Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico by Ben Vinson III (review)

Before Mestizaje is a major contribution to an increasingly sophisticated literature about racial mixture in colonial Latin America with its critical scrutiny of the "sistema de castas" and the political, legal, social, and cultural variables that shaped its development. Such studies have challenged the very existence of such a "sistema" and a top-down imposition of its political logic. Rather, socioracial hierarchies in colonial Latin America were characterized more by flexibility and malleability than by stasis and immobility, varied widely within and across regions throughout the Spanish Empire, and were shaped as much as by accident as design.¹

At the core of this richly textured work is Vinson's determination to write a social history of what he refers to as "the forgotten castes" or "extreme caste groups of Mexico," racially mixed offspring of unions among Spaniards, Indians, and Africans, categorized with exotic labels such as lobos, moriscos, coyotes, and salto para atrás ("jumps backward"). As he points out, such castes are routinely cited as examples of seemingly infinite racial mixtures and amply represented in the eighteenth-century genre of casta paintings. Much less is known, however, about the forgotten castes' experiences and grounded histories. As Vinson astutely observes, it is "at its extremes, [that] caste's fluidity became most apparent" (202). At a broader level, Vinson uses his analysis of the forgotten castes to reflect on the caste system's origins, development, and legacies in order to rethink our understandings of mestizaje. He argues that "Before mestizaje existed casta, morphing through a conduit of change called castizaje" (69). In his view, castizaje/castagenesis provides a more nuanced concept through which to understand racial mixture in the colonial period. He builds on earlier works by Sánchez and Morales Cruz who argued for castizaje's ability to capture the granularities and fluidity of caste interactions in ways that mestizaje did not.² Vinson emphasizes, however, that it is precisely the fluidity of castizaje that requires deeper interrogation. By reconstructing the patterns of caste pluralism and caste shifting experienced by the forgotten castes, he contends that "colonial racial mobility likely extended deeper and proved more socially profound than we might have initially imagined" (63).

Although the main focus is on Mexico City in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Vinson also comments on trends throughout the colony. Drawing on ethnohistory, anthropology, and demography, Vinson deploys an impressive range of primary sources that includes censuses, notarial records of slave sales, baptismal and marriage registers, and bigamy and inquisition cases. By tracing individuals categorized as lobos, moriscos, mulatos, coyotes, and pardos, the racial demographics that he reconstructs for these groups are revealing of previously unknown trends. For Mexico City, extreme castes accounted for less than one-half of 1 percent of the sampled population. Moreover, children accounted for a significant number of extreme castes in Mexico City. Vinson interprets this evidence to suggest that extreme caste categories did not follow individuals into adulthood. The 1791 census data also points to a low level of cross-racial/intercaste interaction: African-based populations had minimal impact on the family structure of whites/mestizos and vice-versa. Although contact between the white/mestizo sector with Indians was more significant than with blacks, it was still low, whereas contact between blacks and Indians occurred more frequently.

Also suggested by the 1791 census sample is that black households provided the main spaces for the generation of caste complexity. The category of mulato encompassed not only the offspring of blacks and whites but also of blacks and chinos or of blacks and Indians. Classifications of morisco, mulato, and mulato blanco substituted for one another, and in the eighteenth century, pardo became synonymous with mulato. Vinson posits that as large numbers of light-skinned individuals such as mulatos and pardos were incorporated into black households, "Mexican blackness itself was effectively transformed. . . . [T]he physical and phenotypic configuration...