Race in Latin America Archives

Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico by Daniel Nemser (2017)

by Haley Schroer
By focusing on the relationship between race and physical space, Nemser analyzes colonial concepts of race through an unexpected and innovative lens. His investigation of concrete structures and their effect on the creation of Mexico’s caste society spans the Spanish colonial period, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Examining the dynamic among the indigenous, Spanish, and mestizo populations in Mexico City, Nemser claims that the conceptualization of race in colonial Mexico developed not only through interpersonal relationships but also grew out of the physical separation of peoples into distinct spaces.

Nemser focuses on four key spaces: religious congregations, mestizo schools, urban neighborhoods, and the city’s royal gardens. Ultimately, he finds that the physical separation of cultural groups implicitly created the subordinate status of non-Spanish populations. These racialized spaces, then, cultivated and institutionalized the inequality still found in Mexico today.

Nemser begins his discussion with the first Spanish efforts to separate indigenous populations into religious settlements known as congregations. He builds upon this foundational Spanish-indigenous dichotomy by then investigating the paradoxical existence of the mestizo and the segregation of Mexico City’s neighborhoods. Initially, biracial mestizos appeared to be the perfect mediators to bring the Spanish Catholic faith to indigenous populations. However, by the end of the sixteenth century, mestizos’ role in society had declined from missionary to vagabond. The subsequent separation of mestizos into different schools and neighborhoods further cultivated their reputation as dangerous and untrustworthy. Finally, Nemser experiments with a much more conceptual argument. Focusing on early modern Spanish understandings of botany, he asserts that the organization of the city’s botanical gardens throughout the nineteenth century acted as the predecessor to the scientific racism characteristic of the twentieth century. As imperial botanists in Mexico City separated plants into distinct spaces and micro-climates based on their biological characteristics, new concepts of biopolitics developed to address New Spain’s growing multiracial population.

A painting showing the casta system in eighteenth-century Mexico (via Wikipedia)

Nemser structures his book in a way that capitalizes on accessibility to the reader. Each of the four core chapters discusses an increasingly more complex separation of space. The reader thus moves from concrete religious congregations to more abstract botanical divisions. This allows Nemser to delve into the complexity of racial separation in the colonial era without confusing readers. Finally, he utilizes the introduction and conclusion to tie these colonial concepts back to the modern era.

Infrastructures of Race relies on public resources such as administrative reports, academic debates, and urban surveys that allow Nemser to demonstrate how Spanish officials restructured urban spaces into racialized areas. Due to the nature of the sources, it is difficult to gauge the indigenous perspective. As such, Nemser’s analysis emphasizes the role of elite administrators in codifying race but cannot provide the indigenous response to such separation.

Infrastructures of Race provides a compelling discussion of the role of physical spaces in creating and solidifying definitions of race in society. Weaving a narrative between established theory and new research, Nemser has created an investigation that is both innovative and accessible to the reader. Taking care to consistently maintain the relevancy of the colonial caste system to modern Mexico, Nemser sheds light on both historical racial organization and contemporary institutional racism. Both academic and non-academic audiences will find Nemser’s work thought provoking.

Also by Haley Schroer on Not Even Past:

Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional

Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Nancy P. Appelbaum (2016)

By Madeleine Olson

What occurs when elite driven narratives about national identity dramatically different differ from the realities people experienced? During the nineteenth century throughout Latin America, when national boundaries were just beginning to become coherent, the upper echelons of society constructed tales about their nations that often vastly differed from lived experiences.

Between 1850 and 1859, the Chorographic Commission traveled the territory of present day Colombia in an attempt to map the land and the people who lived there, using chorography, or detailed representations of a particular region. Sponsored by the government of New Granada (an older name for Colombia), the commission produced a wealth of maps, texts, illustrations, as well as travel journals and diaries, in order to construct the image of a unified nation. Implicit in the commission’s initial mandate was the assumption that it would justify the existing administrative order by making that order appear natural.

The visual culture it produced, however, depicted a nation that was far from cohesive, with regional individuality and diversity. Instead of portraying a unified nation, the commission presented the country as fragmented into different, and often opposing regions, inhabited by racially and culturally distinct races, that reinforced assumptions of Andean and white mestizo superiority. In this new book, Nancy Appelbaum expands our understanding of this central paradox, demonstrating that the commission’s materials reveal some of the ways that Colombian elites grappled with the challenges posed by varied topographies and diverse inhabitants.

