Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers

Defining Race in the Colonial Era

It is difficult to determine the "groupness" of mestizos in early colonial Santafé: they defied classification by constantly "disappearing" into other categories; they did not consistently embody a clear set of attributes distinguishing them from others in colonial society; they did not enjoy special rights or obligations defining them as mestizos and facilitating their incorporation as a sociological group. Furthermore, the concept "mestizo" functioned as much as a metaphor as a social category, standing in for a broad range of types of mixing, not only between people of different socioracial categories, but also between those of different social statuses. "Mestizo" also denoted the mixing of different "blood," pure and impure, such as occurred when an African or indigenous wet nurse suckled a Spanish infant. "Mestizo" was the term used to speak about crossbred animals, such as mules. Therefore, to say that mestizos constituted a fluid socioracial category in the colonial period is insufficient. If we concentrate exclusively on how people defined themselves or were classified by others, we get only a piece of the story, a glimpse of their individual identities—themselves highly contextual and transitory—without making inroads into comprehending how the process of identification worked, and why.

The best place to begin an inquiry into the meaning of "mestizo" is to look at colonial people who pretended to be that which they were not: people who consciously "passed" for someone else. This exercise might help us to discern the nature of the boundaries that colonial people perceived between themselves and others, instead of forcing on the colonial situation a particularly modern consciousness of what those boundaries might be. Such an approach results in the observation, however startling it may be to the twenty-first-century observer, that "race" as it was understood in the sixteenth century was not what we understand it to be today. Furthermore, many of the social boundaries we would immediately tag as "racial" were founded in the colonial period on other sorts of distinctions. Race in the colonial period was inherited through the blood—not through the genes—and could not always be discerned in individual phenotypes. It characterized members of lineages, not broad social groups. And it revolved around such matters as nobility and religion.

I open my inquiry with a story that at first glance appears to be a classic narrative of racial passing: the bungled elopement of the sixteen-year-old Spanish noblewoman doña Catalina Acero de Vargas with an "indio zambo," a mulatto of native and African parentage. In 1675 Doña Catalina escaped from her brother's house and ran off with Francisco Suárez, a young man who enticed her into marriage by telling her he was a nobleman from Lima and thus a good match for a young aristocratic woman. When the two met in person, however, she discovered that Suárez was not the Limeño noble he purported to be. The actions of doña Catalina brought dishonor upon her well-placed family. Her brother, Juan de Vargas, brought accusations against Suárez to the Santafé authorities, alleging that the man "went to the houses of my dwelling and with trickery removed from them doña Catalina de Acero, my sister, a damsel of sixteen years of age, and he took her where he would, under the pretext, which he later made known, that he wanted to marry her, tricking her as though she were a child, pretending to be a great nobleman ... although he was, as is commonly called, an indio guauqui or zambo [como comunmente se dize yndio guauqui o zambo]" (902r). He warned the authorities to resolve the issue with haste, "both so that the aggressor did not flee and so that any of [doña Catalina's] relatives who felt offended did not pursue him and attempt to take revenge for the offense" (902r–v).

An orphan living under the tutelage of her brother, doña Catalina grumbled about the poor treatment she said she received from her sister-in-law, so it is not surprising that she was seduced by the stranger who promised to lure her out of her captivity. Suárez, a painter by trade, courted doña Catalina in a series of letters in which he attested to his noble birth, saying his parents in Peru were "well-born, of good stock [heran caualleros y jente muy principal]" (905v); who actually penned the missives is not revealed in the testimony. Slipping away from her brother's home under cover of night, doña Catalina found herself face to face with her suitor for the first time. It was then that she realized the irresoluble predicament she had gotten herself into. On closer observation, doña Catalina recognized "by the aforementioned man's color and his speech, he was not of the quality that he had told her [por el color del dicho honbre y sus palabras no ser de la calidad que se le auia dicho]" (906r). Witnesses corroborated her observations, identifying Suárez as "brown" (moreno) in color (903v).

