The arancel of the gracias al sacar (royal cedula of 10 February 1795)
A royal cedula of 1795 approved a printed price list for the favours the Camara de Indias could grant. It charged 500 reales to dispense a man from the legal quality of pardo and 800 from that of quinteron — against 1,000 for the style of Don, 8,000 for the right to hang chains at your door, and 80,000 for a patent of nobility. Read from the tariff itself, printed in 1797, where the price of ceasing to be pardo sits in the same column as the price of enclosing a field.
Why this wins its question: English writing on the gracias al sacar reports that late colonial Spanish America let people of African descent purchase "whiteness", and cites either a secondary summary or a number with no document behind it. This object goes to the tariff as printed: the two caste entries at 500 and 800 reales de vellon, the clause reserving discretion to raise them, the media annata due on top, the order to publish the list across the Indies and the Philippines, and the neighbouring prices — a patent of nobility at 80,000, chains at a door at 8,000, the style of Don at 1,000 — that tell you what the state thought each thing was worth. It also says which printing was read and does not pretend to be the original sheet.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Under the article "Gracias al sacar" a printed compendium of 1797 reproduces a royal cedula of 10 February 1795. Its preamble recites that a petition for a carta de naturaleza had shown the crown that the money payments charged for favours of this class "no guardaban proporcion con la importancia de ellas"; that the Camara de Indias was therefore told to settle what should in future be paid; that the Contaduria general of those dominions drew up a new arancel dated 10 September of the previous year; and that the king, on a consulta of 20 October, approved it "que es del tenor siguiente".
The tariff is denominated in reales de vellon and contains two entries on race. "Por la dispensacion de la calidad de Pardo, debera hacerse el servicio de 500." and "Idem, de la calidad de Quinteron se debera servir con 800." Those are the only two categories of caste the arancel prices.
The comparators printed on the same pages are what give those two figures their meaning. The faculty to found an entail cost 8,800 reales; a licence for a foreigner to reside in the Indies 6,000; a carta de naturaleza for the Indies 6,000; the grant of chains at one's doors 10,000 to a community and 8,000 to a private person; the style of Don 1,000; leave for a city to call itself "muy noble, leal" 1,000; an honorary regidor with voice and vote in a provincial capital 40,000; the legitimation of children of professed knights of the military orders and of clergy 24,200; and each patent of noble status 80,000. Removing the legal quality of pardo was the cheapest substantive item in the list.
The arancel was a price of dispensation, not a right. Its closing paragraphs reserve to the Camara de Indias the power, in cases not expressed in it or of particular circumstances, to "graduar la quota del servicio, o variar conforme le pareciere justo y conveniente, aumentando las que van señaladas", and for gracias of lesser amount the text says outright that "no se puede dar regla fixa" because the estimate must fall on the persons who ask and the place they come from.
Every favour on the list additionally owed the royal media annata, regulated as prescribed under number 42 of the royal cedula of 3 July 1664, so the printed figure was a floor rather than the whole cost.
The cedula orders the viceroys, audiencias and governors of the Indies and the Philippine Islands to have the arancel published in their districts, so that vassals and other residents might bring their petitions "con el debido conocimiento". Whatever else it was, the price of legal reclassification was a published price, not a private arrangement.
The counterpoint is inside the document and does not need an outside source. A tariff for dispensing the quality of pardo exists only because that quality was a legal disability; the crown is here selling relief from a bar it maintained, in the same column and the same currency as the licence to enclose a private field at 22 reales the fanega. Read straight, the page is evidence both that a legal route out of caste status existed and open, and that the state priced it as an item of revenue.
The transmission is stated rather than hidden. The text used here is not the original 1795 cedula printing but its reproduction two years later in tome XV of Antonio Xavier Perez y Lopez's Teatro de la legislacion universal de España e Indias, Madrid, 1797, where the article "Gracias al sacar" and the arancel run from page 163 to page 172. How far this printing departs from the original sheet has not been checked against another witness, and no claim here depends on a word not printed on those pages.