The leaders of the Chorographic Commission included both foreign members and others who were born and bred in New Granada. Two of the key figures on the commission, whose writings play an important role throughout the book, were Agustín Codazzi and Manuel Ancízar. Born in Italy’s papal states and a Napoleonic war veteran, Codazzi was in fact first contracted to map the Venezuelan provinces, which had seceded from Gran Colombia, in 1830. The secession precipitated Gran Colombia’s dissolution into Venezuela, Ecuador, and New Granada. Manuel Ancízar, a Colombian lawyer, writer, and journalist, joined Codazzi on the Commission in 1850.

Gran Colombia and modern countries (via Wikimedia Commons).

Using personal correspondence between Codazzi and Ancízar, Appelbaum argues that although the creation of the commission reflected nationalist aspirations of the government, it was fundamentally shaped through its leaders’ own exposure to foreign culture. The geographic writings of Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, as well as Italian Adriano Balbi, strongly influenced Codazzi’s and Ancízar’s initial overviews, as they “draped themselves in the ‘mantle of Humboldtianism’ to emphasize their own scientific legitimacy.” Inspired by Humboldt, Codazzi divided the terrain of New Granada according to the differing altitudes, winds, and vegetables that he encountered. The ideological influence of Humboldt, together with Balbi’s schematic list methodology, helped the Commission create a novel and distinct approach to chorography that was more affordable than the fashionable trigonometric survey.

The detailed accounts produced by Codazzi and Ancízar on the commission’s initial expeditions to the highland region of Antioquia and the Pacific lowland, comprised not only field reports, but also included detailed watercolors created by the commission’s first illustrators in order to depict the populations they encountered. Through comparing the perceptions noted in the field reports with the pictorial representations, the tension comes out between the inclination to show these regions as homogenous when the commission clearly experienced great heterogeneity of the people and customs.

William Price, Typical Inhabitants of the Province of Medellín (via World Digital Library).

This visual culture reflected a literary and artistic current in nineteenth-century Latin America called costumbrismo, or using descriptive prose and dialogue to verbally paint a local scene, emphasizing the customs and particularities of that locale. Within these works, tipos “types” that organized the population into component parts defined by race, occupation, and place, were created to provide both a visual and discursive way to manage the heterogeneity that the commission encountered. In William Price’s Tipos de Medellin, the commission’s artists displayed idealized images of people one would encounter when visiting these places. These images of the racial types that the commission produced updated the eighteenth-century genre of casta paintings for the republican era.

As the commission moved into the tropical lowlands and the eastern plains, Appelbaum further elaborates how the illustrations were largely aimed at an external audience in order to attract immigrants and economic investment to the region. The commission’s efforts were not meant to simply represent the landscape, they were also to transform it in the service of economic advancement. Codazzi believed that these areas, rich in agriculture and livestock, could support many more people than their sparse, midcentury population. Elites defined the tropics, for instance, as being filled with disease, poverty, and backwardness, making it a desirable region for colonization and improved methods of production. The commission took on an ethnographic dimension, as studying the population became an integral part in determining the economic capabilities of the land. Reports, maps, and paintings that Codazzi, Ancízar, and others, produced provided abundant information aimed to facilitate the conquest of the regions they mapped and studied.

Manuel María Paz, Provincia del Chocó: Aspecto esterior de las casas de Nóvita (via World Digital Library).

Applebaum goes on to discuss the methods that mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals living in the highlands around Bogotá employed to rationalize their claim over the local populations. By emphasizing the glorious origins and civilization of the Andean region around Bogotá, at the expense of lower “savage” climates, intellectuals reinforced Bogotá’s claim over this topographically disparate territory. Codazzi projected national history into the ancient past by weaving geology, archeology, and history together and referencing the past as “history” rather than prehistory. They placed themselves, not the local indigenous populations, who ultimately were the Commission’s guides, at the top of the intellectual scale to read the cataclysmic past.

Carmelo Fernández, Piedra grabada de Gámesa. Provincia de Tundama (via World Digital Library).

After Codazzi died in 1859, elites left behind tried to make sense of his project and battled each other over meanings and representations of the nation. Although members of the commission had high hopes for the mass reproduction and circulation of the materials they produced, that did not occur. Chorography and the work of the Chorographic Commission died with Codazzi, supplanted later in the nineteenth century by newer forms of mapping which are still common today, such as topography.

