1

RACE AND ETHNICITY

Turning to real history, there can be no doubt, first,
as to the widespread, nay, universal, prevalence of
the race idea. . . .
W. E. B. Dubois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897)

TABLE 1.1
POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES: PERCENT OF
TOTAL BY “RACE,” 2000*
WHITE 75.1
BLACK 12.5
HISPANIC 12.3
ASIAN 3.4
NATIVE AMERICAN 0.9
*Source: Bureau of the Census, 2001. The percentages add up to more than
100 percent because people were allowed to choose more than one race. The
Hawaiian population was 0.1 percent.

The population of the United States in 2000 reached 281,421,906. In

the last thirty years, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, and Native
Americans have increased their numbers faster than the white majority.
In the 1970 census, these four groups made up about 16 percent of the
U.S. population. By 2000, according to the census conducted that year,
the proportion had grown to 29 percent. The United States Census
Bureau estimates that by 2050 these groups will make up almost 50
percent of the population.
2 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

SCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATIONS
The classification of people by race and ethnicity is not
easy. As we will see, even the definition of race is under dispute and
changes dramatically over time. Some people believe everything about
an individual is determined by his or her racial characteristics, which
are biologically inherited through the genes. They think everything
about a person’s character, including his or her intelligence and
behavior, results from racial inheritance. Most modern scientists see
race as nothing more than a method of dividing people by the color of
their skin, which turns out to be a rather insignificant biological factor.
The director of the Human Genome Project has estimated that less than
1 percent of human genetic variations are the result of race. And in
1998 the American Anthropological Association described race as “a
worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human
differences and group behavior.”
Ethnicity in the United States, on the other hand, is based on a
person’s ancestral homeland—a person is Polish because his or her
ancestors came from that part of Europe designated as Poland when
they migrated to the United States. In Europe, ethnicity is based on
language and geography. The French people are the people who live
within the borders of France and speak French. But what if Algerian or
Belgian or African immigrants speak French and reside within the
physical boundaries of that place on the map we call France? Are they
French? Many Africans do speak French because France was their
colonial master (and French is still the official language of nations like
Chad and Niger)—are they French then because they speak the
language, eat French food, and know a lot about French history and
politics? Yes, they are, just as in the United States, under whose
Constitution anyone born within the geographical boundaries of the
country is a citizen, regardless of the nationality, race, or legal status of
one’s parents.

CENSUS BUREAU CLASSIFICATIONS

Racial statistics for the United States come from the Census Bureau,
which classifies people according to some very broad standards.
Census workers generally accept the classification chosen by the
respondent. If you mark that you are white on your form you will be
counted as white, even if you are Botswanian. This procedure creates
some interesting problems. How do you classify a person whose
mother in Asian and whose father is African American? Or whose
mother is half Italian and half African while the father is one-fourth
Mexican, one-fourth Native American, one-fourth Greek, and one-
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 3

fourth Jewish? (Interestingly, for most of American history both would

have been classified as black.) In 2000, for the first time, the Census
Bureau allowed respondents to designate two or more racial groups,
and 2.4 percent chose this option.
In 2000 the government accepted six racial classifications: Hispanic
(which included all Mexicans, Central Americans, South Americans,
Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, and people from Spain or Portugal); White
(not of Hispanic origin); Black or African American (not of Hispanic
origin); Asian; American Indian (including Alaskan Native, Alaskan
Eskimo, and Aleut); and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander.
These classifications were voluntary; respondents could choose any
race or combination of races.

RACE AND BIOLOGY

The American Heritage dictionary defines race as “one of the great
divisions of mankind with certain inherited physical characteristics in
common, such as the color of skin and hair, and the shape of the eyes
and nose.” The meaning of race has changed significantly throughout
history. Modern biologists use the term to define a subspecies, part of a
species of animal that looks different from other members because of
separation over time. For instance, an earthquake or a flood may
separate a species of squirrels so that individuals will never have
contact with the squirrels on the other side of the divide. Over time
each separate community will develop different characteristics in
response to unique conditions in its habitat. This is how races develop
—through isolation over long periods of time and in response to
differing environments.
R The key scientific difference between a race and a species is that
races can breed with all members of the species they belong to, and
most species generally include several races or subspecies as biologists
call them. Different species, such as lions and tigers, or cats and dogs,
cannot breed with each other. Different races within the species,
however, such as collies and German shepherds, can and do have
offspring.
All life forms, both plant and animal, are classified according to their
structure and genetic inheritance. Such classification is necessary to
bring order out of the seeming chaos of nature. And sometimes the
classifications are surprising. Recently, scientists studying DNA
(deoxyribonucleic acid)—the material that determines an individual’s
genetic inheritance—concluded that animals as different as elephants
and aardvarks had a common ancestor that probably lived about one
hundred million years ago in Africa. Modern researchers believe that,
4 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

although there is no physical likeness between ten-thousand-

pound elephants and twenty-pound aardvarks, their DNA is
similar enough to provide convincing evidence of their distant kinship.
DNA similarities show that the human species has a common
ancestor who lived somewhere in east Africa about seven million years
ago, and from whom all modern races have evolved. Clearly, all six
billion humans now living in the world share more than 99.7 percent of
the same genetic materials. In this way, we are all related regardless of
skin color, blood type, capacity of the brain, nose shape, or hair texture.
Modern biologists recognize that human DNA shows that we all
include genetic material derived from one woman, and that she lived in
Africa several thousand generations ago.
The animal and plant kingdoms contain millions of species and
subspecies (races). Humans are classified as follows: animal kingdom,
phylum Chordata, class Mammalia, order Primate, family Hominidae,
genus Homo, species Homo sapiens. We are the only living members of
that species, all six billion of us.

