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Acknowledgements
The research upon which this article is based was supported in 2005–2006 by an International Collaborative Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, during the summer of 2005 by a Summer Academic Grant from the Graduate School of Georgetown University, and during the spring of 2007 by a Fulbright Fellowship in Bogotá; it was written while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2008–2009). I thank the directors and staff of the Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain) and the Archivo General de la Nación (Bogotá, Colombia) for their hospitality and assistance on this project; in particular, I am beholden to the director of the Sala de Investigadores of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mauricio Tovar, whom it is a continuing joy to work with. Marta Zambrano of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia shared the Wenner-Gren grant with me. I thank Carolina Castañeda, María Fernanda Durán, Juan Felipe Hoyos, Bernardo Leal, and Laura Sánchez for their able assistance in the Bogotá archives and for their willingness to brainstorm with me. Careful readings by Kathryn Burns, Ruth CitationHill, and Mercedes López Rodríguez illuminated my understanding of the complexities of my materials.
Notes
1. Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá (AGN/B), Criminales Juicios 93, d. 12, ff. 902–906. Citation of folios of this document will be made in parenthetical notes. I have chosen to privilege the original Spanish names for categories like indio, mestizo, and the like over English glosses, so as to avoid purposefully injecting them with twenty-first-century meanings.
2. Huauqui means “brother” in Quechua; a zambo was the progeny of an india and a negro. What this combination might have meant in Bogotá (as opposed to Quito) is uncertain. I thank Frank Salomon for helping me with this conundrum.
3. I do not use the word casta or caste to refer to the different colonial designations, such as mestizo or mulato, because the term does not appear in the documentation of the period for the Nuevo Reino (cf. CitationCope on use of caste for colonial Mexico). Hill (Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America ch. 5) rightly cautions us against equating casta categories with modern racial ones that carry the same names but operate within very distinct systems of hierarchy.
4. The Inca CitationGarcilaso (II: 525–526) has an excellent example of an indigenous commoner passing for a native noble, which demonstrates that passing could occur exclusively within the indigenous sphere. I thank Gary Urton for alerting me to this passage.
5. But not in the past: I hesitate to move “racial thinking” back to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, as some authors have recently suggested (CitationCañizares-Esguerra chap. 4; CitationSilverblatt), preferring to see race in its early-modern manifestation as a distinct epistemological formation and system of hierarchy (Hill, Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America).
6. AGN/B, Encomiendas 21, f. 409r.
7. Twinam (“Racial Passing” 254) defines passing as “a dichotomy between a person's private reality and an alternative, publicly constructed status”, which certainly sounds like the modern sense of the word. Nonetheless, she proceeds to suggest that it would be more pertinent to reconceptualize passing in the colonial period in terms of the process of the bureaucratic modification of a publicly constructed status, as opposed to dissimulation.
8. Romero's requests for office can be found in AGI/S, Patronato 154, n.3, r.1, c.1–4; Santa Fe 122, n. 32.
9. See, for example, AGI/S, Escribanía 952; AGI/S, Justicia 502, n. 2, r. 1; AGI/S, Justicia 505, n. 3, r. 2; AGI/S, Patronato 282, n. 2, r. 4; AGN/B, Caciques e Indios 30, d.60, ff. 723–748; AGN/B, Encomiendas 20, doc. 15, ff. 744–756. Romero was continually in debt, facing suits and imprisonment for shirking financial obligations: AGN/B, Juicios Civiles de Cundinamarca 21, ff. 742–854; AGN/B, Juicios Civiles de Cundinamarca 29, ff. 893–980.
10. AGI/S, Justicia 509, n. 1, f. 14r. All subsequent references to this document will be cited in parentheses in the body of the text.
11. AGN/B, Caciques e Indios 54, doc. 31, f. 533v. Emphasis mine.
12. He was also forced to ward off attention to the single physical feature that would have identified him as a morisco: circumcision, a practice that was strictly policed in the Iberian Peninsula during the course of the sixteenth century, long after Muslims were expelled and a generation or more of Catholic converts came under the tutelage of the Church (CitationVincent 1992). Romero steered clear of a physical examination by making the case that the lack of a foreskin did not prove that he had been a Muslim, just that he had been circumcised for some reason, and that such an ordeal would only cause him “notable infamia y del honor” (f. 48r).