Although the work that the Chorographic Commission created between 1850 and 1859 was not as widely received as hoped, the spatialized and racialized regional hierarchy inherent in its visual materials would be reproduced and refined within Colombian scholarly and popular discourse. By no means the originator of this fragmented discourse, the Commission’s cartographic project formed the basis for most maps of Colombia into the early twentieth century.

Gracefully written, integrating over thirty images and maps, Mapping the Country of Regions offers a fascinating window into both the visual culture produced during the nineteenth century in Colombia, and the ways that territories, boundaries, and state-lines are constructed. Appelbaum’s contextualization of her source base that she makes explicit within her analysis heightens her claims about the use of geographic, ethnographic, and visual methods to secure territory. This theme of racialization of geographic hierarchy is not solely limited to Colombia, as ideas about how race and region have historically informed each other throughout Latin America. The blending of analysis with visual representation enables this book to be of use for those interested in not only Latin American nation-state building, but this methodology of combining visual and textual analysis would be of value for anyone incorporating visual culture into their own work.

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

Also by Madeleine Olson on Not Even Past:
A Texas Historian’s Perspective on Mexican State Anticlericalism.

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Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional, by Haley Schroer.
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History and Advocacy: Brazil in Turmoil

By Edward Shore

On August 31, 2016, Brazil’s senate impeached embattled President Dilma Rousseff on charges of concealing budget shortfalls with funds from a federal bank. The vote was merely a formality. The decision of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) to abandon its coalition with Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (PT) had sealed the fate of Brazil’s first female president months ago. Dilma’s ouster took place amid a free falling economy and a jarring corruption scandal involving the state oil company, Petrobras, that has implicated roughly two-thirds of the Brazilian legislature and rocked the foundation of Latin America’s largest democracy. Operação Lava Jato or “Operation Car Wash” is a criminal investigation authorized by the Brazilian Federal Police that began as a money laundering probe but has since widened to investigate politicians and Petrobras executives accused of accepting bribes in return for awarding contracts to construction firms at inflated prices. Prominent members of every major party are accused of accepting bribes and stashing public funds in secret accounts in Panama and Switzerland. Brazil’s Supreme Court charged Michel Temer, Dilma’s former vice-president and current president of Brazil, with violating campaign finance laws, preventing him from seeking re-election after his term ends in 2018. His disqualification is probably moot. Temer is so unpopular that he chose not to attend the closing ceremonies of the Rio Olympic Games at Maracanã Stadium to avoid angry spectators who jeered and brandished signs calling for his resignation.

Picture of demonstrators clamor for Dilma Rousseff's impeachment in São Paulo — Demonstrators clamor for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in São Paulo. Courtesy Al Jazeera.

While cabinet ministers, legislators, and former presidential candidates are accused of stealing from public coffers, prosecutors have failed to bring similar charges against Rousseff. Many observers allege that her impeachment was a conspiracy to prevent further investigation into the Car Wash scandal and to remove the Workers’ Party from power after thirteen years. They suspect that Dilma’s predecessor and presumptive favorite to win the presidency in 2018, Luiz Ignácio “Lula” Da Silva, was the target of the federal investigators all along. Michel Temer and his all white male cabinet represent a stark repudiation of the PT coalition, an alliance of working people, students, intellectuals, social movement activists, women, and people of color. The administration’s proposal to slash social programs responsible for lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty has led to violent clashes between police and demonstrators in major cities across the country September 2016. Once again, the poor and vulnerable will pay a heavy price for the sins of Brazil’s political class.

What does the fallout mean for Brazil’s traditional peoples- namely indigenous groups, rubber tappers, and rural black communities descended from fugitive slaves called quilombos? Two weeks before Dilma’s impeachment, I traveled to São Paulo’s Atlantic Rainforest to visit my friends and colleagues at the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), an NGO that defends the social and environmental rights of traditional peoples in Brazil. I attended the Ninth Annual Quilombo Seeds Festival, a farmers’ market and seminar organized by ISA in the heartland of the Ribeira Valley, a region that is home to 88 quilombo communities and the last preserves of endangered species and wildlife in Brazil’s most heavily industrialized state. Each year, farmers and fishermen from the quilombos gather in the town of Eldorado to exchange seeds, roots, crops, livestock, fish, and oysters to promote food security and to defend against cultural loss resulting from environmental restrictions on subsistence farming and the intrusion of mineral companies on their lands.

