Día de la Raza

From top: Charles Cordier, Cristóbal Colón, installed 1877, Mexico City (image found here); Jan Van der Straet, Vespucci Meets America, c. 1609 (Image found here; José Clemente Orozco, Cortés and Malinche, 1926 (Image found here); commemorative marker at Tlatelolco (also called the Plaza de las Tres Culturas), Mexico City. The text reads: "On the 13th of August of 1521/heroically defended by Cuauhtemoc/Tlatelolco fell into the possession of Hernán Cortés/It was neither triumph nor defeat/It was the painful birth of the mestizo people/which is the Mexico of today."

Today, Columbus Day, is known in Mexico and throughout much of Latin America as Día de la Raza ("Day of the People"). As in the United States, this day is a legal holiday in Mexico; however, Mexico observes all holidays on their actual dates, so tomorrow will be a work day there, as it will not be for many people here.

We in this country, for better and for worse, are good at forgetting; Mexicans, for better and for worse, are good at remembering. I'm pretty sure I've told this before in the past, but it so perfectly, to my mind, encapsulates the quality of the long Mexican memory that it bears repeating: When I mentioned to a Mexican acquaintance that in all of Mexico there was no monument to Santa Anna, he said, "Texas is a monument to Santa Anna." There is something of that quality of the still-felt direct connection to the past implicit in the contrasting names for this day in this country and Mexico. To call this day "Columbus Day," to be sure, commemorates the man and this day in 1492; but, unless we're given to reflection we're not likely to feel much direct connection between that day and us, in much the same way that not many people seem to remember exactly what Memorial Day memorializes (ironic, given those words' common theme of memory). The Latin American name for this day, though, implicitly puts the particular fact of Columbus' arrival aside in favor of a succinct statement of what that arrival, indirectly, hath wrought: the emergence of a new people.

In part because I presently have Mexico on the brain (we fly to Mexico City on Wednesday) and in part because of some recent reading I've done in connection with my sabbatical work, this day has more than the usual resonance for me. I also think, though, that a little attention to how this day is commemorated can give us some insight into why this hemisphere is, culturally-speaking, such a weird place, as embodied in its twin (but, I'd argue, distinct) names for itself, "the Americas" and "the New World."

More on this later.

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Unknowing the world

Some comments inspired by chapter one of Mignolo's The Idea of Latin America, first mentioned here.

UPDATE: Now, a bit more readable (I hope).

A "T-in-O" map from a 1472 edition of the Etymologies of St. Isidore (7th cen., Seville), oriented to East. The "O" is the "mare oceanum" (more familiar to us as the phrase "Ocean Sea," which, recall, Columbus would be designated as Admiral of. The crossbar of the "T" is formed by the Don, the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Nile. Older versions of this map would have located Jerusalem in the center of the map. The "T"'s vertical is the Mediterranean. Underneath "Asia," "Africa" and "Europe" are written, respectively, "Shem," "Ham" and "Japeth," the sons of Noah, consigned to those spaces by Augustine in his City of God. Image found here.

A map created by Muslim geographer Al-Idrisi from the 12th century. The map is oriented to South; Mecca is at its center. What we now call Africa dominates the upper half; "Europe" is in the lower-right; "Asia" is in the lower left. Image found here.

Maps are fascinating texts. We have become so accustomed to accepting their renderings of the earth's surface as truthful, if not Truth, that we forget that their makers determine their "narratives," which is to say, everything from their form (such as the various projection methods for depicting the planet's curved surface on a 2-dimensional surface) to their contents. When looking at maps, who among us has not felt some surprise at one time or another by what has been included in or excluded from one and wondered why that information is or is not there? Map-making is far from a value-neutral activity, therefore--or, as these ancient maps indicate, a culture-neutral one. The fact that modern maps are far more accurate in their renderings of the outlines of landmasses does not mean they have become any less value- or culture-neutral. That we here in the West rarely wonder about our maps' objectivity means only one thing: The West's way of framing the world, of thinking about it conceptually (which is what a map represents), won out over all those other culturally-specific ways.