SOCIAL DEFINITIONS OF RACE

A lot of confusion has existed over the use of the word race. The
biological definition refers to blood types and other things that are
transmitted by DNA from parents to their children. This definition has
nothing to do with the nationality, the language, or the customs of
individuals. Thus there is no French race, no American race, no Russian
race, and no African race. There are French, American, Russian, and
African people and languages, but these have nothing to do with DNA.
Better terms to use when discussing different groups of human beings
based on what language they speak or what customs they use are:
nations, peoples, and civilizations. These terms define differences
between communities based on their historical development, their
customs, and their languages—and none of these things are biologically
determined. They are human creations and therefore they are subject to
change as ideas and cultures grow or decline in response to new
environments or historical events. It is easier to change customs and
languages, for example, than to change genetic inheritance, or at least it
has been until these days of genetic engineering.

Scientists who study the development of human races believe that

none of the observed skin color differences among humans are
important from a scientific perspective. If they are considered
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 5

important it is because people want color to be significant; using race to

define people is a cultural development and subject to change. Ideas
concerning the importance of color differ from place to place and time
to time. In Brazil, for example, only a person of direct African ancestry
is a black, whereas at different times in the United States a person who
was seven-eighths European and one-eighth (or even less) African
would be considered “black.” Had this person moved to Rio de Janeiro,
he or she would become “white” without changing anything about his
or her skin color.

RACISM
Many societies distinguish among individuals because of skin color
or other physical characteristics. Some societies make racial
distinctions important by suggesting that skin color is linked to
differences in intelligence, morality, and behavior. These are racist
societies. Racism is a theory of human character that suggests that
differences in ability, taste, intelligence, and culture can be explained
by the biological inheritance of skin color. German National Socialists
(Nazis), for example, believed that all of human history is a struggle
between races and that race is biologically determined. After Adolf
Hitler came to power in 1933, his government established a Race and
Settlement Office to conduct research to determine the suitability of
wives for members of Hitler’s elite SS forces. Two years later Germany
passed the Nuremberg laws, which established a biological definition
of “Jewishness.” Later, those labeled as Jews were arrested and killed
because of their membership in a so-called inferior race. This was
racism in its rawest and most violent form.

PREJUDICE
Prejudice is a way of thinking based on racist ideas. It is defined as
learned beliefs and values that could lead to an opinion or feeling that
strongly favors or disfavors an individual or a group. For instance, to
say of someone “he is prejudiced toward Indians,” means that he hates
them without knowing anything about them, or even knowing any
Native American people. He just hates them! He believes they are
savage and barbaric because that is the image of American Indians that
he carries in his mind. A stereotype is the first picture that comes to
mind when you hear a particular term—such as Italian. What first
comes to mind when you hear Chinese? Japanese? Mexican? Are your
pictures positive or negative?

DISCRIMINATION
6 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

Prejudice does not have to lead to any action. Prejudiced

people can sit in their homes and hate whomever they want; as
long as they take no action this hate does not lead to harm, at least for
the people being hated. Discrimination, on the other hand, refers to
negative ideas, images, or stereotypes about groups or individuals that
lead to action. Discrimination means putting prejudice into action, such
as when people join hate groups or talk with others about the alleged
defects of the people they hate. For example, a person may be
prejudiced against Arabian people, thinking of them as terrorists” or
“mad bombers.” When that person calls for laws keeping Arabs out of
the United States, this behavior is discrimination. Entire societies can
practice discrimination by passing laws taking away the rights of
people for prejudiced reasons, as happened in 1882 when the United
States Congress approved the Chinese Restriction Act, which barred
anyone of Chinese ancestry from entering the country.

THE HOLOCAUST
Historical examples of prejudice and discrimination are many. The
prejudice and discrimination displayed toward Jews in Europe and
especially in Germany during the nineteenth century and into World
War II provides a particularly deadly example of the horrible crimes
committed by nations legalizing hate and prejudice. In 1942 Adolf
Hitler told one of his aides:

The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest

revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle in
which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle
waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch
[scientists who researched the causes of epidemics]. How
many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We
shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.
Everything has a cause, nothing comes by chance.

The Nazis attempted to kill all the Jews in Europe during World War
II strictly because of their race. Race meant everything to the Nazi
party. People’s “blood” determined their destiny in Hitler’s Germany.
Nazism provided the world with the purest form of racist thinking in
the history of civilization. By the time they were finished, the
follower’s of Hitler had killed more than 5,800,000 people because
they were considered racially inferior.

