Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies by Ann Twinam (review)

On the surface, Twinam’s Purchasing Whiteness is an archival exploration into the notorious—and to historians, highly symbolic—practice in the Spanish Indies by which some free men and women of partial African ancestry attained the legal status and privileges of whites (for a fee). Yet holistically the work achieves much more; it will be received both as a landmark in Latin American historiography as well as a model of historical methodology more generally. In addition to a detailed examination of social mobility within the Spanish American caste system, it also dispels myths and highlights the ways by which archives might mislead scholars.

The practice of “whitening” gracias al sacar—the royal dispensation of the privileges of whiteness for a fee—has for many Anglophone historians tidily symbolized Latin America’s comparatively open and fluid regimes of racial differentiation. Yet by exploring the experiences of those who petitioned for such privileges, as well as the motivations of the imperial bureaucrats who handled their requests, Twinam demonstrates that few achieved whiteness in this way—and, intriguingly, that Crown officials largely opposed the idea. Indeed, the finding that no human mind “decided” that such dispensations were just or necessary upsets their iconic role in Anglophone historiography. Rather, the “policy” resulted largely from bureaucratic crosstalk within the understaffed and overworked chambers of the Council of the Indies.

In telling this history, Twinam brings one historical discussion to a close while laying the foundation for another. Purchasing Whiteness offers an overview of the meaning of African heritage in colonial Spanish America, followed by a detailed examination of a handful of eighteenth-century cases in which aspiring professionals—surgeons, apothecaries, and scribes—sought license to practice their vocations despite legal restrictions against those with African ancestors. Then, with intimate attention to parallel chronologies on both sides of the Atlantic, Twinam reveals the process by which the flustered trans-Atlantic bureaucracy, responding to such requests, inadvertently gave whitening via the gracias al sacar an official “price” in 1795.

Yet the issue was far from settled. Twinam traces the efforts of later petitioners and royal officials alike to understand, embrace, or negate the resulting notion of socioracial equality, and she highlights its role within the creation of the Spanish Constitution of 1812.

This book will be of broad interest. It pertains most directly to scholars of Latin America and the African diaspora. Yet it will benefit those in other fields as well, inasmuch as it self-consciously models new ways of approaching archives—for example, by accounting for the agency of bureaucratic “process” alongside individuals—as well as the new research strategies enabled by digital archives. In some ways, Twinam demonstrates that whitening via the gracias al sacar—an exotic and radical notion to many people in the United States—was a red herring. Yet the complete story has much to reveal, not only about the vagaries of Spanish imperial administration but also about the full extent of the struggle for justice by men and women of African descent across the centuries in the Americas.