2.5: Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico
Lead scholar-producer: Christopher J. Nygren
I: Introduction [0:00-10:32]
Christopher Nygren: Close your eyes. See if you can picture this. You’re looking at a painting made in oil on canvas. Relatively large. Let's say four and half feet tall and about three and half feet wide. The colors are rich but the palette is subdued. In the foreground at your left is a man. He wears an elegant blue coat. It almost looks like the kind of coat you’d see Russell Crowe wearing in Master and Commander, just without all of that naval paraphernalia.
Ryan McDermott: That’s art historian Christopher Nygren, describing a painting we are looking at that was made in the middle of the 1700s in what we now call Mexico, and it was made for a very important purpose.
Chris Nygren: The man stands perpendicular to the picture plane. He gestures with his left hand to a woman who stands not far away. This looks to be a woman of a certain means: three strands of a pearl choker encircle her neck, and six pearls dangle from each ear. Her right hand rests on the head of a young girl standing in front of her while her left hand holds the left wrist of the child.
Now this child looks to be about seven or eight. Her white bodice encircles the tiny torso and then splays out into a patterned skirt of blue and white just below the waist. Like her mother, the child wears a pearl necklace and earrings. The child looks dotingly up at the man in blue.
Now, Ryan, what do you think is going on here?
Ryan McDermott: It looks to me like the woman is maybe some sort of shop keeper. I mean, she’s standing in front of a wooden shed that fills the entire right side of the picture, from bottom to top, but it’s open to us. And inside, there are fabrics—I see fabrics of all kinds of colors and patterns, neatly folded into piles and labeled. It actually looks to me like the three people are a family, the father, the mother, and their daughter.
Chris Nygren: Now… What have I left out of my description of this picture?
Ryan McDermott: Well, you said nothing about skin tone, which I do notice, and when you first described the painting to me, I don’t think I had any image of skin tone in my mind. But now that I look at it, the variation in skin tone stands out. So, the man’s hand as he gestures toward the woman is bright white, I mean it’s as white as his lace cuff. And his hand contrasts to what I’d say is a warm brown of the woman’s cheek and chest.
Chris Nygren: Very true. I also left out one important piece of information: up at the top of the picture, running across the blue sky on the left to the shopfront at right is an inscription written in Spanish: De Español y India, Mestisa, “from Spanish and Indian, mestiza.” Now, mestizo is a term with a long history, but it is generally a term for someone of mixed ethnic or racial background, and in this picture that word is referring to the little girl. She is the mestiza, and she is really the subject of this painting.
[Short beat]
Ryan McDermott: Welcome to the Genealogies of Modernity Podcast. I’m your host, Ryan McDermott. In this series, we trace unexplored and unexpected histories behind key parts of our modern world to unearth overlooked resources in the past that can help us flourish in the present. In this episode, we will be considering the work that paintings do.
Chris Nygren: We tend to think of paintings on exhibit in museums. And in that context, they can often seem inert, the sort of thing that you can just take or leave—you can walk by without noticing too much. But in this episode, we want you to come to see them not as passive works of art hanging on a wall, but as a tool for constructing and imposing identities. We’re going to focus on a group of paintings that did work. Real work. The work of producing and reproducing racial categories that classified human beings for the purposes of asserting and maintaining power.
Ryan McDermott: In the show notes, you can find links not only to the pictures that we’re discussing—those can be really helpful—but also to an animated video that outlines some of the key points of this episode. So feel free to go check those out.
Chris Nygren: The picture I've been describing hangs in the Museo de América in Madrid and is part of a particular genre of pictures that emerged in the Spanish colony of Mexico in the 1700s. At the time, Mexico was also called “New Spain,” and was administratively controlled by a Viceroy, who ruled on behalf of the King of Spain back in Madrid. The painting was mostly likely shipped to Spain and intended as something like an “illustration” of life in the colonies.
[05:06]
Ilona Katzew: Because of the long distance between Spain and the New World, it’s not like what happens today that you have such instant access to information almost within seconds. I think it’s important for, for audiences today to remember that the communication between one part of the world and the other could take up months, years sometimes. And it was mostly through the written word, through letters.
Ryan McDermott: The voice you hear is Ilona Katzew, Head and Curator of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA, which has one of the most important collections of colonial or Spanish American art in the world. She is a specialist on this genre of paintings, which are generally called Casta Paintings. She’s curated several major exhibitions of these pictures and written a book about them, as well as several essays. If you want to learn about Casta paintings, Ilona is the person to talk to. And as she notes, in the colonial context, these pictures were instruments of state power, lenses of a colonial gaze.
Ilona Katzew: Images were really amazing because it gave a sense to people who did not have access to certain regions of the world to sort of like form an idea in their heads of what was happening in distant lands. So images were very powerful in that way because they, they constructed reality that could be taken at face value. Or it’s really also easy to imagine how somebody from—a Spaniard, for example, who was in Mexico for a certain amount of time would go back to Spain with his rolled up paintings, bring them to their family or to a prominent member of society, unroll them, and just kind of use them as prompts to start explaining about realities on the other side of the Atlantic.
