Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753

Abstract

HE relationship among race, social position, and economic roles was one of considerable significance in colonial Latin America. Race and presumed racial differences were the basic criteria for social differentiation. Initially the elite were (white) European-Spanish peninsulars, the slaves were Black, and the peasants were Indians, commonly residing apart from both Europeans and Blacks in semiautonomous communities. The economic organization of colonial society was based upon similar divisions with specific necessary tasks associated with various racial groups. The Indians were the tribute payers, the producers of food; the Blacks were the skilled and unskilled laborers on sugar plantations and in mines and servants in the great houses of the major cities. The peninsulars were the economically and socially privileged sector, benefiting from the labor of the Black and Indian populations. This tripartite division soon collapsed as miscegenation produced a series of intermediate racial categories. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the process of racial mixture in New Spain had been taking place for more than two hundred years. There were thus sufficient numbers of individuals in the category of mixed-bloods to be considered significant segments of the social order. Not only were the descendants of mixed racial origin present in sufficient numbers to make an impact on the social hierarchy, but they had lost much of their original definition as strictly biological types. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the relationship between race and the division of labor, or the socioeconomic dimension of race, was no longer as straightforward as it had been before. Where each of these new racial categories fit into the division of labor is a question that has interested several historians. Magnus Morner sug-