The Caste System and the Development of the Mestizo The following selections from Sons of the Shaking Earth, Eric Wolf's provocative study of Mexican colonial society, describe the mestizo, his development and growth. In this selection we can see that macho behavior comes from the disenfranchised group that became a majority in the Colonial caste system, and helps us see where some of the aggressive behavior originated. Note: I have highlighted the text that I see as particularly pertinent to macho behavior.

[In Mexican Colonial society] to gain wealth, to improve his chances in life, to secure a newly won position against competitors, a man needed connections... In the strongly centralized government of New Spain, only a few doors led into the sanctuary of power in Mexico City; only the wealthiest and the most powerful could gain entrance, through ties of marriage or offers of profitable collusion. Inevitably, therefore, the colonists came to be divided into the well connected, for whom all things were easy, and the unconnected, who found their paths barred by invisible hands, their holdings and wealth eroded by lack of political guaranties. Where the well connected flourished, the unconnected had to content themselves with humbler returns on their capital. Increasingly, they found themselves edged out, pushed into provincial areas too mountainous or too far from city markets or lacking in potential labor to support large holdings. Steadily and implacably, they came to feel the narrowness of their circumstances. As holdings grew smaller, fathers found it ever more difficult to provide their daughters with proper dowries, their sons with farms adequate to maintain them. Their inability to entail their estates, to keep their wealth inviolate, forced many of the sons into the poorly paid priesthood or into petty officialdom.

[At the same time, r[ather than resign their positions, the elite families bound themselves ever more tightly to Spain, seeking in the mother country both their marriage partners and their political replacements. For the unconnected, the pattern of life descended from dignified poverty to bare existence, without title to property, without guaranties in court.

Deprived of a place in the sun, relegated to the byways and back alleys of society, all these varieties of men encountered one another in common destitution along the trail, in mining camps, in hostelries, in city taverns. Recognizing their common fate, they produced common offspring, resulting in an ever -increasing number of mixed physical types.

These the colonial authorities called "colored" people or castes, following the traditional Iberian usage of "caste" for color. Later it became fashionable to call them mestizos or mixed bloods, or ladinos, a term which meant somebody Latinized and therefore wise to the ways of the world.

At first, the members of this group were relatively few. By the end of the eighteenth century [however], the Indian population of New Spain had quadrupled, to a total of about 5,200,000, but the castes had increased more than seventeen times, to a total of 2,270,000. From the end of the eighteenth century to the present, the Indian population of what was once New Spain has remained surprisingly stable. But during the same period, ... the mestizo population of Mexico and Guatemala has increased more than a hundredfold. In numbers the Indian has held his own; but it is clearly the mestizo who represents the future of Middle America.

Prejudice did not take root in Latin America until the nineteenth century, and then only briefly in restricted areas of the Caribbean, when the institution of Negro slavery was nearing its end. But in Middle America, the prejudice against castes, as indeed the prejudice against Indians, remained social prejudice. If the offspring of a mixed union gained wealth and standing, he could obtain from the pertinent authorities a legal paper that declared him to be "white." Thus the white group quickly became a social, not a racial, group, just as an Indian was any person, whatever his parents, acknowledged to be a member of an Indian community. In like fashion, castes or mestizos were neither 'white" nor "Indian," but embodiments of all whose social position made it impossible for them to join the other two groupings. What the colonial society feared was not the creation of mixed offspring but the growth of a large mass of unattached, disinherited, rootless people in its centers and along its margins. In their fear of the mestizo, men feared for the future of their social order.

Also, because men usually hate, dislike, or fear those of whom they avail themselves in the pursuit of socially concealed ends, feeling toward the mestizos came to be tinged with the mixed emotions of hidden complicity. This was perhaps most obvious in the sexual sphere, where men frequently claimed no responsibility for the mixed offspring they had fathered, leaving them to be raised by their usually destitute mothers. But resentment was generated also in other contacts of social life. There was little correspondence between law and reality in the utopian order of New Spain. The crown wished to deny the colonist his own supply of labor; the colonist obtained it illegally by attaching peons to his person and his land. Royal prescript supported the trade monopoly over goods flowing in and out of the colony; but along the edges of the law moved smugglers, cattle-rustlers, bandits, the buyers and sellers of clandestine produce. To blind the eyes of the law, there arose a multitude of scribes, lawyers, go-betweens, influence peddlers, and undercover agents, the coyotes In such a society, even the transactions of everyday life could smack of illegality; yet such illegality was the stuff of which this social order was made. Thus a tide of illegality and disorder seemed ever ready to swallow up the precariously defended islands of legality and privilege.

At the same time, the citizens of New Spain blamed the mestizo for those of their own activities that daily subverted an order of society they were formally committed to uphold.

