Casta Paintings, Ray Hernández-Durán, April 15, 2017

Summary

The video delves into the intricate world of Casta paintings, a unique 18th-century art form prevalent in New Spain, specifically around Mexico City. These paintings depicted racial mixing and societal structure with a pseudo-scientific taxonomy. Through series of 16 vignettes, they illustrated racial hierarchies starting from the mixing of Spaniards with indigenous people, reflecting on the social obsession with 'purity of blood'. Casta paintings served as a portrayal of societal ideologies rather than factual representations of demographics. This exploration reveals the dynamics of racial and social constructs during colonial times and their lasting impact on modern Latin American societies.

Highlights

• Casta paintings, exclusive to New Spain, provided insights into 18th-century racial ideologies 🧐
• These paintings depicted mixed families, often with captions explaining the racial mix 🚹🚺
• The artistic focus was on 'purity of blood', showcasing a pseudo-scientific approach to lineage 📚
• Bourbon policies influenced the depiction and control of racial mixing during this period 🗂️
• Despite being artworks, these reflected societal complexities and prejudices of their time 🎭

Key Takeaways

• Casta paintings were unique to the 18th-century New Spain, depicting mixed-race family scenes 🎨
• These artworks reflected colonial obsession with racial purity and European lineage 🧬
• Racial mixing nuances portrayed in Casta paintings influenced social hierarchy and status in colonial society 🏛️
• The Bourbon era's focus on rationalism influenced these ‘taxonomic’ charts of racial mixing 📏
• Despite their artistic value, Casta paintings reinforced stereotypes and reflected biased ideologies 🤔

Overview

Diving into the intriguing world of Casta paintings, the video presents how these 18th-century artworks became a defining cultural artifact of colonial Mexico. Commonly emerging from the Bourbon era's artistic ventures, these paintings depicted racial mixing with a sense of pseudo-scientific accuracy. The exploration reveals how these paintings, often consist of 16 vignettes, portrayed the societal urge to classify and control mixed-race populations.

What sets Casta paintings apart is their reflection of the racial obsession and hierarchy issues of the colonial period. The depiction of various family dynamics often focused on maintaining or regaining 'Spanish' purity. This implied that mixing with indigenous people still allowed a path back to being considered Spanish, but mixing with Black lineage was portrayed as irreversible. Such narratives reveal the prejudiced and hierarchical nature of the society then.

