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.
General
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