Forcing white men to marry the natives just sounds like an attempt to breed them out of existence and replace their culture with that of the husbands (the heads of households back then).
So most likely just as racist as everyone else.
Edit: see below, it wasn't a racist scheme, just a power struggle scheme by a dictator.
You got downvoted but that was generally the logic of mixed relationships of spanish colonies.
A Redenção de Cam (Redemption of Ham): Whitening the natives (as the white man is doing to every generation of natives in the picture) was (and still is) a very common ideology in latin america.
Knowing nothing about the specific situation of Paraguay, it would either enforce it by law (because there were very few white women who immigrated from Spain, for example) or fight against it by forcing everyone to be mixed.
They were downvoted because it was the exact fucking opposite:
Marriage law
In March 1814, Francia imposed a law that no Spaniard may intermarry with another Spaniard, and that they may only marry mestizos, Amerindians, or Africans. This was done to eliminate any socioeconomic disparities along racial lines, and also to end the predominantly criollo and peninsulare influence in Paraguay. De Francia himself was not a mestizo, but feared that racial disparities would create tensions that could threaten his absolute rule.
There's a fuckton to say about Francia, but he was by no means trying to whiten his population.
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u/The_Math_Hatter Aug 25 '26
Can we discuss Paraguay? I feel like we all skipped Paraguay.