The work of race in colonial Peru

Is ‘race’ an appropriate term to describe the affinities and enmities, or the identities and affiliations in colonial Spanish America, a center of the early modern Iberian realms? In the 1970s and 1980s Patricia Seed (1983), Robert McCaa (1979), John Chance and William Taylor (1979), and other U.S. historians of Latin America quantified data, for example, collected from 17th- and 18th-century parish records to ascertain whether colonial Latin Americans distinguished themselves according to class, honor, sex, occupation, or caste – or a mixture of these categories. Race, for these scholars, constituted any of the multiple categories employed by Spanish colonizers