Mixed Race Studies

Racial mixture and civil war: The histories of the U.S. South and Mexico in the novels of William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes

Michigan State University
2008
266 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3331903
ISBN: 9780549837800

Emron Lee Esplin, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

A Dissertation Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English

This dissertation is an endeavor in inter-American literary criticism with three primary arguments. First, I argue that the affinities and differences between the histories of the U.S. South and Mexico require us to redefine the terms “America” and “American” according to their original hemispheric context and to adopt a transnational approach when studying American literature. Second, I claim that the ways in which race and racial mixture are viewed in the Americas—specifically, the discourse of miscegenation in the United States and the discourse of mestizaje in Mexico–are national not natural. These discourses are connected to lengthy colonial and national histories and to specific moments of crisis in the formation of U.S. and Mexican national identities that took place during the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. Third, I argue that William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes participate in these discourses of racial mixture when their novels both replicate and challenge the essentialisms of miscegenation and mestizaje, respectively.

In my introduction, I develop a historiographic approach to inter-American literary studies that I follow in chapter one by laying the historical groundwork for comparing the U.S. Civil War to the Mexican Revolution and in chapter two by examining how the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje which grew out of these conflicts disparately favor(ed) whiteness–miscegenation through overt segregation and mestizaje through public praise for racial mixture and private desires for assimilation. Chapter three explores how Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! , and Go Down, Moses and Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Gringo viejo repeat the essentialist underpinnings of miscegenation and mestizaje by describing so-called racially mixed characters as fragments. Chapter four examines how Light in August and Gringo viejo challenge the discourses by assigning violence to whiteness. Chapter five analyzes how Light in August and La muerte de Artemio Cruz offer fictional portrayals of both miscegenation’s and mestizaje’s erasure of Mexico’s African past. I conclude the project by offering a critique of current hybridity theory and by arguing that Go Down, Moses and La muerte de Artemio Cruz demonstrate the impossibility of positive hybridity.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION: METHODS FOR INTER-AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES
• CHAPTER 1: WAR IN THE TWO SOUTHS: PRESENT PASTS AND CIVIL WAR IN THE U.S. SOUTH AND MEXICO
• CHAPTER 2: DISCOURSES OF RACIAL MIXTURE BORN IN CIVIL WAR: CREATING THE NATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO
• CHAPTER 3: RACIAL MIXTURE AS FRAGMENTATION
• CHAPTER 4: ANCESTRY, BLOOD, AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE WHITE FATHERS
• CHAPTER 5: BLACK, MEXICAN, AND BLACK MEXICAN
• CONCLUSION: POSITIVE HYBRIDITY?
• WORKS CITED

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Afro-Mexican presence in Guadalajara at the dawn of independence

Purdue University
December 2010
85 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1490649
ISBN: 9781124557854

Beau D. J. Gaitors

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Beau D. J. Gaitors In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Scholars often characterize the Afro-Mexican experience through depictions of a large presence during the colonial period and a rapid decline after Mexican independence. Prior studies emphasized miscegenation and racism as causes of the disappearance of Afro-Mexicans from Mexican society. This thesis addresses the presence and subsequent disappearance of Afro-Mexicans from Guadalajara. Census records show that the Afro-Mexican population in Guadalajara was significant, one-fourth of the population, at the end of the colonial period. However, records also show that the Afro-Mexican population experienced a substantial decline to only two percent of Guadalajara’s population at the dawn of independence. This thesis asserts that the “disappearance” of Afro-Mexicans was a result of integration, especially in the residential and occupational spheres of Guadalajara. The two percent of Afro-Mexicans recorded in the census illustrates that Afro-Mexicans continued to integrate into society and did not simply disappear. Afro-Mexicans became Mexicans through social incorporation into the city through residential, occupational, and marital integration.

