Casta

Based on Wikipedia: Casta

For decades, historians told us that colonial Spain ran the Americas like a racial sorting machine. Spaniards at the top, indigenous people in the middle, Africans at the bottom, and everyone else slotted into precise categories based on the exact percentages of blood flowing through their veins. It was a tidy story. It was also, according to recent scholarship, largely wrong.

The truth is messier, more human, and frankly more interesting.

The Word That Launched a Thousand Theories

Casta is an Iberian word meaning "lineage." It appears in Spanish documents as early as 1417, long before Columbus stumbled onto the Caribbean. The Portuguese version, casta, eventually gave English the word "caste"—which is where the trouble begins.

When English speakers hear "caste," they think of India. They imagine birth determining everything: your job, your marriage prospects, your place in society, rigid and unchangeable across generations. This mental association proved irresistible to twentieth-century scholars trying to make sense of colonial Latin America.

In the 1940s, a Polish-Venezuelan philologist named Ángel Rosenblat and a Mexican anthropologist named Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán developed what became the dominant framework for understanding colonial society. They called it the sistema de castas—the caste system. According to their theory, race was the key organizing principle of Spanish colonial rule. Your racial category determined your legal rights, your economic opportunities, your social standing.

This interpretation became orthodoxy in the English-speaking academic world for the rest of the century. It appeared in textbooks, shaped dissertations, and influenced how generations of students understood the colonial period.

There was just one problem. The archives told a different story.

What the Records Actually Show

When historians started digging through colonial documents—baptismal records, legal proceedings, tax rolls, property transfers—they found something unexpected. The same person might be identified as a mestizo in one document and a Spaniard in another. People shifted categories depending on context, on who was doing the classifying, on what advantages a particular label might confer.

Consider the strategic possibilities. Mestizos and Spaniards were both exempt from tribute payments to the crown. But both were subject to the Inquisition—that fearsome institution that investigated religious orthodoxy and punished heretics. Indigenous people, on the other hand, paid tribute but were exempt from the Inquisition's jurisdiction. The logic was paternalistic: indigenous people were considered too new to Christianity to be held to the same standards as those with centuries of Catholic heritage.

So what happened when a mestizo faced an Inquisition investigation? Sometimes he suddenly became an indio. And when an indigenous person wanted to escape tribute obligations? He might present himself as a mestizo.

This wasn't a rigid system. It was a negotiation.

The Eight Official Categories

The Spanish Empire did recognize official racial categories. There were eight main divisions, and understanding them requires understanding the colonial context of who had power and why.

At the top were the Españoles—Spaniards. But even this category had gradations. Peninsulares were Spaniards born in Spain who later settled in the Americas. They held the highest positions in colonial administration, the most prestigious appointments. Criollos were people of Spanish descent born in the Americas. Despite having the same ancestry as peninsulares, criollos faced systematic discrimination in appointments to high office. This tension would eventually help fuel independence movements across Latin America.

Castizos were people with primarily Spanish ancestry and some indigenous heritage, born into mixed families. Mestizos had more extended mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry. The word mestizo comes from the Latin mixtus, meaning mixed.

Indios were people of indigenous ancestry. This category, despite its apparent simplicity, encompassed an enormous diversity of peoples, languages, and cultures—everyone from the descendants of the Aztec nobility to small farming communities in remote highlands.

Pardos were people of mixed Spanish, indigenous, and African ancestry. The term could also serve as a polite way to refer to someone who was Black. Mulatos had mixed Spanish and African ancestry. Zambos had mixed African and indigenous ancestry. And Negros were people of African descent, primarily former enslaved people and their descendants.

These eight categories appeared in official colonial documentation. But here's what the sistema de castas theory got wrong: these weren't rigid slots that determined everything about a person's life. They were administrative labels, often applied inconsistently, frequently contested, and sometimes strategically adopted or shed by the people being classified.

The Beautiful, Misleading Paintings

If the archives show fluidity, where did the idea of a rigid racial hierarchy come from? Part of the answer hangs in museums around the world.

In eighteenth-century Mexico, artists produced a distinctive genre known as casta paintings. These works typically showed sets of sixteen images, each depicting a family: a man and woman of different racial categories, and their child. The paintings labeled each combination with specific terms, some common and others so obscure that scholars have found no evidence they were ever actually used in daily life.

The paintings are visually striking. They show domestic scenes with detailed attention to clothing, food, furniture, and household objects. Art historians have used them to study material culture—what people wore, what they ate, how they decorated their homes.