The Bourbon era saw strides towards controlling social order and economic productivity, reinforcing European lineage while downplaying mixed identities. Casta paintings served as visual aids to codifying these ideals, intertwining art with politics to navigate colonial challenges. More than mere depictions, these artworks reflect the intricate intersection of race, social, and political ideologies prevalent during Mexico’s colonial era.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction to Casta Paintings The chapter introduces 'Casta Paintings,' a genre that has captivated many and sparked interest in the 18th century art scene. Casta Paintings are distinct to New Spain during the 18th century, specifically around Mexico City. They are different from paintings depicting race in places like Peru, positioning them as unique cultural artifacts of New Spain.
• 03:00 - 06:00: Juan Rodriguez Juarez's Contribution The chapter discusses the contributions of Juan Rodriguez Juarez, a painter from the early 18th century. He is noted for his work on 'pinturas de casta,' a genre of painting. Juarez is recognized as the first colonial painter to engage with the new Bourbon vice-regal court, which established its rule following the War of Succession between 1700 and 1715.
• 06:00 - 09:00: Elements and Themes in Casta Paintings The chapter discusses the elements and themes present in Casta paintings, specifically focusing on the work produced for the Bourbon viceroyalty in Mexico City. It highlights the career of a colonial painter who worked for the court during that period, noting that like many artists of the time, he created portraits, religious images, and participated in the trend of Casta paintings in the 18th century. The chapter mentions a series of Casta paintings thought to be produced by an artist named Rodriguez.
• 09:00 - 12:00: Casta Painting Series and Racial Dynamics The chapter examines the Casta Painting series that began around 1715, focusing on racial dynamics portrayed in these artworks. It describes a painting featuring a Spanish man and an Indian woman, with text explaining that the union of a Spaniard and an Indian produces a mestizo. The Spanish man could be either Creole (American-born) or from Spain, while the Indian woman is portrayed in indigenous but affluent attire, highlighting her status.
• 12:00 - 15:00: Social Implications and Colonial Context The chapter 'Social Implications and Colonial Context' discusses the portrayal of racial types in art, particularly focusing on the depiction of mestizo and mulatto children within family scenes. It poses questions about the inclusion of parent figures in these artworks, rather than just focusing on the racial types themselves. The chapter highlights how caste paintings typically fall into one of two forms, and provides specific examples, such as a painting of a Spaniard and mestizo child producing a castiso, and a Spaniard and black woman producing a mulatto. These examples are part of a larger series illustrating different racial combinations within colonial society.
• 15:00 - 18:00: Visual Representations and Racial Stereotyping The chapter titled 'Visual Representations and Racial Stereotyping' discusses a self-portrait of Juan Rodriguez, highlighting its rarity as one of the few self-portraits available from him, assumed to be from around 1710 and painted on canvas. The text also mentions a portrait of the Duke of Linares, the first Bourbon viceroy and a patron to Juan Rodriguez, noting the French stylistic influence characterized by the depiction of a wig.
• 18:00 - 21:00: Obsession with Blood Purity and Colonial Hierarchies The chapter titled 'Obsession with Blood Purity and Colonial Hierarchies' delves into the visual language and symbolism found in colonial portraiture. It describes how these portraits often include elements such as velvet waste coats, gauntlets, gloves, drapery, and family crests, all of which serve to signal the subject's identity, achievements, and social status. The chapter explains that this portrayal style is typical and that these visual cues communicate status and occupation through objects depicted alongside the individual in the artwork. This 'language' of portraiture is shown to consistently repeat throughout colonial art, emphasizing themes of hierarchy and purity.
• 21:00 - 24:00: Economic and Social Structures in the Bourbon Period The chapter discusses the role of secular colonial portraiture during the Bourbon period, focusing on cast paintings and their significance. It mentions an early artist believed to have produced initial versions of such artwork, known as Areano, although there are no available images of his work. One painting attributed to him depicts a mestiza, highlighting the racial and social classifications present in such artworks.
• 24:00 - 27:00: Artistic Representations of Family and Society The chapter explores the work of Juan Rodriguez Juarez, whose caste paintings became emblematic in representing family and society in New Spain. His works typically depict family groups that illustrate the racial mixing of the society at the time. These paintings usually feature three parent groups: the male Spaniard, the Indian woman, and the black individual. Juarez's work is presented in a series of 16 vignettes, each offering a unique perspective on the racial and social dynamics of the period.
• 27:00 - 30:00: Political and Religious Shifts Under Bourbon Rule This chapter examines the cultural and societal shifts under Bourbon rule, focusing on the art and pseudo-scientific endeavors of the time. It discusses the categorization of people and objects, drawing comparisons between the numerous categories in populous areas versus rural settings. The use of art to codify these categories reflects the Enlightenment's influence on organizing and understanding the world through a taxonomic lens. The chapter underscores the role of paintings in manifesting these ideas, presenting them as taxonomic charts to support contemporary intellectual pursuits.

