towards an eighteenth-century transatlantic critical race theory

Towards an Eighteenth-Century TransatlanticCritical Race Theory*

Ruth HillUniversity of Virginia

Abstract

A critical race theory that examines Anglo and Hispanic contexts, and stretchesfrom Western Europe to the Americas, remains a desideratum. However, by teachingand studying Anglo critical race theory alongside Hispanic critical race theory,critical race theorists of colonial and postcolonial situations would find their ownassumptions and preconceptions challenged, and come to recognize differencesamong those situations. Spanish-English dictionaries published before the nineteenthcentury provided a jumping-off point for scholars and students interested in thepre-history of race. John Stevens’ New Spanish and English Dictionary (1706) andPedro Pineda’s largely derivative New Dictionary, Spanish and English (1740) aresignal works that offer insights into the caste system in 18th-century Spanish America.How the taxonomy of caste developed in Spain and Spanish America and how itwas disseminated are questions that are rarely posed. Bilingual dictionaries no lessthan natural history and related discourses (alchemy, books of secrets, husbandry)will perhaps suggest some answers and at the same time encourage critical racetheorists to study social hierarchy from a transatlantic perspective.

In the past five years or so, positions for specialists in critical race theory orcritical race studies have multiplied in American Studies, Latino Studies,Women’s Studies, Hispanic Studies, Latin American Studies, and Englishand Comparative Literature. Search committees have not been not searchingfor legal historians, of course, though the term “critical race theory” wasfirst coined in critical legal studies (cls) during the mid-80s. This “migration”of critical race theory and critical race studies (the first emphasizing conceptsand the generation of models; the second focussing primarily on praxis, e.g.,representations of blackness in Cervantes or Shakespeare) has not goneunnoticed by critical race theorists at law schools. Given that much of theirwork is rooted in anthropology, sociology, women’s studies, and so on, itis best to view the relationship between critical race theorists at law schoolsand in the humanities, as the law professors do, as one of exchange.1

In the humanities at least, critical race theorists of Iberian andIbero-American situations have not been fond of diachronic conceptualanalysis: the best-known general guides focus on the 19th and 20th centuries.2

In addition to this celebration of the modern and postmodern, there is

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another problem in 18th-century critical race theory that is common toboth Anglo and Hispanic varieties: its parochial, decidedly non-transatlanticfocus.

My own engagement with transatlantic studies dates back to 1991, whenI was engaged in writing what would become a two-volume dissertationon Spain and Spanish America that emphasized the influence of rationalismand empiricism on Spanish and Spanish-American literatures and cultures,and on the New World historiography authored by the French and Italians.I thereafter became increasingly focussed on the exile of Spain and its NewWorld dominions from modernity, on ethnic and epistemological grounds,that stretches from the 17th-century writings of Cartesians to 20th-centurycritical histories of the renaissance, baroque and Enlightenment. Sweepingaway that ideological residue, I believed then, would compel scholars todistinguish between Eurocentric and Gallocentric – to collate that Spaniardswere ridiculed as irrational Arabs and Jews by the French in the 17th and18th centuries and are now portrayed as white European rationalists bypostmodern cultural historians – and to start thinking about themethodological significance of transatlantic webs. I exemplified myreconceptualization of modernity by demonstrating the accomodation ofrationalism and empiricism within early 18th-century Spanish andSpanish-American cultural institutions and situations; the influence of the16th-century natural historian José de Acosta on Sir Francis Bacon; theinfluence of Sir Francis Bacon (and Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes)on the late 17th-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; and soon.3

Since that time, signal works by Jorge Cañizares Esguerra and RalphBauer,4 the latter very active in both hemispheric studies and transatlanticstudies, have shown conclusively that such endeavors are both worth doingand of great interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines. However,transatlantic studies has yet to engage in a sustained conceptual analysis ofrace in the 18th century.5

The causes of this current state of critical affairs go back centuries and Icannot review them here. The consequences are both more present andfar-reaching: few, if any, critical race theory courses are team-taught orcross-listed;Anglo critical race theory textbooks at most include a handfulof essays written by Hispanists; and Hispanic critical race theory guides eitherignore Anglo contexts or reduce Hispanic critical race theory to Latino (i.e.North American) critical race theory. It appears that we cannot criticallytalk to one another about a burgeoning critical discipline and a subject thatis increasingly important to students, professors, and administrators alike:race.

