Purchasing Whiteness

Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies

Ann Twinam

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780804750936, 9780804750929
• eBook ISBN: 9780804793209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The colonization of Spanish America resulted in the mixing of Natives, Europeans, and Africans and the subsequent creation of a casta system that discriminated against them. Members of mixed races could, however, free themselves from such burdensome restrictions through the purchase of a gracias al sacar—a royal exemption that provided the privileges of Whiteness. For more than a century, the whitening gracias al sacar has fascinated historians. Even while the documents remained elusive, scholars continually mentioned the potential to acquire Whiteness as a provocative marker of the historic differences between Anglo and Latin American treatments of race. Purchasing Whiteness explores the fascinating details of 40 cases of whitening petitions, tracking thousands of pages of ensuing conversations as petitioners, royal officials, and local elites disputed not only whether the state should grant full whiteness to deserving individuals, but whether selective prejudices against the castas should cease.

Purchasing Whiteness contextualizes the history of the gracias al sacar within the broader framework of three centuries of mixed race efforts to end discrimination. It identifies those historic variables that structured the potential for mobility as Africans moved from slavery to freedom, mixed with Natives and Whites, and transformed later generations into vassals worthy of royal favor. By examining this history of pardo and mulatto mobility, the author provides striking insight into those uniquely characteristic and deeply embedded pathways through which the Hispanic world negotiated processes of inclusion and exclusion.

PART ONE

Introductions

ONE

Conclusions

A Century of Historiography

For the dispensation of the quality of Pardo . . . 500 [reales].

For the dispensation of the quality of Quinterón . . . 800 [reales].

ROYAL CÉDULA . . . of the pecuniary charges of the gracias al sacar¹

In 1912, Brazilian historian Manoel de Oliveira Lima delivered a speech at Stanford University on a controversial theme. Referring to the “ever burning question of race feeling,” he pointedly observed that “it is a sentiment which among you has reached a degree of intensity which has never been equaled among Americans of Iberian descent.”² He suggested that perhaps one reason that “scruples of blood” might not be as divisive in Latin America was that mixing was “silently solving” the “color problem.” He used as one historic example of such Hispanic “liberalism” the “famous cédulas de gracias al sacar” in which the Spanish state sold “certificates of white blood.”³

It must have taken a certain courage for Oliveira Lima to raise such a provocative subject: he was lecturing to a U.S. audience that lived in a world that institutionalized separation, prohibited mixing, and legitimized racism. Nor is there any doubt that he—as many authors who would write about gracias al sacar—fundamentally underestimated the presence of both racial consciousness and discrimination in Latin America. Still, these comments, which introduced the concept of purchasing whiteness to an English-speaking audience, would initiate a trend. Scholars would consider the option to purchase whiteness as providing insight not only to a comparative Anglo-Latin American past but also as speaking to the issues of their present. Through charged silences or pointed comments they would link the whitening gracias al sacar to contemporary events, as the United States moved from the apartheid of Oliveira Lima’s day, through the struggles of the civil rights movement, to the identity politics of today.⁴

Although the concept of purchasing whiteness has continually fascinated researchers, unanswered questions and inaccuracies riddle much of the existing historiography. This chapter explores some first “conclusions.” It traces how scholars searched for whitening documents, seizing on the gracias al sacar as a provocative marker as they explored key themes, including comparative slavery and citizenship in the Americas, the significance of caste versus class, the salience of identity, and the benefits and problematics of comparison. It also reveals how historians missed provocative clues suggesting that they needed to rethink why the whitening gracias al sacar appeared and what it meant. Even as they wrote incessantly about the purchase of whiteness, interpretations began to veer from the documentary record. Only the “reverse engineering” of known documents, the breaking of an archival code, and the systematic collection of whitening petitions have produced some first answers. It has also raised new questions.