13. His legitimate son and successor, Diego Romero de Aguilar, was a prominent encomendero (AGN/B, Notaría 3a, t. 26, ff. 542r-544r; Flórez de Ocariz II: 67). His two daughers, doña Francisca de Mendoza y Aguilar and Isabel Romero—Isabel was his illegitimate daughter—married prominent men (Flórez de Ocariz II: 67–68; AGN/B, Notaría 3a, t. 9, ff. 396r–401r). His legitimate son, Melchor Romero de Aguilar, was a doctrinal priest in Tenjo (Flórez de Ocariz II: 67; AGN/B, Curas y Obispos 28, d. 4, ff. 34r–v), while his illegitimate mestizo sons, Andrés Romero and Alonso Romero, were also priests; Andrés was named to the parish of Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, one of the largely indigenous barrios of Santafé (Flórez de Ocariz II: 67–68; AGN/B, Curas y Obispos 9, d. 143, ff. 239r–v).
14. AGI/S, Contratación 5287, n.11.
15. Don Diego de Torres, the cacique of Turmequé, whose words I cite at the beginning of this article, was accused of organizing a rebellion in the company of other caciques and mestizos (CitationRojas). Mestizos were routinely associated with rebellious sectors in the early colonial Andes (Burns “Gender and the Politics of Mestizaje”).
16. I found no other references to moriscos in the Nuevo Reino, with the exception of a 1557 document decreeing the expulsion of Pedro Hernández, a highly skilled tile-worker from Hornachos (Badajoz) and a self-confessed Muslim, whose role in the construction of the church of Tocaima was so vital to the city fathers that they asked he be permitted to continue his work on the temple despite his religious affiliation (AGN/B, Negocios Exteriores 4, ff. 1–23). Muslim and Jewish antecedents were obviously more significant in larger and wealthier colonial settings, such as Lima, where Jewish converts of Portuguese nationality were persecuted and discredited by the Inquisition in the seventeenth century (Silverblatt), as well as in the major trading port of Cartagena, where the Inquisition targeted Portuguese merchants as judaizers after the foundation of a tribunal in 1610 (CitationNavarrete 62; Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid [AHN/M], Inquisición de Cartagena de Indias, 1620, exp. 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 18; AHN/M, Inquisición Cartagena, 1621, exp. 1, 11).
17. AGN/B, Juicios Criminales 14, doc. 8, f. 434r; Juicios Criminales 107, doc. 25, f. 333r
18. AGN/B, Testamentarias de Boyacá 3, ff. 993–1005. All citations of this document will appear in parentheses in the body of the text.
19. Limitations of space do not allow me to paint a picture of lower-class mestizas, who were servants in their fathers’ households, such as the case of Juana, the daughter of a Santafé artisan, caught in an affair with a mestizo youth (AGN/B, Juicios Civiles de Cundinamarca 46, ff. 54–69).
20. See also Dana Leibsohn's commentary on this painting in <http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/analyzing/mcimages/mcimgsq5.html>
21. I thank Mercedes López for clarifying this point.
22. Graubart (“Hybrid Thinking”) and Ares (“Mestizos en hábito de indios”) both note the existence in Peru of mestizo men who assumed native costume, sometimes because they were hiding from the law, at other times because they were too poor to afford European clothing. Don Diego de Torres was accused of donning the “habito de indio”, but this characterization was used only in a metaphorical sense, to insinuate his use of native costume to officiate at idolatrous rituals (AGN/B, Encomiendas 21, ff. 404r–v); although this use of the descriptor is fascinating, I have no space to deal with it here.
23. I am thinking in particular of Ella CitationLarsen's 1929 novel, Passing, and Colson CitationWhitehead's more recent The Intuitionist.
24. We know nothing, however, about her husband, who was evidently not a member of the elite, but may have been an artisan or a Spaniard of lower social standing.