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Casta Painting and the Rhetorical BodyChrista Olson

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Casta Painting and the Rhetorical Body

Christa Olson

Late-colonial New Spain was awash with conflicting energies: American-born Spaniards (Creoles),like their North American counterparts, felt a growing desire for independence, yet needed theiridentification with Europe to cement their sense of superiority over the racialized indigenous,African, and mixed-race lower classes; the Enlightenment brought new fervor for scientificexploration and gave intellectual heft to the desire for independence, yet also facilitatedadministrative reforms that increased the Spanish monarchy’s intervention in its subjects’ lives. Inthe midst of this ferment, there appeared a popular but short-lived genre of art whose depictions oflife in New Spain provide a powerful image of the rhetorical role of the colonial body. This articleexamines how that genre, casta painting, used topoi of family, publicity, and science to constituteand comment upon its moments’ racialized common sense. The article suggests that takingseriously the rhetorical contribution of these artifacts contributes to a more complex understandingof Enlightenment rhetoric, particularly in the Spanish Americas.

Introduction—Setting the Scene

Around 1750, Luis de Mena painted a single-panel cuadro de casta divided into

twelve sections. At the top left he placed a small landscape showing a church

and a group of dancing figures dressed in white. At the top right another landscape

shows the Paseo de Jamaica, a popular promenade in Mexico City, filled with

people. Across the bottom of the panel Mena painted a still life of tropical fruits,

each numbered and identified in a key. Between the landscapes and the still life,

eight small images placed in two rows of four dominate the panel. Each image

depicts a mother, a father, and a child; each figure is labeled with a caste name

indicating racial mixture, names such as mestizo, mulata, morisca, and lobo.

Moving from left to right and top to bottom the images show a genealogical

progression explicating the caste names applied to children of successive interra-

cial marriages. Hovering over the entire panel, placed between the two landscapes,

is the Virgin of Guadalupe (Fig. 1).

The bishops and cathedral chapters of New Spain (present-day Mexico)

declared the Virgin of Guadalupe their patroness in 1746. In 1754, the Pope

formally confirmed that status (Taylor 12). By that time, the Virgin of Guadalupe

Crista Olson is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana Cham-

paign, 608 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: cjolson2@illinois.edu

Rhetoric Society Quarterly

Vol. 39, No. 4, October 2009, pp. 307–330

ISSN 0277-3945 (print)/ISSN 1930-322X (online) # 2009 The Rhetoric Society of America

DOI: 10.1080/02773940902991429

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was already seen as a uniquely Mexican figure that distinguished the colony from

its Spanish overlords. The association of the Virgin with a line from Psalm 147,

‘‘Non fecit taliter omni nationi’’ (He has not done this for any other nation), also

solidified around this time, by the late 1760s, further marking the Virgin as a

symbol of Mexican distinction (Katzew Casta 194; Taylor 14). She eventually

became a powerful symbol of the independence movement. Her presence on this

mid-eighteenth century painting underlines a foundational assumption of this

article: that cuadros de casta, although they carried many meanings and served

many purposes, inevitably reflect the sense of national identity and desire for inde-

pendence that was emerging from the complex of identifications held by Creoles

(American-born Spaniards) in the late colonial period.

By the early eighteenth century, Creoles in New Spain lived within a complex

system of racial castes that combined biological, genealogical, and pigmentocratic

beliefs about race and largely determined social and political life in the colony.1

Figure 1 Luis de Mena, Escenas de Mestizaje, ca. 1750. Museo de America, Madrid.

1Although Creoles were by definition white and therefore were not considered a caste (the term casta

indicated racial mixture), the fact of their American, rather than European, birth distinguished them from

Espa~nnoles in terms of economic, political, and social status.

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Out of this obsession with race and caste grew a unique visual form, a genre of

painting now known as cuadros de casta or caste paintings (referred to in English

as ‘‘casta painting’’). Essentially unique to eighteenth-century New Spain,2 this

genre flourished briefly (extant casta paintings date from 1711 to 1790) and drew

artists of varying ability and prestige. A secular genre from a sacred era, mysterious

in purpose and meaning, and rarely preserved, casta painting itself has received

relatively little scholarly attention, serving mainly as an illustration for scholars

more interested in the Spanish colonial practice of social and racial castes (cf.

McDonald; Nash). However, casta painting’s clear orientation toward problems

of the public and its visual contributions to the negotiation of the proper civic

body make it amenable to rhetorical criticism. Even more enticing, however, is

what attention to casta painting might add to our understanding of eighteenth-

century rhetorical culture within and beyond the Spanish colonial context. Most

scholarship on casta painting has interpreted individual casta images as univocal,

positioning them as Enlightenment-inspired attempts to construct in imagery a

level of racial control already impossible in practice. In this article, I argue that

casta images should instead be approached as multivocal and layered. Metaphors

of family, publicity, and science dominate most casta images and function as topoi

that make casta paintings persuasive artifacts, simultaneously participating in

colonial control and depicting the tensions and weaknesses within that control.

As such, casta images can be placed not only within the emerging nationalism of

their local rhetorical culture, but also within broader Euro-American eighteenth-

century rhetorical culture that, far from being wholly dominated by Enlightened

science, was characterized by complex identifications constantly negotiating

Enlightenment coloniality’s romance with abstract rationality.

To demonstrate casta painting’s participation in those complex identifications

and commitments, this article traces the work done by the topoi of the family,

the public, and the scientific. The first part of the article extends existing scholar-

ship on casta painting to explore the genre’s conflicted identifications. Here, I am

most concerned with the particular circumstances of colonial New Spain and

elaborate on the social and political changes occurring within the colony during

the eighteenth century. Grounded in readings of two much-discussed and often-

copied3 casta images, part one uses the topoi of the family and the public to argue

that casta paintings invoke a rhetorical culture deeply conflicted in its identifica-

tions and deeply concerned about the racial character of its civic body.

In part two, the article moves beyond New Spain, setting the conflicted rheto-

rical efforts of casta painting in the broader context of eighteenth-century colonial

2There is one known casta series that was produced in Quito early in the century.3Later casta series often repeat scenes from earlier ones, although less experienced painters often simplify

complicated scenes. This repetition suggests the emergence of commonplaces in which castes became

increasingly knowable through the accumulation of images.

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modernity. Examining the conflicted uptake of Enlightenment philosophy and

science in the Spanish world and beyond, it argues that casta painting may be seen

as refracting a racial common sense that both contests and depends on the topos

of Enlightenment science. It also suggests that casta painting can be seen as parti-

cipating in an eighteenth-century rhetorical culture already bound up in and

aware of the tensions of colonialism and scientific rationality.

