Colonial militia, color and local forms of urban belonging (Spanish America, 18th century)

By studying the militia as an autonomous space, the Americanist historiography has defined the color of men as its only criterion of social differentiation and as a distinctive element of colonial urban societies. This article aims to examine in a new way the social implications of recruitment patterns in the colonial militia. Far from revealing a strict segregation based on color, phenotype or race, the multi-site approach of a dozen urban environments invites us to be careful with the discourse of the actors, which does not always take account of classification practices and criteria, nor of the complex corporate organization of American cities. The militia – and within it the militia of color – was a space of urban cohesion and social reproduction that institutionalized informal networks of sociability, solidarity and clientele. As in Europe, the militiamen of the colonial cities thus inherited positions and dignities occupied in other social spaces of the city (parishes, brotherhoods, guilds). Color was central, but above all it was a discursive recourse bringing out the crucial importance of the place of enunciation. Indeed, color was never the only criterion determining the social position of the militiamen. He was mostly a way of saying hierarchies, as the birth could be in European societies at the time, with the same centrality of restrictive social conventions, but crossed by many contradictions and incoherence, which conferred a decisive importance to specific situations and negotiations.