The Disappearing MestizoMuch of the scholarship on difference in colonial Spanish America has been based on the "racial" categorizations of indigeneity, Africanness, and the eighteenth century Mexican castas system. Adopting an alternative approach to the question of difference, Joanne Rappaport examines what it meant to be mestizo (of mixed parentage) in the early colonial era. She draws on lively vignettes culled from the sixteenth and seventeenth century archives of the