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Histories of Race and Racism
The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5043-9
Chapter One
Unfixing Race KATHRYN BURNS
Race in lineage is understood to be bad, as to have some Moorish or Jewish race. —Sebasti? de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611)
"We order and command that no one, of whatsoever quality and condition, be received into the said Order ... unless he be a Gentleman ... born of legitimate matrimony, and not of Jewish, Moorish, Heretic, nor Plebeian race." —Real Academia Española, Diccionario de autoridades (1726–39)
The word "race" has never been stable. Old dictionaries make this clear, while pointing up the persistent racism that avails itself of categories even as they change. Covarrubias, for example, begins his definition of raza with "the caste of purebred horses, which are marked with brands to distinguish them," and moves on to cloth, in which race denotes "the coarse thread that is distinct from the other threads in the weave." Only then does he turn to lineage, mentioning Moors and Jews. Jews and Moors also appear in the Real Academia's Diccionario, in an embedded snippet of the rules of the prestigious Order of Calatrava, but in significantly augmented company: alongside the races of Heretics and Plebeians. Both definitions emphasize the term's negative associations. And each divers strikingly from modern usages rooted in scientific racism and the many ways it has been used and contested.
Such definitional drift, I'll argue, bespeaks complex histories marked by very local struggles as well as far-flung imperial rivalries. Scholars in many fields increasingly put the term "race" in scare quotes. This is a welcome move to unfix race—to signal that the categories we recognize as racial are not stable or panhistoric—but is only the beginning of a project we can take much further. The point of carefully historicizing racial usages is to better understand both early modern racisms and those of our time.
Consider, for example, that one of the most potent racial insults one could hurl in early seventeenth-century Peru was "judío" (Jew). Jews were stigmatized as la mala casta blanca, or "bad whites." This is a historically specific frame of reference, one Albert Sicrov calls "religious racism." Its Iberian genealogy is quite involved and links together histories that exist on separate shelves of our libraries: the histories of Spanish Jews, many of whom converted under pressure to Roman Catholicism after the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1391 and were known as conversos, and Spanish Muslims who did likewise, known as moriscos. By the early fifteenth century, "Old Christians" increasingly regarded "New Christian" populations with deep suspicion. A sincere convert could not, at a glance, be distinguished from a false or backsliding convert, and considerable anxiety centered on those Spaniards who allegedly still practiced in secret a faith they had publicly renounced. Spain's monarchs created the Spanish Inquisition in the late 1470s primarily to discipline suspected "judaizers"—people who were thought to practice Judaism clandestinely. And concerns began to fix on the supposed cleanliness of people's bloodlines. More and more Spanish institutions and municipalities devised and enforced statutes that excluded those not descended from Old Christians.
In short, the Castilian politics of race circa 1492 hinged on the purity of one's Christianity, increasingly defined as a matter not simply of belief and practice but of inheritance, or limpieza de sangre (purity of blood)—something that could not be changed at the baptismal font. The intensifying persecution of those believed to be of impure Christian lineage was intimately related to the consolidation of the lineage of the Spanish absolutist state. A militant, intolerant Christianity drove both processes. As the inquisitorial policing of distinctions between correct and heretical Christians got underway, the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand were campaigning to defeat the last Iberian stronghold of Islam, the kingdom of Granada. The year they succeeded, 1492, was also the year in which they obliged Spain's remaining Jews to convert to Christianity or emigrate. Ten years later, Muslims were given the same choice. After another century of tensions, Philip III moved to expel all moriscos in 1609.
From 1391 to 1609, the status of New Christians—who were not recognizable at a glance, but were considered by Old Christians to be ineradicably tainted in their blood—became a white-hot political and cultural issue in Spain. And militant Christianity, sharply defined against Spain's internal, demonized Others, was part of the mental baggage that Columbus and the Iberians who followed him brought along as they invaded and subjugated American peoples after 1492. Columbus's famous account of his first voyage begins with the touchstone moment of the fall of Granada: "This present year of 1492 ... I saw the Royal Standards of Your Highnesses placed by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra." Columbus's description of the Caribbean peoples he encounters on the other side of the Atlantic has an eerie echo of conflicts of the recent past: according to him, they live in houses that "are all made like Moorish campaign tents." (He refers to his own companions interchangeably as "Spaniards" and "Christians.") Cortés likewise wrote of Yucatecan houses of rooms "small and low in the Moorish fashion." As many historians have noted, the horizon of conquest these men had in mind as they measured their exploits was that of the Spanish reconquista and the cleansing of the realm of their sovereigns from the stain of the "sects" of Moses and Mohammed.
