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By Root 3121 0

with their own personal contingent of Indian laborers. To build the city, its architects ended up relying on encomienda labor. Spaniards kept leaving, and the clerics had to sweeten the pot. Ultimately, each Pueblan household received the services of forty to fifty Indian workers every week. The city created to protect Indians from Spanish calls for forced Indian labor thus was wholly based on forced Indian labor. And Indians and Spaniards were again completely intermingled. Even when the authorities were able to keep them separate, free Africans acted as arbitrageurs, taking advantage of price differences between native and Spanish neighborhoods to buy goods in one and sell them in the other.

The inexorably rising number of people with mixed descent made a mockery of the two republics—what group did they belong to? Mexican churches kept separate baptismal, marriage, and death registers for Indians and Spaniards. Did they have to begin a third set of records? Worse, the growing number of mixed people aroused fears for the purity of the colonists’ blood.

At the time many Spaniards believed that parents passed on their ideas and moral characters to their children, with the effect amplified by the atmosphere of the home. A mother who was born Jewish or Muslim somehow would instill the essence of Judaism or Islam in her offspring, even if she never exposed them to the religion. If the children lived in a family with Jewish or Muslim customs like not eating pork or frequent bathing, the inner stain would be darker and more ineradicable. Conversely, the stain was reduced, though not eliminated, if the child had a Christian parent and ate Christian food and learned Christian habits. In this view, Africans were to be feared not because of their African genes, but because their ancestors had embraced the immoral heresy of Islam, which would lodge in their descendants’ hearts.

Initially Indians were not seen as dangerous in this way. Because the Gospel had never come to the Americas before Colón, their ancestors had never rejected the Savior. Their heathen beliefs were mistakes born of ignorance, not of evil. As innocents, they could not pass the brand of heresy to their children. Over time, though, it became clear that many Indians were resisting full evangelization, and they became suspect as a class. Meanwhile, the number of Africans and mixed people rose inexorably. Surrounded in the seventeenth century by an ever-larger population of untrustworthy groups, the elites who had embraced mixed unions in the sixteenth century felt themselves losing control. With this loss of control went their previous tolerance for the populace’s freewheeling ways.

Views on race are a complicated subject that scholars have devoted careers to elucidating. The issue has a charged history that prompts suspicion and defensiveness. As one might imagine, there is considerable dispute. My brief discussion above is an attempt to summarize part of what seems to me a persuasive analysis by María Elena Martínez, a historian at the University of Southern California. Some scholars surely would roll their eyes at her views, or at least my truncated version of them. But few doubt that as colonial society grew more diverse, colonial authorities tried to put the genie back into the bottle.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, Spanish governments began restricting mixed people, forbidding them from carrying weapons, becoming priests, practicing prestigious trades (silk making, glove making, needle making), and serving in most governmental positions. A Spanish butcher who used fraudulent scales to cheat customers was to be fined twenty pesos. A butcher with Indian blood who did the same thing was to receive a hundred lashes. Men and women with African blood could not be seen in public after 8:00 p.m. or congregate in groups of more than four. In addition, they had to pay special assessments every year—a sort of original-sin tax. Indo-European women were not allowed to wear Indian clothes. Afro-European women were not allowed to wear Spanish-style gold jewelry