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Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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Casta Painting and the Rhetorical Body

Christa Olson Available online: 13 Oct 2009

To cite this article: Christa Olson (2009): Casta Painting and the Rhetorical Body, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 39:4, 307-330 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02773940902991429

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Rhetoric Society Quarterly Vol. 39, No. 4, October 2009, pp. 307330

Casta Painting and the Rhetorical Body

Christa Olson

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Late-colonial New Spain was awash with conflicting energies: American-born Spaniards (Creoles), like their North American counterparts, felt a growing desire for independence, yet needed their identification with Europe to cement their sense of superiority over the racialized indigenous, African, and mixed-race lower classes; the Enlightenment brought new fervor for scientific exploration and gave intellectual heft to the desire for independence, yet also facilitated administrative reforms that increased the Spanish monarchys intervention in its subjects lives. In the midst of this ferment, there appeared a popular but short-lived genre of art whose depictions of life in New Spain provide a powerful image of the rhetorical role of the colonial body. This article examines how that genre, casta painting, used topoi of family, publicity, and science to constitute and comment upon its moments racialized common sense. The article suggests that taking seriously the rhetorical contribution of these artifacts contributes to a more complex understanding of Enlightenment rhetoric, particularly in the Spanish Americas.

IntroductionSetting the Scene Around 1750, Luis de Mena painted a single-panel cuadro de casta divided into twelve sections. At the top left he placed a small landscape showing a church and a group of dancing figures dressed in white. At the top right another landscape shows the Paseo de Jamaica, a popular promenade in Mexico City, filled with people. Across the bottom of the panel Mena painted a still life of tropical fruits, each numbered and identified in a key. Between the landscapes and the still life, eight small images placed in two rows of four dominate the panel. Each image depicts a mother, a father, and a child; each figure is labeled with a caste name indicating racial mixture, names such as mestizo, mulata, morisca, and lobo. Moving from left to right and top to bottom the images show a genealogical progression explicating the caste names applied to children of successive interracial marriages. Hovering over the entire panel, placed between the two landscapes, is the Virgin of Guadalupe (Fig. 1). The bishops and cathedral chapters of New Spain (present-day Mexico) declared the Virgin of Guadalupe their patroness in 1746. In 1754, the Pope formally confirmed that status (Taylor 12). By that time, the Virgin of Guadalupe

Crista Olson is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 608 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: cjolson2@illinois.edu
ISSN 0277-3945 (print)/ISSN 1930-322X (online) # 2009 The Rhetoric Society of America DOI: 10.1080/02773940902991429

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Figure 1

Luis de Mena, Escenas de Mestizaje, ca. 1750. Museo de America, Madrid.

was already seen as a uniquely Mexican figure that distinguished the colony from its Spanish overlords. The association of the Virgin with a line from Psalm 147, Non fecit taliter omni nationi (He has not done this for any other nation), also solidified around this time, by the late 1760s, further marking the Virgin as a symbol of Mexican distinction (Katzew Casta 194; Taylor 14). She eventually became a powerful symbol of the independence movement. Her presence on this mid-eighteenth century painting underlines a foundational assumption of this article: that cuadros de casta, although they carried many meanings and served many purposes, inevitably reflect the sense of national identity and desire for independence that was emerging from the complex of identifications held by Creoles (American-born Spaniards) in the late colonial period. By the early eighteenth century, Creoles in New Spain lived within a complex system of racial castes that combined biological, genealogical, and pigmentocratic beliefs about race and largely determined social and political life in the colony.1
1 Although Creoles were by definition white and therefore were not considered a caste (the term casta indicated racial mixture), the fact of their American, rather than European, birth distinguished them from Espa~oles in terms of economic, political, and social status. n

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Out of this obsession with race and caste grew a unique visual form, a genre of painting now known as cuadros de casta or caste paintings (referred to in English as casta painting). Essentially unique to eighteenth-century New Spain,2 this genre flourished briefly (extant casta paintings date from 1711 to 1790) and drew artists of varying ability and prestige. A secular genre from a sacred era, mysterious in purpose and meaning, and rarely preserved, casta painting itself has received relatively little scholarly attention, serving mainly as an illustration for scholars more interested in the Spanish colonial practice of social and racial castes (cf. McDonald; Nash). However, casta paintings clear orientation toward problems of the public and its visual contributions to the negotiation of the proper civic body make it amenable to rhetorical criticism. Even more enticing, however, is what attention to casta painting might add to our understanding of eighteenthcentury rhetorical culture within and beyond the Spanish colonial context. Most scholarship on casta painting has interpreted individual casta images as univocal, positioning them as Enlightenment-inspired attempts to construct in imagery a level of racial control already impossible in practice. In this article, I argue that casta images should instead be approached as multivocal and layered. Metaphors of family, publicity, and science dominate most casta images and function as topoi that make casta paintings persuasive artifacts, simultaneously participating in colonial control and depicting the tensions and weaknesses within that control. As such, casta images can be placed not only within the emerging nationalism of their local rhetorical culture, but also within broader Euro-American eighteenthcentury rhetorical culture that, far from being wholly dominated by Enlightened science, was characterized by complex identifications constantly negotiating Enlightenment colonialitys romance with abstract rationality. To demonstrate casta paintings participation in those complex identifications and commitments, this article traces the work done by the topoi of the family, the public, and the scientific. The first part of the article extends existing scholarship on casta painting to explore the genres conflicted identifications. Here, I am most concerned with the particular circumstances of colonial New Spain and elaborate on the social and political changes occurring within the colony during the eighteenth century. Grounded in readings of two much-discussed and oftencopied3 casta images, part one uses the topoi of the family and the public to argue that casta paintings invoke a rhetorical culture deeply conflicted in its identifications and deeply concerned about the racial character of its civic body. In part two, the article moves beyond New Spain, setting the conflicted rhetorical efforts of casta painting in the broader context of eighteenth-century colonial

