Identity politics is an abstraction; a white man benefitting from it, is not. Up to the last decades of Spanish colonization in Puerto Rico, in order to vote you had to be a white male (Criollos and Europeos). Later on, towards the end of the 19th century "negros libertos" and male pardos were allowed to vote if they were able to demonstrate that they and their ancestors -at least three generations- had stopped practicing non Christian rites. The same racial rule also applied to marriages. The sister of the "prócer" Betances had to go to the Tribunal to prove her "limpieza de sangre" (blood cleansing) in order to get married by the Church. Being a "mulata", according to the well documented and studied "sistema de castas latinoamericanas", placed her on a second tier category within the taxonomy that saw its genesis on the medieval church ideas (blacks and indigenous peoples as a different species); given "scientific" weight in the latter part of the 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's theories on races: spirit and science together.
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