When I give a talk to Hispanists, for example, I prefer to sum up thearguments made by Banton or Wheeler without mentioning their namesor works because they (and Malik and Hannaford and a host of other scholarswho have written in English on race before the 19th century) are virtually

54 . Towards an Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Critical Race Theory

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unknown to Hispanists. Likewise, I cannot be certain that an audience ofEnglish critical race theorists will have come across the touchstones of acritical race theorist in Hispanic Studies: Mörner, Cope, Cornejo Polar,Gruzinski, and others. In either scenario, the convenient shorthand thatallows us to compress five or ten minutes of critical history into ten or fifteensyllables of last names simply will not do. It would appear that we had nocommon ground at all, and that it would be much easier to stick to one’sown constituency than to sustain a dialogue across the disciplines, no matterhow artificial we like to claim those boundaries are. Yet, I have becomeincreasingly interested in how professors of English, anthropology,African-American studies, and history think and theorize about race in the18th century, and more certain by the day that bridges between theseacademic disciplines and cultures can and should be built if we wish to teachcourses and write about race. A critical race theory for the 18th century thatis not transatlantic appears less critical and more theory than we should hopefor.

One of the bridges that I use to cross this impasse, which is personal aswell as professional, is the bilingual dictionary. Spanish-English dictionariespublished before the 19th century are typically ignored by Anglo- andIbero-Americanists who produce and consume critical race theory, but Ihave been using these dictionaries as pedagogical tools in scholarly talks andundergraduate and graduate courses since 2000. They have contributedimmensely to my thinking and research on hierarchy in the Hispanic worldbefore the 19th century and they continue to aid me in conceptualizing andillustrating signal differences between traditional and modern forms ofhierarchy.6 Captain John Stevens’ New Spanish and English Dictionary,7 amonumental work that has been analyzed by linguists and often ignored byliterary historians and critical race theorists,8 is a good place to start forscholars and students in Spanish and English departments alike.

The assessment of Stevens’ dictionary has not been favorable. In aninfluential monograph, linguist Roger Steiner concluded that the work wasbasically worthless:

Captain John Stevens’ 1705–6 Spanish and English bilingual dictionary does notprovide a notable advance in Spanish and English bilingual lexicography. The1705 English-Spanish work is an almost verbatim copy of Minsheu while the1706 Spanish-English work is an amalgamation of Minsheu (1599) and Oudin(1607) with a bit of Aldrete (1606) and Covarrubias (1611) thrown in along with2,000 proverbs accompanied by obscure explanations that were later condemnedby succeeding lexicographers. The Stevens dictionary represents a lexicographicalretreat because of the elimination of all gender labels so faithfully provided byMinsheu, because of the less-than-rigorous application of alphabetical orderingof entries, and because of the technique of glossing which includes the use ofthe leisurely exposition of learned and obscure meanings, the redundantexplanation, and the discursive definition. These faults are not atoned for by theoccasional addition of an etymon or inflectional irregularity not given by Minsheu.


Towards an Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Critical Race Theory . 55

His revision twenty years later added practically nothing; so his work can beevaluated on the basis of the 1705–6 dictionary. (105)

Colin Steele supported this assessment, referring his readers to Steiner.9

Notwithstanding his title, English Interpreters of the Iberian New World FromPurchas to Stevens, and his labored analysis of Stevens’ English translations ofSpanish American histories, Steele ignored what the New Spanish and EnglishDictionary had to say about cities and peoples in Spanish America.

At Buenos Aires, for example, Stevens’ entry is brief but useful: “BuenosAyres, or Nuestra Senora de Buenos Ayres: A Town in the province of Río dela Plata, in South America, on the South Bank of the River of Plate, 60 leaguesfrom the mouth of it, in 34 Degrees and 40 Minutes of South Latitude”(n.p.). His definition of Lima is fuller, hitting upon wealth and trade, twoareas that were to be especially significant after the conclusion of the Warof the Spanish Succession in 1713:

Lima, the capital City of the Kingdom of Peru, in South America, seated in 12Degrees, 30 Minutes of Latitude. All its Streets are straight without any bending;it is magnificently built, very large, has a mighty Trade, and infinite Wealth, andis an Archbishoprick, and the Residence of the Viceroy, containing about 5000Spaniards, 40,000 Blacks, and many thousands of Indians, many Churches,Monasteries, Colleges, and Hospitals, besides a sumptuous Palace of the Viceroy.(n.p.)