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There is one known casta series that was produced in Quito early in the century. Later casta series often repeat scenes from earlier ones, although less experienced painters often simplify complicated scenes. This repetition suggests the emergence of commonplaces in which castes became increasingly knowable through the accumulation of images.
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modernity. Examining the conflicted uptake of Enlightenment philosophy and science in the Spanish world and beyond, it argues that casta painting may be seen as refracting a racial common sense that both contests and depends on the topos of Enlightenment science. It also suggests that casta painting can be seen as participating in an eighteenth-century rhetorical culture already bound up in and aware of the tensions of colonialism and scientific rationality. Part 1: On Casta Painting, Coloniality, and Nationalism Starting early in the colonial period, New Spains population was divided into three groups in the registration books maintained by church authorities: Espa~oles n (Creoles), Indios, and castas4 (persons of mixed racial heritage). The castas were, in turn, divided into a varying number of caste subgroups (Klor de Alva 64). It is not clear what precipitated the painting of the first casta images early in the eighteenth century, almost three hundred years after the castas became a recognizable part of colonial life, although the emerging emphasis on observation and the gaze in modern visuality (Poole 14) likely played a part. Casta paintings represent hierarchies of miscegenation among the colonys three main racial5 groups (Africans, Europeans, and Indians). Generally, casta paintings appear in a series of 12 to 16 images, presented either as separate panels or as a grid of images on a single panel. Each casta image depicts a family: a mother, a father, and one or two children. Each set of parents represents a different combination of racial groups or castes. The children resulting from those relationships bear the caste name that forms the title of the painting. For example, a painting showing an indigenous woman and a Spanish man with their mestizo son might be titled, From Indian and Spaniard is born Mestizo (de India y Espa~ol nace Mestizo). The Mestizo painting is n almost always the first image in a casta series. Successive images show the titled caste of the previous image as a parent in the next, showing increasing levels of miscegenation and labeled with ever more esoteric caste names. Though casta series include castes such as tente en el aire (hold yourself in the air), albarazado (white-spotted), or no te entiendo (I dont get you), everyday use of those names seems to have been rare. In general, there were far fewer caste names in common use than appear in the average casta series. Early eighteenth-century casta series often show families in half or three-quarter view against a non-descript background. Although the figures clothing carries some indication of social class, the extremes that appear in later series are notably

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African slaves were also listed in the book of castas, even if they were technically pure African. Throughout this article I use race to reference the three groups depicted in casta painting. Here, race suggests the eras sense of raza as a combination of lineage and biological inheritance. Although a study of the racialization occurring in this era is beyond the scope of this essay, my use of race is inflected with concern for the social and economic forces racializing individuals in colonial New Spain.
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absent. These series present a fairly neutral mood in each panel, showing generally prosperous families in scenes devoid of contextual markers. They also often depict a smaller number of castes than later examples do. In these paintings, anxiety over racial mixing is subdued and the categories appear precise. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, casta series place figures in complicated scenes complete with rich details about the social status of the figures and the life of the colony. These later series often show a marked decline in socioeconomic status and moral behavior as they move down the caste hierarchy. An increase in depicted violence is especially common in those panels where one or more figures possess significant African heritage. Casta paintings draw on strategies of visual education in use since at least the medieval period. The Church used religious imagery (painting, stained glass, statuary, controlled movement through cathedrals, etc.) to narrate sacred stories through corporeal interaction. Such physical notions of persuasion still held a great deal of sway in eighteenth-century Spanish America and the serial nature of casta sets is clearly connected to the hagiographic series that were major tools in Spanish colonial evangelization. Ilona Katzew suggests that just as hagiographic series narrated key stories of Christian faith, casta series narrated the process of miscegenation and created a visual paradigm . . . that could easily be remembered and invoke various associations (Casta 63). Following this strategy, single-panel casta paintings construct a visual hierarchy through a simple grid.6 Vertically, there are three main caste subgroups. The top row depicts SpanishIndigenous relationships; the middle row shows SpanishAfrican partners; the bottom row features AfricanIndigenous couples.7 Both in terms of grid position and markers of class status, families that include a Spanish parent8 hold the highest place in the visual hierarchy. People of indigenous heritage are often shown as respectable and dignified when depicted in a relationship with a Spaniard, but when in a relationship with an African, they appear to occupy the lowest strata of society. African blood is depicted as most degraded and most contaminating: whereas sufficient dilution of indigenous heritage returns a child to the status of Espa~ol, there is n no such cleansing for African heritage. Horizontally within each subgroup the series move from least to most mixed heritage (thus, except in the case of African Indigenous pairs, children move from least to most white), with the last image of SpanishIndigenous intermarriage often labeling the child as Espa~ol. n

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There is at least one exception to this form: a single casta panel in which the castes mingle in a public market. As most of the figures in the image are adults, this casta panel also breaks with the genres typical familial organization. 7 The Luis de Mena painting with which I begin this article is an exception to the three-tiered structure, it is, however, unusual in its use of two rows. 8 Carrera and Katzew read the fact that the European figures in casta painting are labeled Espa~oles and n not Criollos (Creoles) as an argument for seeing the genre in terms of a nationalist project.

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Multi-panel casta series establish a similar hierarchy using clothing, setting, and behavior as class and status markers. In addition, many are numbered to indicate the order in which they should be presented, an order that mimics the hierarchies in single-panel casta paintings. In their visual organization these paintings reproduce colonial anxieties about race and the elaborate systems of categorization and control designed to alleviate those anxieties. They attempt to make truths about miscegenation in the colonial context through the representation of raced bodies. However, the truths being made are complex truths, shot through with conflicting allegiances and readable in terms of multiple identifications.9 What we know today about the conditions of production for casta painting supports the argument that they were multivocal objects. Because the majority of extant casta series were found in European private collections and museums, scholars agree that their largest market must have been Spanish administrators or visitors collecting a sort of tourist booty by which to narrate their time in the exotic colonial setting. However, the artists creating casta images were Americans, probably Creoles. Those artists whose identities are discernable (through signatures or comparison of style) were known Creole artists; the remainder, though anonymous, were clearly familiar with New Spanish social life, flora, and fauna. In this context, though many casta series were commissioned for export to Spain, Katzew notes that the emphasis on the luxury and abundance of the colony and the mediation of reality as conveyed by the careful selection of the scenes represented point to a conscious effort at Creole self-representation (Casta Painting 17). In addition, it appears that at least some casta series were purchased by Creole elites attempting to capture an emerging sense of identity separate from Spain. Thus, casta paintings simultaneously served an exoticizing function for their Spanish patrons and an identificatory function for their Creole producers and a small number of Creole patrons. Artists producing casta paintings were likely able to maintain a layered, multiple voice in their images because of the genres particularity. Sacred art dominated the market in eighteenth-century New Spain, followed distantly by portraiture. Both religious painting and portraiture required strict attention to form and content, especially because the Inquisition remained a powerful normalizing force in the colony. Casta painting carried no such formal obligation and may have been a lower-risk way artists practiced representing human figures. Rarely mentioned in correspondence or criticism from its own era, casta painting appears to have garnered minimal attention. Many of the paintings, done by unknown artists and of dubious artistic quality, have been lost in storage since their completion. Carrera emphasizes that casta painting was a relatively unimportant genre and