Part 1: On Casta Painting, Coloniality, and Nationalism

Starting early in the colonial period, New Spain’s population was divided into

three groups in the registration books maintained by church authorities: Espa~nnoles

(Creoles), Indios, and castas4 (persons of mixed racial heritage). The castas were, in

turn, divided into a varying number of caste subgroups (Klor de Alva 64). It is not

clear what precipitated the painting of the first casta images early in the eighteenth

century, almost three hundred years after the castas became a recognizable part of

colonial life, although the emerging emphasis on observation and the gaze in mod-

ern visuality (Poole 14) likely played a part. Casta paintings represent hierarchies

of miscegenation among the colony’s three main ‘‘racial’’5 groups (Africans,

Europeans, and Indians). Generally, casta paintings appear in a series of 12 to 16

images, presented either as separate panels or as a grid of images on a single panel.

Each casta image depicts a family: a mother, a father, and one or two children.

Each set of parents represents a different combination of racial groups or castes.

The children resulting from those relationships bear the caste name that forms

the title of the painting. For example, a painting showing an indigenous woman

and a Spanish man with their mestizo son might be titled, ‘‘From Indian and Spa-

niard is born Mestizo’’ (de India y Espa~nnol nace Mestizo). The Mestizo painting is

almost always the first image in a casta series. Successive images show the titled

caste of the previous image as a parent in the next, showing increasing levels of

miscegenation and labeled with ever more esoteric caste names. Though casta ser-

ies include castes such as ‘‘tente en el aire’’ (hold yourself in the air), ‘‘albarazado’’

(white-spotted), or ‘‘no te entiendo’’ (I don’t get you), everyday use of those

names seems to have been rare. In general, there were far fewer caste names in

common use than appear in the average casta series.

Early eighteenth-century casta series often show families in half or three-quarter

view against a non-descript background. Although the figures’ clothing carries

some indication of social class, the extremes that appear in later series are notably

4African slaves were also listed in the book of castas, even if they were technically ‘‘pure’’ African.5Throughout this article I use ‘‘race’’ to reference the three groups depicted in casta painting. Here, race

suggests the era’s sense of raza as a combination of lineage and biological inheritance. Although a study of

the racialization occurring in this era is beyond the scope of this essay, my use of ‘‘race’’ is inflected with

concern for the social and economic forces racializing individuals in colonial New Spain.

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absent. These series present a fairly neutral mood in each panel, showing generally

prosperous families in scenes devoid of contextual markers. They also often depict

a smaller number of castes than later examples do. In these paintings, anxiety over

racial mixing is subdued and the categories appear precise. By the second half of

the eighteenth century, however, casta series place figures in complicated scenes

complete with rich details about the social status of the figures and the life of

the colony. These later series often show a marked decline in socioeconomic status

and moral behavior as they move down the caste hierarchy. An increase in

depicted violence is especially common in those panels where one or more figures

possess significant African heritage.

Casta paintings draw on strategies of visual education in use since at least the

medieval period. The Church used religious imagery (painting, stained glass,

statuary, controlled movement through cathedrals, etc.) to ‘‘narrate’’ sacred stories

through corporeal interaction. Such physical notions of persuasion still held a

great deal of sway in eighteenth-century Spanish America and the serial nature

of casta sets is clearly connected to the hagiographic series that were major tools

in Spanish colonial evangelization. Ilona Katzew suggests that just as hagiographic

series narrated key stories of Christian faith, casta series narrated the process of

miscegenation and created a ‘‘visual paradigm . . . that could easily be remembered

and invoke various associations’’ (Casta 63). Following this strategy, single-panel

casta paintings construct a visual hierarchy through a simple grid.6 Vertically,

there are three main caste subgroups. The top row depicts Spanish–Indigenous

relationships; the middle row shows Spanish–African partners; the bottom row

features African–Indigenous couples.7 Both in terms of grid position and markers

of class status, families that include a Spanish parent8 hold the highest place in the

visual hierarchy. People of indigenous heritage are often shown as respectable and

dignified when depicted in a relationship with a Spaniard, but when in a relation-

ship with an African, they appear to occupy the lowest strata of society. African

blood is depicted as most degraded and most contaminating: whereas sufficient

dilution of indigenous heritage returns a child to the status of Espa~nnol, there is

no such cleansing for African heritage. Horizontally within each subgroup the

series move from least to most mixed heritage (thus, except in the case of African–

Indigenous pairs, children move from least to most ‘‘white’’), with the last image

of Spanish–Indigenous intermarriage often labeling the child as Espa~nnol.

6There is at least one exception to this form: a single casta panel in which the castes mingle in a public

market. As most of the figures in the image are adults, this casta panel also breaks with the genre’s typical

familial organization.7The Luis de Mena painting with which I begin this article is an exception to the three-tiered structure, it

is, however, unusual in its use of two rows.8Carrera and Katzew read the fact that the European figures in casta painting are labeled Espa~nnoles and

not Criollos (Creoles) as an argument for seeing the genre in terms of a nationalist project.

Casta Painting 311

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Multi-panel casta series establish a similar hierarchy using clothing, setting, and

behavior as class and status markers. In addition, many are numbered to indicate

the order in which they should be presented, an order that mimics the hierarchies

in single-panel casta paintings. In their visual organization these paintings repro-

duce colonial anxieties about race and the elaborate systems of categorization and

control designed to alleviate those anxieties. They attempt to make truths about

miscegenation in the colonial context through the representation of raced bodies.

However, the truths being made are complex truths, shot through with conflicting

allegiances and readable in terms of multiple identifications.9

What we know today about the conditions of production for casta painting

supports the argument that they were multivocal objects. Because the majority

of extant casta series were found in European private collections and museums,

scholars agree that their largest market must have been Spanish administrators

or visitors collecting a sort of tourist booty by which to narrate their time in the

exotic colonial setting. However, the artists creating casta images were Americans,

probably Creoles. Those artists whose identities are discernable (through signa-

tures or comparison of style) were known Creole artists; the remainder, though

anonymous, were clearly familiar with New Spanish social life, flora, and fauna.

In this context, though many casta series were commissioned for export to Spain,

Katzew notes that ‘‘the emphasis on the luxury and abundance of the colony and

the mediation of reality as conveyed by the careful selection of the scenes repre-

sented’’ point to a conscious effort at Creole self-representation (‘‘Casta Painting’’

17). In addition, it appears that at least some casta series were purchased by Creole

elites attempting to capture an emerging sense of identity separate from Spain.

Thus, casta paintings simultaneously served an exoticizing function for their

Spanish patrons and an identificatory function for their Creole producers and a

small number of Creole patrons.

