Race, Gender, and the Visual Vernacular of Colonial Latin America

In the past decade or so, scholars have shown increased attention to casta painting, the genre of portraiture from colonial Mexico that is characterized by depictions of successive generations of race-mixture (see, for example, Magali Carrera 2003, Ilona Katzew 2004, and Susan Deans-Smith 2005). In so doing, they have signaled the profound importance of visual culture as a tool for communicating ideas about race and status in the region. This paper builds on that work while also shifting the focus away from colonial Mexico to include other parts of Latin America. In particular, I analyze two sets of images, both from the eighteenth-century: a series of Peruvian casta paintings and a collection of similarly-styled images produced in Ecuador. The images offer unique and compelling insights into the relationship between race and gender in the visual vernacular of colonial Latin America. To begin, Spanish women (defined here as both Iberian-born peninsulares and American-born criollos) are completely absent from the Peruvian casta paintings. Instead, the primary vectors of race-mixing are Spanish men and African and Indigenous women (suggesting that Spanish women would be spared the exposure to non-Spanish men). In the case of the Ecuadorian images, Spanish women appear as central figures, almost to the complete exclusion of Spanish men. And they appear alongside African and Indigenous women in ways that insist upon Spanish women’s socio-economic superiority. When taken together, the images push us to consider the kinds of ideals of Spanish womanhood and masculinity that circulated throughout Latin America and beyond its boundaries in the eighteenth century. Through analyzing the images on their own and in relation to one another, as well as the conditions of their creation, this paper also considers the potential of visual and material culture to facilitate comparative historical analyses.