Mestizo

Caste System

Caste categories began to take form in New Spain during the mid-16th century and were officially institutionalized in the 17th century. As Spain's new colonies were settled, a system of two republics was established—the Republic of Indians and the Republic of Spaniards—granting different rights and statuses to people based on lineage. This separation had roots in 15th-century Iberia, where people understood themselves and their relationship to the polity based on language, clan, religion, and purity of blood. In New Spain, both Spanish and Indians made claims to blood purity and lineage in order to claim status as elites within their separate republics.

The separation of Indians and Spanish did not prevent people from miscegenation and various other relationships. With the importation of African slaves, increased miscegenation, and the contestation of elite titles, the lines between Africans, Indians, and Spanish were diminished, threatening the internal stability of the colonies.

In response, the Spanish Crown imposed a caste system with five initial categories: Spanish, Indian, black, mulatto, and mestizo. This naming and categorizing of differences was intended to assuage elite anxieties about the profusion of difference and impose social order. Rights and privileges became based on one's caste. Mestizos had fewer rights than the Spanish but more than Indians and Afro-descendants.

Martín Cortés, the illegitimate child of the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and his Nahua interpreter, Malintzin (more commonly known as La Malinche), is symbolically considered to be the first mestizo of the New World. By the end of the colonial period, mestizos represented the majority in most Latin American countries and gained greater political and economic power in the years following independence from Spain.

Mexican Nationalism

Prior to the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), Mexico was a regionally and culturally fragmented country. Although the Mexican state had gained power during the years under Porfirio Díaz's rule (1876–1910), a Mexican nation, with a unifying identity and traditions, had not formed. Post-revolutionary governments, with the assistance of Mexican intellectuals such as José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, incorporated a mestizo identity as the basis of a new national identity. In fact, Article Two of the 1917 Constitution recognized Mexico as a multicultural state, of which mestizos were the majority.

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