Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

6 Negotiating Racial Identities in the 1790s

In September 1799, Doña Clara Lopez de la Peña, a twenty-old-year-old native and vecina of New Orleans, appeared before Bishop Luis Peñalver y Cárdenas to request that he correct a clerical error concerning her daughter Luisa’s baptism. Then almost five years old, Luisa was, according to her mother, subject to “notorious prejudice” because her baptism had been recorded in the sacramental registry “corresponding only to Negros.” At her baptism in 1795, Luisa and Clara were both noted as mestizas libres, which Lopez de la Peña did not deny; what she did deny was that having Indian ancestry made them not white. Five witnesses testified on Lopez de la Peña’s behalf, tracing her maternal lineage back to her grandmother, who, they swore, was “a mestiza,” “the daughter of a hombre blanco and an India without any mixture of negro and mulato.”1 Lopez de la Peña thus requested that her daughter’s record should be erased from the negro registry and entered into the book of blancos. By the end of the eighteenth century, New Orleanians utilized a casta system that was both more restrictive than what had come before and yet allowed for more flexibility in the categorization of certain individuals. One’s calidad in New Orleans was not determined solely by racial ancestry but also by social status, including whether one was free or enslaved. In addition, rather than the presence of African ancestry, it was the percentage of European blood that suggested one’s racial identity. This racial order involved a more complex hierarchy than those present in contemporary Anglo-America, but there was one important similarity: in New Orleans’ casta system and in Anglo-America’s dualistic racial order, Indians qua Indians had come to be excluded from the colonial system and were seen as existing outside of it. Indians had been erased from the city’s racial order through a process that Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau have called “documentary genocide.”2 Louisiana ’s native peoples had been a part of colonial society from the very beginning of c h a p t e r s i x Negotiating Racial Identitiesinthe1790s 156 Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans the century: as slaves, consorts, and wives. Some officials had reservations about the enslavement of native peoples, not because they didn’t think they weren’t suited to be slaves (they did) but rather because they were concerned about the possible pragmatic political and economic ramifications of enslaving them. Indians were, in any event, quickly outnumbered by an ample supply of African slaves. At the beginning of the century, officials had also debated whether or not Indian women could be incorporated into colonial society as the wives of French colonists. As we have seen, metropolitan and local officials, on the one hand, ultimately decided to prevent “marriages of this sort . . . as much as possible”; secular officials, on the other, tolerated French-Indian extramarital relationships, demonstrating that they were at least willing to consider the incorporation of native peoples into colonial society. This was in stark contrast to the almost immediate metropolitan prohibition on marriages between noirs and blancs and on extramarital relationships between free (whether blancs or noirs) and slave laid down in the 1724 Code Noir, which engendered no local debate or opposition.3 The different prescriptions regarding Euro-Louisianan marriages to Indians and to Afro-Louisianans illustrate that, as colonial authorities attempted to order the colony along racial lines, they had different ideas about the roles that Indians and Afro-Louisianans should play. They encountered Indians as the indigenous inhabitants of the land they hoped to colonize; they had to negotiate with them, and they depended on them for defense, food, and trade. They realized, therefore, that intimate relationships might be necessary to create alliances between colonists and native peoples. Afro-Louisianans, on the other hand, had only their labor to offer, and the colonists took that by force. No alliances had to be built, no negotiations made. In a plantation economy, assimilating enslaved Afro-Louisianans into French creole society through intimacy served no useful purpose, even as the frontier nature of that plantation economy allowed for greater social fluidity and closeness.4 By the end of the century, however, Afro-Louisianans had increasingly come to be seen as an essential part of the colonial social order, while Indians had...