This study uses the participation of free colored men, whether
mulatos, pardos, or morenos (i.e., Afro-Spaniards, Afro-Indians, or
"pure blacks"), in New Spain's militias as a prism for examining
race relations, racial identity, racial categorization, and issues
of social mobility for racially stigmatized groups in colonial
Mexico. By 1793, nearly 10 percent of New Spain's population was
made up of people who could trace some African ancestry-people
subject to more legal disabilities and social discrimination than
mestizos, who in turn fell below white creoles, who in turn fell
below the Spanish-born, in the stratified and caste-like society of
colonial Spanish America. The originality of this study lies in
approaching race via a single, important institution, the military,
rather than via abstractions or examples taken from particular
regions or single runs of legal documents. By exploring the lives
of tens of thousands of part-time and full-time free colored
soldiers, who served the colony as volunteers or conscripts, and by
adopting a multi-regional approach, the author is able not only to
show how military institutions evolved with reference to race and
vice versa, but to do so in a manner that reveals discontinuities
and regional differences as well as historical trends. He also is
able to examine black lives beyond the institution of slavery and
to achieve a more nuanced impression of the meaning of freedom in
colonial times. From the 1550s on, free colored forces figured
prominently in the colony's military forces, and units of free
colored soldiers evolved with increasing autonomy in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author concludes,
however, that the Bourbon reforms of the 1760s-which clearly
expanded the military establishment and the role of Spanish
soldiers born in the New World-came at the expense of free colored
companies, which experienced a reduction in both numbers and
institutional privileges.
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