Chris Nygren: However, Casta paintings didn’t just reflect reality, they also shaped it. And did so in very particular ways. Casta, after all, is a cognate for the English word caste, which refers to social hierarchies. The Spanish term ‘Casta,’ however, does not mean the same thing as the Hindu caste system. Casta was an umbrella term that was used to describe and classify the children of unions between the three major branches of colonial society—Spaniards, Amerindians, and Africans. So, this isn’t primarily about class. The Spanish idea of Casta is more aligned with what we’d think of as race: a concept by which humanity is divided into categories, based on the perception that innate, immutable differences between humans can be seen through skin color or other physical features. Importantly, however, one’s position within the Casta system wasn’t determined solely by skin color—this was not like the infamous Brown Paper Bag Test that began in the American South in the early 1900s. One’s position in a Casta was determined by familial inheritance, whether that inheritance was visible or not.
Ryan McDermott: Casta existed outside of these pictures too—it was a way of structuring hierarchy within society. But these Casta pictures were a crucial tool that not only illustrated but also constructed that racialized system of social hierarchies, which was essential to the exercise of colonial power.
Chris Nygren: By the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had colonized most of the Americas, significant parts of Southeast Asia, and even much of Italy and the Netherlands. Each of those areas took on its own character. In the Spanish American colonies, there were stark divisions of power, which were broadly divided on racial or ethnic lines. Spaniards were at the top and Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans were far below them.
Ryan McDermott: While some people like the Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas argued for the dignity and humanity of indigenous populations, this hierarchy remained a central aspect of Spanish colonization, of how power was established and maintained. But as we’ll see throughout this episode, categories of race and ethnicity weren’t always neatly defined, and it wasn’t necessarily evident from looking at an individual where they were supposed to slot into that hierarchy. And that is where the casta paintings came into play; they constructed a genealogical map for how to read a person’s place in the hierarchy—their Casta.
Ilona Katzew: So, images are powerful vectors for constructing reality, and casta paintings are extraordinary instruments in that way because they are partly based on an undeniable reality that was taking place in the new world, which was racial mixing. And the enormous anxieties that came with that: many authors in Europe would describe Spanish America and New Spain as a place that was hopelessly degraded with hybrids.
Chris Nygren: To understand exactly why these Casta images were so important, we have to take a few steps back in history. By the end of this exploration, we hope you’ll come to see how these paintings used genealogy to construct a notion of colonial modernity—and that you’ll see how aspects of that order based on genealogy are still with us in the present.
II: Background: Conquest and Mestizos [10:32-19:15]
Ryan McDermott: As I recall from third grade history class, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and he did so under the patronage of the Spanish crown. Columbus paved the way for Spanish conquistadors who claimed territory in the Americas for Spain.
Chris Nygren: One of the most important among these was Hernán Cortes. Now, Cortés’ story is fascinating, and could be the subject of a podcast all its own. What interests us is that, in 1519, he basically disobeyed a direct order and led an expedition of men across the Caribbean ocean from Cuba to Mexico. When he arrived in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1519, he and his troops were amazed by what they saw. A highly developed civilization that was built on a saltwater lake. It actually reminded them of Venice. At first, relations with the Aztecs were good, but by 1521, war had broken out. Through a series of strategic alliances with competing tribes and some backhanded maneuvers, Cortés and his soldiers conquered Tenochtitlan, they sacked the city and destroyed its magnificent temples and sacred buildings. They razed it and built a new city on top. No longer was it Tenochtitlan; it was now Mexico City, built on the model of a European capital. Now, there are some really important things to remember here.
Ilona Katzew: One of the things I like to remind people, because I think this pops up a lot in relationship to the U.S. This notion of the indigenous population being completely decimated and subjugated, it’s a really narrow way of looking at the history of the time, because what it essentially does by trying to to, to tell this story of conquest and repeating in many ways the so-called black legend where Spaniards arrived in all this regions and destroyed the cultures of the place, what you’re really doing is kind of taking, unwillingly, agency from the people in those places.
Ryan McDermott: While the indigenous populations were badly hit by famine, disease, and state-inflicted violence, indigenous Americans were not eradicated in Mexico. They were incorporated into the civic structure of the new Mexico City, which was basically divided into two, one part for the Spanish and another part for the Indigenous population.
Ilona Katzew: There were attempts to keep different sectors separated. There was the república de españoles, or the Spanish Republic, that lived in sort of the center of Mexico, for example, and the República de indios or the Indian Republic that lived outside the center. And just the fact that you have these denominations, república de indios and república de españoles is already sort of telling you that these are polities that are coexisting together, but that they also have their own systems of authority. And that’s really important to, to keep in mind. It’s not that, again, that the Spanish just went in and subjugated all the local population, which is a way of flattening the narrative.
Ryan McDermott: The Spanish empire did plenty of killing, both intentional and unintentional. It is no defense of their form of colonization to note this important historical fact: the indigenous population remained after 1521, and it was much larger than the small population of Spaniards who inhabited Mexico City.
