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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers (53th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - March 2006 |
VI
Like its capital, New Spain was a potpourri of peoples. With its disparate cultures, its peculiar Catholicism, and its isolation from Europe, it was hardly just a reincarnation of Western civilization. Racially, it was, by all accounts, “one of the most diverse and complicated societies the world had yet seen.”
True, the Spaniards settle New Spain, but they were always a minority. In 1570, for instance, there were merely seven thousand Spaniards alongside of three and a half million Indians. In Yucatán, moreover, Indians made up 90 percent of the population until the early eighteenth century, a statistic probably duplicated by Oaxaca and Chiapas. During three centuries of colonial rule, perhaps no more than three hundred thousand Spaniards arrived in New Spain.
From the days of Hernán Cortés, Spaniards were the elite. Above all, they claimed limpieza de sangre, the mythical purity of blood so venerated by Spaniards of the Reconquista. Color of skin was one of their major preoccupations. Writing in 1570, to illustrate, Juan López de Velasco pontificated in his Geografía y descripción de las Indias that Spanish Americans were darker in color than Europeans; ultimately, he warned, they would be “indistinguishable from Indians,” even though they avoided cohabitation with them. Ironically, hidalgos settle rarely in New Spain. Most of the conquistadores were cobblers, masons, seamen, carpenters, or soldiers, some barely literate. Immigrants of a different sort followed them. In the eyes of the sons of the conquistadores, they were gachupines, a pejorative term, or peninsulares. High royal officials and church prelates, gachupines to the core, were generally men of learning, lawyers, and professionals. They had little good to say about the rough-hewn colonist and, with this opinion, gave birth to the clash between criollos, Spaniards born in the New World, and peninsulares. Labeled late-comers by the criollos, the peninsulares monopolized quickly the best jobs in government, the church and commerce. They were “kings of the hill.” When they married a criollo woman, no matter how wealthy her family, the peninsular, simply by being born in Spain, bestowed social distinction upon her.
Not all Spaniards prospered in New Spain. Self-proclaimed hidalgos were numerous; most, however, had neither fortune nor social credentials. But as hidalgos they held manual labor in low esteem, refusing to learn a trade or some other useful occupation. Scorning hard work, they became vagabonds, roaming the byways of New Spain, “loafers, ne’er-do-wells, pickpockets and the like on the streets and squares of the larger towns and cities.” These pícaros, as they were called, supported themselves by preying on Indians and poor mestizos. They had a knack for reporting to Spanish officials “unused lands” of Indian pueblos, in this way earning a fee for their endeavors. The “vacant” lands, of course, were sold to Spaniards.
A step down from the gachupines were the criollos, at the start sons and daughters of conquistadores. Whereas the early Spaniards arrived mostly alone, some eventually brought wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters who shared the rigors of colonial settlement and sired offspring of Spanish descent. The criollo held an ambiguous place in the social scale. Fair of skin, he could not be lumped with Indians and the castas, the mestizos and mulattoes. Law, medicine, and theology were open to him. As a lawyer or simply as a man of means, he could hold office in the church or the bureaucracy. During the age of silver, criollos ruled the secular clergy; of the orders, only the Jesuits were predominantly Spaniards. Two criollos became archbishops, and others were bishops of Mexico, Puebla, Michoacán, Guadalajara, and, more frequently, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán, and Nueva Vizcaya. They sat on the ayuntamientos. Some were hacendados, mineowners, or cattlemen. Socially, their status took a turn for the better during the lean years of the seventeenth century when the crown, short of cash, began selling jobs in the bureaucracy and the clergy to wealthy criollos, who sent their sons abroad for schooling, married their daughters to Spaniards, and dwelt in splendid homes staffed by servants. Obviously, not all criollos reached the top; some were out and out failures. Thomas gage thought of them as a particular obnoxious and parasitic lot.
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City of Puebla with the volcanoes in the back
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Municipal Palace (Puebla)
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In the next issue we’ll continue with Chapter IV of this fascinating book: A NEW SPAIN (Miracles of Silver).
Prof. Germán Estrada
E-mail: estradanav@yahoo.com
Source: From the book Triumphs and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization. (W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London).
Prof. Germán Estrada is the author of the best selling book, México Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books, Books as well as directly from his website. |
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