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

Students in my classes on colonial Latin America are always fascinated to learn about the gracias al sacar decree of 1795, a list of the royal “gracias” (favors or dispensations) available for purchase by Spanish subjects. At the very end of that list were the prices for pardos (people of racially mixed ancestry) and quinterones (people of one-fifth African ancestry) to purchase dispensation from their racial status and access to the privileges of whiteness. Under the laws of the Spanish caste system, people of African ancestry were barred from entering the university, becoming priests or royal officials, exercising the liberal professions or higher-status manual trades, carrying arms, and other restrictions. Those laws also limited Afro-descendants’ ability to marry white spouses or others outside their “caste.”

Establishing a formal mechanism for people of color to buy their way out of blackness and into whiteness strikes my students as a novel and intriguing concept, and they always have questions about it. How many people took advantage of the law and applied for whiteness? Were the prices high, low, or reasonable in relation to the benefits that they bought? When pardos bought whiteness, were they accepted by their neighbors and compatriots as “real” white people? Or did African ancestry continue to limit their social and economic prospects?

Ann Twinam’s deeply researched new book answers those questions and more. How many people bought whiteness? Hardly any, it turns out, in part because Spanish bureaucrats did not publicize the 1795 law. News of this opportunity therefore did not travel widely, with the result that the handful of people who applied for whiteness—in all of Spanish America, 17 before 1795 and 23 after—tended to be linked to each other in local networks of successful pardo professionals and their families. The largest such cluster was drawn from the Mexías Bejarano and Landaeta families of Caracas, who were connected through marriage and militia service. Other clusters were professional: for example, small groups of pardo notaries in Panama and of surgeons in Cuba. Of the forty applicants, only nine succeeded in purchasing whiteness; nine more obtained more limited dispensations allowing them to practice professions that under the caste laws were closed to people of African descent. The remaining petitions were either denied or never acted on, as hesitant royal officials debated how and whether to implement the legislation.

Given the law’s very limited application, and royal bureaucrats’ obvious uneasiness with it, one wonders how it ever got enacted. It is on precisely this question that Purchasing Whiteness is especially illuminating. Twinam finds that gracias al sacar was neither a bold state initiative nor a significant source of new revenue. Rather, it was a royal response to “generations of pardo and mulatto efforts to achieve mobility” (33). As soon as the caste laws took form, in the early 1600s, so too did free black and mulatto efforts to escape the strictures of those laws. Afro-Spanish Americans sought, with widespread success, to evade racially defined tribute taxes. By joining (racially segregated) colonial militias they won the right the bear arms and, by the 1700s, to become officers in those units. They also pursued extra-legal means of mobility, attending (though seldom graduating from) universities that were supposedly closed to them and infiltrating professions from which they were theoretically barred.

Those quietly subversive tactics produced the first petitions, in the mid-1700s, from pardo notaries and surgeons requesting royal confirmation of their right to practice professions that they were already practicing. In the absence of official guidelines for such petitions, claimants had to invent their own documentary formats, citing their many “merits” and their loyalty to the king. It was those groundbreaking petitions, and royal bureaucrats’ improvised decisions over how much to charge to dispense petitioners from their blackness, that set the template...