But as evidence for how colonial society actually worked? The paintings are deeply problematic.

Think about who commissioned them and who viewed them. These were elite productions, made by artists patronized by wealthy criollos, often sent to Spain as curiosities or kept in the homes of colonial aristocrats. They represented what elites wanted to believe about the society around them—or perhaps what they wanted to impose on it.

As one scholar put it: "For colonial elites, casta paintings might well have been an attempt to fix in place rigid divisions based on race, even as they were disappearing in social reality."

The paintings show a fantasy of order. The archives show chaos.

Purity of Blood and Its Discontents

To understand why racial categories existed at all, we need to go back to Spain before colonization even began.

Limpieza de sangre—purity of blood—was originally a religious concept, not a racial one. After centuries of coexistence among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Iberia, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed. Spain expelled its Jewish population that year and its Muslim population shortly after.

But conversion was an option. Many Jews and Muslims became Christians rather than leave. The Spanish called these converts conversos or, less politely, marranos (a slur meaning "pigs") for converted Jews and moriscos for converted Muslims.

The Old Christians—those whose families had been Christian for generations—distrusted these New Christians. The suspicion was that conversion was superficial, that conversos and moriscos secretly maintained their old faiths. The Inquisition was established partly to root out such secret practice.

To hold certain offices, to join certain religious orders, to qualify for certain privileges, a Spaniard had to prove limpieza de sangre—that their family had been Christian for generations, untainted by Jewish or Moorish ancestry. Genealogical investigations became a cottage industry.

When Spaniards arrived in the Americas, they brought this framework with them. But they also brought their tendency to ignore it when convenient. The official requirement was that only those who could demonstrate pure Christian ancestry could emigrate to the colonies. In practice, numerous conquistadors were conversos. Juan Valiente, who participated in the conquest of Chile, was a Black African. Others had recent Moorish ancestry.

The limpieza de sangre system in the Americas eventually expanded to include African and indigenous ancestry as potential "stains." But it was never a closed system in the Indian sense. There was always mobility, always negotiation, always exceptions.

The Evidence of Social Mobility

If colonial Spanish America really operated as a rigid caste system, we would expect to find few examples of non-whites achieving wealth, status, or power. We find the opposite.

Juan Latino was a Black African who became a renowned humanist scholar and professor of Latin and Greek at the University of Granada. He published poetry that was admired across Spain. Juan Garrido, a free Black man, participated in the conquest of Mexico and later conducted agricultural experiments, becoming the first person to grow wheat in the Americas. José Manuel Valdés, of African and indigenous ancestry, became one of the most prominent physicians in colonial Peru.

Among indigenous people, the examples are even more numerous. The Spanish crown recognized indigenous nobility, and descendants of Aztec and Inca royalty held positions of considerable prestige. Isabel Moctezuma, daughter of the Aztec emperor, married a Spanish conquistador and received an encomienda—a grant of indigenous labor—from Hernán Cortés himself. Her descendants formed part of the colonial aristocracy. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca princess, became one of the most celebrated writers of the colonial period, and his histories remain important sources today.

A royal decree from Philip II in 1559 explicitly protected the rights of mestizos to travel between Spain and the Americas for study or other purposes without requiring special licenses. Laws are not written for hypothetical situations. This decree suggests that mestizo travel to Spain for education was common enough to require royal attention—hardly the sign of a society where racial category rigidly determined life possibilities.

The Scholarly Reappraisal

The last two decades have seen a sustained scholarly assault on the sistema de castas framework.

In 2013, Pilar Gonzalbo published La trampa de las castas—"The Caste Trap"—which systematically dismantled the idea that New Spain operated as a "social organization based on race and supported by coercive power." She found that the more derogatory elements sometimes seen in casta paintings were not a general phenomenon. They appeared mainly after the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century, when ideas of scientific racism began filtering in from France and Northern Europe.

In 2014, Joanne Rappaport published The Disappearing Mestizo, a study of colonial New Granada (roughly modern Colombia). She rejected the caste system as an interpretive framework entirely, questioning whether any model could validly apply across the entire colonial world.

In 2015, Berta Ares examined records from the Viceroyalty of Peru and found that colonial authorities barely used the term "casta" at all. Even in the eighteenth century, when the term appeared, it was rare and ambiguous. It didn't specifically refer to mixed-race people but could include Spaniards and indigenous people of lower socioeconomic status. Colonial administrators more commonly used terms like plebe (common people), vulgo (the masses), naciones (nations), clases (classes), or calidades (qualities).