Disinherited by society, the mestizo was also disinherited culturally. Deprived of a stable place in the social order, he could make only limited use of the heterogeneous cultural heritage left him by his varied ancestors... The Indian had little to contribute to the new ways of city, stock ranch, mine, or factory, beyond his inventory of household arts, his techniques for curing illness, his folk beliefs about the supernatural. The heritage of Spain had already undergone the simplification of transatlantic migration and Conquest; much of it the mestizo had to jettison still further, because it was not consonant with the erratic rhythm of his new life. His chances of survival lay neither in accumulating cultural furniture nor in cleaving to cultural norms, but in an ability to change, to adapt, to improvise. The ever shifting nature of his social condition forced him to move with guile and speed through the hidden passageways of society, not to commit himself to any one position or to any one spot. Always he would be called upon to seem both more or less than what he was, to be both more or less than what he seemed.

Thus the mestizo would come to be the very antithesis of the Indian. Where the Indian was rooted in a community, he would be rootless. Where the Indian clung stubbornly to the norms of his group, he would learn to change his behavior as other men assume or doff a mask. Where the Indian remained closed in upon himself, impervious to arguments raised beyond the confines of his local universe, he would have to make himself at home in the market place of goods, ideas, and people. The Indian could turn a face to the outside world that yielded no knowledge and accepted no premise of the larger society; but the mestizo would have to operate with its premises and logic, so as to be counted among "men of reason" (gente de razón), as non-Indians are called in Middle America. Where the Indian valued access to land, land to work by the sweat of his brow, the mestizo would value manipulation of people and situations. Above all, he would value power, the instrument that would make people listen where society granted him no voice and obey where the law yielded him no authority. Where the Indian saw power as an attribute of office and redistributed it with care lest it attach itself to persons, the mestizo would value power as an attribute of the self, as personal energy that could subjugate and subject people.

For the mestizo, power is not an attribute of groups. The group exists to back the individual; the individual does not exist for the group. The individual wish, the individual gesture, are paramount, subject only to a man's grip upon his fellow men. The measure of success is the readiness of others to serve him, to underwrite with their services his conspicuous consumption of time and goods. The outcome of defeat is bondage or death. There is no middle ground: if a man does not wish to be victor, he must needs be loser. Ultimately, all means are legitimate in this battle for personal control of people and things, even violence and death.

This struggle for power was more than a means: as a validation of self and of one's station in society, it became an end in itself. To the mestizo, the capacity to exercise power is ultimately sexual in character: a man succeeds because he is truly male (macho), possessed of sexual potency. While the Indian strives neither to control nor to exploit other men and women, the mestizo reaches for power over women as over men. As the urge for personal vindication through power is continuous and limitless, so the mestizo possesses "a limitless sexual deficit" which feeds merely upon past conquests. the mestizo male requires absolute ascendance over women. Thus even familial and personal relationships become battlegrounds of emotion, subject to defeat and to victory. As men expect hostility and aggression from others, so they rise to defend themselves with hostility and aggression. They advance upon each other, ever circumspect, ever ready to defend themselves, ever willing to take advantage of the chink in their opponent's armor. Personal encounters thus become daily dramas in which the participants transcend the limits of the workaday world through gestures of potency or submission. The ultimate gesture, however, is not the stance of the victor; it is the defiant posture of the victim who can turn defeat and death into triumph by a calm and derisive acceptance of his fate.

The Indian is reality-adjusted and reality-bound. Hard work and its fruits are his primary values; he knows that wishing does not make it so. The mestizo, in contrast, enjoys the play of fantasy. Standing on the edge of society, he has also come to stand on the edge of reality. Uncertain of backing from his fellows, he is thrown back on his own resources; propertyless and alienated, he often feels estranged from society. Wishing to escape reality, he has learned to "drown the pain of living" in alcohol or gambling, creating for himself an unreal world with unreal stakes. Despising life, he has learned to substitute the dream for unfriendly reality. He may rise suddenly on a crest of fantasy into a dream world of personal dominance, only to fall back into a trough of self-denigration, filled with feelings of misfortune and insufficiency. Rarely in tune with things as they are, he is in the words of José Iturriaga, "either above or below them." Yet, suspicious of reality, he is also suspicious of dreams. Dreams do not come true, and in a sudden reversal of moods he may pull himself back to the demands of life with a cynical joke. Thus he does not commit himself easily either to dream or to actuality. The dream may give him wings, unleash the energy for which he strives, but in the pursuit of energy the dream is but a means, the original catalyst. Dreaming, men retain a vast gift for improvisation, an ability to shift both ends and means that enables them to score a personal triumph where critics could predict only the failure of a cause.

The following are visual representations of the relationship between castes and machismo:

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