Mixed Race Studies

Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of Colonial Tlaxcala

The Americas
Volume 69, Number 1, July 2012
pages 1-36
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2012.0060

Peter B. Villella, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

In 1773, a Mexico City expert in gold embroidery named don José Mariano Sánchez de Salazar Zitlalpopoca petitioned for a license to operate his own shop and take on apprentices. As handling precious metals was politically and economically sensitive, such professions were by law exclusive, open only to those of proven character, standing, and reputation—qualities understood to be inherited by blood. Thus, to establish his sufficiency for the license don José called forth witnesses to his family’s honor, reputation, and good lineage.

Genealogical and character investigations were common in the early modern Spanish world, part of the required process for those seeking access to elite institutions and associations. Among other indicators of high social status, aspirants often cited noble ancestors in Spain, both real and invented, as proof of their blood quality. Yet don José was not Spanish and could not credibly establish such a pedigree. Instead, he hired a scribe in the primarily Nahuatl-speaking city of Tlaxcala, east of Mexico City, to consult its noble registry (becerro) and confirm that he was descended from don Bartolomé Citlalpopoca, a Tlaxcalan leader at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival two and a half centuries earlier (Figure 1).

The scribe also reported that subsequent generations of Salazars, up to and including don José’s own brother, had served honorably with the Tlaxcalan cabildo, or municipal governing council. Finally, lest his indigenous origins raise suspicions among Spanish officials, the petitioner also submitted copies of royal decrees explicitly equating the legal status and rights of caciques, the hereditary lords in America’s native communities, with those of Spain’s hidalgos, gentlemen who enjoyed the privileges of minor nobility. “I am a cacique,” don José concluded, and “caciques are . . . eligible for all the ecclesiastical and secular employments and dignities customarily conferred upon the hidalgos of Castile, and can participate in any communities that require nobility.” Satisfied, the overseer confirmed that don José was indeed “a cacique Indian of the Tlaxcaltecos,” and, following a successful practical examination, the viceroy certified him as a master goldworker. Ironically, upon conferring his new rights, they required him to swear that he would never accept non-Spanish apprentices.

Don José was not the first of his family to find success in a social and professional realm normally reserved for Spaniards and creoles (American-born Spaniards). Nor was he the first cacique to gain access to the privileges of Spanish hidalgos, which was not entirely unusual by the end of the eighteenth century. Yet the Salazars of Tlaxcala stand out, inasmuch as their participation in the elite institutions of New Spain did not entirely replace the political offices they held and the historical identities they proclaimed as Tlaxcalan aristocrats. That is, they were not creoles boasting (as some did) of distant and mostly abstract cacica great-grandmothers. Rather, they were both caciques and hidalgos, performing each role simultaneously: Nahua nobles living as Novohispanic gentlemen, Tlaxcalan aristocrats wielding intellectual, political, and legal authority within the Spanish empire.

The Salazars belonged to a handful of families in central Mexico that had managed to escape the general decline of the Mesoamerican hereditary elite by the eighteenth century. The late-colonial plight of the indigenous nobility was such that in…

Thrall, Poems

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2012-08-28
96 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547571607; ISBN-10:0547571607
E-Book ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547840420; ISBN-10:054784042X

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

By unflinchingly charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces—across time and space—that determine the roles consigned to a mixed-race daughter and her white father. In a vivid series of poems about interracial marriage depicted in the Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico, Trethewey investigates the philosophical assumptions that underpin Enlightenment notions of taxonomy and classification, exposing the way they encode ideas of race within our collective imagination. While tropes about captivity, bondage, inheritance, and enthrallment permeate the collection, Trethewey, by reflecting on a series of small estrangements from her poet father, comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.

Thrall not only confirms that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.

Indigenous Nationalities and the Mestizo Dilemma

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-07-24

Duane Champagne, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles

Mestizo. Métis. Mixed bloods. Though clearly different, all these terms are used to racially classify people with Indian ancestry. However, the definitions vary—and none is wholly satisfactory.
 
Part of the problem is the widely varying histories of these people. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are settler states, where immigrants who took the land went on to form the majority. There, Indian and mixed-blood populations are a distinct minority.
 