Casta Paintings, Ray Hernández-Durán, April 15, 2017 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 now we're going to move to something that a lot of people love you know pinturas de gusta or cast paintings gusta paintings or different words uh have really are are really the works that opened an interest into the 18th century they're a genre of painting that seemed to be particular to the 18th century in new spain okay there are certain kinds of paintings that depict race in peru but they're very different from the cast painting so the the cast paintings seem to be very unique to new spain and specifically to the area around of course mexico city
• 00:30 - 01:00 and what pinturas de casta are this is the one in the image set this has been attributed to juan rodriguez juarez he was a painter working in the early 18th century and he seems to be the first colonial painter that is working with the new bourbon vice regal court okay the bourbons come into the throne in 1700 after the war succession 1700 1715 and juan rodriguez juarez becomes a painter
• 01:00 - 01:30 for the viceroy the bourbon vice regal court so he's probably like the first bourbon colonial painter who uh works for the court the advisory record in mexico city and like many artists of his time i mean he did portraits there are a lot of portraits he did religious images uh he did in the 18th century all the major artists do cast paintings at one time or another you know so this is one image of a series of cast paintings that were produced or we think are produced by rodriguez squad
• 01:30 - 02:00 it makes sense around 1715 and what we're looking at here again we have text to clarify in case you don't know what you're looking at we have it says of a spaniard and an indian produces mestizo so you have the spanish man he's either creole either american born or from spain we don't we can't tell he's just called spanish he could have been an american creole and we have an indian woman who's dressed very well you know she's dressed in indigenous style but clearly well off
• 02:00 - 02:30 and they're two mestizo children okay and it's like a family scene and one of the questions we have to ask is if they're interested in depictions of racial types why not just have like the mulatto and the mestizo why bring the the father and the mother into it i'm going to explain why cast paintings take one of two forms oh here are just two others they're part of a series this one is of spaniard and mestizo produced castiso of spaniard and a black woman they produce mulatto just very just examples from this one
• 02:30 - 03:00 series uh here's a self-portrait of juan rodriguez one of the few so portraits we have i think there are only two or three that i know of uh this is one of them uh from around 1710 i'm guessing on canvas and then to the right is uh one of the individuals for whom who was like a patron uh he's the viceroy the first bourbon viceroy the duke of linares then uh he painted that portrait and you can tell the styles of french influence with the wig
• 03:00 - 03:30 and the velvet waste coast the gauntlets the gloves typical of colonial portraiture with the drape element the crest riding in the cartouche that it's almost like a cv it identifies who it is any major accomplishments then there's always some kind of table with objects on it that refer back to the individual's profession or status this is the typical language it's full length quarter turn sumptuous dress drape element objects cartouche family crest we're going to see this language repeatedly in colonial portraiture or
• 03:30 - 04:00 secular colonial portraiture so cast paintings take one of two forms the whole issue of gustas is really interesting because you know the first artist we think produced an early version of this i don't have images of his work his last name was areano very very early there there's at least one painting i've seen known to be by him that seems to depict a mestiza okay but
• 04:00 - 04:30 it's very very different it's juan rodriguez juarez who produces the the type of cast painting that becomes a model that is we have a family group but and the cast reflect the racial mixing in novel hispanic society and you start with three parent groups there's the white span spaniard typically male the indian woman and the black okay and you always start and it's in a series of 16 vignettes the thing is that there are numerous
• 04:30 - 05:00 names there are numerous categories of gustas but in the in in there as many as like over there like over 60 in some of the more populated areas and as few as four or six out in the countryside you know but in the in terms of the paintings itself they get sort of uh codified into 16. so you have either all 16 on one canvas like this like a taxonomic chart here we have to think about like enlightenment ideas and kind of pseudo pseudoscientific interests and in identifying and organizing and
• 05:00 - 05:30 taxonomies you know so it's like a taxonomic chart there are four registers with four vignettes running across or if you have the money and the space you can commission to have a series of cast paintings where each of the vignettes becomes an individual canvas okay those are the two versions either all on one canvas like a taxonomic chart or in a series of individual canvases that depict the racial mixing it always starts with the white spanish man mixing with the indian woman
• 05:30 - 06:00 producing a mestizo what's really interesting if you look at the first uh couple of vignettes that embedded in these uh paintings there's a suggestion that you can mix with natives you can be a spaniard mixed with native but your descendants go back to being spanish so it's not all lost if you mix with the native so the first image of course is the spaniard with an indian producing a mestizo then that product is then mixing back with the spaniard in the next vignette producing what's called the castiso who's lighter and then the castiso then shows up in
