Talk:Casta/Archive 1

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Archive 1

??

Does anybody knows the veracity of this? --Jmieres 20:41, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Mexican Indian on Indian

Since this was throughout Spanish America, don't you think we should like to something beyond Mexican Indian?

Definition

This page is not just a definition but also a discussion of the Spanish caste system in Latin America. Maybe another article is needed titled something like "Spanish caste system in Latin America'" but to be simplified to a Wiktionary entry seems like a bad idea.

--Moheroy 22:14, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Needs a fuller development of the paintings section

There should be a section discussing the paintings, which were a major art field in their day. It might even be worthy of its own article at some point.

Here are two articles that mention the paintings:

Lawikitejana 20:19, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I just saw some of the paintings in the Tesoros exhibit in Philadelphia. I was hoping this page would explain it better. But maybe I should edit it myself? *g* Some of the paintings suggested that "whiter" women were marrying "less white" men, which seemed unlikely, but did this happen?

The paintings were a recolection of all posible combinations, even if they were not common. In practice, unlike spain, where blood certificates existed, in México the catholic priest decided the caste of the children at the baptism ceremony. With a some monetary compensation, the rpiest cold assign a better caste to the children. As a result, eventually most of the populations became "mestizo" or "criollo".

At the same time, this gave the catholich church much power and wealth, and corruption. I want to put this themes in the article, but i need to look for good references first... Nanahuatzin 16:05, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

About us: Borbotones Team

Hi. We are a group of Mexican students from major degree of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. We are actually taking our course in English Advanced B and we are interested in participating in Wiki-Project Mexico.

Because of that, we decided to modify this article in order to make it better and reliable (including official sources). We hope you'll like it. If you need some help with Mexican History of Spanish writing or spelling please contact us.

Sincerely Borbotones Team.

EDGAR-ENCASTIN 04:32, 26 October 2007 (UTC) Leader of team.

TEAM PAGE:Wikipedia:School and university projects/ITESM Campus Toluca/Borbotonesteam

Your contributions were reverted. Please do not simply replace an entire article with your own version; work in your content where relevant. --Geniac 20:17, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Show combinations

I think somone should add examples of mixing. I still have no idea what a mestiza and a criollo make. Will there child be a castizo(a) or what? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.38.67.79 (talk) 00:16, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

yes, it would result in a person classified a Castizo or less than a quarter (1/4 or 0.25%) Amerindian, but can be treated like a "white" Caucasian/European... and somehow can inherit some Amerindian ethnoracial features. Other terms for various "more Criollo/less Indio" mestizos in the casta - Suco, Montubio and Tipio del Caste means lesser Amerindian blood and most likely classified a white or Spanish person. Except for terms Mestizo, Castizo or Cholo (simpler degrees of designating persons of certain Euro-Amerindian admixture), the terminology is outdated and not common in today's Latin American countries. + 71.102.11.193 (talk) 16:29, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Insulares and Mestizaje

This article needs to mention the terms "insulares" and "mestizajes" and their relations and ranks in the Spanish caste system. XXXpinoy777 (talk) 23:21, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Are you referring to people from the Philippines, XXXpinoy777? Previous editors seem to feel that this article should only deal with Spanish America. (See, March 19, 2010 edit.) I disagree; Spanish colonial culture did not exist in a vacuum and was not cut off from either the Peninsula or the Pacific possessions—quite the contrary, the Manila galleons ensured the opposite. If you have a source, use it to create a sentence or two and be sure to cite the source!TriniMuñoz (talk) 12:09, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Peninsular

The Peninsular was an important group, but the link redirect was to 'peninsula' so I removed it. Also, a proper page doesn't exist.