In 2018, Ben Vinson conducted extensive research in Mexican archives and confirmed these findings. The evidence simply does not support the existence of a fixed, rigid system.

What Colonial Society Actually Was

If not a caste society, what was colonial Spanish America?

Scholars now describe it as a society of "quality"—a society of estates, corporations, patronage networks, and guilds. Social position depended on many factors: wealth, legitimacy of birth, family reputation, occupation, connections, and yes, race. But race was not the single determining factor, and racial categories were not unchangeable.

The purpose of registering lineages was primarily administrative. The crown needed to know who belonged to the república de españoles (the Spanish commonwealth) and who to the república de indios (the Indian commonwealth). These designations came with different obligations and protections. Indigenous people paid tribute but were exempt from the Inquisition and could access special protections meant to prevent their exploitation. Spaniards and mestizos paid different taxes and were subject to different legal jurisdictions.

This was not a racial hierarchy designed to keep non-whites in permanent subordination. It was a feudal system of corporate identities, where each group had particular rights and duties. Movement between categories was possible. Advancement was possible. The rigid boundaries existed more in elite imagination—and elite art—than in social reality.

Independence and the End of Categories

By the early nineteenth century, colonial racial distinctions had become politically explosive.

During the Mexican War of Independence, the question of who counted as what became a rallying cry for revolution. José María Morelos—who was himself registered as a Spaniard in his baptismal records, though his ancestry was probably mixed—called for abolishing all formal racial distinctions. He wanted to eliminate the categories entirely, "calling them one and all Americans."

In 1810, Morelos issued regulations specifically designed to prevent ethnic-based disturbances. His approach was blunt: "He who raises his voice should be immediately punished." By 1821, when Mexico negotiated its independence through the Plan of Iguala, the elimination of racial categories was a central issue.

The new Latin American republics formally abolished the colonial caste categories. But the social realities they had described—the correlations between ancestry and wealth, the persistence of racial prejudice, the advantages of European appearance—did not disappear with independence. They simply became unofficial rather than official, implicit rather than explicit.

The Persistence of a Myth

Why did the sistema de castas theory become so entrenched in English-language scholarship, even as scholars working in Spanish and Portuguese archives found evidence against it?

Part of the answer lies in what historians call the Black Legend—a tradition dating back centuries of depicting Spanish colonialism as uniquely cruel and benighted. English and Dutch Protestant powers had political reasons to portray Catholic Spain as barbaric. The idea of a rigid caste system fit this narrative perfectly: it made Spanish colonialism seem more oppressive, more systematic in its racism, more deserving of condemnation.

Another part of the answer is the seductive clarity of the casta paintings. Images are powerful. A set of sixteen paintings showing neat racial categories and their combinations is much easier to remember and teach than a complex story of administrative convenience, strategic self-identification, and contextual flexibility.

And finally, there's the human tendency to project our own categories backward. Modern concepts of race—especially as they developed in the United States, with its "one-drop rule" and rigid Black-white binary—are historically unusual. Colonial Spanish America operated with different assumptions. Understanding those assumptions requires setting aside our own, which is harder than it sounds.

What This Means for Understanding the Past

None of this is to say that colonial Spanish America was a racial paradise. It wasn't. Indigenous people were subjected to brutal conquest, forced labor, and epidemic disease that killed millions. Africans were enslaved and transported across the ocean in horrific conditions. Racial prejudice was real, and European ancestry conferred advantages.

But the story is more complicated than "rigid caste system." The same empire that created racial categories also recognized indigenous nobility, allowed substantial social mobility, and produced extensive legal protections for indigenous people (however imperfectly enforced). The same society that valued limpieza de sangre also enabled conversos to become conquistadors, Black Africans to become professors, and mestizos to become physicians.

Understanding this complexity matters because it affects how we understand the present. Latin America's racial dynamics today—with their different vocabulary, different categories, different patterns of discrimination and integration—cannot be explained as simply the legacy of a rigid colonial caste system. They are the legacy of something messier and more human: a centuries-long negotiation over identity, status, and belonging, in which official categories were always just one factor among many.

The casta paintings remain beautiful. But they should be understood as art, not as sociology—as elite aspiration, not as social description. The real history lies in the archives, in the baptismal records where the same person appears under different labels, in the legal cases where individuals contested their classifications, in the royal decrees that assumed mobility was normal. That history is less tidy than the paintings suggest. It is also more true.