Or, to put it another way:

"But don't African people know they live in Africa, and Asian people in Asia?"

Well--now they do."

More below the fold.

Mignolo's task is that of swimming against 1500 years or so of culture to get his reader to see the cultural construct beneath our accustomed way of picturing the world. The T-in-O map above is his starting point. According to Mignolo, thinking about the world's landmasses in terms of continents was peculiar to Europeans; other peoples thought in terms of regions distinct from each other, both topographically and culturally. Moreover, Europeans saw the world much more overtly through the lens of the Bible--in the case of the T-in-O map, through the story of Noah's three sons and where each went to live. Shem's line settled in Asia; Jesus, a descendant of Shem, was born there (or, as Augustine puts it in City of God, was first revealed there). Japheth ("enlargement") and his descendants lived in what came to be called Europe--as Augustine notes, the home of Christ's church. Ham, though, "was included neither in the first fruits of Israel nor in the full harvest of the Gentiles. He could only stand for the hot breed of heretics" (Augustine, in Mignolo 28).

It is no blasphemy, nor is it politically-correct, to say that to read the world and its peoples through such a reductive lens as this was, to put it very charitably, problematic. Most of us would agree with that statement. It was because of this frame, after all, that for most of the 16th century there were actual debates regarding just how human were the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere were: they didn't fit this paradigm--Noah had three sons, yet these are clearly a fourth people. Mignolo's larger point, despite his at times hectoring tone, thus becomes clear: it is to recognize that thinking of the history of the past 500 years--in particular, re his book, the history of the Americas--not only has determined how the West thinks of that history but also how we in the Americas think of it: as having originated in/emanated from Europe. That is a legitimate narrative, to be sure, but it's not the only one or, for that matter, the one that most truly relates the Americas' full history, the one that begins prior to and is its own history--not a negation or rebuttal of European history's version of American history. That we now recognize the absurdity, not to say the offensiveness, of those debates regarding the Indians' humanity is a sign that that paradigm is no longer so in force; but what are 100 years in comparison to the 1400 before then?

By contrast, the Islamic map is quite literally Islamo-centric--its center is Mecca, after all, no more strange a thing to do for a Muslim mapmaker than for a Christian mapmaker to center his map on Jerusalem. But the Islamic has no names for the continents it depicts, much less some implicit categorizing of the peoples therein--even though Noah and his sons appear in the Qu'ran as well.

So, which map is truer? If your impulse is to say that it no longer matters, Mignolo would say that that is precisely his point in this chapter: that once upon a time, competing maps, competing ways of describing the world, did exist, and the fact that the Western depiction of space won out has not been necessarily all to the good. Except for Westerners, of course. The modern world's eventual acquiescence to that depiction is not like acknowledging that the earth orbits the sun; it's a genuflecting before the West's economic and cultural power.

So, on the one hand, we have become so accustomed to thinking of the history of this hemisphere in Eurocentric terms that it becomes hard for us to conceive of that history in some other manner. On the other, those familiar grand historical narratives--even the ones indigenous to a place--can also obscure other, just-as-valuable narratives. That second point reminded me of Edward P. Jones' masterful first novel, The Known World, which I posted about here. Though set in the antebellum world of northern Virginia, a place and a time we think we know, we realize fairly quickly that the story Jones is going to tell us--one based on fact--is one that we may never have heard before: in part, it's the story of a black man whose parents had worked to buy his freedom and who then buys slaves to work his land and who sees nothing wrong with doing that. What is the frame of that world, after all, but the preeminence of the Peculiar Institution? Everything, from law to social relations, exists to affirm and maintain that frame. So where, then, is the inconsistency if a newly-freed slave chooses to participate in the affirming and maintaining of that frame? The power of Jones's novel is in not telling us but showing us slavery's warping of human relationships in a way that the old, familiar, no-less-true narratives can never quite do on their own.

