Mixed Race Studies

Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

Brandeis University Press
2020-11-01
212 pages
5.5 x 8.5 in.
Cloth ISBN: 9781684580194

Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Moriscos: Real, Occasional, and Imaginary Muslims
• Conversos: The Mestizos of Faith
• Mestizos: “A Monster of . . . Many Species”
• Notes
• Index

Spaniards, ‘pardos’, and the missing mestizos: identities and racial categories in the early Hispanic Caribbean

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 71, Numbers 1&2 (1997)
pages 5-19

Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University

Traces the history of the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Author asks whether they constituted a separate ethnicity. He also looks at the question why the position of the mestizos in the Spanish Caribbean seems different from that in other areas in Spanish America.

On arrival in Puerto Rico today, one can not but help noticing the way in which the term criollo has become a descriptive adjective denoting things local or indigenous to the island: café criollo, comida criolla, müsica criolla, pan criollo, etc. The word criollo has become a way of claiming authenticity and a distinctive island identity. In the Americas, the term “criollo” had a complex history, many uses, and considerable regional variation. Used in Brazil (crioulo) and in early Spanish America as a designation for American-born black slaves, the term was often employed generically for anything locally-born. Hence usages such as ganado criollo (native cattle) or even, as in the case of Guatemala, of references to mestizos criollos (Megged 1992:422-24; Garcia Arévalo 1992a). The traditional usage of the term in colonial mainland Spanish America—as a designation a white person of European heritage born in the colony—had begun to take hold in the 1560s (Lavallé 1986, 1993; Lockhart 1994) but it had never fully taken hold in the islands. Father Agustfn Inigo Abbad y Lasierra (1971: 181-84) reported in the 1780s: “They give the name criollo without distinction to all those born on the island regardless of the caste or mixture from which they derive.” Clearly a fusion of categories of social and racial differences was summarized in this term. In it, an identity and a history are claimed (Sider 1994).

In the Hispanic Caribbean with its peculiar early demographic history of elimination of the indigenous population, low levels of European immigration, and the large-scale importation of Africans, the process of classification had a distinctive character and form in which whites, blacks, Indians, and people of mixed origins were grouped and categorized in different ways at different times. This study seeks to explore a small part of this process by examining the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Mestizos, there from the outset, seem to fade from sight. What happened to them? Did they constitute a separate ethnicity, and why does their position in the Hispanic Caribbean seem different from that in other areas of Spanish America?…

…The word “mestizo” itself appeared in the Caribbean as early as the 1520s but it was rarely used, a fact surprisingly paralleled in early Peru and Paraguay where less pejorative terms like genizaro or montanés were preferred at first. In a place like Puerto Rico, for example, it is difficult to find any references to mestizos despite the fact that many already existed by the 1530s. The Lando census of 1530 enumerated Spaniards, Indians, and blacks but made no mention of persons of mixed origin. Over a century later, in the 1645 synod of San Juan there was no reference to mestizos, and the presiding Bishop, Damian López de Haro, in describing the island’s population made no mention of them. Still, modern historian Francisco Scarano (1993:199) has argued that by the seventeenth century mestizos “were probably more numerous than the Spaniards themselves.” What may be at stake here is not the definition of “mestizo,” but rather the definition of “Spaniard.” Mestizos, especially those born legitimately and who lived according to accepted colonial norms were being accepted as “Spaniards,” a term that now no longer indicated place of origin alone, but was being expanded to indicate status and a level of acceptance based on cultural attributes and probably to some extent on appearance (Schwartz 1995)…

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