Chris Nygren: Yeah, so the history of Spanish colonization is complicated, and it changed over time. But, in the main, they were most interested in extracting resources from their overseas holdings; Spaniards came to Mexico in significant numbers—enough to establish a military and political stronghold. But the number of Spanish settlers in any given place was usually quite small compared to the indigenous population. And moving to the Americas was not necessarily a permanent change of abode. Many Spaniards—like the Viceroy and other officials—went to serve in the Americas for some predetermined amount of time, and then they took the wealth they accumulated through resource extraction back to the Iberian Peninsula. Mostly, these settlers were men, and often they left their families back in Spain.
[14:55]
Ilona Katzew: You know, when the Spaniards arrived, they mostly arrived without women. So that gave rise to this massive process of miscegenation or racial mixings.
Chris Nygren: Spanish soldiers frequently had sexual relations with indigenous women. These relationships were often non-consensual. Many of the children were born out of wedlock to a mother who came from one of the tribes that made up the Mexica (or Aztec) empire and a Spanish father. These children, known as mestizos, were, relatively speaking, of a high social status within the local Spanish society—at least at first. This initial high status stemmed from a Spanish culture that valued notions of genealogy and inherited nobility as a means of establishing social status, and their Spanish fathers had often attained some claim to nobility or favor by serving in the King’s expeditionary forces. Later on, though, the mestizo status became associated with illegitimacy and even vagrancy.
Ilona Katzew: But then as the sixteenth century wore off, people of mixed background were largely seen as illegitimate. So the term mestiso acquired this very pejorative meaning as did many of the other terms that were introduced at the time to describe mixed race individuals.
Ryan McDermott: So, by about 1600 the children of Spaniards who were born in Mexico City had a harder time reintegrating to life back in Spain, or even attaining certain ranks in Mexico itself. Their social status was compromised by their heritage, which was not purely Spanish. They were marked as being different, both by their birth in a colonial holding rather than in Spain and by their heritage, which was a combination of Spanish and Amerindian. On account of this, they possessed what would have been called at the time “impure blood.”
Chris Nygren: This shift in mestizo status can be explained in part by the fact that there was another population also present in Mexico City and Mexico more broadly: Africans. Now this was true of more or less all of the efforts to colonize the Americas: enslaved Africans were brought over very early, already in the sixteenth century, to provide labor for these new state projects. So, we have three major populations co-existing in Mexico City, as early as about 1535: first, the indigenous populations; second, the Spanish conquistadors; and third, Africans who had been brought over as slaves.
Ryan McDermott: Beginning in the sixteenth century and then increasingly over the next 200 years or so, these three populations began to intermix. That created some serious difficulties for the Spanish state. It called into question issues of nobility and inheritance, and more generally, it put a lot of pressure on the Spanish colonial authorities to come up with a coherent way of categorizing the populations in New Spain. What was the status, say, of a child who was born to a couple made of a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman? And even more importantly, what was the status of a child born through the intermingling of their offspring with, say, someone of African descent? And what was the legal status of these offspring born in the Americas vis-a-vis the father’s offspring born in Spain to a Spanish mother?
Chris Nygren: This is where the notion of Casta comes into play. Money was at stake in questions of inheritance, as were issues of nobility and social standing. Many organizations within Spain and the Spanish colonial bureaucracy were governed by statutes that forbade those with “impure blood” from holding positions of power. So, to operate in most state-sanctioned fields, you needed to be able to prove the purity of your bloodline in front of an official court, which was usually a part of the Spanish Inquisition. These statutes about blood purity governed many aspects of life in Spain. But it is important to note that these rules about who could and could not serve first emerged in the late medieval period, before Columbus had even arrived in America.
III: Critical Genealogy: Medieval Roots of Raza [19:15-25:59]
Ryan McDermott: And now we need to take a step back in time. Throughout the middle ages, the Iberian Peninsula (where Spain is located) was occupied predominantly by three religious groups. Here, it’s really important to understand that in this culture, religion was considered something more like an ethnicity—you actually inherited your religion through bloodlines, and was a way of establishing social hierarchies. First, we have the Catholics, who thought of themselves as more or less descended from the Roman empire; they were European and we would now call them white, though as we’ll see, the situation doesn’t map particularly well onto an American understanding of whiteness.
Chris Nygren: Second, there were Sephardic Jews, who likely migrated to the Iberian peninsula shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70 AD. They developed their own rites and customs which made them quite distinctive from the Jewish populations elsewhere in Europe and the Levant.
Ryan McDermott: The third group were Muslims, who had arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century as part of a broad military conquest that covered much of the Mediterranean basin. For about seven centuries after that, Catholic troops were in constant battles with Muslim troops to take back territory. And of course, those populations mixed too. And this is when statutes governing blood purity began to emerge.
Chris Nygren: Legislation regarding blood purity became especially important after 1492, but not because of Amerindians. The same year that Columbus sailed to the Americas, the Spanish crown effectively outlawed Judaism. Jews whose families had spent centuries in Spain were given a choice: convert to Christianity or leave Spain. Decades later, the Spanish crown would give the same choice to Muslims in Spain: convert or go into exile. This created a division between the the “old Christians,” whose families had been practicing Catholicism in Spain for generations and the new converts, or conversos. And an important term started being used describe these groups:
Ilona Katzew: But around the sixteenth century, the term raza, or race, in Spain itself started being used differently to distinguish between old Christians, cristianos viejos, and recent converts to Christianity, Jews and Muslims who were recently converts to Christianity, cristianos nuevos.
