Reading Inhumanity Through Depictions of Africans and Their Descendants in the Casta Paintings of New Spain

Abstract:In the eighteenth century, artists in Mexico began producing sets of casta paintings. Depicting nuclear families where each member represents a different caste, these works carried a number of ideological messages; they codified a racialized hierarchy in the colony with white Spaniards at the top, advertised the abundant and exotic resources of the New World, tried to demonstrate that local administrators had control of an orderly society, and were meant to improve the social and economic status of painters.Casta paintings carried a crueler message as well. By representing Africans and their descendants as inclined to violence, deceitful, uncivilized, and close to nature, Mexican artists aided in the normalization of racism and slavery, and discouraged miscegenation. A non-white wife, they warned, was liable to attack her husband, as in the painting De español y negra, nace mulata by Andrés de Islas, or produce visibly dark-skinned children, as in the painting De español y albina, torna atrás by Miguel Cabrera. In short, casta paintings repeatedly indicated, both subtly and overtly, that Africans and their American-born offspring in New Spain were not considered fully human.