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Wiki Education assignment: History 215 Colonial Latin America

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation–supported course assignment, between 27 October 2025 and 11 December 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Celefoo (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Katherine.Holt (talk) 15:21, 5 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

No citations in the introduction?

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Is that gonna be fixed or not FLIPPINGOUT (talk) 04:34, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply

NPOV and sourcing problems in "caste system" critique sections

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The article currently goes beyond the legitimate scholarly debate over how rigid the casta system was (Cope 1994, Gonzalbo 2013, Rappaport 2014, Vinson 2018) and presents contested revisionist claims as settled. Specific problems:

* The lead calls the caste framework "now-discredited." The cited scholarship argues it was more fluid than once thought, not that racial hierarchy didn't exist. Suggest "contested" or "revised."

* Several strong claims are unsourced and tagged [citation needed]: that the caste concept may be part of the Black Legend, that limpieza de sangre was religious rather than racial, that race was understood as "purely spiritual," and that colonial society was not conditioned by race.

* The list of socially mobile Black, mestizo, and Indigenous individuals is sourced to popular history sites (Desperta Ferro, La Brújula Verde) and a personal blog, and is used to imply systemic conclusions that individual examples can't support.

* These sections contradict well-sourced material in the same article: race-based tribute, exclusion from the priesthood and university, weapons bans, and treatment of African ancestry as a hereditary "stain."

Proposal: remove or source the uncited claims within a reasonable period, reframe the lead, and add balancing scholarship, e.g. Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness (Stanford UP, 2015) and Martínez, Genealogical Fictions (Stanford UP, 2008), which document both fluidity and real race-based legal consequences. Poli Sci Grad Student ~2026-56095-87 (talk) 01:52, 20 October 2026 (UTC)Reply