ETHNIC GROUPS
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 7

The word ethnic comes from the Greek ethnos, which refers to a
nation or people. The term “ethnic group” refers to a group of people
who have a shared cultural and historical experience. The historical
experience of group members usually involves some kind of suffering
or abuse, frequently in the distant past. Or an ethnic group might evolve
simply because people speak the same language or share the same
religious beliefs or customs. Not all nations or peoples form an ethnic
group. Nations such as Brazil or Russia or the United States contain
large numbers of groups, each with a distinct language and culture.
What makes the people in these groups members of a nation is simply
the fact that they live within the borders of a specific country.
Nationalism is different from ethnicity. You can be a member of the
Ukrainian ethnic group in Moscow and still be proud to be a Russian.
Or you can speak Spanish in the United States and still take pride in
being a member of the American nation. Nationalism is based on
loyalty to a government or leader; ethnicity usually is not. Instead it is
based on loyalty to traditional customs and a specific language or
historical record.
Ethnicity gets very confusing. The terms Indian people and African
people can refer to hundreds of different ethnic groups and cultures,
some of which might hate each other. There are, after all, hundreds of
different languages in Africa, and in North America alone there may
have been at one time as many as five hundred different Indian
cultures, each of which could be considered an ethnic group.
Ethnic groups are created out of similarities in language, culture, and
historical experience. Many times the historical experiences that create
ethnicity are bad ones. Typically a group of people has been exploited,
enslaved, or treated miserably by some other group. Over time this
memory creates a feeling of hatred toward the exploiters, and a call for
the creation of some new, independent people is heard. An ethnic group
is born.
Ethnic groups sensitive to these past injustices build barriers and
create separate communities for their members, apart from the hated
conqueror or oppressor. Separation can be physical (walls can be built
or individuals can refuse to live next to the enemy or to marry one of
them). Or the separation can be emotional (a father can teach his son to
hate those “savages who took our land from us and killed your
grandfather”). The point is that individuals decide to remain apart from
the enemy community. Ethnic feelings based on this kind of historic
hate frequently explode into violence, hostility, and mass killing.

SEGREGATION
8 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

Ethnic groups can be either cultural or racial. The key is that

people who share a negative experience end up feeling hostile
and resentful toward their abusers. They decide to maintain a
distinction between themselves and the others. Keeping those
boundaries closed becomes the chief occupation of group members.
Boundaries can be maintained by territorial segregation—”you must
live there and we will live here”—or by refusing to participate in the
activities of the oppressors. They can be maintained by sticking to
patterns of thought and feeling that are totally at odds with the attitudes
of the hated majority, or by sustaining the memory of historical abuse
for generations through stories, songs, and poetry.
Segregation involves physical separation of one group from another.
Many times both the conquerors and the conquered want to maintain
this separation. The conquering community wants the separation
because it sees the conquered as criminal and inferior (“if they were as
good as us, they would not have been defeated”). The conquered group
resents the conquest and hates being treated unequally and unfairly, so
it avoids contact with the enemy.

INTEGRATION
Integration is a measure of how well a majority group accepts a
racial or ethnic minority. The rate of inter-group marriage (marriage
between persons of different races or ethnic communities) is an
indicator of integration and whether groups accept each other as equals.
Statistics show that between 1960 and 1990 in the United States,
interracial marriages more than tripled as a percentage of all married
couples. But this rate still accounted for only 4 percent of all married
couples in 1990, which shows that there is still a high degree of
separation based on race in the United States. African Americans and
whites are least likely to marry outside their groups (less than 2 percent
of all marriages within each group take place outside that community).
When whites marry members of minority groups, they are least likely
to marry African Americans (less than three-quarters of 1 percent of all
marriages are in this category). What does this indicate about white
people’s views of African Americans?

ASSIMILATION AND ACULTURATION

hating each other include: Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi,
two small African nations; Jews and Christians in Europe for much of
history since the fall of the Roman Empire; the Irish and the English;
Poles and Russians; Slavs and Croats in southeastern Europe,
Albanians and Slavs in the Balkans; Chechnians and Russians; and
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 9

Armenians and Turks. Oppression forced the conquered peoples in

these pairings to band together to survive and win back what they had
lost—their dignity, pride, and self-respect. The traditional language,
religious beliefs, and values of the oppressed were passed down from
generation to generation and reinforced the feeling of rejection, making
the ethnic community very difficult to break apart.
The alternatives to ethnic wars (or ethnic cleansing) are assimilation
and acculturation. Assimilation is the full acceptance of the cultural
values, attitudes, and customs of the conqueror or the majority.
Acculturation is less comprehensive and involves retaining many of a
group’s cultural traits while doing what is necessary to work and get by
in the conquering or majority culture. Depending on the degree of
abuse and degradation involved, assimilation for many people is
undesirable, while acculturation is difficult and filled with anxiety.
Sleeping with the enemy may be seen as a horrible crime, punishable
by death.

PLURALISM
Can diverse groups form a unified nation? Or does each group have
to be out only for itself? Can we all live together as Rodney King once
wondered? Ethnic pluralism refers to a system in which distinct ethnic
cultures exist independently in the same geographical region by
managing to tolerate differences. A pluralist society is one in which
ethnic groups live together by respecting each other’s rights. Ethnic
loyalty can be expressed by many different groups: Irish, Polish,
Lithuanian, Serbian, Croatian, Italian, German, Nigerian, Mexican,
Chinese, Latvian, Kosovars, Albanian, Arabian, Canadian,
Herzogovinian, and others. The key in a pluralist system, however, is
that all peoples agree to recognize the right of the other groups to live
according to their own customs and traditions. “Live and let live” is the
pluralist philosophy.
Unfortunately, ethnic loyalty can also lead to violence and division,
as has been demonstrated in recent years in nations including: Burundi
and Rwanda (the Hutus and the Tutsis); Serbia (the Bosnians, the
Albanians, and the Kosovars); Iraq, Turkey, and Iran (the Kurds); and
Russia (the Chechens). Ethnic warfare results from ethnocentrism—
the feeling that your group is vastly superior to the other and deserves
its own territory uncontaminated by the other’s blood. One of the
deadliest episodes of ethnic war took place in the African nation of
Rwanda in 1994. Almost 800,000 people were killed in an outbreak of
mass murder. The world had seen nothing like this destruction since the
Holocaust. Thousands of members of the majority Hutu ethnic group,
10 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

which had been oppressed for generations by the Tutsis,

hacked to death their Tutsi neighbors.
The killing went on for more than a month as bodies filled roads,
rivers, and lakes. When asked why they killed Tutsis, who sometimes
were their own wives and children, the Hutu replied, because they were
cockroaches! Even Hutu nuns and priests (Rwanda having a largely
Roman Catholic population) participated in the killing of Tutsis. In
2001 two Hutu nuns were convicted by an international war crimes
court of helping pour gasoline on a locked building in which hundreds
of Tutsi women and children were praying for mercy. The gasoline was
then ignited.

