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By Root 1734 0

features and speak Quechua. Similarly, the most recently elected Miss Peru publicly celebrated her mixed heritage, including a dark-skinned mother, a Chinese grandfather, and a great-grandmother who was a Spanish vice countess. Nevertheless, the fact remains that in all these countries, Amerindians represent a distinct, recognizable, mass underclass, often the object of condescension, controlling only a tiny portion of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, whites—however artificial the term and however permeable the category may sometimes be—are a starkly market-dominant minority.

“Pigmentocracy” in Latin America

But the phenomenon of white market dominance in Latin America is not confined to these four countries. It is equally visible even in countries where indigenous communities are much smaller and the vast majority of the population is “mestizo.” With the exception of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (where from early on indigenous peoples were largely extinguished), Latin American society is fundamentally pigmentocratic: characterized by a social spectrum with taller, lighter-skinned, European-blooded elites at one end; shorter, darker, Indian-blooded masses at the other end; and a great deal of “passing” in between. The roots of pigmentocracy are traceable to the colonial era.

Unlike their (evidently more repressed) British counterparts in, say, India or Malaysia, the Spanish colonialists freely and prolifically procreated with indigenous women. From the outset, Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers waxed enthusiastic about the charms of Amerindian women, who were “beautiful, and not a little lascivious, and fond of the Spaniards” by one account and “very handsome and great lovers, affectionate and with ardent bodies” by another.

12 In an important sense, the Spanish Conquest of the Americas was a conquest of women. The Spanish obtained Amerindian girls both by force and by peaceful means—sometimes, for example, as tokens of friendship from the Indian caciques. Intermarriage, concubinage, and polygamy were common.

Although this “racial mixing” might suggest a readiness among Latin America’s colonizers to transcend ethnic boundaries, in reality it was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, what emerged was an invidious social system known as the Society of Castes (sociedad de castas), in which individuals were classified in accordance with the lightness of their skin, with whites occupying the highest stratum.

The names of the specific castas that emerged in Spanish America varied across different regions and changed over the years. The following list is illustrative of eighteenth-century New Spain:

1. Spaniard and Indian beget mestizo

2. Mestizo and Spanish woman beget castizo

3. Castizo woman and Spaniard beget Spaniard

4. Spanish woman and Negro beget mulatto

5. Spaniard and mulatto woman beget morisco

6. Morisco woman and Spaniard beget albino

7. Spaniard and albino woman beget torna atrás

8. Indian and torna atrás beget lobo

9. Lobo and Indian woman beget zambaigo

10. Zambaigo and Indian woman beget cambujo

11. Cambujo and mulatto woman beget albarazado

12. Albarazado and mulatto woman beget barcino

13. Barcino and mulatto woman beget coyote

14. Coyote woman and Indian beget chamiso

15. Chamiso woman and mestizo beget coyote mestizo

16. Coyote mestizo and mulatto woman beget ahí te estás

13

That the Spaniards were supposed to be “pure-blooded” is, to say the least, ironic. Among the numerous groups that, by the Middle Ages, had inhabited and commingled with each other on Iberian soil were Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs, Berbers, and Gypsies.

14

Nevertheless, the disdain of a “pure white” Spanish elite for the “colored” masses is a deeply ingrained feature of the history of every modern Latin American nation. In Mexico, mixed-blooded mestizos were for years prohibited from owning land or joining the army or clergy. In Peru, even intellectuals believed that “the Indian is not now, nor can he ever be, anything but a machine.” In Chile, victory