Washington photometry of candidate star clusters in the Small Magellanic
  Cloud
  We present for the first time Washington CT1 photometry for 11 unstudied or
poorly studied candidate star clusters. The selected objects are of small
angular size, contain a handful of stars, and are projected towards the
innermost regions of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The respective
Colour-Magnitude Diagrams (CMDs) were cleaned from the unavoidable star field
contamination by taking advantage of a procedure which makes use of variable
size Colour-Magnitude Diagram cells. This method has shown to be able to
eliminate stochastic effects in the cluster CMDs caused by the presence of
isolated bright stars, as well as, to make a finer cleaning in the most
populous CMD regions. Our results suggest that nearly 1/3 of the studied
candidate star clusters would appear to be genuine physical systems. In this
sense, the ages previously derived for some of them mostly reflect those of the
composite stellar populations of the SMC field. Finally, we used the spatial
distribution in the SMC of possible non-clusters to statistically decontaminate
that of the SMC cluster system. We found that there is no clear difference
between both expected and observed cluster spatial distributions, although it
would become more important at a 2\sigma\, level between a ~ 0.3deg and 1.2deg
(the semi-major axis of a ellipse parallel to the SMC bar and with b/a = 1/2),
if the asterisms were increased up to 20%.
