The names of the new generations: Garcilaso's 1609 lexicon of criollo, mestizo, mulato and cholo
One chapter of the Comentarios Reales defines the words colonial Spanish America invented for its own children, and it was written by one of the people the words named. It gives criollo an African origin, cholo a Caribbean one, says mestizo was imposed by the first Spanish fathers and taken as an insult in the Indies, and answers that with a sentence its author put in print about himself: he calls himself mestizo openly and is honoured by it.
Why this wins its question: The caste vocabulary of Spanish America is usually explained through eighteenth-century casta paintings, or through a modern glossary that gives a definition and no provenance. This object goes to the earliest systematic statement the corpus has read - one chapter of 1609, quoted with its folio - and it brings back four things a glossary cannot. It gives criollo an African coinage and says the Spaniards borrowed it, which inverts the usual account of who named whom. It records that within the group that coined it the word was already resented. It catches, in Quechua, the malice inside the polite substitute Montanes, an insult only a bilingual reader could see and one that Garcilaso says his own relatives were proudly wearing. And it ends where the chapter ends, with the categories themselves classed as an import, in the same book of the same work that lists the horses and the vine. The author is not a neutral observer and the object says so; he is the better witness for it, because he is one of the people the words were for.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The chapter is framed as an afterthought to a list of imports, and that framing is the argument. Cap. XXXI of libro nono, "Nombres nuevos, para nombrar diversas generaciones", opens on folio 339 by saying that the best of what has passed to the Indies was being forgotten - "que son los Espanoles, y los Negros, que despues aca han llevado por Esclavos, para servirse dellos, que tampoco los avia antes en aquella mi Tierra". From these two nations others have been made there, mixed in every manner, and to tell them apart they are called by various names. The vocabulary of the castes is introduced, by a Peruvian author in 1609, as one more thing brought over in the ships.
The etymology given for criollo is not Spanish. Folio 339: children of Spanish parents born in the Indies are called criollo or criolla, "por decir, que son nascidos en Indias. Es Nombre, que lo inventaron los Negros, y asi lo muestra la obra. Quiere decir entre ellos, Negro nascido en Indias" - a word coined among enslaved Africans to distinguish those shipped from Guinea from those born in the Americas, "porque se tienen por mas honrados, y de mas calidad, por aver nascido en la Patria". Garcilaso adds that the Spaniards took the word into their own language by analogy, to name those born there. On his account the standard term for the American-born Spanish elite is a loan from the speech of the people that elite held in slavery.
A detail inside the same passage is worth keeping because it complicates the neat picture: Garcilaso says the African parents are offended if their children are called criollos - "y los Padres se ofenden, si les llaman Criollos" - so within the group that coined it the word already carried the reverse charge. He states this as observed usage and gives no source for it, and no independent witness was consulted here.
The rest of the lexicon is set out on folio 340 in order. A Black person shipped from Spain is called plainly Negro or Guineo. The child of a Black and an Indian, in either direction, is mulato or mulata. The children of those are called cholo, and Garcilaso says the word is not Peruvian: "es vocablo de las Islas de Barlovento, quiere decir Perro, no de los casticos, sino de los mui bellacos gocones: y los Espanoles usan del por infamia, y vituperio". The children of Spaniard and Indian are mestizos. The child of a Spaniard and a mestiza is a cuatralvo, "por decir, que tienen quarta parte de Indio, y tres de Espanol"; the child of a mestizo and an Indian is a tresalvo, "por decir, que tienen tres partes de Indio, y una de Espanol". The arithmetic of blood fractions is already in place in a book of 1609, a century and a half before the casta paintings.
On mestizo the chapter states both the origin of the word and its social charge, and they are opposite. It was imposed "por los primeros Espanoles, que tuvieron hijos en Indias" and means simply that those so called are mixed of both nations; and yet, folio 340 says, in the Indies "si a uno dellos le dicen, sois un Mestico, o es un Mestico, lo toman por menosprecio". A neutral word of description was in use as a slur within two generations of its coining.
The author's answer to that is the most quoted sentence of the chapter and it is a public act rather than a definition. Because the name was imposed by "nuestros Padres" and because of what it means, he writes, "me lo llamo Yo a boca llena, y me honrro con el" - I call myself so openly, and am honoured by it. It is printed in a book dedicated to the king of Spain by a man whose title page calls him El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, natural del Cozco, captain of His Majesty.
The chapter then records a euphemism and takes it apart, and this is the passage that shows the vocabulary being fought over rather than merely listed. Because mestizo was heard as contempt, folio 340 says, people embraced with great pleasure the name Montanes, which a powerful man had imposed on them in its place among other affronts. Garcilaso objects that although in Spain Montanes is an honourable surname by the privileges given to the natives of the mountains of Asturias and Vizcaya, applied to anyone not born there it is an insult, since in its proper meaning it is a thing of the mountain, "como lo dice en su Vocabulario el Gran Maestro Antonio de Lebrija".
The sting is bilingual, and only a bilingual reader could have caught it. In the general language of Peru, the same page says, the word for Montanes is "Sacharuna, que en propria significacion, quiere decir, Salvage"; so the man who renamed the mestizos Montaneses was, in Quechua, calling them savages under cover of a Castilian compliment - "y por llamarles aquel buen Hombre, disimuladamente, Salvages, les llamo Montaneses". Garcilaso's complaint is that his own relatives, not understanding the malice of the man who imposed it, take pride in the affront: they should flee and abominate it, "y llamarse como nuestros Padres nos llamavan, y no recebir nuevos nombres afrentosos". The reading of the insult depends on knowing both languages, which is precisely the qualification the author is asserting.
The chapter closes by putting the whole vocabulary on the same shelf as the livestock and the wheat: all these names and others left out for brevity "se han inventado en mi Tierra, para nombrar las Generaciones, que ha avido, despues que los Espanoles fueron a ella: y podemos decir, que ellos los llevaron con las demas cosas, que no avia antes". The categories are classed as an import, in the closing line of the same book of chapters that inventories the horses, the vine and the olive.
Word-borrowing in the other direction is recorded a few folios earlier, and it is worth setting beside this chapter because it shows the same process without the insult. On folio 327 Garcilaso notes that the Indians call pigs cuchi and have taken the word into their language for pig, "porque oieron decir a los Espanoles, coche, coche, quando les hablavan" - a Quechua term formed from the noise Spaniards made calling the animals. The lexicon of contact was being made from both sides at once.
The limits of the chapter as evidence should be stated. It is one man's account of usage, written in Spain about a Peru he had left in 1560, and read here in the Madrid reprint of 1723 that calls itself a corrected second impression, so the spellings are an eighteenth-century compositor's. Garcilaso gives no source for the African origin of criollo beyond his own hearing, and none at all for the Barlovento origin of cholo; both are claims about speech made by an interested party who is arguing, in the same paragraphs, about how he and his relatives ought to be named. Modern lexicography does not settle either etymology, and nothing was checked against a dictionary here. What the chapter is beyond doubt is the earliest systematic statement of the vocabulary that this corpus has opened, made from inside the group it classifies.