12 Race In 16th Century Mexico

Speaking of Race

In our last episode, we showed that pre-Columbian ideas about human differences weren't consistent with what we think of today as race. In this episode we try to answer the question of how race got culturally constructed after Columbus. We talk to Professor Rob Schwaller of the Department of History at the University of Kansas who tells us how notions of difference in 16th century colonial Mexico led to legal decisions by the Spanish crown that resulted in a process of racialization of difference. He describes a complex and messy process between indigenous peoples, Africans, and Spanish that played an important role in the development of scientific ideas about race. Here are some resources for this topic: Schwaller, Robert C. Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference. University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Rob’s web page at Kansas: https://history.ku.edu/robert-c-schwaller. Here’s the James Sweet article that Rob mentioned: Sweet, James H. "The Iberian roots of American racist thought." The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 143-166. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953315.