"It is curious that a country whose Crown tried to dismantle racial privileges be called racist. Which were those racial privileges? I guess that they were not sanctioned by law."
You might be right, I don't know. But the privileges were certainly sanctioned by custom and by the town councils and other local bodies that administered justice at a practical level in Spanish America.
The problem here seems to be that we are arguing about different things - or, more accurately, I am arguing about one thing and sometimes you have also been arguing about that same one thing but at other times you have been arguing about two or three other things as well. I'd say the things are as follows:
Me: Spanish America was racist from top to bottom.
You: (a) No, it wasn't.
(b) It might have been but racism wasn't legally sanctioned. (c) It might have been but European Spain wasn't.
I agree with (c) up to a point.
I don't know the facts about (b) but suspect that there were indeed local laws that contradicted the edicts that arrived from faraway Spain from time to time. I do know that the colonial aristocracy ignored many of those edicts.
I disagree with (a).
"The important point, as I see it, is that a country whose laws sanction racial discrimination is a racist country, and one that doesn't is not."
Laws aren't everything.
"What about the early island colonies?"
"I see that you have done your homework. The fact is that as soon as 1542, the Spanish Crown clearly stated through its laws that the American indigenous were not slaves but freemen."
This is true. They were no longer slaves in any official or legal sense. But most of them were effectively enslaved by the various tribute and forced-labour laws - or, more accurately, by the interpretation the criollos chose to take of those laws.
"Or the later mita system of forced labour. Or the slavery of the llaneros?"
"Which slavery is that of the llaneros? I've never heard about it."
Well, I'm busking really. Most of the llaneros were slaves, I think, and some them were Indians. Therefore I thought it possible that some of the Indians on the llanos were slaves.
But really I just wanted to talk about the Legion of Hell.
"(Will someone please ask me about the Legion of Hell? There's nudity, posh furs, bamboo, and undeviating savagery.)"
"Ok. What is that Legion of Hell? Bamboo, the plant?"
Yes.
It looks like someone has just published a book about the Legion:
http://www.centvria.com/catalogo/colonial/fal-004.htm
Anyway, the Legion (or Division) of Hell was a force of slave-cowboy cavalry that rode into battle under a black flag known as the Pennant of Death. They usually wore nothing but crude rawhide chaps and a jaguar- skin cap. They lived on raw beef that had been tenderised under their saddles for a few hours. Their only weapons were a bamboo spear and a complete and utter ruthlessness. They were, perhaps, the nastiest cavalrymen the world has ever seen. They might have been caballeros but they weren't gentlemen.
(Incidentally, it's said that the motto of the ruling classes in Spanish America was 'Todo blanco es caballero'.)
Mickwick