Ryan McDermott: Now of course, we need to remember that these conversions were not really a choice; they were forced. But this created a two-tiered system of Old Christians and New Christians, and as time went on, this raised a question: Could the descendants of a Jewish or Muslim family ever occupy the sort of jobs, political positions, or social status that was available to the descendants of “Old Christians”? That was a real question about which they passed lots of legislation.
Chris Nygren: And this is where the concept of raza, or race, comes in. On the Iberian Peninsula, religious identity was not just something that you chose, but something that you inherited, in a way that is similar to our current understanding of how race is inherited. The word raza, or race, seems to have entered the Spanish lexicon in the 13th century, first as a means of distinguishing between nobles and pecheros, or those who needed to pay taxes. It was indifferent to what we’d think of as “race” nowadays, but depended on nobility as an inheritance. By about 1500, though, the term’s connotation had changed. At that time, it was used to describe individuals who descended from Jews and Muslims. So, raza was no longer about fiscal policy, but became a way of drawing distinctions and tracing lines of inheritance as the Iberian populations increasingly mixed.
Ryan McDermott: After 1492, an entire cottage industry of genealogists emerged in Spain as families tried to prove that they were in fact “old Christians” as opposed to the “new Christians” who had converted after the edict of 1492.
Chris Nygren: If a family could demonstrate the religious purity of its blood—what they called limpieza de sangre—they would be accorded all the rights of an old Christian family. We see that in the Spanish world, the ideas of race and caste developed out of a genealogical understanding of heritability: the status of the parents—whether as Jews, Christians, or Indigenous Americans—passed down to the children.
Ryan McDermott: Your race is definitely immutable for your lifetime, but it can change across your descendants. Over the course of generations, the religion (and therefore race) of one’s family line actually could transform.
Chris Nygren: Most statutes on limpieza de sangre suggested that it took three generations for a Christian convert’s descendants to be considered “pure blood” Christians. Sometimes the number was four, but in general the magic number was three.
Ilona Katzew: Even for new Christians to be recognized as fully cristianos viejos, you had to have three generations pass.
Chris Nygren: For “New Christian” families, after three generations, the modifier “new” dropped off and members just became “Christian.” In the terminology of the time, your blood became “pure” after it had cycled through three generations. This attention to genealogy was being developed in Spain at the same time that their overseas empires were becoming a place of ethnic and racial mixing. And this concept of purification carried on in more secularized terms in Casta paintings. It became more related to a visual discourse about the body and about skin color. The theory of raza that had first been developed in the middle ages was repurposed as the basis for what became called castas in New Spain.
[Beat]
Chris Nygren: So now we’re developing a picture of what Castas meant in New Spain. Your caste was an indication of your place in the social hierarchy of this colonial society; it was a category connected to your birthplace and your ancestry; and like raza, it was something you inherited—though sometimes in a complicated way. Now we’re going to try to parse how this casta system worked—starting with how many castes there were.
IV: Critical Genealogy: How Many Castas Were There? [25:59-33:01]
Ilona Katzew: You know, it’s, it’s a tricky question because there a lot of sets have sixteen paintings or sixteen vignettes, and sometimes you have these sets unraveling through separate canvases or copper plates, but sometimes you have the vignettes being painted in a single surface. And the number tends to be sixteen.
Chris Nygren: But the number is variable. Some sets have twelve, some fourteen, and some as much as twenty. This goes to show that we are not dealing with a system that is actually biologically coherent—and this is a point that we’ll return to later.
Ryan McDermott: Even for scholars like Ilona Katzew, who have spent their lives studying these pictures, it is evident that the actual categories themselves are impossible to delineate exactly. But it was necessary to have some sort of system, inexact as it was, for tracing people’s bloodlines and “blood purity.”
Chris Nygren: Remember that concept of limpieza de sangre, or “purity of blood,” which emerged around 1492. According to that system, your blood purity was a function of your parents’ blood purity. Race and caste were fully inheritable. But how this inheritance worked became more complicated with the introduction of racial mixing—what the Spanish called mestizaje. If your parents were not from the same ethnicity, you would have mixed blood. But there was a system for escaping that “contamination” for children whose ancestors had a lower caste status—a system that again traced back to medieval Spain.
Ilona Katzew: So that notion of like the three generations for a new Christian to become an old Christian kind of gets, transposed to, specifically in the casta paintings, the sistema de casas that we're seeing, which is probably very different than what was happening in reality. The casta paintings are a construction, based in part on what was happening on the ground, but also highly contrived.
Chris Nygren: Casta paintings were produced as sets which illustrated the possible racial or caste recombinations; they also illustrated this process of purification across generations. We’ll look back to that first painting we described to start understanding how it was supposed to work.
Ilona Katzew: It’s very easy to see, for example, in the three first paintings of most sets where you have the first mixture, shows a Spanish man with an indigenous woman who gives a mestizo.
Chris Nygren: Here we should note, the inscriptions on many of these paintings carry numbers, so there is no confusing the order.
