richardboyer negotiating calidad 10

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Negotiating Calidad: The Everyday Struggle for Status in MexicoAuthor(s): Richard BoyerSource: Historical Archaeology, Vol. 31, No. 1, Diversity and Social Identity in ColonialSpanish America: Native American, African, and Hispanic Communities during the MiddlePeriod (1997), pp. 64-73

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NEGOTIATINGCALIDAD: THE EVERYDAYSTRUGGLE FOR STATUS INMEXICO 65

ian-noble distinction based on who was liable

for a head tax), cultural (Hispanic versus Indian),economic (work, wealth, property), and physicalor "racial" distinctions (regimen de castas) as

they could be used to categorize people and,

more importantlyfor our purposes, to categorizethemselves and their acquaintances (Cook and

Borah 1971-1979, 2:188; Chance and Taylor

1977:460). As racial terms (e. g., espanol, mes

tizo,mulato, indio) placed people, therefore,theystood formore than race. In this theywere a

kind of "inclusive impression reflecting one's

reputation as a whole," or one's calidad (McCaa

1984:477). Nuances of such labeling are there

fore all themore difficult to decipher now. Just

as the sum of a small number can be the product of many different combinations of numbers,so variables deciding calidad came together in

different combinations to equal, for example, the

judgment mulato. Should students therefore de

spair of sorting out what theymeant? No, but

it should be kept in mind that labels varied with

time, place, and circumstance which means that

the process of labeling mattered as much as the

label itself. Plebeians and others in colonial

society

were

making complexand

impromptuplacements of each other, not as disinterested

observers, but to flatterpatrons and diminish ri

vals. This was an ordinary part of daily life,and the labels the currency of an everyday Hob

besian discourse of actors jockeying for positionin the social struggle.

Because these judgments are difficult to sort

out now, scholars have reduced them to a "sys

tem"-concentrating on types rather than nuance,

variation, and apparent contradiction in usage.

Partly this reflects the nature of the sources traditionally used to study stratification: parish

registers and census listings. In a study based

on the latter, for example, Patricia Seed

(1982:573) speaks of "the five basic [emphasisadded] terms in use in colonial Mexico by the

middle of the eigteenth century. .[:] Spanish,Black, Indian,mestizo, and mulatto. Her categories seem to follow the respected reductionism of

Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran who divided theMexican

populationinto the three

unmixed groupsof

European, African, and Indian, and the three

dominant cultural/phenotypic combinations of

Euro-, Afro-, and Indo-mestizo (Aguirre Beltran

1946:153-196, 270-271; Cook and Borah 1971

1979:188-189). Aguirre glosses his biological

categories with what he calls a cultural observa

tion, saying that Afro- and Indo-me stizos were"united" (unidos) by a common culture under the

term castas . He thereforeposits an overlap of

function and phenotype. If castas served as

mostly unskilled workers (obreros), Euro-mesti

zos served as skilled artisans who escaped casta

identification and, to varying degrees, shaded

into the white strata of Europeans. The

conflation of racial and functional categories thus

subsumes racial within functional racial catego

ries. It is almost a class analysis under the rubric of culture, the latternot concerned with lan

guage, ethnic consciousness, tradition, or organiz

ing beliefs, but with the castas' permanent as

cription as an underclass with reference towhite

society.

However well-taken these points, they under

state the nature of status and identity as a con

struct by an essentialist and, except for Euro

mestizos, static ordering that blocks out the ne

gotiabilityof status. Sherburne F. Cook and

Woodrow Borah (1971-1979, 2:189-190) recognized the instabilityof racial categories-warningreaders that racial designations mean littlemore

than "ranges of intergrading types,"-."predominant

but not rigidly distinct racial character"-even as

they reified them into main types as they con

structedaggregate population profiles. The pointmatters because the terms constitute reality as

much as they reflect it. The assigning of them,as noted above, came as a

politicalrather than

a descriptive process. Nevertheless historians

have been willing to claim, for example, that

men and women about tomarry in 18th-centuryLeon, frequently were "mistaken" about each

other's racial label, although the "errors" show a

pattern of "coalescence" in the categories Indian

and mulatto (Brading andWu 1973:9). In fact

the patternmay show something quite different:

that racial categories were assigned not dispas

sionatelyto describe

peoplebut

politicallyto

place them.



