Mixed Race Studies

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands [DeLeón Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 99, Issue 4 (March 2013)
page 1284
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jas678

Arnoldo DeLeón, Professor of History
Angelo State University, San Angelo Texas

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. By Grace Peña Delgado. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xvi, 304 pp.

Several theses drive this book’s narrative, among them are three that the author develops scrupulously. First, international and national influences shaped the histories of the borderlands of Arizona and Sonora. Migration—created in the nineteenth century by civil war in China and global demands for labor—brought the Chinese to the United States and Mexico. Chinese communities sprouted in both countries by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though they were more successful in Mexico where the Chinese established themselves as merchants. Commerce among these businessmen involved crossing borders and…

Read or purchase the review here.

Interracial Families in 18th-Century Mexico

The Root
2013-07-23

Unknown artist working in New Spain (Mexico), De español y negra mulata, oil on canvas, 36 by 48 cm (Museo de America, Madrid)

Image of the Week: A painting captures the multiethnic population in New Spain, now Mexico.

One of the most typical, revealing products of colonial Spanish culture was the casta painting. This Iberian term means “lineage,” or “race,” and in art refers to the comprehensive representation of mixed-race couples and their offspring. Produced in a series usually consisting of 16 family groups, casta paintings categorize the uniquely complex degree of racial variation that arose within the multiethnic population of the viceroyalty of New Spain, now Mexico. These works were produced almost exclusively in the major artistic and governmental centers of Mexico City and Puebla during the 18th century. About 100 sets of casta paintings survive today from what must once have been a considerably larger number.

Casta sets were commissioned primarily by members of the ruling elite of New Spain. Their audience consisted of a fairly limited but discerning group of officials, clergy and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases the sets were directly presented to the king in Madrid as a visual record of the diversity of his overseas realm. The miscegenation recorded in these series is also reflected in the origins of the artists themselves. With only one known exception, all identified casta painters were born in Mexico, not Spain, and many were themselves of mixed race.

In all casta series, the couples consist of men and women from the three main ethnicities living in New Spain: white, Indian and black. Those represented are types, not specific individuals. All known series begin with the union between a white man, described as a Spaniard (español), and an Indian, producing a mestizo. The sequence then continues with a new category produced by the pairing of a mestizo with another Spaniard, producing a castizo. In the next case a white man is the father as well, and so the complexion becomes lighter, and therefore of greater advantage in the racially ordered hierarchy of colonial life. The child is, in fact, described as español, the same as his or her father…

Read the entire article here.

Displaced looks: The lived experience of beauty and racism

Feminist Theory
Volume 14, Number 2, August 2013  
pages 137-151
DOI: 10.1177/1464700113483241

Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University

 With a focus on appearance and racialised perceptions of skin colour, this paper discusses the differences between being and feeling acceptable, pretty or ugly and the possibility of such displacement (from being to feeling or vice versa), as a way to understand what beauty does in people’s lives. The paper explores the fragility of beauty in relation to the visibility of the body in specific racialised contexts. It investigates the claim that beauty can be considered a feeling that emphasises processes (what beauty does) rather than contents (what beauty is). Drawing from life stories with Mexican women, I examine their concerns about visibility, temporality and appearance as expressions of racist practices and ideas, within a context where the racial project of mestizaje (racial mixture) is in operation. Beauty matters as it makes evident the pervasiveness of racism in the everyday. The lived experience of beauty, in its displacement and fragility, as a feeling and as resource, can also point to some of the strategies to resist, cope and get on.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico

University of Minnesota Press
June 2012
248 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5637-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5636-3

Joshua Lund, Associate Professor of Spanish
University of Pittsburgh

The Mestizo State examines how the ideas, images, and public discourse around race, nation, and citizen formation have been transformed in Mexico from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Starting with the Porfiriato, Joshua Lund investigates the rise of a racialized “mestizo state,” its reinvention after the Mexican Revolution, and its mobilization as a critical lever that would act both on behalf of and against mainstream Mexican political culture during the long hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.

