Capturing the quotidian: casta paintings and demographic trends in late colonial Mexico

Abstract

In 1581, Spanish magistrates near Celaya investigated the murder of Andrés Vásquez at the hands of his employer, the infamous Antonio de Espejo. While the case itself centered on the dispute that caused Espejo to violently assault several of his ranch hands, the testimony preserves a rich set of racial ascriptions for many of the individuals involved. Of particular interest are the highly varied racial monikers deployed to describe Vásquez. To some he appeared Indigenous. For others he appeared to be a mulato of partial African ancestry. Still others found ways to suggest that he could be both. His various ascriptions included: indio, indio mexicano, indio ladino, indio amulatado, indio como mulato, indio que parecía mulato, mulato medio indio, mulato, and mulato, hijo de mulato e india. Sadly for the historian, the testimony never revealed his specific parentage or ancestry, yet all indications suggest that he was part of a rural ranch community that incorporated varied, Indigenous, African, and Afro-Indigenous members. In all likelihood, Vásquez could trace his ancestry to both Indigenous and African forebears. Importantly, in this period and place, no unique racial term existed that denoted Afro-Indigenous persons like Vásquez. For much of the early colonial period, the category of mulato served as a catch all for individuals of perceived partial African ancestry (Schwaller 2011; 2016, 114–15). The frequency of interethnic and interracial unions which gave rise to racially ambiguous individuals such as Vásquez did not abate. Over time new racial categories appeared in an attempt to offer greater nuance in ascription than could be offered by the core colonial racial categories: español, mestizo, indio, mulato, negro. During the late seventeenth century new terms such as lobo, coyote, pardo, and morisco entered the lexicon. These terms offered a means to denote more specific ancestries and sociocultural identities, but they saw infrequent use in official documentation. Ben Vinson has termed such categories ‘extreme castas’—a description that highlights both their rare appearance in the archival record and the complexity of the genealogical ancestries they purported to describe (Vinson 2018, 16). Adding to this proliferation in the nomenclature for mixed-race castes in eighteenthcentury New Spain are vagaries in the historical record and regional differences, suggesting that few racial terms held broadly shared, temporally consistent meanings. The semantic breadth of mulato captures the fluidity of racial meanings. Initially coined to denote the offspring of one Spanish and one African parent, the term