66 HISTORICALARCHAEOLOGY, VOLUME 31 (1)

Another historian, observing that racial categories did notmean what they literally said, calledthem "irrational" (Carmagnani 1972:426, 445).

He set out, therefore, to "extract [. . .] the se

mantic and cultural content hidden behind the

terms" and concluded that the terms espanol andmestizo refer to "a social and economic realityrather than one of ethnicity or color"; that

mulato or negro classifies mostly color; and thatindio mainly points to culture. His work suggests that in some aspects calidad may have

determined caste categories in a differentiatingbut somewhat patterned way. But if true, one

stillwonders why, how, by whom, and for how

long.

The age of "complex criteria" for determiningstratification,let us remember,was the 17th cen

turyor, more loosely, themiddle period. Eco

nomically determined by the rise of capitalism,criteria for status by the late 18th century became more straightforwardly conomic as societybecame one of classes rather than castes.

Chance and Taylor (1977:485-486) say that this

"had clearly passed the 'incipient' stage by1792." Thus theydifferwith Lyle McAlister on

the extent and timing of class stratification bythe late 18th century. McAlister (1963:362-363)

thought "economic classes" a merely "incipientsituation" thatwould reach a more fully realized

form after the colonial period (author's emphasis).

Studies of stratification acknowledge to some

degree an unresolved problem: the degree to

which "outside observer" point-of-view, to use

McAlister's (1963:362) term, should override

"the waypeople

of the time conceived of and

defined their own and others' role and status."

Historians, as noted above, judged the terms

"mistaken" or "irrational" and considered the

categories ambiguous and unstable. Yet historians have to use whatever sources have survivedas best they can. And to do this they have to

aggregate records of casta labels as if they con

stituted a system when, as Chance and Taylor(1977:464) remind us in their study of a late

18th-century city, "there was no one 'correct'

folk model of the social structureof Antequera,neitherwas there always one correct racial iden

tity formany of its inhabitants."The rest of this essay will be concerned with

reputational, subjective aspects of social identity.In this way the "looseness" of the categories,togetherwith the concern that theywere of "limited value for structural analysis," can be set

aside in order to try to understand what theymeant as "a contemporary reality.

. .in the con

temporary mind" (McAlister 1963:356). This

bypasses the debate about structures and, in thisbrief discussion, does not try to fix with any

particular precision which, and inwhat propor

tions, extra ethno-racial factors informed the categories in given times and places. That may be

unknowable. One can, however, focus on the

nomenclature as people used it "in the street" to

place themselves and to contest theirplacementsby others. Those usages can provide a numberof glosses on the general problem of identity as

it relates to vocabularies of stratification. Itraises the possibility that so-called "loose" and

apparently contradictory uses of the categoriesmake political if not

descriptive

sense as

peopleplaced each other in situations of everyday life.

Racial Terms as a Discursive Resource

Racial, ascriptive vocabulary, like all language,could not be controlled from above. At one

level, it can be viewed as an elite-defined

scheme to systematize subordination. And theymust have thought itworked, for the lower or

ders

adoptedthe

vocabulary,but not

passively.In the hands of ordinary people, the language of

stratificationprovided a set of categories toma

nipulate (Chance and Taylor 1979:437). The

very proliferation of caste designations over time

points to this process, in part, perhaps, reflectinga mentality able to live with "a diverse and un

wieldy order of the world" (Morse 1964:134),but also, in our terms, the result of ordinary

people in everyday life pushing, expanding, and




testing the categories by grading themselves upand others down. In this, they reordered their

world as much as conformed to it.

