Ben Vinson III. Before Mestizaje

In this fascinating and engaging book, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico, Ben Vinson III shakes up a topic long at the center of colonial Spanish American history: categories of social difference, generically labeled castas, and the hierarchies associated with them. He examines a rich collection of archival sources documenting what he calls “extreme castes.” The extreme castes stretched the limits of the so-called sistema de castas, and included labels such as morisco, coyote, and lobo. These terms are found less frequently in the archival record than the core categories of colonial society, whether indio, español, negro, mestizo, or mulato. Yet Vinson suggests they are essential to understanding the long-term evolution of casta and its influence on modern Latin America. Vinson analyzes the extreme castes using both quantitative and qualitative methods. He reads his sources with great skill, humanizing the subjects at every turn. He also considers colonial casta alongside the ideas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers who began to rethink the very meaning of miscegenation. Quite provocatively, Vinson suggests that colonial casta provided a conceptual foundation that helps explain the later emergence of mestizaje, an ideology that generally viewed racial mixing in a more positive light and is most famously associated with the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos and his 1925 essay La raza cósmica.

Archaeology · Caste · Colonialism · Epistemology · Ethnology · Genealogy · Ideology · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy