![]() ![]() Several of the other groups of this strange racial pyramid, namely indios, mestizos, and mulattoes, made up New Spain’s large class of legally free but economically poor subjects. ![]() Criollos also often served as lower-level government officials. 4 Criollos, while sometimes poor, often made decent, if not amazing, livings for themselves as traders or owners of mines, haciendas, and ranches. The peninsulares were the only group allowed to hold high-ranking positions in the government, Catholic church, and the army – the theory being they felt greater allegiance to the crown. The peninsulares sat at the top of this new social pyramid, followed by their Spanish cousins born in the New World. The most well-known of these racial categories are españoles peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain), españoles criollos (white Spaniards born in the Americas), indios (Native Americans), mestizos (people with a Spanish father and Native mother), negros (Africans), and mulattoes (a person with both European and African ancestry). The Categories in the Casta SystemĪt its simplest, the casta system categorized four races at its most complex, it categorized over 40. Race determined your occupation, how much money you made, how much you paid in taxes, who you could marry, and whether or not you were legally free. And in New Spain, whichever one of these races you belonged to by and large determined just how much you could accomplish in life. Each of the squares represented a different race within the Spanish Empire. This image illustrates the extremity of the casta system. 3 The casta system organized society into various levels, much as the Aztec caste system had, but race formed the basis of each level.Īn 18th century painting detailing 16 different categories in the casta system. The casta system resulted from the Spanish use of the Aztec caste system mixed with their own notion of “purity of blood,” which they used back in Iberia to marginalize people of Jewish and Moorish descent. 1 Rather than reinvent the imperial wheel, the Spanish sought to use this caste system and slot themselves in at the top. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, the Aztecs had organized their society into a rigid caste system that loosely reflected that of Late Medieval European societies: nobles sat at the top, while indentured servants, serfs, and slaves made up the lowest classes. In order to cement their place as the new ruling class, the Spaniards began implementing policies meant to distinguish them from native Mesoamericans, and, later, imported African slaves. Indeed, after eight decades of colonization, the Spanish would only make up 10% of New Spain’s population. Despite their military victories over Montezuma’s troops, and the rampant diseases that ran through indigenous towns, the Spanish remained vastly outnumbered by native Mesoamericans. After taking control of Tenonchtitlan, the Aztec capital, and turning it into Mexico city, the Spanish faced the problem of cementing their control over this vast new territory. Hernan Cortes, his band of merry war criminals, and their Mesoamerican allies completed the conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521. ![]()
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