In a similar way, Mignolo has to make his reader see the Eurocentricity of the history of the Americas before he can begin to show what alternate histories of this part of the world would look like. The familiar has to be made to look strange before we can see and come to accept the familiarity of the strange.

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A reading of a casta painting

EDIT: Now cross-posted, with some brief additional commentary, at Domestic Issue, as well as a brief note at the end of this post.

Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Yale, 2004). Amazon link here. Image found here.

This post from March on the genre of casta painting continues to draw a fair amount of traffic to this blog, so as a follow-up to that post I thought I would post some brief comments on Katzew's book and offer up not so much a reading of a painting as a kind of wading-into of the various social codes casta paintings participated in.

Here are some things I hadn't know before reading this book that seem to me of significance: First of all, casta paintings are apparently exclusively a Spanish colonial--more precisely Mexican--genre (though Katzew notes the existence of one known casta painting set from Peru). This was surprising to me because the French Caribbean colonies likewise had worked out elaborate nomenclatures for various racial combinations--though theirs involved black-white combinations, and the New Spain system carried within it an implicit didactic element for its audience, about which more later. The other thing I didn't know was the extent of these paintings' popularity: Katzew notes that there are 100 known complete sets of these paintings (a set usually consists of 16 paintings; some depict up to 19 racial combinations) and any number of paintings belonging to now-incomplete sets. The other sign of their popularity is that, similar to but stricter than the guild system for painters in Dutch and Flemish culture, the Spanish crown regulated the licensing of artist workshops and who could paint what subjects in the colonies. Specifically, the Crown determined through examination who could paint religious and royal subjects and how to paint them, but no such regulations governed casta paintings; Katzew politely suggests that this lack of regulation accounts for these paintings' "wide range of quality" (9).

If you have more than passing (no pun, about which more later) interest in this subject, look for this book. Katzew's book is exemplary art history, with the emphasis here on the "history" part. But though there is lots of history, it serves to provide much-needed context for what would otherwise be rather enigmatic paintings. But neither does it skimp on images: there are 265 of them, most of them in color, not counting large closeups of some of the paintings. Moreover, many of the paintings included here are held privately and published here for the first time, thus adding to the book's value.

Reading Katzew's book reassured me that for the most part I hadn't just been talking through my hat in that earlier post regarding these paintings' ambiguities for their audiences. Because her book is a work of art history, as opposed to criticism, she does not in the end argue for a definitive way to think about them. Rather, by so firmly establishing their cultural and social and legal contexts, Katzew makes clear that a far safer way for us to think about these paintings is that how they were understood in the 18th century depended on a whole complex of issues. They are part American exotica for primarily Spanish consumption, part visual codification of class and racial codes (and, thus, reassurance for Spaniards that everything is under control) . . . and yet, something about the very necessity to create a casta system in the first place would lead to its eventual (partial) deconstruction in the form of the wars for independence in the first quarter of the 19th century. The title of Katzew's conclusion pretty much sums it up: "A genre with many meanings." It's outside the scope of her book to do so, but I would push that conclusion harder: Given that these series of paintings are intended to be part dictionary of racial types, part social code, and part visual cabinet of curiosities, I tend to think that their audiences, if they thought about the correspondences between the paintings and the realities of New Spain, could not escape the uneasy feeling that a social order founded on racial difference would eventually become untenable--especially given that part of these paintings' very point (and whether this point was intended or not is difficult to determine) is that those differences were becoming ever harder to discern in real life. These paintings end up implicitly depicting their own inadequacy to depict the very thing they're intended to depict--another version of something I was trying to get at in this post with regard to American literature.

Imagine if the King of Ambiguity in American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had instead been a painter in 18th-century colonial Mexico. I think you'd have a pretty good sense of the complexities casta paintings presented for their immediate audiences--and, for that matter, for us.

An example of what I mean is below the fold.

Attributed to Juan Rodríguez Juárez. "De mulatto y mestiza, produce mulatto es torna atrás" (Mulatto and Mestiza Produce a Mulatto Return-Backwards), c. 1715 (image found here).

