The racial categories used by Benoit in Voyage a Surinam were not invented out of thin air, but rather represented a long history of race-making in the colony by both the Dutch and the French, who controlled the Netherlands between 1795-1813. Benoit’s race-making also reflect similar attempts to “regularize” race in the Spanish colonies in casta paintings. Casta paintings are an art form that began after the (French) Bourbon dynasty took over the Spanish monarchy. Interestingly, although Jews had played a key role in the early proto-racial language used during the Inquisition in Iberia and in early New Spain, by 1700, no Jews appeared in Mexican casta paintings.
Jews and Race in New Spain
Casta paintings are a distinctly Mexican genre and speak to the way European understandings of race were transformed as Europeans came to the Americas. Casta can roughly translated as “caste,” but it invokes ideas of calidad (status) and raza, a word that can mean race or “lineage” (Carrera, Imaging). In Iberia, people who bloodlines were considered “unclean” were typically “New Christians”–that is Muslim or Jewish converts and their descendants (called morsicos and conversos respectively). In the context of New Spain, however, this concept of a spiritual taint running in someone’s blood was transferred to the system of race. That is, people with indigenous or African ancestry were now suddenly treated as if they had inherited in their bodies a predilection towards being heretics.
Officially “New Christians” were not allowed to settle in the colonies, though some snuck through. When questions about someone’s status arose, or when someone committed certain sins, the Inquisition was commissioned to investigate the purity of the person’s blood and their genealogy. The castas paintings naturalize the symbolic order and the way blood was thought to work. Genealogical information was given when people were born, married, or were baptized. In turn, this genealogical information informed the rights of people in the colony.
Descendants of Jewish converts (conversos) were penalized. In 1524, for example, the Franciscans “prohibited anyone with Jewish ancestry within four generations from joining the order.” A few years later they issued a decree warning that “New Christians possess ‘Jewish’ attributes’ that make them dangerous” (Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic, 467). People of this “mala raza” (perverse race/lineage), they explained had a “physical condition which makes them ordinarily not suited for corporal labor” and they are typically filled with “avarice and cupidity” as well as “arrogant ostentation, which makes them always want to be the most rather than the least important” (Schorsch, Swimming the Christian Atlantic, 467-468).
While initially “impure blood” was connected to religion as much as “race” as we understand it today, in the early 1600s, slavery began to be a more important sign of who was likely to be prosecuted in New Spain. Although people with African ancestry typically made up about 10% of the population in New Spain, nearly 50% of the Inquisition proceedings in the region involved Africans and their descendants (Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 9). New Christians with Jewish ancestry made up only a small fraction of those punished in the colonies.
Enlightenment and Scientific Racism
Although today casta paintings are used as a visual symbol for colonial Mexico, they actually had a very short lifetime in terms of popularity. They began to be produced during the reign of Philip V (1700-1746) and lost their popularity after Mexican independence (1821) when slavery was abolished. Scholars tend to believe that the paintings were mainly aimed at a European audience, or for españoles living in the colony. Most agree that there is a lot of fiction at work in casta paintings, which reveal more of a desire to codify the extreme diversity of colonial life than an actual ability to colonial bureaucrats to police race in the colonies. Even eighteenth-century travelers were skeptical that race and lineage were as tidy as casta paintings suggested (190-191).
If casta paintings were fictional, they were part of a larger story that was being created during this era by early racial scientists. This, in turn, may also help explain why Jews drop out of the lineages of New Spain, as scientists disagreed about where exactly Jews belonged in the new racial categories.
For more on the way casta paintings are indebted to the Enlightenment and Science watch this magnificent video by Ilona Katzew, Department Head and Curator of Latin American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:
Racecraft
Thinking about casta paintings as fiction rather than “ethnography” can help us interpret them better. Like in Benoit’s drawings, “racecraft” was just as crucial as skin color was to how casta paintings explained racial difference. As Karen and Barbara Fields emphasize, “racecraft is not a euphemistic substitution for racism. It is a kind of fingerprint evidence that racism has been on the scene” (Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 18). Fields and fields argue that the four main practices of racecraft ideas that
govern what goes with what and whom (sumptuary codes [for example about dress]), how different people must deal with each other (rituals of deference and dominance), where human kinship begins and ends (blood), and how … [people] look at themselves and each other (the gaze).
Emphasis added; Fields and Fields, Racecraft 25
Casta paintings heavily rely on what people wear (jewelry and clothes), how they act, who needs to serve whom, and who gets to look at whom in order to construct their racial categories.
Anonymous, “De mulato y española, sale morisco. Mulato 1. Española 2. Morisco 3.,” Collection of Malú and Alejandra Escandón, Mexico City, Mexico.
Learn more about racecraft in casta paintings in this video:
For more images of casta painting see the following:
- Ignacio María Barreda y Ordóñez, Casta Painting (1777)
- Casta Paintings on Wikipedia.
Resources
Bennett, Herman L. Africans in Colonial Mexico Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. Indiana University Press, 2003.
Better, Shirley Jean. Institutional Racism a Primer on Theory and Strategies for Social Change. Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
Deans-Smith, Susan. “Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain.” Colonial Latin American Review 14, no. 2 (December 1, 2005): 169–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/10609160500314980.
Fields, Karen E., and Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2014.
Markus, Hazel and Paula Moya. Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century. W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.
Martínez, María E. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza De Sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford University Press, 2008.
Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture. University of Minnesota, 2006.
Rodrigue, Aron. “The Jew as the Original “Other”: Difference, Antisemitism, and Race” in Hazel Rose Markus and Paula Moya, eds. Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century, New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.
Schorsch, Jonathan. Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century. Brill, 2009.
Seijas, Tatiana. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Sierra Silva, Pablo Miguel. Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico : Puebla De Los Ángeles, 1531-1706. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Vinson, Ben. Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Voss, Barbara L. The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco. University of California Press, 2008.
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House, 2020.