Lund takes race as his object of critical reflection in the context of modern Mexico. An analysis that does not confuse race with mestizaje, indigeneity, African identity, or whiteness, the book sheds light on the history of the materialism of race as it unfolds within the cultural production of modern Mexico, grounded on close readings of four writers whose work explicitly challenged the politics of race in Mexico: Luis Alva, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Rosario Castellanos, and Elena Garro.

In seeking to address race as a cultural-political problematic, Lund considers race as integral to the production of the materiality of Mexican national history: constitutive of the nation form, a mediator of capitalist accumulation, and a central actor in the rise of modernity.

Contents

• Introduction: The Mestizo State
• 1. Colonization and Indianization in Liberal Mexico: The Case of Luis Alva
• 2. Altamirano’s Burden
• 3. Misplaced Revolution: Rosario Castellanos and the Race War
• 4. Elena Garro and the Failure of Alliance
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

A Continent Divided: The U.S.-Mexico War

Center for Greater Southwestern Studies
University of Texas at Arlington
2013-06-18

The Center for Greater Southwestern Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington announces the launch of a new website, A Continent Divided: The U.S.-Mexico War. Drawn from the holdings of UT Arlington’s Special Collections, long recognized as one of the premier archives on the war, the website features a broad range of primary source materials, as well as explanatory text on the events of 1846-1848. Dedicated to presenting the war as a bi-national conflict, the website currently features more than 50 translated Mexican broadsides, dealing with such topics as the fall of the Herrera government in 1845, the Polkos Revolt, and the post-war occupation of Mexico City.

A Continent Divided is an ongoing, multi-year digital humanities project which, when completed, will offer one of the most comprehensive internet resources available on the U.S.-Mexico War.

For more information, click here.

Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico by Ilona Katzew; Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings by Magali M. Carrera

The Art Bulletin
Volume 88, Number 1 (March, 2006)
pages 185-189

Thomas B.F. Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art
Harvard University

Ilona Katzew, Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 256 pp.; 127 color ills., 143 b/w.

Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. 188 pp.; 12 color ills., 60 b/w.

In eighteenth-century New Spain (Mexico), a genre of painting appeared, the likes of which had never been seen before. Called casta paintings in English, this new genre took as its subject the colonial issue of race (raza), racial intermarriage, and their offspring. Almost always painted in a series of approximately sixteen canvases, they depict a mother, father, and child, each of whom represents a different category within the sistema de castas, or racial lineages. For example, the first painting in the series normally represents a Spaniard, an Indian, and their child, a mestizo. These remarkable paintings have become increasingly the subject of studies and exhibitions in the last twenty years. (1) These recent books by Ilona Katzew and Magali M. Carrera add greatly to our knowledge about this unique and fascinating genre, and they demonstrate at the same time the growth of the field of Latin American colonial art history in the United States. More important, their work demonstrates that scholars in the United States are no longer interested only in the art and architecture of the sixteenth century, an area first plowed by George Kubler (to use his metaphor), Harold We they, and George MacAndrew in the United States and by a much larger contingent of scholars from Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Spain. New and careful studies in the United States by such scholars as Jaime Lara, Jeanette Peterson, Elizabeth Boone, and Barbara Mundy concerning the sixteenth century have been published. New and important work also is being published in Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, and Mexico, and a list would be too long to mention the outstanding research that has enlivened the sixteenth-century colonial art studies in the past twenty years. It is, in fact, now possible to teach an early Spanish colonial art history course using a wide range of material published in English. But now, as this area matures, some art historians throughout the Americas are looking to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as fertile fields of inquiry, and not only in areas of religious art–although the production of religious art certainly predominates in all colonial periods–but also in the study of secular works such as maps, textiles, silver-work, portraits, and casta paintings.

