Creole

In Spanish America, the term "creole" (criollo) refers to people of European descent, especially Spaniards who were born in the New World—in contrast to peninsulares, born in Europe. Because few Spanish women came to the colonies, creoles often were not exclusively of European descent. Nevertheless, they represented a privileged group that held much of the land and economic power in the colonies, although they often felt discrimination from Spanish-born peninsulares in political and economic privileges. Creoles occupied many of the positions in the bureaucracy and were legally equal to peninsulares, although a tendency under the Bourbons to appoint peninsulares to office heightened the rivalry between these two groups in the eighteenth century and contributed to independence sentiment. Creoles led the independence movements in the early nineteenth century and were the group that inherited political power in Hispanic America. They imposed a strong conservative legacy in their domination of the higher clergy, military officer corps, and the landowning and merchant elites, often in collaboration with foreign investors.

The term criollo or créole also was used in Portuguese and French colonies to indicate those of European descent, while in Brazil criolo defines a black person of African descent. In modern Latin America the term often refers to characteristics that are especially native or traditional to the country, for example, "creole cuisine."

In English-speaking areas, especially those once ruled by France or Spain, the term has been corrupted to mean not only those of French or Spanish descent but also those of mixed, often African, descent, as in the British Caribbean, Haiti, or Louisiana; indeed, in modern times, it has come to be applied to virtually all the native inhabitants. In much of the Caribbean, it also often refers to the mixed European-African language spoken by natives of the former colonies.

Since the term is used in different ways in different regions, the context of its use is important for understanding its precise meaning.

See alsoPeninsular; Race and Ethnicity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Severo Martínez Peláez, La patria del criollo: Ensayo de interpretación de la realidad colonial guatemalteca (1970).

Mark A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, From Impotence to Authority: The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias, 1687–1808 (1977).

Barbara Lalla and Jean D'costa, Language in Exile: Three Hundred Years of Jamaica Creole (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Brading, D. A. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Díz Caballero, Jesús. "El incaísmo como primera ficción orientadora en la formación de la nación criolla en las provincias unidas del Río de la Plata." A Contracorriente 3.1 (Fall 2005 ? Otoño 2005): 67-113. http://www.ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente/fall_05/Diaz-Caballero.pdf.

Mazzotti, José Antonio, ed. Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad "colonial" en las letras hispanoamericanas. Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh, 2000.

Poupeney-Hart, Catherine, and Albino Chacón Gutiérrez. El discurso colonial: Construcción de una diferencia americana. Heredia: Editorial Universidad Nacional, 2002.

Stephens, Thomas M. Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989.

                              Ralph Lee Woodward Jr.