How Did African Americans Enforce The Casta

The social conditions of colonial Latin America were that of intense social stratification, much like those of colonial India later on, except in Latin America the casta system (the precursor term to the Indian caste a.k.a Varna system) was imposed upon the people instead of already being part of their culture and society, as was the case for Vedic cultures. The people of Latin America were categorized in terms of racial admixture of the three races that could be encountered in these Spanish colonies: Africans, European Spanish, and the Natives. The Natives existed in the colonies long before Columbus and his peers discovered, explored, and claimed them. The Spanish arrived to impose Spanish rule and oversee resource production and distribution. The African peoples were brought in after it was determined that the indigenous population was unfit for large-scale slave labor. As these peoples mixed, so did their cultures. Spanish who refrained from mixing, or who could claim majority Spanish ancestry, had reason to enforce the casta system, since they sat at the top of …show more content…
The casta paintings largely depict the “optimal” jobs for each denomination, including supposed inherent skills and qualities. As such, the more your place in the system leaned toward a majority African ethnicity, the more the labor became simple and physical, to the point that several denominations were referenced as “slow”, “lazy”, and “thieves and pickpockets”. Further, the preconceptions that the ruling class held about other classes stifled upward mobility, even so for their compatriots, simply on the basis of not being born in “the motherland”. The role slavery played in colonial South America was that of an engine that drove the entire Spanish-colonial economy, and it could be reasonably assumed that it even drove Spanish economy as a