Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico

Episode 2.5 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast is live! This episode argues that while race is sometimes treated as a biological fact, it is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be spread—and made visible. Art historian Ilona Katzew tells the story of how Spanish colonists of modern-day Mexico developed theories of blood purity and used the casta paintings—featuring family groups with differing skin pigmentations set in domestic scenes—to represent these theories as reality. She also shares the strange challenges of curating these paintings in the present, with the paintings’ insidious ideologies debunked, when mixed-race viewers appreciate images that testify to their presence in the past.