Description
In New Spain, the Castilian Crown solidified their dominance over the region by implementing a social hierarchy that ordered the inhabitants into racial groups according to the person’s proportion of Spanish blood—el sistema de castas. While there is plenty of analysis on the study of el sistema de castas by scholars of race, class, and caste, scholars have not devoted sufficient time in discussing the origins of el sistema de castas, specifically the role Christianity played in producing ideas of superiority and inferiority that directly influenced the construction of racial difference in New Spain. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between the formation of Christian attitudes of superiority and inferiority through preconceived notions of gender and slavery that allowed for the promotion of Christian superiority as the ideal standard in the colonial period. A discussion of the Castilian understanding of patriarchy and slavery in a Christian worldview provides a glimpse into how Spaniards perceived gender as an authorative power over others they deemed inferior by using Christianity as a tool of differentiation. Understanding these ideas then provides insight into how patriarchy and slavery shaped Iberian/Spanish ideas about social hierarchy and how these ideas would be applied to the indigenous people in the Americas. This thesis seeks to address the missing link in historiography on the ideas that aided in the development of the sistema de castas in New Spain. It seeks to trace the construction of Christian attitudes of superiority and inferiority from the early formation of Christianity into the period colonization. This thesis seeks to understand how Christian views and attitudes of superiority and inferiority aided in the construction of difference and the kinds of hegemonic systems that were set in place in the colonial period to rationalize, order, and contain difference. Ultimately, this examination demonstrates that while preconceived notions of gender and slavery aided in the construction of difference, the Christian faith remained at the center of the discussion as a tool that was utilized to create difference between the European and Indigenous worlds—between “reason and civility.”