• 06:00 - 06:30 the next vignette mixing with the spaniard producing a spaniard and to me that's a very interesting dynamic in the 18th century because in the 18th century when we start to see sort of this interest in in independence uh uh the creels the upper class aristocratic hispanics the american born hispanics the creoles uh one of the arguments they seem to present to justify sort of the this uh their valid claim to self-sovereignty is that they're even though they're they're white that they're all mestizo
• 06:30 - 07:00 because their ancestors mixed with indians and not just any indians they mixed with uh upper class aztec okay so they have indian blood in them which makes them mestizo which gives them a claim to the land okay so when you think about that kind of argument that we see in the 18th century then you look at the first couple of vignettes it seems to kind of illustrate how that happens is you can mix with the native but if your descendants keep mixing back with spaniards you can reach back spanish status
• 07:00 - 07:30 okay it's an interesting kind of political thing there what is that that's a mixture of mestizo and spanish okay so yeah it's kind of like on your way yes yeah he's the castizo's lighter than the mestizo then when the castiso mixes with the spaniard they produce a spanish again but once you have black you can't go back you know once the black gets mixed in there's no way you can go back to being spanish the bourbons actually passed policies to prevent racial mixing with blacks
• 07:30 - 08:00 there was like a really like strong kind of racist element to the bourbons where they actually implemented policies to prevent certain kinds of miscegenation so mixing with the black is a no-no and what you see in the rest of the casts are all the different mixtures from that point forward and the more mixed you become the darker skinned and it's not just about phenotype there's an element here of or elements that suggest profession or trade class but also character in many cases the cast paintings are very
• 08:00 - 08:30 stereotypical and offensive you know where like black women are depicted as sexual or as violent and aggressive or the more mixed you are the poorer you are the more violently inherent you are criminal okay and to me what a lot of people misread these this does not give us a window into what the population in mexico city would look like this kind of gives us sort of an interpretation of or an ideology it's a representation of an ideology of difference the majority of whites the light-skinned
• 08:30 - 09:00 hispanics were poor the majority of them were you don't see any light-skinned people at the bottom you know the light-skinned people are towards the top and the idea here uh kind of reflecting what has been up what was an obsession for the spanish limp purity of blood was an obsession for the spanish and it still is today in latin america latin america is still very colonial in these kinds of hierarchies if you look at any elite classes in latin america they're all european
• 09:00 - 09:30 looking they're very white you just look at telenovelas it's all the white mexicans you know limp sangre means purity of blood and this is something that can be traced back to the 15th century in spain when the muslims were expelled and the jews were forcibly converted this obsession with demonstrating that you're not tainted by muslim or african or jewish blood becomes a thing that gets incorporated into colonial policy in order to serve as a colonial official you have to demonstrate old christian stock and purity of blood that is brought to the americas where
• 09:30 - 10:00 now the indians and the blacks and the asians are implicated so the sangri is kind of this obsession and in the 18th century mixing with black this dilution was believed to not only change you racially or phenotypically but also affect or degrade the quality of your character okay so what we see here is in this this is an earlier one they look like almost like mannequins in a natural history museum you know they're just wearing outfits standing in blank backgrounds but eventually there's backgrounds like this
• 10:00 - 10:30 one they're shopping they're clearly at a market they're shopping for textiles she's dressed very nicely okay with let's look at some others the one on the left we know this is not about a race as we understand it because the albino is incorporated we know that's not a race it's really interesting about the albino she was sort of a question mark and a threat because she looks white but she might be mixed you just can't tell because albino so in the cast paintings when the
• 10:30 - 11:00 albino's married to the spaniard or we don't know if they're married but she's with the spaniard she always produces a black child some of these names are crazy means turn backward to look backward or to go backward okay so when the albino always in the cast paintings we know this genetically is not is improbable but at least in the language of cast paintings it's codified where the albino woman always has a black child you know and this becomes sort of an obsession i always tell my classes about when i was really little
• 11:00 - 11:30 in san antonio my mom's from mexico uh we would go watch mexican movies from the golden age in the 40s and 50s there was a theater downtown and in the 60s when i was really little we would go downtown to see the movies and there was a group of movies made in the 40s and 50s that kind of focused on this kind of obsession with race this is in the 20th century there's one movie called angelitos negros little black angels and it's about this like upper class mexico city girl she's light-skinned of course wealthy