New Spain's vocabulary of caste begins with

a basic separation of Indian and Hispanic. The

formerwere subject to tribute and under special

jurisdiction. The latter, at first Spaniards and

increasingly one or another racial combinations,were gente de razon, fully accountable for their

orthodoxy and behavior under Spanish law. As

African slaves joined with the two other racial

stocks, theAfro-mestizo emerged, usually called

mulato even though the proportion of African

stock in individuals might be small. As free

persons, mulatos and blacks were by definition

scoundrels and vagabonds, "the cancer of NewSpain"; as slaves, they were little more than

"beasts of burden" (Aguirre Beltran 1946:173).Chance and Taylor (1977:463), for example, cite

colloquial examples of language that equatemulato with "inferior tributepayer or a dangerous, provocative person." Mulato slaves, as

opposed to black slaves, were tarnished with thesame reputation for troublemaking, partly, per

haps, because more easily than blacks they couldrun away, and as ladinos (fluent in

Spanish,culturally adept) blend inwith a diverse plebeian population. For these reasons mulatos couldbe purchased at prices 20-25 percent lower on

the Mexican slave market than blacks (Valdes

1987:177-178). That blacks were presumed to

be more docile and less troublesome than

mulatos ("beasts of burden" rather than "trickyscoundrels"), helps to explain a brief comment

Francisco de Aguilar made about Petronila Ruizin a letter of 1581. So mistreated as a house

servant (he said) that she was "serving like ablack," she has thereforebegged him to take her

away (Archive General de la Nation, Inquisition[AGNI] 1581). The comment presumes that

because she was not black, the beast-of-burdentreatmentwas inappropriate, unjust, and reason

to run away.

In contrast to Afro-mestizos, Euro-mestizos

(combinations of European plus Indian, known

simply as mestizos) were not infamous by definition.

Theycould

emphasizetheir

Europeanside by dressing, speaking, and behaving as

Spaniards, as in varying degrees theydid. And

Indians, likemestizos, could also sometimes ben

efit from their classification to take refuge under

the umbrella of their special jurisdiction in colo

nial law. Blacks or mulatos, on the other hand,

never benefited from their categorization.But within the categories based on African

descent they could at lest present themselves as

free rather than slave, as did so many runawayslaves. On running away from his master earlyin the 18th century, for example, a black slave

named Juan Lorenzo immediately began to passas a "free mulatoT As a slave he had been

married to a slave; as a freeman, he married an

Indian. Changing his civil status also advanced

his calidad (AGNI 1707). As a broad tendency,the following generalization may be proposed:

Afro-mestizos had every reason to pass as Euro

mestizos and Euro-mestizos to draw ever closer

to full European status. The statement assumes

thatmulatos retained little of African, and mes

tizos, little of Indian, culture. Instead, interme

diate groups tended to integrateevermore tightlyinto the Hispanic world, hierarchically gradedinto subgroups but not mainly according to a

logic of ethnic identification. (Mestizos who were

reabsorbed into the Indian population are diffi

cult to track; in effect they no longerwere mes

tizos but "Indians.") Aboriginal peoples, who

had the best chance to retain an ethnic identifi

cation, sometimes tried to pass as mestizos and

sometimes did not. That they often did not,reflects the presence of the cultural resources ofa sizable population base, in spite of the ravagesof epidemic disease, in communities, towns, and

the barrios of large cities where they spoke their

own languages and adhered to their customs.They also had an opportunistic incentive to iden

tify themselves as Indians: their special status

under Spanish law.

From Slave to Free

A fundamental aspect of calidad was whetherone was slave or free. About 1725, Juan

Bautista Aleman, "slender, almost black, with

tightlywaved black hair (de pasa apretada),more Negro than mulato," ran away from his




Dominican masters inGuatemala (AGNI 1746).To the Inquisitors he testified that in his 10

years as a fugitive he "always has passed as a

free man." In fact, he settled in the town of

San Christobal Tacotalpan (in the district of

Vera Cruz) and, using the alias Alegria, married

Monica de la Cruz, a freemulata, and fathered

a daughter. A self-confessed slave, therefore,constructed himself as free and lived as if he

were. Only after about two years, because a

paisano fromGuatemala saw him married and

accused him of bigamy, did Juan abandon

Monica.

