Brown Lives, Black Lives, Statues

The killing of George Floyd has made the questions of skin colour, racism, discrimination, inequality, and community here in the United Kingdom a very live issue, as well as in USA. I thought that perhaps looking at how these issues have played out in another country might add an interesting perspective.

Part of the debate in the UK has centred on the responsibility of Britain for the ills of slavery and, more widely, of colonialism. The British were not, of course, the first European colonialists or slavers – the Spanish preceded us, but with a different model.

The defeat of the Aztecs in 1521 was possible only because the indigenous enemies of the rulers of Tenochtitlan fought with a few thousand Spaniards. Those Spaniards suddenly found themselves nominally in charge of some 22 million Indians. They were not inclined to be tillers of the land as the British would be further north. They needed to rely on others to grow their food, provide domestic service, build their churches and houses, work in their mines, and ideally make them stinking rich. On the other hand, the King’s deal with the Pope made Mexico his private property, but he was specifically obliged to care for the welfare and conversion to Catholicism of the Indians.

The tensions between these competing demands led to a vigorous religio-legal debate about the status of the Indians: were they human, did they have souls, could they be enslaved? The verdict was that they were children, without fully developed souls, could not be held fully responsible for their actions, could be enslaved only for rebellion, and should be protected by the state. The Indians had obligations, but also certain privileges and protections. They had to pay tribute (taxes), either to the King or to a private individual, and were subject to drafts of forced labour. On the other hand, they could not be prosecuted for heresy by the Inquisition, were exempt from certain taxes, and had a degree of self-government in communities designated repúblicas de indios (Indian republics).

But as the Indians died in enormous numbers, the Spaniards needed labour. They could not, in good Catholic conscience continue to enslave the Indians, but it was quite all right to enslave Africans, and assorted Asians (Chinese, Filipinos, Malaysians and the like). Odd as it may seem, these imported slaves sometimes enjoyed greater social status and home comforts than the Indians: Africans were often foremen in the mines or on the cattle ranches, managing Indian labourers. On the other hand, while the Indians were not liable for heresy, bigamy and the like, the Africans and Asians were. They had to watch out for the Inquisition, therefore.

All of this led to a society in which the obligations, rights, access to state offices and privileges, and wealth were determined by racial categories. The first level of division was a simple dichotomy. The Spaniards, Africans and Asians were “people of reason”. They had souls and could be held responsible for their actions and misdeeds. The Indians lacked fully formed souls and must therefore be treated well (in theory) as wards of the state.

Anonymous 18th-century casta painting

Two categories were not enough, so, the different groups had to be categorized. Initially, this was simple. There were Indians, Negros, Chinos (all Asians, not just strictly Chinese) and Spaniards. Before long, more categories were needed. There were very few Spanish women in Mexico for the first several decades of the colonial period, so racial mixing soon proliferated. Rather like the spread of a virus, each procreational contact exponentially increased the number of categories needed to classify the population. At the simplest level, the offspring of sex between a Spaniard and an Indian woman was a mestizo. A Spaniard and an African woman’s child was a mulato. But what if the mulato married a mestiza, and that if their child married somebody of yet another mix of bloods? If a mestizo married an Indian woman, their child was categorized as a coyote, a particularly unpleasant term.

It was not easy to keep up with this confusing proliferation of racial categories. Some kind of aide memoire was needed: artists were commissioned to make paintings that depicted in little boxes a man and woman of different racial groups and their child, with a caption denoting the child’s racial category. These were called casta (caste) paintings. In practice, this was an extremely imperfect science. Priests, officials, and society in general pretended to know what they were doing, but often had no idea. Three centuries of colonial rule made Mexicans a pretty mixed up lot from a genetic point of view.

Miguel Cabrera, De Español e India Mestizo, 1763

But the Indians, living in theoretically separate Indian republics, with their own government systems, land, languages, cultures, syncretic varieties of Catholicism, rights and obligations, remained somewhat separate (in theory, but not always in practice). When Mexico achieved Independence in 1821 things changed. The new republican rulers had no deal with the Pope to honour, and a good many of them espoused a 19^th-century liberalism whose ideal was the enterprising individual. They declared the Indians free and equal citizens.

You might think that the Indians just whooped for joy as they gained their freedom from the hated monarch. Things were not that simple. Firstly, the Indians lost the protections they had under colonial rule. Simultaneously, they lost their tax exemptions, and their way of governing their communities came under threat. In short, they had most to lose from independence, and not much to gain. In the second half of the 19^th-century, politicians with liberal views came to power. They favoured the modernising, dynamic invisible hand of free enterprise, and therefore opposed the community management of assets typical of many Indian communities. They also tended to consider the Indians as socially and economically backward. They favoured importing European blood to bring in new skills and energies. Many Indian communities lost their land, legally or illegally, their members forced to become labourers cultivating their village’s land for a new owner. Yet, at the same time the government used Mexico’s ancient heritage to promote the country in international trade fairs. Artists painted fanciful pictures of the ancient cultures.