However, many other countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have majority mixed-blood and indigenous populations, or mixed-blood leadership over indigenous majorities. Here, indigenous and mixed-blood identities and political relations come into sharper focus.
 
Officially, racial classifications were officially discouraged in so-called Latin America after Spain lost control over most of its colonies there in the early 1800s. Just the same, many governments, like Mexico’s, promoted a mestizo national identity based on a mix of European and indigenous heritages. In the United States and Canada, we call this process assimilation.
 
In Mexico, by contrast, it is called mestizaje. Mestizaje policies ask Indigenous Peoples to join the national community and economy, adopt the Spanish language, and abandon their traditional tribal communities, culture, language and dress.

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Gay male pornography and the re/de/construction of postcolonial queer identity in Mexico

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
ISSN: 14742756
Volume 8 Issue 2 (November 2010)

Gustavo Subero, Independent Researcher

Since colonial times, the figuration of the Latin(o) male homosexual has been highly exoticized and troped in western media accounts (Shohat and Stam 1994; Ramirez Berg 2002), as they are depicted as hypermasculine figures whose raw sexuality functions as an unquestionable sign of their inner primal machismo. This view on male (homo)sexuality has been further reinforced through the kind of images of Latin(o) men that have been presented in male gay pornography. Such stereotyped representations of male (homo)sexuality have permeated into a global, socio-sexual imaginary that persists in placing such men within a sexual and erotic order in which their bodies convey an extreme form of primal sexuality. As a result, the emergence of national gay pornographic industry(ies) in Mexico has resulted in a re-evaluation of the social and sexual notions commonly associated with male (homo)sexuality. The mestizo (mixed race) gay man is both deconstructed from his positions of sexual subordination (differently from submission) to a white subject (even when such coloured individuals take the active role during sex) and reconstructed in a new space of libidinal economy. This article offers an analysis of the role that national gay pornography has played in shaping Mexican gay men’s perception of their own sexuality taking as a point of departure their own national and ethnic background. The research will focus on a number of films made by Mecos Films and Eros Digital in Mexico, and demonstrate that such films have challenged notions of gender and sexual universalism, and instead offer new alternatives for the production and execution of desire amongst coloured men.

Afro-Mexican: A Short Study on Identity

University of Kansas
April 2009
63 pages

Ariane Rose Tulloch

Submitted to the graduate degree program in Anthropology and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master’s of Arts.

Up until the early 19th century, blacks outnumbered white Spaniards in most major Mexican cities (Vaughn 2008). Nowadays, the black population has been localized to two areas: Veracruz and the Costa Chica. This study looks at whether Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica region had developed a racial consciousness, and if so, to what extent. Data gathered about Afro-Mexicans was analyzed using the Minority Identity Development Model (Atkinson et al 1983) which captured the complexities of minority-majority relations in a multi-ethnic society. Not all Afro-Mexicans had developed a strong sense of Afro-Mexican identity, but instead accepted their classification into the dominant mestizo group. Others see themselves as Afro-Mexicans in their own right, possibly due to having been influenced by activist group in the U.S. and elsewhere. The latter group sees itself and others in a positive yet autonomous light, corresponding to the final stages of the Minority Identity Development Model.

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Historical trauma: The impact of colonial racism on contemporary relations between African Americans and Mexican immigrants

Colorado State University
Spring 2011
114 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1492454
ISBN: 9781124645148

Noah M. Wright

Submitted by Noah M. Wright Department of Ethnic Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado

The purpose of this project is to examine tensions in present day United States between African Americans and Mexican immigrants. Hyper-violent incidents of interracial gang violence between these two communities are presented by mainstream media as signifiers of the existence of the tension. Latinos, as a whole, and African Americans, whether in gangs or civilians, are often portrayed to be in competition due to three conventional explanations. While scholars and media sources have validity in pointing out the significance of socioeconomic competition, struggles for political power and the problems that the language barrier create, these explanations are not complete. El sistema de castas or the caste system, a racial hierarchy created by the Spaniards in Latin America during their colonial efforts, established how people of African descent, both free and slave, were treated in New Spain. The caste system’s continued influence can be seen with the denial of African heritage and the marginalized position of Afro-Mexicans in present day Mexico. Furthermore, these prejudices remain intact when Mexican immigrants enter the U.S. It is understood that Mexico’s national identity is mestizaje, a racially mixed nation; however, racism existed and is also present today in Mexico. By combining a historical perspective with the three primary reasons, mentioned above, it is hoped that the complete picture will help resolve tensions. This thesis argues that colonization, influenced heavily by a racial hierarchy, has caused Mexican immigrants to carry with them prejudices towards African Americans that were learned in Mexico, showing that the issue is deeper than competition over resources in present times. In response to an influx of Latino immigrants, African American responses show parallels with historical nativist responses to immigrants. By combining the impacts of historical racism with conventional explanations for the existence of the tension it is hoped an understanding may develop that will help reduce conflict.

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Blacks, Black Indians, Afromexicans: the Dynamics of Race, Nation, and Identity in a Mexican Moreno Community (Guerrero)

American Ethnologist
Volume 27, Issue 4, November 2000
pages 898–626
DOI: 10.1525/ae.2000.27.4.898

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology
James Madison University

In this article, I explore identity formation in Mexico from the perspective of residents of San Nicolás Tolentino, a village located on the Costa Chica, a historically black region of the southern Pacific Coast of Guerrero. Outsiders characterize San Nicolás’s residents as black, but in Mexico, national ideologies, anthropologies, and histories have traditionally worked to exclude or ignore blackness. Instead, the Spanish and Indian mestizo has been constituted as the quintessential Mexican, even as the Mexican past is tied to a romanticized and ideologically powerful Indian foundation. Ethnographic evidence suggests that San Nicolás’s “black” residents in fact see themselves as morenos, a term that signifies their common descent with Indians, whom they consider to be central to Mexicanness. As morenos interweave their identities, experiences, and descent with Indians, they also anchor themselves through Indians to the nation. These identity issues are complicated by the recent introduction to the coast of Africanness in the context of new national and scholarly projects reformulating the components of a new Mexican multicultural identity. In part, local morenos see Africanness as an outside imposition that conflicts with their sense of themselves as Mexican while it reinforces their political and economic marginality.

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Mexico’s black history is often ignored

Los Angeles Times
2008-04-13

John L. Mitchell, Times Staff Writer

In Mexico, the story of the country’s black population has been largely ignored in favor of an ideology that declares that all Mexicans are “mixed race.” But it’s the mixture of indigenous and European heritage that most Mexicans embrace; the African legacy is overlooked.

“They are saying we are all the same and therefore there is no reason to distinguish yourself,” said Padre Glyn Jemmott, a Roman Catholic priest from Trinidad and Tobago who has had a parish of a dozen Costa Chican pueblos since 1984.

“What they are not saying is that in ordinary life in Mexico, lighter-skinned Mexicans are accepted and have first place,” he said.

Jemmott, a co-founder of Mexico Negro, an organization that seeks to promote cultural pride and political strength in the coastal pueblos, said many Costa Chicans often don’t fully understand what it means to be black in Mexico until they leave their region.

Some tell stories of being confronted in other parts of the country by police who refuse to believe they’re Mexican and sometimes accuse them of being there illegally…

…They were not taught the details of their history: that Spanish slavers took Africans to colonial Mexico (New Spain) in the 16th century, long before the first slaves arrived in Jamestown, Va.; that during the colonial period there were more Africans than Europeans in Mexico.

The Costa Chicans were also not taught that some of the blacks were not slaves; that blacks lived throughout what is now Mexico, working in mining, sugar plantations and fishing.

In some instances black Mexicans were explorers and co-founders of settlements, including Los Angeles.

