Casta paintings and the Virgin of Guadalupe: a link

Luis de Mena, casta painting, c. 1750. Museo de América, Madrid. Click on image to enlarge. Image found here.

(A couple of earlier posts on casta painting are here. A long post on the meaning of the Virgin of Guadalupe in connection with the New World as a miscegenated space is here.)

As part of my research for the book project, the other day I revisited this post's accompanying image, and some further reading--especially in reading the historical record supporting the authenticity of the story and, more directly, here--I was reminded, in a different way this time, of the contested nature of just about everything regarding the story of the Virgin's appearance to Juan Diego, from the very earliest days of that story (she appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in 1531). Some (much?) of that argument, we find between the lines, was driven by rivalries among bishops and their respective orders (which I first speculated on here). Thus, it makes sense that we also have overt written and visual assertions of Juan Diego's worthiness as a way of asserting the truth of the Virgin's appearance to him on the hill of Tepeyac; hence, in the frieze over the east entrance of the old basilica dedicated to the Virgin, Juan Diego's accompanying hat and staff, which mark him iconographically not only as a shepherd but also as someone making a pilgrimage to a shrine, and the beaver in the foreground (a symbol of chastity in medieval bestiaries).

Anyway, that and the fact of the Virgin's appearance as a mestiza to an indigenous person--that is, she appears, in effect, as always already of mixed ethnicity--made me wonder about linkages, whether direct or thematic, between depictions of the Virgin and the genre of casta painting that arose in Mexico and, to a lesser extent, in Peru during the colonial era. Those paintings are not merely secular in content, they are quite literally domestic: often their settings are the interiors of houses, or they show a family out for a promenade; some standardized depictions of castes show physical violence occurring between the spouses, their child attempting to intervene. So, off to Wichita State University's library I went yesterday, and in one of the books I looked at I ran across the Luis de Mena painting you see at the top of this post. As it turns out, this same image also appears in Ilona Katzew's excellent book on the subject; I own this book, but I didn't remember seeing it in there and so didn't bother to look again before last night. (Man: the things I tell you people.)

In a way, it's my forgetting this image that really prompts this post.

Casta paintings that also include images of the Virgin apparently are not very common: this is the only such example in Katzew's book, and I know I've not seen any others like this. At one level, that near-absence of juxtapositions is to be expected: The Virgin is, of course, the embodiment of chastity, while the most direct message of the casta paintings is, ahem, the consequences of the procreative act; moreover, though interracial marriages were officially permitted in Mexico, some, as I discussed in this post, were more approved-of than others were with regard to the social standing of the children of that marriage--more approved-of because of the matter of their racial purity. These were clearly not sacred but secular matters, as regarded the rules governing the painting guilds and their permitted subjects; to directly link the Virgin to such paintings would cross not only legal bounds but also those of propriety. I can be forgiven for not having remembered Mena's painting, then: it's something of an anomaly within this genre.

Katzew herself doesn't spend too much time on Mena's painting, either. She briefly discusses it within the context of a book by Juan Manuel de San Vicente, a book published in 1768 whose purpose was to extol New Spain's virtues and whose language Katzew describes as an example of "creole discourses of pride" (193)--even though San Vicente was a Spaniard. This book

ends majestically with a discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, of whom he quotes the famous verse from Psalm 147 (20): "Non fecit taliter omni nationi" (He has not done the like for any other nation), pointing to the honor that God bestowed on Mexico by having the Virgin appear in that country. The Virgin of Guadalupe also features prominently in Mena's casta painting along with the fruits of the land, the city's famous retreats [shown in the upper-right corner], and the Virgin's sanctuary [in the upper-left corner], allowing us to see how the work might have been interpreted by contemporary audiences. (194)

Katzew, as is typical of her book, doesn't go into those interpretations. But, especially when compared to other casta paintings, it becomes pretty clear that Mena wants to insist on a more benign interpretation of these different castas by placing their depiction within a context in which Mexico's other virtues are submitted for our admiration. The castas occupy the middle two registers of the painting; they are framed, below, by a depiction of native fruits and vegetables (it is no accident that the costumes of the figures in the casta paintings are in the same colors as the produce--as if to suggest that these many-hued people are likewise the fruit of the same Mexican soil) and, above, by the Virgin, her basilica and Ixtacalco, a popular place to visit on the southeast of the capital known for its canals. The painting's overall message is that of exuberant variety that is clearly and distinctly Mexican, a variety, moreover, presided over approvingly by the Virgin herself.