Table of Contents

• LIST OF TABLES
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2. THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN NEW SPAIN
• CHAPTER 3. THE GROWTH OF GUADALAJARA TO 1791
• CHAPTER 4. RESIDENTS OF GUADALAJARA 1791-1822
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Tables

• Table 1. Afro-Mexicans in Guadalajara, 1821-1822, by Cuartel
• Table 2. Marriage within Race (Major Groups)
• Table 3. Afro-Mexican Marriage Across Race
• Table 4. Race in the System of Education
• Table 5. Distribution of Afro-Mexican Occupational Positions

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

On December 6, 1810, standing on the balcony of the Palacio Real in the city of 

Guadalajara, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla proclaimed the independence of the Mexican nation. In this proclamation he also declared that the independence of Mexico, known as New Spain in the colonial period, would be accompanied by the emancipation of all slaves in the nation.1 More specifically, Hidalgo stated that all slaveholders should emancipate their slaves within ten days of the decree. These enslaved individuals constituted several different racial and ethnic groups, including Native American and African. Native Americans were taken captive during wars and employed as slaves by the Spanish especially in Northern New Spain. In contrast, the vast majority of Africans arrived in New Spain alongside Europeans either as enslaved laborers or free conquistadors, creating a sizeable population of Africans within New Spain. African descendants remained in many regions of New Spain throughout the colonial period; however, centuries of assimilation and integration rendered the African presence in Mexico miniscule at the dawn of independence.

Today when people are asked, “What is a Mexican?” individuals rarely visualize a person of African descent. Despite a considerable presence in the history of Mexico, Mexicans of African descent, or Afro-Mexicans, have been essentially invisible in the history of Mexico. Afro-Mexicans, like many other marginalized groups in other nations, have been constantly neglected in contemporary national narratives or given brief references in national histories despite the prominent historic role they played. Afro-Mexicans have experienced varying degrees of invisibility in the contemporary portrayal of Mexican history and national identity. The neglect of the Afro- Mexican in the national history directly impacts the present-day position of people of African descent in Mexico. The inability of individuals to immediately and quickly point to the significant contributions and the presence of Africans in the history of Mexico makes it easy to assume that African descendants do not have a space in present-day Mexico. More specifically, the neglect of the African presence in the narrative of Mexico makes it easy for people to imagine Mexico as a nation without strong ties to African heritage and blood. Yet, in the last fifteen to twenty years, Afro-Mexicans have struggled to gain a representative space in the Mexican self-portrait, causing many scholars to reevaluate and reconsider the presence of people of African descent in Mexico. Although individuals have reconsidered the varying degrees of invisibility of the African heritage in Mexico, there is still a lack of momentum in recovering the African links to Mexico in the present day.

The process resulting in the invisibility of Afro-Mexicans is not simply a contemporary issue; it is steeped in the historic construction of the Mexican identity. Centuries of miscegenation and assimilation of different racial and ethnic groups led to the creation of a multi-racial society in Mexico. Theories emerged to account for the image of the Mexican nation and its interracial heritage. Individuals in power constructed the Mexican identity with great influence on the perceptions of citizens. In the 1920s Mexican intellectuals, most notably José Vasconcelos, began to promote the idea of a cosmic race, “la raza cósmica,” in Mexico. This theory sought to promote a collective group identity that went beyond race and ethnicity in Mexico. Individuals of Spanish descent, Native American descent, and African descent populated the vast region that made up Mexico. However, these three groups had many variations within themselves. There were numerous indigenous groups that populated the region that would later become Mexico. People of African descent had a significant role in populating Mexico in the colonial period. Some were born in different regions in Africa and brought to the New World, while others were born in the Americas. Furthermore, the African position in the colonial system varied, as some Africans were enslaved while others were free. Just as with the African case, there were Spaniards who were born in the New World, known as criollos, and Spaniards born in Spain, known as peninsulares. Throughout the colonial and post-independence periods the indigenous, African, and Spanish groups constituted a multiracial and multiethnic society. Contributing to this mixed landscape were the sexual relations between these individuals, resulting in the birth of mixed-race individuals who inhabited colonial Mexico.

The concept of the “cosmic race” necessitated the erasure of specific group contributions in the construction of the Mexican state in order to create a homogenized Mexican national identity. This new identity was intended to go beyond the multiple distinct groups and mixed groups in Mexican society. The new Mexican identity would theoretically represent the diverse groups as equal participants in the construction of the Mexican nation. These diverse groups would be represented as part of a collective that provided the building blocks to construct the Mexican nation. Yet, the emergence of a homogenous identity resulted in a substantial disappearance and neglect of some groups that participated in the construction of Mexican society. Individual groups were subsumed into the collective identity of the Mexican nation as their contributions were bulked into a single framework of progress.

Although specific groups were brought into a collective identity, they found it difficult to ignore their distinct differences. With this in mind, specific groups presented themselves as both Mexican and their unique group identity. When the cultural contributions to Mexico were acknowledged, the focus was on Spanish and indigenous groups as the primary participants in the construction of Mexico, while the contributions of Afro-Mexicans were relegated to the margins.

Although Afro-Mexicans have been relegated to the margins, their presence in Mexico cannot be so easily overlooked. There are locations in Mexico that hold populations of African descendants in large numbers. Coastal regions and port cities such as Costa Chica, Guerrero, and Veracruz, reflect the significant presence of people of African descent in Mexico. Despite the presence in these regions, the potential for the representation of Afro-Mexicans is limited. The concentration of Afro-Mexicans in these regions encourages the social invisibility of African presence within the greater Mexican nation. More specifically, it is readily assumed that people of African descent have resided solely in these areas. However, Afro-Mexicans were also present on a large scale in other areas of Mexico, especially in urban centers such as Mexico City and Guadalajara. Many Afro-Mexican slaves found their way to various locales in colonial Mexico as a result of slavery and the migratory patterns of slaveholders…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Without Impediment: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Colonial Mexico

The Americas
Volume 67, Number 4 (April 2011)
E-ISSN: 1533-6247; Print ISSN: 0003-1615

Jake Federick, Assistant Professor of History
Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin

On April 18, 1773, in the town of Teziutlán in the eastern mountains of Mexico, Captain don Raphael Padres participated in the baptism of his godson in the local church. He stood watching as Father Francisco Flandes leaned over the baptismal font to daub oil on the head of Joseph Philipe. As the priest performed the sacrament, reciting the script of baptism, the boy’s parents, don Cristóbal Hernández and doña Isabel Pérez, followed along. After anointing the child, Father Flandes turned to the militia captain to inform him of his responsibilities as godfather, explaining the spiritual kinship that Padres now had with the boy. After the rite was completed, the priest recorded his actions in the church’s book of baptisms. He noted the boy’s age and that he had been legitimately born the previous day. He also listed the names of the boy, his parents, the godfather, and the godfather’s wife, doña Josepha Fernández. The priest also pointed out that all the adults were españoles (of pure Spanish ancestry).

Two years later, on July 4, 1775, Captain Padres once again stood at the baptismal font in the Teziutlán church. The priest presiding over the rite this time was Pedro Francisco Gómez, and the child was five-day-old Mariana Paula. She too was legitimate, the child of Manuel Castillo and Antonia Vásquez. According to the book of baptisms, Manuel and Antonia were de razón (an abbreviation of gente de razón), which meant literally that they had the power of reason but in the eighteenth century the term was used to describe non-natives. Padres was described only as being from the local parish; no racial information was recorded. On this occasion, for some reason, the priest did not feel that it was necessary to note a casta (racial category) for young Mariana or her parents…

Read or purchase the article here.

Blacks in Mexico: A Forgotten Minority

Time Magazine
2009-09-15

Alexis Okeowo

The first town of freed African slaves in the Americas is not exactly where you would expect to find it—and it isn’t exactly what you’d expect to find either. First, it’s not in the United States. Yanga, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, is a sleepy pueblito founded by its namesake, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave who led a rebellion against his Spanish colonial masters in the late 16th century and fought off attempts to retake the settlement. The second thing that is immediately evident to vistors who reach the town’s rustic central plaza: there are virtually no blacks among the few hundred residents milling around the center of town.

Mirroring Mexico’s history itself, most of Yanga’s Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants. Mexico’s independence from Spain and new focus on building a national identity on the idea of mestizaje, or mixed race, drove African Mexicans into invisibility as leaders chose not to count them or assess their needs. Now many blacks want to fight back by improving the shoddy education and social services available to them and are petitioning for the constitution to recognize Afro-Mexicans as a separate ethnic group worthy of special consideration.

Read the entire article here.

“Mulata, Hija de Negro y India”: Afro-Indigenous Mulatos in Early Colonial Mexico

Journal of Social History
Volume 44, Number 3 (Spring 2011)
pages 889-914
E-ISSN: 1527-1897; Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2011.0007

Robert C. Schwaller, Lecturer of History
University of North Carolinia, Charlotte

Since the fifteenth century, the term “mulato” has been used to describe individuals of mixed African and European ancestry. Through an examination of mulatos from sixteenth century New Spain this piece complicates our understanding of the usage and implication of this socio-racial ascription. Both demographic and anecdotal evidence suggests that in the early colonial period mulato frequently described individuals of mixed African-indigenous ancestry. Moreover, these individuals may have represented the majority of individuals so named. Additionally this piece uses several case studies to demonstrate that Afro-indigenous mulatos formed frequent and long-term connections to indigenous society and culture. Through acculturation and familial ties, early mulatos helped to encourage interethnic unions and may have played a key role in the growth of a highly varied, multi-ethnic colonial population in Mexico. By highlighting these important trends, this study challenges our traditional assumptions concerning the category of mulato and suggests that we must avoid the homogenizing tendency inherent in such terminology.

