Methodologies of Socio-Cultural Classification: Contexutalizing the Casta Painting (1710-1800) as a Product of Time |
Undergraduate Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies
Volume 1, Issue 1 (2012)
17 pages
Pooja Chaudhuri
University of California, Berkeley
The “casta painting” appeared in the early 18th century Colonial Mexico (New Spain). The paintings illustrated different offspring produced from sexual unions between men and women of Spanish, native Indian and African descent in the Americas. Series of casta paintings came in sets of typically sixteen panels, each featuring a mixed race couple and their one or sometimes, two children over a period of multiple generations. The viewer’s attention is drawn to phenotypic distinctions like skin color, styles of clothing and posture, all of which serve to racially distinguish each figure. The casta paintings were generally produced by criollo (creole) painters, a term used to refer to Spaniards who were born and raised in Spanish America. The paintings served to an extent, the viewing pleasure of creole elites in colonial Mexico, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula. Some casta paintings were commissioned by colonial officials who intended to take them back to Spain. Other sets were exhibited at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, founded by Charles III in Madrid to display a plethora of objects and cultural artifacts from overseas territories belonging to the Castilian Crown. Over the course of the century, the paintings developed into elaborate taxonomic and ethnographic projects.
Conceptions of raza, or race are central to situating casta paintings in the history of Colonial Mexico. For the Spanish, ‘raza’ converged with views on religion, occupation, gender and the separate functions of male and female bodies. Such complex vocabularies of race were articulated in the casta paintings as mestizaje, or race mixing between people of Indian, African, Spanish and Mixed descent in the Colonial Mexico. Not only do these paintings visually depict intimate spheres between people living in the colony, they point to a greater colonial preoccupation with classifying and categorizing reproductive outcomes from sex across racial boundaries. Granted that the paintings circulated as artifacts of popular culture in elite Spanish circles, they relied on a system of racial logic that developed over the course of centuries as the Spanish encountered new ideas, people, and places.
Furthermore, casta paintings represent a map making project that place racialized bodies of men, women, and children as points of reference in a larger narrative of human action. Each painting serves as a stage for exposing narratives of race mixing, which were informed by a range of historical processes and changing discourses on gender, race, class and sexuality. This analysis of casta paintings posits them as maps of socio-cultural, racial, and gendered hierarchy. In addition, the paintings are targeted towards an elite Spanish audience and serve as instructive maps of both desirable and undesirable mixed race combinations. Their didactic purpose points to a desire on the part of painters to classify the population of Colonial Mexico within a map of sexual reproduction thereby, endorsing the colonial management of the most intimate relations among men and women in the colony.
Over the course of different time periods, the term, ‘race’ has been woven with ideas of gender and class. In its modern twentieth century usage, race developed from biological explanations that defined it as a cluster of genetic characteristics linking a group of people together. Genetic similarities within a group are thought to determine phenotype like skin color, hair texture, and body structure. Ian F. Haney Lopéz argues against the idea that “racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences.” Lopéz cites several scientific findings which have shown that variations between two or more different populations (or, intragroup differences) exceed variations within a ‘racial’ group (or, intergroup differences). This argument supports the view that race is not biologically determined but socially and historically constructed. In other words, the notion of race as a social construct suggests that different racial systems rely on interactions between humans rather than on natural distinctions.
Moreover, because ideas about race have changed over time, racial logic has significantly transformed the ‘social fabric’ of different histories. Gender, class and sexuality are integral to this ‘social fabric’. Race is therefore not a strictly genetic category and is instead enmeshed with gender, class and long histories of colonization; at different points in time the term has been associated more with either the biological or the social. This understanding of race as a fluid category presents important insight into looking at the casta painting as a methodology of socio-cultural classification…
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Tags: Pooja Chaudhuri, Undergraduate Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies