The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada - Softcover

Rappaport, Joanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822356368 ISBN 13: 9780822356363

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Much of the scholarship on difference in colonial Spanish America has been based on the "racial" categorizations of indigeneity, Africanness, and the eighteenth-century Mexican castas system. Adopting an alternative approach to the question of difference, Joanne Rappaport examines what it meant to be mestizo (of mixed parentage) in the early colonial era. She draws on lively vignettes culled from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archives of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia) to show that individuals classified as "mixed" were not members of coherent sociological groups. Rather, they slipped in and out of the mestizo category. Sometimes they were identified as mestizos, sometimes as Indians or Spaniards. In other instances, they identified themselves by attributes such as their status, the language that they spoke, or the place where they lived. The Disappearing Mestizo suggests that processes of identification in early colonial Spanish America were fluid and rooted in an epistemology entirely distinct from modern racial discourses.
 

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Joanne Rappaport is Professor of Anthropology, and Spanish and Portuguese, at Georgetown University. She is the author of Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Dialogue in Colombia and coauthor (with Tom Cummins) of Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes, both also published by Duke University Press.

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The Disappearing Mestizo

Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada

By JOANNE RAPPAPORT

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5636-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Author's Note on Transcriptions, Translations, Archives, and Spanish Naming Practices, xiii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: Defining Race in the Colonial Era, 29, 
2 Mestizo Networks: Did "Mestizo" Constitute a Group?, 61, 
3 Hiding in Plain Sight: Gendering Mestizos, 95, 
4 Good Blood and Spanish Habits: The Making of a Mestizo Cacique, 133, 
5 "Asi lo Paresçe por su Aspeto": Physiognomy and the Construction of Difference in Colonial Santafé, 171, 
6 The Problem of Caste, 205, 
Conclusion, 227, 
Appendix: Cast of Characters, 239, 
Notes, 245, 
Glossary, 303, 
Bibliography, 307, 
Index, 333, 

CHAPTER 1

Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers

Defining Race in the Colonial Era

It is difficult to determine the "groupness" of mestizos in early colonial Santafé: they defied classification by constantly "disappearing" into other categories; they did not consistently embody a clear set of attributes distinguishing them from others in colonial society; they did not enjoy special rights or obligations defining them as mestizos and facilitating their incorporation as a sociological group. Furthermore, the concept "mestizo" functioned as much as a metaphor as a social category, standing in for a broad range of types of mixing, not only between people of different socioracial categories, but also between those of different social statuses. "Mestizo" also denoted the mixing of different "blood," pure and impure, such as occurred when an African or indigenous wet nurse suckled a Spanish infant. "Mestizo" was the term used to speak about crossbred animals, such as mules. Therefore, to say that mestizos constituted a fluid socioracial category in the colonial period is insufficient. If we concentrate exclusively on how people defined themselves or were classified by others, we get only a piece of the story, a glimpse of their individual identities—themselves highly contextual and transitory—without making inroads into comprehending how the process of identification worked, and why.

The best place to begin an inquiry into the meaning of "mestizo" is to look at colonial people who pretended to be that which they were not: people who consciously "passed" for someone else. This exercise might help us to discern the nature of the boundaries that colonial people perceived between themselves and others, instead of forcing on the colonial situation a particularly modern consciousness of what those boundaries might be. Such an approach results in the observation, however startling it may be to the twenty-first-century observer, that "race" as it was understood in the sixteenth century was not what we understand it to be today. Furthermore, many of the social boundaries we would immediately tag as "racial" were founded in the colonial period on other sorts of distinctions. Race in the colonial period was inherited through the blood—not through the genes—and could not always be discerned in individual phenotypes. It characterized members of lineages, not broad social groups. And it revolved around such matters as nobility and religion.

I open my inquiry with a story that at first glance appears to be a classic narrative of racial passing: the bungled elopement of the sixteen-year-old Spanish noblewoman doña Catalina Acero de Vargas with an "indio zambo," a mulatto of native and African parentage. In 1675 Doña Catalina escaped from her brother's house and ran off with Francisco Suárez, a young man who enticed her into marriage by telling her he was a nobleman from Lima and thus a good match for a young aristocratic woman. When the two met in person, however, she discovered that Suárez was not the Limeño noble he purported to be. The actions of doña Catalina brought dishonor upon her well-placed family. Her brother, Juan de Vargas, brought accusations against Suárez to the Santafé authorities, alleging that the man "went to the houses of my dwelling and with trickery removed from them doña Catalina de Acero, my sister, a damsel of sixteen years of age, and he took her where he would, under the pretext, which he later made known, that he wanted to marry her, tricking her as though she were a child, pretending to be a great nobleman ... although he was, as is commonly called, an indio guauqui or zambo [como comunmente se dize yndio guauqui o zambo]" (902r). He warned the authorities to resolve the issue with haste, "both so that the aggressor did not flee and so that any of [doña Catalina's] relatives who felt offended did not pursue him and attempt to take revenge for the offense" (902r–v).

An orphan living under the tutelage of her brother, doña Catalina grumbled about the poor treatment she said she received from her sister-in-law, so it is not surprising that she was seduced by the stranger who promised to lure her out of her captivity. Suárez, a painter by trade, courted doña Catalina in a series of letters in which he attested to his noble birth, saying his parents in Peru were "well-born, of good stock [heran caualleros y jente muy principal]" (905v); who actually penned the missives is not revealed in the testimony. Slipping away from her brother's home under cover of night, doña Catalina found herself face to face with her suitor for the first time. It was then that she realized the irresoluble predicament she had gotten herself into. On closer observation, doña Catalina recognized "by the aforementioned man's color and his speech, he was not of the quality that he had told her [por el color del dicho honbre y sus palabras no ser de la calidad que se le auia dicho]" (906r). Witnesses corroborated her observations, identifying Suárez as "brown" (moreno) in color (903v).

This story of a dishonest suitor is an excellent example of what would today be called "racial passing," but with a telling colonial cadence. A twenty-first-century Catalina would have immediately recognized Francisco Suárez before running off with him because she would have met him in person, seen him, and heard him speak. But as befitted a high-born unmarried woman, she was sheltered (recogida) in her brother's house (which also likely explains why she grew weary of her sister-in-law, who was committed to preserving the family's honor by isolating her). Thus, her only experience of courtship was through letters. Given a world in which the written word was privileged over speech—indeed, was fetishized—passing could easily be camouflaged through literate communication. Unfortunately for doña Catalina, her sheltered upbringing, boredom, and immaturity all interfered with the critical faculties she should have brought to an evaluation of Suárez's missives.

SITUATING FRANCISCO SUÁREZ'S BEHAVIOR

My research in the archives of Bogotá and Seville uncovered only a handful of cases of passing as we moderns would understand the practice, that is, of individuals belonging to one racial group masquerading as members of another. To be sure, I encountered examples of passing in a broader sense: conversos (new converts to Christianity or their descendants) posing as Old Christians,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822356368
• ISBN 13: 9780822356363
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland