Literacy in colonial Latin America can be conceptualized as the intersection of European and indigenous alphabetic, visual, and performative strategies. As such, the written word needs to be understood as embedded in a broader constellation of legal, religious, and political practices. It is this embedding that produces a particular form of “papereality,” understood as the propensity for writing to create lived worlds. This presentation will focus on how socioracial classification emerges out of literate conventions and legal and visual genres in the sixteenth-century New Kingdom of Granada (today, Colombia) by concentrating on the classification and self-ascription of the category of “mestizo.” Read more