Artists producing casta paintings were likely able to maintain a layered, multiple

voice in their images because of the genre’s particularity. Sacred art dominated the

market in eighteenth-century New Spain, followed distantly by portraiture. Both

religious painting and portraiture required strict attention to form and content,

especially because the Inquisition remained a powerful normalizing force in the

colony. Casta painting carried no such formal obligation and may have been a

lower-risk way artists practiced representing human figures. Rarely mentioned

in correspondence or criticism from its own era, casta painting appears to have

garnered minimal attention. Many of the paintings, done by unknown artists

and of dubious artistic quality, have been lost in storage since their completion.

Carrera emphasizes that casta painting was a relatively unimportant genre and

9Burke’s argument that rhetoric is a matter of identification, of aligning one’s self with one group and in

conflict with another is key here. Like Burke, I am concerned with identification ‘‘in its partisan aspects’’ (22).

I also suggest that individuals may be at odds with themselves through multiple, conflicted identifications.

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thus should not be approached as substantially altering our understanding of

eighteenth-century colonial art history. However, she argues, its very obscurity

makes the genre useful for understanding how artists envisioned their social

milieu. The more quotidian nature of the genre may have given artists new free-

dom to incorporate experimental forms and unconventional ideas. For Carrera,

this feature of being both ordinary and innovative means that casta paintings

‘‘almost inadvertently reveal through time the increasing discourse on the colonial

body’’ (Carrera Imagining Identity 49). The somewhat greater freedom experi-

enced by artists producing casta series also means that the genre is, among Spanish

colonial art forms, particularly well-positioned to suggest the conflicted identifica-

tions of the social context in which it was created.

Casta painting embodies the dynamic contradictions in the construction and

maintenance of the caste system in New Spain. These paintings circulated within

Creole and Peninsular (European Spanish) society, making meaning in the juxtapo-

sition of conflicting social experiences. They are eminently rhetorical images in the

sense that in them one is able to ‘‘imprecisely [track] the making of social imagin-

aries, including their histories, possible futures, and connections to material condi-

tions’’ (Cintron ‘‘Gates Locked’’ 10). They carry ideas about social organization and

communicate the conflicted identifications of the elites who painted, commis-

sioned, and observed them. Although casta paintings were likely not part of a coor-

dinated effort at persuasion, they still function as persuasive means of identification

in the Burkean sense, leading toward an alignment of interests or senses of self.

Burke’s link between identification and ‘‘consubstantiality’’ is particularly applic-

able to casta painting because, as Burke says of consubstantiality, in the moment

of identification with a casta other, one is both fully distinct from that other and

joined with it. Casta paintings imagine ‘‘a way of life [as] an acting-together’’ and

invoke ‘‘common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes’’ based on the

consubstantial sense of identifying with that which one is not (Burke 21).

Casta painting promotes this consubstantial identification through topoi best

understood as ‘‘storehouses of social energy’’ (Cintron Democracy 7). Here, topoi

function persuasively and encourage identification by tapping into the complexes

of values, experiences, and customs that knit societies together. Commonplaces

carry the accumulated force of those complexes and wield it in more-or-less expli-

cit terms. This definition of topoi emphasizes the generative dimensions of the

commonplace, integrating the related concept of energeia through the invocation

of social energy. Cintron draws on energeia’s illustrative=constitutive implications

to position topoi as ‘‘‘[bringing their content]-before-the-eyes’ ’’ (Democracy 9).

What makes topoi powerful, then, is that they simultaneously index and produce

their social milieu, often by making it visible. In addition, this definition of topoi

emphasizes the value of closely examining commonplaces in order to understand

the collections of values, experiences, and customs that make them resonant

in their own era. The three casta painting topoi identified in this article (the

family, the public, and the scientific) draw on everyday life experiences for elite

Casta Painting 313

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Creoles and Peninsulars as well as lower-status indigenous people, Africans, and

castas. They bring before the eyes ‘‘the energeia of collective desires, jealousies,

loathings, pleasures, [and] self-indulgences’’ that motivated the life-world of

many, especially elites, in colonial New Spain (Democracy 11). In this context,

the question of how closely or distantly casta painting reproduces the actual con-

ditions of life in the colony recedes in importance and is replaced by concern with

how casta painting made visible the complex of self-understandings, aspirations,

and anxieties of the elite who were its creators and its audience, tapping into

and constituting a persuasive image of the colonial life-world.

Although casta painting has not previously been the subject of rhetorical criti-

cism, most scholarship on the form implicitly recognizes its rhetorical contours.

Garcıa S�aaiz, Katzew, and Carrera, three prominent scholars of the genre, all argue

that casta painting offers an ideologically inflected interpretation of colonial life

rather than a faithful reproduction. They point out that contemporary historical

documents reveal the colonial government’s inability to identify and maintain strict

caste differentiation (Garcıa S�aaiz 44). By the era of casta painting, it was nearly

impossible to accurately distinguish pure-blooded Europeans from lighter-skinned

castes,10 and legal efforts to control miscegenation were abandoned by the end of

the century. In this context, casta paintings can be seen as persuasive objects that

tapped into a complex of social energy amassed from the power anxieties of elites

and that aimed to allay worries about loss of control by imagining New Spain’s

population as divided into easily identifiable and eminently knowable groups

(Carrera ‘‘Locating Race’’ 38; Katzew ‘‘Casta Painting’’ 15). The clear demarcations

of the caste hierarchy shown in casta paintings, according to this scholarship, repre-

sent a racial fiction designed to reassert colonial control.

However, although casta paintings carry powerful messages of colonial control,

it is too limiting to read them only as a symbolic reassertion of Spanish domina-

tion in the face of an increasingly complex and rebellious mixed-race society. As

often as they engage the topos of scientific control and widely circulated assump-

tions about European intellectual superiority, the paintings redirect that topos

away from Spanish authority and toward an emerging sense of Creole American

identity. In particular, casta paintings toy with the messiness and instability within

the topos of science, pairing and manipulating it with commonplaces of family

and publicity that simultaneously buttress and undermine the message of colonial

control so visible in the series.

Two paintings from a 1774 casta series by Andres de Islas, held by the Museum

of America in Madrid, help illustrate this complexity. The identity of the series’

original commissioner is unknown, but its location in Spain suggests a European

patron. This series is particularly useful for considering the mixture of topoi in

casta painting because the series was copied multiple times by later casta artists.

10Although phenotypical distinction became increasingly difficult, as Carrera argues, rigid distinctions

based on class still maintained a highly stratified society.

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It appears to have captured, in some way, a shared understanding of the genre’s

import. The images examined here are the fourth and seventh in the series. Both

show Spanish–African relationships. To begin, I offer a brief description of each

image, then elaborate on each in terms of two of the three topoi: the family

and the public. Part two elaborates on casta painting’s invocation of science as

a commonplace.

In the first painting, entitled ‘‘From Spaniard and Black is born Mulatto’’ (De

Espa~nnol y Negra, nace Mulata; Fig. 2), a dark-skinned woman dressed as a servant

beats a well-dressed Spaniard. The woman, standing beside a counter scattered

with jars and plates, is turned away from the viewer, though her face is visible.

The image catches her with her right hand high above her head, grasping a small

mallet. The man, dressed as a gentleman, stands in front of a window showing

open sky and trees. He wears a white coat with black trim and white lace at the

wrists. With his right hand, he grasps the woman’s left arm, a look of fear on

his face as she pulls his hair and threatens him with the mallet. His left arm rests,

open-palmed, under the woman’s left arm.11 Standing between the fighting

Figure 2 Andres de Islas, De Espa~nnol y Negra, nace Mulata, 1774. Museo de America, Madrid.

11It is hard for a viewer today to see this image and not assume that the man is the woman’s master, their

child more his demand than their mutual desire. It is equally hard to know if such a meaning would have

been visible to the painting’s original viewers, although Marıa Garcıa S�aaiz refers to these images obliquely as

‘‘allud[ing], perhaps, to certain types of accepted husband-wife relationships’’ (Garcıa S�aaiz 40).

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couple, their mulata daughter makes a diagonal line of intervention. Her feet are

planted beside her father’s left foot, her small, light-brown hands push against her

mother’s skirt. Her head is thrown back, her eyes look up imploringly at her par-

ents, and her mouth is open in a cry of distress. On the floor beside the woman sits

a basket full of fruits, each marked with a number. Above the man’s head is a

numbered list of names corresponding to the fruits below.

In the second image, ‘‘From Spaniard and Albino is born Torna-atras’’ (De

Espa~nnol y Alvina, nace Torna-atras; Fig. 3), a dark-skinned boy perches on his

light-skinned father’s lap while his pale mother stands nearby holding the boy’s

cloak and tri-cornered hat. The scene takes place in a room with brocaded velvet

wall coverings. The father wears a long, silver-gray coat and his knee-length pants

are of the same material; a deep blue cloak with silver embroidery rests on his

shoulders. The son, dressed in a neat blue coat with a red waistcoat and pants,

stands on his father’s legs. With one hand, the father holds his son’s small hand;

his other hand is wrapped around the boy’s back, steadying him. The boy looks up

at his father, his long, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail (in some versions of

this image the boy’s hair is clearly wiry, emphasizing his African heritage. Here, it

appears smooth). The pale-skinned mother, wearing a jeweled necklace and earr-

ings, a black skirt, and a tailored blouse does not appear dressed to leave the house.

She looks down, gazing demurely at the floor, the picture of a cultured woman.

Figure 3 Andres de Islas, De Espa~nnol y Albina, nace Torna-atras, 1774. Museo de America, Madrid.

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These (and other) casta images manifest their conflicted sense of identification,

in part, through their representation of the basic family unit. Such images of family,

though approachable as simply images or themes, are productively examined as

topoi in order to emphasize how the images index the reservoir of unspoken cus-

toms and assumptions welling up around depictions of parent–child relationships.

Katzew suggests that this reliance on images of the family projects messages of a

benign and natural social hierarchy and implies racial harmony. She notes, ‘‘Since

the subordination of women to man and child to woman were considered natural

facts, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guaran-

tee social difference as a category of nature’’ (‘‘Casta Painting’’ 13). Although this

analogy between hierarchical control and the family responds to one powerful set of

customs driving casta images’ persuasive power, it does not seem satisfactory given

the range of family types and relations depicted in the images—some of which seem

to tap other sorts of familial commonplaces. Casta painting’s reliance on the family

as a persuasive commonplace depends on the layered meanings that viewers might

apply to these images based on their knowledge and experience of family in the

colonial context. Gonzalbo Aizpuru emphasizes that in colonial New Spain the

family unit and kinship networks (parentezco) were essential to establishing

economic and social status. They were also, however, nexuses of the many conflicts

and contradictions lacing colonial society. She writes,

Disorder in the face of order, material interests against emotional connections,religious principles buried beneath political convenience, virtue in conflict withvice, negated equality, abandoned children, promiscuity in contact withisolation . . . are just some of the conflicts that appear in the modes of sharedlife found in colonial society. There are no easy answers to the questions[that the article poses about the meaning and structure of colonial family life],nor do stereotypes help explain attitudes or justify decisions. (GonzalboAizpuru 405)12

In particular, the prominence and roles given to children in many casta images

demonstrate that as storehouses of social energy, depictions of the family carried

more than a sense of natural hierarchy. Children are regularly placed between their

parents, at the center of the image. Often, one or both of the parents are in

physical contact with the child—holding, touching, guiding the child. Though

in many scenes the children are passive infants or docile toddlers, they are just

as likely to be shown in action, pointing the way, requesting food, or caring for

younger siblings. Even in scenes that depict violence, the children are never the

12‘‘El desorden frente al orden, el interes material contra los sentimientos, los principios religiosos enterrados

bajo la conveniencia polıtica, la virtud en lucha con el vicio, la igualdad negada, la infancia abandonada, la

promiscuidad en contacto con el aislamiento . . . son apenas algunos de los conflictos que se aprecian en las formas

de convivencia propias de la sociedad colonial. No hay una respuesta simple para las cuestiones planteadas, ni

sirven los estereotipos para explicar actitudes o justificar decisiones.’’

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focus of that violence. In fact, in such scenes children are often the intermediaries

between their parents.

The daughter’s intervention is one of the most striking features of the Islas

Mulata image described earlier. Her distress occupies the center of the image

and is a clear focal point, just as her caste name provides the title for the painting.

The image constructs, as Katzew suggests, a clear message that the African woman

is dangerous and volatile and must be controlled. However, the Spanish man, head

of the family and symbol of governance and control in Katzew’s reading, seems

powerless to subdue his spouse. Instead, he is caught by the hair (and in some ver-

sions of this image, his forehead is bloodied by a previous strike of her mallet),

looking helpless and frightened. It is the child, the American casta, who seems cap-

able of intervention and is, indeed, the most powerful figure in the scene. This

balance of power in the image does not reasonably contribute to an argument

in which the Spaniard effortlessly maintains his much-vaunted Enlightened

colonial control. He appears compromised by his colonial relationship with the

woman, unable to sway her to his will. Instead, the sympathy of the image is with

the daughter who is caught between the battling parents yet also appears as the

likely way out of the conflict. If we assume, like Katzew, that the Spanish man

stands in for Spanish colonial governance in general and that the African woman

represents the colonial other, we might then read their casta child as consubstan-

tially identified with the Creole population and embodying the motive of national

