1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [181]
Casta paintings, bizarre versions of the natural-history paintings then becoming popular in Europe, were intended to instruct outsiders about the cultural mixes in Spain’s American colonies. Laying out a complex racial scheme that parceled out European, Indian, and African ancestry, they were pictorial anthropological treatises, the racial types neatly labeled. Sometimes they warned of the dire consequences of certain ethnic combinations: spouses murdering each other, children who don’t resemble their parents. Above: Spaniard and Negro Makes Mulato (attrib. José de Alcibar, 1760–70); below: Negro and Indian Makes Wolf (José de Ibarra, ca. 1725). (Photo credit 8.5)
Above: Chamizo and Indian Makes Cambuja (Unknown, ca. 1780); below: Spaniard and Albino Makes Return-Backwards (Ramón Torres, 1770–80). (Photo credit 8.6)
Human beliefs and actions about ethnic and racial differences rarely withstand logical scrutiny, and Mexico was no exception. From a geneticist’s point of view, the population blended increasingly over time. By the end of the eighteenth century “pure” Africans were disappearing, disease and intermarriage were reducing the number of “pure” Indians at a tremendous rate, and even the remaining “pure” Spaniards—a tiny group that in Mexico City consisted of less than 5 percent of the populace—were marrying outside their category at such a rate that they soon would no longer exist as a separate entity. Yet as it became ever more difficult to distinguish one individual from another, colonial authorities tried ever harder to separate them, a peculiar dynamic perhaps best exemplified in one of the world’s odder artistic genres: casta paintings.
Casta paintings are sets of images, usually but not always sixteen in number, that purport to depict the categories of people in New Spain. Painted or engraved in the colony itself, they portray the mestizos, mulattos, coyotes, lobos, and tente en el aires of Spanish America with the frozen exactitude of Audubon birds. Several sets, in fact, were displayed at Madrid’s natural history museum, the strains of Homo sapiens in Spain’s American colonies side by side with exhibits of fossils and exotic plants. Almost all the paintings present the viewer with a family group: a man of one category, a woman of another, and their offspring. Gilt labels, painted directly on the canvas, act as explanatory captions:
From Black Man and Indian Woman, Wolf
From Spanish Man and Moorish Woman, Albino
From Mulatto Man and Mestiza Woman, Wolf-Suspended-in-Air
From Indian Woman and Male Wolf-Return-Backwards, Wolf Again
More than a hundred sets of casta paintings are known. Many are beautifully crafted. Some were painted by mixed people themselves.
Looking at these images today, it is hard to imagine what their creators were thinking at the time. They must have known that Europeans were fascinated and repulsed by New Spain’s exotic inhabitants. The portraits were intended to parade their fellows like specimens in a zoo. Yet at the same time most show the castizos, mestizos, and mulattos dressed sumptuously, moving happily about their daily business, tall and robustly healthy each and every one. Looking at the smooth, smiling faces now, one would never know that on the streets of the cities where they were painted these people were scorned for their very diversity. One would also never know that the casta paintings were not diverse enough—not a single one portrayed New Spain’s Asian population, by far the biggest outside Asia.
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