He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Wrangling Pelicans: Military Life in Texas Presidios, with the following results:
When a reader opens page 99 of Wrangling Pelicans they will find themselves in the book’s fifth chapter entitled "A Most Dangerous and Desirable Profession." For some context, Texas throughout the eighteenth century is firmly controlled by Native peoples, even if the Spanish empire claimed otherwise. Being a Crown soldier in this space, then, was incredibly dangerous. By today’s standards, it would easily rank as the most dangerous job in the United States, if not the world. Why, then, would men be willing to risk their lives in signing up as a soldier? Page 99 of my book answers that question: by enlisting in the presidio, mestizo, mulatto, and Indigenous men of the region could be legally classified as españoles (Spaniards) and gain all the advantages that came with that status.Visit Tim Seiter's website.
Race mattered a great deal in the Spanish empire. As I write in the book, "those perceived as having limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) received additional protections under the law, had more opportunities for employment, and experienced little to no social ostracism." For instance, municipal codes from places such as San Antonio reveal that Indigenous offenders could be sentenced to as many as 200 lashes "with a rope about [their] neck," whereas white offenders typically paid a fine and spent a few days in jail.
On colonial Mexico’s northern borderlands, the Spanish Crown faced a fundamental problem—it could not find enough “clean-blooded” españoles to fill its military ranks. Few white Spaniards had any incentive to relocate to the empire’s fringes, where they would find limited opportunity but limitless amounts of danger. With manpower in great need, the Crown solved this problem by turning their mixed race soldiers white on paper, thereby creating a phenomenal recruiting tool. Despite its danger, mixed race men increasingly flocked to the presidios to acquire this social status.
Alas, the Page 99 Test does a great job of summarizing one of the main arguments I make in Wrangling Pelicans. In short, men and women in borderland spaces were willing to be part of the Spanish Crown’s imperial projects if they received tangible benefits for themselves, in this case whiteness. But ultimately, throughout the rest of the book, we learn that when residents of these remote regions perceived no personal advantage, they readily violated Crown laws.
--Marshal Zeringue