Read or purchase the article here.

Black Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Race and Nation

Brown University
May 2009
268 pages

Marisela Jiménez Ramos

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

On January 31, 2006, the Associated Press reported that while remodeling the central plaza in Campeche, a Mexican port city on the Yucatan peninsula, construction workers stumbled upon a sixteenth-century cemetery containing what seemed to be the oldest archeological evidence of African slavery in the Americas. The cemetery had been in use as early as the mid-sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. That same day, the New York Times published an article about the discovery that focused on the teeth that had been unearthed by archeologists. At least four of the 180 bodies that were recovered showed evidence of having come from West Africa, including the most telling fact that “some of their teeth were filed and chipped to sharp edges in a decorative practice characteristic of Africa.” In January of 2006 the evidence of early African slavery in New Spain (now Mexico) was finally making “big news” in the modern world. But, for the historians, archeologists, anthropologists, or cultural investigators who have dug through dusty colonial documents in many of Mexico’s archives or have mined the world histories and local memories of Mexico’s “third root,” the news that there had been Africans in Mexico was hardly news. Scholars have always known that Mexico, along with all of the other Spanish colonies, had a comprehensive fully actualized system of African slavery. Two days after the initial AP news release, Mexico City’s El Universal and La Reforma carried the story.  What these and subsequent news articles reveal is the prevalent and dominant discourse of mestizaje—defined as the mixture of Spanish and Indian elements—and the obscurity of Mexico’s African history.

In El Universal, the director of the project, Vera Tiesler from the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, reported that “the most important thing is to create a consciousness that we [Mexicans] not only originate from Indians and Europeans, but that there is also a third root.” Tiesler also commented that the discovery was especially important for Blacks in the United States because it provides further evidence of their arrival to the New World.  Underlying the language of the “rediscovery” of Mexico’s ancient Black population is the dominant discourse of mestizaje—Mexico’s ideology of racial mixture and national identity.  A major feature of this ideology is that “the African, under no circumstance persevered as pure black, either biologically or culturally.” Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, a mid-twentieth-century pioneer of Black Mexican studies, expressed the common attitude of Mexicans who believed that “the slaves who contributed to Mexico’s genetic make-up became so completely integrated into the process of mestizaje that it is now very difficult for the layman to distinguish the Negroid features of the present population as a whole.” Our current understanding of racial mixture in Mexico does not negate the fact that Blacks were present in that country. If the African presence and influence is not obvious, it is not any less important historically. Blacks in Mexico have “disappeared” as a separate racial/ethnic group, to the point that nothing Black or African is considered Mexican. Yet, what is lacking is a clear explanation for the “disappearance” of the contributions that Blacks have made to our current understanding of Mexican identity.

The story of those bones in Campeche can be brought to life with a better understanding of the development of Mexican national identity. In this work I focus on nineteenth-century discourses of race and their intersection with nation-building and the exclusion of Blackness from what would eventually be termed, “mestizaje.” Since my purpose is not so much to understand what Mexico’s national identity is (or was), as to understand how and why it came to exclude all things Black and African, I focus my research on the period between Independence in 1821 and the the Porfiriato (1876-1911) when nationalism and national identity became a state-sponsored project. Historians like Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo have claimed that the modern nationalist project in Mexico began with the period of the Porfiriato and culminated with the Mexican Revolution (1911-1917)—an essentially twentieth-century phenomenon. Yet, even before the beginning of the Porfiriato, I argue, “Mexican” identity had already been defined to a large degree. The nineteenth century period marks the beginning of Mexico’s political and social liberation from Spanish rule, as well as the beginning of a self-conscious
process of nation-building…

My goal is to make clear the role of Blacks and Blackness in nineteenth-century Mexican discourses of nation and to document their contributions to the makeup of mestizaje. I focus on what Florencia Mallón calls “discursive transformation.” Prasenjit Duara explains, “the meanings of the nation are produced mainly through linguistic mechanisms.” In reality, Blacks “disappeared” through omission from nineteenth-century discourses of race and nation, a process I call the Black exception, a term that highlights how Blacks were exempt from Mexico’s understanding of its own racial makeup.

