Caste War - Violence and the Caste War of Yucatán. By Wolfgang Gabbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 342. $120.00 cloth.

Abstract

From this book, scholars should pay closer attention to the ways that casta, calidad, and clase, all topics raised here, intersect, but are also different. We cannot conflate these in practice, because although closely related, they meant different things, and it is important to be precise about them. Otherwise, we risk reducing these, and other Latin American experiences, to processes more historically linked to US experiences. The scholarship on Afro-Mexicans, for its part, has depicted during the last decades a complex picture of the identities of negros, mulatos, moriscos, lobos, chinos, pardos, and morenos in New Spain. Gharala adds one more element to this multifaceted portrait: that of the tributary subject. Despite these contributions, however, the author is at times imprecise in her approach to the colonial-era language of difference. There is also a lack of clarity in the use of blackness and tributary status. In turn, this blurs the book's conclusions. Furthermore, the author's claims about the inflexibility and unchangeable nature of social labels linked to blackness are puzzling and run counter to the findings of a number of other studies that engage social differentiation and Afro-Mexican identity during this period. Nonetheless, the author should be praised for debunking the stereotypes about the mulatos vagos and for reconstructing the history of Afro-Mexican communities.