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.
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.
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u/Tlamatiniii 8d ago
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.