Taxing Blackness: Tribute and Free-colored Community in Colonial Mexico
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Date
2014-05-19
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Royal tribute from free people of African descent, though an insignificant source of revenue for the Spanish Crown, defined community, family, and reputation (calidad) for the purposes of the colonial regime in eighteenth-century Mexico. “Taxing Blackness” uses royal tribute registers to show how bureaucrats and local officials delineated communities around shared financial obligations. By defining tributaries in relation to one another—as spouses, children, or neighbors—bureaucrats used tributary status to distinguish free-colored communities and genealogies from those of Spaniards, Indians, or other people of mixed ancestry. In theory, these methods would lead to more efficient collection, though this goal proved elusive. The dissertation compares these quantitative data with petitions from free-coloreds for tribute exemption in which individuals and families interpreted and deployed ideas about lineage and privilege to improve their economic lives and reputations. This approach peels away the layers of meaning in calidad, a description of reputation ubiquitous in the eighteenth century. This dissertation finds that the majority of free-colored tributaries were people with families whose livelihoods and reputations depended upon satisfying colonial obligations, including royal tribute. Genealogy, privilege, and calidad characterized tributary subjecthood in the eighteenth century.
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Keywords
Afromexico, Royal tribute, New Spain, Calidad, Taxation, Gender, Genealogy