Ilona Katzew: The second painting would show you a mestizo with a Spaniard who gives a castizo. And the third painting would show you a castizo who mixes with a Spaniard man again and gives a fully unadulterated white Spaniard. So after three generations, if an indigenous person, not a black person, continues to mix with Spaniards, they can revert to being fully Spaniard, which again has to do with this notion in Spain of new Christians becoming old Christians after three or four generations. So it's a notion that initially was used for ideas of religion that here is being attached to, to the body. And to skin color.
[29:26]
Chris Nygren: So, the first three paintings outline a process of racial recombination, whereby Spanish blood is first “contaminated” by breeding with an indigenous person. The children of such a combination, called “mestizo” in the terminology of the time, would have a diminished social status with regard to those born to two Spanish parents: fewer rights of inheritance, access to certain jobs, titles of nobility, etc. But eventually, those restraints could be overturned by marrying those of pure Spanish blood, and the “purity” of the bloodline—and consequently status and inheritance—could be restored. According to the theory set out in the paintings, after three generations of procreation with “pure blood,” the “contamination” of impure blood is effectively reset. This is an example of genealogy being used in ways that echo certain points examined in Episode 3, where medieval genealogy tracked the distance and difference among relations in order to recognize opportunities for new beginnings. Here, though, genealogy is being meticulously tracked and calculated as a means of maintaining social order.
Ryan McDermott: At least in theory, this system would maintain order. In practice, it was very difficult to create an orderly process for changing caste status because it was very difficult to establish someone’s caste status to begin with.
Ilona Katzew: But really it's completely fluid. It’s fluid in the ground, on the ground, and it’s fluid in the paintings. There’s an attempt to construct reality, but this attempt is always finding loopholes. You can’t definitively measure or control mestizaje. There is an attempt to do that, but at the end of the day, it becomes really clear that that’s an impossibility.
Chris Nygren: Simply trying to track people’s ancestry and bloodlines was difficult in a period when birth records were often not thorough, were easily misplaced, and often destroyed by fires or other calamities. And there were also other questions. Which carried more weight in deciding a person’s racial category: their ancestry, or their birth place? Some people were of pure Spanish descent—meaning they had a mother and a father who were both Spanish—but born in Mexico. They strained the system. They were called criollos in Spanish documents of this period. But interestingly, in the paintings, we don’t find criollos, only españoles. Within the Casta system constructed in the paintings, criollos are subsumed under the category of Spaniards even while other documents maintained that distinction. Already we can see that this classificatory system struggles to accommodate the complexity of human genealogy.
Ilona Katzew: As time went on in the seventeenth century, the whole system of casta, sort of the systematic castas, crystallized in many ways, and the, uh, the lexicon for describing the, the vast array of mixtures possible just expanded exponentially. This notion that all the terminology was imposed top down, which is how a lot of the field has been seen, has also been questioned by recent scholars. Many of the terms were actually invented by the populace. So that just also gives you a sense of the, how complex just the naming of the different peoples was.
V: Critical Genealogy: Naming Castas and Enlightenment Thinking [33:01-40:44]
Ryan McDermott: So, now we will run through some of the names of these categories that supposedly result from different racial combinations, and they’ll show how quickly the taxonomy breaks down. This discussion may seem hard to follow—but that’s kind of the point.
Chris Nygren: Okay, so in a typical set of Casta paintings, painting number eight shows “From Indian and Black, a Wolf is Born”—that’s the title. Here the term for wolf is lobo. It derives directly from zoological observations, and it’s pretty clearly derogatory. Ok… but let’s follow the lobo, the wolf, through this constructed matrix of race. The next time the lobo appears is in painting number 10, which shows us how “From Wolf and Black, a Chino is born.” Number 11 then illustrates how from “Chino and Indian, a Cambujo is born.” So, we’re now three generations down from the original mixing that led to the lobo. If we were dealing with one parent of “pure” blood, that would be enough time to dilute the “impurities” and return them to their status as Spaniards through some sort of almost magical intervention. But how does that magical power apply to those whose blood is not “pure”? Well, no one seemed to know. Picture 12 shows how “From Cambujo and Indian, Hold-Yourself-in-Midair is born.” The Spanish term here, tente en el aire, well… it’s not at all clear what that means, either linguistically or genealogically.
Ilona Katzew: So you start seeing the unraveling of terms such as, no te intiendo, I don’t understand you or, or hold yourself suspended in mid-air so that these categories are really alluding to the fact that, you know, people’s mixture is so confusing that you are neither progressing down or moving forward.
Chris Nygren: In the eighteenth century, they didn’t yet have an understanding of how genetic inheritance works, especially with recessive traits. And this presented a serious problem, especially in the case of people with albinism, or the lack of melanin in their skin tone. Now, across mammalian populations, about 1 in 10,000 births are born with this trait, but in pre-modern times it was believed to occur almost exclusively among black populations.
Ilona Katzew: There’s like a complete obsession with depicting albinos in these pictures, because it was a much talked-about topic in the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. And back then they didn't have the language of genetics to discuss many of these things. So there was this notion that albinos could only descend from people of black origin.
Chris Nygren: Because remember, albinism is a recessive trait, meaning that it likely won’t manifest in the children of someone with albinism. So, if a person of African descent has albinism, their children will likely have dark skin. And this… well, it effectively broke the taxonomy.