This story of a dishonest suitor is an excellent example of what would today be called "racial passing," but with a telling colonial cadence. A twenty-first-century Catalina would have immediately recognized Francisco Suárez before running off with him because she would have met him in person, seen him, and heard him speak. But as befitted a high-born unmarried woman, she was sheltered (recogida) in her brother's house (which also likely explains why she grew weary of her sister-in-law, who was committed to preserving the family's honor by isolating her). Thus, her only experience of courtship was through letters. Given a world in which the written word was privileged over speech—indeed, was fetishized—passing could easily be camouflaged through literate communication. Unfortunately for doña Catalina, her sheltered upbringing, boredom, and immaturity all interfered with the critical faculties she should have brought to an evaluation of Suárez's missives.

SITUATING FRANCISCO SUÁREZ'S BEHAVIOR

My research in the archives of Bogotá and Seville uncovered only a handful of cases of passing as we moderns would understand the practice, that is, of individuals belonging to one racial group masquerading as members of another. To be sure, I encountered examples of passing in a broader sense: conversos (new converts to Christianity or their descendants) posing as Old Christians, idolaters claiming to be pious Catholics, mestizos or native commoners serving as indigenous hereditary chiefs, mestiza women walking the streets of Santafé in native garb, slaves pretending to be free men. Suárez is an anomaly in the documentary record. His deception was unusual and was easily discovered when he emerged from behind his epistles, given the tremendous gap in status that yawned between a huauqui (Indian from Quito) and a Lima grandee.

The cases of passing I encountered did not revolve around phenotype, centering instead on religious identity or on rank, drawing on what in the colonial period was called calidad, or quality. Calidad constituted a system of social classification that bound together what we would today call "racial" markers—such as "Indian," "mestizo," and so on—with other means of distinguishing individuals: their place of residence, their costume, the language they spoke, their status as slave or free, their moral or economic status, and their rights and obligations in society, in addition to (sometimes in spite of) their color. Calidad can be understood as the intersection of multiple axes that plotted individual status according to ethnicity or race, congregation, morality, privilege, and aspect. Socioracial categories were thus but one component of a broader set of classificatory practices that we might think of as being constituted more by "doing" than by "being." In other words, one's classification emerged out of the ways in which one actively engaged one's birthright or transcended it through behavior: it was a type of performance. Doña Catalina appealed to this early modern method of distinguishing among individuals in her recounting of how she discovered her error: she confessed that Suárez's color and diction betrayed his "quality." However, we should not assume that doña Catalina's interpretation of her suitor's identity was the same as our own might be.

That is to say, we would be committing a serious error if we were to assume that Francisco Suárez's crime was that of a zambo passing for white, since that racialized label does not appear in the document or in most of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century papers I consulted. "White" was not a category comparable in the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Nuevo Reino to "indio," "mestizo," "mulatto," or "black." Individuals of European descent were, in contrast, identified by their nationality or place of residence as Spaniards, French, English, or more commonly as vecinos (citizens) of a particular town or city or by their occupation (notary, merchant, silversmith, shoemaker). In this case, Suárez was posing as a person of noble birth (most of whom, with the exception of caciques, were Spaniards or American-born individuals of Iberian descent). The difference between "white" and "noble" is crucial, because it colors how we interpret why doña Catalina was attracted to her mysterious correspondent in the first place. If we understand calidad as reflecting nobility and general social standing, rather than reducing it exclusively to its socioracial dimension, we can enter more fully into the ethos of the period to understand more precisely the kind of subterfuge in which Suárez was engaged.

It is not only the nature of the categories across which people move that is at stake here, but that of passing itself, whose meaning in the colonial period stands at odds with modern understandings of that. Ann Twinam considers colonial-era passing to be "a dichotomy between a person's private reality and an alternative, publicly constructed status," such as, for example, a child born out of wedlock but brought up as a member of an elite household, who thus occupied an ambiguous social position with respect to his or her family. Such discrepancies could be reconciled in the late colonial Spanish America studied by Twinam by means of bureaucratic arrangements like gracias al sacar, the institutionalized practice of petitioning to change one's birth or socioracial status, which was widely used in the eighteenth century. Twinam's description of gracias al sacar is not, however, entirely appropriate to an early colonial context, because it was very rarely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, she is on the mark when she rethinks passing as a process of closing the gap between public and private realities. That was more likely achieved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the public recognition by fathers of their illegitimate offspring or by officially legitimizing them by petition to the Crown, which would permit mestizo children to move with greater ease in polite society. In each case, however, we are speaking of a legal fiction, not of an act of dissimulation such as that perpetrated by Francisco Suárez, in which the public-private gap was only briefly closed on the pages of a handwritten letter.

