In the 1925 edition of the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, ‘raza’ is defined as ‘groups of human beings that are categorised as white, yellow, copper, or black races according to their skin colour and other features’. Although this definition of race prioritises the biological aspect of racial categories, it is the inclusion of ‘other features’ that allows the term to become fluid and malleable and able to be defined in manifold, often contradictory ways. Joshua Goode notes that in early twentieth-century Spanish racial thought, race was a much more unstable concept than previous theorists have argued, and that faith, culture, history, morality, and temperament often carried more weight than ethnicity in definitions of the Spanish race.

The malleability of the term ‘raza’ allows Spanish commentators to claim racial commonality with Moroccan Muslim and Jewish cultures while at the same time establishing what Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper have termed ‘grammars of difference’: categories of ethnicity, gender, class, and religion that are used in colonial relationships to define the superiority of the colonising culture, and in many cases, to justify the use of violence in colonial regimes. As we shall see, the same colonialist ideologies and press and literary narratives that emphasised the ties between Spain and North Africa often also highlighted their fundamental difference. This malleability also allowed Catholic traditionalists in the 1920s and later Francoist ideologues to claim to be colour-blind and racially inclusive while crafting an ethno-national narrative of Spanish identity, as Ramiro de Maeztu does in his manifesto of Catholic nationalism, Defensa de la hispanidad (1931), where he defines race as follows:

Maeztu's claim, which becomes a mantra of Spanish fascism and later Francoism and is still invoked by the Spanish right, is often referenced to argue that in opposition to British and French colonial rhetoric, Spanish colonial discourse was characterised by a complete absence of racial attitudes.