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9 Burkes argument that rhetoric is a matter of identification, of aligning ones self with one group and in conflict with another is key here. Like Burke, I am concerned with identification in its partisan aspects (22). I also suggest that individuals may be at odds with themselves through multiple, conflicted identifications.

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thus should not be approached as substantially altering our understanding of eighteenth-century colonial art history. However, she argues, its very obscurity makes the genre useful for understanding how artists envisioned their social milieu. The more quotidian nature of the genre may have given artists new freedom to incorporate experimental forms and unconventional ideas. For Carrera, this feature of being both ordinary and innovative means that casta paintings almost inadvertently reveal through time the increasing discourse on the colonial body (Carrera Imagining Identity 49). The somewhat greater freedom experienced by artists producing casta series also means that the genre is, among Spanish colonial art forms, particularly well-positioned to suggest the conflicted identifications of the social context in which it was created. Casta painting embodies the dynamic contradictions in the construction and maintenance of the caste system in New Spain. These paintings circulated within Creole and Peninsular (European Spanish) society, making meaning in the juxtaposition of conflicting social experiences. They are eminently rhetorical images in the sense that in them one is able to imprecisely [track] the making of social imaginaries, including their histories, possible futures, and connections to material conditions (Cintron Gates Locked 10). They carry ideas about social organization and communicate the conflicted identifications of the elites who painted, commissioned, and observed them. Although casta paintings were likely not part of a coordinated effort at persuasion, they still function as persuasive means of identification in the Burkean sense, leading toward an alignment of interests or senses of self. Burkes link between identification and consubstantiality is particularly applicable to casta painting because, as Burke says of consubstantiality, in the moment of identification with a casta other, one is both fully distinct from that other and joined with it. Casta paintings imagine a way of life [as] an acting-together and invoke common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes based on the consubstantial sense of identifying with that which one is not (Burke 21). Casta painting promotes this consubstantial identification through topoi best understood as storehouses of social energy (Cintron Democracy 7). Here, topoi function persuasively and encourage identification by tapping into the complexes of values, experiences, and customs that knit societies together. Commonplaces carry the accumulated force of those complexes and wield it in more-or-less explicit terms. This definition of topoi emphasizes the generative dimensions of the commonplace, integrating the related concept of energeia through the invocation of social energy. Cintron draws on energeias illustrative=constitutive implications to position topoi as [bringing their content]-before-the-eyes (Democracy 9). What makes topoi powerful, then, is that they simultaneously index and produce their social milieu, often by making it visible. In addition, this definition of topoi emphasizes the value of closely examining commonplaces in order to understand the collections of values, experiences, and customs that make them resonant in their own era. The three casta painting topoi identified in this article (the family, the public, and the scientific) draw on everyday life experiences for elite

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Creoles and Peninsulars as well as lower-status indigenous people, Africans, and castas. They bring before the eyes the energeia of collective desires, jealousies, loathings, pleasures, [and] self-indulgences that motivated the life-world of many, especially elites, in colonial New Spain (Democracy 11). In this context, the question of how closely or distantly casta painting reproduces the actual conditions of life in the colony recedes in importance and is replaced by concern with how casta painting made visible the complex of self-understandings, aspirations, and anxieties of the elite who were its creators and its audience, tapping into and constituting a persuasive image of the colonial life-world. Although casta painting has not previously been the subject of rhetorical criticism, most scholarship on the form implicitly recognizes its rhetorical contours. a Garca Siz, Katzew, and Carrera, three prominent scholars of the genre, all argue that casta painting offers an ideologically inflected interpretation of colonial life rather than a faithful reproduction. They point out that contemporary historical documents reveal the colonial governments inability to identify and maintain strict a caste differentiation (Garca Siz 44). By the era of casta painting, it was nearly impossible to accurately distinguish pure-blooded Europeans from lighter-skinned castes,10 and legal efforts to control miscegenation were abandoned by the end of the century. In this context, casta paintings can be seen as persuasive objects that tapped into a complex of social energy amassed from the power anxieties of elites and that aimed to allay worries about loss of control by imagining New Spains population as divided into easily identifiable and eminently knowable groups (Carrera Locating Race 38; Katzew Casta Painting 15). The clear demarcations of the caste hierarchy shown in casta paintings, according to this scholarship, represent a racial fiction designed to reassert colonial control. However, although casta paintings carry powerful messages of colonial control, it is too limiting to read them only as a symbolic reassertion of Spanish domination in the face of an increasingly complex and rebellious mixed-race society. As often as they engage the topos of scientific control and widely circulated assumptions about European intellectual superiority, the paintings redirect that topos away from Spanish authority and toward an emerging sense of Creole American identity. In particular, casta paintings toy with the messiness and instability within the topos of science, pairing and manipulating it with commonplaces of family and publicity that simultaneously buttress and undermine the message of colonial control so visible in the series. Two paintings from a 1774 casta series by Andres de Islas, held by the Museum of America in Madrid, help illustrate this complexity. The identity of the series original commissioner is unknown, but its location in Spain suggests a European patron. This series is particularly useful for considering the mixture of topoi in casta painting because the series was copied multiple times by later casta artists.
10 Although phenotypical distinction became increasingly difficult, as Carrera argues, rigid distinctions based on class still maintained a highly stratified society.

