Racism Without Race: Ethnic Group Relations in Late Colonial Peru

Abstract

Racism Without Race: Ethnic Group Relations in Late Colonial Peru Leon G. Campbell In 1912, Lord James Bryce, the British Ambassador to the United States, returned from Spanish America and proclaimed the region an excellent laboratory for the study of race relations.1 No doubt his view was the result of Spanish America’s unique population. Miscegenation had taken place there since the sixteenth century, at an unparalleled rate, so that the idea of race as it applied to La­ tin America referred to a peculiarly complex reality. Despite Bryce’s implicit advice to social scientists, the subject of Spanish American race relations is still virtually untouched,2 and so is the related subject of racism. Racism has been defined as "the assumption that psychocultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another which is usually cou­ pled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over the others.”3 As a phenomenon in Spanish America, it is usually associated with the turn of the nineteenth century. Buffeted by the harsh winds of international economics and internal strife, Latins rejected their indigenous past and sought their future among waves of European immigrants, whom they felt would infuse the region with a dynamism that was biologically inspired. The "scientifically” based ideas of Euro­ pean intellectuals such as Gobineau, Huxley, and Spencer that a racial hierarchy with whites, or Aryans, constituting the upper stra­ tum formed the proper basis for world society seemed little more than belated recognition of what had been a reality in Latin Amer­ ica for three centuries. 323 Racism in the Eighteenth Century The purpose of this paper is to explore the colonial antecedents of this phenomenon. By reviewing briefly the social structure and racial composition of late colonial Peru, Spanish racial attitudes, and ethnic group relations, it may be possible to determine whether Spanish American racism can be said to have existed prior to the nineteenth century, and perhaps more importantly, if so, on what bases it was predicated. Peru, as the seat of the former Inca empire, produced a variety of racial strains and thus offers an op­ portunity for an interesting case study of ethnic group relations. Hopefully, this study will aid in the more precise analysis of a uni­ versal phenomenon that is of concern to all thinking persons. Following the conquest of America, social rank or status was based largely upon phenotype, i.e. color and physiognomy, with a whitish skin indicating limpieza de sangre, or purity of the blood from Moorish or Jewish ancestry, a virtue prized since the days of the Reconquest. Yet although Spanish law regarded each racially -definable group as a separate social stratum, with attendant rights and obligations, by the eighteenth century, and probably well before, miscegenation, or race mixture, had caused racial lines in Peru and elsewhere to become hopelessly blurred. Definition for the purposes of maintaining social stratification on the basis of race alone became virtually impossible, so that the Spaniards perforce adopted sociocultural indices to maintain intact the so­ cial system. As early as 1560 the social pyramid in Peru consisted of a small upper stratum of Spaniards, numbering between 5,000 and 10,000 persons, who by this date had been matched in number by Mesti­ zos, the issue of their liasons with Indian women. Negroes, both free and slave, brought from Africa, ranked directly below them. The base of this social pyramid consisted of a large number of In­ dians who formed a separate culture from the above.4 There is considerable disagreement among scholars as to the exact configu­ rations of this social structure, with one authority viewing it in terms of multiple hierarchies rather than a single pyramid;5 the point for our purposes, however, is simply that "racial” identifi­ cation by the mid-sixteenth century was becoming difficult. A 1796 census in Peru indicated a population of 1,115,207 persons. Of this 324 Racism Without Race number 56.5 percent were classified as, Indians, 26.5 percent as Mestizos, 4 percent as Negroes, both slave and free, and 13 percent as Espanoles, or...