At about age 20, Sebastian de Moxica, a slave

born about 1665, made the transition to "free

mulato" as provided for by his master's will(AGNI 1702). When Sebastian gave his gene

alogy to the Inquisitors in 1702 he knew a few

facts about his deceased Spanish father, that his

name was Diego de Castaneda, native of "the

mountains" of Spain, formerly a merchant in

Sayula (probably with a small retail store). Yet,he had no actual contact with his father's side of

the family. His mother and grandmother were

both slaves of Domingo Moxica, a merchant in

thepueblo

of Cocula(in

thejurisdiction

of

Sayula, now south central Jalisco). But some

gradations may be noted within this family:Sebastian termed his grandmother a bozal (without doubt to designate that she had been born in

Africa), his mother a mulata, and his uncle (hismother's brother) a black (casta negro). His

mother and uncle therefore,may have been fa

thered by two different men?one black, the

otherwhite or mulato. Or, other determinants of

calidad, unavailable to the uncle, may have

graded his mother up. Sebastian himself hadbeen removed furtherfrom his African forebears

with a Spanish father.

The shift from slave to freewas both an event

and a process, for free blacks had to act the partas well as make the claim. Substantively theyhad to overcome their "vileness," without a

doubt the dominant perception of them embed

ded in hispanic culture. Dennis N. Valdes

(1987:193), summarizing five similar cases of

runaway slaves, observes that they "seldom

achieved significant upward mobility" because

they "almost invariably assumed the same jobsthat they had performed as slaves." Yet doing"the same job" as a slave or a free person could

make considerable difference in status, dignity,and quality of life.

How else can one explain why so many slaves

ran away? A free person could quit one joband move to another, look for a lenient em

ployer or an openhanded patron, more easilydraw support from a community of plebeians,and perhaps overcome vileness. None of this

presumes it common that escaped slaves made

more than minor jumps within the categories of

social stratification. Most would have shunned

more ambitious aspirations. For one thing, inflating their calidad, which usually meant claim

ing precedence over peers, would have called

attention to themselves by creating friction, in

vited others to contest their claims, and set in

motion a self-policing mechanism over status

(Valdes 1987:193). An escaped slave passing as

a "free" mulato risked an unmasking by a rival.

Multiple Labels, One Person

As Chance and Taylor (1977:465) noted, indi

viduals commonly enough shifted labels to gain

advantage. A conventional moment for such

shifts came at marriage when the calidades of

prospective spouses were often made to corre

spond. But this is only one kind of event, a

formal occasion that left a documentary trail. It

is important to remember that countless informal

incidents also took place when labels were as

signed with no particular polemical intent.These nevertheless amounted to on-the-spot per

ceptions that in some way suited the situation

and the purposes of a labeler. In 1617, for ex

ample, Christobal de Toro, formerly of Seville

but in the Indies since about 1600, referred to

his compatriot Christobal de Castroverde in the

following way: "a mulato although white, and

of good body, round face, and light beard"

(AGNI 1616). The "although" here is crucial. It

signals that the categorization of Christobal as




mulato, a reference to his calidad, overrides his

phenotype. Reality and appearance, in other

word, did not coincide.

This glossing of categories happened all the

time, as a few examples will illustrate. In 1615,

Anton Martinez described Juan Luis as "amulato, slender and of good body, and not very

mulato, [with] aquiline face" (AGNI 1616). In

1707, a mestizo named Teresa de la Cruz labeled

her husband Juan Lorenzo del Castillo as "lobo

in caste, tending more to mulato than to mes

tizo" (AGNI 1707). Little is at stake in these

two examples beyond shading the first Juan to

ward a more European status and clarifying the

second Juan's intermediate category lobo toward

mulato-ness. Beyond that, in the second case,the description notes Juan's shortness, largeblack eyes, straighthair, and the fact that he has

six fingers on one hand.