Ilona Katzew: Because you would have two ostensibly white parents with a torna atras, with a figure that was darker, because that darker figure had been born from an albino. You can well imagine somebody seeing the mixture of a Spaniard with an albino woman and their darker child, and you see that in many of the pictures. [Mm-hmm.] Because they, to all appearances, they look like two white or Spanish parents, but then you have the darker child.
Chris Nygren: There are just too many factors going into the recombination of the gene pool to actually chart a “system” of mestizaje. But that is evidence that the pictures are doing more work than just labeling reality. They are constructing it—and with a purpose.
Ryan McDermott: The project of trying to slot human diversity into neat categories is a product of this period. Breaking history into periods is always hard, but this era that we’re talking about, primarily the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, roughly aligns with what is often called the Enlightenment. Although the idea of castas had been around since the sixteenth century, it was only in the eighteenth century (the 1700s) that we begin to see images illustrating them in such a systematic way. That temporal lag is interesting in its own right, but it makes sense that the Enlightenment sought to give visual form to Spanish racial categories. This is the period, after all, in which modern science as we know it was being invented. Taxonomies were being created for everything, from different kinds of rocks, to animals, to human civilizations.
Chris Nygren: Those categories were developed by European thinkers because this was a period of colonization as well as advancing science, and knowledge was power: knowing which crops could grow where and what properties each mineral had—well, those had direct economic consequences. In creating these categories, these Enlightenment thinkers purported to be simply describing reality as it is. But subsequent research has shown that they were also shaping how reality was perceived. And one place where this becomes especially clear is in the alignment between colonization and race. Spanish authorities used Enlightenment tools, like slotting everyone into a grid-like organization, to categorize racial mixing, which was known as mestizaje in the period.
Ilona Katzew: You have the attempt to quantify and chart mestizaje. You have this idea of the Enlightenment, this idea that you have to classify everything and make everything into sort of neat packages that are not in accordance with reality.
Chris Nygren: And the Enlightenment framework has, until quite recently, really conditioned the way that the Casta pictures were understood. For decades, they were looked at as reflections or illustrations of a social reality.
Ilona Katzew: For the longest time in the historiography, the paintings were seen as reflecting, for example, parish records, right? Because we know that colonial authorities requested that parish records be kept in churches. So if you, you know, baptismal books, for example, were baptismal books for Spaniards and for the castas and for indigenous peoples. So it was a way to kind of quantify and control colonial society. So people were starting to discuss these paintings as documents to aid in the, uh, priest who records different race mixture. And that was really, really early on in the historiography, which makes no sense because these things are completely constructed.
Chris Nygren: And again, that is because we are dealing with an attempt to classify something that is, ultimately, not classifiable. Race and caste are not biological realities. They are mutable social constructs that were used for very specific purposes. They are used to consolidate power and establish hierarchies. Inheritance, holding certain jobs, being subject to taxation, being able to take on noble titles… lots of things depended on one’s genealogy.
VI: Creative Genealogy: Other Ways to See Casta Paintings [40:44-50:23]
Chris Nygren: In their own way, though, the paintings also presented an interesting image of life in the colonies, one that might have challenged the expectations of those living in Spain.
Ilona Katzew: And then you have this emphasis on the abundance of the land, which also kind of speaks to the agency of local artists, and also probably people who were commissioning these paintings that they wanted yes, to prove that colonial society was hybrid, but also that it was ordered, that there was a certain hierarchy and that Spaniards always remained on the top and um, to counter notions in Europe that everything degenerated in the New World.
Ryan McDermott: So the paintings are not just about constructing categories, but also advocating for the dignity of those living in the colonies. And they are also defending, in some ways, the people who are subjects of the empire, whose communities are being run over by the empire. We can never lose sight of the fact that this system was a product of a brutal regime of colonization; but there are some interesting and unexpected side effects from trying to systematize a very complex situation.
Chris Nygren: Casta scenes generally show images of order. Remember back to the picture I described at the top. It showed a shop with fabrics on display. These are all delicately folded and carefully presented with labels in the indigenous language representing which fabric they are. And this holds true across other scenes too. If the image shows a kitchen, the utensils are all clearly in order and the workspace is really clean. If it shows a fruit seller, their goods are plump, ripe, and neatly stacked. In Casta paintings, there is obviously an attempt to show not just racial ordering, but also a colonial society that is itself meticulously ordered, not out of line. And this is interesting when we consider that most of the Casta paintings were likely made by artists who were themselves mixed-race and living in Mexico. This is probably the case with Miguel Cabrera, who painted the picture I described at the top. So, these paintings were in some way a self-presentation by the colonized that was intended to shape the perception of the colonizers, showing the colonies as a place of order and abundance.
Ilona Katzew: There’s this emphasis on creating order. And if you take it one step further too, I mean, what do these pictures depict? They depict families. So family comes with a notion of marriage, and marriage is a Christian sacrament. So it’s a society that is bound by love.
Chris Nygren: These paintings are really clever in how they close the aperture of the colonial gaze from an entire continent or the system of human intermingling down to scenes of three or four people, a nuclear family. This too was a conscious choice, an attempt to encourage and celebrate family within a society where family cohesion was being put to the test.