The Spanish Enlightenment literary historian John Dowling acknowledgedthat Stevens “introduced a great many words from America”.10 Indeed,Stevens’ entries on Spanish American cities should be seen as respectableforebears of the late eighteenth-century entries in Coleti, Alcedo, and theanonymous authors of the American Gazetteer. However, Stevens’ innovationsdid not end there, for the New Spanish and English Dictionary proves his keenawareness of the nomenclature engendered by the social hierarchy of18th-century Spanish America. That hierarchy was constructed from ahandful of principles, one of which is central to his bilingual dictionary andto my teaching: casta, or caste. In a general sense, casta meant group or kind:animals, trees, flowers, humans, and commodities such as slaves were sortedinto castas. When we speak of human communities in early modern Spain,castas were the groups classified according to their culture and appearance,e.g., Jews, Christians, and Moors. In Spanish America, there were unmixedcastas (the Spaniards, Blacks, and Indians mentioned in Stevens’ entry onLima) and mixed castas (mulattos, mestizos, zambos, and so on).

Because scholars and students who desire an 18th-century transatlanticcritical race theory must be disposed to respecting differences betweenperiods and places, I emphasize that casta was not the equivalent of themodern or postmodern “race.” The casta known as Indians (indios), forinstance, did not include mestizos (the descendants of Spanish men and Indianwomen) with a noble Spanish parent or the descendants of the Aztec andInca rulers. Both of these groups, irrespective of how they (or we) mightdefine their race today, legally and socially belonged to the casta called



Spaniards (españoles).11 This distinction between caste and race invitesreflections on the transition from traditional to modern forms of hierarchy,and on the relationship between modernity and the category of race, thathave been aired elsewhere.12

Returning now to the New Spanish and English Dictionary, it is remarkablethat no one has commented on one of Stevens’ most striking, and mysterious,innovations: entries for several mixed castas in late viceregal Spanish America,which had not appeared before in monolingual Spanish language dictionariesor in bilingual Spanish-English, Spanish-French, and Spanish-Italiandictionaries. Before I turn to these novel entries, I wish to briefly discuss ahandful of basic terms for mixed castas that were already well known inEurope by the early 17th century and are springboards for scholarly andclassroom discussions of caste, religion, modernity, otherness, andEuropeanness.

The term mestizo is found in early 16th-century Spanish husbandry. In amanual called Agricultura, the Spaniard Gabriel Alonso Herrera used mestizoto refer to a mixed breed of dog (286). In John Minsheu’s Dictionarie inSpanish and English, the term was applicable to humans and beasts alike:“*Mestizo, m. that which is come or sprung of a mixture of two kinds, as a blackeMoore and a Christian, a mungrell dog or beast” (169). Note that religion playsa role here: Minsheu wrote blacke Moore and Christian, not black andwhite. According to César Oudin’s Spanish-French dictionary from eightyears later,mestizo meant a half-breed – like the child of a Moor and a whitewoman, or vice versa – and it was applied to dogs and other animals:“Mestizo, mestif ou mestis, qui est de deux races, comme un enfant d’un More &d’une blanche, & au contraire: il se dit aussi des chiens & autres animaux” (Tesoro1607, n.p.). This entry is largely derivative of Minsheu’s from 1599.

However, in the first Spanish language dictionary compiled by Sebastiánde Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, mestizo had the same meaningit had had for Herrera almost a century before: “MESTIZO. El que esengendrado de diversas especies de animales; del verbo misceo, es, pormezclarse” (“One that is engendered by different species of animals, fromthe [Latin] verb for commingle, misceo, -es”) (802). In the 1675 edition ofOudin’s dictionary, another definition was included:“mestizo, m. C’est aussiun enfant d’un Chrestien, & d’un infidele” (Tesoro 1675, 1:668). The variouseditions of Oudin’s bilingual dictionary show that the term meant eitherthe offspring of parents of different groups (or of animals of different species),or the offspring of parents of different religions. Again, a truly transatlanticcritical race theory will have to address the transition from traditional tomodern forms of hierarchy – from casta (rooted in religious norms and theinseparation of church and state) to raza, in the Hispanic context – withoutassuming that race (or the West, for that matter) was a category that “alwaysalready” existed.13

