By arturdeleon |

my research, searching for my half sibling ancestors at Totatiche Jalisco provided me
with a birth record of her great grandmother. in the sentence indicating raza, it had Indigena-Blanca. does it mean that she was a mestiza? Other findings I have founded were either Indios/as, mestizos/as or espanol/a natural if born in Nueva Galicia, so the term indigena-blanca is new to me. Can anybody clear this for me. Thanks. Arturo

Arturo,

I've never seen indigena blanca before on records but I have seen the term mulata blanca before and I guess that means that a child looks light but definitely has two mulato parents, so it probably means that by looking at the parents they'd be Indios but the daughter looks much less India than her parents.

Danny C. Alonso

Thank you Alonzo, I guess it could also mean that one parent was blanca and the other Indio.
My half sibling's father was light skinned and his hair was castania.

I think probly she was a mestiza, and mestiza was a common term that every priest and scribe would have used daily, so i think there was a reason they didn't use it. my guess is the reason they wrote indigena blanca was because both parents looked indigenous and not mixed and that's why he was writing it that way because the daughter came out looking much lighter than her parents that were dark. the genes are strange that way sometime. Both my parents have dark hair and eyes but only one of my parents is Mexican and I came out with light hair (reddish blond) an blue eyes and my light hair and blue eyes comes from my Mexican side because my dad's parents both have light hair and eyes and my moms Scottish parents both have dark hair and eyes.

Danny C. Alonso

Hola:

Mestiza no es lo mismo que mulata, específicamente la primera es mezcla de indígena-blanco y la segunda de negra-blanco, frecuentemente el padre era blanco ya que era el patrón o el capataz en muchos casos, en otros simplemente un hombre que se casaba o relacionaba con una mujer indígena o negra. Los casos en que una mujer blanca se casaba con un indígena o un negro también se presentaron pero con menor frecuencia, los indígenas ricos a veces buscaban enlazarse con mujeres blancas.

En el caso de indígena blanca se refiere a que la niña nació con tez blanca pero dentro de una familia con costumbres o lengua indígena.

Antiguamente se distinguía la forma de vida de las personas por su vestimenta, posiblemente los padres de esta niña vistieran también con ropas de campesinos.

Saludos

Marcelina

Genealogy Research