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY
Equal opportunity has always been one of the fundamental
principles of the American way of life. It essentially means that each
person gets the same opportunity to achieve his or her goals in life.
Does everyone have that chance? Statistics indicate otherwise.
Education has always been the key to equality of opportunity in the
United States; educational achievement is a good predictor of a
person’s future economic status and health. According to every reliable
survey, income follows education—the more education people have,
the higher their lifetime income will be. Current studies show that
Asians and whites are the groups in the United States most likely to
have completed education beyond high school, far more so than
African Americans, Hispanics, or Native Americans. And the incomes
of Asian and white American are dramatically higher than those of the
other groups.
The question to ask is: Do all Americans have an equal opportunity to
achieve their educational goals? In 1997, a study showed that about 87
percent of Asians, 85 percent of whites, 49 percent of Hispanics, and 40
percent of American Indians had completed high school. Almost 83
percent of blacks had high school diplomas, a vast improvement since
the 1950s, but many questions remained about the quality of the
education they received. What accounts for these differences? Is it
cultural values (Indian and black cultures do not value education) or
genes (perhaps those groups with lower educational achievement are
born less intelligent than whites or Asians)? Or do the differences occur
because blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics have lived through
long years of discrimination and pain, a result being poverty and
desperation for many, which makes them unable to compete with the
privileged majority?
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 11

Another survey showed that 9 percent of whites and 15 percent of

Asians held master’s, professional, or doctoral degrees (does this mean
that Asians are smarter than whites?), compared to 4 percent of blacks
and 3 percent of Hispanics and American Indians. A survey of the
history of prejudice and discrimination in America offers some clues to
the answers to these questions. It also provides an explanation of
differences relating to the wealth, health, and social and legal status of
these groups in American society. Do the statistics below suggest any
additional problems? Are these differences explained by race or by
history?

TABLE 1.2
MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME IN THE UNITED STATES:
1988*
BLACK $18,080
HISPANIC 21,920
WHITE 30,410
NATIONAL AVERAGE 28,910
*Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census Report, 1989

THE CHALLENGE
In 1997 President Bill Clinton said, “I believe the greatest challenge
we face . . . is also our greatest opportunity. Of all the questions of
discrimination and prejudice that still exist in our society, the most
perplexing one is the oldest, and in some ways today, the newest: the
problem of race. Can we fulfill the promise of America by embracing
all our citizens of all races? . . . In short, can we become one America
in the 21st Century?” We begin looking for answers to this question
with the first encounters between white Europeans and the people of
the Western Hemisphere.
12 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

2
THE SPANISH AND THE INDIANS
1492–1848
Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers
and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the
fields. The dogs and the vultures devoured the bodies. The
mortality was terrible. . . . We were born to die!

A memory of the Cakchiquel people after the coming of the whites

TABLE 2.1
NATIVE POPULATION OF MEXICO*

YEAR POPULATION
1518 25.2 million
1532 16.8
1548 6.3
1568 2.65
1585 1.9
1595 1.375
1605 1.075
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 13

1622 0.75
Source: Woodrow W. Borah, Justice by Insurance (Berkeley, 1983), p. 26

THE EARLIEST IMMIGRANTS

The first “Indians” in the Western Hemisphere came from
northeastern and central Asia. They crossed the Bering Strait, the body
of water that separates Siberia and Alaska, somewhere between 25,000
and 17,000 BC, a few thousand years before the end of the last Ice Age.
These migrants were genetically related to the Chinese and Mongolian
peoples of central Asia. They moved because over-hunting of local
reindeer populations had led to food shortages that had devastated their
homeland. The reindeer had nearly disappeared, forcing small
communities of the hunters and gatherers to move east and north in
search of new resources.
After hundreds of years, small groups of hunting families had
reached the northern Pacific Ocean coast. The Bering Strait was frozen,
making an ice bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. They crossed
the bridge and became the first humans to reach the Western
Hemisphere, where they found an untapped supply of animals to hunt.
They kept coming until the ice bridge melted, about 12,000 BC, as a
result of global warming. The melting of the glaciers prevented any
new movement of people into the hemisphere for the next thirteen
thousand years.

Thousands of years of isolation had protected the

New World peoples from many of the terrible diseases that
killed millions of Europeans, Africans, and Asians.
Thousands of miles of ocean prevented the germs that
carried diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and whooping
cough from spreading their killing power into the Western
Hemisphere. With the coming of the Spanish in 1492 that
separation ended, with devastating results for New World
and its people.

FIRST CONTACT
Christopher Columbus was impressed with the people he found on
Watling Island in the Bahamas where he landed in 1492. He wrote in
his Journal:

As I saw they were very friendly to us, and perceived

that they could be much more easily converted to our holy
faith by gentle means than by force, I presented them with
some red caps, and strings of beads to wear upon the neck,
and many other trifles of small value, wherewith they were
14 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

much delighted, and became wonderfully

attached to us. Afterwards they came swimming
to the boats, bringing parrots, balls of cotton thread,
javelins, and many other things which they exchanged for
articles we gave them, such as glass beads, and hawk's
bills; which trade was carried on with utmost good will."

