low endogamy ratio for the mulattos and mestizos is almost wholly explained by their relative scarcity in the marrying population.” McCaa, Robert, Schwartz, Stuart, and Grubessich, Arturo, “Race and Class in Colonial Latin America: A Critique“ Comparative Studies in Society and History 21:3 (July 1979), pp. 421–33, 427.Google Scholar Though blacks have often been found to be a relatively exogamous caste, Ben Vinson III identified an interesting counterexample in the community of Igualapa in southwestern Mexico, where in 1791, free–colored individuals were more than 90% endogamous. Vinson, Ben III, “The Racial Profile of a Rural Mexican Province,” The Americas 57:2 (October 2001): 269–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. In the sample, 30 of the españoles are designated with the title don or doña. An additional 23 have parents with those titles. All of those individuals can be characterized as elite by title, and all but one married other Spaniards. Thus, if we consider only those Spaniards who are not demonstrably elite by the possession of or descent from the title don or doña, the rate of exogamy increases to 36%.

42. An additional couple records an español groom, but the bride’s casta is not recorded.

43. Sweet, , “The Iberian Origins of American Racist Thought,” pp. 145–55.Google Scholar

44. Ibid.

45. Vinson, Ben III, “The Racial Profile of a Rural Mexican Province,” p. 280.Google Scholar

46. Martinez, Maria Elena, “Interrogating Bloodlines,” p. 209.Google Scholar

47. Seed, “The Social Dimensions of Race,” p. 569.

48. Sec Chance, and Taylor, “Estate and Class in a Colonial City”; McCaa, Schwartz, and Grubessich, “Race and Class in Colonial Latin America: A Critique”; Seed, Patricia and Rust, Philip F., “Estate and Class in Colonial Oaxaca Revisited” Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, No. 4. (October 1983), pp. 703–10;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Jackson, Robert H., Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999);Google Scholar and Von Germeten, Nicole, Black Blood Brothers, p. 6.Google Scholar

49. Patrick Carroll’s study of mestizaje in Veracruz demonstrated this same dynamic playing out among small Afro-Mexican populations. Carroll, Patrick, “Los mexicanos negros, el mestizaje y los fundamentos olvidados de la ‘raza cósmica’: una perspectiva regional,” Historia Mexicana 44:3 (1995), pp. 403–38, 411, 415.Google Scholar

50. Perhaps wc might claim that the mestizos and mulattos who formed unions with non-elite Spaniards were “marrying up.” But at the same time, no stigma of “marrying down” seemed to prohibit Spaniards from finding partners outside their own ethnic group.

51. Cope, , The Limits of Racial Domination, p. 78.Google Scholar

52. APST, Información Matrimonial, 1751–1777, microfilm roll 712772. April 18, 1774.