emergence. Thus, the topos of family in this and similar casta images can also be

seen as tapping into and appropriating an existing narrative that saw American-

born Spaniards and castas as children in their relationship with the paternal

metropole. As in this image, Creoles were caught between their identification with

the colonizing Spaniards and their sense of sharing colonial exploitation with cas-

tas, indigenous people, and Africans. Tainted by their American birth, Creole elites

simultaneously asserted their European-ness and, as the possibility of indepen-

dence dawned, distinguished themselves from Europe. Thomas Abercrombie

notes that Creole elites were always ‘‘swinging between fear of contamination

and transgressive desire’’ for the colonial Other (177). Although it would be a mis-

take to suggest that beyond the casta painting canvas Islas and other Creole

artists identified themselves politically and socially with members of the lower

castes, it does not seem a stretch, given the generally idealized figures of casta

painting, to suggest that the children in those casta paintings that include a

Spanish parent invoke identification with the Creole population. In the Mulata

image, the daughter’s reference to the Creole elite is especially clear in her posi-

tioning vis a vis her parents. With her feet firmly placed alongside her father,

she appears to side with the Spanish effort to restrain her African mother. Unlike

him, however, the daughter seems to have some chance of success. She is not

caught, as he is, and she has the ability to appeal to her mother based in their

shared sense of opposition to European domination. There is, within this image,

an implicit argument that the children of the union between Spain and its colonies

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ought to rule the future of the colony and are best suited to the control (and

exploitation) of its lower classes.

The family topos plays out in another way in paintings like Islas’s Torna-atras.

Here, in the context of affluence, the fact that casta paintings are grounded in

the family unit seems to naturalize not only social hierarchy, but also racial mixture

itself, playing with and against the common belief among European Spaniards that

even so-called pure-blooded Creoles were contaminated by their birth into the cli-

mate and society of the colony. The caste label torna-atras shows up in a variety of

contexts in casta series, but is most often applied to the child of a Spaniard and an

‘‘Albino’’ (1=8th African and 7=8ths Spanish heritage).13 The label suggests that

‘‘blood will out’’ as the phrase torna-atras means ‘‘return backwards’’ and many

torna-atras casta paintings show two phenotypically European parents with a mark-

edly dark-skinned child. Some paintings that show the torna-atras family put dis-

tance between the child and its Spanish father, suggesting slight rejection by the

Spanish parent, and all torna-atras images carry a bit of the social energy invested

in limpieza de sangre (blood purity)14 and the colonial fear that African blood will

work its way into the Spanish elite. This powerful narrative of contamination, of a

black child born of white parents, would clearly have triggered anxieties about racial

impurity and lack of social control. However, most torna-atras paintings play with

setting in a way that counteracts that fear of being ‘‘outed’’ as impure. The images

of torna-atras families in casta painting generally suggest respectability rather than

social degradation. Often, the families are represented as wealthy: dressed in fine,

European-style clothing and located in well-appointed sitting rooms, on sculptured

terraces, or in manicured gardens. The parents and children demonstrate the marks

of status (calidad) through poised positions, fine jewelry, and other details reminis-

cent of elite portraits.15 Andres de Islas’s Torna-atras is no exception. All three fig-

ures are well-dressed and the alliance of the torna-atras child with his Spanish father

is heightened by their physical proximity. The boy is positioned as his father’s heir

(a point on which I elaborate later) and looks to his father for guidance. Although

themes of racial and sexual domination are visible in the husband’s direct gaze and

the wife’s demure focus on the floor, the more obviously casta child does not seem

bound by those same strictures.

A fuller understanding of the narratives at work in this Torna-atras painting

requires turning to the second major topos at work in the conflicted rhetoric of

13Studies of casta painting generally point out that while there is consistency in the names of less mixed

castas (mestizo, mulato, castizo, and morisco), the labels applied to more racially ambiguous groups tend to

be fluid. Torna-atras appears most often toward the end of the sub-series of African–Spanish mixtures. How-

ever, torna-atras also sometimes labels a child of indigenous and African heritage.14In Spain, limpieza de sangre originally referred to ‘‘pure’’ Christian heritage and the requirement that

elites not have Jewish or Islamic heritage. In Spanish America, limpieza referred to purity of European or

Indigenous heritage and barred those of African or mixed inheritance from holding public positions.15For more information on the tradition of elite portraits and its connection to casta painting, see Carrera

(Imagining Identity).

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casta painting: the topos of publicity. As with the complex of associations

surrounding images of family, representations of public and private life drew on

and likely triggered associations with a series of assumptions about social place

and status. Especially early in the eighteenth century, the quality and position of

the space that elites occupied at public events such as the corridas del toro

(bullfights) held on ceremonial occasions were highly scrutinized markers of class

status (Viqueira Alb�aan 13). Beyond the spectacle of the bullfights, participation in

other public diversions such as the paseo, or promenade, and the theater also

reinscribed the class hierarchies of the colony. People of all classes attended these

public activities and being visibly present in the proper vehicle and dress was an

important part of maintaining status for the elites (xx).16

Influenced by changes in artistic style (signaling the early arrival of romanti-

cism) and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the scientific observation of the

natural world, casta paintings from the second half of the eighteenth century

invoke a more developed sense of space than do their earlier counterparts. In these

later images, depictions of space, especially urban space, encode a complex set of

information about the image, tapping into contemporary changes in notions of

public and private. The Bourbon reforms, most notably under the ‘‘Enlightened

Despot’’ Carlos III (1759–88),17 did much to delineate the realms of the public

and private in Spanish America, especially in terms of reforming public adminis-

tration and introducing a more liberal economy (Uribe-Uran 428). The Bourbon

reforms also included a literal emphasis on public space as they introduced ideals

of urban planning and hygiene that attempted to modernize Mexico City. Carrera

argues that casta painting’s ‘‘visual construction of colonial bodies’’ is inextricably

linked to a ‘‘bureaucratic reaction to demographic changes [in Mexico City]

which . . . attempted increasingly vigorous regulation and renovation of colonial

bodies and spaces’’ (Imagining Identity 107). Casta images thus use depictions

of spatial organization and hierarchy as indexes for readily available ideas about

public and private space and the space of the city.

By the end of the eighteenth century, public participation in civil society

through literary, scientific, and philanthropic associations became increasingly

common among elites, suggesting, according to Uribe-Uran, the early stages of

a Habermasian public sphere in the colony (425). Casta painting also made

use of publicly-performed hierarchies of class and the raced body, often rooted

in images of civil society. Within many series, location signals calidad, as higher

status families appear in private houses or salons and lower status families stand

on grimy streets or in outdoor markets and kitchens. Even within a single paint-

ing, the relative positions of the adults in the image vis a vis their public roles

16However, Viqueira Alb�aan suggests that that staple of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, the

cafe or coffee house, was not as common in New Spain as in some parts of Europe (xix).17Paradoxically, these reforms also enabled Creole nationalism by reducing the colonies’ economic dependence

on Spain and increasing contact between the colony and France and Britain. See Thurner and Guerrero (28).