Ilona Katzew: Hybridity has to do a lot with illicit sex in many ways. So it’s about everything that's forbidden and not allowed. So by stressing the family groups, you are in a way, kind of making the point that this is, yes, a hybrid society, but everybody’s in their place and the unions are also caused through marriage. So that is a way of proving that this is, ultimately, that this is a mixed society that’s civilized.
Chris Nygren: Remember, the painting with which we began, and how it showed a young girl? I left out that the man rests his hand on her shoulder. That picture is constructing a genealogical relationship between these two. That is his daughter. The woman is the mother of his child. And paintings like this are attempting to solidify that bond.
[44:57]
Ryan McDermott: The paintings do many things. They normalize a brutal mode of colonization that dispossessed indigenous populations, imported enslaved Africans, and systematically suppressed both groups. And that perspective is the one most emphasized when scholars study the paintings.
Chris Nygren: Sometimes, however, it’s other people looking at the paintings—museum-goers and viewers who are of mixed-race themselves. And they sometimes see from a different perspective. They may feel seen and acknowledged by the paintings, despite how the images propped up structures of racial oppression. These viewers remind us that the paintings also depict a family unit, and a pathway for bringing people of indigenous heritage into the Spanish state. Again, that pathway can be seen as normalizing and reinforcing the unjust hierarchy of a colonial situation. But in the family units themselves, viewers may also see themselves and their families. That contradiction is one that Katzew has had to confront every time she’s displayed these pictures.
Ilona Katzew: I remember when I organized one of these exhibitions at the LA County Museum of Art, that my whole goal was for people to look at these paintings and realize how there were constructions. But at the same time, I was seeing that some people were actually seeing themselves reflected in the pictures.
Ryan McDermott: So even as Katzew was trying to demonstrate that the paintings are constructions—that they’re tools by which empire sought to construct ideas of race and hierarchy that mirrored the project of colonization—even then, some present-day beholders looked at the paintings and saw not oppression and subjugation (or not only those things) but also saw themselves represented there. They saw an affirmation of the genealogical truth of their presence on the territory now known as Mexico and the United States. This is a version of the analogical theory of consanguinity outlined in the episode about genealogy. Here distance and difference offer a new opportunity for identity formation through elective affiliation: it’s a chance to decide who you are, by who you identify as your family and your people.
Ilona Katzew: Yeah, I think that for today’s viewers, the pictures are quite striking because on one level, people see themselves represented in these works. That's one of the initial encounters with the pictures. It’s like, wow, there are a lot of different people in these works. They, they portray my family or people I know.
Chris Nygren: That positive reaction from visitors to the LACMA really surprised Katzew because the underlying message of the pictures, their original function, was more complex than that.
Ilona Katzew: But then, once you start looking at the pictures, like a much darker reality lurks under because of the inscriptions mostly. There have been cases when the inscriptions have been removed in later times, which I find really fascinating. You would find them to be placid views of the racially mixed colonial society because most of the people are dressed lavishly. There is a lot of jewelry, they are bedecked with jewelry, pearls, different, uh, clothing, silks. And they, they contain all these, uh, products that point to a certain wealth and ostentation. But once you start looking at the inscriptions, then you see the real nitty gritty of what these paintings are, are doing, which is to articulate a story of mestizaje, or racial mixing, whereby the right patterns of mixing will take you back to the whiter or Spanish racial pole, and the wrong types of mixing will take you down a line of degeneration.
Chris Nygren: This darker hidden reality meant that Katzew gave a lot of thought to how these images were presented in the museum context.
Ilona Katzew: The whole sort of way of dividing society by race and color,, ultimately it’s all about power. It’s a certain, a specific group of people who are anxious about losing their perceived notion of superiority and power and creating these divisions to uphold it. So unless we talk about it, and unless we sort of analyze how these things have been constructed in the literature and visually and through mythology, we, we will never move past it.
Chris Nygren: That need to confront and analyze cultural constructions helps answer the question of why these racially-charged images should be displayed at all.
Ilona Katzew: I’ve also been confronted when organizing these exhibitions with the sort of, why would we show this? They’re racial depictions with, like, products of colonialism, conquest, violence. So why are we even discussing this? And I always say, we are discussing this so we can actually tear these paintings apart, see what was happening, and be aware of how these notions of race and societal divisions are constructed and how they impact us to this very day.
VII: Conclusion [50:23-59:58]
Ryan McDermott: For a very long time, humans have been forming racial categories as a means of discriminating against and suppressing certain groups. Even so, it is important to understand that every society has its own history, and that every mode of racial oppression is specifically constructed. There is no natural state of racist subjugation. It’s a fiction that helps distribute power unevenly.
Chris Nygren: As we’ve seen, between about 1300 and 1800, the Spanish world developed its own way of constructing genealogy and heritability, in order to privilege certain people and disadvantage others. In order to justify its colonization of the Americas, Spain reached back to strategies that had been developed in the middle ages, when the Iberian peninsula was inhabited by a mixed group of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The Spanish state transformed its medieval caste system in order to make it suitable for transatlantic colonization. Over the last decade or so, several groups of scholars have argued that the formation of a particular conception of racial hierarchy marks the emergence of modernity. But this look that we’ve taken at how raza became casta shows that the project of developing a racial hierarchy was actually not modern.
