COLONIAL SOCIETY IN TRANSITION, 1750–1810: AN OVERVIEW 151
the stigma attached to artisan labor by decreeing
that it was no bar to nobility, also issued decrees
that empowered colonial parents to refuse con-
sent to interracial marriages of their children that
threatened the family’s “honor.” As interpreted by
high colonial courts, however, these decrees as a
rule only sanctioned such parental refusal when
the parties to a proposed marriage were unequal
in wealth, meaning, as previously noted, that a
wealthy mulatto was a suitable marriage partner
for a member of the Spanish elite. The last Bourbon
kings also promoted social mobility by permitting
pardos (free mulattos), despised for their slave ori-
gin, to buy legal whiteness through the purchase
of dispensations (cédulas de gracias al sacar) that
freed them from the status of “infamous.”
It would be an error to suppose that these
concessions to a small number of wealthy mixed-
bloods refl ected a crumbling of the caste system
and the ideology on which it was based. Racial
prejudice and stereotypes continued to dominate
the colonial mentality. For example, mulattos and
mestizos eagerly sought to achieve whiteness by
purchasing dispensations just mentioned, and elite
groups like the cabildo of Caracas protested that
the more liberal Bourbon racial policy promoted
“the amalgamation of whites and pardos.” Finally,
some parents were prepared to litigate against their
children to prevent their marriage to dark-skinned
individuals.
The partial penetration of elite society, even on
its highest levels, by individuals with some traces
of indigenous or African blood did not alter the
rigidity of the class structure, the sharp class dis-
tinctions, or the vast gulf that separated the rich
from the poor. Humboldt spoke of “that monstrous
inequality of rights and wealth” that characterized
late colonial Mexico. But the late colonial period
saw some change in the economic base of the elite
and some shifts in the relative weight of its various
sectors. If the seventeenth century was the golden
age of the large landowners, then the eighteenth
century, especially its last decades, saw their as-
cendancy challenged by the growing wealth and
political and social infl uence of the export-import
merchant class, most of whose members were of
Spanish immigrant origin. The merchants provided
the capital needed by the mining industry and ab-
sorbed much of its profi ts. They also fi nanced the
purchase of the posts of corregidors, offi cials who
monopolized trade with indigenous communi-
ties in collusion with the merchants. To provide a
hedge against commercial losses—not just to se-
cure the prestige identifi ed with landownership—
wealthy merchants acquired estates, establishing
hacienda complexes that produced a variety of
crops and were situated to supply the major mar-
kets. They further diversifi ed by acquiring fl our
mills or obrajes and by establishing themselves as
major retailers, not only in the cities but also in the
countryside. The wealthiest married into rich and
powerful creole extended families, forming an Es-
tablishment whose offspring had preference in ap-
pointments to important and prestigious positions
in the colonial government and church.
The second half of the eighteenth century saw
a new wave of immigration from the peninsula.
The presence of these newcomers, often of humble
origins, who competed with the American-born
Spaniards for limited employment opportunities,
sharpened the traditional creole resentment of
gachupines or chapetones (tenderfoots). Although,
according to Humboldt, “the lowest, least edu-
cated and uncultivated European believes himself
superior to the white born in the New World,” most
of the new arrivals failed to fi nd the high-status
and well-paid employments they had expected.
The 1753 and 1811 census reports for Mexico City
listed some Spaniards working as unskilled laborers
and house servants and still others as unemployed.
TheDiario de México often carried advertisements
by jobless Spanish immigrants who were willing to
accept any kind of low-level supervisory post. Two
observant Spanish offi cials, Jorge Juan and Anto-
nio de Ulloa, who visited the city of Cartagena in
New Granada about 1750, found that the creoles
and Europeans there disdained any trade below
that of commerce. “But it being impossible for all
to succeed, great numbers not being able to secure
suffi cient credit, they become poor and miserable
from their aversion to the trades they follow in Eu-
rope, and instead of the riches which they fl attered
themselves with possessing in the Indies, they ex-
perience the most complicated wretchedness.”