The two books by Carrera and Katzew are additions to this growing area. While their almost simultaneous publication on the same eighteenth-century genre may seem imbalanced in light of how much other work remains to be done in the field of eighteenth-century Mexican art and architecture, their efforts might be best understood as a consequence of the tremendous attraction exerted by casta paintings. Beyond their aspect as visually arresting paintings, these works, unlike any other genre of painting in Western art, deal directly and concretely with the visualization of racial categories within the colonial context of a broad racial discourse. As such, casta paintings resonate in various ways with modern sensibilities about race; it should be no surprise that the recent exhibition of casta paintings curated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Ilona Katzew drew a very large, enthusiastic, and diverse public. In fact, any American viewer of today–and by American I mean anyone in the Americas–who looks at these paintings must come face-to-face with the roots of racialized America. Casta paintings, as both Katzew and Carrera point out, constitute a pivotal part of the formation of racial categories and how they are registered in Mexico. The paintings visually order the interracial marriages of New Spain, beginning with a marriage between a Spaniard (Espanol) and an Indian (Indios); a Spaniard and a Negro (Negros); a Negro and an Indian. These marriages are compounded in racial diversity by the marriages of their children (mestizos, mulattoes, and so on). The progression has infinite possibilities in terms of the degree of mixture. However, casta paintings are organized in a predetermined sequence, often numbered from one to sixteen, so that the order cannot be altered. It therefore composes a closed series in which is found a bewildering and ultimately fictitious set of categories for the descending categories of racial mixing. For example, from the marriage between an Espanol (Spaniard) and torna atras (literally, return backward, who is the offspring of the marriage of a Spaniard and albino) is born a tenete en el aire (hold-yourself-in-midair). This immediately poses the question: What racial category is an albino in the system of castas in Mexico? To arrive at the category of albino in the casta series there must first be a marriage between a Spaniard and a mulata, the child of whom is called a morisco. The morisco in turn must marry a Spaniard, whose child is termed an albino. Of course, in reality, not all moriscos and Spaniards have albino children and not all albino children are born to morisco and Spanish parents. The system of castas is not, however, about such logic. Casta paintings as a series present a clear causal progression that includes the albino as a predicable and known casta. Neither author ever thoroughly addresses this category in terms of the casta series, although Katzew offers an interesting discussion of the albino as described by two Spanish authors in relation to “whiteness and blackness” (pp. 47-48)…

Read the entire review of both books here.

Casta Painting: Art, Race and Identity in Colonial Mexico (HI972)

University of Warwick
Coventry, England
Spring 2013

Rebecca Earle, Professor of History

This module explores the distinctive vision of colonial Mexico purveyed via the artistic genre known as the casta painting. Casta paintings depict the outcomes of different types of inter-ethnic mixing, and often come in series of 16, showing many different family groups. They are quite remarkable. Consider, for example, José de Alcíbar’s painting showing a family group consisting, we are told in the helpful label, of a Black father, and Indian mother and their ‘Wolf’ son:

Casta paintings can be seen as attempts at cataloguing the varied inhabitants of Spain’s colonial universe. They thus offer a visual taxonomy of colonial space. At the same time, they have been read as statements of local pride, and usually include a wealth of details about local customs and habits. In addition, they are rich and complex documents relating to the material culture of colonial Spanish America. In Alcíbar’s painting reproduced above we notice not only the domestic strife but also the beautiful china (which is endangered by the parental row) and food items such as the headless chicken. How are we to interpret and understand such images?

The module will introduce students to this artistic genre, and will explore different ways of interpreting these multi-valent images. Its educational aims, therefore, are to help students consider how to read artistic works produced in a colonial setting, how to use casta paintings as a body of source material, and how to explore the relationship between visual and textual depictions of colonial space…

For more information, click here.

The Art of Conversation: Eighteenth-Century Mexican Casta Painting

SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture
Issue 5, 2012
25 pages

Mey-Yen Moriuchi
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Traditionally, casta paintings have been interpreted as an isolated colonial Mexican art form and examined within the social historical moment in which they emerged. Casta paintings visually represented the miscegenation of the Spanish, Indian and Black African populations that constituted the new world and embraced a diverse terminology to demarcate the land’s mixed races. Racial mixing challenged established social and racial categories, and casta paintings sought to stabilize issues of race, gender and social status that were present in colonial Mexico.

