Castizo - Race

Race

Under the caste system of colonial Latin America, the term originally applied to the offspring resulting from the union of a European and a mestizo, that is, someone of three quarters European and one quarter Amerindian ancestry. During this era a myriad of other terms (mestizo, cuarterón de indio, etc.) were in use to denote other individuals of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry in ratios smaller or greater than that of castizos.

The term was mainly applied to mixed-race people who had a slightly darker complexion than what was assumed an unmixed Spaniard would have, but which were otherwise of European appearance with almost no visible admixture. Under this same caste system, the offspring of a Spaniard and a Castiza was classified as a criollo (legally, a Spaniard born in the Americas), thus the offspring regained his or her "purity of blood". (See the related concept of Limpieza de sangre.) For some castizos whose residual quarter of Amerindian ancestry was not apparent at all, many simply consolidated themselves within the criollos and Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain).

With the fall of the Spanish Empire, the numerous caste terminologies fell out of use and lost all meaning, other than the categories of White, Black, Amerindian, and their three possible resulting combinations; mestizo, mulato and zambo (the latter three, now without blood quantum connotations), as these legal categories were seen as incompatible with the new concept of citizenship.

Furthermore, by the second part of the 19th century, most Hispanic countries had abolished even these surviving categories of distinction among their citizens, and so the racial heritage of a person was no longer compiled by the state as part of the individual's civil record, whether to legally hinder or privilege him in matters of civil life. Some countries, however, have recently reintroduced voluntary and annonymous declarations of race (or race mixture) in recent population censuses for statistical purposes, with no legal consequence to the individual.

A person who formerly would have been deemed a Castizo, would today simply identify as mestizo or White. The word "castizo" itself has lost all racial meaning.