{"id":10254,"date":"2010-11-26T02:47:09","date_gmt":"2010-11-26T02:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10254"},"modified":"2017-04-14T00:09:26","modified_gmt":"2017-04-14T00:09:26","slug":"casta-paintings-inventing-race-through-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10254","title":{"rendered":"Casta Paintings: Inventing Race Through Art"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=3043790\" target=\"_blank\">Casta Paintings: Inventing Race Through Art<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Tavis Smiley Show<br \/>\nNational Public Radio<br \/>\n2004-06-30<\/p>\n<p><em>Mexican Art Genre Reveals 18th-Century Attitudes on Racial Mixing<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lacma.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/a> is hosting the first-ever major exhibition paintings that reflect what many upper-class Spaniards thought about race, class and skin color during the 1700s, when <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mexico\" target=\"_blank\">Mexico<\/a> was a colony of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Spain\" target=\"_blank\">Spain<\/a>. NPR producer Nova Safo reports on the controversial exhibit.<\/p>\n<p>The genre of art, called <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Casta\" target=\"_blank\">casta<\/a>, reveals more about prejudices in Spain at the time than the reality in Mexico. One portrait of a family, used as the centerpiece of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lacma.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">LACMA<\/a> exhibit, is typical of the genre: A mother with snow-white skin, a dark-skinned father and a daughter with skin tone in between the two appear as prosperous and well-dressed.<\/p>\n<p>But the title of the portrait is curious: \u201cDe Espaniol y Albina, Torna Atras\u201d\u2014literally, \u201cFrom a Spaniard and Albino, return backwards.\u201d The prevailing theory at the time was that albinos were thought to be part African. So the union of an albino with a Spaniard was actually seen as a step backward, towards African heritage&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=3043790\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.\u00a0 Listen to the story (00:05:26) here in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/dmg\/dmg.php?prgCode=TAVIS&amp;showDate=30-Jun-2004&amp;segNum=4&amp;NPRMediaPref=RM\" target=\"_blank\">Real Media<\/a> or\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/dmg\/dmg.php?prgCode=TAVIS&amp;showDate=30-Jun-2004&amp;segNum=4&amp;NPRMediaPref=WM\" target=\"_blank\">Windows<\/a> format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mexican Art Genre Reveals 18th-Century Attitudes on Racial Mixing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,2850,21,459,8,103,20],"tags":[4510,20753,2309,4509],"class_list":["post-10254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-audio","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","category-mexico","category-usa","tag-casta-paintings","tag-mexico","tag-national-public-radio","tag-the-tavis-smiley-show"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53501,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10254\/revisions\/53501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}