For the New World, contact with Europe meant the conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan by Hernán
Cortés and the fall of the Inca Empire to Francisco Pizarro. It also meant the deaths of millions from diseases to
which they had no immunity. Yet despite these calamities, New World culture did not disappear and indigenous
Americans remained as powerful a force as the Spanish in shaping the culture of the Americas.
Answering the Queen's Call
In response to Queen Isabella's call to convert the peoples of the Americas, waves of Catholic missionaries
flooded the New World, only to find that the people living there already had their own deeply held beliefs. As a
result, the New World cultures gradually blended their native beliefs and Catholicism to create new spiritual
traditions, images, and symbols.
One example involves the now-legendary experience of Juan Diego, an early
Indian convert to Catholicism. According to tradition, in the winter of 1531,
Diego heard a woman's voice calling him from a hillside overlooking Mexico
City. The woman had a serene countenance and was outlined by a luminescent
glow. She also had native features, spoke Nahuatl, the pre-Columbian language
of the Aztec, and looked very much the way the Aztecs had depicted Tonantzin,
their revered fertility goddess. She told Diego that she was Mary, the mother of
Jesus. This is an example of what historians call syncretism: the merging of two
or more religious traditions and ideas.
The woman that Diego encountered in the form of an indigenous goddess came
to be called "Our Lady of Guadalupe," the most important Catholic icon in the
Americas. As the centuries passed, this story served as a kind of creation story
for the Catholic Church in Mexico. But it is also a quintessentially Mestizo story, in which Catholic and native
spiritual traditions became so thoroughly fused that it is difficult to tell one where one begins and the other ends.
The appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Tepeyac, this is something of great importance. It reveals that she
existed, and, most important, among indigenous Mexicans. Think about it. Why did she appear to an Indian?
Why didn't she appear to a member of a religious order? Why did she appear to an Indian? That is something
wonderful. - Enrique Fernández
The Sistema de Castas
The Spanish tried to impose not only their religion, but also a new social and
economic order on the peoples of the New World. When the fighting was over
the almost total absence of Spanish women in America led some conquistadors
to seek unions with native women.
At first, there was no clear way to identify children born of these unions to a
Spanish and a native parent. Then the word "Mestizos," which is Spanish for
"mixed," came into use.
As late as 1570, there were only 25,000 Spanish households in the entire New
World, facing a vastly greater native population that threatened to
demographically swallow them whole. To preserve their wealth, power, and
identity, the Spanish took a page from the way they had treated Muslims and
Jews in Spain and created a caste-like system in the Americas.
The "Sistema de Castas" (Caste System) was a complex system of ethnic
classification that placed pure blooded Spaniards (“Pennisulares”, those born
on the Iberian Penninsula) from Spain in the top group. Below them were the
creoles, those of Spanish ancestry born in the New World, and "Castizos," who
had one Mestizo parent and one Spanish parent and were three quarters
Spanish. Then came the "Mestizos," who were fifty percent Spanish.
So what did these terms mean? Well, it could determine whether you could be a priest, whether you could enter
the university, whether you could enter religious guilds, whether you could enter certain religious orders,
whether you could become a nun. In other words, the terms had actual social consequences and, taken as a
whole, they were meant to create this hierarchical society based on ancestry, based on blood.
- María Elena Martínez
African Branch of the Family Tree
The "Sistema de Castas" also had to account for a
group of people whose ancestors came from an
entirely different branch of the Mestizo family tree:
the Africans. Not long after the Spanish arrived in the
New World, they began bringing African slaves with
them to work in the ports and the mines.
Free blacks from North Africa participated alongside
the Spanish in the conquest of the Americas, some as
conquistadors themselves, and Africans made vital
contributions in every sphere of life in the New World.
But as the Spanish imported more slaves, they began
associating all people of African ancestry with slavery.
Thus, the Africans, together with the so-called
"barbaric" or uncivilized Indians, were placed at the
bottom of the social system.
But Africans, too, began having children with Spaniards and Castizos, Mestizos, and indigenous Americans.
This mixing eventually made it impossible to keep track of who was who. The complexity of human interactions
ultimately doomed the Sistema de Castas.