Mulatto

Painting on the theme "mulate"Black and Spanish comes mulato).

The mulatto Juan de Pareja, by Velázquez (c. 1650).

According to the RAE dictionary, the term mulatto refers to a person born black and white, or white and black. However, in some languages such as English, mulatto is considered an "animalizing epithet that assimilated the mule as a hybrid animal of mixed-race African ancestry", while in the original Spanish and in Portuguese it does not have a negative connotation.

Etymology

In its etymological origin the word "mulatto" refers to the "mule", which is the product of the cross between a mare and a donkey, due to the racialist vision of that time and the subordinate position attributed to slaves, mostly black, and according to which the donkey was assimilated to the black person and the mare or horse to the white one. Another theory affirms that the term has its origin in Arabic, in which the word muwallad was used to designate those born to a Muslim parent and one of another confession. The root is the word wallad, which means "son" or "begotten" (see muladí).

In turn, the son of two mulattoes receives the same name, currently, the populations in which it is very common to see this mixed origin are in the African areas of the northern limit of the Sahara, the United States and most of the countries Caribbean, such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama, as well as in Brazil, Ecuador and Peru.

A related term is "pardo" (referring to caste), which refers to the descendants of mixed European whites, African blacks, and Amerindians. Another term related to mulatto is “mestizo”.

History

This word arose in the XVI century, in the context of the Spanish colonization of America, as a form used by los conquistadores to refer to those born from the union between a white person (in general, during the colonization of America, of European descent) and one of black origin. In the Spanish colonial days of America these terms were used as part of a racial division defined by six "castes" (in the sense of a "lineage"). The Spanish colonizers of America categorized the inhabitants of their possessions into: "Spanish" (whose children were called "Creoles"), "Indians" (today also called "Indigenous", "Amerindians" or, occasionally, "Aborigines"), “blacks” and the resulting crosses between them: “mestizo” (Spanish and indigenous), “mulato” (Spanish and black) and “zambo” (black and indigenous).