Classic and New Reading on Race and Status in Colonial Latin America
by Ann Twinam
Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
While Morner proposed a more static view of the construction of racial categories in colonial Spanish America, his work is fundamental to understanding where we started.
Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Cope’s work complicates Mörner’s by emphasizing the fluidity of socioracial categories in Spanish America. He suggested that ““a person’s race might be described as a shorthand summation of his social network.”
Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Matthew Restall’s many publications highlight the repercussions of Native and African interactions, a theme less researched until recently.
Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Joanne Rappaport provides nuanced understandings of the complexities of racial construction, exploring how Spanish Americans created their own socio-racial identities. (Reviewed in depth on NEP by Adrian Masters.)