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   197 Chapter 5 Before Race: Hierarchy in Bourbon Spanish America I want to clarify from the outset what this chapter is and what it is not. By hierarchy , I do not mean “racial thinking” or “racism”; these are modern, postcolonial forms of hierarchy, which do not enter into this study of Carrió’s Spanish America.1 My approach to hierarchy is both limited in scope and experimental. It is not intended to replace Albert Sicroff’s still important 1985 study of what are commonly known as blood purity statutes (estatutos de limpieza de sangre) or José Antonio Maravall’s (1979) work on estates (estamentos or estados), and it does not address the immense literature on honor and gender. In order to make sense of Carrió’s material reality—Bourbon Spanish America— and his inspection report, this study analyzes what I consider to be three overlapping principles of hierarchy in the Hispanic world: casta, limpieza, and estado. The main objectives of this chapter are two, one broad and the other narrow: On one hand, it aims to spark a scholarly dialogue about hierarchy and its generative base in the Hispanic world before the nineteenth century—not race but infamy as it was codified and interpreted since the twelfth century. On the other hand, it attempts to broaden the critical revision of Carrió’s hierarchical values and attitudes in El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes that were presented in the Introduction and in Chapter 2 and that­ extend into Chapter 6 herein. Spurred by the social anthropologist Louis Dumont’s (1961, 1980) work on hierarchy, I postulate here that viceregal Spanish American societies had a norm of inequality: a written and unwritten hierarchy that ostensibly mirrored nature and its laws but was in fact a social construct. That written hierarchy was constituted by constitutions, edicts, rules, bylaws, glosses, and the like. However, it is not helpful to oppose this written hierarchy to the unwritten hierarchy of values (customs, assumptions, stereotypes, and so forth) as if the legal could be detached from the social. I therefore caution my readers not to dismiss legal analysis as top-down analysis or to oppose legal history to social history in studies of viceregal Spanish America. This is to give the rule of law an existence independent of social actors, be they judges, glossators, defendants, witnesses, or plaintiffs—an existence it did not have. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, for example, argues that “the race of individuals in Colonial Latin America [was] a subjective and malleable category which 198   Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America could be influenced and changed during a person’s life,” unlike gender (1995, 155– 56). If we substitute for her “race” the phrase “casta, limpieza, and estado,” I agree with this affirmation. However, Kuznesof proceeds to oppose the written to the unwritten as if the legal were not social, a view that effectively legitimates the naturalizing ideology of written legal codes and protocols.2 R. Douglas Cope (1994), on the other hand, has shown convincingly that social negotiation relied heavily on the legal system: interpretation, both written and unwritten, of the rule of law was key to establishing one’s identity (i.e., one’s duties and privileges within the social hierarchy).3 Skillful negotiation of the rule of law in viceregal Spanish America, I am convinced , offers at least a partial explanation for what Kuznesof has characterized as “the constant and minute legislation related to race in every aspect of colonial life, in every community and within every guild,” which she feels is a demonstration of “the extreme level of social anxiety related to race-related privilege and discrimination ” (1995, 156). Another partial explanation for the oversized load of legal literature related to casta, limpieza, and estado lies in the fact that infamy legislation and glosses were central to negotiations of one’s place in local and regional hierarchies well before the religious and occupational purity bylaws, constitutions, rules, and definitions—the so-called blood purity statutes—that they engendered began to appear in viceregal Spanish America. An important step toward the two main goals of this chapter is the recovery of casta through historical, or situational, semantics. To take that step, we must learn to distinguish casta from raza and from the Anglo concept of race, a differentiation that requires that we revisit the birth of both raza and race in the nineteenth century. The chapter then analyzes what raza and estado meant before the nineteenth century, initial spadework that provides...

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