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Pilar Gonzalbo, in her study La trampa de las castas (2013) discards the idea of the existence of a "caste system" or a "caste society" in New Spain, understood as a "social organization based on the race and supported by coercive power". [14]
During de Padilla's life, New Spain followed a caste system that categorized people based on the amount of "pure blood" or Spanish blood. [2] This system limited the already restricted social mobility of non-Spaniard races and those who possessed a lesser amount of Spanish blood were segregated from jobs, were banned from carrying arms, had to live with their masters and could not be in large ...
Once New Spain achieved independence, the legal basis of the colonial caste system was abolished and mentions of a person's caste in official documents was also abandoned, which led to the exclusion of racial classification from future censuses, and made it difficult to track demographic development of each ethnicity in the country.
The system was, in part, created to try and impose an order on a very messy reality – the mixing of ‘races’ between the Spanish, indigenous, and African peoples of New Spain. Therefore, the guild had specific rules for how the representations of races were to be depicted and in what way. [ 3 ]
In the Spanish colonial period, the Spanish developed a complex set of racial terms and ways to describe difference. Although this has been conceived of as a "system," and often called the sistema de castas or sociedad de castas, archival research shows that racial labels were not fixed throughout a person's life. [19]
Very generally speaking ethno-racial relations can be arranged on an axis between the two extremes of European and Indigenous American cultural and biological heritage, this is a remnant of the colonial Spanish caste system which categorized individuals according to their perceived level of biological mixture between the two groups.
Apart from the distinction of peninsulares from criollo, the castas system distinguished also mestizos of mixed Spanish and Amerindian ancestry in the Americas, and 'mestizos de español' (mixed Spanish and native Filipino (Spanish Filipino)), or 'tornatrás' (mixed Spanish and Sangley Chinese (Chinese Filipino)) in the Philippines / Spanish ...
The system is present in New Spain's first national census (in 1793), in which castizo, pardo, mulatto and zambo are also collectively listed as "castes". [13] The caste system and racial censuses were legally abandoned after independence, and academics who reviewed and republished the census figures referred to the castes simply as mestizos. [14]