• 11:30 - 12:00 the toast of the town she's engaged to marry this a wealthy young man from a well-positioned family again light skin mexico city everybody loves them they have their friends she was raised by her black nanny and her father her mother died in childbirth so the nanny raised her well they get married she gets pregnant everyone's happy and she gives birth to a black baby and the husband leaves her and their friends stop talking to her and she rejects the baby the nanny takes the baby it's a mexican movie so it has a moral you know she eventually turns out that her mother's
• 12:00 - 12:30 actually the black nanny that her father had had an affair with the black servant which is common in the colonial period uh white men were like getting around and uh so it turns out her father had an affair with uh the black nanny and her mother had committed suicide she hadn't died in childbirth and she was raised by her mother the black nanny so that by the end of the movie she comes around the black nanny's dying she accepts her baby and accepts the black nannies her mother and everybody's happy you know has like a good moral conclusion but to me it's just
• 12:30 - 13:00 astounding you know yeah that we look at this from the colonial period and in mexico it's still a thing so my question was too do they were the people living because we know that the people buying these were in spain right to understand well it appears that the the first cast paintings were commissioned to be taken back just like the manuscripts much earlier to take back to spain so they can see american types okay
• 13:00 - 13:30 would they know those things and would that be an issue in maryland like were they obsessed with it as well i mean there's been a suggestion that the castas didn't really exist because the racial mixing is so fluid but we do find there's a scholar r douglas cope who went through archives looking apparently 16 17th century and what he identified was that people were illiterate okay marriage most people didn't marry marriage was something conducted only by the upper class there's even some there's some cases where the common population ridicule marriage is a spanish
• 13:30 - 14:00 kind of practice you know people would just shack up have kids break up you know it was very fluid unstable we don't see marriage promoted until this period the 18th century which is one of the reasons i think we have this emphasis on family but before this people didn't marry the majority of people didn't marry but when a child was born they would still get it baptized and registered and he looked at all these archives and what he finds that because most people were illiterate they couldn't read and most of them because of the the nature of instability in the home they didn't know their parents names
• 14:00 - 14:30 they didn't know their own last names so the church official would see a man and a woman bringing their child to be baptized and he would look at them and they don't know their last name so he would look at her her name's wanna and he'd be like you look like you're part black so he just write juana la mulata that's her name and the record they'd be identified by the phenotype and he would look at the man pedro he looks indian pedro their kid clearly is a mixture so you know pedro and lobo whatever the cast name is and that's how they're recorded in the documents they don't know their names
• 14:30 - 15:00 so the casts would surface as identifiers in legal maybe not that they would self-identify yeah yeah right yeah you know and the things that rate what we understand is race of course it's a social construction but it's very slippery and unstable because race exists on multiple levels on one hand you have phenotype okay and the way you look and how other people see you but you can also during the colonial period it was possible to change your racial status if you paid for it
• 15:00 - 15:30 it's called gracias al-sakar [Laughter] you don't know me so these petitions these petitions were called gracias thanks for taking me out and you could pay you could pay to have your racial status changed you know so there are cases like where like natives or mestizos become wealthy they become affluent and then they pay
• 15:30 - 16:00 to change their racial status legally i even came across a suggestion that there might even be like a white white who change their status down to indian because natives were exempt from paying tax these are artists and there's at least one case i remember coming across where a white creole changed the status to indian to kind of avoid having to pay tax on what he was making yeah yeah so it's there's like so you have race you know visually there's the phenotype
• 16:00 - 16:30 there's legally there's also the nicknames people call each other by nicknames you know even though my family one of my cousins looked asian we called them chino chinese you know it still survives today they used i think the cast paintings must have been based on these earlier nomenclatures that predate the images when the first artist was asked produce an image of types he's never seen this before what do you think he's basing it on where he's basing it on the different categories which survive in social practice through nicknames who would survive legally in the form of
• 16:30 - 17:00 documents you know in addition to whatever you think someone looks like i mean so it's this very kind of complicated thing that gets negotiated in a number of ways so when you a lot of people don't know how to read colonial documents and this is an issue i have with you know especially people in new mexico i found this to be true in some cases when they see the word espanol they automatically think they're from spain that's not necessarily the case they could have been american born and they might not even be spanish they could be mestizo we just there's no way of real knowing really knowing sort of racial makeup so race is kind of the slippery thing but what happens here