By looking into the role of Blackness, or negritud, in nineteenth-century discourses of nation I seek to formulate a new understanding of Mexico’s national identity, but primarily a new theoretical understanding of ethnic relations in the period after independence. I investigate the social and political processes that contributed to the eventual—but by no means inevitable—‘disappearance’ of Blacks and all things African from the national self-consciousness of modern Mexico. To be more precise, I provide answers to the following questions. In the absence of racial categories in post-independence Mexico how did the understanding of what it meant to be Black change for former Blacks and for non-Blacks? More importantly, how did these definitions fit within the evolving concept of “lo Mejicano”?

I argue that Mexico’s twentieth-century struggles for social and political development cannot be understood without examining the role that nineteenth-century racial ideologies played in the institutionalization of official and unofficial conceptions of citizenship and nation-building. I hope to show how the historical record may be mined for evidence of the conflicting ideologies determining the context of the roles that Blacks would play—or would not be allowed to play—in the new nation. In addition to a reconceptualization of the discourse of mestizaje, this research will open avenues to a rethinking of the contemporary identity of Mexicans, including a recovery of the (obscured) Black presence…

Table of Contents

• Signature Page
• Curriculum Vitae
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Blackness of Slavery: Race in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1821
• Chapter 2: Inventing Mexico: Race and the Discourse of Independence
• Chapter 3: Mexico Mestizo: Nation and the Discourse of Race
• Chapter 4: Freedom Across the Border: U.S. Fugitive Slave Migration and the Discourse of Mexican Racial Equality, 1821-1866
• Chapter 5: The Cultural Meaning of Blackness: The Strange But True Adventures of “La Mulata de Córdoba” and “El Negrito Poeta”
• Chapter 6: Yanga: Mexico’s First Revolutionary
• Conclusion: “Where Did The Blacks Go?”

Read the entire dissertation here.

Chinos and Paisanos: Chinese Mexican Relations in the Borderlands

Pacific Historical Review
Volume 79, Number 1 (February 2010)
Pages 50–85
DOI: 10.1525/phr.2010.79.1.50

Julian Lim
Cornell University

In 1920 Manual Lee Chew’s family held a great wedding banquet at the Casa Blanca restaurant, located in the center of Mexicali’s la Chinesca [Chinatown].  All of the Lees, along with their paisanos [countrymen], were there to celebrate. It was a momentous occasion as well, for the bride was one of the first Mexicans to marry a Chinese in Mexicali.  For family friends such as Samuel Lee, it was the perfect event for sharing their good fortune and wishes with the happy couple: Samuel Lee proudly lent his cherished Cadillac to Lee Chew for the wedding.  More that seventy years later, memories about the great celebration and other experiences of Chinese immigrants in the Mexican borderlands…

Read or purchase the article here.

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality

University of Texas Press
December 2010
183 pages
62 b&w illus, 14 color photos
7 x 10 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-292-72324-5

Anita González, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Theatre Arts
State University of New York, New Paltz

Photographs by George O. Jackson and José Manuel Pellicer
Foreword by Ben Vinson III

While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves to be either black or African. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as having a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—of dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal the influence of African people and their cultural productions on Mexican society.

In this work, Anita González articulates African ethnicity and artistry within the broader panorama of Mexican culture by featuring dance events that are performed either by Afro-Mexicans or by other ethnic Mexican groups about Afro-Mexicans. She illustrates how dance reflects upon social histories and relationships and documents how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. Festival dances and, sometimes, professional staged dances point to a continuing negotiation among Native American, Spanish, African, and other ethnic identities within the evolving nation of Mexico. These performances embody the mobile histories of ethnic encounters because each dance includes a spectrum of characters based upon local situations and historical memories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ben Vinson III
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Framing African Performance in Mexico
• Chapter 2: Masked Dances: Devils and Beasts of the Costa Chica
• Chapter 3: Archetypes of Race: Performance Responses to Afro-Mexican Presence
• Chapter 4: Becoming National: Chilena, Artesa, and Jarocho as Folkloric Dances
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality, as the title suggests, is a book about dancing. But more important, it is a book about how dance reflects on social histories and relationships. The photographs and text document how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. The idea of Afro-Mexico is, in some ways, an enigma. While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves either black or African. Instead, members of this ethnic population blend into the national imagination of Mexico as a mixed-race country. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This construct obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal that African people and their cultural productions have consistently influenced Mexican society…

