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MEXICO MAGICO
TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY... A history of the Mexican people |
CHAPTER IV, The Forefathers (55th part continues...)
By Prof. German Estrada - April 2006 |
Seldom did Spaniards marry their Indian concubines. Some who did had wives in Spain; they were, in the eyes of Western jurisprudence, bigamist. Many conquistadores and early colonists, moreover, never married or lived apart from their Spanish wives, whom they had left at home. Some married mestizos, if they were pretty, light of skin and “Spanish looking,” and, above all, of wealthy families. Marriage, it was asserted, bestowed stability on the colony. If encomenderos failed to marry within three years, for example, they lost their Indians; so some took their Indian mistresses for wives, not a few of them daughters of the old Aztec nobility. Eventually, Spaniards brought their wives and other Spanish women, usually relatives. These women, plus the growing number of light-skinned mestizos, dubbed “Spanish girls,” some fairer than Spaniards from Castilla, put a stop to marriages between Spaniards and Indian women. Henceforth, Spanish and criollo men married mestizos or, more likely, simply went to bed with them. For their part, mestizos, more and more, slept with each other and married, producing second, third, fourth, and so on generations of mestizos. Before long, miscegenation made highly improbable claims to “purity” of blood.
Mestizos shared the poverty of Indian and other castes. A few made it to the top, especially if fair of skin or the child of a Spanish father who legitimized them and sent them to school. Most mestizos had limited social mobility. Still, they were better off than the Indian and, ultimately, the castas of black ancestry. In mining towns, obrajes, haciendas, and the cities, they made up the core of the work force. Urbanization multiplied their numbers. Only in the South, especially in Yucatán, Puebla, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, did Indians made up the majority of the population, although rural New Spain, generally, remained heavily Indian. Numerically, as the years took their toll of the Indian, mestizos, more dark than fair skin, became the majority in the north, in the Bajío, and in the cities of the west and central plateau. They ent into the trades and crafts, usually as journeymen, and bore arms, an honored profession in New Spain; soldiering was a hallmark of the mestizo macho, the he-man of society. It was the mestizo soldier, both as officer and as enlisted man, who staffed the presidios, from California to Texas.
Compared with the life of most Spaniards, that of the Indian meant poverty and hardship. During the colonial centuries, Indians, as in pre-Columbian days, neither slept in beds or hammocks nor ate from tables or chairs. They used mats, sat on the floor, and lived in huts lacking windows or doors. Indian came to signify poor, above all rural poor. Whatever Bartolomé de las Casas, Vasco de Quiroga, and Motolinía may have preached, the Indian, in the eyes of the Spaniards, was inferior. When he did not do their bidding, they labeled him lazy, untrustworthy, and drunkard, a man prone to vice. Indians were not gente de razón, people with the ability to think. The gente decente, another way of saying it, were Spaniards and criollos and, perhaps, mestizos.
When they lived in the barrios of the cities, on big plantations, or on haciendas, Indians were integrated into Spanish society –“espanolized,” that is---arrogating for themselves the ways of their mestizo, African, and mulatto neighbors. They lost their language, learned Spanish, wore European dress, slept in simple beds, and ate rice, wheat bread (when they could afford it) as well as tortillas, and, once in a while, meat, the food of the Spaniards. If inhabitants of barrios, they quenched their thirst at squalid pulquerías. After a generation or two, they ceased being Indian, becoming just poor, dark-skinned residents of the cities or haciendas. The lost of their land to Spaniards or criollos drew more and more Indians to the cities and towns.
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Palenque, Chiapas. The Palace complex
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Cathedral in the city of Chihuahua (c1724-1826)
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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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