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Figure 2

Andres de Islas, De Espa~ol y Negra, nace Mulata, 1774. Museo de America, Madrid. n

It appears to have captured, in some way, a shared understanding of the genres import. The images examined here are the fourth and seventh in the series. Both show SpanishAfrican relationships. To begin, I offer a brief description of each image, then elaborate on each in terms of two of the three topoi: the family and the public. Part two elaborates on casta paintings invocation of science as a commonplace. In the first painting, entitled From Spaniard and Black is born Mulatto (De Espa~ol y Negra, nace Mulata; Fig. 2), a dark-skinned woman dressed as a servant n beats a well-dressed Spaniard. The woman, standing beside a counter scattered with jars and plates, is turned away from the viewer, though her face is visible. The image catches her with her right hand high above her head, grasping a small mallet. The man, dressed as a gentleman, stands in front of a window showing open sky and trees. He wears a white coat with black trim and white lace at the wrists. With his right hand, he grasps the womans left arm, a look of fear on his face as she pulls his hair and threatens him with the mallet. His left arm rests, open-palmed, under the womans left arm.11 Standing between the fighting
11 It is hard for a viewer today to see this image and not assume that the man is the womans master, their child more his demand than their mutual desire. It is equally hard to know if such a meaning would have a been visible to the paintings original viewers, although Mara Garca Siz refers to these images obliquely as a allud[ing], perhaps, to certain types of accepted husband-wife relationships (Garca Siz 40).

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couple, their mulata daughter makes a diagonal line of intervention. Her feet are planted beside her fathers left foot, her small, light-brown hands push against her mothers skirt. Her head is thrown back, her eyes look up imploringly at her parents, and her mouth is open in a cry of distress. On the floor beside the woman sits a basket full of fruits, each marked with a number. Above the mans head is a numbered list of names corresponding to the fruits below. In the second image, From Spaniard and Albino is born Torna-atras (De Espa~ol y Alvina, nace Torna-atras; Fig. 3), a dark-skinned boy perches on his n light-skinned fathers lap while his pale mother stands nearby holding the boys cloak and tri-cornered hat. The scene takes place in a room with brocaded velvet wall coverings. The father wears a long, silver-gray coat and his knee-length pants are of the same material; a deep blue cloak with silver embroidery rests on his shoulders. The son, dressed in a neat blue coat with a red waistcoat and pants, stands on his fathers legs. With one hand, the father holds his sons small hand; his other hand is wrapped around the boys back, steadying him. The boy looks up at his father, his long, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail (in some versions of this image the boys hair is clearly wiry, emphasizing his African heritage. Here, it appears smooth). The pale-skinned mother, wearing a jeweled necklace and earrings, a black skirt, and a tailored blouse does not appear dressed to leave the house. She looks down, gazing demurely at the floor, the picture of a cultured woman.

Figure 3

Andres de Islas, De Espa~ol y Albina, nace Torna-atras, 1774. Museo de America, Madrid. n

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These (and other) casta images manifest their conflicted sense of identification, in part, through their representation of the basic family unit. Such images of family, though approachable as simply images or themes, are productively examined as topoi in order to emphasize how the images index the reservoir of unspoken customs and assumptions welling up around depictions of parentchild relationships. Katzew suggests that this reliance on images of the family projects messages of a benign and natural social hierarchy and implies racial harmony. She notes, Since the subordination of women to man and child to woman were considered natural facts, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature (Casta Painting 13). Although this analogy between hierarchical control and the family responds to one powerful set of customs driving casta images persuasive power, it does not seem satisfactory given the range of family types and relations depicted in the imagessome of which seem to tap other sorts of familial commonplaces. Casta paintings reliance on the family as a persuasive commonplace depends on the layered meanings that viewers might apply to these images based on their knowledge and experience of family in the colonial context. Gonzalbo Aizpuru emphasizes that in colonial New Spain the family unit and kinship networks (parentezco) were essential to establishing economic and social status. They were also, however, nexuses of the many conflicts and contradictions lacing colonial society. She writes,
Disorder in the face of order, material interests against emotional connections, religious principles buried beneath political convenience, virtue in conflict with vice, negated equality, abandoned children, promiscuity in contact with isolation . . . are just some of the conflicts that appear in the modes of shared life found in colonial society. There are no easy answers to the questions [that the article poses about the meaning and structure of colonial family life], nor do stereotypes help explain attitudes or justify decisions. (Gonzalbo Aizpuru 405)12

In particular, the prominence and roles given to children in many casta images demonstrate that as storehouses of social energy, depictions of the family carried more than a sense of natural hierarchy. Children are regularly placed between their parents, at the center of the image. Often, one or both of the parents are in physical contact with the childholding, touching, guiding the child. Though in many scenes the children are passive infants or docile toddlers, they are just as likely to be shown in action, pointing the way, requesting food, or caring for younger siblings. Even in scenes that depict violence, the children are never the

12 El desorden frente al orden, el interes material contra los sentimientos, los principios religiosos enterrados bajo la conveniencia poltica, la virtud en lucha con el vicio, la igualdad negada, la infancia abandonada, la promiscuidad en contacto con el aislamiento . . . son apenas algunos de los conflictos que se aprecian en las formas de convivencia propias de la sociedad colonial. No hay una respuesta simple para las cuestiones planteadas, ni sirven los estereotipos para explicar actitudes o justificar decisiones.

