This option to “pass,” however, was not available to most Mexicans who were predominantly of Indigenous and African ancestry. “Court and legislative records from 1848 to 1947 reveal that the skin color of Mexican-origin people strongly influenced whether they were treated by the legal system as white or as non-white,” however, local governments found ways to segregate and otherwise discriminate against white Mexicans based on their Spanish-language backgrounds and other racialized markers of identity.51

Inventing Indians was to serve an important imperial end for Spain, for by calling the natives indios, the Spaniards erased and leveled the diverse and complex indigenous political and religious hierarchies they found.

The conquest of the territory that would eventually become the United States began with the Spanish empire laying down permanent settlements in Saint Augustine, Florida in 1565, followed by the kingdom of New Mexico in 1598 (which included the current states of New Mexico and Arizona), and the provinces of Texas in 1691 and Alta California in 1769.