Coyote (racial category) explained

Coyote (fem. Coyota) (from the Nahuatl word coyotl, coyote) is a colonial Spanish American racial term for a mixed-race person casta that usually refers to a person born of parents, one of whom a Mestizo (mixed Spanish + Indigenous) and the other indigenous (indio). 

Representation

The casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera (1763) show the place of the coyote in the idealized colonial racial hierarchy (sistema de castas).^[1] In colonial Mexico, the term varied regionally, with "regional differences determin[ing] just how much native ancestry qualified a person to be a coyote."^[2]

See also

• Casta
• Cholo

Further reading

• Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press 2004.

Notes and References

1. Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press 2004.
2. Vinson, Ben III. Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press 2018, p. 70.