A central goal of what follows is to focus on what Ben Vinson called the “lens of success”—to explore those variables that might combine to permit successive generations of Africans and their descendants to achieve mobility in the Americas.⁵ Those who appear in the following pages formed a unique cohort. Never should their struggles for whiteness obscure recognition of the unknown thousands who were born or died in slavery or who lived at the margins even if free. Yet, it is also evident that successful transitions from slave to free person and from vassal to citizen formed essential progressions that linked the complex histories of Africans and their descendants in the Indies.

THE INTERNET: THE NEW CHALLENGE

Any review of existing literature on the purchase of whiteness has become far more complicated, albeit more revealing, as historians enter the digital age. As this work goes to press, an internet search reveals that the exact words “gracias al sacar” appear in 39,700 monographs and 630 articles. While previously a brief mention would be unlikely to appear in an index and tend to be overlooked, now search engines relentlessly reveal each occurrence and permit a more nuanced evaluation. The new challenge is to find a methodology to contextualize such an immense historiography.

Digital searches reveal a provocative divide in scholarly writing about the whitening gracias al sacar. English-speaking, primarily U.S. authors have either implicitly or explicitly presented the purchase of whiteness as a conceptual lightening rod. The very fact of its presence exists as an immediate shorthand, a dramatic illustration of the different ways that the Anglo and Hispanic worlds have conceptualized and lived differences of race. A number have suggested that the purchase of whiteness provides insight not only to the past but also to contemporary issues of race relations in both Americas.

In contrast, scholars, whether from Spain or Latin America, do not consider the purchase of whiteness to be a particularly novel concept. While some do not ignore the comparative American focus, their primary concern is to contextualize gracias al sacar within imperial or local themes. These include conflict over social and ethnic hierarchy or the subsequent impact of the whitening controversy on independence. Venezuelan historians and historians of Venezuela have played a particular role, given that much of this debate took place in Caracas. Only recently has the gracias al sacar appeared in this literature as providing insight into race relations or identity in the Hispanic world. Tracking these diverse approaches illustrates those ways that contemporary preoccupations shaped a scholarly agenda and a century of publications.

U.S. SCHOLARS AND FIRST RESEARCH ON GRACIAS AL SACAR

Although Manoel de Oliveira Lima’s comments concerning the purchase of whiteness to a Stanford audience in 1912 were provocative, they proved mostly to be a dead end. Since he did not footnote his remarks, he did not provide any documentary trail for U.S. historians to research, nor did they evidence much interest in doing so. Confirmation of rising awareness of the whitening option became manifest in the 1930s as, with interest in Latin America increasing, U.S. historians who wrote textbooks began to refer to it, if only in passing. In his 1933 edition of Colonial Hispanic America, Charles E. Chapman initiated what would become a somewhat amusing trend: attempts to translate gracias al sacar for an English-reading audience. The problem was that the literal translation—“thanks to take”—does not convey the subtlety of the Spanish meaning.

Since Chapman did not know that gracias al sacar included numerous purchasable favors, he shaped his translation solely around the acquisition of whiteness. He rendered gracias al sacar as “royal decrees of thanks for getting out of it, i.e. out of the colored ranks into those of white men.”⁶ When John Crow wrote his Epic of Latin America in 1946, he somewhat more elegantly, although equally mistakenly, translated gracias al sacar as a “decree of thanks for getting out of . . . the colored ranks.”⁷

Since then scholars have struggled to translate gracias al sacar—some with greater and others with lesser success—by combining the concept of thanks, gracias, with that of movement, al sacar, of being taken from one state to another. Later versions have included: “concession of exemptions” (1951), “removal thanks” (1967), “thanks for the exclusion” (1978), “thanks for getting out of it” (1979), “grateful for deliverance” (1980), “permission to pass” (1983), “document of thanksgiving for being pulled up” (1989), “thanks to be taken out, removed or freed” (1996), “document of grace upon receipt” (1997), “thanks for rescuing me” (2003), “proceeding to change legal status” (2004), “conceded grace” (2007), “thank you for removing” (2008), and “thanks for taking that background out” (2008).⁸ The more elegant solution seems less to translate gracias literally as “thanks,” but rather to consider it more reflective of the medieval concept of a “leave” granted by the monarch to a deserving vassal.⁹ It then becomes a “leave to take” or, more colloquially, a “permission to take” from one condition, for example, the state of pardo-ness and to move to another such as whiteness.

