One of the recurring arguments that Spanish colonisation was better / less worse than English colonisation is that the Spanish made an effort to mix with the population, which is referred historically as mestizaje. I have mentioned this before in regards of how pernicious it truly was in the long term, but now I must mention another feature that people often ignore.
It is true that people âintermixedâ with different races (like black and indigenous Americans) and that those relationships werenât entirely âunlawfulâ per se, but that does not mean that there wasnât a strong component of racial discrimination in all of this. A white Spaniard had far more opportunities in life than a free black man, or a mulatto man, an indigenous man, or a mestizo man, and not only from a social point of view, but also from a legal one. âWe were all Spaniardsâ some like to say say, with a tinge of melancholy, of resentment for what they perceive was a botched independence of the âmotherlandâ. They were all Spaniards, indeed; but they werenât all equal.
In a system in which your Hispanicity was measured by your whiteness and by the number of pure blooded Spanish ancestors that could be traced back in your family tree, there was an increasing pressure to appear white, to be white. In the days of the viceroyalties, when your opportunities in life depended on something as asinine as your background, people used to hid black, indigenous and Jewish ancestors from their legal documents, refusing to be associated to their mestizo ascendents, just to be allowed to enter institutions like University, because many had an strict requirement that only white, legitimate students could be allowed in (which further breaks the argument that, since Spanish colonial rulers stablished universities and churches, those were âpublic institutions for everyoneâ).
People rejected their roots, to be fully Spanish, to be fully deserving.
And that hasnât really changed, no matter how many yera have passed since. To this day you will see people calling black or biracial Venezuelans âvenecosâ and Peruvian people (who are known to have a higher number of indigenous population) âperucosâ, and in Mexico you will see people insulting people by saying that they have âel nopal en la caraâ (the nopal in their face, aka they look very indigenous Mexican) or that their features are akin to âartesanĂa mayaâ (mayan pottery) to insult them. You will find families unironically telling their daughters who have European / USA American / white boyfriends to âmejorar la razaâ (bettering the race), and you will see people mocking girlâs exes calling them âindiosâ if they were ugly.
People who really donât believe in the emancipation of South America from Spanish yoke often argue that nothing changed. But how can you expect three centuries worth of systemic racism and racial inequality and prejudices to vanish the moment the last royalist chief is sent packing back to were he came from? The caste system never left because the Spaniards never left.
Hispanists and deniers of imperial cruelty are quick to point out that 1) the emancipators of many of this countries were themselves white and direct descendants of Spaniards (mantuanos, in many cases) and 2) that they had the aid of England and the USA; these are used as a gotcha to delegitimise the independence. But just because the official heads of the rebellion where white men with Spanish names and a strong Spanish ascent does not invalidate the need of asserting independence from Spain; it was a very important step that should never be looked down. But then again, we must remember that, even if they were enlightened thinkers and more liberal in their ideology than the royalist factions, a vast majority of the men who lead the revolutions were, doubtlessly, descendants of Spain, but not in the same way mulattoes or mestizos and other biracial American people were; they had been brought into a world in which their skin colour and their familiesâ position had granted them a certain privilege over the rest of their American citizens, received a kind of education and had been taught to view the world and the people in it through very particular lenses. And even if many of them took measures not to flaunt this privileged upbringing, they still viewed the world like it has been taught to them. The corruption that ensued, the racial fears of black dominion (like pardocracia) and an abandonment of measures to better the lives of black and indigenous people further cemented the damage, even in post-colonial era. Without this, we cannot fully understand why things havenât changed that much from a social and structural point of view.
The countries of South America may no longer be Spanish colonies, but colonial mindset has never fully left them.