But as soon as I saw Mena's painting, I was immediately reminded of the painting below, which I saw for the first time when the Mrs. and I went on our Mexico City trip back in the fall of 2008:

Anon., Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de México, Patrona de la Nueva España. 18th cen. Museo de la Basilica de Guadalupe, Mexico City. Image found here.

(Apologies, by the way, for the poor quality of the image. For details I describe below, I'm working from a picture in a small booklet I bought at the museum.)

The Museum caters to a niche audience, obviously, but if you've read this far and ever find yourself in Mexico City with a few extra hours to spare at the basilica, it's well worth the 30 pesos admission fee to visit. Fortunately for the Mrs. and me, it wasn't too crowded the day we went because when I saw this painting, I couldn't help but stare and stare at it.

In remembering this painting, it suddenly occurred to me that it bears some compositional similarities to the standard casta painting: we have a male and female of different races (here, the female figure on the left symbolizes Europe; the male figure, dressed in indigenous garb, represents the Americas. (The male figure, by the way, is speaking the same verse from Psalm 140 that Katzew reports San Vicente as quoting regarding the Virgin's appearance.) But other images in the painting seem to argue for the Virgin's distinctive Mexican-ness. Directly below the angel who is directly under the Virgin's feet (the angel, by the way, is part of her traditional depiction--it's on the framed cloth with the miraculous image that hangs over the altar in the new basilica), we see two small scenes depicting, on the left, the Virgin's final appearance to Juan Diego and, on the right, Juan Diego showing the bishop his ayate with the Virgin's image on it. But those two scenes rest on the outspread wings of an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus, which itself is emerging from a body of water: the Aztecs' sign from the gods to build their city on that place and, now, the emblem in the center of the Mexican flag.

Clearly, this painting functions as more than an image honoring the Virgin or as one depicting particular scenes from the story of her appearances to Juan Diego. It contains, in the allegorical figures of Europe and the Americas, themselves explicitly female and male, "parents" for the Virgin--whose respective races would account for the Virgin's mestiza appearance, were this a typical casta painting. Moreover, her placement over the eagle on the cactus seems both to locate her in a very specific place and to explicitly associate her appearance with that earlier tradition (pagan though it was) of miraculous signs to the people in the Valle de Anahuac.

But no matter the truth of the Virgin's origins, no religious syncretism is at work here: The Conquest was by now two centuries past for both Mena and the anonymous painter of the painting I have been discussing. San Vicente, whom I quoted above, introduced his work on Mexico by celebrating the Aztec emperors who preceded Cortés' arrival, "because it is one of the circumstances that truly makes this city great, for having as its children (although heathen) eleven so great and illustrious emperors." Katzew goes on to comment, "In other words, Mexico's precolonial past is deployed to legitimize the uniqueness of the country and to set the stage for the remainder of his description [of the country]" (194). The latter half of 18th century was a time among Mexicans of growing pride of place and of culture, and the Virgin was most definitely included in that pride, so much so that in 1746 she would be declared the patroness of New Spain by the archbishop. What is at work in this painting is an allegorizing of the Virgin's cultural parentage, and that her parentage is a miscegenated one. To see a painting of the Virgin from this time borrowing the basic form of the casta paintings is certainly startling from the point of view of religion and of veneration, but from that of culture, specifically Mexican culture, it makes perfect sense. But even more importantly, the Church's official embracing of the Virgin as New Spain's patroness implicitly validated the mixed-race populations who venerated her.

In a later post, I want to address at greater length something I said in this post--in particular, this:

Whatever happened in December of 1531 and the weeks and months following–whether miracle or fraud or some now-irrecoverable combination of the two–the Church lost control over the meaning of the Virgin and the resulting manner of her veneration in the instant that she appeared to an Indian as a mestiza. Which, of course, is tantamount to saying that it thus never had control over her. Such is her power in Mexico and throughout Hispanic America: that everyone knows this; all the Church can do is acknowledge it and appear to grant it official sanction as it is able via such means as papal visits and the move to canonize Juan Diego.

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"Who painted it?"

[Edited for clarity so that no one would understand me to be saying that all of the image has been painted on the cloth]

Oops.

In fairness: no one denies that some of the things seen on the relic in the basilica have been painted. But instances such as this lead me to reflect on two things: 1) that one person's "common knowledge" is not necessarily another's; and/but 2) one's religion or lack thereof aside, the centrality of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Mexican history and culture--and, by extension, hispanic American history and culture--is such that the briefing book of any diplomat visiting Mexico should contain at least a cursory mention of her. Especially if a visit to the basilica is on said diplomat's itinerary. There's also 3) that, surely, my nation's diplomats are not the only ones who occasionally blunder in such ways

Ah, well. It's also useful (if embarrassing) to be reminded that diplomatic faux pas will occur no matter whose administration is in power.