This is a very typical casta painting: the parents and child shown in a relaxed setting and enjoying each other's company. Based on their dress, they appear to be well off. One thing the viewer cannot see, though, is that this painting is not meant to stand alone. It is one of a series of 16 paintings, each of which depicts a father and mother of different racial designations and their resulting offspring. Earlier paintings in the series would show the racial combinations that would produce a mulatto/a and a mestizo/a (Spaniard-Negro and Spaniard-Indian, respectively); knowing this means we can place this painting approximately in the middle of the series--which also serves as an implicit social ranking for this couple as well.

The didactic portion of this painting, as with all casta paintings, is in the child's racial designation. Katzew notes that while "pure" Spaniards occupied the undisputed pinnacle of the colonies' social hierarchies, Spanish-Indian intermarriage was tolerated because indigenous peoples were likewise regarded as a "pure" race. Moreover, mestizos/as who themselves "married up," ethnically speaking, would in three generations produce offspring regarded as "Spanish." The offspring of Spanish-African intermarriage, however, had no such corresponding promises if they also married up: People of African descent were regarded as a degenerate people for biblical reasons; thus, no one with African blood in his/her family's past, no matter how remote, could be regarded as white. The mestiza mother, had she married a Spaniard, would have produced a castizo/a, who then, had s/he married a Spaniard, would produce offspring considered by law to be Spaniards. Those combinations, by the way, would have been depicted in preceding paintings in the series. Instead, this mother has married a mulatto; their son's designation as a "Return-Backwards" refers to the fact that for his offspring there is no hope of their whitening, whether or not they marry up in the hierarchy. The official message of this painting, then, could not be clearer--if, that is, one is interested in achieving the eventual racial redemption of one's progeny. I should quickly add here that miscegenation in the abstract was officially regarded by Spaniards as a sign of moral degeneracy; casta paintings from the second half of the 18th century would seek to combat this attitude by depicting such things as lighter-skinned mothers breast-feeding their children (it was thought at the time that having infants nourished by wet-nurses (who tended to be Indians or blacks) contributed to that moral degeneracy) and depicting all but the very lowest of the racial castes as prosperous or engaged in honest labor. At this point in the history of the genre, I think one could make a case for an implicit politics present in these paintings: By the latter half of the 18th century, New Spain was demographically a criollo (Creole) society, and many of these paintings make an implicit case that the most prosperous of the Spanish colonies was not suffering as a result. On the contrary: almost all its subjects, no matter their caste, were contributing to that prosperity.

But even as this painting implicitly dramatizes what is officially seen to be (in this case) a mother's unfortunate choice in a husband, Katzew's book also is at pains to discuss markers of social class other than race in New Spain, one of which is on display in this painting: clothes. One's ethnicity consigned one to a certain status in the colony, and certain jobs, especially those having to do with the administering of the colony's affairs, were reserved for Spaniards. However, there were apparently no restrictions on business ownership; thus, some mulattoes and others of lower racial castes became quite wealthy and dressed the part. You can see where this is headed: At least some lighter-skinned members of lower castes who had the means would pass as wealthy castizos so as to secure status and plum positions either for themselves or for their children. Katzew makes note of the fact that the viceroys passed laws forbidding the ostentatious display of wealth via the wearing of expensive fabrics and placing limits on the number of pieces of jewelry one could wear in public. The official reason given had to do with the fact that such displays ran contrary to the more preferred public image of humility; surely, though, the codified rigidity of the casta system could not change the obvious fact that, as intermarriage over time blurred and further blurred obvious physical distinctions among whites, blacks and Indians, one could no longer be certain of others' castes just by looking at them. The regulations placed on clothes, then, were intended to create more surety along these lines. This painting, though, and many other casta paintings' subjects, make pretty clear what Katzew's text confirms: that people ignored the regulations, which weren't stringently enforced anyway.

