1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [180]
As the restrictions increased, so did the fear of the restricted, which led to more restrictions and more fear. Clerics took to arguing that Indians were not innocent—that, like Jews, they bore the stain of their previous un-Christian beliefs. Maybe they actually had descended from Jews—the lost tribes of Israel! Maybe some of them, like some of the ex-Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, hadn’t really converted to Christianity. Maybe they were jointly plotting with Africans to attack Christians. New Spain, the Augustinian monk Nicolás de Witte stated in 1552,
is full of mestizos, who are [born] badly inclined. It is full of black men and women who are descended from slaves. It is full of black men who marry Indian women, from which derive mulattoes. And it is full of mestizos who marry Indian women, from which derive a diverse casta [caste] of infinite number, and from all of these mixtures derive other diverse and not very good mixtures.
“Mestizo” and “mulatto” became key concepts in the elaborate classificatory scheme known as the casta system. Never formally codified on an empire-wide level but recognized in hundreds of separate local, ecclesiastical, and trade-guild rules, the casta system was an attempt to categorize the peoples of New Spain according to moral and spiritual worth, which was linked to descent. Each group had a fundamental, unalterable nature that combined in distinct, predictable ways with people outside that group. A mulatto (Afro-European) was different from a mestizo (Indo-European) was different from a zambo (Afro-Indian—the term comes, unflatteringly, from zambaigo, knock-kneed). When a Spaniard produced a child with a mestizo, the offspring was a castizo; with a mulatto, a morisco (the name, oddly, means “Moor”). Over time the classifications grew more baroque, refined, and absurd: coyote, lobo (wolf), albino, cambujo (swarthy), albarazado (white-spotted), barcino (the opposite—color-spotted, so to speak), tente en el aire (suspended in air), no te entiendo (I don’t understand you).5
None of it worked quite as the government intended. Rather than being confined to their allocated social slots, people used the categories as tools to better their condition, shopping for the identity that most suited them. The half-Indian son of the conquistador Diego Muñoz married a native noblewoman; his son, who would theoretically be classed a a coyote, was declared an Indian, and this grandson of a Spaniard became the “Indian governor” in Tlaxcala, east of Mexico City. Meanwhile, other Indians claimed to be Africans—slaves paid fewer taxes, and the Indians didn’t see why they should pay them, either. Local officials were supposed to police the categories; strapped for cash, they were in fact ready to sell people whatever identity they wanted to assume. When Spaniards in the Caribbean died before producing legitimate offspring, their mestizo and mulatto offspring were promoted to “Spaniards” and pressed into duty as heirs—a transformation that occurred so often that the bishop of Puerto Rico sniffed in 1738 that the islands had “very few white families without mixture of all the bad races.” Later that century a traveler sardonically noted that although “many whites are listed” in Hispaniola’s official census, local parish registers listed the same people as “mixtures of whites and Indians and these with zambos, mulattos, and blacks.”
The New Laws that banned indigenous slavery added to the ethnic jumble. Because the Spanish legal code known as the Siete Partidas declared that children inherited the status of their mother, the offspring of European and Indian women had to be free, at least in theory. In consequence, African men sought out non-African women (in any case, the colonies didn’t have enough African women for them—three-quarters of the slaves were male). Madrid demanded that Africans only marry