Purchasing Whiteness

Ann Twinam defines what whiteness was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spanish officials and Spanish American elites constructed whiteness, a category rooted in bureaucratic privilege, a reputation of legitimacy, and a public perception of color (p. 407). By tracing the adjudicating, implementing, and petitioning for casta mobility and the privilege of gracias al sacar, defined as purchasing whitening, Twinam reveals the multidimensionality of colonial whiteness. By carefully reconstructing the debates among local officials and metropolitan authorities as well as how families revised their applications, Twinam highlights the goal of generational transformation. Through an examination of the application process, Twinam defines how men of color understood whiteness as “occupational and civic parity” as well as “equality in intimacy” that could be inherited and officially recorded (pp. 180–81, 185). By examining how men of African descent were successful in claiming “white offices” and by exploring gender and casta combinations of the gracias al sacar petitions, Twinam concludes that pardo women “whitened” through relations with white men while pardo men married women with the greatest number of white relations (p. 105).Twinam has clearly established firm definitions and a bird's-eye view of historical cause and effect. Applying her understanding of the emic, Twinam examines the terminology of the cases to conclude that though categories such as pardo and mulato “marked inferior conditions, they were not permanent and might be changed” (p. 49). Officials were not concerned with changing an individual's color, but “they considered that whitening eliminated an internal defect of naturaleza,” or inheritance (p. 51). The crown, however, could reward loyal vassals, and by tracing the locations and the personages who made decisions on gracias al sacar applications Twinam concludes that men of African descent did not rely on precedent but “had to invent their own application process,” a fascinating assertion (p. 68).Even though Twinam appears to be exploring the family strategies of men and women of color, including intermarriage among “an elite pardo cohort,” whiteness remains the category of analysis (p. 143). As a result of her close attention to the logics produced by the applications, Twinam reveals how inhabitants of Spanish America employed gracias al sacar to promote themselves and their families. But what were the ways that pardos understood their identities, group categories, or privileges in relation to the crown? Likewise, Twinam employs the question of tribute payment to track individual favor to group exceptions, but when putting together the “case studies” from particular periods and regions of the Spanish Americas, there appear to be multiple reasons for why communities of Africans and their descendants would evade, claim, or deny tribute payments as a tactic to claim vassalage. Twinam is clear that her goal is to explain the reasons why men of color in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would present evidence of their forefathers' service, but in the pursuit of patterns she reproduces regional tropes such as the core (Lima) and periphery (Panama). Moreover, Twinam's implicit argument emerges that racial distinctions revolve around a liberal idea of equality, which defines race within a binary question of exclusion versus inclusion. While certainly a useful definition to carry into further research, Twinam assumes from her reading of legislative patterns that men of African descent, categorically, shared the common goal of white ascendancy.Scholars of colonial Latin America will certainly appreciate the extensive archival work of this book. Ann Twinam demonstrates the making of gracias al sacar, or the purchase of whitening, in colonial Spanish America, specifically through its institutionalization, which makes her effort not just noteworthy but critical to advancing the field. Repeatedly, she shows how precedent and proximity played a role in the awards, as petitioners, with local officials and the Cámara (a subgroup of the Council of the Indies), dissented and declared their way to policy. Twinam unwinds disputes among government ministers to underline the multiplicities of colonial bureaucracies, furthering her point that there was no colonial state in Spanish America. The resulting disputes reveal that the cost of a gracias al sacar did not equal the value of the status and indicate that a reliance on precedent and local politics determined the outcome of a gracias al sacar petition. Twinam's attention to detail, and her insistence on the correct versus incorrect interpretation of royal rulings, reveals an attention to the official narrative and a monumental institutional study, or a history of a policy

Art · Humanities · Legitimacy · Political science · Privilege (computing) · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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