Pardo is a term used in the former Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas to refer to the multiracial descendants of Europeans, Indigenous Americans, and West Africans. In some places they were defined as neither exclusively mestizo, nor mulatto, nor zambo. In colonial Mexico, pardo "became virtually synonymous with mulatto, thereby losing much of its indigenous referencing." In the eighteenth century, pardo might have been the preferred label for blackness. Unlike negro, pardo had no association with slavery. Casta paintings from eighteenth-century Mexico use the label negro never pardo to identify Africans paired with Spaniards. In Brazil, the wordpardo has had a general meaning, since the beginning of the colonization. In the famous letter by Pêro Vaz de Caminha, for example, in which Brazil was first described by the Portuguese, the Indigenous Americans were called "pardo": "Pardo, naked, without clothing". The word has ever since been used to cover African/European mixes, South Asian/European mixes, Amerindian/European/South Asian/African mixes and Indigenous Americans themselves. For example, Diogo de Vasconcelos, a widely known historian from Minas Gerais, mentions the story of Andresa de Castilhos. According to 18th-century accounts, Andresa de Castilhos was described by the following: "I declare that Andresa de Castilhos, parda woman ... has been freed ... is a descendant of the native of the land ... I declare that Andresa de Castilhos is the daughter of a white man and a woman". The historian Maria Leônia Chaves de Resende says that the word pardo was used to classify people with partial or full Amerindian ancestry. A Manoel, natural son of Ana carijó, was baptized as a 'pardo'; in Campanha several Indigenous Americans were classified as 'pardo'; the Amerindian João Ferreira, Joana Rodriges and Andreza Pedrosa, for example, were described as 'freed pardo'; a Damaso identifies as a 'freed pardo' of the 'native of the land'; etc. According to Chaves de Resende, the growth of the pardo population in Brazil includes the descendants of Amerindian and not only those of African descent: "the growth of the 'pardo' segment had not only to do with the descendants of Africans, but also with the descendants of the Amerindian, in particular the carijós and bastards, included in the condition of 'pardo'". The American historian Muriel Nazzari in 2001 noted that the "pardo" category has absorbed those persons of Amerindian descent in the records of São Paulo: "This paper seeks to demonstrate that, though many Indians and mestizos did migrate, those who remained in São Paulo came to be classified as pardos."
Most pardos within Hispanic America historically inhabited the territories where the Spanish conquistadors imported slaves during colonial times, such as the Captaincies of Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Colombia and Venezuela, as well as the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. For example, the 1887 census conducted by Spain of Puerto Rico showed Aguadilla municipality had a population of 16,140 with 1,390 pardo men and 1,650 pardo women, with the rest classified as black or white. In Peru, Pardos, are referred to the mixture of Spanish and Amerindian with a little afro contribution, located exclusively along the whole coast, in greater proportion between the regions of Tumbes to Ica.
Pardos in Brazil
In Brazil, pardo is a race/skin color category used by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics in Brazilian censuses, with historic roots in the colonial period. The term "pardo" is more commonly used to refer to mixed-race Brazilians, individuals with varied racial ancestries. The other categories are branco, preto, amarelo, and indígena. The term is still popular in Brazil. According to IBGE, pardo is a broad classification that encompasses Multiracial Brazilians such as mulatto and zambo, as well as assimilated Amerindians known as caboclos, mixed with Europeans or not. The term pardo was first used in a Brazilian census in 1872. The following census, in 1890, replaced the word pardo by mestiço. The censuses of 1900 and 1920 did not ask about race, arguing that "the answers largely hid the truth".
