USOS, GENERACION Y CONTROLES

The Town Council of Mexico, representing the largest and wealthiest city of the empire, voted him gifts and recorded their approval of his

theories, encouraging him to continue his advocacy of Spanish domination

Quoted in Phelan, ’Conflicting Spanish Imperial Ideologies', 47-51. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that his Opera appeared in print and the book that was the immediate cause of the Valladolid dispute was not published until 1892; Hanke, Struggle

of the peoples of the colonies. Although unofficial, the position

adopted by Sepulveda was most congenial to those Spaniards who, as

officials and colonists, settled in the colonies and adopted an attitude

of racial superiority to the natives they controlled. His thesis that

Spaniards were superior to Indians intellectually, culturally and morally

was reflected in the colonial mentality which emerged in the Philippines

as in Spanish America by the second generation of Spanish rule.

Assumptions less harshly expressed but still based on the idea

that the peoples of the colonies were innately inferior to Spaniards

actually received official recognition when colonial policy was finally

regulated by the Laws of the Indies published in 1681. In this basic

code, the Indians were presented as minors, rather than fully responsible

adults, to be protected by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities.

The implication was clear that they lacked the intellectual and moral 37

capacity to order their own lives. Racial distinctions which were

benevolent in intention carried the other message that relations between

Spaniards and Indians were those between superiors and inferiors. Though

in qualified form, the unequal colonial relationship was officially

sane t i o n e d .

Spanish attitudes to the colonised peoples of America and the

Philippines differed from the growing intolerance of Muslims and Jews

evident in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but there was

probably some transference of discriminatory assumptions fostered during

the final century of the reconquest to the colonial situation. The

36

lb i d .

37

concept of limpieza de sangre was peculiarly Spanish and preoccupied Spanish thinkers from the fifteenth century onwards as they debated the status and rights of conversos or New Christians. The question at issue was whether the descendants of Jewish or Muslim converts could be accorded full rights in church and state with Spanish Old Christians. One by one, the religious orders themselves succumbed to political suspicions and economic jealousies affecting relations between Old and New Christians, and adopted discriminatory statutes against Catholics

38

of ’impure’ descent.' The founding of the Spanish Inquisition in 1480 provided the principal vehicle for the spread of limpleza statutes

within cathedral chapters, monastic, communit ies, the universities, and religious courts. While limpleza statutes reflected the political and religious concerns of the reconquista in Spain and had only an indirect influence on policies adopted in the New World they officially encouragd a hostility to miscegenation between Spaniards and Jews or Muslims which could be transferred into a prejudice against the children of sexual relations between Spaniards and Indians in the colonies. Limpieza

statutes were attacked in Spain from as early as 1449 and they had only a brief and limited application in the Philippines, at a time when, during

The Franciscans adopted a statute of limpieza de sangre excluding all Christians of Jewish descent from the Order in 1525 and the Dominicans followed soon after. These measures were confirmed by the definitive statement adopted by the Cathedral Chapter of Toledo in 1547 at the instance of the Archbishop, Juan Martinez Siliceo. In 1555 and 1556, first the Pope and then Philip II recognised such distinctions with­ in the Spanish Church. The Jesuits stood out longest, accepting a modified form of the limpieza statute in 1608. See Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (London, 1965), 129-30. See also Magnus MÖrner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston, 1967), 13. European candidates for the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus in the seventeenth century were required to prove their limpleza de sangre; de la Costa, Jesuits, 236-37.

the reign of Philip IV (1623-1665), the long process of dismantling them 39

had begun in Spain. Nevertheless, limpieza statutes reflected an aspect of sixteenth century Spanish prejudice which provided part of the general mental context within which colonial policies were made. When, influenced by later eighteenth and nineteenth century racial

theories, the Spanish regulars in the Philippines denounced the leaders of the revolution as depraved mestizos, this new and more virulent modern form of racism had these older discriminatory assumptions as a precedent.

In the Philippines, for the whole of the Spanish period, the Spanish regulars generally discouraged too much contact between the

Filipinos under their charge and private Spaniards, partly to protect the Filipinos from the abuses of Spanish adventurers and colonists, and partly to keep them pure in the faith quarantined from irreligious and corrupt

40

ideas. Colonial society was conceived as dualistic, divided between the Spanish stratum of peninsulares, criollos and legitimate, fully

Hispanicised mestizos and the mass of the Indians; a division formulated in the early concept of the two republics, the Republica de Espanoles

✓ 41

and the Republica de Indios. In the Philippines the religious orders

Regulations adopted for the collegiates of the Seminary of San Felipe de Austria in 1641 forbade acceptance of candidates for the priesthood with 'a fourth part of Filipino blood'; Blair and

Robertson, XLV, 175. Restrictions on the ordination of Indians and mestizos in the Philippines will be discussed in the following chapter. Attacks on the limpieza statutes in Spain began with Alonso de

Cartagena's Defensorium Unitatis Christianae of 1449-1450, and continued throughout the sixteenth century; Kamen, op. cit., 129.