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focus of that violence. In fact, in such scenes children are often the intermediaries between their parents. The daughters intervention is one of the most striking features of the Islas Mulata image described earlier. Her distress occupies the center of the image and is a clear focal point, just as her caste name provides the title for the painting. The image constructs, as Katzew suggests, a clear message that the African woman is dangerous and volatile and must be controlled. However, the Spanish man, head of the family and symbol of governance and control in Katzews reading, seems powerless to subdue his spouse. Instead, he is caught by the hair (and in some versions of this image, his forehead is bloodied by a previous strike of her mallet), looking helpless and frightened. It is the child, the American casta, who seems capable of intervention and is, indeed, the most powerful figure in the scene. This balance of power in the image does not reasonably contribute to an argument in which the Spaniard effortlessly maintains his much-vaunted Enlightened colonial control. He appears compromised by his colonial relationship with the woman, unable to sway her to his will. Instead, the sympathy of the image is with the daughter who is caught between the battling parents yet also appears as the likely way out of the conflict. If we assume, like Katzew, that the Spanish man stands in for Spanish colonial governance in general and that the African woman represents the colonial other, we might then read their casta child as consubstantially identified with the Creole population and embodying the motive of national emergence. Thus, the topos of family in this and similar casta images can also be seen as tapping into and appropriating an existing narrative that saw Americanborn Spaniards and castas as children in their relationship with the paternal metropole. As in this image, Creoles were caught between their identification with the colonizing Spaniards and their sense of sharing colonial exploitation with castas, indigenous people, and Africans. Tainted by their American birth, Creole elites simultaneously asserted their European-ness and, as the possibility of independence dawned, distinguished themselves from Europe. Thomas Abercrombie notes that Creole elites were always swinging between fear of contamination and transgressive desire for the colonial Other (177). Although it would be a mistake to suggest that beyond the casta painting canvas Islas and other Creole artists identified themselves politically and socially with members of the lower castes, it does not seem a stretch, given the generally idealized figures of casta painting, to suggest that the children in those casta paintings that include a Spanish parent invoke identification with the Creole population. In the Mulata image, the daughters reference to the Creole elite is especially clear in her posi` tioning vis a vis her parents. With her feet firmly placed alongside her father, she appears to side with the Spanish effort to restrain her African mother. Unlike him, however, the daughter seems to have some chance of success. She is not caught, as he is, and she has the ability to appeal to her mother based in their shared sense of opposition to European domination. There is, within this image, an implicit argument that the children of the union between Spain and its colonies

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ought to rule the future of the colony and are best suited to the control (and exploitation) of its lower classes. The family topos plays out in another way in paintings like Islass Torna-atras. Here, in the context of affluence, the fact that casta paintings are grounded in the family unit seems to naturalize not only social hierarchy, but also racial mixture itself, playing with and against the common belief among European Spaniards that even so-called pure-blooded Creoles were contaminated by their birth into the climate and society of the colony. The caste label torna-atras shows up in a variety of contexts in casta series, but is most often applied to the child of a Spaniard and an Albino (1=8th African and 7=8ths Spanish heritage).13 The label suggests that blood will out as the phrase torna-atras means return backwards and many torna-atras casta paintings show two phenotypically European parents with a markedly dark-skinned child. Some paintings that show the torna-atras family put distance between the child and its Spanish father, suggesting slight rejection by the Spanish parent, and all torna-atras images carry a bit of the social energy invested in limpieza de sangre (blood purity)14 and the colonial fear that African blood will work its way into the Spanish elite. This powerful narrative of contamination, of a black child born of white parents, would clearly have triggered anxieties about racial impurity and lack of social control. However, most torna-atras paintings play with setting in a way that counteracts that fear of being outed as impure. The images of torna-atras families in casta painting generally suggest respectability rather than social degradation. Often, the families are represented as wealthy: dressed in fine, European-style clothing and located in well-appointed sitting rooms, on sculptured terraces, or in manicured gardens. The parents and children demonstrate the marks of status (calidad) through poised positions, fine jewelry, and other details reminis cent of elite portraits.15 Andres de Islass Torna-atras is no exception. All three figures are well-dressed and the alliance of the torna-atras child with his Spanish father is heightened by their physical proximity. The boy is positioned as his fathers heir (a point on which I elaborate later) and looks to his father for guidance. Although themes of racial and sexual domination are visible in the husbands direct gaze and the wifes demure focus on the floor, the more obviously casta child does not seem bound by those same strictures. A fuller understanding of the narratives at work in this Torna-atras painting requires turning to the second major topos at work in the conflicted rhetoric of
Studies of casta painting generally point out that while there is consistency in the names of less mixed castas (mestizo, mulato, castizo, and morisco), the labels applied to more racially ambiguous groups tend to be fluid. Torna-atras appears most often toward the end of the sub-series of AfricanSpanish mixtures. However, torna-atras also sometimes labels a child of indigenous and African heritage. 14 In Spain, limpieza de sangre originally referred to pure Christian heritage and the requirement that elites not have Jewish or Islamic heritage. In Spanish America, limpieza referred to purity of European or Indigenous heritage and barred those of African or mixed inheritance from holding public positions. 15 For more information on the tradition of elite portraits and its connection to casta painting, see Carrera (Imagining Identity).
13

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casta painting: the topos of publicity. As with the complex of associations surrounding images of family, representations of public and private life drew on and likely triggered associations with a series of assumptions about social place and status. Especially early in the eighteenth century, the quality and position of the space that elites occupied at public events such as the corridas del toro (bullfights) held on ceremonial occasions were highly scrutinized markers of class status (Viqueira Albn 13). Beyond the spectacle of the bullfights, participation in a other public diversions such as the paseo, or promenade, and the theater also reinscribed the class hierarchies of the colony. People of all classes attended these public activities and being visibly present in the proper vehicle and dress was an important part of maintaining status for the elites (xx).16 Influenced by changes in artistic style (signaling the early arrival of romanticism) and the Enlightenments emphasis on the scientific observation of the natural world, casta paintings from the second half of the eighteenth century invoke a more developed sense of space than do their earlier counterparts. In these later images, depictions of space, especially urban space, encode a complex set of information about the image, tapping into contemporary changes in notions of public and private. The Bourbon reforms, most notably under the Enlightened Despot Carlos III (175988),17 did much to delineate the realms of the public and private in Spanish America, especially in terms of reforming public administration and introducing a more liberal economy (Uribe-Uran 428). The Bourbon reforms also included a literal emphasis on public space as they introduced ideals of urban planning and hygiene that attempted to modernize Mexico City. Carrera argues that casta paintings visual construction of colonial bodies is inextricably linked to a bureaucratic reaction to demographic changes [in Mexico City] which . . . attempted increasingly vigorous regulation and renovation of colonial bodies and spaces (Imagining Identity 107). Casta images thus use depictions of spatial organization and hierarchy as indexes for readily available ideas about public and private space and the space of the city. By the end of the eighteenth century, public participation in civil society through literary, scientific, and philanthropic associations became increasingly common among elites, suggesting, according to Uribe-Uran, the early stages of a Habermasian public sphere in the colony (425). Casta painting also made use of publicly-performed hierarchies of class and the raced body, often rooted in images of civil society. Within many series, location signals calidad, as higher status families appear in private houses or salons and lower status families stand on grimy streets or in outdoor markets and kitchens. Even within a single paint` ing, the relative positions of the adults in the image vis a vis their public roles
16 However, Viqueira Albn suggests that that staple of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, the a or coffee house, was not as common in New Spain as in some parts of Europe (xix). cafe 17 Paradoxically, these reforms also enabled Creole nationalism by reducing the colonies economic dependence on Spain and increasing contact between the colony and France and Britain. See Thurner and Guerrero (28).

