Casta State of Mind: Michael Menchaca and the Graphic Revolution of Caste

Abstract

This article revisits the eighteenth-century pinturas de castas (caste painting) tradition by juxtaposing it with the artistic production of contemporary Latinx artist Michael Menchaca. Enigmatic and haunting, casta paintings blatantly reveal the workings of colonial miscegenation. The paintings have been interpreted as souvenirs for wealthy European patrons, as “exotica” for eclectic Wunderkammers, and as ethnographic confirmation of mestizaje (racial mixing). Regularly incorporated in art history courses and texts about global early modernisms, casta paintings are invoked as evidence of a deeply troubling colonial past in which racial taxonomies placed a hierarchical premium on “whiteness.” Arguably one of the most important contemporary Latinx artists, Menchaca explicitly summons the canonical type in his suite of sixteen screen prints, La Raza Cósmica 20XX. Bold and graphically appealing, Menchaca’s series visualizes the colonial sistema de castas (caste system) as a world populated by animal hybrids and surveilled by Big Tech. Menchaca’s interpretation of and dialogue with the casta painting tradition calls attention to the endurance of casta thinking in the twenty-first century. By interrogating the multivalent layers of Menchaca’s images alongside their early modern “sources,” it is possible to better understand the mechanisms of a modern process of mestizaje. In this way, contemporary artists like Menchaca animate the art of the past and, as this essay suggests, redirect our art historical gaze toward a more just future.