Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America
Edited by Andrew B. Fisher and
Matthew D. O’Hara
2009, Duke University Press
303 pages
THERE ARE striking similarities between the officially sanctioned political correctness of today and policies on race and ethnicity employed by Crown authorities during the colonial era in Latin America, even if the former is in so many ways an historical reaction to the latter, albeit one that has emerged two centuries later. Self-identification and formal debates about the criteria and categories that determine social policies but also legal interactions between individuals and institutions are integral to both systems of classification. As is the implicit acknowledgment that many categories – such as those of mulattoes or pardos- were transformable, as Ann Twinam points out in her fascinating study on the purchasing of whiteness from the Council of the Indies in the closing decades of the 18th century. Twinam’s contribution and others in Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America provide an essential introduction to the role played by race and ethnicity in the experiences of ordinary people in colonial Latin America and to that contact point between individual and institution at which the political dimensions of identity construction can so often be
discerned. – GJ
