ABSTRACT
From the very beginning the Spaniards established a system of exploiting land and minerals, with the Amerindians providing forced labor. In fact, during the entire colonial period there were institutional artifices for extracting maximum labor from the Amerindians at a minimum of cost and effort. The fact remains, however, that Amerindians can become mestizos, and mestizos can become virtual Europeans by upgrading their education, social, and economic standing, and speaking Spanish like people of the dominant culture. This hierarchy of racial and ethnic mixes and values reveals the importance of high-context considerations within culture. As in the Amerindian-European hybridity, the African Mexicans and Europeans consequently realized mutual adaptation to yield a complex cultural mixture along the coasts of contemporary Mexico. The mestizos, from the very beginning, were neither Europeans nor Amerindians, and they were caught up in a tension that placed them in a sort of cultural limbo.