Quilombos and spectators gather for the Ninth Annual ISA Quilombo Seeds Festival in Eldorado, São Paulo. Photo courtesy Claudio Tavares-ISA — Quilombos and spectators gather for the Ninth Annual ISA Quilombo Seeds Festival in Eldorado, São Paulo, August 2016. Courtesy Claudio Tavares-ISA

Dilma’s impending trial cast a shadow over the event. Quilombolas (individuals who identify as quilombo-descendants) feared the ouster of PT would embolden their enemies: corporate farmers, cattle ranchers, and proponents of hydroelectric dams. They also worried that Temer’s government would impose new limitations on quilombos’ constitutional rights to land. Dilma Rousseff was hardly an ardent defender of traditional peoples’ rights. Davi Pereira Júnior, a doctoral student in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas and activist from the quilombo community of Itamatatiua in Maranhão, has criticized Rousseff’s government for “closing its eyes to the assassinations of dozens of quilombo leaders who were killed in cold blood while defending their communities’ rights to land.” During Dilma’s presidency, Brazil fast tracked approval of several hydroelectric dams, including the Belo Monte project in Xingu, Pará, that will displace more than 20,000 people, including indigenous groups like the Juruna and Arara, and destroy 250 square miles of protected rainforest in the Amazon. Her administration also did little to resolve the bureaucratic impasse that has prevented thousands of quilombos from obtaining land and recognition from the government. Still, many acknowledge the situation could get worse. Much worse.

Michel Temer’s government has already curbed traditional peoples’ rights in significant ways. First, his administration axed the Ministry of Culture that previously was in charge of approving communities’ petitions for recognition as quilombo-descendant and stripped responsibility for titling quilombo lands from INCRA, the federal agency in charge of agrarian reform. Now the task of certifying quilombos and conferring land titles falls to the Ministry of Education, which lacks the funds, personnel, or expertise to carry out its responsibilities. “In this political climate, how will our communities obtain recognition? Who will take responsibility? Who is responsible for recognizing our rights?” asked Zé Rodrigues, a leader from Quilombo Ivaporunduva. Temer’s administration has eliminated the Secretary for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR), an agency that oversaw public policies to promote education, health care, social services for quilombo communities across the country.

Quilombola activists gather in Eldorado for a seminar on climate change hosted by Instituto Socioambiental. Courtesy Claudio Tavares ISA. — Quilombola activists gather in Eldorado for a seminar on climate change hosted by Instituto Socioambiental in August 2016. Courtesy Claudio Tavares-ISA.

The new government also endorsed PEC 215, a proposed amendment to the constitution that seeks to delegate the Brazilian Congress, dominated by the agribusiness lobby, with the duty of recognizing and demarcating indigenous and quilombola territories. “PEC 215 represents an instrument of repression against original and traditional peoples in Brazil,” affirmed Ewerton Lobório, a human rights lawyer and staffer for Nilto Tatto, a Workers’ Party congressman from São Paulo. “The right wing has seized power by demonizing the poor and enacting legislation that takes away their guaranteed rights.” Temer’s actions have emboldened his ally, Governor Gerardo Alckmin of São Paulo, who signed a bill privatizing São Paulo’s state parks and giving mineral companies a blank check to drill for lead, zinc, and baryte in environmentally sensitive areas used by quilombos and indigenous communities for subsistence farming and fishing. In sum, Temer’s rise to power represents an assault on the hard fought rights and privileges achieved by indigenous communities, Afro-Brazilians, and traditional peoples following the return to democracy in 1985.

How can the academic community express solidarity with traditional peoples’ activists and their allies? I posed the same question on this blog last January and I’m still no closer to arriving at a definitive answer. Still, I’m convinced that the university has a role to play, at the very least, in speaking out against these violations of human rights. One way researchers can help is by organizing workshops and conferences to provide quilombola activists with a platform to publicize their struggle for rights and inclusion. Next February, LLILAS and IHS will be co-sponsoring a conference about food security and quilombos’ ongoing struggle to restore subsistence farming rights in the Atlantic Rainforest. Panelists will include representatives from the Instituto Socioambiental, experts on sustainable agriculture, and quilombola farmers fighting to restore access to subsistence garden plots called “roças.” We hope that the event will enable our guests to forge partnerships with researchers at the University of Texas who are interested in agriculture, sustainability, traditional peoples’ rights, and climate change in tropical rainforests. We also hope to apply pressure on Brazilian authorities to comply with their constitutional obligation to respect the rights of quilombo communities. “What can we do about this?” asked Davi Pereira. “Well, we can do what we’ve always done: fight to defend our rights. These rights are nonnegotiable for they guarantee the social, economic, cultural, political, and religious survival of our communities.”