40

'The Friar Memorial of 1898', op, cit., 245. 41

managed to maintain this policy until the nineteenth century when easier communication between the islands and Spain and an influx of Spanish colonists, adding to the rapid rise of a Spanish-Chinese mestizo

42

population made the policy untenable. As in the Americas marriages

between Spaniards and Indians were recognised by church and state but

were not encouraged. Marriage regulations drawn up by the crown in the

late eighteenth century decreed that ’information on the purity of blood 43 should not include the Indian race among bad and deficient races'.

In practice, however, the children of mixed marriages faced official as

well as social discrimination. The concept of the two republics was

not racist in intention and, as the New Laws set out, the Indians were

free vassals and subjects of the crown as much as the Spaniards. Never­

theless, the Indians were collectively regarded as the base of the social

pyramid equivalent to ’miserable rustics’ in Spain. Their rights and

44

restrictions on their actual independence were counterbalanced. The

emergence, of a wealthy and educated mestizo class in the Philippines

confused the original concept of a dual society but by drawing up elaborate categories of racial mixtures and by generally assuming the mestizo group to be an accretion rather than an integral part of Filipino society, the

friars attempted to preserve the two cultures theory and thus justify

their special role as guardians and teachers of indio society. The fiction

42

Hörner concludes that the official policy of separating the Spaniards and the Indians, worked out in the 16th century and legislated in the Laws of the Indies was largely ineffective in Spanish America

by the middle of the 18th century; ibid., 47.

43

Ibid., 44. 44

of a colony ethnically divided on the lines of the first decades of missionary work remained a necessary presupposition for the orders'

claim to be essential for the religious and social life of the Filipinos. This need to maintain the special relationship between the Spanish priest and his indio parishioner in order to justify both Spanish rule and the control of the Philippine Church by the orders is part of the explanation for the gradual intensification of racial distinctions in the colony at a time when such distinctions were being challenged and discarded in Spain. The more stringent and discriminatory measures taken against mestizo aspirants to the priesthood in the nineteenth century were moti­ vated largely by the fear that a mestizo clergy, like mestizo lawyers, doctors, merchants, and intellectuals would challenge the 'most enviable peace and felt respect to authority' prevailing among a simple indio population which, without the intrigues of an elite, would obey Spanish authority without question, 'by conscience, by education, by tradition,

45 by social habit, passively and by custom'.

The sixteenth century legacy was complex. Rather than one,

official and orthodox view of the colonial relationship between Spaniard and Indian, the legacy was ambivalent and even contradictory. Rival factions within the Spanish colonial elite could draw on one or another of the various theories of empire debated during the sixteenth century to support rationalisations congenial to their particular material or political interests. The crown did enunciate a legal code for the proper relations between colonist and colonised and theologians in the Dominican

45

,

tradition did achieve a certain success in establishing a benign view of the purpose of Spain's sovereignty but the sixteenth century 'model' was complex enough for advocates of contradictory views of colonialism to find within it support for their arguments without conscious

hypocrisy. Nevertheless, however ambiguous, the sixteenth century

legacy was recognised by later generations of churchmen as a real and profound influence on their understanding of the colonial church and

of their role in the colonies. In time, it assumed an authority which

limited the range of options open to the Spanish religious in their

response to changing conditions. The conservatism which was to become

the strongest feature of Spanish-Philippine Catholicism was already apparent within a few decades of the conquest, corresponding to a grow­

ing rigidity and authoritarianism in Spanish culture remarked by

historians of the late sixteenth century. The creative energies of the

intellectual revival of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had settled into formalism and institutionalised conformity which placed fidelity to sources and the inherited patterns of thought they contained

above originality and innovation. Thus, proponents of the new science

were opposed by 'conservative scholastics [who] endlessly repeated the

doctrines and methods of the medieval schoolmen'. The writings of

Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas were treated as received truth by their 4 6

disciplines and their denial as equivalent to heresy. The Protestant

Reformation encouraged religious conservatism in Spain and gave further impetus to a Thomist revival which stressed the need for exact and

4