José María Morelos, Brownness, and the Visibility of Race in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Abstract

Independence hero José María Morelos y Pavón has been described racially as criollo, mestizo, Indigenous, mulato, and moreno, and scholars have long turned to his portraits to support claims made about his racial identity. However, the ambiguity of his social status during life and in his portraits has allowed scholars to project and reaffirm racial thinking rather than challenge its assumptions. Departing from this perspective, this essay examines his representation in text and image as a means of excavating the changing racial ideologies of nineteenth-century Mexico and the visual technologies that supported them. During Morelos’s lifetime, caste (lineage) remained the most significant signifier of status; however, emerging ideas regarding physiognomy, empiricism, and the bodily manifestation of racial character enabled competing assertions about Morelos’s race by midcentury. In the later nineteenth century, ethnohistorical notions of race began to emerge, allowing race to serve as an allegory of Mexico’s body politic. In this final phase, the ideology of Brownness emerged as a foil to mestizaje: a national body politic that created space for mixtures inclusive of Afro-Mexicans.