The development of race as a social construct. The Latin European colonies vs. British colonies, Part 1: the birth of the Mestizo and the genesis of mixed-race people as distinct racial groups
Western-European colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy have all affected each country in the Americas simultaneously. However, the way white-supremacy has operated and the way that it has lead to the development of social constructs, such as race, differs drastically between what can be referred to as historical/cultural-regions. The two main regions I will be focusing on in this post, and comparing-contrasting can be defined as:
Region (A): Latin America or the former Latin European colonies. Defined as all regions of the American continent which were colonized by Latin Europeans and where Spanish, French, and Portuguese are legislated as official languages, with the exception of Canada. The Catholics Church played a key role in the colonization process by Latin Europeans, and this is an important aspect to keep in mind, as it had somewhat of a regulated structure unlike the more chaotic process of the British colonizers.
Region (B): Anglo America or the former British colonies. Defined as all regions of the American continent which were colonized by the British and English is legislated as an official language. The main focus will be on the United States.
The grouping of Latin America into one metacultural-region can often be highly problematic given its greats social diversity; cultural, racial, ethnic, historical, political, and so on. However in this context it is appropriate to do so due to many overlapping historical and cultural factors of the former Latin European colonies, which helped shape a unique perception of race in today’s Latin America in contrast to that of Anglo America. In this post I will explain how modern racial categories and views of race developed in Latin America, and why they differ from those in the United States.
The Spaniards first encounter with Indigenous people of the Americas: the genesis of the western concept of race
The foundation set for the creation of the modern western concept of race began with the arrival of the Spaniards to the Americas.The Spanish conquistadors encountered various Indigenous people as they began to explore and conquer different areas of the Caribbean and the two continents. These Native American groups generally did not share any overarching social identity, but this came to be of no importance to the Spaniards who soon began to refer to them all as “Indians” thus racializing them. The reason these diverse groups of people came to be classified as “Indians” had a basis on two factors; the first factor being that to the Spaniards they shared similar phenotypical (racial) characteristics such as brown skin and facial features, and the second was that they shared lifestyles foreign to those of Christians. As “Indians” this also lead the Spaniards to generalize overlapping social traits among them, characteristics which conflicted with Christian dogma such as polytheistic or animistic theologies. This became a pretext for the Spaniards to conquer and exploit the Native Americans who they labeled uniformly as Indian, claiming they were doing their Christian duty by trying to help redeem from their “sinful” ways of life.
The formation of unique castes of race and racial mixtures which distinguished Latin European colonizers from their British counter-parts
Similar views of Indigenous people were later adopted by all Western European colonial powers once they themselves began colonizing the Americas, but what makes the Latin colonizers unique is the how the process of colonization was initially enacted by them. When the first waves of Latin colonizers ventured to the Americas, the majority of them came as single men with only a few women accompanying them. It was not until decades later that more women and eventually families began to migrate in greater numbers. It should be noted that the latter part is an important aspect to keep in mind as there is a misinformed belief that Latin women, especially Spanish women, were not present in the colonies and that the colonial process was completely anchored by Spanish men. This is not true at all, as Spanish women had been present in the Americas starting from Columbus’ third voyage; the Spanish crown specifically sought out women to settle in the Americas in order to help the colonies develop. The reason this is an important aspect to remember, is because the presence of Spanish women in the colonies would be essential for forming racial purity legislates and maintaining a white population throughout these colonies, particularly an elite. I’ll expand on these ideas a little later on though, when they become more relevant to the context.
With that being said, it is correct to say that the majority of the Latin colonizers in the first few decades of colonization were single men. This was unlike the case of many of the first British colonizers, who partook in the colonization of the Americas much later, and who were more likely to emigrate with entire families. The insufficiency of European women in the Latin colonies caused a dilemma for male colonizers, since the bequest of estate and power to heirs was an essential factor in maintaining control over colonial territories. A solution to this issue was for the colonizers to seek out Indigenous women as mates, so that they could have children with them and thus heirs.This would also be beneficial to them as in certain Indigenous ethnic groups, such as the Guarani, there were common cultural practices in which men of certain tribes would swap their wives or marry out their daughters to men of different tribes, this was then in order to establish bonds between both tribes. In many areas of the Latin colonies this would also be an established practice for European men to partake in; in order to trade, keep peace, and expect protection from these Indigenous groups.
This soon lead to the common societal manifestations of concubinage, cohabitation, and even interracial marriage in the Latin colonies among white men and non-white women, something highly criticized and shunned by their Anglo counterparts (even if similar phenomenons occurred in their societies too, just more subtly).
