Essay

• Describe and analyze the structures of class and caste, and the real or supposed place of each ethnic group within that structure.
The Americas, during the colonial period, became a place ofdifferent racial and ethnic population. This diversity was the result of blacks, Indians and whites mixing with one another; and as a result of these mixtures, the term castas or castes were born. Therewere about 16 ethnic combinations during the colonial period; some of the names of those castes were seen as good, like the mestizos, and some of them were derogative like the black-return-backwards. Ingeneral the term caste was pejorative, meaning that those people were many of the times illegitimate, because of the mixture of different races and because many of the times one or both parents werealready married (1).
The castes that were the result from a Spaniard parent (usually male) were somehow more important than the ones that didn’t involve Spaniards; some castes experienceddiscrimination while others didn’t (2). For example one of the privileged castes were the Mestizos, who were the result of the mixture of a Spaniard and an Indian, they were usually wealthy and enjoyed someprivileges, but later the term mestizo became associated with illegitimacy (3).
Class and caste were much related in the colonial period, and the classification of people in such stratums depended ontheir racial characteristics, their socio-cultural status and sometimes on their genetic inheritance (4). For example, the result of mixing blacks and Indians were usually in the lower social classes andthe mixture of Spaniards and either Indians or blacks, as I said before, sometimes were privileged. Spaniards were above every other ethnic or racial group, next were the creoles, the descendantsfrom full blooded Spaniards who were born in the Americas. Mestizos, mulattos and zambos were next and the Indians followed them; at the bottom of the social stratification were the blacks, who were...