A fair question arises: Did Rodríguez Juárez intend for his casta paintings to raise all this? The short answer is, Who knows? And it's that response, which I'm not at all dismissive of, that Katzew is at pains to make clear in her book by staying away from definitive readings of these paintings' ultimate intentions. Though casta paintings were a popular genre, they weren't the sort of things that were painted "just because." Often, they were commissioned by a patron as souvenirs of his time in New Spain or to be given as gifts to friends or associates. Moreover, over time a certain standardization arose within this genre: within these series certain scenes became associated with certain caste groupings as painters took their cues from their peers. So, all those factors--the market-driven nature of the genre; the patron's purpose(s) in commissioning a set; the beginnings of standardization--also make it harder to know what, if anything, the artist might have wanted to say about his subject via his work. It's nevertheless true, though, that these paintings participate in Spanish and colonial debates on race and class and serve to reveal the complexities and subtleties of that debate.

UPDATE: In case you're wondering . . . These paintings interest me because there continues to be simply no equivalent mainstream sustained discourse of miscegenation, either visual or textual, from the U.S. during the corresponding period in our history--or, indeed, well into our own times. To be sure, there were plenty of texts that treated this subject in various soap opera-like or sensationalized ways, but--with the exception of some works by African-American writers--no dispassionate treatments such as those which these paintings seem to present to the viewer. There are various reasons why this is so, but the contrast is striking nonetheless.

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Where do nations come from?: Some comments on Imagined Communities

Image found here.

Note: More sabbatical-project reading.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. Ed. London: Verso, 2006.

It's difficult to overstate the importance of this book to people interested in the question posed in the title of this post--not to mention the questions that arise from the answers to that question. Anderson's book is seminal because, while prior to it there had been any number of historical studies of the emergence of specific nations, no book had addressed what cultural work first had to occur before something like a nation, in our sense of that word, could appear. Anderson's book's position in this discussion, then, is analogous to that of Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel for students of the English novel or, in my own field of American literature, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: agree or disagree with it, you have to be familiar with it.

Anderson's first important move is to discuss nationalism not as an ideology but "as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion', rather than with 'liberalism' or 'fascism'" (5). (As one can see, such a move has the effect of rendering the term more neutral in its charge--in the post-war wake of National Socialism's defeat, "nationalism" had become an extraordinarily pejorative term. To be sure, the example of Nazism reveals the potential for horror within nationalism; but, as Anderson's analogous examples of kinship and religion indicate, there is much that is positive contained within a people's sense of itself as a nation.) He then offers this simple definition: "[I]t is an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (6). They are imagined because, within them, no one can possibly know all its other members--yet, despite that, one feels a political (in its broadest sense) link to those other members. They are limited because, no matter how expansive a nation is or wants to be, it always recognizes the existence of other nations beyond its boundaries. And finally, they are sovereign in that the people have some small say in their own governance (6-7).

Before I get into the wonkier stuff, I'd urge you who are the least bit curious about any of this but who don't want to pony up $20 or so for the book to go to the library and read the chapters "Cultural Roots" and "The Origins of National Consciousness." Here, Anderson identifies and discusses those cultural trends that to his mind had to be in place before nationalism could emerge as a political force. All these will be familiar to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with late-medieval to Renaissance history and culture; what's striking (for me, anyway) is how Anderson can make one see these trends in a new, compelling light as they--the trends--are revealed to also be performing a latent political work that wouldn't fully manifest itself for another 200 years. The crucial trend Anderson identifies is the gradually-waning power of the Church's ability to define the realities of this world on its own terms. Out of that trend emerged the others: the waning of Latin as educated/empowered/priestly Europe's privileged language and its gradual supplanting by vernaculars ("The determinative fact about Latin--aside from its sacrality--was that it was a language of bilinguals. Relatively few were born to speak it and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it" [38]); the fading of the notion of the dynasty as the sole legitimate form of governance; and, finally and most fascinating, a movement from what Anderson, referring to Walter Benjamin, calls "Messianic time--a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present" (in other words, the traditionally-Christian way of conceiving how God perceives time) to (in reference to Benjamin again) a sense of time as being "'homogeneous [and] empty,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar" (24). Anderson then notes that "homogeneous, empty time" is also precisely that of the novel-as-genre. I should also note here (though Anderson doesn't) that Mikhail Bakhtin (he of the idea of the chronotope that I mentioned in the previous post) notes precisely these two different senses of time as marking the chief difference between epic and novel.

