Question

what role did the spanish colonial caste system play in early 19th century revolution in the americas

Answer 1

In the colonial era, the Spanish American society had a pyramidal cast system with a few Spaniards at the top, mixed-race in the middle, and a large population of indigenous people, and a small number of slaves usually of African origin at the bottom. Although the size of the groups varied there was a hierarchy of power and social status observed during the colonial period. The Spaniards occupied the upper echelons of colonial society by holding all the positions of economic privilege and political power. However, there was a sharp split between the people born in Europe, peninsula, and those born in the Americas, creoles. Many castes in the Americas in the 19th Century were resentful of the racial, economic and land inequality present because of colonial rule and the rigid caste system imposed by the Spanish.

Answer 2

The terms colonial caste system and Indian caste system are historiographical denominations of the stratified social system that sought to impose on the Spanish possessions of America ("the Indies" or the "New World") an order based on ethnic inequality. A social hierarchy dominated at the top was formed by the "Spaniards" (peninsulares and criollos, a minority of increasingly exclusive potentates that settled as a colonial aristocracy of European origin and "white race", submitted to the statutes of blood cleansing ), and under them, at a great distance in political, economic and prestige power, the "Indians" (or "natives", Native Americans) and the "blacks" (coming from Africa through the slave trade of "black race") . In intermediate positions, a variegated multiplicity of miscegenation situations. Each category, theoretically closed to social ascent, was characterized by a specialized socio-economic position, linked to its socially recognized racial identity.

Finally, the collapse of the caste system was due to the great social mobility, product of the same miscegenation that had helped to create them. In this way there was a process of caste amalgamation, composed of relatively uniform human types in customs, ideas and status social, which would accelerate more during the Spanish-American Wars of Independence, until the collapse of the colonial caste system as a result of the war over the white aristocracy, and ended later with the slavery of the African Negro, abolished in the first years of existence of the new Hispano-American countries.