Jose Maria Morelos, one of Mexico’s leaders for independence, was a mulatto, as was Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s second president, who abolished slavery in 1822…

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Am I that Race? Punjabi Mexicans and Hybrid Subjectivity, or How To Do Theory So That It Doesn’t Do You

Hastings Women’s Law Journal
Volume 21, Number 2 (Summer 2010)
page 311-332

Falguni A. Sheth, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory
Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts

I. INTRODUCTION
 
This paper explores the conceptual and racial status of “Punjabi Mexicans” at the turn of the twentieth century. I refer primarily to marriages between East Indian men and Mexican or Mexican-American women on the West Coast and in the Southwestern United States. The scant information available about these alliances has been uncovered by several historians and an anthropologist.  In that literature, this group appears to be a “given,” i.e., it is portrayed as a coherent identity that emerges from a simple set of circumstances.  Yet, it is anything but a given; its existence and its collective and individual consciousness is created out of a complex nexus of legal, political, social, and natural environments that spurred the migration of East Indian men and Mexican women from their homelands and to their adopted lands. I am interested in examining the collective consciousness of individuals who are located in the same moment, but who are living in distinct but overlapping contexts. The structural sources – laws, institutions, explicit and implicit prohibitions, cultural trends, and economic interests – converge to give this population its subjectivity. By subjectivity, I refer to the complex existence of human beings, whose self-understanding is found in the nexus of historical, political, and social circumstances; juridical and social institutions such as laws and government; as well as in their creativity and imagination in negotiating and resisting those circumstances in order to survive or flourish. In other words, as Michel Foucault says, “There are two …

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Articulating Space: The Free-Colored Military Establishment in Colonial Mexico from the Conquest to Independence

Callaloo
Volume 27, Number 1 (Winter 2004)
pages 150-171
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2004.0052

Ben Vinson, III, Vice Dean for Centers, Interdepartmental Programs, and Graduate Programs
Johns Hopkins University

Introduction: Questioning the Question of Non-White Military Service in Colonial Mexico

At the close of the seventeenth century, even with Spain feeling the heat of war and with streams of pirate raids still punishing the coastlines of the crown’s New World holdings, Spanish bureaucrats cringed when considering the prospect of using black troops to defend their possessions. Francisco de Seijas y Lobera, the former alcalde mayor (district governor) of Tacuba, a distinguished member of the Spanish gentry, a scientist, merchant, and a traveler, seemed to capture the spirit of the times in his fourteen-volume history of the Spanish kingdom. Written between 1702–1704 as a counseling guide for the new monarch, Philip V, Seijas dedicated an entire tome exclusively to Mexican affairs. Within, he described in detail the existing military landscape, the scope of enemy threats, the parameters of existing defenses, and most importantly, he offered a series of recommendations for improving the mechanisms for protecting the crown’s borders. During times of emergency, Seijas suggested that Mexico could probably count upon the military services of 200,000 coastal and frontier defenders. His estimates tallied that a full 175,000 of these would be drawn from the negro, mulatto, pardo, Indian, and mestizo racial classes.

But in his enthusiasm for advocating the expansion of the military to include nonwhites, Seijas also revealed certain prejudices that seemed characteristic of his times. Sure, negros and mulattos (i.e. free-coloreds) could be called upon to serve; however, the terms of their service had to be constricted:

With respect to the formation of the two companies, considering (as one should) that the said negros and mulatos cannot be allowed to use swords and daggers, sharp weapons, or firearms of any type… it is not convenient or safe for the service of the king that the tremendous number of negro and mulatto rabble that exist (sic) in the Indies use such weapons. This is because they could use these arms to revolt. Moreover, there is no just or political reason why these people, who are of the same species as slaves (being their offspring), should enjoy the same privileges (preeminencias) as Spaniards. For these reasons, and because [negros and mulattos] have already been involved in many uprisings and tumults in the Indies, it is best for the crown that free negros and mulattos not be permitted to use offensive or defensive weapons.

Seijas proceeded to state that only salaried, full-time free-colored soldiers should be allowed to carry such armament. By contrast, the bulk of his proposed negro and mulatto militia forces, including mounted lancers, were to wield long spears and machetes, weapons that were light, easy to handle, and that could inflict harm on the enemy while minimizing the threat to the colony itself. Junior and senior officers within these militia units might be permitted to carry daggers, swords, and pistols, but mainly to demarcate differences in rank and to inspire their loyalty to the Spanish crown.

