We explain who the Creoles were in colonial America, their customs and their relationship with the mestizos. Also, the origin of the term.
Who were the Creoles?
During the colonial times of Latin America, the society was divided into social classes and racial, which assigned individuals a place and a hierarchy depending on their ethnic origins. At that time the term criollos (or creole whites) was used to refer to the persons born on American soil, but descendants of European whites, especially peninsular Spaniards.
Creole whites were part of the privileged caste of the Suburb, being white, but they were in a lower category than Europeans. In fact, the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century prevented them from accessing the political leadership (public offices) or ecclesiastical (religious offices) of colonial society, and in Viceroyalties such as New Spain, white Creoles were prevented from marrying. with peninsular officials.
Such measures were aimed at limiting the power of the criollos, since they owned most of the agrarian property and controlled most of the land. Commerce, which gave them an important economic power and great social prestige, which constituted a threat to the colonial control of Spain.
Paradoxically, the European attempts to limit the power of the Creoles were conferring more and more an identity of their own, fundamental to feed their independence desires that in the 19th century would unleash the Spanish American Wars of Independence.
Origin of the term
The Creole term comes from the word Creole from Portuguese, and in turn from the verb to breed, so that in principle the Creoles are those individuals who are raised in a certain territory. This use of the word, in fact, survives to this day, when it is spoken of traditions Creoles (that is, local), Creole cuisine, and even the Creole breed of horses, the only Native American.
On the other hand, just as there were Creole whites, there were also Creole blacks: slaves black born in Americadescendants of those captives brought from Africa to America to serve as workforce in the colony. However, the term is usually used for the white caste, whose privileged position made it an important historical actor of the time.
The Creole word is used today in much of Hispanic America as synonymous of “local”, that is, as representative of the culture particular to the region, without making major racial or ethnic distinctions in this regard. In fact, "criollismo" is called the nationalist cultural movement of appreciation and visibility of the Latin American.
The latter does not mean that in the Creole the white, black and indigenous heritage of the Hispanic American culture are represented in equal parts, of course. In fact, the precise meaning of "criollo" can vary enormously within Latin American geography, and even have connotations associated with virility, national pride, and other elements of prestige.
Creole customs
Creole clothing tended to ostentation and decorum.The American Creoles in colonial times classified themselves as white, distancing themselves from the aborigines ("Indians" in colonial jargon) and Africans, as well as the extensive classification of mestizo castes, the result of the intense miscegenation that characterized the region. So, broadly speaking, the customs and culture of the Creoles was, essentially, a local reworking of the peninsular ones.
That does not mean that they were identical. In fact, the Creoles were easily distinguishable from their European counterparts, because as time went by, the Spanish-American and Spanish peninsular cultures were distancing themselves in their cultural, social and even religious practices.
Creoles used to meet their peers at parties, gatherings and celebrations, and embraced the Catholic faith and traditions inherited from Europe. His education, in many cases, took shape in the Old Continent, especially in France, where many of them absorbed the culture of the Illustration and their republican values that would later inspire the ideals of the independence revolution.
Creole clothing varied by region, but tended toward ostentation and decorum, given that they were the local elite of their societies. For the society ladies' dresses, for example, imported fabrics from Europe and the textile labor of the family's slaves or servants were used.
The Creoles were possessors of lands and therefore also of slaves, and in general their gastronomic customs differed from those of the peninsula by adapting to the food grown on American soil.
Creoles and mestizos
While the Creoles were the whites born in America, the mestizos were instead those American citizens who were the fruit of miscegenation. That is, the mestizos were descendants of the different ethnic groups involved in colonial society: white, black and Indian.
Legally, the mestizos were Spanish citizens and legally equal to the Creole whites. Therefore, they could own property and freely engage in commerce, without the obligation to pay. tax to the crown as the Indians were obliged, nor live under forced labor like slaves.
However, the role of the mestizos in society was very different from that of the Creoles, since the whiteness of the latter placed them in a privileged situation, not to mention the economic power accumulated by their families. In many cases, a mestizo with fair skin and refined manners could well pass for Creole white, and the rules of differentiation of racial castes were not always observed in colonial society.
In fact, the term brown was popularized in the regions of strong African migration, to name the descendants of the mixture between blacks, indigenous people and whites, whose factions and skin color could become indeterminable within the racial classification of the time, constituting a sort of “ sack of cats ”racial fruit of the mixture.
Creole languages
When speaking of Creole languages, the same meaning of this word should not be used, since in reality it is the set of mestizo languages or dialects, the result of the hybridization between European languages (such as Spanish, French or English) and native African or indigenous languages.
The fruit of this linguistic mix is often referred to as Creole or as creole, and is prevalent in regions of abundant African migration during colonial times. Some examples of Creole languages still in existence are Panamanian Creole, Nicaraguan Creole English, Patois or Jamaican Creole, Bichelamar, Ndyuka, Louisiana French Creole, or Costa Rican Mekatelyu.