In another example, Matias Martinez de

Torres, a Spanish immigrantwho in 1663 had

been in New Spain for three years, placedSebastian de Loaysa as "a mulato bianco, veryladino" (AGNI 1663). Here "white" as a glosson the category mulato, seems to come from the

cultural judgment "very ladino"?meaning, in

rough terms, fully integrated into hispanic soci

ety. Sebastian's wife, Michaela de San Joseph,was classified as a mulata with the additional

notation that she had been a slave but was now

free. She referred to three of her four children,

apparently all fathered by Sebastian, in racial

terms: two as mulatos and the other as lobo (thelast usually implying an Indian component).

Here, however, the labels surely characterize

appearance only, differentiating her lobo from

her mulatos, perhaps, by his straighthair or skintone.

Like Michaela, Sebastian's second wife,

Tomasa, also bordered on two caste categories.In 1671, when she first appeared before the

Holy Office, the court identified her as a "mes

tiza," but, as elaborated by the notary, "she is a

woman who goes about dressed as a mestiza"The classification thus derives from dress, an

indication that cultural rather than phenotypiccriteria dominate the

assigningof it. Tomasa

was able to push her cultural persona even fur

therwhen she married Sebastian in 1659, for the

officiating priest entered her into the register as

"Spaniard, single, natural daughter of Diego de

Orduna."

From such designations, however briefly noted,

it is possible to tease out some clues to identity.On thewhole, however, they remain too frag

mentary to yield very solid judgments without

the cross-referencing of situations and other in

formation on the perceiver and the perceived.Their flat matter-of-factness may minimize the

extreme exaggeration of designations made in

anger and mainly with hostile intent, but theynevertheless are political in the sense that cat

egorizing people in a hierarchical arrangement

was always about worth and precedence. Onewould stand on firmer ground methodologicallyto examine instances of the use of terminologywhen they can be placed inmore detailed con

texts and have a dialogic dimension showing the

contestation as well as the assigning of labels.

As an example, one may consider the case of

Juan Gutierrez de Estrada, a Spaniard who in

1600 said that the calidad of his wife Ines had

been falsified when he was about tomarry her

(AGNI 1600). Before themarriage, he com

plained, "they told him she was a castiza, butshe is only a mulata." The former, implying

Spanish-Indian descent in a ration of three to

one, made Ines nearly a Spaniard. So why, pre

suming that Juan had observed Ines and her

demeanor, had he failed to judge for himself

whether she was a castiza or a mulatal Most

likely because Juan and Ines were both servinga common master who patronized and encour

aged the match. The master, to solidify his

household, undoubtedly inflated Ines's calidad toapproximate Juan's. Juan, a peninsular Spaniard

but a no-account and marginal figure who had

worked only as a sailor and soldier, acceptedthis fiction in anticipation of receiving other

benefits later. This situationmade for a rough

parity, but an unstable one dependent on patron

age. When Juan determined the latter too little,he cast Ines as a mulata to show that his worth

had been depreciated by his wife's low calidad.

With themarriage

confirmed as beneathhim,Juan effected a "self-divorce" by deserting Ines.




Juan restored his identity fully to Spaniard by

discarding a mulato wife; Marcos Calderon

stretched his to Spaniard by denying his placement as mestizo (AGNI 1751). Marcos can beseen in 1751 (pushing the "middle period" here

to the limit) presenting himself as a Spaniardwhen he was arrested and put in the public jailof Merida as a suspected bigamist. Yet this

assessment had earlier been challenged. An in

strumental witness to Marcos's second marriage,

don Francisco Lopez Sarmiento, described

Marcos as a "man of average height, broad

shouldered, with the coloration of a mestizo,black hair like an Indian, a narrow face, about

40, and I don't take him for a Spaniard." The

statement deflates Marcos more emphaticallythan itmight at first appear, associating him

both with Indians (hair) and mestizos (skin col

oration). And, to spell out such inferences even

more directly, don Francisco concludes that such

characteristics do not amount to being a Spaniard. A second witness, don Diego de la Cruz

Rosado, captain of themilitia inEspita (Hondu

ras), also struckMarcos from the category Spaniard because he had "black hair like an Indian"

andregarded

neitherMarcos nor AndreaNovelo,his second wife, as Spaniards.

