Mexico City’s Alameda as a Racialized Space in New Spanish Painting

In the foreground of a Mexican casta painting (c. 1770) an albina woman pleads to God for the fate of her family. Her child by a Spanish husband is a torna atrás, the boy’s dark skin revealing her hidden African ancestry. The woman fears the loss of the family’s social standing due to her “tainted” blood. Her only recourse is to lean on faith, as her husband relies on reason, peering through a telescope at the Alameda park below. In the prior century English Dominican friar Thomas Gage walked that same park and wrote of the Black and mixed-race women dressed in fine clothing who accompanied their Spanish masters on their strolls through the Alameda. Gage described these women using the local expression, “fl[ies] in milk,” which called attention to their obvious difference. The very surface appearance of their skin visually marked them as “other,” as property, and as something to be feared.

This paper examines paintings picturing Black citizens within the Alameda, an elite park in Mexico City. These images, serving an elite criollo audience, reveal a preoccupation with making blackness visible, and a dis-ease at the possibility of its invisibility. These images underpin the ways in which criollos sought to encode their racial purity, or limpieza de sangre, in contrast with the marked visibility of Black bodies. They also offer insight into the occupations and material culture associated with people of African descent within the built environment of the Viceregal capital.