During the 1910-1920 Revolution many communities rose up and seized land expropriated from them. The revolutionary regime espoused agrarian reform. It restored land to many communities, and gave land to some villages that had never owned any. The indigenous cultures of ancient Mexico became potent symbols in the great mural painting programmes of the 1920s and 1930s, alongside images of national heroes, including liberals who had expropriated Indian land, and Marx and Lenin. Revolutionary peasant leaders, and their agrarista (agrarian reformers) followers appeared alongside their presumed indigenous forebears.

But this was not a return to a glorious indigenous past, as the murals and revolutionary rhetoric intimidated. Indigenous Mexicans now became clients of a corporatist state. They could be delivered by their leaders to vote in elections, join demonstrations, combat rebellious generals, and fight against devout Catholic rebels. The price of land was support, and sometimes death at the hands of landowner’s gunmen. To some degree the government protected the indigenous cultures and languages, so praised in the soaring rhetoric of revolutionary political leaders. Government social programmes provided clinics, schools, libraries and technical assistance. But, the descendants of the Aztecs, Tarascans, Zapotecs, Mayans, Lacandons and so on, honoured in school textbooks, rhetoric and ceremony, are among the poorest of the nation. Their education and health care are basic at best. They tend to be looked down on by sophisticated city dwellers.

The descendants of the slaves imported from Africa and Asia are not numerous. Moreover, they have generally mixed with indigenous populations to create certain regional types, in whose skin colour and cultures traces of African ancestry can be seen. They do not form an easily identifiable (nor, indeed self-identifying) group, subjected as a group to systemic discrimination like the African  Americans of the USA or the BAME (Black, African and Minority Ethnic, a complicated acronym covering quite disparate peoples) of the UK, or the Arabs of France.

Afromestiza girls in Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero

The net result of this history, is that, although slavery was common practice for several centuries, and although some (probably many) Mexicans are descended from slave owners, it is not easy clearly to identify any contemporary group of people who are enjoying the benefits of slavery. In Mexico there are is no equivalent of the Confederates and the Confederate flag. Nobody lives in grand country houses built on the profits of slavery. If identifiable villains there be, they are probably in Spain, or the African and Asian countries of origin.

El caballito, monument Charles V of Spain on the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City, 1880

As for statues, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztecs, is strictly not welcome: no statue records

Monument to Cuauhtémoc, Cuitlahuac and other Aztec warriors, Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City, c.1880

his violent but foundational contribution to Mexican history. Nor does his victim, emperor

Cuauhtémoc monument in its modern setting

Moctezuma, merit a statue. Mexicans are ashamed of this cowardly emperor who surrendered rather than resist. His successors, Cuitláhuac, killed by European disease, and Cuauhtémoc, cruelly tortured to death by the Spanish, are honoured as heroes with statues in the capital. Curiously, however, Charles V, King of Spain and the first sovereign of New Spain (as Mexico was known then), is commemorated with an equestrian statue (popularly known as El Caballito, the little horse), which for many decades occupied a prestigious location on the Paseo de la Reforma, the capital’s main boulevard. American friends might imagine what they would make of George III honoured with a statue on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a block or two from the White House. One colonial Spaniard who deserves statues in places of honour is Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of Mexico, known as the Protector of the Indians.

Statue of Bishop Zumárraga, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán

Thus, Mexico does not have a statue problem comparable to those of Confederate leaders in the USA, or slavers in the UK. This does not mean that racism is not a problem, simply that there is no easy target for protest on public display.

As for police brutality, sad to say that it is quite pervasive. A citizen perceived as “un pinche indio” (a ******* Indian) or “un negro” or a “pardo” (mixed race), is an easy target for casual violence. But an ill-trained, badly paid police officer, who can be confident of impunity, exposes all but the most powerful of Mexicans to the risk of arbitrary violence.

A footnote concerning statues out of favour in USA:

A friend in Indianapolis tells me that in 1912 a monument was erected to commemorate 1500 Confederate prisoners of war buried in mass graves. In the 1920s the remains of the prisoners were reburied in another cemetery and the monument moved to a park. The central plinth was surmounted by the word “pax” and bronze tablets recorded the names and units of the dead men. After the Black Lives Matter protests in Indianapolis, the monument was taken apart and the pieces removed to an undisclosed location. This means that the names of those buried are no longer recorded. For example, a descendant who wants to know what happened to an ancestor who might have been one of those who died in captivity in Indianapolis can no longer find this out. I think this has taken historical erasure too far, with no benefit to anybody. None of us can know whether one or more of these 1,500 men were good or bad characters, simply that they fought and died for a cause that is now judged much more harshly than it was in their lifetimes, some 150 years ago.