Coyote (racial category)

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). 

De Mestizo y de India; Coyote. Miguel Cabrera, 1763, oil on canvas, Waldo-Dentzel Art Center.

De mestizo e india, sale coiote. Anonymous, 18th century (From a Mestizo man and an Amerindian woman, a coyote is begotten).

De Castizo y India, Coyota. Anonymous, 18th century Mexico.

Representation

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

See also

• Casta
• Cholo

Further reading

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