The Civility in the Veiled Castes of Present Mexico

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of the present patterns of living together of Mexicans, starting from the concept of Caste, managed during the Colonial times. In the New Spain, that concept meant ‘racial mixture’ and, with that meaning, the concept integrated two different semantic horizons: that of the mixture of races and that of the social stratum. During the Colonial times, the caste placed people in two different horizons, one based on somatic characteristics, and another, based on social hierarchy. Today, the Novohispanic meanings of the words ‘caste’ y ‘race’ are absent. The issue of the somatic differences has disappeared from the analysis of the identity of the Mexican, but those differences are still underlined as a sign of differences of economic, educative and cultural wealth, and, overall, as a sign of interpersonal manners, that is, as signs of differences of civility.