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On the Mexican Mestizo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

John K. Chance
John K. Chance*
Affiliation:
Lawrence University
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No one with even a passing acquaintance with the literature on Mexican society, not to mention the rest of Spanish America, can fail to be impressed by the frequent use of the term mestizo. Despite its ubiquity in the writings of social scientists, however, the concept of the mestizo is customarily employed in a vague fashion and usually left undefined. This is especially evident in the work of anthropologists, who for many years have been preoccupied with defining the Mexican Indian but have rarely focused their analytical powers on the mestizo. The term itself has been used rather loosely to refer to a certain group of people who presumably comprise a majority of the Mexican population, a cultural pattern shared by these people and other Latin Americans, and even a personality type.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , 1979 , pp. 153 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 75th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C., 17–21 November 1976. I wish to thank my colleagues William P. Delaney, Karl L. Eggert, and Hugo Martines, as well as three anonymous readers provided by this journal, for their comments and criticisms on earlier drafts.

2. For recent examples see Judith Friedlander, Being Indian in Hueyapan: A Study of Forced Identity in Contemporary Mexico (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975); and Barbara Luise Margolies, Princes of the Earth: Subcultural Diversity in a Mexican Municipality (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1975).

3. John Gillin, “Modern Latin American Culture,” Social Forces 25 (1947):243–48; and “Mestizo America,” in Most of the World, ed. Ralph Linton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), pp. 156–211.

4. Eric Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

5. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Obra polémica (Mexico City: SEP-INAH, 1976), p. 119.

6. Ibid.

7. The difference in meaning between the terms mestizo and ladino is a related topic of interest that will not be dealt with here. The latter term is most commonly used in the highland regions of Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala. See Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Mestizo or Ladino?,” Race 10 (1969):463–77.

8. Wolf, Shaking Earth.

9. Ibid., p. 235.

10. Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México: estudio etnohistórico, Segunda Edición (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972), p. 219. I have reinterpreted Aguirre Beltrán's idiosyncratic definition of racial categories in his table 10.

11. S. F. Cook, “The Population of Mexico in 1793,” Human Biology 14 (1942):499–515.

12. Ibid., p. 503 fn.

13. Fernando Navarro y Noriega, Memoria sobre la población del reino de Nueva España (Mexico City: Oficina de D. Juan Bautista de Arizpe, 1820), p. 15.

14. Alejandro de Humboldt, Ensayo político sobre el reino de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1941) 2:140; Navarro y Noriega, Memoria, p. 15.

15. The data that form the base for this discussion come from chapters 5 and 6 of John K. Chance, Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978).

16. Archivo General de Indias (Seville), Patronato 230B, Ramo 10.

17. D. A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 248–49.

18. Archivo Parroquial del Sagrario, Oaxaca, Libros de Casamientos, 1693–1700.

19. These matters are discussed at greater length in Chance, Race and Class.

20. John K. Chance, “The Urban Indian in Colonial Oaxaca,” American Ethnologist 3(1976):603–32.

21. Wolf, Shaking Earth, pp. 238–42.

22. Archivo General de Indias (Seville), Patronato 230B, Ramo 10.

23. Technically, castizos were nonwhites who derived from creole-mestizo unions. Since in Oaxaca they were very small in numbers and did not constitute a significant element in the social structure, they have been included with the mestizos in these figures.

24. Archivo Parroquial del Sagrario, Oaxaca, Libros de Casamientos, 1793–97.

25. Wolf, Shaking Earth, p. 243.

26. Lyle McAlister, in “Social Structure and Social Change in New Spain,” Hispanic American Historical Review 43 (1963):349–70 includes the mestizos in the casta stratum. Magnus Mörner, in Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), chapter 5, regards the colonial mestizos as forming a distinct racial estate. For a more detailed critique of these positions see John K. Chance and William B. Taylor, “Estate and Class in a Colonial City: Oaxaca in 1792,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977):454–87; and Chance, Race and Class.

27. H. Hoetink, Caribbean Race Relations: A Study of Two Variants (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 21.

28. D. A. Brading and Celia Wu, “Population Growth and Crisis: León, 1720–1860,” Journal of Latin American Studies 5 (1973):8–9.

29. Brading and Wu (“Population Growth,” pp. 9, 36) point out that by the end of the eighteenth century the Indian and mulatto groups of the Bajío region were fast losing their separate ethnic identities. In Oaxaca, by contrast, there was much less intermarriage between Indians and non-Indians, and more Indian males married creole than mulatto women in the late eighteenth century. Indian identity in Oaxaca remained strong in both rural and urban settings. See Chance, “The Urban Indian,” p. 628.

30. Moisés González Navarro, “Mestizaje in Mexico during the National Period,” in Race and Class in Latin America, ed. Magnus Mörner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 145–69.

31. Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra, pp. 226–27.

32. Humboldt, Ensayo Politico 2:120.

33. Navarro y Noriega, Memoria, p. 15.

34. Quoted in Humboldt, Ensayo Politico 2:101.

35. José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi, Periquillo Sarniento (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1976), 2 vols.

36. Wolf, Shaking Earth, pp. 241, 244, 246.

37. See González Navarro, “Mestizaje” for a brief discussion.

38. Aguirre Beltrán, Obra polemica, p. 141.

39. See Martin S. Stabb, “Indigenism and Racism in Mexican Thought: 1857–1911,” Journal of Interamerican Studies 1 (1959), p. 413.

40. Aguirre Beltrán, Obra polémica, p. 145.

41. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 87.