It thus behooves us to reconsider the meaning of passing in seventeenth-century Santafé. In a thoughtful critique of scholarship that treats passing as a form of deception, Sara Ahmed suggests that we would do better to refrain from viewing it as a ruse whereby a subject assumes the image of another. Instead, she entreats us to consider passing as the process by which an individual seeks to control how others perceive her, as well as, alternately, the process by which someone is recognized, and sometimes misconstrued, by others. That is to say, Ahmed urges us to keep in mind the individual intentions, as much of people who deliberately shift their identities as of those who observe the act of passing (and either tacitly accept it or call it out). If we think of passing in this sense, it becomes more conceivable as a tool for comprehending the early colonial social landscape.

What did passing mean to doña Catalina Acero de Vargas, her brother, and the colonial authorities who handled her case? They could only make sense of Francisco Suárez's behavior according to culturally and historically situated cues read in light of their own positioning in the social hierarchy. For example, they would have interpreted their dilemma from their standpoint as members of the nobility. Members of the Vargas family were routinely addressed as "doña" (in the case of women) and as "don" (in the case of men), titles that were the exclusive province of the nobility (in contrast to modern-day Latin America, where "don" and "doña" are terms of respect employed in all sorts of social encounters). Whether doña Catalina's Spanish ancestors were nobles is uncertain. Perhaps they belonged to the Iberian aristocracy, or perhaps their standing issued from the heroic deeds of sixteenth-century conquistadors, as was frequently the case in Santafé, where there were relatively few nobles by birth and many who were invited into the ranks of the lesser nobility (hidalgos or caballeros) in recognition of their military service or that of their ancestors. Flórez de Ocáriz's Genealogías del Nuevo Reino de Granada mentions Juan de Vargas only briefly, in a note on his spouse, and does not highlight his ancestry, which suggests that he probably was not of old aristocratic stock. Whatever the origins of their noble position, families like the Vargases were not subject to taxes, nor could they be imprisoned for debt; they were spared certain punishments, and their testimony was of higher value in court than was that of commoners.

Descendants of conquistadors promoted their lineages by producing reports recalling their ancestors' services to the Crown (probanzas de méritos y servicios, or merit and service reports). They endeavored to dress the part, sporting rich robes made from expensive imported textiles. They shied away from manual labor. They adorned the lintels of their houses with coats of arms to publicly proclaim their hidalguía, or nobility. Their status was an essential aspect of their calidad, which had to be continuously maintained through lifelong performance. Ruth Hill explains how the difference between essence and exercise can be comprehended by turning to the distinction between the Spanish verbs "to be," or ser (a permanent or long-term attribute), and estar (a temporal activity or a transient attribute): the Vargases were active participants in the public performance of their nobility, that is, they had to exercise to maintain a semblance of their noble essence as though it were a permanent characteristic. But, of course, blemishes on a family's honor could cause irreparable damage to its social standing. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala sums up the Vargases' predicament in a sentence cautioning against the dangers of a noblewoman marrying a plebeian or a Jew: "And if the man is of vile status or a Jew and the woman of a house of noblemen and Old Christians, all is lost, relatives and lineages and her sons; they are of a ruined caste, worse than a mestizo [son de rruyn casta, peor que mestizo]."

Juan de Vargas undoubtedly fretted over how Francisco Suárez's ruse might impact his position in Santafereña society. The stain that the mulatto left on his honor would have consequences that ranged far beyond that fateful evening in 1675. It would adhere for decades, affecting all family members: not just Catalina herself, but especially her brother and his sons and grandsons. Even if Juan de Vargas were to assuage the effect of his sister's kidnapping by forcing Francisco Suárez to keep to his word and marry her—which, in cases of couples of equal status provided a kind of compensation to the woman's family—the Vargases would have continued to suffer the affront of having a lowborn "indio zambo" in their family tree, never entirely cleansing the blemish he left on their honor.