Don Diego's mention of Andrea's non-Spanishstatus in conjunction with Marcos's adds to

judgments based on physical appearance. It presumes that like married like, and that categoriesof spouses (especially for purposes of registrationin parish records) matched. That Andrea failed

to rank as a Spaniard helped confirmMarcos's

exclusion as well. In thisway, then, a criterion

of calidad played some part in don Diego's

ranking ofMarcos.That neither don Diego nor don Francisco at

tempted to give Marcos a precise racial label

reveals that this mattered little to them. What

did matter was that he was not; for the rest, he

could remain amorphously with the mestizos.This fitswith Edward Said's (1978:54) observa

tion that societies tend "to derive their identities

negatively." Hispanic society of early modern

times, obsessed with proving lineages untainted

by Jewish, Moorish, African, or Indian descent,fits this ethos. Don Francisco and don Diego,

unworried about slight shiftswithin the plebeian

rankings of the social order?notwithstanding the

importance of minor shifts to other plebeians,

firmly excluded Juan from theirown category of

Spaniards.

From Indian toMestizo

In the historical literature one routinely sees

statements such as the following: "the demo

graphic crisis of 1726-1727 [in theGuadalajara

region]. . .drove Indians in the north to cities

and haciendas, thus, in some cases, acculturatingthem away from the Indian village towards the

non-Indian population" (MacLeod 1983:43). It

might be well, however, to think further aboutthemeaning of a phrase such as "acculturatingthem away." It implies a kind of environmen

tal determinism in the shaping of culture, here

formulated as a polarity: on the one hand "the

Indian village," on the other, the Spanish city or

hacienda. But MacLeod (1983) qualifies this

process of acculturation by saying that it happens "in some cases." Although he does not

specify which cases, the notion that people had

severalidentities,

not asingle

fixedone,

and the

fact that individuals chose and shifted identities

situationally can help to explore the question.One may consider, for example, an instance of

an Indian becoming a mestizo (AGNI 1706).His name was Matias Cortes, and we learn

about him because, in mid-career as a mestizo,

he hastily backtracked and declared himself In

dian to escape the jurisdiction of theHoly Of

fice of the Inquisition. The Holy Office, there

fore, had to decide: was he mestizo (and under

its jurisdiction) or Indian (and not under it)?His history of representing himself as ladino,officials thought,put the burden of proof on him

to establish that he was not a mestizo. At first

Matias asked them to overlook superficial as

pects of his appearance. "Although in his de

meanor (en el porte de su persona)," he testified

in 1706, "he has been considered a mestizo, he

is an Indian and he contracted his second mar

riage as an Indian." Thus Matias distinguishes

between appearance and reality, betweena con

structed identityand an inherentone. In the end



NEGOTIATINGCALIDAD: THE EVERYDAY STRUGGLE FORSTATUS INMEXICO 71

theHoly Office got him to admit thathis father

was a mestizo, yet in spite of this,Matias clungto his Indian identityby insisting thatwhile he

had "always gone about as a mestizo in realityhe is not because his mother is Indian" (AGNI

1706).The argument, held so tenaciously, can hardly

surprise; it is exactly the self presentation one

would expect given his situation. More impor

tantly for our purposes, it demonstrates that

Matias could "have" two identities at once. At

least in this opportunistic way, forwithout the

"accident" of an Inquisitorial proceeding, the

direction ofMatias's life, as a young man livinginMexico City and practicing a trade, had been

to become mestizo. That process, moreover, canbe followed from testimony in Matias's file.

