Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D´OHara.

Imperial Subjects: Race and

Identity in Colonial Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press. 2009.

Objective: “this volume seeks to unlock this fundamental question of how

Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multiethnic
progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various
communities, and ultimately as imperial subjects. More specifically, it
explores the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the
identities historical actors presented, performed, and defended in their
interactions with one another and the representatives of the twin bastions of
the imperial rule, the Crown and the Church. It is an attempt to understand
the inseparable bond between public and private realities”(p. 2).

The chapters of Dantas, Diaz and Twinam show that free and enslave blacks,
as they became familiar with Hispanic culture and Iberian law, began to
assert their identity as imperial subjects entitled to honor, rights, and
privileges that the Crown originally did not ascribe to those in bondage or
inferior racial status. Other boundaries were crossed by white men who
engaged in permanent or temporal relationships with Indian women, which
went beyond the strategic unions with daughters of the Indian chiefs during
the early years of the conquest. It wasn’t clear how the offspring of these
unions were going to be classified, although many were automatically
labeled according to their mothers’ condition. Fisher and D’OHara recognize
the deep roots of the Latin American racial ambiguity. They also agree that
the “Two Republic” system was more a theoretical abstraction, usually
betrayed by social mixture, and that the system of caste might have been
meaningless in daily life. These models, inherited from previous experiences
in the Old World, changed irrevocably as they were put in practice in
America. Yet, ideas about racial difference and hierarchy had deep roots
there. For scholars as Immanuel Wallerstein, race and racism are the
representations, promoter and consequences of geographical concentrations
associated with the axial division of labor.

Fisher and D’OHara state that racial discourse has always been the product
of specific cultural and historical contexts. Race, blood lineage, and
phenotype worked as markers in a different manner across time and space.
Historians thus have to deal with the question of terminology, and knowing
which factors were the most crucial in assigning particular people or groups
given categories. David Tavarez’s chapter on Mexican Inquisition shows
these were far from straightforward decisions for officials. It remains the
question whether these people differentiate among themselves in terms that
fit our modern notions of race or racial ideology. Some historians have
already answered they didn’t. Identity and ethnicity are still problematic to
be used for the early colonial Latin American context. However, they opted
to use identity over ethnicity. Fisher and D’OHara say: “Whereas scholars
tend to use ethnicity when describing the relational aspect of intergroup
dynamics (p. 8), identity more commonly connotes a multinodal approach to
the construction of personhood that recognizes no primary factor” (p. 9).
Race thus is not an independent variable, but it’s just another universal and
interdependent variable (along with gender and class), as this multinodular
model of identity recognizes it. Another challenge is how to capture what
these subaltern subjects thought about themselves and others (this is what
they are looking for unlike Rappaport who questions about how and when,
and not what they were or thought) by looking at the fragmented historical
records.

Historians have dealt with the question of how to impute the normative
meanings of colonial classifications of difference. Some historians have
given priority to social, economic or juridical meanings, without reaching to
a consensus. The correlation of caste with other markers of social status,
occupation and wealth for instance, has led to other scholars to consider the
concept of “social race”, or the colonial term calidad the capture the
multiple meanings beyond phenotype.

Fisher and D’OHara’s critiques about traditional literature: “Both earlier

studies about caste and more recent and primarily quantitative critiques of
that literature did not adequately conceptualize change over time […] They
offered empirically rich and insightful analyzes of social structures and
demographic patterns, yet they did not tackle the way that the interaction of
subjects with colonial institutions could produce new meanings for social
identities or alter existing ones” (p. 12)

Recent studies have departed from elite’s constructions of difference to

consider the plebeian reception and understanding of racial terminology.

