Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (review)

In the second half of the twentieth century, many historians of colonial Latin America turned their attention to the ways in which indigenous inhabitants of the Americas “became Indians”—that is, how the Spanish colonial system flattened diverse indigenous societies into a single legal, fiscal, and ultimately social category, and how some of those subjects learned to manipulate that role for their own gain. This work broke real ground in our understanding of how a society emerged out of conquest and of how local ethnicities both shaped and were shaped by larger ideological processes, culminating in the hierarchies of biological race at the end of the colonial period. Subsequently, some historians came to reject terms like race for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as anachronistic or inadequate, while others were trying to redefine these concepts to demonstrate continuity from the Spanish conquest (or before) more or less to the present. The issue stands unanswered: How did early-modern Spanish subjects understand the relationship among social position, religion, physiology, and heritage in a world that saw blood as a bearer of social being, yet allowed for a great deal of (necessary) ambiguity, and understood the power of the Crown to change a subject’s status with a pen stroke?

Andrew Fisher and Matthew O’Hara have gathered together essays addressing what their subtitle calls “Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America.” Their thoughtful introductory essay nicely lays out what is at stake in these debates. They recognize the dissonance within the historical community over terms like identity, ethnicity, and race, and argue for the utility of these fuzzy terms, claiming contentiously that identity lies in the nexus between labels that the state imposes and the “lived reality” of these categories. The essays that follow, while they do not always interact with the editors’ well-constructed points (often ignoring or contradicting them and rarely utilizing the same definitions), offer important insights into the complicated processes of social formation in the colonies.

Among the most interesting contributions are María Elena Díaz’s extremely sophisticated re-evaluation of her earlier work on Cuban royal slaves who made potent political claims, utilizing categories usually attributed to free Iberians. Mariana Dantas assesses Afro-Brazilian political struggles in the eighteenth century, from their attempts to gain their own (Afro-Brazilian) public defender to their participation in segregated Catholic confraternities. Ann Twinam adds to her work on the gracias al sacar, a formal (paid) request to the Crown to whiten a person’s status, with an analysis of the single application to fail on the (startling) grounds that a nonwhite person could not become white. Cynthia Radding’s terrific essay on ethnicity, gender, and identity (or ethnogenesis) in two borderland regions of the Iberian empires stands out as a clear demonstration of how difficult it is to speak of ethnicity as stable concept. There are also essays by David Tavárez on the ambiguity of public identification of plebeians in New Spain, Jane Mangan on the variety of roles played by market women in Potosí, Jeremy Mumford on the construction of elite indigenous identities in early Peru, Sergio Serulnikov on political realignments in the southern Andes leading up to independence, and Karen Caplan on political participation and ethnic identity in postindependence Mexico. Douglas Cope draws the volume’s conclusions with a fine essay that highlights the collective and individual strategies presented by the authors, and the complicated political systems that allowed for both flexibility and fiat.

The volume as a whole is not a game-changer: the ambivalences of many contributors to their editors’ theoretical charge make the volume inconsistent and sometimes confusing. More attention to the history of science, to the role of religions, and especially to social and intellectual transitions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries are still needed before we can...