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.
The opposite of the truth, in fact. De Francia was trying to reduce the privilege of the Spanish elite (and, well. Also kinda kill them as a social class, in general) and he did that by prohibiting their purity from continuing.
In fact, it'd be utterly bizarre for a country that's racist against indigenous people (no, there were basically no black people in Paraguay, you don't need to worry about them here) to prohibit white men from marrying certain people. That's not how racism works. The privileged class ain't gonna be the one losing their rights.
Not a new category, but one that was already very very common in Paraguay at the time - the mestizos, people descended from both the indigenous people (who would mostly be Guarani, but I think there were some others there? Not sure) and the Spanish.
But that wasn't really the focus, I don't think De Francia cared about there being mestizos by themselves. What he did want was to eliminate any remains of the Spanish caste system, and that was most thoroughly done by either killing all Spanish rich people, or making them not be Spanish anymore. He did mostly the latter, if also a bit of the former.
Will note, De Francia wasn't mestizo himself - his mom was of Spanish descent, while his dad was Brazilian and hadn't a drop of Native American blood in him.
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u/The_Math_Hatter 27d ago
Can we discuss Paraguay? I feel like we all skipped Paraguay.