Spanish colonial law aimed to keep colonized peoples in perpetual legal minority

Evidence

The great principle of the Spanish law respecting the Indians,” writes Herman Merivale in his extraordinarily revealing lectures on colonization in the early 1840s, “was that of preserving them in a state of perpetual minority” (1841/1928: 6, emphasis in original). — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 2245

Categorization

• DEFINE: Merivale’s phrase ‘perpetual minority’ captures the legal fiction at the heart of colonial governance — colonized adults treated as permanent legal wards.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s continued thread on the racial state by naming the precise legal mechanism — guardianship/minority — through which racial subordination is formalized, rather than merely social. — connects to: Spanish mining law declared natives owners while they were worked to death — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 337