On studying social identities: “Studies of social identities, therefore, must

also take into account the factors (be they social, cultural, (p. 13) economic,
political) that provided categories of social difference a force and solidity,
reproduced the terms over time, and influenced the behavior of historical
actors” (p. 14). This restates the old debate about the relation between
agency and structure and its dynamics over time.
They survey this preliminary overview of the literature as follows: “In sum,
then, recent historical scholarship has underlined the degree which imperial
subjects played a hand in shaping the meaning of colonial discourse […]
Royal and Church officials may have been responsible for articulating and
enforcing the norms of colonial behavior and thought, but they never
governed passive human objects. Rather, colonial mandates, rulings, and
legislation worked in conjunction (p. 14) with the actual exercise and
negotiation of power between individual officials and a bewildering array of
social actors” (p. 15).

Overall argument: “As the book’s contributors demonstrate, the lived

experience of social categories rarely fits comfortably within normative
models, and most individuals’ life experiences could not easily be subsumed
under a single identity –be it an ethnic, gender, or racial one. The hybridity
so often noted by contemporary observers may have its own modern-day
flavors and influences, but it was always a critical element of Latin American
societies and cultures” (p. 15).

Two methodological challenges: temporal distance with the subjects, and

mediation through fragmented archival sources. Recent identity theory
might offer some help to colonial historians working on identity. There are
some consensuses about identity: it’s multinodal, and socially constructed.
Thanks to the works of Fredrik Barth, there was a shift from the question
about the substance of the identity, to how these are produced, how the
differentiating boundaries are shaped. Markers, boundaries are constructed
socially, and then expected to change over time. Richard Jenkins added the
role of individuals, and how identities result from the feedback between
individual behavior and the meanings derived from that behavior. The next
question is, how do collectivities cohere? Anthony Cohen argues the
substance of group boundaries is essentially symbolic, polyvalent, so all the
members can feel identified with it, in spite of their differences. Criticism of
Barth’s works suggests he overemphasized the importance of differentiation
from the other in the process of boundary-making, when the shared
experiences between individuals are also relevant in defining the identity
group. Anyway, identity formation is at the center of the research agenda.
Now the focus is on individual historical actors, rather than ethnic groups,
caste categories, etc., which prevents the temptation of taking for granted
groupness without understanding individual choices. It also indicates the
limits of individual agency. Scholars also pay more attention to the
meanings of social identities. These trends have consequences for historians
of colonial Latin America: “Despite the apparent resilience and permanence
of such categories, identification takes place at the moment when an
individual interacts on a cognitive level with some external, publicly
available system of social categories and symbols” (p. 19).

Before Brubaker and Cooper’s suggestion about dismissing the term

“identity” and use other more precise nomenclature, Fisher and D’OHara
disagree because “identity” comprises both the internal self-understanding
and the external categorization like any other concept: “identity comprises
the relationship between the categories one is born into or placed into […]
their meaning for an individual, the sense of groupness they may or not
create, the possibilities and limits they create for human agency, and so on.
Researchers thus need a term such as identity that embraces the
simultaneity at the heart of social difference, a term that captures the
categorization and lived experience” (p. 20). Methodologically, historians
should pay attention to both dimensions, and capture both practices through
archival research.

Criticism on identity (and Rappaport’s work): They seem to critique, based

on Brubaker and Cooper, the scholarship that points out that identities are
constructed and fluid, because they overestimate individuals’ capacity to
create or modify social identities. They ascribe to the literature on agency
and structure (Giddens and William Sewell) who consider “historical agents’
thoughts, motives, and intentions are constituted by the cultures and social
institutions into which they are born, and how these cultures and
institutions are reproduced by the structurally shaped and constrained
actions of those agents” (p.21), without denying that eventually individuals
might reconfigure the very same structures (theory of duality of structure).
On the basis of that, this book focuses “on the interactions of colonial
subjects around institutions at the moment when social categories are
articulated, publicized, internalized, contested, and sometimes altered […]
By placing the moment of institutional interaction and practice under
scrutiny, the study of contact points highlights the social norms and rules,
or, to use Sewell’s terminology, the schema and resources that govern (and
limit) agency” (p. 22).