Ryan McDermott: Because, as we’ve come to see across these episodes, modernity moments are characterized by ruptures, a claim of a radical dissociation with what has come before. In this regard, the racial categories developed in the Spanish colonies weren’t really modern; they were an adaptation of a genealogical idea of inheritance that had already been at play in Spain for hundreds of years. The terms were slightly different, given a local inflection based on the circumstances on the ground, but the framework is recognizable. Tracing the genealogy of the racial categorization developed in pre-modern Spain and then transferred to the Spanish colonies reveals exactly how artificial these racial categories are; they are not biological or ontological—they are constructs that people made up to suit particular purposes.
Chris Nygren: J. Michael Martinez frames this idea of racial construction in a striking and elegant way in a poem that he wrote in response to looking at Casta paintings, and I want to read a few lines from that poem: “The calligraphic script underscoring each panel doesn’t name these figures with specific proper nouns; rather, the calligraphy titles each figure a representative of a general racial species…. Language & oil combine to boundary the body into ‘race’.”
Ryan McDermott: And you know, modern DNA science has completely changed our understanding of race and ethnicity, in a way that really makes that last line of the poem resonate with me—“Language & oil combine to boundary the body into ‘race’.” I mean, that’s what’s happening with race, it’s not the way genetics work. Here’s Vence Bonham Jr., Acting Deputy Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute:
Vence Bonham Jr: Genomic scientists are currently investigating the relationship between self-identified race and genetic ancestry. There is more genetic variation within self-identified racial groups than between them.
Chris Nygren: So those who have spent their lives looking for the biology of race have found that it just isn’t there. Across skin tones, language groups, and physical appearance, we share so much of our genetic material that it doesn’t make sense to try to divide the species into “races.” They are basically meaningless.
Ryan McDermott: Race, of the sort that the Spanish conceived of, may be an empty signifier. But, nevertheless, lines of inheritance as traced through DNA can play important familial and cultural roles. They can be used as part of “reconciliation projects,” like those that Alondra Nelson described in Episode 3, on genealogy.
Chris Nygren: In fact, the Spanish state has engaged in its own form of reconciliation with descendants of Sephardic Jews who chose to accept exile from Spain in 1492 rather than convert to Christianity. In 2015, the Spanish government made citizenship available to those who were able to demonstrate that their genealogy extends back to an exiled Jewish family that had left Spain.
[55:07]
Ryan McDermott: It is noteworthy that there is no parallel program for the descendants of Iberian Muslims forced into exile. Reconciliation projects can be selective.
Chris Nygren: Casta paintings were an extension of a medieval mode of theorizing inheritance and race. They were also pictures that did something. Seeking to tame the messy truth of human lives in a colonial situation, they established order through racial hierarchies. We still see, and suffer from, racial hierarchies all around us. But in these paintings, we’ve also learned to see something else. Visitors to LACMA saw racialization in these pictures, certainly, but they also saw history and family—they saw themselves. While race may be an empty signifier, genealogy is not. Genealogies can be critical, they can be selective, and they can be creative. They can always be rewritten to bear new and significant meanings. They are convenient illustrations that carry enduring consequences.
Ryan McDermott: These pictures demonstrate the fallacy of the idea that we can choose not to see skin color. But as the LACMA museum-goers demonstrated, it is in our power to see it differently. We can see skin color not as a means of dividing society and distributing power, wealth, and oppression, but as a part of the genealogical inheritance that unites us with our diverse pasts.
Chris Nygren: See, there’s a way of reading these paintings against the very categories that they at first seem to construct and uphold. The paintings don’t just chart the logic of racial mixing; they also can be understood to make an argument for the dignity of those mixtures within a family unit, which is present in every one of the scenes, no matter how far down the order you go. The pictures can be seen to make an argument that is almost counter-genealogical, which runs something like this: “Our ancestry might place us lower in social hierarchy, but when it comes to love and mutual care, our present generation is on equal footing with everyone else.”
Some series of these pictures show all sixteen scenes in a grid, one giant painting which places Family number one at the top left and the last family at the lower right—the numbers run in order from left to right progressively going downward as blood purity diminishes. But placing these families into a gridwork, that most Enlightenment of shapes—ordered and symmetrical—can actually be read against the Enlightenment values. For an Enlightenment viewer, the family in vignette number one has more dignity and rights than the family shown in vignette number sixteen. But by examining the logic that underwrites the Enlightenment system, we’ve actually come to see those genealogies as constructions that can be undone.
Ryan McDermott: It’s impossible to know whether Miguel Cabrera, or the other artists who made Casta paintings, were deliberately trying to disrupt Enlightenment hierarchies. But as critics looking back on these images, the disposition of creative genealogy lets us be attuned to that possibility of a different, more optimistic reading. We can claim sufficient distance and difference from the Enlightenment to imagine that it might not have been totalizing, to imagine that its voracious desire to construct and shore up oppressive hierarchies might not have been all-consuming. Through the lens of creative genealogy, we can imagine that oppression might not have exhausted the identity of the oppressed. That here, in these images of domestic love within the nuclear family, was something that could never be fully contained by the grid.