Concurrently, halfway across the world, another country’s artists were striving to find the visual vocabulary to represent its families, socio-economic class and genealogical lineage. I am referring to England and its eighteenth-century conversation pictures. Like casta paintings, English conversation pieces articulate beliefs about social and familial propriety. It is through the family unit and the presence of a child that a genealogical statement is made and an effigy is preserved for subsequent generations. Utilizing both invention and mimesis, artists of both genres emphasize costume and accessories in order to cater to particular stereotypes.

I read casta paintings as conversations like their European counterparts—both internal conversations among the figures within the frame, and external ones between the figures, the artist and the beholder. It is my position that both casta paintings and conversation pieces demonstrate a similar concern with the construction of a particular self-image in the midst of societies that were apprehensive about the varying conflicting notions of socio-familial and socio-racial categories.

Read the entire article here.

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. [Book Review]

The Journal of San Diego History
Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer 1981)

W. Michael Mathes (1936-2012), Professor of History
University of San Francisco

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. By Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodríguez O. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. 362 pages.

In general, Mexico’s colonial past has been interpreted as a negative experience by modern scholars. Within Mexico this interpretation is based primarily upon political concepts which idealize pre-Cortesian culture and condemn Spain as a cruel, autocratic nation which forcefully imposed itself upon Aztec civilization through bloody conquest. Foreign scholars either adhere to this “Black Legend” concept or, in a more revisionary sense, simply condemn colonialism as an institution. This new study presents a positive approach to the three centuries of Spanish domination in Mexico as an integral part of national evolution, not as a better-to-be forgotten period of darkness.

The basis for the development of Colonial Mexico, New Spain, is seen as mestizaje, the fusion of Indian and European culture which began with the conquest in 1519. In that Aztec and Spanish society shared more similarities than differences, mestizaje produced a dynamic new race, referred to by José Vasconcelos as “Cosmic,” the “Mexican.” As an integral part of society within New Spain, the mestizo is seen as the prime mover of economic growth and cultural homogeneity…

Read the entire review here.

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico

University of California Press
December 1980
408 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520042803

Colin M. MacLachlan, Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Jamie E. Rodríguez, Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

“The Forging of the Cosmic Race” challenges the widely held notion that Mexico’s colonial period is the source of many of that country’s ills. The authors contend that New Spain was neither feudal nor pre-capitalists as some Neo-Marxist authors have argued. Instead they advance two central themes: that only in New Spain did a true mestizo society emerge, integrating Indians, Europeans, Africans, and Asians into a unique cultural mix; and that colonial Mexico forged a complex, balanced, and integrated economy that transformed the area into the most important and dynamic part of the Spanish empire.

The revisionist view is based on a careful examination of all the recent research done on colonial Mexican history. The study begins with a discussion of the area’s rich pre-Columbian heritage. It traces the merging of two great cultural traditions—the Meso-american and the European—which occurred as a consequence of the Spanish conquest. The authors analyze the evolution of a new mestizo society through an examination of the colony’s institutions, economy, and social organization. The role of women and of the family receive particular attention because they were critical to the development of colonial Mexico. The work concludes with an analysis of the 18th century reforms and the process of independence which ended the history of the most successful colony in the Western hemisphere.

The role of silver mining emerges as a major factor of Mexico’s great socio-economic achievement. The rich silver mines served as an engine of economic growth that stimulated agricultural expansion, pastoral activities, commerce, and manufacturing. The destruction of the silver mines during the wars of Independence was perhaps the most important factor in Mexico’s prolonged 19th century economic decline. Without the great wealth from silver mining, economic recovery proved extremely difficult in the post-independence period. These reverses at the end of the colonial epoch are important in understanding why Mexicans came to view the era as a “burden” to be overcome rather than as a formative period upon which to build a new nation.

Contents

• List of Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
  • 1. The Setting
  • 2. Ancient Mexico
  • 3. The Mexica-Aztecs
  • 4. The Birth of New Spain, 1519-1530
• Part Two
  • 5. The Institutional Process
  • 6. The Economy
  • 7. Society
  • 8. Women and the Family
• Part Three
  • 9. Rationalization, Reform, and Reaction
  • 10. The Process of Independence
  • 11. A Rejected Legacy
• Bibliographical Essay
• Sources for Illustration
• Index