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Ethnohistory 47.3-4 (2000) 800-802



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Book Review

Race, Caste, and Status:
Indians in Colonial Spanish America


Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America. By Robert H. Jackson. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. ix + 150 pp., introduction, maps, bibliography, index. $40.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Robert H. Jackson examines the processes of identity creation in Bolivia and northwestern New Spain—specifically, the creation of indio status, what that status meant for those so categorized, and how elite perceptions of that status changed over time. He focuses on the Valle Bajo region of Bolivia, representative, in his eyes at least, of “core” regions by virtue of its dense sedentary population, and on Sonora and Baja California, on New Spain’s northern frontier. Central to his analysis is the idea of the mutability of racial categorization, the imprecision and subjectivity of labeling in the documentary record, and the various factors that affected the application of racial labels.

Jackson contrasts the reducción system of Valle Bajo with the mission system employed in northwestern Mexico. In Bolivia, Spaniards encountered peoples with already-established corporate identities; the task was to “break down ethnic identities” and create in their stead a generic indio category, a fiscal category defining certain obligations (tribute, labor) to the state. In the more sparsely populated Sonora and Baja California, however, the Spaniards dealt with peoples with no clearly defined “sense of corporate self” (to borrow James Lockhart’s phrase), organized in small tribal village states or clan-based bands. The story of the Spanish endeavor there was thus the creation of indios, the incorporation of indigenous populations into a “new colonial order that, under the best conditions, would rely on the exploitation of labor and collection of tribute” (97). Spaniards created sedentary populations, and then created an indio identity through the establishment of what Jackson calls “pseudoethnic” categories. New identities were forged in both Bolivia and northern New Spain, but the processes [End Page 800] were qualitatively different, a difference rooted in the profound differences between sedentary and semisedentary civilizations and between core areas and frontiers.

Jackson also details the transition from indio to mestizo, a process most clearly seen in the case of Valle Bajo, one inextricably linked to nineteenth-century socioeconomic changes prompted by the collapse of colonial systems of tribute and mita obligations and the transformation of land tenure. The indio ceased to be an indio and became a peasant, a “demographic sleight of hand,” as caste gave way to class. The relative absence of such a transition for northern New Spain points to the quite different ethnic and economic picture of that region (sparse indigenous population, different modes of community organization, different types of economic endeavors) relative to Bolivia.

Jackson argues that identity was imposed from outside, from above, that an economic and social rationale governed the assignment of racial and ethnic labels. But this is hardly new. Scholars of early Mexico have long noted the Spanish propensity to apply racial and fiscal labels to peoples whose self-referents were firmly rooted in the local setting; Jackson’s argument that “the Spanish caste system was an artifact of colonialism, and was inconsistent, idiosyncratic, and subjective” breaks no new ground.

Jackson’s work pairs two quite disparate regions of the Spanish American empire for the purposes of study. Yet the logic behind such a pairing is not at all clear. Would not a core/periphery approach in the context of one or another of the major viceroyalties be more logical and more easily handled? Might he have opted for a comparative frontier approach? Choosing to stretch across a continent and a half, might he have strived for a more equal treatment of the two regions? As it stands, northwestern New Spain is given more attention than Bolivia, and different questions are asked in each context.

Careless errors mar the work, however, which suggests hasty writing and editing. Sometimes this simply irritates: to find “Gilas” River for Gila, for example, or to follow the variously named Hispanized Indian referred to in one...

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