He called the people “Indians” because he thought he had reached

India. And he was equally wrong about the peaceful nature of the
inhabitants. War and conquest were not unknown to these people, as he
soon discovered.

They are all of a good size and stature, and

handsomely formed. I saw some with scars or wounds upon
their bodies, and demanded by signs the origin of them;
they answered me in the same way, that there came people
from the other islands in the neighborhood who endeavored
to make prisoners of them, and they defended themselves.

Columbus brought six Indians (of the Carib people) back to Spain
for observation by the Church authorities and the King. They all died in
Spain. The King, however, upon observation of the Indians’ anatomy,
was convinced that they were part of humanity and had been created in
God’s image.

SLAVERY, DISEASE, AND DEATH

On his second voyage to the New World Columbus began
enslaving native peoples. It was easy to do. His soldiers had guns and
cannons and the Indians did not. Enslavement was necessary, the
Spanish thought, because Indians were not used to working and
preferred to spend their time in idle pleasure. They would not work for
wages, since money was a concept they did not understand, so slavery
was the answer.
The system that developed was harsh and brutal. Slavery was one
of the major causes of death for many groups of Indians. Within ten
years of their first contact with the Europeans, almost the entire
population (90 percent) of Caribs on the island of Hispaniola (modern
Haiti and the Dominican Republic) had died—mainly from overwork
in the gold mines, but also because of disease and war. Among the
diseases brought to the New World by Columbus’s crew and their
successors were smallpox and influenza. New World Indians had been
isolated from the rest of humanity for almost thirteen thousand years
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 15

and had never before been exposed to these diseases, so they died
quickly from them.

THE ENCOMIENDA AND MITA

The system of labor that the conquistadors brought with them
resembled the traditional aristocratic system found in their homeland.
There the poor worked and the rich played or prayed. It was beneath
the dignity of Spanish nobles, government officials, and colonists to
work in fields and mines; men of this class did not perform physical
labor. Intense work was suitable only for lower beings like peasants and
slaves. So, Native Americans were forced to work in the fields and
mines.
Spanish landowners, according to the law, owned the right to the
labor of all peasants or serfs living on their estates. This was called the
encomienda system in the Old World. In the New, Indians replaced
serfs. The dons (landlords) also received tribute (taxes) from all
families living on their huge land holdings. In New Spain, the taxes on
Indians averaged about three bushels of maize (corn), and a cotton
blanket or deer or buffalo hide, to be paid each year for maintenance of
the lord’s army and castle. In times of drought and poor harvests these
payments were especially burdensome and deeply resented by the
Indians.
Native peoples also hated the compulsory labor (the mita)
demanded of them by Spanish authorities. They were supposed to get
paid for this work but most got nothing. The work was usually aimed at
maintaining roads and government buildings and was supposed to last
only a few days a month. But in some places the natives were used as
pack animals to carry logs and heavy mining equipment hundreds of
miles across the desert. This kind of virtual slavery increased Native
American hatred of the Spanish invaders and led to several violent
revolts.

THE QUESTION OF INDIAN SLAVERY

The Spanish did not approach the idea of slavery without
consideration of their religious beliefs, which in some places raised
questions about its legitimacy. A long debate took place over the moral
and legal right of Spanish conquerors to take land away from native
peoples and then enslave them. The questions asked by lawyers,
theologians, and defenders of the Indians included: Were the natives
truly part of humanity? Did they possess souls and therefore the
potential for conversion to Christianity? Was the conquest of their lands
and wealth justified by the fact that they were not Christians? Did some
16 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

of the customs the Indians practiced, such as cannibalism and

human sacrifice, mark them as children of the Devil?
Francisco de Victoria, a Franciscan missionary writing in the
1530s, defended “the Conquest.” War against the natives was justified,
he wrote, if they refused to let Spaniards live peacefully in the New
World, or if they refused to hear the Gospel of Christ. The Spanish also
had the right to intervene to save innocent people from cannibalism,
which missionaries had reported existed among many New World
people. It was the duty of Christians to protect fellow human beings
from such “unjust kinds of death,” and one way to do that was to
conquer native peoples and convert them to the teachings of Christ.
Dr. Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a lawyer, also defended Spanish
actions in the West, but he provided a racial defense of slavery. The
native peoples were naturally inferior, he argued. They were “idolatrous
and sinful,” as witnessed by their marriage customs—some men
seemed to have more than one wife and they walked around naked.
They were also afflicted with the sin of extreme laziness. They seemed
totally unaware of the concept of work. If making war against them and
enslaving them would help teach them the benefits of hard labor and
bring them to Christianity, then those practices were just and right.
Even forced conversions were permissible.

