Slavery’s offense deepened when birth, not conquest, naturalized the status.

Evidence

The pattern is plain in the Americas. For example, of the 170 viceroys in Spanish America prior to 1813, only 4 were creoles. These figures are all the more startling if we note that in 1800 less than 5% of the 3,200,000 creole ‘whites’ in the Western Empire (imposed on about 13,700,000 indigenes) were Spain-born Spaniards. On the eve of the revolution in Mexico, there was only one creole bishop, although creoles in the viceroyalty outnumbered peninsulares by 70 to 1.33 And, needless to say, it was nearly unheard-of for a creole to rise to a position of official importance in Spain. Moreover, the pilgrimages of creole functionaries were not merely vertically barred. If peninsular officials could travel the road from Zaragoza to Cartagena, Madrid, Lima, and again Madrid, the ‘Mexican’ or ‘Chilean’ creole typically served only in the territories of colonial Mexico or Chile: his lateral movement was as cramped as his vertical ascent. In this way, the apex of his looping climb, the highest administrative centre to which he could be assigned, was the capital of the imperial administrative unit in which he found himself. Yet on this cramped pilgrimage he found travelling-companions, who came to sense that their fellowship was based not only on that pilgrimage’s particular stretch, but on the shared fatality of trans-Atlantic birth. Even if he was born within one week of his father’s migration, the accident of birth in the Americas consigned him to subordination – even though in terms of language, religion, ancestry, or manners he was largely indistinguishable from the Spain-born Spaniard. There was nothing to be done about it: he was irremediably a creole. Yet how irrational his exclusion must have seemed! Nonetheless, hidden inside the irrationality was this logic: born in the Americas, he could not be a true Spaniard; ergo, born in Spain, the peninsular could not be a true American. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 227 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial birth itself, not behavior, barred creoles from imperial office — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 227; Selective naturalization of a few Africans masked continued subjecthood of most

Related

• Colonial birth itself, not behavior, barred creoles from imperial office (similarity 0.88)

Broader Connections

• Selective naturalization of a few Africans masked continued subjecthood of most #expands (0.75)
• Colonial birth itself, not behavior, barred creoles from imperial office #expands (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 227