Author’s note: Brazilian Federal Judge Sergio Moro brought charges against Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva on September 20, 2016, for alleged involvement in the Car Wash Scandal.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Disappearing Mestizo, by Joanne Rappaport (2014)

By Adrian Masters

From Mexico to Chile, Latin American intellectuals, artists, and activists proudly proclaim that they, their nations, and their cultures were born from a mix of Spanish and Indian heritage. The adjective for this mix is “mestizo;” individuals of Spanish-Indian descent are “mestizos.” These terms, along with the general word for mixing (mestizaje), have become increasingly prominent in North American scholarship in recent years, especially since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, when many U.S American activists with Latin American heritage sought to explore and embrace their Indian roots.

The category of mestizo first arose in the 16^th century Spanish Empire. In The Disappearing Mestizo, Joanne Rappaport takes readers to 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th-century Colombia, where she questions whether mestizos constituted a real social group. Many scholars have treated colonial mestizos as a sort of ethnicity or collective, a concept frequently influenced by the era’s spectacular paintings of genealogical mixes between Africans, Indians, and Spaniards. These colonial Mexican paintings create the appearance of a hierarchical society, a “caste system,” where a colonist would fall into one of dozens of categories and would live his or her life according to the privileges and limitations of that group. The idea of the caste system has recently come under the scrutiny of contemporary scholars, who argue that the rigid idealized world of caste paintings never materialized in day-to-day life.

Casta painting by Luis de Mena

Rappaport’s book builds on this growing suspicion towards the caste system and colonial-era terms like the mestizo. Whereas Africans, Indians, and Spaniards often had languages, histories, and legal statuses that brought them together, Rappaport argues that mestizos were adrift between colonial ethnicities. This meant that they appeared and disappeared from colonial documents with ease, “becoming” Indians or Spaniards at times and becoming mestizos at other times. If there were no mestizo sociological or ethnic group, Rappaport reasons, we must set out to determine not “Who is a mestizo?” or “What is a mestizo?” but “When and how is someone a mestizo?”

Casta Painting from the end of the 18th century or beginning of 19th century. Author unknown. The caption reads “From a Spanish man and an Amerindian woman, a Mestizo is produced”

This book seeks to answer why colonists called others mestizos, through a handful of fine-grained “ethnographic” vignettes that appear in the archives of Spain and Colombia. The author begins by exploring the importance of markers of difference that go beyond 19^th and 20^th century markers of “race:” religion, appearance, dress, blood, honor, reputation, occupation, and even ideas regarding breast-milk (ideas that colonists summarized as calidad, or “quality”). Readers meet a moreno (dark-skinned man) who seduces a high-born Spanish woman with love letters but shames and threatens the reputation of her family when he reveals his physical appearance to her. A half-Spanish, half-Indian girl brings dishonor upon her father by dressing as an Indian. A distinguished conquistador’s enemies accuse him of being a Moorish slave from Oran, throwing his Christian genealogy and virtue into question. These cases force us to think beyond “race” as a simple category of genetic difference and to focus instead on the cultural reasons why colonists did or did not use so-called caste categories when describing themselves and others.

Casta painting by Miguel Cabrera

Rappaport then turns her attention directly toward mestizos (and occasionally mulattos), presenting various stories in which Crown officials struggled with caste terms. There is Juan de Medina, the self-proclaimed Indian whose enemy, an Indian, insults him as a mestizo after a bloody brawl involving a severed nose. When a tax collector confused Juana Galván for a tribute-paying indigenous woman, she complained that she had a Spanish father and was in reality a mestiza (colonial Iberians and their mestizo children did not normally pay taxes). Rappaport also notes the cases of mulattos Lázaro, who lived and paid taxes as an Indian, and Manuel Rodríguez, who lived among Spaniards and Indians, even as he terrorized them with robberies and rape. There was Ana de Mendoza, an elite mestiza who became “hispanized” by her marriage, and Juan Birvez, a man who witnesses outed as a mestizo as he lay in bed with the daughter of a powerful landowner. Birvez, in turn, revealed that the daughter was a mestiza herself. Rappaport concludes from these episodes that the matter of who was and was not a mestizo was highly contingent on the time, the place, and who was doing the naming. She argues that mestizos and mulatos did not live in a caste system; they moved in and out of their categories with ease.

