Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings

Abstract

Like many previous works, this book reminds us that the Spanish imperial hierarchy distinguished rank in a multilayered fashion, primarily on the basis of calidad and policía rather than the more ethnically and racially oriented limpieza de sangre. Indeed, given the nature of the hierarchy, Carrera questions whether colonial notions of raza as lineage can be compared to nineteenth-century notions of race derived from social Darwinism. She uses court documents, literary sources, and edicts and decrees, as would any historian; however, as a trained art historian, she integrates a thorough review of the eighteenth-century casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera, Andrés de Islas, and others. She demonstrates that the clothing worn and mannerisms displayed define the quality and character of the Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans portrayed. This emphasis in late colonial iconography (which does not completely eliminate racial notions more akin to limpieza) helps to explain the transformations, by means of clothing and discourse, found in José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (most of which was published serially between 1816 and 1820). Through the iconography and written discourse of the time, Carrera shows just how much late colonial Mexican society loved metamorphosis, as well as the attempts of royal officials to maintain a static order based on the separation of ranks. The casta paintings demonstrate just how difficult this ideal of separation was to maintain.The strengths of this book are manifold, and they are especially manifested in Carrera’s analysis of an anonymous late eighteenth-century casta painting entitled De Alvina y Español produce Negro torna atrás, Juan Antonio Prado’s Plaza Mayor de la ciudad de México (1767), and Retrato de Matías de Gálvez, attributed to Andrés López. In the first, a Spanish man gazes through a handheld telescope at the geometrical orderliness of Mexico City’s Alameda Park—replete with orderly members of the elite on promenade. This painting can only be contrasted to Prado’s, where the Plaza Mayor—complete with vendors and thieves—threatens the separation of hierarchical ranks with all sorts of legal and illicit mixing. Spaniards surveying this society from afar, like the man with the telescope in the anonymous painting, are thereby warned that their edicts and decrees do not always effect their desires for social control. That fear, according to Carrera, appears in the portrait of Viceroy de Gálvez, where two well-dressed young men are deliberately contrasted with “two shoeless, unkempt, and dark-skinned boys . . . who may represent artisans” (p. 138). Carrera’s analysis is compelling, and while she is influenced by Foucauldian notions of surveillance and Homi Bhabha’s views on “hybridity,” she uses postmodernism judiciously and avoids the dangers inherent in its proclivity to use ambiguous jargon.While Carrera’s use of court cases regarding raza is well done by any historical standards, her use of the historiographical literature is not as broad as some might desire. The discussion of ideology, discourse, and perception might have been informed by the insights of David Brading’s The First America (1991) and Eric Van Young’s The Other Rebellion (2001)—especially Van Young’s analysis of Timothy Anna’s work on the ethnic breakdown of Mexican insurgents, compared to that of New Spain as a whole. Likewise, her skillful epilogue regarding the iconography of citizenship in nineteenth-century Mexican art might have been balanced by some reference to the sixteenth century’s struggle with the hierarchical question. “Hybridity” existed where the républica de españoles and républica de indios were concerned. Her extensive use of Alejandro Cañeque’s recent dissertation on the body politic in seventeenth-century New Spain (1999) is a more than valid contextualization of her work, but she ignores use of the body politic image in the sixteenth century. The imagery of the policía’s body politic used clothing display in the sixteenth as well as the eighteenth century. Likewise, the question of racial mixing was obviously not new to the seventeenth century, and Carrera references Elizabeth Kuznesof’s excellent studies of it. There was a continuity, as well as change, in colonial discourse, as there is throughout human history. No period is so unique that it does not speak to us, despite current rhetorical strategies targeting difference.Still, Imagining Identity in New Spain accomplishes its goals and adds to the art historical literature on casta paintings. By incorporating some key works by historians, she adds to the discussion begun by María Concepción García Sáiz’s 1989 catalog and continued by the works of Ilona Katzew and others. Carrera’s book stands as a real contribution within the conversation on casta paintings.