Oudin’s entry for mulato in 1675 made it interchangeable with mestizo:“Mulatos, m. Ce sont des demy Mores, enfans qui sont engendrez d’un



blanc & d’une Moresse, ou d’un More & d’une blanche, & sont de couleurolivastre” (Tesoro 1675, 1:688). However, it is difficult to ascertain whatMore meant to Oudin from the following equivalents: “More, c. Moro, Mora.Negro de la Guinea” (2:452). The same problem arises with the term mulatoin Spanish language dictionaries. Covarrubias’ definition of mulato is a casein point: “MULATO. El que es hijo de negra y de hombre blanco, o alrevés: y por ser mezcla extraordinaria la compararon a la naturaleza del mulo”(“One that is the son of a negress and a white man, or vice versa, and becauseit is an out-of-the-ordinary mixture they compared it to the origins of themule”) (819). Did More mean Moor or Black? And what did negro mean –Moor? Muslim? Ethiopian? A man from India? In our racial world, it is easyto racialize everything (to collapse almost every form of hierarchy into one:race), but there are no clear-cut answers in a pre-racial world in which thesocial hierarchy for males was largely defined and legitimated by religion.14

It was Stevens in 1706 who clearly defined the pre-Independence SpanishAmerican meaning of mestizo: “Mestizo, a Mungrel, a Man born of Indianand Spanish Parents. From the Lat. Misceo, to mix” (n.p.). In 1740 Pinedawould essentially repeat Stevens’ definition: “Mestizo, s.m. a Mungrel, aMan born of Indian and Spanish Parents; from the Latin Misceo, to mix”(n.p.). The entry for mulato in Captain Stevens’ New Spanish and EnglishDictionary echoes that which is found in Covarrubias’Tesoro in 1611: “Mulata,the Daughter of a Black and of a White, that is, of a tawny Colour” and“Mulato, a Mulatto, the Son of a Black and of a White, so call’d by reason ofthe mixture, from Mula, a Mule, which is a mixt breed” (n.p.). Again,Pineda’s bilingual dictionary would reproduce Stevens’ (or Covarrubias’s)definition:“Mulato, a Mulatto, the Son of a Black and of a White, so calledby reason of the Mixture, from Mula, a Mule, which is a mixt breed” (n.p.).Just as we saw at mestizo, animals and humans are linked in these definitionsof mulato from the 17th and 18th centuries.

What Stevens has to offer critical race theorists interested inconceptualizing race in 18th-century Anglo and/or Iberian contexts is notlimited to his entries for mestizo and mulato. Indeed, it is only when we getbeyond these basic Old World Spanish terms for mixture that we discoverthe role that Stevens played in disseminating a lexicography particular tolate viceregal Spanish America. He included equivalents and definitions forcertain mixed castas that had not appeared in dictionaries before, as thefollowing ensemble of examples illustrates:

Cabra, a she Goat. Also the Son of an Indian Woman and a Sambo.Castizo, Subst. the Son of a Mestizo and Mestiza.Grifo, or Grifón, a Griffin; also the Son of a Black Woman and a Mulatto. It islikewise a cock for Water.Sambo, the Son of a Mulata Woman and an Indian Man.Tente en el ayre, a Name given to a Mountain People in New Spain, because theirHair stands up like Men in a Fright. (n.p.)



The last definition is laughably incorrect; tente en el aire (literally,“remainup-in-the-air”) meant that the individual’s biological and cultural ancestorswere uncertain. In a society in which members of the casta of Spaniards(whether they were biologically, or racially, Spanish or not) had the mostprivileges, up in the air was not a good place to be. According to Williams,Stevens was in Spain in 1712/13,15 and so he could have met with personswho had been in Spanish America and were familiar with 18th-centurynomenclature. Clearly, however, he did not get all of his information aboutthe different caste groupings from expert travellers or authors.

Steiner’s assessment of Pedro de Pineda’s Dictionary was far moreencouraging than his review of Stevens’ work: “Peter Pineda has the honorof being the first Spaniard to compile a Spanish and English bilingualdictionary. . . . Although he copied Stevens almost verbatim (including theproverbs), samplings corroborate the claim of the addition of 6,000 Spanishand 12,000 English vocabulary entries. Many of these additions may beclassified as idiomatic, living speech,particularly in the English-Spanish part”(106). Nevertheless, Pineda’s definitions of mixed castas suggest to me thathe pilfered them from Stevens’ New Spanish and English Dictionary. Theexamples that I have collected below do not present Pineda’s readers withnew information:

Cabra, s.f. a She-Goat; also the Son of an Indian Woman and a Sambo; also theFish call’d a Gurnet; also three Poles set up joining at the Top and forming aTriangle at the Bottom to weigh Things. Latin Capra.Castizo, sub. the Son of a Mestizo and Mestiza.Grifo, s.m. or Grifón, a Griffin; also the Son of a black Woman and a Mulatto. Itis likewise a cock for Water.Sambo, s.m. the Son of a Mulata Woman and an Indian Man. (n.p.)

