Costas: Spanish Conquest and Colonial Society

Following the conquest of the Aztecs, the Spanish expanded their control over surrounding territories, establishing New Spain as the richest jewel of the Spanish crown.
Nueva Galicia and the Yucatan proved difficult to subdue, but disease eventually weakened resistant native communities leading to a demographic collapse between 1550 and 1650.
Despite the decline in the indigenous population, the European population remained small.

The first generation of conquistadors received large grants of Indian labor called encomiendas.
The encomienda was a holdover from the Reconquista, where the Spanish reconquered the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors.
Encomiendas were like mini-kingdoms granted to conquistadors, who were given control over several villages.
Villages under encomienda were tributary villages, required to give tribute, including labor, to the encomendero (owner of the encomienda).
In exchange, villagers received religious instruction and guarantees of communal land.
The system aimed at Christianizing the indigenous population without offering them any true choice.
The encomienda system devolved into a form of slavery.

Eventually, resistance to the encomienda system led to the establishment of an apartheid system, segregating indigenous and European communities.
Spanish people resided in European-style cities called pueblos, where they established Spanish culture.
These Spanish villages were known as the "Republica De Los Espanoles" (Republic of the Spanish), implying they were the people with reason and intelligence.
Indigenous communities were segregated in rural regions.

The encomienda system was short-lived, lasting only one generation, as the King of Spain feared the conquistadors would become too powerful.
With the demise of the encomienda, the Spanish developed private estates in the countryside called haciendas.
Haciendas were created on land seized from devastated indigenous communities.
Indigenous people were lured to work on haciendas as peons.
A paternalistic relationship developed between indigenous peons and hacendados (hacienda owners), becoming an important social bond of the colonial period.
The hacienda system allowed elites to gain more control over indigenous people similar to the encomienda system.

The majority of indigenous people resided in their traditional villages, governed by elders called casiques (male) or casicas (female).
These villages preserved indigenous ways of life but were also exposed to European culture from nearby Spanish pueblos.
These indigenous communities were known as the "Republica De Los Indios," also referred to as "la gente sin razon" (the people without reason), implying that indigenous people lacked reason and required guidance.
Indigenous people were considered "children with beards" who needed constant instruction and paternalistic oversight.

The ejido was a grant of land to a village by the colonial authority, owned collectively by the community.
The ejido allowed indigenous villages to survive through difficult times.
Indigenous communities were shielded from the Inquisition, a search for heretics, due to advocacy from figures like Bartolomeo de las Casas.
These protections were intended to shield indigenous communities from violence, although they were not always effective.

After 1650, indigenous communities began to rebound after a sharp demographic decline in the initial century after the conquest.
This rebound made African slavery less practical in Mexico compared to other parts of Latin America like the Caribbean.
An underclass of mixed-race offspring known as mestizos grew exponentially.
Mestizo refers to individuals of mixed European and indigenous heritage and is the most significant racial categorization in modern Mexico.
Due to the gender imbalance in the Spanish colonies, with more Spanish men than women, mixed-race unions increased.
The mestizo population became the fastest-growing group in the late colonial period.

Socioeconomic rules were assigned by race and ethnicity in colonial New Spain through the casta system.
The hierarchy placed Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain) at the top, followed by criollos (Spaniards born in the New World), then mestizos, blacks and mulattoes, and finally indigenous people at the bottom.
A person's casta designation was recorded on baptismal, marriage, and inquisitional documents, as well as land titles and criminal records.
When a person's race was questioned, purity certifications or probanzas were used to verify identity.
The probanza is essentially $Olympiesa_de_Sangre$ .
Probanzas involved tracing genealogy, reviewing physical characteristics, and gathering testimony from acquaintances.

Initially, these investigations were conducted in Spain but proved to be expensive.
Poor individuals often lacked the documents and money to prove their lineage, which sometimes allowed them to maintain the fiction of their chosen identity.
People began to "pass" for another race, hiding their actual ethnicity.
Mestizos could sometimes pass for Spanish or indigenous, depending on the benefits.
The limpieza de sangre was a fluid system where documents could be falsified, testimony could be bought, and new identities could be created, allowing for some social mobility.

Native nobility retained some privileges, such as the right to wear Spanish clothes, ride horses, carry arms, and use honorific titles like don or dona.
They could intermarry with Spanish nobility without tainting it, often to provide access to their wealth.
In the 1700s, the focus shifted from lineage to skin color.
Marrying someone with lighter skin was seen as a way to "marry up" and return to the pool of purity, erasing indigenous ancestry over generations.
This intense focus on race and ethnicity led to the popularization of casta paintings.