Born in 1665, Matias declared that his parentsand grandparents were Indians, on his mother's

side from Tacuba, on his father's side from

Toluca. He grew up in Toluca, learned to read

but not to write, and at age eight went to

Mexico City to live with his padrino of confir

mation, Pedro Lopez Guerrero, a lawyer. As a

servant in Mexico City and then a lacemaker

(bordador),Matias shed his Indianness and took

on theways of theHispanic world.

Teresa Martinez observed this transition. She,a Spaniard, wife of theweaver Cleto Marzelino,and the madrina of Matias's marriage, knew

Matias a little as a neighbor in the area of

Alameda, and then at closer range, when her

husband Cleto hired Matias tomake some lace

for a dress, and he worked in her house. Here

is how he described him: "Matias ismore Indian

thanmestizo although he spoke fluent Spanish.

When she first knew him he went around incoarse cotton (mantas) and barefoot like the

other Indians; but after he became a lacemaker

he dressed in a cape (capote) and wore shoes

and stockings as mestizos do." Teresa's husband

Cleto remembered Matias and his betrothedwife

Hypolita as "reputed to be Indians and as such

theymarried." Elsewhere he calls Hypolita a

"mestizo-ed Indian," although others consistentlycalled hermestizo or, as in Teresa's case, "white

mestiza." Matias, however, termed Hypolita

castiza, adding that she is "tall and with a fair

complexion, black eyes, [and was the] daughterof Pedro de Alcantaro, castizo, master shoe

maker" (AGNI 1706).

This optimistic version of his wife's calidad

helped Matias solidify his own place inHispanic

society. That he did so mattered little to obser

vant Spaniards such as Cleto and Teresa, who,in conceding his calidad as mestizo, had nothingto lose. They nevertheless retained a clear

awareness it was a construct. For its part, the

Inquisition strictlyused the criterion of biological descent, rejecting Matias's plea for Indian

status because of his mestizo father. They there

fore tried and punished him for bigamy.

The Self as a Social and Individual Construct

Although the evidence is spotty, students can

find ways to read the documentary record to see

people struggling for position and preference.Their behaviors, existential in the root sense of

that term, "to stand out," were profoundly social

in that one might only stand out with reference

to another. The

complex

differs little from be

haviors associated with hidalgma: the drive to be

a somebody. Put in slightly different terms,one

might view the drama of identity in daily life as,

in Stephen Greenblatt's (1980:159) phrase, "a

schema of communication." By this he seems

tomean that relative status among individuals,

although roughly agreed on, was not fixed abso

lutely. People had to be ever vigilant: they de

fended against slights and insults, and they at

tacked to claim precedence. As dependent on

situations and a social context, then, identityplayed out as a drama of daily existence, espe

cially for plebeians who enjoyed no automatic

deference from theirpeers, no unassailable placein the social landscape, as can be documented in

criminal as well as in Inquisition records. As

for the former,Pablo Escalante (1990), William

Taylor (1979), Cheryl Martin (1990), and John

Chasteen (1990) have shown what can be ac

complished by looking closely at the exact




words attributed to one or another party in the

exchange of insults that sometimes led to assaultand homicide.

Two final observations conclude this essay.First, it is important that the verbal currency of

insults is so often sexual in nature. Why this isso has to do with order and ordering. Orderwas the goal. Householders and communities

wanted, above all, to live a settled and predictable existence. Metonymically, the principle thatmen controlled women, should be seen as

equivalent to order itself. In application, a man

who failed to protect or control the sexuality of

wives and daughters had no claim to an honor

able place in society. Thus, to call a man

cornudo or cabron (cuckold) defamed him in anessential way. And in a differentway, to calla woman puta or soltera rather than doncella

(Lavrin [1993]:2-5), did the same, for it re

moved her, together with theman who should

have protected her from such depreciation, from

the standards of orderly respectability. Women

who called each other puta did so within the

logic of male definitions of order in conflatingillicit sexuality and dishonor. These insults

struck with so much force becausethey

attacked

individuals, not as if theywere isolated entities,but as inextricably embedded in a social context.

