-
Race, Caste, and Status: Indians in Colonial Spanish America (review)
- Hispanic American Historical Review
- Duke University Press
- 81:2, May 2001
- pp. 364-365
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Hispanic American Historical Review 81.2 (2001) 364-365
[Access article in PDF]
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. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 151 pp. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $18.95.
In Spain's American colonies, elite notions of race served as an instrument for perpetuating Spanish rule along practical administrative lines and reinforcing European notions of cultural superiority in the evolving American consciousness. Throughout the New World, the Spanish employed the concept of race to distinguish themselves from those over whom they claimed dominion. Specifically, the Spanish elaborated social identities that placed individuals into an elite-designed racial hierarchy, the caste system. While the ruled did not necessarily share these ascribed notions of identity, they were nonetheless subject to sumptuary laws and fiscal requirements defined by their assessed racial status.
In this study, Robert Jackson investigates the process of identity creation in two rural Spanish American regions, Bolivia's Valle Bajo and Mexico's Sonora and Baja California. Using sacramental registers, parish censuses, and missionary reports, he analyzes the efficacy of the Spanish caste system within a core-periphery context between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The product of this examination of these two distinct rural regions--one closer to the Hispanic center and one frontier--provides a valuable counterbalance to the primarily urban focus of the historiography on race and ethnic status in the colonial and early national periods.
Jackson demonstrates that the process of identity creation was driven by the fiscal, labor and evangelical designs of the colonial state, yet prone to create human categories that ignored meaningful points of differentiation. In Valle Bajo, identity creation served to place various ethnic groups into a single indio category tied to residence in corporate communities and subject to labor and tribute obligations. However, indigenous folk sought to escape their fiscal and tributary duties by fleeing the reducciones and moving to settlements organized around precontact ethnic bonds. Such internal migration necessitated new labor and tribute classifications and, by the later stages of the colony, "complicated considerably the neat and tidy Spanish definition of indio status" (p. 27). After independence, a supposed transition from indio to mestizo population was nothing more than a "demographic sleight of hand" (p. 42) that resulted more from economically induced changes in land tenure patterns and a subsequent shift in elite perceptions of rural people than a genuine decline of indios and increase of mestizos.
The caste system functioned much differently on the New Spanish frontier. Precontact indigenous settlement was limited to tribal villages and the goal of [End Page 364] Spain's frontier Indian policy was to create sedentary, tribute-paying indio villagers. However, since Jesuit--and later Franciscan--missionaries negotiated colonial contact with native groups, and mission populations were exempted from tributary demands, there could be little systematic exploitation of the native population through corporate structures. Hence, strategies of identity creation depended upon the use of pseudoethnic terms that could differentiate people based on such factors as whether they lived within or beyond colonial jurisdiction, were Christian or pagan, and were hostile or more accommodating to the intrusion of colonial administration. One significant result was less--and inconsistent--use of conventional racial terms.
While the study yields several key conclusions about identity creation, the vantage point is primarily top-down. The nature of the documentary evidence limits the extent to which questions about how indios viewed, accepted and rejected their ascribed identities can be answered. Consequently, the work provides less contextual richness and alternative perspective than other significant Indian studies published in recent years. Nonetheless, Jackson's monograph is important to specialists of race and ethnic relations, since it shows that the caste system was far from monolithic and immutable. It also appeals to nonspecialists for it shows that the process of identity creation provides an additional and heretofore unstudied means to measure both the extension of Spanish colonialism to Latin America's peripheral regions and the ways...