Joanne Rappaport's ‘historical ethnography’ of a handful of notable figures drawn from the archives of the New Kingdom of Granada would dispense with current understandings of ‘mestizo’ that take it as an ontological category in a colonial racial order in favour of a historicist reading of the ‘context of the naming’ of sometimes ‘mestizo’ subjects. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and indeed well into the eighteenth, she argues, ‘mestizo’ was not a fixed ‘identity’ nor did it name a cog in a ‘caste system’ of ‘race’ classification. Thus, the question ‘is not “Who is a Mestizo?” or “What is a Mestizo?” but “When and how is someone a mestizo?”’ (p. 4).

The author argues that ‘who [the mestizo] was would depend on who was labelling him and for what purpose’ (p. 5). This insight lies behind the book's title, as the author explains: ‘By “disappearing” I wish to imply that under particular circumstances people classified as mestizos dropped out of the mestizo slot and into other categories, not that the population of mixed parentage disappeared from the map through a simple speech act; indeed, by all accounts the population of those classified in the census rolls as mestizos expanded exponentially over the course of the colonial period, becoming the plurality by the late eighteenth century’ (p. 10). In short, Rappaport is interested in ‘mestizo’ before it became a topos in the teleological story of Colombian national identity and Latin Americanist historical science. In this sense, the author's ‘disappearing’ metaphor applies to the lost historical meanings of ‘mestizo’; the book's cause is to revive those ‘disappeared’ meanings. Thus, ‘If we hope to comprehend what “mestizo” meant in the sixteenth century, we must disentangle it from the meanings that accrued to it in the course of the subsequent four centuries. That is what I hope to accomplish in this book’ (p. 3).

The author's disentangling proceeds via a series of vignettes of a ‘cast of characters’ drawn from the archives and conveniently described in an appendix. These characters range from ‘Ines Hinojosa, a sixteenth-century Tunja adulteress who murdered several husbands and was ultimately hanged for her crimes’ (p. 239) to Juan Mulato and Pablo Orejuela, a would-be slave who claimed to be an Indian but was labelled a mulatto, and an itinerant mestizo labourer and tithe collector brought before the Inquisition, respectively (pp. 242–3). The author notes that in many cases ‘the physiognomical eye’ (Martin Porter's coinage) of Galenic medicine structured the descriptions of their bodies. Following Porter, the author states that this Galenic discourse ‘filtered into the Spanish American psyche’ (p. 184) where it was cultivated by ‘the skilled vision’ of colonial bureaucrats. Nevertheless, this ‘filtered’ set of skills did not yield a fully consistent ‘system’ in part because ‘calidad’ or personal quality was also deployed as a mark of ‘difference’ or distinction. For the most part it is the nuances of ‘calidad’ that the author privileges in her reading. The historicist mantra of the book is resumed conveniently on p. 226: ‘I urge readers to consider why we might do best to approach our research not with a preformulated model, but instead by engaging historical evidence more fully to construct explanations that emerge out of documentation instead of imposing frameworks on it.’ Ranke could not have said it better. Oddly, the author revives this old (some would say naïve) approach to chide ‘historians’ for whom it has been an article of faith since the very foundation of their discipline in the nineteenth century.

Given the author's allegedly contextual and document-driven approach to her subject, it is legitimate to ask what the context and indeed framework of her own naming practice is. Notably, Rappaport fails to make use of the available conceptual history literature and theory – designed to deal precisely with the kinds of issues the author raises in this book – but instead chooses to rely explicitly on the naming practices of scholars of other shores, most notably Brubaker and Cooper, and their particular use of the somewhat awkward terms of ‘groupness’ (as opposed to ‘group’) and ‘identification’ (as opposed to ‘identity’). Although the author confesses to be ‘at a loss for words in this enterprise’ throughout the book she in fact relies heavily on such late twentieth-century notions as ‘socioracial’ and ‘ethnoracial’ (glosses for ‘race’), as she admits on p. 7. In other words, the language and ‘native point of view’ of her period ‘characters’ and ‘documents’ are inevitably interpolated from and framed by her own naming practice and academic milieu. One random example should suffice to illustrate: ‘At the moment of Catalina Tafur's costume change, socioracial cross-dressing constituted a prime scenario for working out and challenging ethnic boundaries erected in the wake of conquest …’ (p. 57). But of course notions of ‘socioracial cross-dressing’ and ‘ethnic boundaries’ or indeed ‘passing’ did not exist and so could not possibly have been the ‘prime scenario’ at that time except in an ‘abstract’, transhistorical, and metaphorical sense which, indeed, is precisely the sort of thing that the author criticises in those ‘historians’ who see ‘system’ and ‘race’ where she sees, or rather substitutes, such terms as ‘passing’ or ‘ethnoracial boundary’. The author appears to recognise the trap she has sprung for herself when she tags on the caveat, ‘if we can speak at all of passing in colonial Spanish America …’ Similar doubts are expressed at nearly every turn in the text. Indeed, one wonders if this book ‘can speak at all of race’. But of course it must and does. Indeed, this is a book that doubts at every turn the very concepts that make it possible.

Perhaps it is asking too much of an already deeply self-critical exercise, but the author misses an opportunity here to push those doubts in a more rigorous fashion toward their source, that is, to reflexively historicise her own method and language. Had she done so, she might have found the methods and language of conceptual history or the history of discourse useful, and indeed could have recruited thereby unrecognised allies to her cause, for similarly situated, historicist readings of ‘mestizo’ are found among nineteenth-century intellectuals in the region. Indeed, the notion of the ‘invisibility of the mestizo’ was central to the brilliant analysis elaborated by the mestizo ‘father of modern Peruvian sociology’, Carlos Lisson. More disappearing mestizos, it seems. Nevertheless, Rappaport's doubting reading is likely to stimulate wider debate and perhaps another wave of looks at the intellectual and performative histories of ‘mestizo’ within and without the region. Better yet, it will stimulate the search for a better language and method for investigating and translating the ‘mestizo’ past. If it does so it will have accomplished much.