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often signals as much about the relationship as do the artist’s choices of clothing

or adornment. Islas’s Mulata image, in its juxtaposition of labeled fruits at the

woman’s feet and numbered key above the man’s head, of open sky above the

man and kitchen interior behind the woman plays with such commonplace

understandings of private and public by placing the adults in positions that

mimic the dualisms of gender roles. If the father, standing against the open win-

dow, exudes publicity and state power, and the mother, the image of a domestic

servant, carries the private burden of household improprieties, the child is an

intermediary between the two: the public image of private behaviors. As in Islas’s

Mulata painting, the location of women along a spectrum of publicity seems to

be particularly important to establishing caste status in most casta series. Across

casta series, lower status African women appear most often in kitchens and

lower-caste Indigenous women are often depicted near rural cottages or selling

fruits on urban streets. Their contribution to and participation in the public

sphere is shown as limited, yet they are also available to the public gaze.

Upper-class Spanish or light-skinned casta women are typically more protected

from publicity and more demure in the face of it, most often seen in domestic

interiors or in apparently private gardens, engaged in some domestic task with

eyes turned away from the viewer.

In all torna-atras images that show a dark-skinned child with light-skinned

parents, the topos of the public plays out, on the one hand, in the sense of misce-

genation being inevitably made public. In that sense, this commonplace clearly par-

ticipates in the disciplining of the colonial body, emphasizing the belief that it is

possible to identify people of ‘‘impure’’ heritage and thus attempting to calm colo-

nial fears of contamination. However, again, because these images do not show the

torna-atras child as the cause of social falling, this topos cannot so easily be read as

univocal or unidirectional. Instead, the apparently harmonious domestic scene in

which the father prepares to take his son into public implies a counter-story and

a countervailing force of social energy in which the threat of miscegenation trans-

forms into what will eventually be a (still racist and race-based) ideology promoting

a history of miscegenation as part of national identity even among Creole elites.18

In the Islas Torna-atras in particular, the son is identified with his father both in

terms of position within the scene and in terms of dress and poise. The image

suggests that father and son are about to leave the domestic scene and go out into

the city together. Soon, dressed in a suit and cloak like his father, the boy will

be publicly visible as his father’s legitimate son, set to inherit. The boy may be

dark-skinned, but the marks of status that surround him belie his inferior caste

position. It is highly unlikely that, in the colonial, pigmentocratic society of

18One hundred and fifty years later, mestizaje, a notion of racial mixture, became an official Mexican

national narrative. Jose Vasconcelos’s 1925 book, La Raza Cosmica, argued for ‘‘a strong fifth race that would

result from a synthesis of the other four races found in Latin America’’ (Barnitz 46) and that would usher in

the next era of humanity.

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New Spain, a dark-skinned child of fair parents would have been able to maintain a

high social status (or even been recognized as legitimate). This casta image is clearly

not a portrait of a real family. Instead, in the context of a fierce warning about the

inevitable emergence of racial contamination, it inserts a powerful metaphor of

American distinction. Here, as in Islas’s Mulata, the denigrated child of the colonial

encounter (read, the Creole) is positioned to inherit the colony.

The Creole elites of New Spain were, by the end of the eighteenth century,

actively imagining themselves as the leaders of a new nation. This constitution

of a new nation required distinguishing the colony from the metropole, imbuing

it with an alternate history and the need for an equally distinct future. Highlight-

ing the growing racial difference between the Americas and Spain and emphasizing

Spain’s inability to respond to that visible reality offered one strategy. The argu-

ment that casta painting participated in the normalization of racial mixing does

not imply, in any way, that racial hierarchy as such disappeared; skin color still

plays a role in social status throughout the Americas today. However, as an argu-

ment for independence, emphasizing the complex racial features of American

society had substantial force. Throughout Latin America, Creole elites began

articulating republican narratives that invoked the sovereignty of the people and

sought the support of the majority casta population while reserving roles of

authority and governance for themselves. As Jose Mo~nnino put it rather baldly at

the time: ‘‘All for the people, but without the people’’ (qtd. in Viqueira Alb�aan

38). Casta painting must be read in light of this dynamic historical moment

and its requirement that Creoles align themselves simultaneously with European

authority and American rebellion. The Creoles who painted and bought casta ser-

ies would have had significant investment in both presenting racial mixture as a

distinctive trait of New Spain (something that separated the colony from Spain)

and maintaining their own privileged status (despite, perhaps, awareness of racial

impurity in their own families).

In this reading, casta painting’s reduction of New Spain’s history of miscegena-

tion to a set of sixteen identifiable castes makes the genre a means through which

Creoles imagined their identification with and resistance to Spain as well as their

identification with other American peoples and their continuing sense of superior-

ity to those raced others. For that reason, in addition to offering a multivocal

response to colonization through topoi of family and publicity, casta painting also

offers insight into the broader Euro-American rhetorical culture of the eighteenth

century. In particular, casta painting exposes rifts in the supposed dominance of

Enlightened science and its rationalized authority.

Part 2: Casta Painting and the Rhetorical Bodyof the Eighteenth Century

The previous two example images carry implicit arguments for a transition of

authority from Spain to the Creole elite. They allude to Spanish failure of control

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within the family and the (male) colonized child’s inevitable inheritance of his

father’s public place. This theme of national emergence out of miscegenation

appears even more forcefully in a final example playing on the foibles of scientific

rationality (Fig. 4). The anonymous painting dates from the late 1770s and

continues the evolution of the casta form from simple portraits to elaborate land-

scapes. ‘‘From Albino and Spaniard is produced Black Torna-atras’’ (De Alvina y

Espa~nnol produce Negro Torna-atras) places little emphasis on its human subjects

and instead depicts a detailed scene of Mexico City, situating the family on a

balcony in the lower left corner. In the painting, the Spanish father stands over

the family, surveying the urban scene below through a telescope. His stance is

arrogant: his right hand rests on his hip, his chest thrusts forward, and an

appraising look rests on his face. His blond, fair-skinned, ‘‘Albino’’ wife sits

facing the viewer, her back to the city. She wears a red dress, gazes up into

the sky, and raises her right hand into the air in a gesture of supplication or exas-

peration. Their son, neatly dressed in royal blue suit and white stockings, stands

behind his mother and places his right hand on her shoulder. His back is also to

the scene below and his dark skin stands out against the muted color palate of

the landscape.

