By Carlos Rilova Jericó
This past Tuesday the controversy over racial issues jumped once again. Two Spanish athletes who are attached to what we call “black” provoked her by pointing out that some people in Spain would … it would annoy a lot if those medals at the Tokyo Olympics had been won by “blacks.”
The tearing of clothes on social networks I think could be heard even in the Japanese capital. I will not go into it. But this new email from History will talk about something that partially mitigates the atrocious ignorances that still circulate around the complex racial history of a country like Spain and, of course, its colonies, which became what the Anglo-Saxons call Melting pot. Something that we can translate as “melting pot (racial)”, in which Spaniards with blue and blond eyes, like many Extremadura and Andalusians, mixed with Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Toltecs, Mixtecs and other native Americans. Plus the descendants of black slaves captured in Africa to exploit Spanish plantations and encomiendas in America.
Something that in the illustrated eighteenth century was collected in detail and captured in a series of curious oil vignettes where – a century before Gregor Mendel systematized Genetics – the rudiments of that Science applied -in this case- to the multiform racial diversity that had emerged in almost three centuries of Spanish domination and colonization of that vast territory that ranged from the great North American plains to the Argentine pampas.
That’s right, in different more or less elaborate versions, various tables arranged in a kind of organization chart illustrated in colonial America, in the middle of the 18th century, the quantity of different races and mixtures of races – called castes – to which it had given rise. the crossing -or grafting from the Mendelian point of view- of white Spaniards with “natives”, that is to say: autochthonous peoples of America. And also with the black slaves brought from Africa who – and this is an important detail – would play a role in that Spanish America not only as slaves, but also as freedmen. That is to say: as freed slaves or freed for whatever reason and integrated into colonial society as free people. And you even thrive in the sight of some illustrations of those same paintings of races and castes, in which you see black people, without any mixture, wearing very luxurious clothes.
The result of all this, as can be deduced from the observation of these curious pictures of races and castes, is a racial – and social – universe of the most varied and endowed with truly striking names to describe a priori what came out of certain unions . For example “wolves”, which were the product of the mixture of a “jump back” with a mulatto. That is to say, of a white with a remote black ancestor and of a half-black, half-white woman …
How to interpret all this in view of this 21st century with a worrying trend, just beginning, to brutalized and summary thinking, so similar to that of interwar Europe a century ago?
Well, to begin with, as always happens in history, things should not be taken out of their temporal context. That the Spaniards, like other Europeans of the time, were dedicated, with relish, to the traffic of black slaves, is an undeniable fact. The Archive of the Indies in Seville is an inexhaustible source of news in this regard. It is also an undeniable fact that said trafficking and use of black people for slave labor on plantations was morally reprehensible and contradictory to what was preached, in the middle of the 18th century, in the pulpits of the Catholic churches of that colonial America on the Christian brotherhood of all human beings. As in the classrooms where illustrated ideas were discussed. At least if those of the eccentric Professor Immanuel Kant, who said heinous things about the black race, were not brought out there.
Undoubtedly, this is how it is necessary to evaluate those organizational charts of “races and castes” of colonial America coming from such a truly complex historical context. The result of a total contradiction between what was preached in the temples of Religion and those of Science about equality between human beings and, on the other hand, the need to enrich themselves at the cost of the work of a race that, inevitably , she looked worthy of that mistreatment for some reason that, finally, had to be the color of her skin …
But, with this contradiction already established, it is also necessary to take into account other aspects of the historical context in which these racial organization charts of Spanish colonial America are born. And it is that the eighteenth century is that of one of those great ideas of Science. As described by a great scientific popularizer such as the once famous doctor in Biochemistry and novelist Isaac Asimov, who thus collected it in his booklet “Great ideas of Science”.
There he tells us about how in 1735 an illustrated Swedish man, Carlos Linneo, created the scientific concept of “Taxonomy”. In other words, the classification of the species that populate the world according to certain criteria. Like their physical characteristics or the affinity between them that gives rise to the current denominations to classify animals and people. For example, the felines, which group from the domestic cat, genus “Felis” species “domesticus”, to the African lion, genus “Felis” species “Leo”.
An essential classificatory furor that was on the rise throughout the 18th century and which, evidently, seems to be reflected in Spanish colonial America.
Something that is not strange at all. As Rafael Lazcano reminds us, one of Gregor Mendel’s biographers – the man who in 1865 would take Linnaeus’ Taxonomy to another level with his genetic laws – was also influenced by his own era of rampant nationalism and with raciological characteristics, which tried to justify, for example, that the “Nordic” races were superior to the Latins. Obsession that we already know ended up turned into columns of sinister smoke since 1942. When the “Nordics” began to systematically execute anyone who could not display certificates of racial purity …
That, then, is the context in which these paintings emerge, those taxonomies “à la Linnaeus” of castes and races in Spanish colonial America. The opinion of History on these classifications made according to the greater or lesser mixture of white, “Indian”, or black blood, has not stopped varying since in 1945 and 1946 – in full hangover of racial extermination in Europe – researchers Argentines like Ángel Rosenblat or Mexicans like Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, saw in her an instrument of racial discrimination. Something however denied by more recent investigations such as those of Pilar Gonzalbo or Ben Vinson, who interpret them as the result of that complex intellectual panorama of the 18th century in which verifying the mixture of “races” did not amount to something similar to Nazi racial laws from Nuremberg …
And it is rather that the caste paintings showed the so-called Mixtigenacion. That is to say: the abundant mixture between races -without too many racial prejudices- that gives rise to that astonishing variety of whites, blacks, mulattoes, “Chinese”, “Jíbaros”, “wolves”, jumps back, “Moriscos” – and a long etc.- whose personal fortunes do not seem to depend on a greater or lesser tone of color in the skin, but on other factors. And where it turns out that a “pure” black could -or not- be just as discriminating against a “wolf”, a jump back, a “Chinese”, or a mulatto … who lacked -for him- the racial integrity of the whites – usually at the height of the colonial social pyramid – but also that of blacks who, once freed, ascended, as best they could, up that same pyramid …
All a lesson, in short, those pictures of “castes”, for a society, like ours, which seems to be becoming more and more intellectually brutalized. Starting with forgetting or misinterpreting your own history …
One in which it would be necessary to fit, just to begin with, elements so contradictory with a historical Spanish racial discrimination, such as the military regiments of Pardos -formed with blacks- in that Spanish colonial America. Or the Spanish volunteers who fought in 1863 against the Confederate slavers in Gettysburg and of whom I was already speaking in another post in History. On June 8, 2020 …
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