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Article Excerpt
No account of color, however brief, can ignore that color in the Hispanic world has a natural and moral history, if I may borrow the title of the Spanish Jesuit José Acosta's opus. Though color was the folk concept of race for much of the twentieth century, its contours had been both religious and scientific in the early modern period. Color constituted the folk concept of casta, or caste, in the pre-modern Spanish world. As part of the pre-history of race, the correlation of color to caste in viceregal Spanish America was always imperfect: indeed, both estate (estamento) and religious and occupational purity (limpieza de sangre y de oficio) overlapped with caste to determine one's privileges and duties. An unequivocal example is offered to us by the legitimate and Christian descendants of the Incas, who were not classified as "Indians" (indios) at all: they were Spaniards (españoles) and gentry (hidalgos). Color had nothing to do with caste assignment in such cases.
For many years, both the presentism and the lack of curiosity that characterize many scholarly treatments had discouraged me from teaching topics belonging to the pre-history of race in Spain and Latin America. I lacked shortcuts for teaching the basic concepts in Spanish (casta v. raza, limpieza de sangre y de oficio, estamento) and the fundamental differences in race as it was constructed in the early modern and modern Anglo and Hispanic worlds. Indeed, several essays and book chapters that I have written since the late 1990s were motivated in large part by pedagogical necessity: "Caste Theatre and Caste Poetry"; "Casta as Culture"; "Towards A Transatlantic"; "Hierarchy and Historicism"; Hierarchy, chs. 2, 5, 6. In what follows I attempt to pull out materials from that body of work that have been useful to me in a half-dozen courses and combine them with materials that I am currently using in a transatlantic graduate seminar titled "Usos del mestizaje." I do not offer a syllabus, but, instead, some of the Hispanic patterns of the racial world ordering that have come out of my teaching experiences, and specific texts and strategies for teaching those patterns culled from several course syllabi at the undegraduate and graduate levels.
Teaching the pre-history of race in Spanish poses conceptual and linguistic problems for undergraduates and graduates alike. For the pre-history of race in general, I have used a variety of background works in English at the undergraduate and graduate levels: Malik; Hannaford; Arendt; Guillaumin; Wolfe; Banton; Goldberg; Wheeler. These authors raise key questions about the origins of the race concept, the place of the Americas within the racial world order, and the relationship between racial thinking and the Enlightenment.
Before tackling the long-eighteenth-century segment of race in the Spains, I have students read brief excerpts from two renowned Spanish authors from the sixteenth century, one a physician and the other a priest. I begin with the following passage from an accessible facsimile edition of Juan de Cárdenas's best-selling Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (1591): "[...] [E]sto de nacer la barba, es accidente como el color, que sigue la semejanza de los padres, quiero decir, que así como naturalmente de padre negro sale hijo negro, y de blanco hijo blanco, así es en el nacer de la barba, que si d padre es lampiño o sin barba, como lo es el indio, lo es también el hijo [...]" (bk. 3, ch. 4, 187 v.). Along with this passage, I ask students to read two pages from Father Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias. After arguing that the presence in the Indies of animal species or breeds (castas or linajes) not found elsewhere is not unusual (it is also true of many animals found in Europe, Africa, and Asia), Father Acosta adds: "También es de considerar si los tales animales difieren específica y esencialmente de todos los otros, o si es su diferencia accidental, que pudo ser causada de diversos accidentes, como en el linaje de los hombres ser unos blancos y otros negros [...]" (204). I tell students that the analogy drawn between beasts and humans is common in the early modern period, and that color was as mucha physical as a metaphysical problem for renaissance humanists like Acosta and for his contemporary Cárdenas.
Students wonder about accidente, so it is necessary to explain in what sense color constituted an "accident" for physicians and priests alike. I tell my students two things: first, that the distinction between essence and accident is Aristotelian, and it flows out of Nicomachean Ethics and into Spanish and Spanish American historiography, especiany religious (or "moral") histories and how-to guides, until the late eighteenth century; (1) and, second, that the historian Acosta and the physician Cárdenas were likely alluding to the distinction found in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Next, I have students download bk. 10, section 9 ("En qué consiste la diferencia de especie"), of the Metaphysics, in which Aristotle argues that man and woman are not different species: "no difieren ... específicamente" (1). Their difference or opposition (contrariedad) is not essential, but, rather, accidental, just as...
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