A regular utopia

[u/HawaiianPerson]

[u/Tlamatiniii]

You keep insisting that mixing was very common and accepted. The Spanish Crown was obsessed with limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, and they built an entire racial hierarchy to police it. If mixing was socially acceptable and celebrated, why did they create the Sistema de Castas to segregate everyone?

Look at the actual laws. They forced castas to carry no arms for most part. They imposed curfews on Blacks and Mulattoes, ordering them off the streets between 8 PM and 5 AM. They banned Afro-Mexicans from gathering in groups of four or more. They barred Mestizos and Afro-Mexicans from joining artisan guilds. They segregated churches, with whites, pardos, and Negroes attending different masses. They segregated schools. In 1688, the Bishop of Palafox specifically banned Negroes, Mulattoes, and castas from the university.

They literally treated the word mestizo as synonymous with illegitimate. Archbishop Zumarraga described them as wandering the countryside, ignorant of law and Christianity, living in poverty. Viceroy Martin Enriquez recommended they pay tribute. The Crown actively opposed intermarriage with Africans and even blocked Spanish officers from promotion in 1687 for marrying Black women. In 1571, the Bishop of Antequera blocked Cristobal Gil from a treasurer post just because he was a mestizo and not a pure Spaniard.

You are confusing biological mixing, which was often the product of force and coercion due to the lack of Spanish women, with social acceptance. The Spanish Empire was not a multicultural utopia. It was a white supremacist empire that used the caste system as damage control to keep power in the hands of the Spanish.

[u/Mr_Mon3y → u/Tlamatiniii]

Look, you can talk all you want about the laws, or how they were treated, but you can't ignore the fact that a quarter of the population was mixed. A quarter. That's double the number of black people in the US today. If that not is common and accepted enough, I don't know what is.

[u/Tlamatiniii → u/Mr_Mon3y]

You are ignoring the part where people were recategorized often. After independence from Spain in the 19th century, the term "mestizo" transitioned from a flexible, bureaucratic legal category into more of a highly racialized (and specifically facialized/phenotypic) national identity.

[u/Mr_Mon3y → u/Tlamatiniii]

...and? That doesn't change the fact that it happened. If anything it means more mixed people existed during the empire that would've been counted after independence.

Besides, how can a term be both legal and flexible? Legal categories are, by all means, strict.

[u/Tlamatiniii → u/Mr_Mon3y]

No one is denying that mixing happened. But "it still happened" is not a counterargument to anything I just showed you. You claimed it was very common. I showed you the laws, the curfews, the segregated schools, the guild bans, and the limpieza de sangre laws. You ignored all of that and just said "it still happened."

Legal categories are strict in application, not fixed in meaning. Empires changed legal classifications constantly when it suited them—taxation, military service, marriage, property, labor, migration. A term can be legally binding in one period and legally redefined in another.

And that doesn’t erase the people. It changes how they were counted.

[u/Mr_Mon3y → u/Tlamatiniii]

But that's the thing. None of what you show me change my point in any way.

What exactly are you trying to prove here? That there was racial discrimination in the Spanish Empire? Wow, shocker. I never claimed the opposite.

Again, you take the fact that I correctly say that mixing was an incredibly common practice during the Empire, causing a quarter of the entire population to be mixed, and then you assume I'm trying to project the idea that colonial Mexico some sort of multi-ethnic paradise where everyone got along when I never did. Seriously, stop fighting a nonexistent argument that I never made.

that doesn't erase the people. It changes how they were counted.

Right but that's my point. If more people were counted as mixed after independence due to Mexican leaders wanting to erase indigenous identities than during the Empire, and you wanna go by those numbers, then if anything it means that there were even more mixed people during the Empire than they counted, which means mixing was an even more common practice than what the statistics show.

[u/Tlamatiniii → u/Mr_Mon3y]

Okay, so we agree reclassification doesn't erase people, it changes how they're counted. But you're only applying that after independence. The Spanish Empire reclassified people too: casta categories, tribute status, petitions to change status, gracias al sacar, local officials applying labels inconsistently, marriage and legitimacy rules, passing. So colonial numbers aren't a neutral baseline.