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often signals as much about the relationship as do the artists choices of clothing or adornment. Islass Mulata image, in its juxtaposition of labeled fruits at the womans feet and numbered key above the mans head, of open sky above the man and kitchen interior behind the woman plays with such commonplace understandings of private and public by placing the adults in positions that mimic the dualisms of gender roles. If the father, standing against the open window, exudes publicity and state power, and the mother, the image of a domestic servant, carries the private burden of household improprieties, the child is an intermediary between the two: the public image of private behaviors. As in Islass Mulata painting, the location of women along a spectrum of publicity seems to be particularly important to establishing caste status in most casta series. Across casta series, lower status African women appear most often in kitchens and lower-caste Indigenous women are often depicted near rural cottages or selling fruits on urban streets. Their contribution to and participation in the public sphere is shown as limited, yet they are also available to the public gaze. Upper-class Spanish or light-skinned casta women are typically more protected from publicity and more demure in the face of it, most often seen in domestic interiors or in apparently private gardens, engaged in some domestic task with eyes turned away from the viewer. In all torna-atras images that show a dark-skinned child with light-skinned parents, the topos of the public plays out, on the one hand, in the sense of miscegenation being inevitably made public. In that sense, this commonplace clearly participates in the disciplining of the colonial body, emphasizing the belief that it is possible to identify people of impure heritage and thus attempting to calm colonial fears of contamination. However, again, because these images do not show the torna-atras child as the cause of social falling, this topos cannot so easily be read as univocal or unidirectional. Instead, the apparently harmonious domestic scene in which the father prepares to take his son into public implies a counter-story and a countervailing force of social energy in which the threat of miscegenation transforms into what will eventually be a (still racist and race-based) ideology promoting a history of miscegenation as part of national identity even among Creole elites.18 In the Islas Torna-atras in particular, the son is identified with his father both in terms of position within the scene and in terms of dress and poise. The image suggests that father and son are about to leave the domestic scene and go out into the city together. Soon, dressed in a suit and cloak like his father, the boy will be publicly visible as his fathers legitimate son, set to inherit. The boy may be dark-skinned, but the marks of status that surround him belie his inferior caste position. It is highly unlikely that, in the colonial, pigmentocratic society of
18 One hundred and fifty years later, mestizaje, a notion of racial mixture, became an official Mexican national narrative. Jose Vasconceloss 1925 book, La Raza Cosmica, argued for a strong fifth race that would result from a synthesis of the other four races found in Latin America (Barnitz 46) and that would usher in the next era of humanity.

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New Spain, a dark-skinned child of fair parents would have been able to maintain a high social status (or even been recognized as legitimate). This casta image is clearly not a portrait of a real family. Instead, in the context of a fierce warning about the inevitable emergence of racial contamination, it inserts a powerful metaphor of American distinction. Here, as in Islass Mulata, the denigrated child of the colonial encounter (read, the Creole) is positioned to inherit the colony. The Creole elites of New Spain were, by the end of the eighteenth century, actively imagining themselves as the leaders of a new nation. This constitution of a new nation required distinguishing the colony from the metropole, imbuing it with an alternate history and the need for an equally distinct future. Highlighting the growing racial difference between the Americas and Spain and emphasizing Spains inability to respond to that visible reality offered one strategy. The argument that casta painting participated in the normalization of racial mixing does not imply, in any way, that racial hierarchy as such disappeared; skin color still plays a role in social status throughout the Americas today. However, as an argument for independence, emphasizing the complex racial features of American society had substantial force. Throughout Latin America, Creole elites began articulating republican narratives that invoked the sovereignty of the people and sought the support of the majority casta population while reserving roles of authority and governance for themselves. As Jose Mo~ino put it rather baldly at n the time: All for the people, but without the people (qtd. in Viqueira Albn a 38). Casta painting must be read in light of this dynamic historical moment and its requirement that Creoles align themselves simultaneously with European authority and American rebellion. The Creoles who painted and bought casta series would have had significant investment in both presenting racial mixture as a distinctive trait of New Spain (something that separated the colony from Spain) and maintaining their own privileged status (despite, perhaps, awareness of racial impurity in their own families). In this reading, casta paintings reduction of New Spains history of miscegenation to a set of sixteen identifiable castes makes the genre a means through which Creoles imagined their identification with and resistance to Spain as well as their identification with other American peoples and their continuing sense of superiority to those raced others. For that reason, in addition to offering a multivocal response to colonization through topoi of family and publicity, casta painting also offers insight into the broader Euro-American rhetorical culture of the eighteenth century. In particular, casta painting exposes rifts in the supposed dominance of Enlightened science and its rationalized authority. Part 2: Casta Painting and the Rhetorical Body of the Eighteenth Century The previous two example images carry implicit arguments for a transition of authority from Spain to the Creole elite. They allude to Spanish failure of control

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within the family and the (male) colonized childs inevitable inheritance of his fathers public place. This theme of national emergence out of miscegenation appears even more forcefully in a final example playing on the foibles of scientific rationality (Fig. 4). The anonymous painting dates from the late 1770s and continues the evolution of the casta form from simple portraits to elaborate landscapes. From Albino and Spaniard is produced Black Torna-atras (De Alvina y Espa~ol produce Negro Torna-atras) places little emphasis on its human subjects n and instead depicts a detailed scene of Mexico City, situating the family on a balcony in the lower left corner. In the painting, the Spanish father stands over the family, surveying the urban scene below through a telescope. His stance is arrogant: his right hand rests on his hip, his chest thrusts forward, and an appraising look rests on his face. His blond, fair-skinned, Albino wife sits facing the viewer, her back to the city. She wears a red dress, gazes up into the sky, and raises her right hand into the air in a gesture of supplication or exasperation. Their son, neatly dressed in royal blue suit and white stockings, stands behind his mother and places his right hand on her shoulder. His back is also to the scene below and his dark skin stands out against the muted color palate of the landscape. Because the father surveys the city through a telescope, suggesting a sort of panopticism, Katzew describes this casta scene in terms of the codification of social hierarchy that drives her overall interpretation of casta painting. She writes,
Here the family group is depicted in a literal space of superiority . . . from which the standing Spanish man beholds the entire Alameda (the main park) and part

Figure 4 Anonymous, De Alvina y Espa~ol, produce Negro torna atras, ca. late 1770s. Coleccin Banco n o Nacional de Mexico, Mexico City.

