The Politics of Slavery and Social Hierarchies in Colonial, Mexican, and Territorial New Mexico

his article explores the political and cultural differentiation between racial groups in New Mexico that began during the Spanish colonial era and lasted well into the U.S. territorial period, when Anglo American newcomers applied similar racial ideologies to the regional population.Once New Mexico was formally designated a U.S. territory with the Compromise of 1850, the mixed racial ancestry of Hispanic inhabitants became an issue in political debates over its future status in the Union and adversely impacted statehood ambitions.I argue that the Southwest's ethnically heterogeneous society emanated in large part from traditional systems of slavery, servitude, and fictive kinship that originated during the long colonial period preceding the American conquest in 1846.New Mexico's failure to attain equal political status and representation as a state during the U.S. antebellum and Civil War eras owed in large part to national debates about the ethnicity and race of its people.Those discussions, however, not only revolved around American nativists' disdain for Catholic Hispanics but were also rooted in congressional arguments over the Southwest's unique systems of involuntary servitude.Those two areas of debate-one involving Hispanic race and ethnicity and the other pertaining to alternative modes of enslavement-were much more closely connected than