The caste system in Spanish America was the most important, and likely the least understood, organizing principle of colonial society. Contemporary historians, particularly at American universities, have debated for decades how the caste system worked, to what extent its rules were enforced, and how relevant it was to everyday society across Spanish colonies.
No one disputes the extent to which the Venezuelan society of the late 1700s, more than that of any other Spanish American colony, was gripped by a furious battle between Creoles and those of mixed-race over the future of their society. The legacy of violence from battles between Indians and Spanish, and the enforcement of African enslavement, had shaped the Wars of Independence. But underneath the conflicts there was a revolt against the caste system.
The lives of distinct social groups marked by religious and ethnic descent had been tightly regulated for hundreds of years in the Muslim and Christian strongholds of Spain. Muslims born of Arab and Syrian ancestry in the Emirate of Granada had different privileges than Mozarabs (Muslims of Spanish ancestry [no, rather Christians under Muslim rule]), those of Jewish ancestry, or the Slavic or Berber warriors in the employ of Sultan Boabdil. Those rights, regulations, and privileges would change for different social groups in Christian-controlled cities like Avila or Valladolid but were just as rigidly enforced, if not more so. Everywhere in the Iberian Peninsula there were rules determining where different ethnic and religious groups could live, who they could marry, and what kind of work they could do. The Spanish exploration and subsequent invasion of today’s Dominican Republic and Cuba came only a few years after the conquest and occupation of the Emirate of Granada. The fall of the Emirate in 1492 had been followed by the reorganization of the social hierarchies, with Muslims dispossessed of their lands and castles, some enslaved, those Mozarabs that opposed the Spanish punished, and those that had collaborated, and professed Catholicism rewarded. Many of the men arriving in the Caribbean had been the same Extremeño and Castilian soldiers fighting in Granada.
Historians of Spanish America tend to see the caste system in its uniquely European and Catholic sense. In the classic Race Mixture in the History of Latin America, Magnus Mörner argues that castes were “created by transferring to the New World the hierarchic, estate-based, corporative society of late medieval Castile and imposing that society upon a multiracial, colonial situation.” But he forgets how multi-ethnic Spain had been since the Muslim invasion of 711. Something else he fails to mention is the extent to which the Mexicas and the Incas in Peru had perfected their own rigid caste systems.
Tenochtitlan and Cusco were organized on even more fixed social lines than Granada or Avila. Hierarchies of lineage, genealogy, ethnicity, and work ruled much of the lives of every inhabitant. The canal that used to separate today’s Zocalo in Mexico City from the market in Tlatelolco, for example, signaled a completely different set of rights and regulations for the ethnically specific inhabitants of each area. In the Mexica city there were slaves and traders from different nations, a priestly class, a warrior class, an aristocracy, and carefully designated guilds for different types of labor. It was in Mexico City and Cusco, cities built on civilizations based on caste-like groupings, that the Colonial Spanish American imaginary was created, and exported to lesser colonies such as Venezuela.
Equally relevant to this discussion is the speed of change in the ethnic composition of colonies like Venezuela from the 1550s through the early 1800s. In 1503 Queen Isabella I issued a royal proclamation encouraging the Spanish and those of indigenous descent to intermarry. By 1514 intermarriage was fully codified in a Royal Edict. Promoting ethnic diversity was an intuitive choice for a Spanish monarch of the time. It would dilute the power of the former rulers and legitimize the new ones. Previous rulers in different parts of the Iberian Peninsula had taken similar actions for the same reasons over the previous 1,000 years.
Later in the 1500s, kidnapped Africans would be transported in substantial numbers to work as slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, where plantation economies were beginning to thrive. The conquerors’ early ideology of slavery was based on the ancient practice in North Africa—a place that the south of Spain was still culturally tied to. It was not racialist in the way the word is understood today: anyone captured in the Mediterranean Sea by pirates would be routinely sold into slavery well into the 1700s. Miguel de Cervantes, before writing Don Quixote, had been captured on the high seas and sold in a Tunisian market as a slave. Five years later he was able to purchase his freedom and write his famous novel.
That is partly why in Spanish America, as opposed to the British colonies and later the southern United States, it was easier and more culturally accepted for the enslaved of African descent to buy or be granted freedom. Once free, they would establish themselves as free artisans near their former plantations or in the cities.
Ethnic diversity in cities was not only a long legacy of both the Iberian Peninsula and the great pre-Hispanic empires. It was a fact created by the bringing together of people of different races and backgrounds in one place. The new colonial social order even made it possible for people from formerly enemy indigenous nations, and their descendants, to now live in peace near each other.
Far Outliers 