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of the city through his telescope. . . . The composition stresses the subordination of child to woman, and of woman to man, while the last is featured as the controlling agent. The erect standing male is not only portrayed in a position of mastery over female and child, but through his gaze, as possessor of the city itself. (Casta Painting 23)

Carrera too reads this image as indicative of the colonial dream in which the Spanish colonizer claims complete surveillance from his veranda above the Alameda. Katzew and Carrera accurately identify, I believe, the powerful topos of science as rational order that dominates this casta image. The science of categorization and control that emerged so particularly from the Enlightenment had much of its origin and practice in the Western attempt to understand its colonial other.19 Here, the Spanish fathers possession of a telescope, presumably aiding his dispassionate surveillance of the cityscape, seems a clear reference to that analytical observation and hierarchical dominance that distinguished Enlightened colonialism. Somewhat less obvious to todays audience, but quite visible to a contemporary viewer, the topos of scientific rationality also appears in the depiction of the Alameda, showing the park as it appeared after renovation under the urban planning aegis of the Bourbon reforms. Especially for members of the cultural and intellectual elite, these images must have invoked the recent attention to administration, order, and progress in the colony. They must also have reminded viewers of the particular colonial experience of that eras scientific revolutions. At the same time, there is an undercurrent of irony in this painting that suggests important fissures in the regimes of rational colonial control. The father who has such oversight of the city apparently failed to notice that, despite her pale skin and light hair, his spouse is not a Spaniard. His rational observation of the world, his skeptical dependence on only those things observable through his senses appears to have fallen short of achieving complete knowledge. Miscegenation and changing ethnic identifications reach even into this tower of surveillance, and scientific surveillance fails to perceive it. This casta image calls into question which bodies are kept under surveillance and which remain hidden, suggesting that scientific colonial control cannot arrest the Americanization of New Spains population. Casta painting scholarship has generally placed the genre wholly within the traditions of observation and categorization that emerged from the European fascination with cultural otherness and that gained pride of place in the Enlight a enment (Garca Siz 44; Katzew Casta Painting 9). This scholarship reads casta images as primarily interested in colonial control, suggesting that they were a
19 The art historical record of colonial Latin America from the late seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries is filled with forms that meticulously depict the natural diversity of the New World. Artists and intellectuals also translated the scientific style of travelers narratives and natural histories into depictions of the human and cultural diversity of the colony (Ades; Catlin).

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visual practice that made the colonial bodyboth elite and noneliteknowable and visible (Carrera Imagining Identity 54). At the same time, existing scholarship implicitly acknowledges the problems with seeing casta painting as unilaterally positioned in terms of control. Although both Carrera and Katzew speak of stabilization and hierarchy, linking their interpretation of casta painting to the cultural dominance of the Enlightenment, their analyses struggle to account for the genres ambiguous and inconsistent representations of race and racial mixing. On one level, casta painting represents miscegenation as a scientific process in which racial castes are analogous to the exotic flora and fauna of the new world. On another level, casta paintings constantly play with those categories and their social meaning, delighting, like the Torna-atras painting above, in images of biological trespass that defy racial surveillance. Carrera grapples with this aspect of the genre when she makes the seemingly contradictory argument that casta paintings inform the viewer that physical race is confusing and ambiguous yet also, fundamentally, attempt to bring order to the deceptive and equivocal nature of the physical markers of race (Locating Race 42). This inevitable sense of contradiction suggests that casta paintings references to the scientific are deployed, in part, as rhetorical moves that, in concert with contemporary discourses, call into question the universal applicability of Enlightened science. This questioning of Enlightenment ideology makes a great deal of sense in the particular context of Spanish America. In eighteenth-century Spain, an array of political and religious forces complicated the absorption of Enlightenment modernity. Influenced by the Catholic Churchs overwhelming cultural and political power, the Spanish Crown long banned work by Descartes and his followers because Cartesian methodology and key assumptions were anathema to Church doctrine, especially the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the maintenance of Papal authority. The conservative, orthodox establishment in the major universities, especially in Salamanca, clung to scholasticism and the authority of Aristotle through at least the mid eighteenth century, arguing (among other, more religiously-inspired points) that the skeptical science of the Enlightenment was ill-suited to the judgment and organization of human affairs (Aldridge 114; Pagden 127). However, despite the resistance of the Church and the intellectual old guard, the ideas of the Enlightenment found their way into elite cultural and intellectual circles on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic. Scholars such as Feijoo, Zapata, and Jovellanos produced a particularly Spanish version of the Enlightenment, removing much of its political and moral skepticism and making it less problematic for the Inquisition, yet still sparking fierce debate (Gutierrez Herrera; Pagden). At the same time, as Rebecca Haidt argues in her study of embodiment in Spanish Enlightenment theory, the Spanish Ilustrados developed a philosophy of enlightenment highly influenced by classical theories, in particular the classical attention to bodies and their comportment. Nor were eighteenth-century Spaniards alone in their conflicted response to the Enlightenment. Throughout Europe and the new world, scientists and scholars

