Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (39 page)

Yet, for all the deceptions and ambiguities, colonial Spanish America evolved into a colour-coded society, although the equation between darkness of skin and social, as distinct from legal, status was by no means absolute. Black servants, the majority of them slaves, were legally inferior to pure-blooded Indians living in their communities, but in social and cultural terms they tended to rank higher, because their occupations in creole households or as hacienda foremen effectively made them members of the Hispanic world.lio If Spanish American colonial society was fundamentally a three-tier society, consisting of `Spaniards', castas and Indians, then the black population, unlike that of Barbados or the Chesapeake, occupied an intermediate position by virtue of its inclusion among the castas, even though Indian ancestry was rated superior to black ancestry when it came to contamination of the blood-line.

The complexities of these shades of ethnic difference, imperfectly superimposed on a traditional society of orders, inevitably made for a volatile society, especially in the cities. The poorer sections of the Spanish creole population, whose `pure' blood placed them above the castas, clung to the status symbols that differentiated them from people of mixed ancestry who might well be better off than themselves. Simultaneously they resented the airs, and wealth, of the creole elite. In spite of attempts by the authorities to end their exemption, mestizos shared with creoles the privilege of paying no direct taxes. This gave them every inducement to differentiate themselves from tribute-paying Indians. Correspondingly, an Indian who could pass himself off as a mestizo stood to gain substantially because he escaped tribute payments. Yet in matters of the faith he was better off if he remained classified as an Indian, since Indians, unlike creoles and mestizos, were not subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition."

Such confusing cross-currents in legislative and social practice gave rise to continuous uncertainties and ambiguities, victimizing some but creating opportunities for others. Inevitably, too, the imperfect fit between rank and colour afforded wide scope for social subversion. According to Humboldt, `when some plebeian gets into an altercation with a titled personage, he will quite commonly say to him: "Do you think you are whiter than me?" - words which perfectly reflect the status and origins of today's aristocracy."2

It is not therefore surprising that Spaniards and the upper ranks of the creoles lived in fear of an explosion among the ethnically mixed population that crowded the streets of the cities of New Spain and Peru. A popular insurrection in Mexico City helped topple the reforming viceroy, the Marquis of Gelves, in 1624. If the Indians made up the bulk of the rioters, these also included many mestizos, blacks and mulattoes, and not a few whites.113 An urban underclass was in process of formation, indiscriminately drawn from a mixture of the different racial groups. Reflecting the hardening social divisions, the elite began to draw a distinction between its own kind - decent people (gente detente) - and the plebe, including the poor whites, just as the Virginia elite would seek to differentiate itself from the lower orders of white society by means of a social code based on the notions of gentility and respectability. 114

In the rural society of Virginia accumulated social and economic resentments found their outlet in Bacon's rebellion of 1676. In the urban society of Mexico City they culminated in a brief explosion of popular violence in 1692. Following heavy rains and floods, maize prices that year reached their highest level of the century,115 and on 8 June an infuriated populace vented its wrath on the symbols of authority, sacking and setting fire to the viceregal palace, the city hall and the town gaol, and looting the shops. Ethnic divisions between Indian, mestizo and Spanish artisans were momentarily forgotten in a concerted denunciation of `the Spaniards and the gacbupines who are eating up our corn'. The orgy of destruction was followed by a wave of repression and the rapid crumbling of the temporary unity achieved on 8 June. Economic hardship might produce a coalition of the poor and disadvantaged, but caste and colour consciousness helped to ensure that it was fragile and short-lived.116

The 1692 Mexico City insurrection, like Bacon's rebellion, proved to be an evanescent phenomenon, representing no lasting threat to an older and more firmly established elite than that of Virginia. Right across Spanish America urban oligarchies had been consolidating their hold over their cities during the second and third generations of the post-conquest period. At the heart of these oligarchies, which controlled the city councils and exercised a growing influence at the wider, provincial level, were those families of the conquerors that had managed to perpetuate themselves and hang on to the spoils of conquest. It was these families, for instance, which constituted the core of the urban elite of Santa Fe de Bogota during most of the colonial period. 117 But they were replenished and renewed - as the elite of its fellow New Granada town of Popayan was renewed - by newcomers from Spain or other parts of the Indies who married into them and periodically revived the family fortunes with injections of new wealth.11'

The new wealth came from trade, from mining and from the benefits of office. To the disgust of old conquistador families that had fallen on bad times, immigrants freshly arrived from the peninsula were all too often preferred in the allocation of posts in the central or local administration, and in the distribution of grants of land or labour. Viceroys would arrive from Spain with a large entourage of friends, relatives and retainers, all of them on the lookout for opportunities for enrichment during the tenure of their patron. Lines of influence and family connection stretched from the Iberian peninsula to Lima and Mexico City, where the viceroys dispensed patronage to their clients, and to those who could afford to pay. Don Luis de Velasco, a member of a junior branch of the powerful dynasty of the Constables of Castile, arrived in New Spain as its second viceroy in 1550, and held the post for fourteen years. His son, of the same name, was viceroy between 1590 and 1595, and again between 1607 and 1611, following an interim period as viceroy of Peru, before moving back to Spain to become President of the Council of the Indies (fig. 16). The more than twenty years of Velasco dominance in New Spain were to see a powerful reinforcement and consolidation of the viceroyalty's elite - an elite that included several members of the Velasco family who had married into the families of Mexican encomenderos or mining entrepreneurs. 119

Map 4. Principal Cities and Towns of British and Spanish America, c. 1700.