EDIT: Speaking of weird moments in diplomacy . . . Miss Universe blogs about her visit to Guantánamo. On second thought, "surreal" may be more appropriate than "weird." (Hat-tip: Talking Points Memo)

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"The Virgin of Guadalupe, and 'The New World' as Oxymoron"

Anonymous, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Patrona de la Nueva España. 18th century. Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe, Mexico City. Image found here.

Some of my official work while in Mexico City is beginning to bear a little preliminary fruit. Over at Domestic Issue, I've just posted something on the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe--specifically, its centrality to Mexican and, by extension, Hispanic identity, that was inspired by this--a painting we encountered completely by accident--and a couple of other paintings you'll see at that post. It's long and wonky, and it's less-than-smooth in places, but it's headed in a direction I feel good about.

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Pictures from Mexico City: First batch

As promised, here are some initial pictures of places we went, courtesy of the Mrs. She's played around with the color on some of these, you'll note; also, some of these are dark because, about half the time we were there, the day was exceedingly overcast and, at times, drizzly.

Click the images to enlarge them.

Monument to the Revolution of 1910. This Art Deco structure is a block away from the hotel where we stayed. It has a hulking rather than triumphant feel to it, but that's just me. Anyway, it is a rather odd coincidence that Mexico's war for independence from Spain and its proto-Socialist revolution occurred 100 years apart from each other; thus, in 2010 it will be celebrating both a bicentennial and a centennial. This structure and its grounds take up a city block but because it is near but not on a major street, its space lends itself well to large-ish gatherings of people; just in the five days we were there, it was the location for three such gatherings: a rally for breast cancer awareness, a gathering of striking teachers, and a government-sponsored function of some sort that was being set up during our last night there.

Atrium, National Palace. The National Palace, located on the Zócalo (the city's enormous main plaza), houses Mexico's legislative bodies and so is the equivalent of our U.S. Capitol. This structure has an exceedingly complex history, but it suffices to say by way of summary that some sort of structure housing a ruler or ruling body has stood on its site since at least the time of Montezuma, if not before--in fact, much of its building material was originally part of Montezuma's own palace. This atrium is noteworthy because, along two of its second-story sides are some extraordinary murals depicting Mexican history painted by Diego Rivera (some panels are here (you'll need to scroll down a bit to find them)). Beyond this atrium is another atrium which contains a botanical garden with examples of plants from throughout Mexico--from the deserts to the tropics. The Mrs. took some pictures of some of its extraordinary cacti; I hope they turned out.

Two more pictures below the fold.

Carlota's View. This view is from the balcony of the Castillo de Chapultepec, looking to the northeast, up the Paseo de la Reforma. Despite the gloomy light, the air was exceedingly clear that day: it was possible to see, about three miles distant, the corner of the Alameda that Reforma grazes before continuing on. This is a big deal; on a couple of past trips there, the smog was so bad that it was hard to see the Monument to Independence, a gleaming golden angel atop a 200-ft.-high column on Reforma just a mile away from Chapultepec.

In a city full of spots that in their essence serve as microcosms of the nation's history in miniature, Chapultepec is one of the most prominent ones. During the Aztecs' rule, they built an aqueduct to bring spring water from the hill to Tenochtitlan (though built on an island in a lake, the water was shallow and brackish). After Mexico's war for independence, a military academy was built on its summit; it was this structure that U.S. Marines sought to capture ("From the halls of Montezuma . . . ") in the final, decisive battle in the U.S.-Mexican War--and it was on that occasion that this place became a national shrine honoring the sacrifice of the Niños Héroes (whom I've mentioned recently). The six columns in the foreground comprise a monument to them, at the base of which is a tomb containing their remains. As a teaser to a future post: René told us something very intriguing about their story which I hadn't known before. For us in the U.S., the Castillo is perhaps best known as the residence of Maximilian and his wife Carlota during their rather quixotic 2-year reign as king and queen of Mexico. The story is that Carlota had Reforma constructed so that she could watch her husband return from the National Palace each afternoon (hence the title of this picture: Carlota's bedroom opens on to the balcony where the Mrs. stood to take this picture). Maximilian's odd, naïve arrogance is well-known: Mexico was its usual mid-19th-century basket-case of warring factions, thanks to the ubiquitous, insufferable Santa Anna, but in no way wanted a king; Napoleon III, though, believed it not only wanted but needed one, and Maximilian was foolish enough to believe it. Carlota, though, did her best to educate herself on the history and popular culture of Mexico--to her credit and, I learned on this trip, the annoyance of the society women she sought this information from. The story is that she went mad. At any rate, after their execution in 1867, the Castillo later became the official residence of Mexico's presidents until 1939, when Lázaro Cárdenas, unquestionably Mexico's most-revered President, declared it a National Museum of History.