Before long, in each American viceroyalty over which Spanish rule was established, those suspected of secretly practicing their Jewish or Muslim faith could be persecuted by an American office of the Spanish Inquisition—and they were persecuted, as Irene Silverblatt shows in the Lima case of Manuel Bautista Pérez. But to expel all non-Christians and suspicious converts was clearly not an option. On the contrary, the Iberian monarchs were obliged by an agreement with the pope to convert the natives of the Americas to Christianity. One way or another, Iberians in the Americas were going to have to coexist with an enormous population of "idolators" and brand new converts—just the kind of people they had learned to despise back home.
Moreover, to stand any chance of success whatsoever, Iberians would need the Americans' help. Assimilation was the initial framework the Spanish Crown advocated during a few brief and experimental years. One royal decree went so far as to recommend that some Spaniards marry Indian women, and some Indian men marry Spanish women, so "that they may communicate with and teach one another ... and the Indians become men and women of reason." Proximity to Spaniards would give Americans a "good example" of Christian conduct to follow, or so it was thought. When the dramatic news from Las Casas and others showed just how badly things were going, however, royal advisors realized that a new course had to be charted. They gradually assembled the juridical fiction of "two republics," the república de españoles and its corresponding república de indios. These were propounded in a series of royal orders strikingly different from those issued not long before. By the 1570s, the crown was betting on a strategy of physical segregation of Indians from non-Indians, and the forced relocation or "reduction" of the former into all-Indian towns. Yet it is crucial to note that the overall goal of assimilation still held for the indigenous nobility, those whom Spaniards indiscriminately termed caciques. Special schools were erected to convert the sons of native leaders to Christianity and give them a thoroughly Spanish upbringing. By the late sixteenth century, indigenous nobles were among the Spanish clergy's most enthusiastic new Christians.
However, the "two republics" model failed from its inception to keep Spaniards and indigenous peoples apart. As they settled in and erected towns, cities, and viceroyalties, Iberian immigrants—overwhelmingly male—brought with them numerous African slaves and peninsular slaves of African descent. No one seemed to stay in the place the crown had assigned. And as part of the violence of conquest and occupation, the invading Europeans and their allies took indigenous women as spoils of war, slaves, servants, and sometimes as wives, appropriating native and enslaved women's bodies. Reports from the new viceroyalties mark new categories of people: mestizo, mulato, zambo, and so forth. These were not terms of self-identification, but of convenient Spanish labeling. They gave Spanish authorities a linguistic handle on those who fit neither of the two republics—and who seemed, to Spaniards' dismay, to threaten both republics with their disorderly conduct. These were Spaniards' impure New World Others.
Were these new categories racial? They did not imply clear color lines. But they did have to do with race in contemporary Castilian terms, as they referenced and linked the issues of blood (im)purity and fresh conversion to Christianity. These new labels—and that of "Indian" as well—were applied to people who, like the conversos and moriscos of Spain, were new converts (or their descendants). The point was to delineate places for them in a society in which Christianization would, in theory, be assured by Christian masters and priests. Spaniards' designs never worked quite as intended. Still, these designs can be seen as driven by the racial considerations of a particular time and place: the early Castilian mission to impose Christianity and extirpate American beliefs considered false and heretical.
But what exactly did new terms like "mestizo," "mulato," and "zambo" mean to those who were devising them in places like Peru or New Spain? What kinds of practices, choices, and lifeways are hidden behind them? And can we see in the written record any terms other than those used by Spaniards, perhaps subaltern usages? I'd like to consider these questions by examining the history of the Spanish terms that were being introduced and circulated in sixteenth-century Cuzco. It is hard to trace anything about Cuzco's history before midcentury through archival work, since most of the paper trail has been scattered or lost. But published chronicles are very rich and give us much to go on.
Take part 1, book 9, chapter 31 of the Comentarios reales of Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, who was born in Cuzco in 1539: "New names for naming new generations." Himself the son of a Spanish father and an Inca mother, Garcilaso focuses this section on mixture, beginning with laudatory comments on Spaniards and their slaves: "There [in America] from these two nations they have made others, mixed in all ways." With this introduction, Garcilaso starts his inventory of categories with Spaniards, noting the distinction between those born in Spain and those born overseas. But what comes across strongly in this passage is the distinctions drawn by Africans:
The children of Spanish men and women born there [in America] are called criollo or criolla, to indicate that they are born in the Indies. This name was invented by the blacks.... It means, among them, "a black born in the Indies." They invented it to diverentiate those who go from here [Spain], and were born in Guinea, from those who were born there. Because they consider themselves more honorable and of better quality, for having been born in the fatherland, than their children who were born in a foreign land. And the parents are ovended if they are called criollos. Spaniards, for like reasons, have begun using this term for those born there, so that Spaniards and Africans born there are called criollo or criolla.
