150 CHAPTER 7 THE BOURBON REFORMS AND SPANISH AMERICA
the revolutionary implications of Mier’s sermon,
arrested him and exiled him to Spain.
The episode illustrates the devious chan-
nels through which creole nationalism moved
to achieve its ends. One of those ends was creole
hegemony over the indigenous and mixed-blood
masses, based on their awareness of their common
patria and their collective adherence to such na-
tional cults as that of the Virgin of Guadalupe in
Mexico. In the 1780s, however, the accumulated
wrath of those people broke out in a series of ex-
plosions that threatened the very existence of the
colonial social and political order. In this crisis the
creole upper class showed that their aristocratic pa-
tria did not really include indígenas, mestizos, and
blacks among its children and that their rhetorical
sympathy for the dead of Moctezuma’s and Ata-
hualpa’s time did not extend to their descendants.
Colonial Society in Transition,
1750–1810: An Overview
An estimate by the late historian Charles Gibson
put the population of Spanish America toward
the end of the colonial period at about 17 million
people. Gibson supposed that of this total some
7,500,000 were indígenas; about 3,200,000,
Europeans; perhaps 750,000, blacks; and the re-
maining 5,500,000, castas. Those fi gures point to
a continuing steady revival of the native popula-
tion from the low point of its decline in the early
seventeenth century, a more rapid increase of the
European population, and an even faster increase
of the castas.
In the late colonial period, the racial catego-
ries used to describe and rank the groups that
comprised the colonial population in terms of their
“honor” or lack of “honor” became increasingly
ambiguous. One reason was the growing mobil-
ity of the colonial population, resulting in a more
rapid pace of Hispanicization and racial mixture.
The laws forbidding indígenas to reside in Spanish
towns and whites and mixed-bloods to live in na-
tive towns were now generally disregarded. Large
numbers of indígenas seeking escape from tribute
and repartimiento burdens migrated to the Span-
ish cities and mining camps, where they learned
to speak Spanish, wore European clothes, and
adopted other Spanish ways. Those who lived in
villages remote from the main areas of Spanish
economic activity were less likely to be infl uenced
by the presence of Spaniards and mestizos and
therefore remained more “indigenous.” For a va-
riety of reasons connected with the area’s history,
geography, and economic patterns, the native
communities in the viceroyalty of Peru seem to
have resisted acculturation more tenaciously than
those of New Spain. But the process of political and
social change gradually transformed the Peruvian
ayllu as well. Its kinship basis was weakened in
time by the infl ux of forasteros (“outsiders”), peas-
ant squatters fl eeing from distant provinces subject
to the mining mita. It was also attacked by late-
eighteenth-century Bourbon policy, which defi ned
it by its geographic location, periodically redistrib-
uted its lands on the basis of its population, and
sold any “excess” land in auctions for the benefi t of
the royal exchequer.
In the late eighteenth century, those who left
their native pueblos and became assimilated to the
Spanish population in dress and language and who
achieved even a modest level of prosperityincreas-
ingly came to be legally regarded as Spaniards—
that is, creoles. The same was true of Hispani-
cized mestizos and—less frequently, perhaps—of
blacks and mulattos. An individual’s race, in short,
now tended to be defi ned not by skin color but
by such traits as occupation, dress, speech, and
self-perception.
The economic advance of the late Bourbon
era, marked by the rapid growth of commercial
agriculture, mining, and domestic and foreign
trade, created opportunities for some fortunate
lower-class individuals and contributed to the
declining signifi cance of racial labels. A growing
number of wealthy mestizo and mulatto fami-
lies sought to rise in the social scale by marrying
their sons and daughters to children of the Span-
ish elite. Charles III’s policy on interracial marriage
refl ected the dilemmas of this reformer-king, who
wished to promote the rise of a progressive middle
class but feared to undermine the foundations of
the old aristocratic order. Charles, who removed