OPPOSITION TO SLAVERY
Still, loud voices were raised against slavery in the Spanish
colonies. Pope Paul III, a Spaniard, writing in 1537, rejected any
defense of unfree labor. He decided, after interviewing several natives
who had been brought to Rome, that Indians were “truly men,” with
souls, and that they were capable of becoming Christians. They had all
the physical characteristics of human beings, which meant they were
created in the image of God and had souls. Hence they could not be
enslaved and had the right to hear the Word of God.
Another voice that emerged to oppose the mistreatment of Native
Americans was that of Bartolome de las Casas (1474–1566), a
missionary and a historian. He defended the equality of Indians in his
many-volumed Historia de las Indias, published in Spain in the 1540s.
Las Casas opposed forced conversions and the enslavement of Indians.
The “Apostle of the Indies,” as he was called, influenced the Spanish
king to issue a decree providing protection for the Indians. One of these
New Laws of 1542 abolished Indian slavery. But so much intense
opposition emerged in the New Spain that the law was never enforced.
The New World was too remote.
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 17

AFRICAN SLAVERY IN NEW SPAIN

The arguments over slavery in Spain had little impact on life in its
colonies. Conquest of the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Central America,
and most of South America in the 1500s had led to the enslavement and
death of millions of Native Americans. The devastation of Indian
cultures in the New World was almost total. Slaves died in such large
numbers in the first half of the sixteenth century that by the 1550s
traders had to turn to Africa for a new supply of unfree laborers. Large
numbers of African slaves were brought to the coasts of Colombia and
Venezuela, where they were put to work in mines and on sugar and
tobacco plantations. Thousands of other innocent victims stolen from
their homes in Africa labored on the sugar plantations of Cuba and
doing farm work in the coastal valleys of Peru. Unfortunately,
defenders of Indian equality were not as fervent in their protests against
African slavery.

TABLE 2.2
ESTIMATED SLAVE IMPORTS TO LATIN AMERICA,
1551–1810*
Years Spanish America Brazil
1551–1600 62,500 50,000
1601–1700 292,500 560,000
1701–1810 578,600 1,891,400
*Source: Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison,
WI, 1969), p.116

By 1800 about 3.5 million Africans had been sold into slavery in
Spanish America and Portuguese America (Brazil). Many died within
five years of reaching the New World. The horrors of slavery began
early; the voyage across the Atlantic, the “Midpassage,” was
devastating. A Spanish missionary visiting Lima provided a description
of the arrival of a slave ship coming into port:
18 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

They arrive looking like skeletons; they are

led ashore, completely naked, and are shut up in
a large court . . . and it is a great pity to see so many sick
and needy people, denied all care or assistance, for as a rule
they are left to lie on the ground, naked and without shelter.
. . . I recall that I once saw two of them, already dead, lying
on the ground on their backs like animals, their mouths
open and full of flies, their arms crossed as if making the
sign of the cross . . . and I was astounded to see them dead
as a result of such great inhumanity.

The majority of imported slaves were males between the ages of

fifteen and twenty. Many of these young men lived a year or less after
arriving in the New World. It was cheaper for their owners to work
them to death—frequently slaves labored twenty hours a day—and
bring in a new supply of slaves than to treat them decently. Only about
one in ten slaves was female, which led to a climate of intense sexual
repression in slave communities. Only slave owners had free access to
the small number of African women available, which made it very
difficult for black mothers and fathers to lead a normal family life.
Sexual exploitation led to the growth of a large mulatto (mixed-
race) population, many of whom eventually became free either by
running away or because they were granted independence by their
fathers. Most slaves on plantations were black, however, and lived like
prisoners. Their guards and their owners controlled everything they did.
The treatment of Africans left a bitter heritage of hatred in Spanish
America.

THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST, 1539–1680

Spanish colonies north of the Rio Grande River included Texas,
New Mexico, and California. This area, which now constitutes the
southwestern part of the United States, has had human inhabitants for
thousands of years. Many of the peoples in this largely desert region
lived in pueblos (the Spanish word for towns), where they farmed,
prayed for rain, and were governed by religious leaders. Even today the
many pueblos are distinct and separate from each other, though there
are linguistic and religious ties that promote some harmony and
cooperation among the peoples.

LIVES OF THE ZUNI

The Zuni lived in six pueblos widely scattered across the modern
states of Arizona and New Mexico. They occupied communities of
apartment houses built on the sides of or on top of mesas in very
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 19

remote areas of the desert. The Zuni had no central government; each
pueblo governed itself, practiced its own religion, and spoke a distinct
language. The Spaniards first entered Zuni lands in 1539. They were
drawn by the legend of the Seven Cities of Gold—the Cibola legend—
which had spread through Spanish colonies in the New World three
years earlier. Indians had told the story to Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca,
a Spaniard who had spent eight years wandering through Texas, living
with the native peoples, after being shipwrecked during a hurricane on
the Gulf coast. He related the myth to Spanish authorities in Mexico
City and they decided to find out whether there was any truth to it.
The governor sent an expedition to find Cibola under the
command of a priest named Marcos de Niza. An African slave named
Estavan accompanied him and served as an advance scout. He came
upon a Zuni pueblo a few days before the priest. But by the time Fray
(Father) Marcos entered the pueblo, the Zuni had killed Estavan for
“taking liberties” with their women. The priest returned to Mexico City
and falsely reported that he had found the Seven Cities of Gold. This
report inspired another, larger expedition.

