110 CHAPTER 5 STATE, CHURCH, AND SOCIETY
irony, placing “conquerors, doctors, and pirates on
the same plane for their part in causing death and
destruction in the Western Hemisphere.” Still more
audaciously, he actually named some of Lima’s
best-known “malpractitioners,” who are intro-
duced by Death during a roll call of his troops. One
was Francisco Bermejo y Roldán, the protomedi-
cato, or chief physician, of Peru; Caviedes mocked
the title, calling him the protoverdugo, or chief ex-
ecutioner, and charged that he took advantage of
his female patients by prescribing “injections that
were administered in the front.”
The Structure of Class and Caste
The social order that arose in the Indies on the ru-
ins of the old indigenous societies was based, like
that of Spain, on aristocratic or feudal principles.
Race, occupation, and religion were the formal cri-
teria that determined an individual’s social status.
All mechanical labor was regarded as degrading,
but large-scale trade (as opposed to retail trade)
was compatible with nobility, at least in the Indies.
Great emphasis was placed on limpieza de san-
gre (purity of blood), meaning above all descent
from “Old Christians,” without mixture of con-
verso or Morisco (Muslim) blood. Proofs of such
descent were jealously guarded and sometimes
manufactured.
The various races and racial mixtures were
carefully distinguished and graded in a kind of hi-
erarchy of rank. A trace of black blood legally suf-
fi ced to deprive an individual of the right to hold
public offi ce or enter the professions, among other
rights and privileges. The same taint attached to
the great mass of mestizos. True, the Laws of the
Indies assigned perfect legal equality to those of le-
gitimate birth, but to the very end of the colonial
period, the charters of certain colonial guilds and
schools excluded all mestizos, without distinction.
The lack of solid demographic information
and major disagreements among historians about
the size of pre-Conquest populations make esti-
mates of Spanish America’s population in 1650,
and of the relative numerical strength of the racial
groups that comprised that population, strictly
conjectural. It appears, however, that by that date,
or even earlier, the long decline of the indigenous
population had ended and a slow recovery had
begun. It also appears that the European element
in the population was growing more rapidly. But
the groups that were growing the fastest were the
castas, mixed-race peoples, the great majority of
whom were born out of wedlock.
As just noted, Spanish law and opinion ranked
all these racial groups in a descending order of
worth and privilege, with Europeans on top, fol-
lowed by the castas, indígenas, and blacks. This
formal ranking did not necessarily correspond to
the actual standing of individuals of different ra-
cial makeup in society, but it provided the colonial
ruling groups with an ideological justifi cation for
their rule. It also created a confl ict society par ex-
cellence, pitting natives against blacks and caste
against caste, and infl ating poor Spaniards with
a sense of their superiority over all other groups,
which hindered forging the unity of the exploited
masses and thus served to maintain an oppressive
social order. The idea of “race” in Latin America, as
elsewhere, was socially constructed to rationalize
and preserve the power of a tiny elite.THE RULING CLASS
In practice, racial lines were not very strictly
drawn. In the Indies, a white skin was a symbol
of social superiority, roughly the equivalent of hi-
dalguía, a title of nobility in Spain, but it had no
cash value. Not all whites belonged to the privi-
leged economic group. Colonial records testify to
the existence of a large class of “poor whites”—
vagabonds, beggars, or worse—who disdained
work and frequently preyed on the indígenas. A
Spaniard of this group, compelled by poverty to
choose his mate from the castas, generally doomed
his descendants to an inferior economic and social
status. But the mestizo or mulatto son of a wealthy
Spanish landowner or merchant, if acknowledged
and made his legal heir, could pass into the colo-
nial aristocracy. If traces of indigenous or African
descent were too strong, the father might reach
an understanding with the parish priest, who had