Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies by Ann Twinam

Abstract

Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies, by Ann Twinam. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015. xvii, 534 pp. $100.00 US (cloth), $34.95 US (paper). In Purchasing Whiteness Ann Twinam demonstrates that former African slaves and their descendants played far greater roles in viceregal societies than was previously recognized. She highlights pardo and mulatto struggles for social equality with a detailed tour of the historic interstices that allowed them to either pass as, or legally become, white. Her study centres on the whitening gracias al sacar, purchasable certificates that made it possible for the progeny of Blacks to erase the stain of their birth and enjoy the offices and privileges of Spaniards and creoles. But these royal decrees were only initially drafted in the late eighteenth century, which is why Twinam argues that processes of whitening clearly rested on the real mobilities of unknown thousands of slaves, free blacks, castas, pardo, and mulatto vassals (421). Twinam analyzes pardo and mulatto mobilities in what she calls long time, charting the centuries-long transition from slave to free person to royal vassal to citizen. Purchasing Whiteness, as a result, is a lengthy study of thirteen chapters divided into five chronological sections. The introductory part sets the stage with an extensive but arguably necessary survey of the historiography on the whitening gracias al sacar, which is immediately followed by a detailed overview of racial thinking in the Spanish Empire. Twinam painstakingly connects petitions for whiteness from various archives across the Spanish world, exposing a series of false assumptions about gracias al sacar. She corrects earlier claims that Mestizos were able to purchase whitening certificates, that these petitions were commonly solicited by pardos and mulattos, and that selling whiteness was the carefully planned policy of a cash-strapped Spanish state to earn money. Twinam also rightly places gracias al sacar in a larger tradition of monarchical dispensations stemming back to the medieval period. Whitening certificates, as a result, are not an entirely surprising development given that Spanish kings had eliminated defects like illegitimacy or blood impurity for centuries. When the reader finally gets into the heart of Purchasing Whiteness in the second section (81), one is treated to a fascinating sketch of pardo and mulatto strategies for social ascendancy in the 1600s and early 1700s. Twinam shows how some avoided tribute payments, others served in royal militias, a few were able to bypass prohibitions to enter universities, and many, guided by a Hispanic propensity to think generationally (126), played genealogical mathematics by calculatingly marrying lighter-skinned partners in hope of whitening future generations. Refreshing about the analysis in this section is Twinam's insistence that the horrors of slavery and the legal restrictions placed upon those of African descent are not the only tales to be told; pardos and mulattos skillfully navigated the confining yet fluid spaces of Spanish law and Spanish American traditions, carving out a better future for both themselves and their offspring. …