Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico

Before Mestizaje is an ambitious attempt to redefine the workings of the caste system (sistema de castas) of colonial Mexico (Viceroyalty of New Spain) by examining individuals on its fringes. Organized into nine short chapters, a coda, and four appendixes, the book is the much-awaited culmination of Vinson's 2005 essay “Estudiando las razas desde la periferia: Las castas olvidadas del sistema colonial mexicano (lobos, moriscos, coyotes, moros y chinos),” which was published in the essay collection Pautas de convivencia étnica en la América Latina colonial (indios, negros, mulatos, pardos y esclavos).Whereas art historians have used casta paintings to address colonial notions of morality, lineage, and physical difference, Vinson examines marital petitions, bigamy cases, and census data to delineate the contours of the Mexican caste system. Before Mestizaje is not so much concerned with individuals that were classified as Spanish, Indigenous, or Black. Instead, the author draws on documentation from Mexico's Archivo General de la Nación in order to analyze the lives of chinos, lobas, coyotes, moriscas, and castizos, to name but a few of the “extreme castas.” This innovative focus on the least stable categories of the caste system allows Vinson to construct a convincing case for racial pluralism. Mixed individuals navigating Mexico's colonial bureaucracy understood the complexity of their own phenotype and lineages and the ways that these affected the production of documentation. As a result, conscious or unintentional slippages into an alternate group (from morisco to castizo, for example) often had concrete consequences for a given person and his or her progeny. Vinson invites us to read discrepancies in caste identification in a critical light, as subtle attempts to alter viewpoints, influence outcomes, or highlight other narratives.Before Mestizaje is not a study of “passing” or whitening, a process that often required considerable efforts to self-fashion an appropriate facade. To the contrary, Vinson argues convincingly that “caste pluralism” represented “a more natural state of affairs” in that “multiple-casta existences could be lived serially, simultaneously, or both” (p. 64). Thus, a given woman could be perceived by her contemporaries as a china, parda, and loba based on their individual understanding of her familial relations, social status, and dress (to say nothing of her self-perception). Vinson does well to highlight the tension that at times underpinned individuals' interactions with census takers, notaries, and religious authorities. These figures had their own objectives in distinguishing or flattening groups of people into specific categories. This was especially true in the late eighteenth century, when Bourbon administrators sought to produce increasingly detailed records on local populations with military and fiscal objectives in mind. Vinson tackled this topic brilliantly in his first monograph, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (2001), as it related to New Spain's free colored militias. Moreover, by focusing on records produced for the Archbishopric of Mexico (and not just Mexico City), the author is able to speak not only to the construction of umbrella categories but also to regional expressions of lineage and phenotype that distinguished places like Apan, Cadereyta, and Cuautla from one another.As racial mixture intensified in Mexican society over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it produced what the author calls “castizaje,” “that process by which casta groups shifted, transformed, moved, and intermingled with each other” (p. 68). Within this process the term casta began to personify all racial mixture, in essence prefiguring the uses of mestizaje as employed by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectuals. Vinson argues that the plasticity of the caste system goes a long way toward explaining its longevity.In chapter 5, the author advances one of the book's most intriguing arguments when claiming that “African-based populations had minimal impact on the family structure of white and mestizo society” in late eighteenth-century Mexico (p. 113). Vinson bases this point on a sample of nine jurisdictions in the 1791 Revillagigedo census and the elevated levels of caste exclusivity found among white and mestizo households. By contrast, African-descended people consistently opened their households to people of other castes, though this was not reciprocated. The implications of this argument are considerable and invite further research into this dynamic in alternate spaces with mixed populations (Veracruz, Alta California, etc.).In crafting a monograph on the “forgotten castes,” Vinson puts the work of María Elena Martínez and Douglas Cope in conversation with art historians Ilona Katzew and Magali Carrera (p. xiv). The author's engagement of the colonial archive and its fabrication dialogues with Kathryn Burns's influential study of writing and power in colonial Peru. To conclude, Vinson has penned an innovative and challenging book that will appeal to scholars of Mexico's history, race, and ethnicity while opening a fascinating window into the lives of its most mixed people.