Because the father surveys the city through a telescope, suggesting a sort of

panopticism, Katzew describes this casta scene in terms of the codification of

social hierarchy that drives her overall interpretation of casta painting. She writes,

Here the family group is depicted in a literal space of superiority . . . from whichthe standing Spanish man beholds the entire Alameda (the main park) and part

Figure 4 Anonymous, De Alvina y Espa~nnol, produce Negro torna atras, ca. late 1770s. Colecci�oon Banco

Nacional de Mexico, Mexico City.

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of the city through his telescope. . . . The composition stresses the subordinationof child to woman, and of woman to man, while the last is featured as the con-trolling agent. The erect standing male is not only portrayed in a position ofmastery over female and child, but through his gaze, as possessor of the cityitself. (‘‘Casta Painting’’ 23)

Carrera too reads this image as indicative of ‘‘the colonial dream’’ in which the

Spanish colonizer claims complete surveillance from his veranda above the

Alameda. Katzew and Carrera accurately identify, I believe, the powerful topos

of science as rational order that dominates this casta image. The science of cate-

gorization and control that emerged so particularly from the Enlightenment had

much of its origin and practice in the Western attempt to understand its colonial

other.19 Here, the Spanish father’s possession of a telescope, presumably aiding

his dispassionate surveillance of the cityscape, seems a clear reference to that ana-

lytical observation and hierarchical dominance that distinguished Enlightened

colonialism. Somewhat less obvious to today’s audience, but quite visible to a

contemporary viewer, the topos of scientific rationality also appears in the depic-

tion of the Alameda, showing the park as it appeared after renovation under the

urban planning aegis of the Bourbon reforms. Especially for members of the

cultural and intellectual elite, these images must have invoked the recent atten-

tion to administration, order, and progress in the colony. They must also have

reminded viewers of the particular colonial experience of that era’s scientific

revolutions.

At the same time, there is an undercurrent of irony in this painting that sug-

gests important fissures in the regimes of rational colonial control. The father

who has such oversight of the city apparently failed to notice that, despite her

pale skin and light hair, his spouse is not a Spaniard. His rational observation

of the world, his skeptical dependence on only those things observable through

his senses appears to have fallen short of achieving complete knowledge. Misce-

genation and changing ethnic identifications reach even into this tower of sur-

veillance, and scientific surveillance fails to perceive it. This casta image calls

into question which bodies are kept under surveillance and which remain hidden,

suggesting that scientific colonial control cannot arrest the Americanization of

New Spain’s population.

Casta painting scholarship has generally placed the genre wholly within the

traditions of observation and categorization that emerged from the European

fascination with cultural otherness and that gained pride of place in the Enlight-

enment (Garcıa S�aaiz 44; Katzew ‘‘Casta Painting’’ 9). This scholarship reads casta

images as primarily interested in colonial control, suggesting that ‘‘they were a

19The art historical record of colonial Latin America from the late seventeenth through early nineteenth

centuries is filled with forms that meticulously depict the natural diversity of the New World. Artists and

intellectuals also translated the scientific style of traveler’s narratives and natural histories into depictions

of the human and cultural diversity of the colony (Ades; Catlin).

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visual practice that made the colonial body—both elite and nonelite—knowable

and visible’’ (Carrera Imagining Identity 54). At the same time, existing scholarship

implicitly acknowledges the problems with seeing casta painting as unilaterally

positioned in terms of control. Although both Carrera and Katzew speak of stabi-

lization and hierarchy, linking their interpretation of casta painting to the cultural

dominance of the Enlightenment, their analyses struggle to account for the genre’s

ambiguous and inconsistent representations of race and racial mixing. On one

level, casta painting represents miscegenation as a scientific process in which racial

castes are analogous to the exotic flora and fauna of the new world. On another

level, casta paintings constantly play with those categories and their social mean-

ing, delighting, like the Torna-atras painting above, in images of biological trespass

that defy racial surveillance. Carrera grapples with this aspect of the genre when

she makes the seemingly contradictory argument that casta paintings ‘‘inform

the viewer that physical race is confusing and ambiguous’’ yet also, fundamentally,

‘‘attempt to bring order to the deceptive and equivocal nature of the physical mar-

kers of race’’ (‘‘Locating Race’’ 42). This inevitable sense of contradiction suggests

that casta painting’s references to the scientific are deployed, in part, as rhetorical

moves that, in concert with contemporary discourses, call into question the

universal applicability of Enlightened science.

This questioning of Enlightenment ideology makes a great deal of sense in the

particular context of Spanish America. In eighteenth-century Spain, an array of

political and religious forces complicated the absorption of Enlightenment mod-

ernity. Influenced by the Catholic Church’s overwhelming cultural and political

power, the Spanish Crown long banned work by Descartes and his followers

because Cartesian methodology and key assumptions were anathema to Church

doctrine, especially the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the maintenance of

Papal authority. The conservative, orthodox establishment in the major universi-

ties, especially in Salamanca, clung to scholasticism and the authority of Aristotle

through at least the mid eighteenth century, arguing (among other, more

religiously-inspired points) that the skeptical science of the Enlightenment was

ill-suited to the judgment and organization of human affairs (Aldridge 114;

Pagden 127). However, despite the resistance of the Church and the intellectual

old guard, the ideas of the Enlightenment found their way into elite cultural

and intellectual circles on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic. Scholars such as

Feijoo, Zapata, and Jovellanos produced a particularly Spanish version of the

Enlightenment, removing much of its political and moral skepticism and making

it less problematic for the Inquisition, yet still sparking fierce debate (Gutierrez

Herrera; Pagden). At the same time, as Rebecca Haidt argues in her study of

embodiment in Spanish Enlightenment theory, the Spanish Ilustrados developed

a philosophy of enlightenment highly influenced by classical theories, in particular

the classical attention to bodies and their comportment.

Nor were eighteenth-century Spaniards alone in their conflicted response to the

Enlightenment. Throughout Europe and the new world, scientists and scholars

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resisted the new science, citing its threat to religious orthodoxy, its failure to

account for human nature, and its problematic separation of body and mind.20

Intellectuals committed to scholasticism objected to Enlightened scholars’ dismis-

sal of Aristotle. Scientists and philosophers seeking an alternative to the Cartesian

split between perception and the body turned to corporeal notions of understand-

ing drawn from classical theory. Some turned to anatomy, searching for the

sensorium commune, a part of the nervous system they believed responsible for

transforming sensation into perception. According to Poole, locating the sensor-

ium commune in the nervous system marked a direct challenge to Descartes’s

theory that the ‘‘highly localized (and extremely minute) pineal gland’’ was ‘‘the

meeting place of sensation and reaction’’ (31). The scientific debate about

the sensorium commune was, according to Poole, representative of a ‘‘shift in

the European common sense about the senses’’ toward an assumption that

‘‘sensory perceptions shared some physical grounding in the body and that this

point of contact was, at least potentially, constitutive of what that body was’’

(56). Although it would be a stretch to argue a direct connection between these

broader challenges to Enlightenment thought and the creators of casta series, it

seems clear that similar ideas pitting the rationality of the Enlightenment

against older notions of human society grounded in scholasticism circulated in

New Spain, especially among the artists, professionals, and intellectuals who made

up the cultural elite.

