From race to races in Republican Hispanic America (1770-1900)

During the revolutions of independence in Spanish America (1810-1825), the new liberal and republican constitutions sought to mark the break with the monarchy and the “colonial system” by challenging the transmission of dignity (nobility, offices and positions) and indignity (racialized status) through generations. They thus sought to legally destroy the genealogical foundations of an old regime that had, overseas, a strong racial dimension. The emancipations, however, insisted on the natural, supposedly racial, dimension of citizenship. How can we explain the apparent contradiction between legal elision and political reconfiguration of racialization? The first part of the argument focuses on the polymorphism of racialization processes at the end of the colonial period, associated with limpieza de sangre, “class” as an emic category or Enlightenment knowledges. The second shows how the naturalization of social relations was disrupted by the revolutionary dynamic. The conjuncture opens new spaces to rethink racialization in a framework that became liberal and republican, as Bolívar’s thought attests. The last part seeks to measure these post-revolutionary transformations of racialization practices by focusing on the mention of racialized status (pardo, negro, indio) in baptismal records. From Mexico to Uruguay and Bolivia, the resistance of colonial categories and their transformations in the 19th century are noted.