2.5 Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico
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, when the paintings’ insidious ideologies have been debunked, but when mixed-race viewers also appreciate images that testify to their presence in the past.
Episode released Nov 29, 2023.
Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Christopher Nygren, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
Featured Scholar:
Ilona Katzew, Curator and Head of Latin American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Special thanks to: Elise Lonich Ryan, Nayeli Riano, Jennifer Josten
Resources
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The transcript for Episode 2.5 is available here.
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Coming Soon
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Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Earle, Rebecca. “The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism.” The William and Mary Quarterly 73.3 (2016): 427–66.
Martínez, María Elena. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza De Sangre Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Martinez, J. Michael. Museum of the Americas. New York: Penguin, 2018.
“Race.” Glossary entry, National Human Genome Research Institute. Updated November 22, 2023.
Cabrera, Miguel. De Español y d’India, Mestiza. 1763. Madrid, Museo de América.
Anonymous. Cuadro de castas. 18th century. Tepotzotlán, Museo Nacional del Virreinato.