In the foundation stages of the colonies the children of mixed-race unions simply fell into the dichotomous “racial” categories of European or Native American.
****It should also be noted that the term racial should be used loosely here, since even though the Spaniards had began to racialize Indigenous people due to their phenotypical characteristics, the most significant difference they saw between themselves and the Natives of America was their lack of Christian beliefs and what they deemed as “primitive” ways of life. The Spaniards would being to refer to the Indigenous people as “people without reason”, in contrast to themselves as “people with reason.” The use of the term white only gained colloquial use in latter parts of history, however the premise had been formed from the beginning of the Spanish conquest.******
Meaning that the progeny of mixed-unions that were embraced and accepted by their fathers were raised as Spaniards, Portuguese, and French people respectfully. These children raised in such families were most often socialized to adopt the European identity, cultural habits, philosophy, and general way of life of their fathers, and thus generally became detached from there mothers Indigenous identity; ergo Latin Europeans were more prone to practice hyperdescent, whereas British colonizers in the United States were more likely to practice hypodescent. However, this was not always the case, and it can be problematic to make such generalizations, because even within different French colonies, within different Spanish colonies, and within different regions of Brazil, social dynamics and relationships between such families could drastically differ depending on the conditions surrounding them. We can take New France, the Captaincy of São Vicente ( São Paulo, Brazil), and Paraguay as examples; in these regions many children of such mixed unions were raised speaking their mothers Indigenous language and in a more Indigenous infused lifestyle compared to other regions where European ways of life heavily dominated. However a shift towards European ways of life, paradigms, and cultures was almost always encouraged even in such social environments and such families still practiced hyperdescent in which these children were more prone to identify with the Europeaness of their fathers.
The children who were abandoned by their fathers, typically were absorbed back into the Indigenous communities of their mothers, if the mother was successfully able to reintegrate herself as well. There were however many cases of Indigenous women abandoned by both the European fathers of their children and their own communities, and in other cases children of mixed-unions abandoned by both their European fathers and Indigenous mothers. Often the later was the fate of those children born out of sexual assault against Indigenous women, which was an occurrence that was very prominent within the colonies. These abandoned children would eventually become the first generation of a unique social group that would come to be known as Mestizos in Spanish; Métis in French; and Mestiços, Mamelucos, or Caboclos in Portuguese. These children were viewed as being neither Indigenous or European, but a completely distinct new “race” made up of a combination of the former two groups. The main reason these children were stigmatized by the Latin Catholic colonizers was because they were born out of wedlock, and therefore out of sin in their eyes of the church. However, it should be noted that these children were born as free-men and held the same [generally low-ranking] social status as full-blooded illegitimate European children born out of wedlock.
As the colonies developed, more women migrated to them from Latin Europe, which lead the colonists to start favoring the practice of endogamy amongst whites, and a discouragement of taking Indigenous women as sexual partners. This allowed the unmxied white population to grow at an increasingly larger rate than it had ever before. However, despite the fact that white women were no longer scarce in the colonies, this did little to detour the colonist men from having extramarital affairs, coercing Indigenous women into concubinage, or out-right sexually assaulting them. Which meant that even though a new generation of white children were being born, an even larger new generation of Mestizo children were also being born at the same time. This made the reality of the differences between those children born in the Americas who were of unmixed European heritage and those who were of mixed European/Indigenous descent more apparent. As more white men began to take white women entering the colonies a wives, they also began abandoning any Indigenous women they were in relationships with before, and also often the children they had with them.
At the same time many Indigenous communities were growing hostile to the children born of European fathers entering and living in their communities, often refusing to distinguish them from unmixed Europeans and thus viewing them in the same light as their colonizers. The feelings these Indigenous communities had towards mixed-race children, and the fears the colonizers had about the growing presence of Mestizos in these Indigenous communities lead both the Spanish and Portuguese crowns to enact legislation's that barred Mestizos/Mestiços and white vagabonds from entering Indigenous settlements, with the exception of those raised by a mother living in such community. These legislation's were the beginning of a societal isolation of Mestizos from Indigenous people in much of the Latin colonies, and would eventually push the Mestizos to more staunchly adopt European-dominated identity, despite being seen as racially distinct from full-blooded Europeans, something rarely seen in U.S. American history.
