I found this week’s readings about how the concepts of race and class interacted very interesting. As Alec Dawson pointed out in the podcast, the entire society was organized around this hierarchy of difference, where a small ruling class categorized and ruled over numerous other diverse groups. It goes without saying that the people who found themselves at the bottom of the constructed social ladder would desire change.

Given this nature of this system, I wonder how it lasted for centuries of colonial rule. Of course, we read about the occasional slave revolt or an idealist who campaigned against the casta system, but nevertheless it seems as though a method of organization that alienated such significant portions of the population would have collapsed much sooner. What was it about this racial governance that allowed it to carry on?

Again, there are numerous historical examples of indigenous or slave revolts throughout Latin America, but they were rarely successful. Were these slaves who revolted accurate representations of the general thought among the entire population of slaves in their particular country, or were they exceptions? In other worlds, did most people of Indigenous or African descent see themselves as equal to whites, or were these ideas about race so pervasive that it effected the thinking of the very members of those groups? There is evidence for this from Josephina Pelliza de Sagasta, who argued that women should just accept their role in society rather than push for systemic change. In this time of transition, where the very notion of belonging to a nation was changing.

In this weeks readings we also saw how after emancipation, the ruling elites found scientific evidence (or rather, what was accepted as scientific evidence at the time) to claim that whiteness was an indicator of general fitness to rule. This shows how deeply embedded the want of racial categorization still was in post-emancipation societies. Even after hard-fought campaigns to eliminate slavery, the ruling class maintained racialized institutions to attempt to keep other groups in line.

It seems to me that history has shown that people in positions of power adapt to a changing political climate. Even as there was increasing desire for change among non-white groups and women, the balance of power merely adjusted but remained functionally intact. Ultimately, it was up to members of a social group to change their thinking about themselves, rather than accept changes handed down from the top of the social hierarchy.