…Race in the Americas

The concept of race is continually being redefined. “Race” troubles academic theorists and affects popular social conceptions about origins and nationality. Political events like the rise of Barack Obama challenge existing myths about race and bring to questions the realities of racial mixtures in the Americas. In both local and global communities public understandings about blackness greatly influence who African Diaspora people think they are. Clearly, those who reside in Mexico are Mexican. However, self-perceptions influence both self-esteem and the sense of belonging. Recently, I was traveling by airplane to Costa Chica and picked up a copy of the magazine Intro*, which services the Oaxacan coast. Inside was a story about a surfer named Angel Salinas, an Afro-Mexican from Mancuernas, Pinotepa Nacional. Salinas is a surfing star who has won national and international tournaments. But he wears a wrestler’s mask to cover his face when he appears in public. The article states that the surfer wears the mask as “a result of some advice that his mother gave him when he didn’t appear in magazines because of his dark skin; he decided to do something that would make him different and that would show a Mexican cultural icon. Now he is known as ‘the masked surfer.'” Angel Salinas feels the need to cover his face in order to feel Mexican. Although Mexico is a country where, at first glance, the races have mixed to become a “cosmic race,” there are still urgent social discrepancies that manifest as internalized or blatant racism. This discrepancy between public policy and daily practices influences the kinds of lives that contemporary Afro-Mexicans lead…

Pinturas de Casta: Mexican Caste Paintings, a Foucauldian Reading

New Readings
School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University
Volume 10 (July 2009)
page 1-17

Nasheli Jiménez del Val
Cardiff University

This article looks at the genre of casta painting developed in colonial Mexico during the eighteenth century. The genre consists of a series of paintings representing the different racial mixes that characterised New Spain throughout the colonial period and that continue to play an important role in contemporary Mexican society. By referring to several Foucauldian concepts such as disciplinary power, biopower, normalisation, deviance and heterotopia, this essay aims to locate the links between this genre and prevailing discourses on race, with a particular focus on the ensuing institutional and political practices implemented in the colony during this period. Centrally, by focusing on this genre as a representational technology of colonial surveillance, the paper argues that discourses on race in New Spain oscillated between an ideal representation of colonial society, ordered and stabilised through rigid classificatory systems, and a real miscegenated population that demanded a more fluid understanding of the colonial subject’s societal value beyond the limitations of racial determinism.

It is known that neither the Indian nor Negro contends in dignity and esteem with the Spaniard; nor do any of the others envy the lot of the Negro, who is the “most dispirited and despised”. […] It is held as systematic that a Spaniard and an Indian produce a mestizo; a mestizo and a Spaniard, a castizo; and a castizo and a Spaniard, a Spaniard. It is agreed that from a Spaniard and a Negro a mulatto is born; from a mulatto and a Spaniard, a morisco; from a morisco and a Spaniard, a torna atrás; and from a torna atrás and a Spaniard, a tente en el aire. The same thing happens from the union of a Negro and Indian, the descent begins as follows: Negro and Indian produce a lobo; lobo and Indian, a chino; and chino and Indian, an albarazado, all of which incline towards the mulatto. [For more terms, see here.]

—Pedro Alonso O’Crowley, 1774.

Casta painting is a pictorial genre produced by colonial artists between the early 18th century and the early 19th century that consists of a series of paintings representing the different racial mixings that characterised the colony of New Spain. As a pictorial genre, it is constituted by a succession of images that show a male and female subject from different ethnic origins and the offspring that result from this combination. The three racial strands of Spaniard, Indian and Black initiate the series, with the possible combinations that derive from these crossing being depicted in detail, to the degree that even fifth or sixth degrees of derivations are often assigned specific names and traits…

Read the entire article here.

Casta Paintings: Inventing Race Through Art

The Tavis Smiley Show
National Public Radio
2004-06-30

Mexican Art Genre Reveals 18th-Century Attitudes on Racial Mixing

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art 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 Mexico was a colony of Spain. NPR producer Nova Safo reports on the controversial exhibit.

The genre of art, called casta, 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 LACMA 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.

But the title of the portrait is curious: “De Espaniol y Albina, Torna Atras”—literally, “From a Spaniard and Albino, return backwards.” 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…

Read the entire article here.  Listen to the story (00:05:26) here in Real Media or Windows format.