A painting of a Spanish man and a Peruvian indigenous woman with Mestizo child, 1770

Some mestizos, however, experienced very tangible discrimination at the hands of Crown officials and clergymen. One was the famous Gonzalo García Zorro, who became a cathedral canon in spite of stiff resistance from members of the Church. His brother Diego was less fortunate. He had close ties to Indians and found that townspeople disdained him and his pretensions to public offices due to his mixed lineage. A similar case, well known among historians of colonial Colombia, was the struggle of two mestizo “caciques” – Indian chiefs – to win the recognition of the Crown for their position. Both Alonso de Silva and Diego de Torres were sons of conquistadors and Indian women, and both lost their rights to act as caciques when their enemies raised questions about their eligibility. Mestizos in colonial Colombia were often either too Spanish or not Spanish enough, depending on the position they sought to achieve.

Casta Painting from Peru, 1770.

Rappaport’s book does admirable work at dismantling the myth of the caste system, showing that colonists hardly ordered themselves into clean-cut categories. This observation brings up a mystery that the author does not answer, however. Why did Crown officials and clergymen frequently describe individuals as mestizos to begin with?

Rappaport all but ignores the problem of mestizo laws – the Crown decrees that insisted that mestizos not enter the priesthood, not live in Indian towns, not act as caciques, and so forth. This is a critical weakness in a work that pivots around the reasons colonists categorized one another.

Mestizo laws are difficult to understand at first glance. My research into the sixteenth-century creation of the term reveals more chaos than clarity. For every law forbidding mestizos’ entry into the priesthood, for example, there are two allowing it. The same follows for many similar decrees regarding mestizos’ rights to carry arms, inherit land, and so forth.

also known as the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, were issued on November 20, 1542, by King Charles I of Spain and regard the Spanish colonization of the Americas.

Front cover of the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians. The New Laws were issued on November 20, 1542, by King Charles I of Spain and regard the Spanish colonization of the Americas.

The solution to this mystery lies in the nature of Spanish imperial law, and has important consequences for the practices of naming mestizos. The King desired close contact with his colonists – from the humblest Indian to the richest Spaniard. He also desired to resolve conflicts and avoid bloodshed. The Monarch and his Council thus oversaw all sorts of legal disputes, simultaneously providing colonists with mediation and collecting hordes of information on the New World all at once. It was in this flurry of colonial petitions to the Crown that the meaning of the term mestizo arose. Countless petitioners thus created different meanings for the term mestizo from below, in the process sowing legal chaos on a grand scale.

Emblem of the Council of the Indies from the frontispiece of the ‘Recopilacion de leyes de los Reynos de Las Indias’, Madrid, 1681.

The archives reveal that the true question baffling colonists and officials alike was how to deal with the petitioner-driven, ever-evolving world of mestizo law. The true “disappearing” or ‘”floating” aspect of mestizos was their shifting and contradictory legal status. Thus to understand why mestizos seem to disappear, we must open a new inquiry into the nature of Spanish imperial law. We need a case-by-case account into each specific petition and counter-petition that shaped this category.

The Disappearing Mestizo suffers from this inattention to legislation on mestizos. For one, it often sinks into an “ethnographic present” – the illusion among many anthropological writings that cultures remain stable over time – because it does not recognize how decrees on mestizos could abruptly reshape ideas about mixture. A second problem is Rappaport’s overstatement of Crown officials’ difficulty in properly identifying mestizos. In reality, most Crown functionaries could determine a person’s part-Indian, part-Spanish genealogy simply by requesting an individual provide it. Mestizo laws had little to say about more extreme cases, where a colonist was an orphan, illiterate, or too marginal in Spanish society to merit official interest. This is not a reflection of difficulty so much as indifference on the part of bureaucrats and secretaries.

Many of the concepts about race that emerged during European colonialism remain with us (in different ways) in the 21^st century. Virtually all Latin American countries point to the contributions of both Spanish and indigenous peoples in shaping what they call their “mestizo nations.” Some scholars today go so far as to argue that immigration and intermarriage are returning North America to colonial times, back to the era of the mestizo. Rappaport’s book will therefore be valuable not only to historians of colonial Colombia and scholars of race, but also to a reading public from Chile to Canada that is increasingly interested in the “mixing” of peoples who created their countries. As more and more authors assert that the future itself is mestizo, the next step for scholars – a step already taken by Rappaport – will be to think deeply about that category, its history, and its hidden baggage and complexities.

Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Duke University Press, 2014)

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