Douglas Cope, In his book The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian society in colonial society in colonial mexico city, 1660-1720 (1994) intends to examine the relation between new, unclassified, and poor urban population, and the elites, and the role of the race in these relations. Cope's study is rooted, as I understood, in Lockhart's New Philology, Postcolonial theory, Cultural Studies and Economic History. Cope joins Lockhart's studies to present other forms in which is visible the Mesoamerican’s ability to resist the cultural impositions. This paper will focuses on the notion of race as a floating signifier and on the elite's anxieties and fears in front of the difference and ambiguity of the racial classification. In Addition, I will…show more content… According to Cope, castas responded creatively to the elite's racial ideology. The mark of the plebeian society was the resistance to hispanic ideology. This resistance was developed with the creation of multiple ways to use and to move within racial categories. In other words, the main tool for plebeians resistance was having the race as a floating signifier to be used, modified and rejected for their own use and convenience,. For this reason, relations between elite and plebeians - as happened with race-- dad to be constantly renegotiated. I find Cope's definition of race as "social construction", flexible, free and strategic, so closed to Cultural Theory (Stuart Hall's…show more content… On one hand, Miguel CAbrera’s paintings attempted to confront and control the threat of mestizaje by presenting Mexico´s racial divisions as objective throw the normal family portrait. These very famous paintings meant to show that mexico’s racial groups were well defined. However, what CAbrera´s paintings show are the desires of the elite to have the society in a hierarchical, controlled and classified system. The racial mark that Cabrera establishes in his castas paintings, was not a fit mark in the real life. The paintings worked as part of the symbolic demonstrations of hispanic power that--Cope says-- were always present in Mexico City. This symbolic demonstration of power could be understood as Spivak’s notion of “epistemic violence”: violence by imposing imaginaries and symbologies that doesn't fit with the daily life. That epistemic violence creates ambiguities and confusion between the elites and the plebeians, the latter who were supposed to incorporate and imitate the framework, but at the same to obey, to be in an inferior socioeconomic status. The result of the ambiguities generated by the colonial power was multiplicity of meaning and of social expressions (in terms of spivak“degree of deviation”; in terms of Bhabha, using Derrida´s concept, “difference”). According to post-colonial theorist, with whom I think Cope dialogue, the more the colonial power