Coyote (racial category)

Coyote (fem. Coyota) (from the Nahuatl word coyotl, coyote) is a colonial Spanish American racial term for a mixed-race person casta that usually refers to a person born of parents, one of whom a Mestizo (mixed Spanish + Indigenous) and the other indigenous (indio). 

De Mestizo y de India; Coyote. Miguel Cabrera, 1763, oil on canvas, Waldo-Dentzel Art Center.
De mestizo e india, sale coiote. Anonymous, 18th century (From a Mestizo man and an Amerindian woman, a coyote is begotten).
De Castizo y India, Coyota. Anonymous, 18th century Mexico.

Representation

The casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera (1763) show the place of the coyote in the idealized colonial racial hierarchy (sistema de castas).[1] In colonial Mexico, the term varied regionally, with "regional differences determin[ing] just how much native ancestry qualified a person to be a coyote."[2]

See also

References
  1. Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press 2004.
  2. Vinson, Ben III. Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press 2018, p. 70.

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