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Race and Classification

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface by William B. Taylor.........................................................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments......................................................................................................................................................................xixContributors.........................................................................................................................................................................xxiIntroduction: The Alchemy of Race in Mexican America Susan Deans-Smith and Ilona Katzew.............................................................................................11. The Language, Genealogy, and Classification of "Race" in Colonial Mexico Mara Elena Martnez....................................................................................252. "Dishonor in the Hands of Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks": The (Racial) Politics of Painting in Early Modern Mexico Susan Deans-Smith.............................................433. "That This Should Be Published and Again in the Age of the Enlightenment?" Eighteenth-Century Debates About the Indian Body in Colonial Mexico Ilona Katzew.....................734. Moctezuma Through the Centuries Jaime Cuadriello.................................................................................................................................1195. Eugenics and Racial Classification in Modern Mexican America Alexandra Minna Stern...............................................................................................1516. Hispanic Identities in the Southwestern United States Ramn A. Gutirrez.........................................................................................................1747. Race and Erasure: The Hernandez v. Texas Case Ian Haney Lpez....................................................................................................................1948. Reconfiguring Race, Gender, and Chicano/a Identity in Film Adriana Katzew........................................................................................................2079. Pose and Poseur: The Racial Politics of Guillermo Gmez-Pea's Photo-Performances Jennifer Gonzlez and Guillermo Gmez-Pea.....................................................236Notes................................................................................................................................................................................267Index................................................................................................................................................................................341

Chapter One

Mara Elena Martnez

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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").

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...