CORONADO’S EXPEDITION
In the summer of 1540 the governor of Mexico City sent more
than one hundred men, including several priests, to the north. Francisco
Vazquez de Coronado led the expedition. After six months the
explorers reached the Zuni villages visited by Fray Marcos. They were
greatly disappointed by the pueblo because it was not built of gold
bricks as the priest had led them to believe. The Zunis, fearing that the
invaders were looking for slaves, met the Spaniards before they entered
the pueblo and warned that trying to enter would mean war.
Coronado explained through an interpreter that he had come on a
sacred mission to save souls for the true God. A priest then read the
Requirement, a document that the King ordered read before any battle
with “the heathen.” It warned Indians and other non-Christians that if
they did not accept Spain’s king, Philip IV, as their ruler, and if they did
not embrace Christ as their Lord, the men would be killed and their
children and wives would be enslaved. The Zunis listened to the priest
and responded with arrows, killing several conquistadors. In a brief,
bloody battle, Spanish muskets and steel swords proved superior to the
native weapons, chiefly bows and arrows. Coronado’s men then burned
the pueblo and slaughtered hundreds of native women and children,
taking only a few as slaves.
The surviving Zunis fled, leaving behind corn, beans, turkeys, and
salt, but no gold. The Spanish were furious. Coronado had crossed the
20 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

desert in full armor (which weighed about two hundred

pounds) and had been wounded during the battle but managed
to survive. He concluded that Cibola must be somewhere else, beyond
the horizon. Before continuing the search, however, he returned to
Mexico City for reinforcements.

THE ACOMA MASSACRE

Coronado’s next expedition did not leave Mexico City until 1598. After
marching hundreds of miles through the desert, the explorers reached
Acoma Pueblo (the Sky City, or, as the Indians called it), which was
built on a four-hundred-foot-high mesa. It could be reached only by
climbing a steep, hidden stairway. The Acoma Indians saw that the
Spaniards were coming. They launched a surprise attack against the
explorers, believing they were part of a slaving expedition, and killed
many of them. The survivors retreated south. When news of the attack
reached Mexico City, the governor sent another army north with orders
to gain revenge. They did. The Spanish killed five hundred men and
three hundred women and children. The rest of the villagers (about five
hundred) were taken prisoner, tried for treachery, and sentenced to
twenty years of slavery. Males over twenty-one had one of their feet cut
off while younger children were given to priests as slaves.

THE EXPANSION OF SPANISH MISSIONS

Dozens of Christian missionaries soon followed the
conquistadors. By 1629 the priests had built more than fifty churches in
the area of modern New Mexico and Arizona. Catholic Church
headquarters were in Santa Fe, which became the largest city in
northern New Spain. Indians built the mission churches, with women
constructing the brick walls and the men doing the carpentry. Usually
they were unpaid “volunteers.”
The priests, wanting all people to hear their message, sent eight
missionaries to Acoma. They received a friendly greeting and built a
large church. A year later one of the priests, Father Estavan de Perez,
left his companions behind and headed even further into the desert in
search of more people to convert. He came to a village of about eight
hundred people and was greeted peacefully. His interpreter told the
Indians that the Father had come to free them from slavery and the
“darkness of idolatry.” The village was Acoma—the town Coronado
had burnt to the ground a generation earlier. Surprisingly, the Zuni
allowed the priest to remain and build a church. It was completed three
years later.
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 21

But then a dispute broke out between Father Estavan and the
traditional religious leaders of the Zuni. Called sorcerers and witches
by the missionary, the Zuni priests urged their people to reject the new
ideas brought by Father Estavan. The conflicts between the old beliefs
and the new were many. In Zuni religion there were many gods, not just
one, and the gods lived on the earth in trees, mountains, plants, and
animals. Traditional Zunis prayed to water gods who made the corn
grow and sustained life in the hot climate of the Southwest. (Water was
as valuable to Zunis as gold was to the Spaniards. The Zunis claimed
that gold was the true Christian god—Coronado supposedly had told
them that the Spanish had a disease of the mind that only gold could
cure.)
On February 22, 1632, Zuni warriors killed Fray Francisco
Letrado, the missionary at Hawikah, while he was saying a mass. The
Zunis abandoned the pueblo and did not return. Upon hearing of the
killing, Governor Francisco de la Mora Ceballas sent a party of soldiers
to find the Indians and bring them to justice. They found the Zuni’s
hiding place and killed twelve of the four hundred Indians in retaliation
for the priest’s murder. The others were enslaved. A few days later,
Zunis killed another priest, Fray Martin de Arvide, at a pueblo fifty
miles west of Hawikah. Two soldiers at the mission were also killed.
The governor sent another military expedition to avenge the deaths, and
a dozen Zuni were executed.

POPE’S REBELLION
The Spanish had extinguished the Zuni uprising, though the
missionaries ultimately abandoned their churches and did not return to
the region until 1660. This time they remained until the Rebellion of
1680, the largest revolt in Spanish-Indian history. Led by Pope, a
Pueblo religious leader, fighting spread throughout the Southwest and
more than four hundred settlers were killed, including thirty-four
missionaries. The remaining two thousand Spaniards fled the region
and did not return for a decade. When they came back, in 1692,
Spanish authorities abolished the worst abuses of the labor system.
Pope’s Rebellion proved that native peoples could join together to
fight.

EXTERMINATION AND RESISTANCE

Life in the Southwest was extremely harsh for men, women, and
children, Indian or Spanish. The normal life expectancy for Spanish
settlers, rich or poor, was about forty years. Death was everywhere.
Indian attacks were a constant problem, especially when the Indios
22 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

barbaros, as the Apache and Comanche were called, rode

through the territory on hunting expeditions. These nomadic
tribes were endlessly fighting their neighbors, whether Pueblos or
whites. In 1780 Governor Jose de Galvez proposed a solution to this
“Indian problem”: complete extermination. He sent his army out with
orders to burn and destroy every Indian village they came across.
Through the use of these tactics the Indios barbaros had been almost
eliminated by 1810, and the policy was considered close to success.
That same year, however, the Mexican War for Independence began in
the southern part of the colony, and the Spanish government brought
most of its troops back from the frontier to protect Mexico City from
the army of independence. During this period of distress and political
chaos the Indians in the north staged a comeback. Their raids against
Spanish settlements and pueblos in search of slaves grew in intensity
and they gained control of almost the entire territory.