Based on R. L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493-1793 (2000), fig. 2.5.

The upper echelon of the imperial bureaucracy - the presidents, judges and fiscal officers of the eleven American Audiencias, numbering 76 ministers and authorized officials by the late seventeenth century120 - in theory represented a closed caste, which was expected to keep its distance from the population in the name of equitable government and even-handed justice. In practice its members soon found ways of circumventing prohibitions on marriage into local families or the acquisition of property in their area of jurisdiction, and by the seventeenth century the crown was increasingly ready to grant special marriage dispensations to judges who wished to arrange marriages that would unite themselves or members of their families to the local elites. These connections with elite families naturally redounded to the benefit of both parties. Judges and officials enriched themselves by marrying into wealth, while the families with which they were now linked by marriage secured special consideration in disputed cases and an inside track to patronage.121

Making use of their special connections to the royal administration, leading urban families built up their resources, established entails where it suited their purposes, and consolidated their dominance over the cities and their hinterland. They took advantage, too, of the crown's growing financial difficulties to buy their way into public office. Private traffic in regimientos - aldermanships - in city councils had long been standard practice, and from 1591 they were put up for public sale. From 1559 notarial posts were placed on the market, and these were followed in 1606 by almost all local offices. Philip II and Philip III had held the line against the sale of treasury offices, but in 1633 Philip IV began putting these, too, up for sale. Eventually, in the second half of the seventeenth century, even the highest posts came onto the market, with posts in the Audiencias being systematically sold from 1687. Creole families naturally moved to take advantage of these expanding opportunities, buying their way into local and central administration, and reinforcing their social and economic dominance in the process.122

A nexus of interests was thus built up, linking leading families to the royal administration, the church, mining and trade. Large profits were to be made, both in mining and the transatlantic trade, where Mexican and Peruvian merchants in the earlier seventeenth century looked for returns of 30 per cent or more.123 Some of these returns were directed into mining, which required heavy capital investment; others were used for dowries, thus enabling large-scale merchants to marry into landowning and administrative families. According to the Marquis of Mancera, viceroy of New Spain from 1664 to 1673, `the merchants and traders, who constitute a large part of the Spanish nation in the Indies, approach close to the nobility, affecting their style and comportment, so that it is not easy to distinguish and segregate these two categories.' The penury of the old-established families, and the ambition of the new merchant families, led to intermarriage, `so that it can be assumed that in these provinces the caballero in general is a merchant, and the merchant a caballero' - an outcome that, with Venice in mind, he regarded as being to the public benefit.124

While large-scale merchants did indeed come to form part of the elite, both in New Spain and Peru, Mancera was exaggerating. Even the wealthiest merchants continued to remain a distinctive social group, often maintaining their commercial interests by arranging for at least one son to go into trade; and they failed to penetrate the uppermost echelon of colonial society.125 This echelon was now acquiring new badges of distinction. During the seventeenth century 422 ceoles were admitted into the prestigious Spanish military orders of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcantara, compared with a mere sixteen in the preceding century.121 Creoles were also beginning to receive titles of nobility from a crown which in the sixteenth century had been determined to prevent the creation of a New World aristocracy, but was now too financially hard pressed to be able to hold the line. Peru, where Francisco Pizarro's marquisate was the sole title of nobility in the sixteenth century, acquired thirteen marquises and fourteen counts during the reign of Carlos II, and a further 78 titles were added in the course of the eighteenth century.127

Although an increasingly exclusive group may have been forming at the summit of Spanish American colonial society, the willingness, or anxiety, of leading families to gain access to new sources of wealth by agreeing to marriage alliances with the families of office-holders, merchants and mining entrepreneurs, helped to ensure that the elite remained relatively open to new blood and new money. It was also an elite with a potentially wide geographical range. For all the localism of Spanish American society, it was conscious of forming part of a wider structure whose parameters were defined by the larger units of royal jurisdiction and extended to Spain itself. Within the two viceroyalties and in the jurisdictional areas of the Audiencias, the elites of the various cities and towns were in constant touch, and in planning their marriage strategies they would frequently operate at the viceregal rather than the purely local level. A leading family in Santiago de Chile might thus be linked by ties of marriage to families in Cuzco, Lima, La Paz and Tucuman.121 Spain's American empire both created, and was held together by, a transcontinental web of inter-related families.

Here, as elsewhere, the all-embracing structure of royal government gave a greater underlying unity, and a greater degree of homogeneity, to the Spanish colonial societies than was to be found in the British societies to the north. There was certainly a significant element of movement between the different colonies in the formation of British America. Puritans from New England settled on the eastern shores of Maryland and Virginia from the 1640s, and during the second half of the seventeenth century thousands of Barbadians left their overcrowded island for a new life on the Chesapeake. Virginian merchants, too, would strengthen their trading connections by arranging marriages between their children and those of merchants in the other colonies with whom they did business.129 Yet, with the partial exception of the eighteenth-century Middle Colonies - New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the three Lower Counties (Delaware), where market ties and common business interests helped to encourage social and political interchangel3o - the mainland colonies of British America remained strongly self-contained communities, preserving and even reinforcing the distinctive characteristics that derived from the occasion and place of settlement, and from the local and regional English origins of their early settlers.