Whether mentioned by Chapman or Crow in their textbooks in the 1930s and 1940s or by more recent scholars, allusions to gracias al sacar are significant less for their translations than for their proliferation. Almost every history on Spanish colonial America written for an English-language audience included a mention of the whitening option, including textbooks by Snow (1967), Davis (1968), Worcester and Schaeffer (1970), Burkholder and Johnson (1994), Keen (1996), Beezley and MacLachlan (1999), and Chasteen (2001) as well as the Cambridge History of Latin America.¹⁰ Nor were historians alone in considering the question. Anthropologists (Wauchope and Nash, 1967; Willems, 1975; Flora and Torres-Rivas, 1989b) and political scientists (Friedman, 1984) also referred to whitening.¹¹ Gracias al sacar also figured in compendiums concerning slavery (Finkelman and Miller, 1998; Heuman and Burnard, 2011), race (Levine, 1980; Appiah and Gates, 1999), and diaspora (Davies, 2008).¹² Even with so many references to whitening, serious research on the topic had stalled, for historians could not find the relevant sources. The result was that historians literally went in pursuit of these elusive documents.

A look back suggests four stages in a hunt that not only discovered whitening petitions but also tantalizing clues as to what had occurred and what it signified. First were the initial publications in 1944 and 1951—by John Tate Lanning and James F. King, respectively—of a few pages from a whitening decree. In 1962, when Richard Konetzke issued his monumental five volumes of documents on Spanish American social history, he included a few additional cases. Next were two volumes, one of analysis and another of documents, published by historian Santos Rodulfo Cortés in 1978, the first systematically to research whitening petitions, in this case, for Venezuela. The last contribution was my own, involving a methodology of reverse engineering in the Archive of the Indies (AGI) to locate gracias al sacar applications throughout the empire. Understanding how historians searched for documents, what information they had, what they lacked, and how they wandered provides insight into the changing historiography on whitening.

THE SEARCH FOR DOCUMENTS: LANNING AND KING

Even though Oliveira Lima had mentioned whitening in a lecture in 1912, and historians subsequently referred to it in textbooks, it was not until 1944 that scholars found any documentary trail leading to the gracias al sacar. In the midst of World War II, John Tate Lanning, then editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review (henceforth HAHR), decided to publish a special edition dedicated to the “Negro on the Spanish-American Mainland.” He printed a document in Spanish that dealt with the case of Joseph Ponciano de Ayarza, a mulatto student who attended but then found himself unable to graduate from the University of Santa Fe in Bogotá, given that Indies legislation reserved university degrees for whites.¹³ The sixteen-page document contained his petition to the crown, local testimony in his favor, and included the royal decree that removed his mulatto-ness, made him white, and permitted him to graduate.¹⁴

Although Lanning penned a short introduction in English to the untranslated document, he did not acknowledge that he was the author, perhaps due to the nature of the publication. After all, he was teaching at a southern university (Duke) and writing in a wartime period where U.S. troops remained segregated, as did most venues. This included universities, many of which would never have admitted a mulatto such as Joseph Ponciano as a student, much less accepted his transformation to the status of white. Given the climate of race relations in the United States in the 1940s, the whitening gracias al sacar was a challenging document.

It is important to underline the context in which Lanning found this first document on whitening, for he almost certainly discovered it by accident. Since he was researching the history of universities, he found a copy in the colonial education section of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part One. Introductions
• Part Two. Long Time
• Part Three. Whitening: Precursor Cases
• Part Four. The Whitening Gracias al Sacar: 1795–1814
• Part Five. Conclusions
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index