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3 The Significance and Ambiguities of "Race" Beneath Mexico City's facade of power and authoritysymbolized by the grandeur of the city's palaces and churches and by the geometrical regularity of its broad avenues-lay the messy vitality of the urban poor. Plebeian society was a reality: in the streets, marketplaces , and taverns, in servants' quarters, ramshackle apartments, and adobe hovels, the poor of all races worked, played, begged, gossiped, argued, fought, drank, gambled, made love-survived. They shared a lifestyle and, to some extent, a consciousness, notably, in their disdain toward the rules and regulations promulgated by the authorities. Yet one may wonder whether a group ofthis size (85% ofthe city's total population) did not have important internal divisions. Perhaps the elite commentators, in their disgust at the plebeians' miscegenation and lack of republica, exaggerated the unity of the plebe. Perhaps the frequent outbursts ofviolence among the city's poor were not merely the result of drunken quarrels or the stress of daily life but indications of the fault lines in plebeian society. One possible element of divisiveness leaps immediately to mind: racial differentiation. Was Mexico's racial hierarchy merely a figment of elite imaginations, a reflection of their own visceral fear of contamination by "impure" blood? Did a kind of "racial democracy" exist among the lower classes? Or was race, even for the poor, an "imperative" status,l dominating their lives and inescapably limiting their social options? In this chapter and in chapter 4, I assess the role of race in plebeian society. Any investigation ofracial differentiation within a population must begin with the question of how "race" is determined. The quotation marks are used adVisedly, for race is not self-evident. Technically, a race is a subspecies , a geographically localized subdivision of a species, marked off from other subdivisions by differing gene frequencies that reveal themselves in physical or behavioral traits. Since Homo sapiens is a differentiated species (with particularly notable variations in skin color), may we conclude that racial divisions among human beings are genetically determined and therefore "real"? This proposition is strongly disputed by many mod49 50 The Significance and Ambiguities of "Race" ern biologists. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, argues that "the fact of variability does not require the designation of races." 2 He continues, The category ["race"] need not be used. All organisms must belong to a species, each species must belong to a genus, each genus to a family, and so on. But there is no requirement that a species be divided into subspecies. The subspecies is a category of convenience. We use it only when we judge that our understanding of variability will be increased by establishing discrete, geographically bounded packages within a species. Many biologists are now arguing that ... [this practice] is not only inconvenient but also downright misleading.3 According to Gould, researchers (with modern computers at their disposal) increasingly prefer to study whole species, using multivariate analysis to map continuous patterns of variation over a species' geographic range. These patterns can then be usefully correlated with, for example, climatic conditions. This dynamic perspective eliminates the need (and the motive) for distinguishing subspecies.4 Thus, the concept of "race" has little or no scientific basis. Genetic differences cause differences in physical appearance (though one cannot assume a direct correspondence), but genes do not unambiguously sort human beings into separate categories. Indeed, the great variety ofhuman phenotypes means that any attempt to draw a hard and fast line between, for instance, "blacks" and "whites" must be (from an objective point of view) largely arbitrary. Such a boundary is socially rather than biologically determined. "Race" is a social construct. But since societies are complex, it is not immediately clear who defines race and then allocates people to various racial categories. In the multiethnic, inequitable society of colonial Mexico, one would assume that the dominant Spaniards would take the lead in defining racial boundaries, for "without a method for clearly distinguishing between one group and another, systematic discrimination cannot be practiced ."5 Such distinctions need not be elaborate or extremely precise; often they merely divide a society into dominant and subordinant groups. North Americans have historically recognized only two major racial groups- "white" and "black"-using the rule of hypo-descent (whereby anyone with one black ancestor is considered black) to keep this dichotomy intact .6 In colonial Mexico, as discussed in chapter 2, the fundamental racial division was also dichotomous. To recapitulate briefly: The Spanish crown organized the colony...

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