page_title: Historiography of Colonial Spanish America
section_title: Race
hierarchical_section_title: Historiography of Colonial Spanish America / Social history / Race
context_page_description: The historiography of colonial Spanish America in multiple languages is vast and has a long history. It dates back to the early sixteenth century with multiple competing accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to discover how to reverse the decline of its empire, and Latin American-born Spaniards' search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism. Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically-engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of Mexico and Peru, dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere, and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish Empire, led by Herbert Eugene Bolton.
context_section_description: The study of race dates to the earliest days of the Spanish Empire, with debates about the status of the indigenous – whether they had souls, whether they could be enslaved, whether they could be Catholic priests, whether they were subject to the Inquisition.  The decisions steered crown and ecclesiastical policy and practices.  With the importation of Africans as slaves during the early days of European settlement in the Caribbean and the emergence of race mixture, social hierarchies and racial categories became complex.  The legal division between the República de indios, that put the indigenous population in a separate legal category from the República de españoles that included Europeans, Africans, and mixed-race castas was the crown's policy to rule its vassals with racial status as one criterion. 
  Much scholarly work has been published in recent years on social structure and race, with an emphasis on how Africans were situated in the legal structure, their socioeconomic status, place within the Catholic Church, and cultural expressions.  Modern studies of race in Spanish America date to the 1940s with the publication of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán's monograph on Africans in Mexico. In the United States, the 1947 publication of Frank Tannenbaum's Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas cast Latin American slavery as more benevolent compared to that in the United States.  In Tannenbaum's work, he argued that although slaves in Latin America were in forced servitude, they incorporated into society as Catholics, could sue for better treatment in Spanish courts, had legal routes to freedom, and in most places abolition was without armed conflict, such as the Civil War in the United States. The work is still a center of contention, with a number of scholars dismissing it as being wrong or outdated, while others consider the basic comparison still holding and simply no longer label it as the "Tannenbaum thesis."
  The 1960s marked the beginning of an upsurge in studies of race and race mixture.  Swedish historian Magnus Mörner's 1967 Race Mixture in the History of Latin America, published by a trade press and suitable for college courses, remained important for defining the issues surrounding race. The historiography on Africans and slavery in Latin America was examined in Frederick Bowser's 1972 article in Latin American Research Review, summarizing research to date and prospects for further investigation.  His major monograph, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650, marked a significant advance in the field, utilizing rich archival sources and broadening the research area to Peru.
  The debates about race, class, and "caste" took off in the 1970s with works by a number of scholars. Scholars have been also interested in how racial hierarchy has been depicted visually in the eighteenth-century flowering of the secular genre of casta painting. These paintings from the elite viewpoint show racial stereotypes with father of one race, mother of another, and their offspring labeled in yet another category.
  Elites' concern about racial purity or "limpieza de sangre" (purity of blood), which in Spain largely revolved around whether one was of pure Christian heritage, in Spanish America encompassed the "taint" of non-white admixture.  A key work is María Elena Martínez's Genealogical Fictions, showing the extent to which elite families sought erase blemishes from genealogies.   Another essential work to understand the workings of race in Spanish America is Ann Twinam's work on petitions to the crown by mulattos and pardos for dispensation from their non-white status, to pursue education or a profession, and later as a blanket request not tied to professional rules prohibiting non-whites to practice. In the decades following Tannenbaum's work, there were few of these documents, known cédulas de gracias al sacar, with just four cases identified, but the possibility of upward social mobility played an important role in framing scholarly analysis of dynamics of race in Spanish America.  Considerabl
caption: Depiction of the casta system in 18th c. Mexico
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