Reputation mattered more than an imagined but

hidden inner integrity.Given the above?and this is the second ob

servation?one can explain why insults spoken

publicly, a kind of theater of contested identity,

exaggerated their force tenfold. They amounted

to a "restatement" or reconstruction of another

that if left uncontested stood as confirmed. If

order was the goal, ordering was a process, aneveryday one dramatizing the degree to which

"identity" was reputational, something prone to

attack and necessary to defend.

A final example oversteps the boundaries of

time and place (but not ofmentality) marked out

for this essay. Following an account by John

Charles Chasteen (1990:48), one may recall the

case of Jose, a young Indian boy who in 1829was drinking with his employer in a rural

pulperia near Brazil's southern frontier.Withoutapparent warning Jose became the target of his

master's verbal and physical abuse in the formof repeated blows with the flat of a sword andloud accusations that he had been too rough

with a horse he had been ordered to break. Ata certain point the boy refused to take this treat

ment any longer. Drawing his knife, he stabbedhis master in the heart and killed him.

The incident reflects Jose's sense of his placein that fragment of the social order present in

thepulperia. True, he was an Indian and a plebeian laborer, but he was no less than a man

among men. He affirmed this, stopping treat

ment that implied that he was not, with his

deadly knife thrust,clearly drawing the line at

being, in Chasteen's (1990:48, 55) words,

"whipped like a dog in a public place." Thepublic context for this drama demonstrates once

again that even tough identity attaches to indi

viduals; itwas maintained, adjusted, and de

fended with reference to society.In a sense, theatrics such as the knifing inci

dent can be viewed as unimportant, trivial, and

meaningless in the big picture. After all, slightshiftswithin plebeian rankings seem insignificantnow, for none of this behavior changed the systematic

deprivationsand brutishness of

plebeianexistence. Moreover, with hindsight one also

knows that the basis for themiddle-period stratification would change as commercial capitalismreshuffled the content of the old labels. RodneyAnderson (1988:241), following this tone of

thought, views Indians, castas, and poor Spaniards inGuadalajara as increasingly lumped to

gether as a proletariat by 1821. He asks why it

should thereforematter whether this constituted

a move up for castas or one down for Span

iards? Itmatters, this essay suggests, because itmattered to people at the time. They saw them

selves as different and as agents, even in a

world changing rapidly around them. How they

adapted and adjusted to capitalism may also

show that they adapted and adjusted capitalismitself. Certainly theydid not cease to adapt and

adjust to each other, to try to stand out, to seek

order, and to engage in ordering. If their at

tempts to cling to old distinctions based on ra

cial labels seems anachronistic, a kind of remnant of the soon-to-be-displaced old order, that




view seems more the teleological overlay of

hindsight that configures what happened in the

past as what had to happen.

Although the evidence is scattered and piecemeal, the documentary record can be read to

view the regime de castas as a discursive resource as much as a "system." People jockeyedfor position and preference as they engaged in a

kind of "self fashioning" (Greenblatt 1980; Davis

1983, 1988:589). More of this posturing took

place in the plebeian ranks than one might have

thought. And if social stratification in the 17th

century can standmetaphorically for the middle

period as a whole, it suggests that the time hascome to test systemic views against the day-to

day transactions of ordinary folk. One shouldnot prejudge these as unimportant because theydid little to change their overall condition as a

people ruled by a small elite whose control

stemmed from a kind of performative, not sub

stantive, paternalism contrived, to use E. P.

Thompson's (1993:47) words, "to receive a return in deference quite disproportionate to the

outlay."

It is not possible, of course, to overturn theconventional periodization of "the colonial period" but it is important to remember that it has

imposed a kind of rhetorical determinism on our

view of the 17th century. Students would therefore do well not to allow it to overdeterminewhat they look for (and therefore find) in the

documentary record. The conveniences of systemic overlays must be balanced with themore

disparate and untidy words and behaviors of

contemporaries whose horizons were limited andopen ended. The study of the 17th centuryshows that the two approaches complement one

another.

richardboyer negotiating calidad 10

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