Race in the Spanish Empire: An Unresolved Debate

Did race matter in the Spanish Empire?

Is it true that race didn't matter in the Spanish Empire? This question, which sounds like an academic disquisition, has been open for 676 days and generated 137 answers without anyone managing to close it. The trigger was a YouTube channel where a conference of historians claimed that racial issues were irrelevant in Hispanic America and that people of high status existed in all ethnic groups. From there, the issue turned into a standoff between those who argue that the empire was structured around lineage and religion, and those who maintain that skin pigmentation marked social position from day one.

What the conference that peine the can of worms said

The starting point is a thesis circulating strongly in certain circles: the Spanish Empire was not built on an ethnocentric basis, unlike other European empires. It is argued that a Black person could become a bachelor at a university or a conquistador on equal terms with their Spanish peers, and that for Spaniards of the time, religion weighed much more than race. Racist theories as we understand them today are said to be a 19th-century Anglo-Saxon invention.

The argument has ammunition. The statutes of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), which excluded Jews and Moriscos from positions of power, are presented as a religious and economic issue, not a racial one. And it is recalled that the British declared Native Americans subjects of the English crown, prohibiting colonists from occupying Indian territory beyond the Appalachians. They claim the comparison with Spanish treatment would not withstand honest scrutiny.

Those who argue that race did matter

The reply comes with names and hierarchies. It is argued that peninsular Spaniards, especially Old Christians, enjoyed greater advantages and benefits in the social pyramid. In America, Spanish women were valued far above indigenous women due to prestige. Hernán Cortés abandoned La Malinche to marry a Spanish woman. And in Europe, Spanish soldiers felt they belonged to a superior society compared to their Italian, French, German, English, and Dutch neighbors.

The most uncomfortable data for the egalitarian thesis is the viceregal terminology itself: criollos, cuarterones, mestizos, ochavones. If race didn't matter, why did the Spanish administration develop such precise vocabulary to classify miscegenation? Some respond that this proves just the opposite: Spaniards were the first to describe physical differences and name them, which does not imply discrimination. The objection collapses under its own weight when it is verified that these categories determined rights, taxes, and access to office.

Lineage as the axis: neither race nor equality

A third path, perhaps the most nuanced, argues that what mattered was not race but lineage. In Spain, a Black person could become a bachelor or conquistador, but what counted was who your parents and grandparents were. You could be short, dark-skinned, and uglier than a monkey; if your ancestry was clean, social position was given. The statutes of purity of blood did not discriminate by pigmentation but by Jewish or Moorish ancestry, which was a stain on origins.

The problem with this thesis is that lineage and race constantly overlapped in America. For example, Máxima of Holland's genealogy traces her lineage as a fourteenth-generation granddaughter of the Inca princess Tupac Yupanqui, through Catalina Paucar Ocllo Yupanqui, who married the encomendero Francisco de Grado y Maldonado. The Alvarado brothers married indigenous princesses. When it came to a rich heiress with exotic antiestéticatures, skin tones were overlooked: she was baptized, her name was Hispanized, and her children and grandchildren became pure-blooded criollos, whether dark or fair.

Miscegenation: love or lust?

Here the debate becomes rough. One side argues that there was miscegenation and marriage from minute one, not the result of lust but of the lack of Spanish women. Illegitimate children were not shameful: Cortés's son with La Malinche was sent to the court of Spain to be educated. Descendants of Incas mixed with Spaniards formed part of the Spanish army and fought in the war of independence against the French.

The reply is forceful: they only had sens with consent or without consent and never accepted their offspring, who were raised by their mothers in the indigenous manner. Testimonies from friars, it is said, show the contempt for bastards. Being mestizo was so frowned upon in viceregal society, by Indians and Spaniards alike, because it was an almost unequivocal sign of extramarital origin.

Race as a modern phenomenon: the disorienting argument

One of the most solid interventions points out that it is difficult to be something that did not exist. There cannot be racism without a theory of races, and there is no theory of races without a more or less elaborated scientific doctrine to support it. Pre-19th-century racist attempts relied on far-fetched biblical explanations, such as Blacks being cursed by God for bearing Cain's mark.

In Spain, and in almost all of Europe, what counted was lineage. But that does not exonerate: Spanish law did not apply in the republics of the Indians, and the Inquisition could not judge them, implying clear distinctions. Spaniards themselves wrote about Indians as inferior beings. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, in the Valladolid controversy of 1550, stated that Indians in virtues were as inferior to Spaniards as Blacks to whites, children to adults, and women to men. That was the first debate on human rights held in the world, more than 200 years before the French declaration.

Racism that persists today

The thread drifts toward the present. It is argued that in America it is common to use 'indio' as an insult and that society was divided and remains divided into racial castes that still exist. In Peru or the Dominican Republic, all wealthy people and powerful politicians are white or Asian, while the population is mostly Amerindian or mulatto. Among mestizos, it is said, the inferiority complex is instinctive, visceral, and gigantic.

The conclusion that imposes itself is uncomfortable for both sides. The Spanish Empire was not an egalitarian society, but neither did it apply biological racism in the Anglo-Saxon style. It was a classist society before it was racist, where lineage, religion, and origin determined access to rights and privileges. That there was a Black mercenary in an army or that Jesuits educated noble Indians does not turn the empire into a miscegenated paradise. And that castas existed does not make it the 17th-century South Africa. The initial question, 676 days later, still lacks an answer that satisfies everyone. Which, regarding history, is probably the most honest answer.