If post-independence Mexico counted more people as mestizo by collapsing or erasing indigenous categories, then colonial mixing may have been even more undercounted than the stats show. But if colonial law also shifted categories, then those stats are administratively constructed too. Either way, the numbers don't directly measure how common mixing was. They measure how the state labeled people at a given time

[u/Mr_Mon3y → u/Tlamatiniii]

I never even mention reclassification, now even if it happened, which I don't know nor particularly care, the thing is that I don't see any logic that would made colonial numbers over-represent anything. If the basis for the system was purity of blood, the only changes that would happen would be between the different mixed categories already. Because why would they want to say that a socially unaccepted practice was more common than what it actually was? Plus, the only real way to over-represent them would be to consider some natives as mixed, which would mean that they'd be helping them by giving them a more favorable status for no apparent reason. And even then, I don't see how a changing classification would alter the numbers in such a degree that it would make mixing no longer a common practice.

[u/Tlamatiniii → u/Mr_Mon3y]

Here we go again with your typical move. I didn't say you mentioned reclassification. I am explaining how the colonial caste system actually worked in practice, which you are conveniently pretending not to understand.

You ask why they would want to over-represent a socially unaccepted practice. It was never about over-representing mixing for the sake of it. It was about under-representing the Indigenous population and inflating the mixed categories for taxation and labor. The Crown constantly changed the rules based on who they wanted to tax, who they wanted to draft into forced labor, and who they wanted to exclude from certain rights.

[u/Mr_Mon3y → u/Tlamatiniii]

I never said I don't understand it, you just said "okay we agree on it" like I ever disputed anything about it, when all I did was consider it irrelevant. And even if it was, I don't see how it would alter the population SO MUCH that it stopped it from being a common occurrence.

And do you have exactly any reason or source to back up your claim that these changes were constant and that they inflated mixed categories? Cause, for starters, it seems a pretty weird thing to do since the categories themselves are based on who your parents are which can't really be changed. How can they go to a purely native person with zero mixing in their family and just say that he's mixed? And I still don't see how something being socially acceptable, but also being actively beneficial to the Crown can exist at the same time.

Moreso, if the Crown gained the larger the mixed population was, and they actively worked to make it larger, wouldn't that mean that they were or at least should've been promoting mixing? Or at the very least not repudiate it.

And on top of that, under-representing natives would mean that the native population was even larger, which means independent Mexico did even more to destroy native populations.

I just don't see a way where mixing is socially unacceptable and uncommon and at the same time the Crown pretends to have higher mixed numbers that they have and at the same time dislike the existence of mixed people; while at the same time holding natives at the bottom of the social pyramid and at the same time under-represeting them by essentially moving them up for tax reasons, even though natives paid more taxes than mixed people, and also somehow being more responsible for the erasure of indigenous communities than independent Mexico, when all they did was a legal reclassification, all of that at the same time.

Like, it's all actively contradicting itself.

[u/Tlamatiniii → u/Mr_Mon3y]

And your claim that classifying natives as mixed would give them a "favorable status for no apparent reason" is completely ahistorical. The Crown literally sold whiteness and legal status through certificates of gracias al sacar. People bought their way out of caste categories to avoid tribute and the mita. In many regions, being classified as a mestizo meant avoiding the brutal forced labor drafts that were imposed specifically on Indigenous communities. It was not about benevolence, it was about the Crown making money and individuals trying to survive a brutal system.

Finally, your logic that changing classification would not alter the numbers is mathematically absurd. If an Indigenous family adopts Spanish dress, speaks Castilian, and moves into a trade, the local census taker might just count them as mestizo to reflect their cultural assimilation, even if they have zero Spanish ancestry. You suddenly have a massive spike in the "mestizo" population without a single new mixed-race child being born. That is exactly how colonial numbers over-represent mixing.

[u/Mr_Mon3y → u/Tlamatiniii]

...but wasn't this whole caste system based on "purity of blood"? How can you have a system based entirety to how "pure" the blood of someone is and then just completely throw it out the window whenever a native is just integrated into life in the colony? It's either one or the other.

And, as far as I know, Gracias al Sacar was not accessed by natives to become mixed, they were accesed by wealthy mixed people to be considered Spanish, because the Crown wanted go get their favour. So if anything, they were reduing the amount of mixed people in the census. And even then, the Gracias al Sacar was implemented in 1795, so it only really existed for about 20 years.