• 17:00 - 17:30 is that some scholars have suggested like lona katsu who's written a lot about this is that this appears to be attempt to kind of control the racial mixing that was really out of control it was the bourbons were trying to control it and stop it but people were doing it and the cast paintings uh according to some uh it seems to be like an attempt to kind of like codify and control you know this type of mixing uh and then i don't know that's just it that's just it
• 17:30 - 18:00 there's one yeah it becomes political in the late 18th century but there's one particular painting that it's not a cast painting it has two rows of casts landscapes a still life at the bottom and the guadalupe it's all about an american experience it's a clearly a political painting to me and that cast painting is the only one i've seen where it's an indian man with a white woman which would have been i know no you know women white women's bodies were controlled especially elites because white skin is important you
• 18:00 - 18:30 wanted to marry into the right families to consolidate wealth and power and you wanted to have white babies okay so white women especially elite white women their movements were very controlled and their lives were determined by the men in their lives first their father then their husband maybe their brothers if they weren't married yet later maybe their sons you know because the fear was that she would get she would get involved with someone from the lower class or non-white and then mix okay that was always like
• 18:30 - 19:00 an obsession it was an obsession so elite white women were very controlled so that cast painting that has all these references to america like local fruits in the still life the cast process landscapes or images of areas in and around mexico city and then the leak in the weather will be on top of it all i mean clearly it's some kind of commentary in american identity and experience but the very first vignette switches the typical formula has an indian male with a white woman which
• 19:00 - 19:30 would have been really like scandalous uh it's a painting by this less known artist named luis de mena i always show that in my classes but in any case just examples and in terms of social rank profession or trade and then character these are just examples the lighter skinned individuals don't work they're like in these very comfortable settings here you have the father playing the violin teaching his son the violin they're dressed nicely you know they're very comfortable it's leisurely activity the darker people are out on the street
• 19:30 - 20:00 selling food or cigarettes or whatnot they're working okay so there's that kind of association of skin color with trade profession and also intelligence skill quality character and some of these have been compared for example these rococo types of genre scenes like fragonard's le ruminage the happy marriage family 1778-80 and i think there is a a an association to be made there this kind of representation of a family
• 20:00 - 20:30 either at leisure play or at work but there's some local elements that are also uh important to understand this is bartolome murillo who is a spanish painter from seville the holy family in the carpenters workshop again joseph mary and christ this becomes a model for the ideal christian family the ideal christian family the good colonial subject the marriage is stable everyone is trained everyone is working you know the
• 20:30 - 21:00 bourbons open schools to train not just men but women and children in different industries they push marriage to stabilize the family unit to make census recording more accurate so everything they do is done to increase economic productivity stabilizing the marriage training everybody putting everyone to work increases productivity and you can keep track of them through the census because they're marrying now so there's documents now that help you identify the population and i think all of these images kind of co
• 21:00 - 21:30 respond to this larger political context you have the focus on families and working in cast paintings and then you have these kinds of images also circulating the ideal i mean the prototype of the christian family in the holy family in the workshop i mean i think it's pretty clear what the agenda is and yeah origin of the christ child or
• 21:30 - 22:00 the wider skin yeah you know and i it's interesting i mean maria wouldn't have been thinking about elevating god right no no no no no yeah yeah you know and we have colonial versions of this subject you know disseminated you know so what i'm saying is all these things intersect and kind of reflect its period this would not have happened in the habsburg period is clearly a bourbon period kind of phenomenon yeah right
• 22:00 - 22:30 right exactly and the bourbons also saw the church's competition you know the habsburgs you know work very closely with the church but the bourbons come in they believe you know they're kind of separating church and state and they want the church's wealth and they start stripping the church of its privileges and power before education fell in the realm of the church they were all religious professors and scholars marriage was a sacrament the church promoted that but in the 18th century the bourbon take that over they take over education and
• 22:30 - 23:00 become secularized uh they're the ones who start promoting marriage so they start stripping the church of its privileges and its power uh and also its properties at some point you know to i mean spain's sinking you know it's in economically dire straits and everything the bourbons do as i mentioned through increased productivity increased taxation introducing new engineering technologies to increase mining production is to support spain which is thinking you know spain's done very clearly you know everything the bourbons do
• 23:00 - 23:30 is try to reinforce spain standing but it just seems like there's no way way around the fact that spain is done and shortly just a few years after this then spain's empire starts to fall apart