On this particular score, I recall Dowling’s general assessment of Stevensand Pineda: “A comparison of Peter Pineda’s dictionary with that of JohnStevens shows that the Spaniard owed much to his English predecessor.Bilingual dictionaries are generally straightforward, providing simpletranslations. . . . However, the Stevens-Pineda dictionaries are greatlyenriched by new elements, and generally it was Stevens who led the way”(8 –9). Notwithstanding Stevens’ originality, Pineda did offer at least twoentries related to members of mixed castas that one does not find in Stevens:“Genizaro, s.m. a Janizary, and in Spanish, any Man whose Father is of oneNation and his Mother of another” and “Quartaron, s.m. the Son of a BlackMan and a Spanish Woman” (n.p.). Both of these terms were used in Spainand Spanish America in the 18th century, although Pineda should havewritten quarterón (today cuarterón).

Neither of these bilingual dictionaries included the dozens of terms formixed castas that appeared in caste paintings and in caste poems from thelong 18th century.16 Still, Anglo and Iberian critical race theorists shouldtake note that Stevens included many terms that would not appear even in



the Diccionario de la lengua castellana (now commonly known as the firstDiccionario de autoridades) compiled by European and American Spaniards.

No one has asked, much less demonstrated, how Stevens came to knowthe nomenclature of biological and cultural mixture in 18th-century SpanishAmerica. “History,” as Murphy observes, “was his preferred study” (443),and in his prefatory “Catalogue of authors from this Dictionary is collected”he listed numerous 16th- and 17th-century historians of Spanish America.Still, I have read and taught and written about those historians for years, andI am confident that none of them was the source for Stevens’ up-to-dateentries. He also named numerous authors of monolingual, bilingual, andtrilingual dictionaries, and it is known that he relied heavily on Minsheu’sdictionaries from 1599 and 1623.17 However, it should be pointed out thatMinsheu did not include the terms for mixed castas that we have seen inStevens, and that his significance to critical race theorists is limited.18 At theend of Stevens’ unnumbered list he added, “Besides at least as many morewhich I took no care to set down as I read, and cannot now recall to mind”(n.p.) and that unwritten list probably holds the key to uncovering Stevens’source or sources for his entries on mixed human communities in viceregalSpanish America.

The lexicon of caste in 18th-century Spanish America raises other issuesthat should interest critical race theorists as well as historians of science andpopular culture. There can be little doubt that in the 18th century one findsan increasingly rationalist and empiricist impulse driving taxonomicexpansion. As Goldberg observes: “Classification is basically the scientificextension of the epistemological drive to place phenomena undercategories. . . . With its catalogues, indices, and inventories, classificationestablishes an ordering of data; it thereby systemizes observation” (49). Butthat is only half of the story, at the very most. Discourses in the animal,vegetable, and mineral kingdoms exercised a decisive influence on mestizo,mulato and other terms for human mixtures in Spanish America such as cabraand grifo (cf. Stevens’ definitions above). Treatises and manuals onhorsebreeding, horticulture, and alchemy were obviously learned discoursesin their day; yet, many of them seem rather homespun or folksy topostmodern readers. Physiognomy, or signature doctrine, itself is a vividdemonstration of the power that folk comparisons between men and plants,rocks, and animals exercised over intellectuals.“There were men,” Hodgenexplains, “whose features, bodily habits, and temperament suggested thelion, or the tiger, the bull, ape, cat, or fox; and the doctrine maintained thatin their moral natures they reproduced the characteristics of their animalprototypes” (392). Eamon’s classic study on books of secrets – which existedin the Hispanic world, too – is another clear indication of that power, asare several caste poems written in Peru during the long 18th century.19