Although the Bourbon Spanish monarchy strongly resisted the importation of

Enlightened political thought to its American colonies, considering it dangerous

to the divine right of kings, it enthusiastically adopted ideals of rational order

and administrative control to reenergize its profits from the colonies. At the same

time, Creole elites in New Spain and throughout the colonies developed a taste for

French revolutionary thought and, in scattered moments of rebellion throughout

the second half of the eighteenth century, made Enlightened trouble for the mon-

archy (Uribe-Uran 430). Creole elites thus developed an ambiguous relationship

with the Enlightened ideals that circulated so widely and in so many forms during

the eighteenth century.

On the one hand, colonial New Spain had become famous for the lavishness

of its lifestyle, and Creoles took pride in being on the cutting edge of trends in

both fashion and intellectual endeavor (Katzew Casta 67). Indignant at the

flawed depictions of the colony published by European travelers, Creole intellec-

tuals produced scientific and historical treatises designed to rebut images of

New Spain as backwards and instead to advance descriptions of its rich cultural

and natural history (Lafuente; Pratt). Especially later in the eighteenth century,

these intellectuals used the language of Enlightenment science, particularly the

20This broader context for casta painting and the contested place of the Enlightenment suggests, for

example, that Giambattista Vico, familiar to rhetoricians as a lone voice advocating the study of rhetoric

in the face of Cartesianism’s distrust for emotional persuasion, was not truly alone in his concern.

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importance of observation, to challenge the ability of transient visitors to pro-

duce scientifically sound assessments of American climate, flora, and society

(Ca~nnizares-Esguerra 90).

On the other hand, Creoles chafed under Enlightenment-inspired controls

designed to maintain Spanish authority in the colony, and Creole uptake of

Enlightened science was shaped by local norms and traditions (Lafuente 156).

The Bourbon reforms made a series of potentially infuriating interventions in

colonial life. These reforms reduced the political and economic power of the

Creole elite through increasingly hierarchical oversight of colonial affairs, admin-

istrative systems designed to direct more income to the crown, and renewed efforts

to classify colonial subjects based on race and class (Carrera Imagining Identity

110). These new regulations applied rigid standards of behavior and status to colo-

nial subjects, attempting to rule them by scientific reason and prevent identifica-

tion and cooperation across caste boundaries.

In this context, although Creoles gained their social status from caste distinc-

tions, they were inclined to resent the dominance of Spain and dislike the inter-

vention of the metropole. Spanish-born Peninsulars received preferential

treatment from the crown and key political positions were unavailable to Creoles.

Whatever the seduction of rational science in their creation of increasingly

patriotic treatises, Creoles would likely have found that the Enlightenment lost

some of its luster when they were subjected to the regulations it inspired. In

addition, being on the ‘‘other side’’ of Enlightened science must have made

Creoles aware of the slippage inherent in attempts at scientific control of a

human population. Even if they placed some hope in classification as a means

to stabilize their own social standing, they must have done so with a simulta-

neous recognition that such controls were more a strategic mask than an accurate

observation of the way things were. As Creoles knew well, caste position was

rather fluid in New Spain. Lighter-skinned castas regularly sought to move them-

selves, legally or illicitly, into more favored groups, Some affluent people desig-

nated as castas in official birth records even received the legal ‘‘gracias al sacar’’

that changed affluent light-skinned castas into ‘‘pure-blooded’’ Creoles. In gen-

eral, caste status in the colony was built more on access to socioeconomic mar-

kers of calidad (quality) than on the specificities of inheritance or biological race

(Carrera Imagining Identity). Creoles would be particularly familiar with these

realities of miscegenation in the colony. They knew the slipperiness of categories

and the uncertainty of phenotype.

Thus, even the topos of the scientific that is readable within casta painting

cannot be seen as a direct application of Enlightenment intellectual culture to

the practice of painting. As in the anonymous Torna-atras, the scientific com-

monplace is often ambivalent and that ambivalence suggests that the social force

of scientific rationality was at best inconsistent. Viqueira Alb�aan implies as much

when he notes that many who took up the language of Enlightened rationality did

so with little understanding of the scientific ideas behind it (36). This ambivalence

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in Creole life, especially taken in light of broader European and American conflict

over the terms of Enlightenment, implies that the scientific approach to social

structure was not an uncontested common sense, even if the language and ima-

gery of that science had become so integrated into colonial society as to imbue

it with significant social energy. There was enough slippage in the meaning of

the scientific topos to make casta painting functionally multivocal. Engaging casta

painting and Enlightenment science at least in part as rhetorical devices, Creoles

participated in a broader rhetorical culture that used the language of scientific

rationality to advance arguments about authority and social status, but did so

with a simultaneous awareness of the ruptures and inconsistencies within that

discourse.

A Return to Luis de Mena

In the Luis de Mena casta painting that opened this article, the three storehouses

of social energy that have guided my criticism are literally layered. At the top,

the landscapes and illuminated image of the Virgin illustrate a sense of publicity

highly infused with national distinction and with the influence of the Catholic

Church. At the bottom, echoing natural history drawings and presenting a care-

ful categorization of type, the still life makes visible the topos of scientific orga-

nization and control. Placed between these two and drawing on the energy of

science and publicity they generate, the eight family scenes complete the layering

of topoi and become the focus of their social energy. Although perhaps more

explicitly presented in this panel than in most casta series, these three topoi

and the diverse ways they are invoked in casta painting over the course of the

century interrupt any attempt to read casta painting as simply invocations of

colonial power. While they are certainly artifacts that served the interests of

the colonial elite, they carry the conflicts and contradictions that characterized

those interests. As such, they remind us that every era is fraught with contradic-

tions clearly discernable in its rhetorical practices. In this case, the multivocal

arguments forwarded implicitly and explicitly in casta painting resonate with

other contemporary arguments to reveal both the real social energy of Enlight-

enment topoi and the forces that troubled and ruptured the hegemony of

Enlightened rationality.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Debra Hawhee, Ralph Cintr�oon, Cory Holding, Oscar Vazquez,

Anna Henning, three anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their comments

on the many drafts of this article. The Museo de America in Madrid and the

Banco Nacional de Mexico generously approved my use of the images reproduced

in this article.

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