ANGLO AMERICANS IN MEXICO

The war with Spain lasted for more than a decade. The Spanish
were not driven out of Mexico by the rebel army until 1821. The first
Mexican government was formed that year under the leadership of
Augustin Iturbide, who soon crowned himself Emperor Augustin I.
During the war life in the north was extremely dangerous; the
government lacked the resources to defend settlers against the
Comanche, Ute, Navajo, and Apache raiders. One solution proposed by
the Iturbide government was to increase the white population in the
region by encouraging citizens of the United States to settle in the area.
One of these immigrants, Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836) brought three
hundred families with him in 1821. Each family received five thousand
acres of land from the Mexican government. In exchange the
immigrants agreed to obey Mexican laws, learn Spanish, and convert to
Catholicism. Because of this offer of free land the English-speaking
population in what later became Texas grew rapidly. By 1830 there
were twenty-five thousand Anglos and only four thousand Mexicans
living in the territory.
Cultural conflicts grew as language, religion (very few Anglos
actually converted to Catholicism), politics, and ethnicity separated the
Anglo and Mexican communities. About three-fourths of the North
Americans had come from the slave-owning South and many had
brought their human property with them, even though slavery was
illegal under Mexican law.
 RACE AND ETHNICITY 23

THE TEXAS REPUBLIC

In 1832 a new government in Mexico outlawed future
immigration from the United States. After this policy was announced,
Sam Houston (1793–1863) organized a movement to break away from
Mexico, and three years later the Texas War for Independence broke
out. On March 6, 1836, the first major battle of the war took place. The
Battle of the Alamo was a tremendous victory for the Mexican army,
ending with 187 Texans, including 6 Mexicans, dead. A few weeks later
the Texans killed 600 Mexican soldiers at the Battle of San Jacinto and
essentially won their independence.
The victorious Texans were still severely divided by language,
ethnicity, and religion. Thus race relations in the Texas Republic, as
the new nation was called, were very tense. The new Anglo (English-
speaking) government took the land of the Spanish-speaking Texans
and treated them as an alien people. The new white leadership wanted
to drive all Mexicans out of Texas; the resulting violence almost
reached the level of a race war. Many Mexican American families,
fearful for their lives, fled to their old homeland south of the Nueces
River, the recognized border with the United States.

THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WAR (1846-1848)

Texans wanted badly to become part of the United States, but
anti-slavery forces in Congress refused to add another slave state to the
country. Another factor slowing annexation was that Mexico had
threatened to go to war if Texas became part of the United States. In
1845 Congress finally voted to annex Texas, and the Mexican
government began to prepare for war. In his inaugural address newly
elected United States President James K. Polk proposed adding
another Mexican province, California, to the United States. He sent a
diplomat to Mexico City to negotiate a price, but the Mexican
government rejected all his offers to buy California. President Polk then
decided to provoke a war with the Mexicans and take California and its
excellent ports by force rather than through negotiations.
The opportunity for war came after Polk ordered the Army to
protect “United States territory” south of the Nueces River, the historic
border between Mexico and Texas. Polk claimed that the true border
was 150 miles further south, at the Rio Grande River. He refused to
settle the border dispute through arbitration by a group of neutral
nations, as the Mexican government had proposed, and sent in troops
instead.
When the American army entered the disputed territory, Mexico
declared war. Less than one year later United States forces had
24 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

occupied large areas of Mexico. At one point during the war,

the United States Senate debated whether to annex all of
Mexico. A majority rejected that idea because, as prominent senators
argued, total annexation would have added too many non-English-
speaking Catholics and Indians to the country’s largely Protestant
population. Hostility against Catholics was extreme throughout the
United States in the 1840s and early 1850s. The intensity of this
religious prejudice is illustrated by an incident during the war. Several
hundred Irish Catholics in the U.S. Army—the “St. Patrick’s
Brigade”—deserted to the Mexican side and fought against their
former comrades. The Irish fled to the enemy to get away from the anti-
Catholic taunts and hatred they received from Protestant soldiers.
The war ended when Mexico, which had lost fifty thousand
soldiers to the United States’ eight thousand, signed a peace treaty on
February 2, 1848. Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadeloupe
Hidalgo, Mexico lost almost one-half of its territory, including
California. The population loss was less severe, as only about 10
percent of the Mexican people lived in the lost provinces. Mexico’s
territorial losses were among the greatest suffered by any nation in the
history of warfare.
According to the treaty, Mexicans were allowed to move south of
the border (the Rio Grande River, as the winners mandated). About two
thousand of the hundred thousand Spanish-speaking residents of the
region made that move. Those who remained north of the border were
supposed to receive “all rights of citizens of the United States,”
regardless of what language they used or what religion they practiced.
The war brought an end to more than three hundred years of Spanish
rule in the American Southwest. In some of the new territories, such as
south Texas, the change of government led to a renewed war aimed at
driving all remaining Spanish-speaking residents out of the United
States.
Thousands of Native Americans in the newly acquired territory
now came under the authority of the government of the United States.
The policy of dealing with the Indians remained the same, however—
extermination and removal. The number of Indians coming into the
Union was never counted. Why bother? They would never be allowed
to become citizens. They were too “savage and warlike” in the view of
many whites.
RACE AND ETHNICITY 25