" 'Race' and 'Class' in the Spanish Colonies of America: A Dinamic Social Perception"

ORQUERA, YOLANDA FABIOLA DEL VALLE

Rereading the Black Legend. The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Rennaisance Empires"

The University of Chicago Press

Lugar: Chicago, USA; Año: 2007; p. 167 - 187

Inspired on Raymond William’s model of changes in society, and based on my study of the formation of memories in the Indies during the early colonial times, I analyze the relationship between race and class from the XVI to the XIX centuries. The chapter is organized in four parts: the first (XVI century) describes the formation of a system of racial difference between Spanish and Indigenous people. Then, the second half of the XVII century is characterized as a period when the racial condition increases its explanatory power instead of the socioeconomic factor, as an effect of the external domination. The third period (most of the XVIII century), is defined by the violent emergence of an indigenous system of identification in the Andean region, through the Tupac Amaru’s rebellion. The forth period (XIX century) witnesses the formation of new systems of differentiation and the emergence of two forms of relationship with the native cultures: in some cases the Creole elites utilize Indigenous memories to establish their difference with the Spanish rulers on the basis of legitimacy, and in other cases these elites openly reject any Indigenous form of knowledge, conceived as “barbarian”.I sustain that the racial criterion seems to be the most effective way to keep alive the ability to perceive social injustices in colonial systems. Since the XVII century the dominated people conceived race as a social and economic condition (for example, Guaman Poma de Ayala describes the indigenous subjects as “poor”). At the same time, the system of pure socio-economic differentiation apparently was not able to generate a combatant identity based on the social strata. This will only crystallize in the XX century, from the anarchists immigrants’ perspectives in the Rio de la Plata’s region to Argueda’s and Mariategui’s Marxist reformulation of the Andean systems of identification.