The chapter "The Origins of National Consciousness," meanwhile, concentrates on the invention of movable type as simultaneously making possible the rapid production of texts and, more crucially, through its products' privileging of vernaculars, gradually turning educated Europeans from a collective who could understand each other via Latin no matter where they lived into linguistically-segregated groupings of monoglots who, now, began to feel connections with other speakers of their vernacular in ways that Latin had not done. From here, it's easy to see how a notion of nation-ness would gradually emerged: first (Anderson nowhere mentions this, but it seems inescapable to conclude otherwise) its prefigurement in the Protestant Reformation--many of the events of which were driven as much by (local) politics as by theology--and the Counterreformation; then in terms of politics.

Anderson's other important move--and the one that begins to explain why I'm reading and writing about this book--is that he locates the origins of nationalism not in Europe, as had been assumed by his predecessors, but in the Americas: specifically, not just in the American Revolution but also in the nearly-simultaneously-occurring wars for independence from Spain and France around the turn of the 18th-19th centuries that very self-consciously modelled themselves politically on the American example. Just as happened in American literature, in Latin America there appeared an explosion of literary works that in various ways attempted to articulate what it meant to be a [name of your new nation here]--and recall Anderson's noting the coincidence of the emergence of the novel-as-genre as accompanying the emergence of modern nationalisms. Using these observations their starting points, a whole slew of books, led by the example of Doris Sommer's Foundational Fictions: The National Romance of Latin America, examine the novels and other literature that emerged in the decades following these revolutions--many of which have as their protagonists men and women of different ethnicities who fall in love with each other--and posit that the work these novels perform is not (or not entirely) "artistic" in intent. Instead, their goal is, as Sommer's book's title states, to help these new states define themselves as inhabited by new peoples. It's no mistake, after all, that the authors of these works were more often than not also bureaucrats in these new governments. Put in Andersonian terms, they are purposefully intended to help these new communities imagine themselves, with the state dictating the terms of the imagining.

Well, yes. Sort of. I think.

Not just wonkiness but vaguely-formulated wonkiness follows.

I've read and thought a fair amount about how the Powers That Be in what are now what we call Latin America tried, on the one hand, to pretend that there was no essential difference between these colonies and themselves and yet, as I posted on here, produced an enormous variety of visual and textual rhetorics whose intents were to try to account precisely for the differences they found themselves immersed in. In these matters, the state's acountings always lagged far behind realities as racial comminglings became ever more complex in the Latin American colonies. To my mind, the byzantine casta-painting charts of the Mexicans and racial charts from the French colonies are, in the end, less testimonies to the desire to catalogue than Sisyphean exercises in futility. I didn't quite say in my post on Reading Columbus that one way of thinking about the mixture of rhetorics in the Columbian texts might be that they are an example of a recurring feature of the literature of the Americas: the seeking out of a language that will make sense of something for which a vocabulary barely exists, if at all. These various pictorial and textual catalogues of racial combinations are other examples of that same seeking out.

Sure: I can certainly see that the state has a vested interest in controlling how it gets defined; what I have more trouble buying, though, is that after 300 years of latent and, at times, not-so-latent anxiety about these new racial combinations and their implications on down the road, the state--even this new one--would suddenly be comfortable with presenting a vision of its people's future as a mixed-race one. The region's fascination, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th, with applying the principles of eugenics to shape such things political institutions and educational systems suggests a continuing ambivalence about all this. Never mind that it was precisely not that vision but the actuality of a mixed-race present that gave at least partial form to these particular imagined communities. And therein lies my point of disagreement with Sommer's basic argument. I think.

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