I provide Seijas’ comments here because they are emblematic of larger trends that permeated the colonial world. They reveal, in stark terms, the predicament of partial citizenship experienced by colonials of color. On the one hand, from as early as the 16th century, mulattos, negros, and pardos were processed in the colonial social framework as gente de razón (rational people). They were distinguishable from Indians in this respect and placed on par with Spaniards in that they were considered “responsible” for their own actions in ways that could be upheld in colonial courts. In other words, whites, mestizos, and free-coloreds participated in the same colonial legal sphere, one that was, in many ways, distinct from Indians. But on the other hand, the shadow of slavery followed the mulatto and negro population into freedom. Their heritage caused them to be described simultaneously as gente de razón and gente vil (base folk), which referenced a supposedly innate set of vices that were inextricably linked to their African bloodlines. Miscegenation with white colonists theoretically extended the possibility of “improving” these “malicious” traits by blending them with the benefits of Spanish “whiteness.” However, more often than not, racial mixture was believed to accentuate the worst racial qualities. Hence, under the rubric of the caste system that gradually evolved over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, free-coloreds were routinely described as haughty, cruel, shiftless, prone to licentiousness, and malevolent. Partly in an effort to contain these vices and to prevent them from “contaminating” the indigenous population, restrictive legislation was decreed, resulting in a deeper, formal articulation of the Spanish colonial caste system.

As the differences between black and white, free-colored, and mestizo began to  sediment, at the same time the distinctions between them began to blur. The phenomenon of partial citizenship rested on the ambiguity produced by questions over the proper station of peoples of color. The military was one arena where the seemingly contradictory elements of caste clarity and caste doubt played themselves out. Beginning in medieval times and extending into the sixteenth century, military service, particularly mounted duty, was construed as a marker of nobility. On a more abstract level, bearing arms in the name of the king was one of the greatest tangible expressions of Spanishness that one could project. Implicit in the act of dressing for combat was expressing interest in defending the colonial order. That meant upholding the principles of conquest, supporting the caste framework of racial dominance with its inherent favoring of white privilege, and sanctioning colonial modes of exploitative labor (including slavery). Yet at the same time, the act of having nonwhites participating in the military establishment threw these issues into question. To what extent were free-colored actions reflective of their commitment to the colonial regime, and to what extent were they not? Did their fragmented, partial citizenship produce fragmented and partial loyalties? How did their participation in the military alter its mission and objectives? How did their participation affect and shape the policies of the colonial state? What were the types of interactions that existed between the state and free-colored military actors?

This article takes these concerns as a point of departure for examining the way free-coloreds became integrated into the colonial Mexican military establishment. But it is important to point out that the focus here is on militia duty, not regular army service. This is a significant distinction. Militias represented localized, provincial expressions of a broader military apparatus. In other words, some of the objectives of imperial service that existed within the regular army, and that often went unquestioned by regular soldiers, became re-worked, filtered, and re-articulated at the local level. Militiamen brought to the military specific understandings of the functioning of the state that emanated from their provincial experiences. As militiamen, they projected their local worlds unto imperial affairs. Regular troops, arguably, represented more concrete instruments of imperial control. As a consequence, the militia probably wielded more social power. Through its chain of command, the militiamen held the attention of high officials such as the viceroy, the auditor de guerra (senior military justice official), and top administrators in the treasury department. Militiamen, even those at the lowest levels, could utilize both the symbolic and material support they acquired from senior crown bureaucrats to frontally contest the policies of local and regional officials. They could also use their political capital to fortify patron-client relationships, to secure privileges for their townships (such as fishing and land rights), to cement racial and regional identities, and even to undermine the structures of racial privilege by challenging the meaning of caste legislation. For instance, matters such as tribute policy could be re-examined in context of the services that free-coloreds rendered in uniform. In more dramatic instances (as occurred in seventeenth and eighteenth century Cuba), militia service could transform the meaning of slavery itself, providing access for people in bondage to become office-holding vecinos (landed citizens or residents) and therefore, eligible for participation in the political life of colonial affairs.  The history offered below provides some flashpoints of duty, tracing a number of the key moments in the evolution of the colonial Mexican free-colored militia institution, while examining some of its concrete effects on the colony’s pardos, mulattos, and negros. At various points throughout the article, the interplay between the militiamen’s local (sometimes racialized) understanding of service and the broader imperial perspective of duty will be highlighted…

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