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

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2013-03-01 05:37Z by Steven

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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Hierarchies of whiteness in the geographies of empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barrets of Jamaica

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Slavery, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2010-12-08 02:27Z by Steven

Hierarchies of whiteness in the geographies of empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barrets of Jamaica

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 80, Numbers 1&2 (2006)
pages 5-43
DOI: 10.1163/13822373-90002486

Cecilla A. Green, Associate Professor, Sociology
Maxwell School of Syracuse University

Shows how a racial solidarity between whites in colonial Jamaica during slavery developed, but covered class differences between whites. Author examines the differences between the lesser-white, socially mobile settlers, and the upper plantocracy. She looks especially at social-structural factors, in particular genealogy and reproduction, that separated upper plantocratic families and dynasties, with connections with Britain, e.g. through absentee plantation owners, from less wealthy white settlers, that obtained intermediate positions as overseers, and generally were single males. She relates this further to the context with a white minority and a majority of slaves, and with relatively less women than men among the whites, that influenced differing reproductive patterns. The upper-class tended to achieve white marrying partners from Britain, alongside having children with slaves or people of colour, while lower-class whites mostly reproduced only in this last way. Author exemplifies this difference by juxtaposing the family histories and relationships, and relative social positions of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer who came alone, and had an intermediate position, and the upper-class wealthy Barrett family, who were large land and slave owners, and established a powerful white dynasty in Jamaica, with British connections, over centuries, and that also included, sidelined, coloured offspring.

…Even here there are important qualifications. Thistlewood is not a candidate for the dual marriage system who decides to forego the benefits of a White wife in part because of the assurance of other conditions of reproduction that guarantee full maintenance of class status. This is true, for example, of George Goodin Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s great-uncle, discussed below, who mates exclusively (at least, in self-acknowledged terms) with a mulatto slave, Elissa Peters. Their children suffer a fate not untypical of the offspring of such couplings: they are not given the Barrett name, but they are sent to England to be schooled and domiciled according to the terms of their father’s will, and they receive secondary (and inevitably contestable) bequests. Thistlewood, in contrast, gives his son John his name. He does not have the economic wherewithal or the genealogical amplitude and latitude to school him in England, and evinces no aspirations or plans to that effect. John is schooled locally and is later apprenticed to a master carpenter, William Hornby.

It should be pointed out here that not all large planter names were so closely guarded (outside of the widespread process of giving estate slaves the surnames of their owners). Another strategy, pursued by Martin or Martyn Williams, the dually married husband of George’s properly pedigreed first cousin (who later becomes the widowed mistress of George’s brother), was to both pass on the name and petition the courts to declare his illegitimate mixed-race children, whose mother was a free Black woman, legally White. To complicate matters, there is a third option that both Williams’s “dual marriage” obligations and the changed inheritance laws of his and George’s time preclude him from pursuing (whatever his personal inclinations): bequeathing his main properties to Colored heirs. His properties are passed on to his legitimate White heirs. The case of Molly or Mary Cope (née Dorill), the fully endowed illegitimate quadroon daughter of Thistlewood’s late employer (now his employer, under coverture of her White husband) is different, but in part only because of the absence of competing claims from a “legitimate” White family. She appears to us, through the admittedly limited medium of Thistlewood’s cryptic daily log, as the tragic dupe of a strategy to re-inscribe and recover a proper plantocratic and racial destiny for the at-risk property and lineage of her paternal ancestry. Once she has fulfilled all the right conditions she becomes practically dispensable. She confides to Thistlewood that her husband “wants her to cut the entail off and settle upon him for life” (Hall 1999:70). She is being pressed to transfer title to the estate to her abusive and incompetent White husband…

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