page_title: Mestizos in Mexico
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mestizos in Mexico / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Painting of mestizos at the end of the 18th century or beginning of 19th century. Unknown author, public domain. The legend reads "1. De español é india produce mestizo / español 1. india 2. mestizo 3." — "1. A male Spaniard and a female Amerindian produces a Mestizo offspring / Spaniard&#160;1. Amerindian&#160;2. Mestizo&#160;3." Español: Representación de los mestizos a finales del siglo XVIII o principios del siglo XIX. Autor desconocido, dominio público. "1. De español é india produce mestizo / español 1. india 2. mestizo 3."
context_page_description: In Mexico, the term Mestizo is used to refer to an ethnic group that can be defined by different criteria, namely a cultural criterion or a more strict biological criterion. Because of this, estimates of the number of Mestizos in Mexico do vary.
  The meaning of the word Mestizo has changed over time. The word was originally used in the colonial era to refer to individuals who were of half Spanish and half Amerindian ancestry and it was one of the many extant castes used to classify individuals. While the caste system and racial classifications were officially abandoned once Mexico achieved its independence, the label mestizo was still used in academic circles: now to refer to all the people who were mixed race. It was in those academic circles that the "Mestizaje" or "Cosmic Race" ideology was created, the ideology asserted that Mestizos are the result of the mixing of all the races and that all of Mexico's population must become Mestizo so Mexico can finally achieve prosperity.
context_section_description: The exact date on which the term Mestizo and the caste system as a whole were introduced to Mexico is not known, however, the earliest surviving records that categorized people by different "qualities" (as castes were known in early colonial Mexico) are church birth and marriage records from the late 18th century. Back then there was an extensive caste system which assigned a different caste name for each possible racial combination, thus unlike definitions of "Mestizo" that would appear later, in these records "Mestizo" referred strictly to people who were of half Spanish and half indigenous ancestry. The same system is present in the first ever national population census of New Spain made in 1793, on which besides "Mestizo" the classification "castizo", "pardo", "mulatto", "zambo" etc. are present and are referred as a whole as "castes". After independence the caste system and racial censuses were legally abandoned which led to academics who reviewed and republished the census figures to refer to the "castes" collective simply as "Mestizos". 
  Recently, a number of historians have explicitly questioned the actual existence of this phenomenon, considering it a fabrication of Historians starting from the 1940s. Pilar Gonzalbo, in her study "The trap of the Caste", discards, on the basis of a careful revision of sources, the idea of the existence of a Caste society in New Spain, understood as a "social organization based on the race and supported by coercive power». Joanne Rappaport, in his book on New Granada, rejects the caste system as an interpretative framework for that time, discussing both the legitimacy of a model valid for the entire colonial world and the usual association between "caste" and " race ". In that same sense, the contribution of Berta Ares on the Peruvian case - the other great American viceroyalty - is going to review the term "Caste", its uses and possible meanings, returning to resume the sources, from employment in the peninsula to the Peruvian case and from the s. XVI to the s. XVIII. He can thus demonstrate his scanty use on the part of the virreinal authorities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which would put into question such a period as the configuration and completeness of the "system". In the eighteenth century, its use would continue to be scarce and would normally appear in the plural, characterized by an ambiguity about who they were considered or not as caste: the word did not refer exclusively to the sectors of the population of mixed descent, but also to Spaniards and Indians, and appeared in addition to many other terms (commoners, nations, classes etc.)
  As a whole, these recent contributions, which question the existence of a Caste system and review the use of Castes(s) and other terms in the sources, open new perspectives on the operability of these concepts as social practices in the colonial world. Discarding, or at least not assuming, the idea of the existence of a stable and coherent system, allows us to avoid getting stuck in an epistemological framework that limits and biases our interpretation, as indicated by the use of Gonzalbo's "trap" and explicit Rappaport in its conclusion.Berta Ares tells us to ask ourselves, then, whether "a society of caste existed" really or if we would be rather in the face of a construct of the historians of the 20th century. From that question my contribution is born, which also retakes a track left by Pilar Gonzalbo when he states: "In the twentieth century, the prestige of authors such as Angel Rosenblat and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, who unreservedly admitted the concept of society of caste, has determined the perpetuation of a myth of social stratification based on race».
  The aforementioned, new definition of “Mestizo” would be the one used in the 1921 census (the second nationwide census that included a comprehensive racial classification in Mexico‘s history). Made right after the consummation of the Mexican revolution, the social context on which this census was made makes it particularly unique, as the government of the tim
caption: An 18th-century casta painting show an indigenous woman with her Spanish husband and their Mestizo child.
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