Cor Ferrum (talk) 22:13, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

The proper Wikilink exists in the bulleted section about two paragraphs below. As people have added their little bits here and there over the last three years (often duplicating and triplicating information), this article has become overlinked, but I will leave it be for now. TriniMuñoz (talk) 18:45, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for clearing that! Cor Ferrum (talk) 00:21, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

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Proposal: splitting off section on casta painting and creating a separate article

The section on casta painting is underdeveloped in this article. There is much more to be said, but saying it would make this article unduly long. There is a large scholarly literature on casta painting as a separate topic. Amuseclio (talk) 17:37, 7 August 2019 (UTC)Amuseclio

The word CASTA has nothing to do with "character and quality" Also your refs do not imply such things

The system of castas, or genízaros, was based on the principle that the character and quality of people varied according largely to their "birth, color, race and origin of ethnic types"

What does "character and quality" have to do with the words "race,colour,birth"? The portugueses created the word Casta to sort of the slaves they owned, the portuguese owned slaves from all different races such as Indians,africans,japanese ect, they then sorted them by age of birth, the colour of a slave was more for saleability for sex slavery which the portugueseagain where famous for, hence Casta actual orginal meaning was Race,Colour,Birth... NOT CHARACTER AND QUALITY, checked your ref and nothing implys Character and Quality.remove it92.236.96.38 (talk) 16:34, 15 October 2014 (UTC)Caplock

I don't have the original citation, but likely it referred to calidad. A person's perceived calidad could raise or lower their public perception and which racial category they were assigned or could pass for. See the discussion in Ben Vinson III: "As readily as the concepts of nación and casta were used interchangeably, so too were the designations of calidad, clase, raza, condición, and casta. Vinson, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press 2018, 57. I hope this helps. Amuseclio (talk) 19:19, 20 August 2019 (UTC)Amuseclio

The Casta System did not exist as portrayed in this article

This article is sheer fantasy. There was never "a formal racial hierarchy" in Latin America. The Casta system is a Anglo-Saxon myth. There was no legal institution of such a system. In fact, many Spanish immigrants were the servants of rich Mestizos and Mulatos in New Spain. I'll allow for a discussion before I start removing unsourced nonsense. Negin2019 (talk) 14:36, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

I have added text with scholarly citations to the fluidity and flexibility of the racial categories. It was not a system of fixed terminology in time or place, but the labels and hierarchies of casta painting have given the impression that the categories were rigid and immutable. I think removing the duplicate descriptions of racial categories would improve the article. Most terms in the short list are linked to full articles that readers can consult. Amuseclio (talk) 22:00, 7 August 2019 (UTC)Amuseclio

Removing descriptions of racial categories altogether is warranted since they are total fiction. They were never used outside of those paintings. We certainly need more detail on the works of Gonzalbo and other Latin American authors. This article suffers from Anglo-bias and distortion. Spanish language sources are absolutely necessary here.176.85.217.174 (talk) 14:42, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Call for discussion of deleted text without discussion

I do not want to engage in an editing war with multiple reverts with an unknown Wiki editor, but user 176.85.217.174 has reverted significant text without any kind of community discussion on the talk page. Since this person is an apparently unregistered Wiki editor, I cannot go to the person's talk page to discuss the person's actions, and the editor has not contacted me on mine. I agree that the notion of a fixed casta "system" has been examined by historians, and I have gone to the works of a number with citations how un-rigid the classifications were. Along with deleting text the user does not approve of, s/he also deleted images from casta paintings that show how elites conceived of persons slotted into the racial categories. These are worthwhile seeing as historical artifacts and placing them in the Wiki article does not suggest that they are true representations. Intellectual history and art history use such evidence to understand they way people (in this case elites) thought. Cultural historians have used casta paintings to understand material culture. I would like to engage in a civil community discussion here on the talk page. I am open to reworking the lengthy section on casta categories, but to have the whole section blanked is not acceptable without discussion. Amuseclio (talk) 17:38, 23 August 2019 (UTC)Amuseclio

