Torna atrás


Torna atrás or Tornatrás is a term once used in the Spanish Empire, colonial Spanish America and the Philippines, to describe a mixed race person who showed phenotypic characteristics of only one of the "original races", that is, white, black, Amerindian, or Asian. The term was also used to describe an individual whose parentage was half white and half "albino".

Colonial Spanish America

Under the casta system of colonial Spanish America, the term torna atrás could also refer to the appearance of racial characteristics not visible in the parents. An example is the child of a white person and a light-skinned person of African ancestry born with darker skin than its African-descended parent.
The term torna atrás does not appear as a legal category in colonial documentation, but it is often shown in families portrayed in casta paintings in eighteenth-century Mexico.

Philippines

It was also used in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era from the 16th to 19th century, to describe persons of mixed indigenous Austronesian, Chinese, and Spanish ancestry.
It is likely that a majority of Filipino people today would have been classified as Tornatrás under this system due to centuries of intermarriage among various foreign and indigenous ethnic groups throughout the islands.

History

Although Tornatrás was originally used to describe a descendant of mestizos, albinos and Europeans, in the Philippines they were commonly known as those born from a Spanish father and a Malay-Chinese mother. Most people of the Tornatrás caste in the Philippines used Spanish as their primary language, and in many cases converted to the Catholic faith.
There are no official statistics on the number of people of Tornatrás ancestry around the world. Given historical and colonial patterns, it is believed that most are to be found in South America and the Philippines.