Lobo (racial category)

Lobo and coyote are derogatory names for persons of mixed race, referred to by animal names.  It could include persons of African and Indian ancestry, and many related variations. Lobo does not have a fixed meaning, with possible parents being a Black and Indian woman; Cambujo (African/Amerindian) and Indian woman; Torna atrás and Indian woman; Mestizo and Indian woman; Salta atrás (of African/European ancestry) and Mulatto woman.[1] 

Lobo was a classification used in official colonial documentation, including the Inquisition trials, marriage registers, and censuses.[2] One example of a Loba is a mixed-race woman who came before the Mexican Inquisition; she had been given multiple racial labels. She was publicly known as a China, was known to be a parda (a brown-skinned person) who “looked like a loba”, suggesting she had visible African features.[3] 

Lobos were known to be enslaved persons in seventeenth-century Mexico, likely with the mother being a Negra. The status of a child as slave or free followed that of the mother; thus children born to enslaved mothers were born into slavery, regardless of their paternity.[4] In historian Ben Vinson III’s analysis of what he calls “extreme racial categories,” he includes lobos with castizos, moriscos, albinos (persons with mixed African ancestry who look European), coyotes, "mestindios", and chinos.[5]  There were regional differences in colonial Mexico for racial labeling.  For instance, in Xichú and Casas Viejas in the Bajío region near Querétaro and the Sierra Gorda mountains, where there were resident indigenous populations, as well as blacks and mulattos, locally the people used lobos as a "normative category".[6] 

In his examination of marriage patterns from marital registers, Vinson found no records of lobos marrying each other; brides and grooms thus classified chose partners from other racial categories.[7]

In eighteenth-century casta paintings, lobos are usually shown doing physical work and not lavishly dressed, indicating lower class status. In Joaquín Antonio de Basarás’s Origen, costumbres, y estado presente de mexicanos y philipinos (1763), the lobo father is a water carrier, while his Indian wife sells chickens.[8] An early 18th-century set of casta paintings shows the Lobo as the offspring of a Black father and India mother; in the same set, a Lobo father and an India mother have a dark-skinned child labeled a Lobo Torna atrás, meaning the child more closely resembled the Black father.[9]

De Lobo y Mestiza, Cambujo. Anon. 18th c. Mexico

A set of casta paintings by Andrés de Islas is typical in the order and combinations of races.

• De Español e India, Mestizo (European white and Indian woman, Mestizo

• De Español y Mestiza, Castizo (European white and Mestiza, Castizo (3/4 white)

• De Castizo y Española, Española (Castizo and Spanish woman, the girl child can be classified as Spanish, 7/8 white)

• De Español y Negra, Mulata (Spaniard and Black woman, Mulatta

• De Español y Mulata, Morisco (Spaniard and Mulatta, Morisco (mixed-race person of part African/European ancestry)

• De Español y Morisca, Albino (Spaniard and Morisca, Albino (the child appears Spanish or European but is known to have part African ancestry)

• De Español y Albina, Torna atrás (Spaniard and Albina, Torna atrás (the child has visible African features, considered a "throw back" to blackness))

• De Indio y Negra, Lobo (Indian man, black woman, child is called a Lobo, "wolf")

• De Indio y Mestiza, Coyote

• De Lobo y Negra, Chino

• De Chino e India, Cambujo (a mixed-race person of part African and mostly Indian ancestry)

• De Cambujo e India, Tente en el aire (Tint in the air, related to some African ancestry)

• De Tente en el aire y Mulata, Albarazado (white lepers, pallid)

• De Albarazado e India, Barcino (ginger)

• De Barcino y Cambuja, Calpamulato

• Indios Mecos bárbaros (Barbarian Meco Indians)

• castas

• Coyote (racial category)

• García Saiz, Maria Conception.  ‘’Las Castas Mexicanas: Un Género Pictórico Americano’’. Milan: Olivetti 1989.

• Katzew, Ilona. ‘’Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico’’. New Haven: Yale University Press 2004.

• Vinson, Ben III. ‘’Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico’’. New York: Cambridge University Press 2018