On Espanoles

Espanoles in the caste categorization referred to Criollos. I have fixed this mistake. It did not refer to peninsulares. I have fixed this.--83.51.46.1 (talk) 18:27, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Need to explain the link between Race and purity of blood

Ultimately, the link is based on the division in Spain between Old Christians and New Christians. Those of Moorish, Jewish, Black, Indian background were lumped together not so much because of their racial background but because of their background as people who have not been Christian for various generations. This is hard to explain but is useful to disentangle the confused link between both concepts. When Spanish Americans began to become acquainted with the concept of race, the idea of purity of blood fit in well with that of race and there was a natural progression from one to the other. --Php2000 (talk) 18:19, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Differences with Spanish language version of this article

This article seems to have some substantial differences in tone with the Spanish language version of this article. It opens by saying that in the Spanish Americas it is "a now discredited 20th century theoretical framework which postulated that colonial society operated under a hierarchical race-based 'caste system'". However, the Spanish version of this article, while mentioning this in the lead, does not make an assertion that this is a discredited framework, and instead calls it out as a controversy, all of which seems to be properly cited, unlike this article. Is it proper then, to call it discredited? If not, should the lead be fixed to reflect that? If it is, what is the Spanish version missing that makes it conclusively discredited, and not just something without sufficient evidence to determine in either direction? Rdelfin (talk) 17:14, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Responding to this: I'm reviewing both the Spanish and English language version of the article and checking sourcing. I'm not convinced the Spanish version of this article is as properly cited as you suggest. In fact, beyond the lead, the bulk of the es: article has rather poor sourcing including statements taken from newspaper articles and non-historians such as Carlos López Beltrán. This implies that someone has worked on the lead but not the article itself. I see no reference to the recent historical studies on the topic of the operation of a "Caste System" in Latin America in the body of the article.

The question is the following: Is there an academic debate on whether a colonial caste system existed or is it simply an outdated or discredited theoretical framework?

Looking at the bibliography of historians who have directly tackled this question it includes: Ben Vinson (2018), Jeanne Rappaport (2014), Berta Ares (2015) and Solange Alberro and Pilar Gonzalbo (2013).

Based on current state of scholarship, evidence weighs in favor of this being a discredited framework rather than a contemporary academic controversy.

The only serious historical study in the last 30 years of academic publications which seems to give credit to the notion of a Caste System in colonial Latin America is by US historian María Elena Martínez published in 2008 (Genealogical fictions). Meanwhile, the es: version of this article doesn't even cite Genealogical Fictions at all.

Meanwhile the Spanish language article lead frames it as a "debate" but provides no evidence of a historian directly challenging the findings of Vinson, Rappaport, Ares or Alberro/Gonzalbo. As a contrary view they provide Magnus Mortimer - a now deceased Swedish hispanist who published in the 1950s; and Edward Telles - a US sociologist specialized in critical race theory and migration - a tertiary source which is not sufficient to support the existence of an "academic controversy".

Sourcing can be improved in this article but I think that based on bibliography, the framing is correct and if anything, its the es version which requires updating. I see an emerging academic consensus among specialized historians that the Caste System as framed by Aguirre Beltrán in the 40s did not exist. Naideq (talk) 22:34, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into this Naideq. Frankly I'm not really familiar with the topic beyond what I have learned in school. I just found the discrepancy. If you do get around to reviewing and sourcing these two I'd be glad to translate/move some of the changes into Spanish, so let me know if you do. Rdelfin (talk) 18:03, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi Rdelfin.I left my thoughts on Spanish language wikipedia. Best of luck. Naideq (talk) 13:23, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

A note on use of capital letters

A lot of Spanish words, particularly for nationality and ethnicity, are used in the article. In Spanish the names of countries (proper nouns) are capitalised, but nationalities, languages and ethnicities (adjectives) are not. So we have España, but español (nationality), español (language), indio, ... Easily verified with a search if anyone disagrees (search for [nacionalidad mayuscula]). Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 16:22, 26 December 2021 (UTC)