As most people who were identified as Mestizo came to be shunned or stigmatized by both European and Indigenous societies, many of them began living on the edged of society, alongside European vagrants, who would roam the colonies without stable homes, and who were also marginalized by their more affluent counterparts. The large number of Mestizos who lived in such vagrant communities and their status as illegitimate children, were two of the main elements that lead them to be viewed as having inherent “delinquent” qualities by the unmixed Europeans. This in turn often lead to further discrimination, marginalization, and disdain towards this distinct group of mixed-race people in different areas of the Spanish, French, Portuguese colonies.
**Again, we need to take into account the diversity of social dynamics within individual colonies. What I mention above was usually the case in areas where a growing white population was analogously present, alongside the growing Mestizo population. In areas where there was very little additional white settlement, the Mestizo population would often simply identify with their Spanish, Portuguese, or French heritage (whiteness) and thus would often hold positions of power. A key example of this would be Paraguay, where a unique Mestizo identity was never actually formed and solidified. **
Eventually, the Spanish crown specifically, in fear of the rising Mestizo population took actions to maintain their control by introducing a racially based caste system that would dictate all aspects of life in the colonies. The limpieza de sangre or “purity of blood” caste-system as it was called, was a very complex method of assigning a social status to someone on the basis of their race or racial mixture. This system was based on one employed in the Iberian peninsula after the reconquest of Moorish occupied areas of the peninsula, which eventually lead to the expulsion of anyone suspected of having Moorish blood from Spain and Portugal. In the Americas however the focus was turned to the Spaniards interaction with Indigenous and African people. Spaniards and their unmixed white children (called Criollos or Creoles) made up the highest positions of the system, while people of unmixed Indigenous and African descent made up the lowest ranks of the system. This left the majority of mixed-race people occupying various ranks in the middle which were based on the degree of white blood they had. Although race-mixing was never lawfully forbidden by the Spanish crown, various edicts did lead to it being highly discouraged among white colonials, and this also helped create an obsession with racial purity among the white colonials and their descendants. As many new Spanish settlers were coming to the colonies, a lot the old-stock families were paranoid of being accused of having non-white blood, and so it was common for them to marry off their daughters to the first new settler looking for a wife they could. This is because after a few generations of a mixed-race individual only having children with a white partner, their descendants could become racially white themselves.
The social dominance of the white population and the possibility of their descendants becoming white in a future generation had a huge influence on mixed race people, leading them to also discriminate against and oppress the unmixed-non white populations of the colonies, and to seek out sexual partners who were either white or had larger amounts of white blood than them. Thus, the caste-system helped keep mixed-race people conscious of the fact that they did not belong to either group they descended from. Futhermore, the contempt that white people had for non-white people, that mixed people had for unmixed non-white people, and that Indigenous people had for white and Mestizos also played a huge part in the racialization of mixed-race people, as completely distinguished anomalies in much of the Spanish American empire.
Although such drastic legislated measures, such as a highly developed and complex caste system, may not have been employed by the Portuguese and French in the way they were with by the Spanish; both groups nonetheless did distinguish and often discriminate between white and Métis/Mestiços people, which lead to the creation of those distinct racialized identities within their own colonies. Both the French and the Portuguese also adopted similar names for the various types of mixed-race people that the Spaniards gave, and also considered degrees of whiteness among those who were mixed-race with the possibility of racial mobility. However, due to factors such as slavery, diseases, and massacre the numbers of Indigenous people soon left in Portuguese, French, and certain Spanish colonies were often minuscule. In these areas more frequently, the colonizers would turn to enslaved Africans that they brought to the Americas, in order to exploit them for their labour which before had been done by Indigenous people. The descendants of mixed European-African soon also followed a similar path as Mestizos into becoming their own distinct racial groups. Having said that, I’ll discuss the racial identity of mixed African-descendants in colonial Latin America in a following post.
Considering all that has been written, it can be easy to see how the Latin European colonizers differed from the Anglo European colonizers. Latin Europeans were more likely to try to assimilate their colonized Indigenous subjects, and they were also more likely to be unopposed to mixing with them, at least in the initial stages of colonization. This was unlike the British who did not have much interest in evangelizing Indigenous people, nor assimilating, or living among them in their own initial stages of colonization. This helped the Latin Europeans create an environment which made it possible for distinct mixed race identities to be developed, rather than keeping dichotomous (black/white) views of race their Anglo counter-parts often had.
To understand race in Latin America, it’s important to keep all this in mind. A lack of understanding this aforementioned history often brings up conflict among mixed-race Latin Americans living in the United States and non-Latin Americans. This is especially true when it comes to mixed race African-descendants who, like I previously mentioned, will be discussed in a following post in detail.