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resisted the new science, citing its threat to religious orthodoxy, its failure to account for human nature, and its problematic separation of body and mind.20 Intellectuals committed to scholasticism objected to Enlightened scholars dismissal of Aristotle. Scientists and philosophers seeking an alternative to the Cartesian split between perception and the body turned to corporeal notions of understanding drawn from classical theory. Some turned to anatomy, searching for the sensorium commune, a part of the nervous system they believed responsible for transforming sensation into perception. According to Poole, locating the sensorium commune in the nervous system marked a direct challenge to Descartess theory that the highly localized (and extremely minute) pineal gland was the meeting place of sensation and reaction (31). The scientific debate about the sensorium commune was, according to Poole, representative of a shift in the European common sense about the senses toward an assumption that sensory perceptions shared some physical grounding in the body and that this point of contact was, at least potentially, constitutive of what that body was (56). Although it would be a stretch to argue a direct connection between these broader challenges to Enlightenment thought and the creators of casta series, it seems clear that similar ideas pitting the rationality of the Enlightenment against older notions of human society grounded in scholasticism circulated in New Spain, especially among the artists, professionals, and intellectuals who made up the cultural elite. Although the Bourbon Spanish monarchy strongly resisted the importation of Enlightened political thought to its American colonies, considering it dangerous to the divine right of kings, it enthusiastically adopted ideals of rational order and administrative control to reenergize its profits from the colonies. At the same time, Creole elites in New Spain and throughout the colonies developed a taste for French revolutionary thought and, in scattered moments of rebellion throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, made Enlightened trouble for the monarchy (Uribe-Uran 430). Creole elites thus developed an ambiguous relationship with the Enlightened ideals that circulated so widely and in so many forms during the eighteenth century. On the one hand, colonial New Spain had become famous for the lavishness of its lifestyle, and Creoles took pride in being on the cutting edge of trends in both fashion and intellectual endeavor (Katzew Casta 67). Indignant at the flawed depictions of the colony published by European travelers, Creole intellectuals produced scientific and historical treatises designed to rebut images of New Spain as backwards and instead to advance descriptions of its rich cultural and natural history (Lafuente; Pratt). Especially later in the eighteenth century, these intellectuals used the language of Enlightenment science, particularly the
20 This broader context for casta painting and the contested place of the Enlightenment suggests, for example, that Giambattista Vico, familiar to rhetoricians as a lone voice advocating the study of rhetoric in the face of Cartesianisms distrust for emotional persuasion, was not truly alone in his concern.

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importance of observation, to challenge the ability of transient visitors to produce scientifically sound assessments of American climate, flora, and society (Ca~izares-Esguerra 90). n On the other hand, Creoles chafed under Enlightenment-inspired controls designed to maintain Spanish authority in the colony, and Creole uptake of Enlightened science was shaped by local norms and traditions (Lafuente 156). The Bourbon reforms made a series of potentially infuriating interventions in colonial life. These reforms reduced the political and economic power of the Creole elite through increasingly hierarchical oversight of colonial affairs, administrative systems designed to direct more income to the crown, and renewed efforts to classify colonial subjects based on race and class (Carrera Imagining Identity 110). These new regulations applied rigid standards of behavior and status to colonial subjects, attempting to rule them by scientific reason and prevent identification and cooperation across caste boundaries. In this context, although Creoles gained their social status from caste distinctions, they were inclined to resent the dominance of Spain and dislike the intervention of the metropole. Spanish-born Peninsulars received preferential treatment from the crown and key political positions were unavailable to Creoles. Whatever the seduction of rational science in their creation of increasingly patriotic treatises, Creoles would likely have found that the Enlightenment lost some of its luster when they were subjected to the regulations it inspired. In addition, being on the other side of Enlightened science must have made Creoles aware of the slippage inherent in attempts at scientific control of a human population. Even if they placed some hope in classification as a means to stabilize their own social standing, they must have done so with a simultaneous recognition that such controls were more a strategic mask than an accurate observation of the way things were. As Creoles knew well, caste position was rather fluid in New Spain. Lighter-skinned castas regularly sought to move themselves, legally or illicitly, into more favored groups, Some affluent people designated as castas in official birth records even received the legal gracias al sacar that changed affluent light-skinned castas into pure-blooded Creoles. In general, caste status in the colony was built more on access to socioeconomic markers of calidad (quality) than on the specificities of inheritance or biological race (Carrera Imagining Identity). Creoles would be particularly familiar with these realities of miscegenation in the colony. They knew the slipperiness of categories and the uncertainty of phenotype. Thus, even the topos of the scientific that is readable within casta painting cannot be seen as a direct application of Enlightenment intellectual culture to the practice of painting. As in the anonymous Torna-atras, the scientific commonplace is often ambivalent and that ambivalence suggests that the social force of scientific rationality was at best inconsistent. Viqueira Albn implies as much a when he notes that many who took up the language of Enlightened rationality did so with little understanding of the scientific ideas behind it (36). This ambivalence

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in Creole life, especially taken in light of broader European and American conflict over the terms of Enlightenment, implies that the scientific approach to social structure was not an uncontested common sense, even if the language and imagery of that science had become so integrated into colonial society as to imbue it with significant social energy. There was enough slippage in the meaning of the scientific topos to make casta painting functionally multivocal. Engaging casta painting and Enlightenment science at least in part as rhetorical devices, Creoles participated in a broader rhetorical culture that used the language of scientific rationality to advance arguments about authority and social status, but did so with a simultaneous awareness of the ruptures and inconsistencies within that discourse.

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A Return to Luis de Mena In the Luis de Mena casta painting that opened this article, the three storehouses of social energy that have guided my criticism are literally layered. At the top, the landscapes and illuminated image of the Virgin illustrate a sense of publicity highly infused with national distinction and with the influence of the Catholic Church. At the bottom, echoing natural history drawings and presenting a careful categorization of type, the still life makes visible the topos of scientific organization and control. Placed between these two and drawing on the energy of science and publicity they generate, the eight family scenes complete the layering of topoi and become the focus of their social energy. Although perhaps more explicitly presented in this panel than in most casta series, these three topoi and the diverse ways they are invoked in casta painting over the course of the century interrupt any attempt to read casta painting as simply invocations of colonial power. While they are certainly artifacts that served the interests of the colonial elite, they carry the conflicts and contradictions that characterized those interests. As such, they remind us that every era is fraught with contradictions clearly discernable in its rhetorical practices. In this case, the multivocal arguments forwarded implicitly and explicitly in casta painting resonate with other contemporary arguments to reveal both the real social energy of Enlightenment topoi and the forces that troubled and ruptured the hegemony of Enlightened rationality.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Debra Hawhee, Ralph Cintrn, Cory Holding, Oscar Vazquez, o Anna Henning, three anonymous reviewers, and the editor for their comments on the many drafts of this article. The Museo de America in Madrid and the Banco Nacional de Mexico generously approved my use of the images reproduced in this article.

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