The etiology of classification and social hierarchy cannot be reduced toa scientific or learned impulse: the brand of empiricism found in books ofsecrets, husbandry and alchemy treatises, and even almanacs, is part of the



critical pre-history of race that remains unwritten for Anglo- andIbero-Americanists. Scott Atran’s demonstration of the influence of folktaxonomies on learned botany in Europe may prove to be a methodologicalmodel for analyzing zoological and anthropological taxonomies in the NewWorld.20 As Lowood acutely observes:

Atran’s important contribution is the notion that systematic taxonomy grewgradually out of local discoveries followed by the comparison and integration ofempirical data. In other words, he recasts the usual opposition of folk knowledgeand system, concluding that the goal of an overarching “worldwide system” roseout of efforts to express local material more or less uniformly for the purposesof comparison and identification. (298)

In other words, it could be true that the drive to classify peoples in viceregalSpanish America was empiricist and rationalist, as writings and paintings onthe castas would suggest, and that the lower orders nonetheless contributeda great deal to the development of a caste taxonomy. Could this also be trueof human taxonomies in colonial Massachusetts or Virginia? Where wouldall of this leave high culture, and how would it compel us to re-think ourdefinitions of the public sphere? The relations between race, print culture,and the public sphere in the Hispanic 18th century have not generated anyscholarly discussion, but Spanish-English dictionaries could start such adiscussion among Anglo- and Ibero-Americanists. In any case, it would behelpful to have several sets of 18th-century specialists – even a workinggroup – devoted to these and related questions, which flow into race as atransatlantic invention and praxis. Stevens and Pineda might yet come toexemplify the bridging of languages and cultures that fosters professionaldialogue and growth.

Notes

* I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this essay for their insightful comments and questions.1 In Valdes, McCristal Culp and Harris, Crossroads, Directions, and A New Critical Race Theory, C.Lawrence writes of the formation of “smaller, more intimate groups of younger and older Lat-Critsand queer-race-Crits and Midatlantic-women-of-color-Crits, homeplaces within a collective toolarge now to be a homeplace itself” (xvii). On the same page he notes that bell hooks was a keynotespeaker at a Critical Legal Studies Conference in the 1990s. A good introduction to an integratedand interdisciplinary critical race theory and studies is Essed and Goldberg,Race Critical Theories: Textand Context.2 See Graham, Idea of Race in Latin America;Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America;Applebaum,Macpherson and Rosemblatt, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America.3 See Hill,“Literary Absolutism”; Hill, Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains.4 See Cañizares Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World; Bauer, The Cultural Geographyof Colonial American Literatures.5 In passing, it should be noted that transatlantic studies and hemispheric studies are related in waysthat have not been critically acknowledged. For instance, there is a fetishization of the Spaniardborn in the New World (criollo) among Hispanists, behind which lurk American exceptionalismand geopolitical realities. If the Philippines and India, say, were superpowers, I imagine that a greatmany scholars would be studying the culture of Spaniards and Portuguese born there, their mixedprogeny, and so forth. See Hill, “Introduction,” Hierarchy, Commerce and Fraud in Bourbon SpanishAmerica.



6 See Hill,“Casta as Culture,” 231–59.7 Stevens, New Spanish and English Dictionary.8 See Steiner, Two Centuries of Spanish and English Bilingual Lexicography; Hausmann, “Lesdictionnaires bilingues (et multilingues),” 11–32; Cormier and Fernández, 291–308. J. Green wasnot interested in Stevens or critical race theory in Chasing the Sun.9 Steele, p. 119, n. 142. Also see Sánchez Pérez, 186.10 Dowling,“Peter Pineda,” 6. I thank Prof. Pedro Álvarez de Miranda for bringing this essay tomy attention.11 Hill, Hierarchy, ch. 5.12 See Cox, 360–68; Dumont, 20–43; Hill,“Casta as Culture”; Hill, Hierarchy, ch. 5.13 On Spain and Spanish America’s exile from the West (or modernity), and the West as a category,see Hill, Sceptres and Sciences, especially pp. 11–21, 245–61.14 See Dumont,“Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification.’”15 Williams, 146, n. 1.16 On cuadros de castas, or caste paintings, see García Sáiz, Las castas mexicanas; Carrera, ImaginingIdentity in New Spain; Katzew, Casta Painting. On caste poetry, see Hill,“Caste Theater and Poetry,”3–26; Hill,“Casta as Culture.”17 Cormier and Fernández, 291.18 See Hill,“Casta as Culture.”19 Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature; Hill, “Caste Theater and Poetry,” 3–26; Hill, “Casta asCulture.”20 Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History.

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