Here the subjectivity attributed to African men and women is in the foreground; the Spaniards are copycats. And the terms "criollo" and "criolla" refer both to Africans and Spaniards, the better to get across another criterion of diverence and hierarchy that mattered: one's natal land or patria. Why did birthplace matter? Garcilaso indicates that it had to do with honor and quality, what contemporaries might also have described as condición. And Garcilaso means the honor and quality of unfree people. This remarkable passage thoroughly upends our expectations of Garcilaso's contemporaries and imagined readers. He gets us to understand criollos through the subjectivity of African men and women concerned with the defense of their honor.
Garcilaso continues by introducing the terms "mulato" and "mulata," but not as the children of black and white parents, as our histories of colonial Latin America usually define them. By his account, "The child of a black man and an Indian woman—or of an Indian man and a black woman—is called a mulato or mulata. And their children are called cholos. This word is from the Barlovento islands. It means 'dog,' not of pure breed but of the very vicious gozcones. And Spaniards use it to defame and insult." Garcilaso moves us further on the terrain of contemporary usage, pointing to active trafficking in words over wide geographic expanses. Here impurity among those of African descent is not just stigmatized but bestialized.
Garcilaso gets to his own background next, and defines "mestizo" with reference to himself: "They call us mestizos, to say that we are mixed from both nations," both Spanish and Indian. He approaches this term much more personally. But note that the bounds of his sympathy have limits:
It was imposed by the first Spaniards to have children in the Indies. And because the name [mestizo] was given us by our fathers according to their understanding, I call myself this with pride and am honored by it. In the Indies, however, if one of them is told "you're a mestizo" or "he's a mestizo," they take it as an insult. This is why they have embraced with such enthusiasm the term montañés that was but one of the many avronts and insults a powerful man gave them in place of the term mestizo. And they fail to consider that although in Spain the name montañés is honorable, because of the privileges that were given to the natives of the mountains of Asturias and the Basques, calling anyone who was not born in those provinces by the same name is an abuse.
So are these terms insults? According to Garcilaso, it depends who uses them, to whom they are applied, and where they are used. He ironizes his kin for readily referring to themselves as "mountain people," since according to him this is an insult if used of anyone other than a Basque or an Asturian. The equivalent term is likewise an insult in the Inca language; he adds that "sacharuna ... properly means 'savage.'" He thinks those he broadly defines as his relatives have been the unwitting dupes of a disrespectful "poderoso" (a locally powerful man). Garcilaso prefers to (re)claim the term "mestizo," and draws this passage out even further to urge his relations to do the same: "My kinsmen, without understanding the malice of the man who imposed the name on them, take pride in his avront, when they should reject and abominate it and call themselves what our fathers called us and not admit such new, insulting names."
Garcilaso concludes his chapter on "new generations" by introducing terms that I have never seen in any manuscript or, for that matter, any chronicle: "cuatralbo" for someone one part Indian and three parts Spanish, and "tresalbo" for someone three parts Indian and one part Spanish. Perhaps these reflect local usages that did not make it into wider circulation. Such terms—like "montañés," which I have come across in the Cuzco archives—may have had a range of reference limited to certain places and to the second half of the sixteenth century.
Because of his evorts to reposition terms in better usage, all the while insisting on their utter novelty and the racism that might inhere in them, Garcilaso unfixes "race" for us while grounding colonial racism in very particular circumstances. He shows us the enormous historical and cultural chasms between his terms and how they operated, his Iberian contemporaries' terms, and ours. This chapter is cited frequently, usually to make a point about Garcilaso's pride in his Spanish-Andean parentage and the losing struggle he was waging to defend himself and his fellow mestizos from disrepute. He was indeed proud. Both his parents were nobles by the standards of their respective cultures, and very important people in Garcilaso's native city. But many of the terms he attempted to fix in part I, book 9, chapter 31 soon drifted away, to catch on other meanings or disappear altogether. "Mestizo" did replace "montañés," as Garcilaso wanted. But it did not lose its powerfully disreputable connotations. And these had nothing to do with the supposed stain of Jewish or Muslim blood.
(Continues...)
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