Tlatelolco. This site is officially known as the Plaza de las Tres Culturas ("Plaza of the Three Cultures"), and this picture reveals why: in the foreground you see the remains of the pyramids and other structures that comprised Tlatelolco, which served as the Aztecs' central market prior to the Spaniards' arrival; in the middle ground are, from the left, the sanctuary and convent of Santiago Tlatelolco, built in the years immediately after the defeat of the Aztecs; and in the background (and surrounding the entire site) are government buildings and housing projects representative of the third culture, the Mexican. Considerably less-officially (though our guide that day is my source for this--as many times as I'd visited this place, I'd not head it before), this place is also known as the Plaza de los Tres Desastres ("Plaza of the Three Disasters"): It was here that the final battle for control of Tenocbtitlan was fought in 1521; on this same site occurred in 1968 the Tlatelolco Massacre, an event that still resonates in the Mexican psyche by a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the way the Kennedy assassination used to for us in this country; and in the massive earthquake of 1985, several large buildings in the area were destroyed, killing many of their occupants. I'll be honest: even knowing all this as I do, I can't imagine what visiting this place must be like for a Mexican given to prolonged thinking about his/her nation and its history. I'll have more to say about that as well in the above-mentioned future post.

In many more ways than the obvious, Mexico City is far away from, say, Cozumel.

More pictures and commentary to come.

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A look at a painting

Anon., El hallazgo de la Virgen de los Remedios ("The Finding of the Virgin of Remedies"). 18th century. Pinacoteca de la Profesa, Mexico City. Image found here.

In the course of Googling about for sabbatical-related material yesterday, I ran across this fascinating painting. What initially struck me was the kneeling figure in the foreground, who looks as though he could have been painted by El Greco, in combination with that marvelous maguey plant that looks like one of Mexico's other great 20th-century muralists--say, Siquieros or Orozco--had painted it. Also, I was struck by the woodenness of the Virgen in comparison to the strong sense that the maguey is actually waving about (something magueys can't and don't do, by the way). So, the painting held--and still holds--my attention at a purely aesthetic level. Given my research interests, its combination of au courant Spanish art sensibilities with a sensibility that, whatever else it is, is certainly not Spanish, certainly makes it a painting worth seeking out for my upcoming trip to Mexico City in October.

This being a painting on a religious subject, though, this painting is performing work at another level--one, by the way, that initially I was completely ignorant of. So, I did a bit more research into the story of the Virgen de los Remedios, and what I have so far found out makes this painting even more intriguing.

The picture you see here is of the sanctuary dedicated to the Virgen, located in Cholula, which is near Puebla (Image found here; my source for most of what follows is from this document (pdf, in Spanish)). The promontory it sits on is actually a pyramid, said to be the largest in the Americas. When Cortés passed through Cholula on his way to Tenochtitlan (the location of present-day Mexico City) in 1519, he placed a succession of crosses on the summit of the pyramid, but they kept being destroyed by lightning. After the defeat of the Aztecs in 1521, monks of the Franciscan order built a church there, which was replaced by this one that was finished in 1666. Almost all that structure was destroyed in an earthquake in 1864, the church was rebuilt shortly after.

As to the Virgin herself, she is a statue of the Virgin Mary that, according to legend, accompanied Cortés on his two expeditions to Tenochtitlan; on the infamous Noche Triste (Night of Sorrows), in which the Aztecs drove out and very nearly destroyed Cortés' army on June 30, 1520, some of the men who survived attributed this to their intercessions to the Virgin. So, then, the Virgen de los Remedios quickly became the saint of choice for soldiers preparing to enter battle. One way to think of the placement of the sanctuary at Cholula is as a symbol not only of the Church over paganism but of Spain over the Aztec: the 16th-century cultural equivalent of standing over your opponent as he lies defeated on the ground.

Why does all this matter? Well, whatever you may think of their motives for doing so, Spain was very much in earnest that as many Indians as possible be converted to Christianity; but to ask Indians to venerate the saint to whom some attributed their defeat created what we would say today was "bad optics." But the concern here was not just for the Indians' sensibilities. As a monk of the time named Flores put it, "The desire to turn the image of Our Lady of the Remedies into a symbol of the conquistador's power is something muttered about disapprovingly, for some are of the opinion that this will spoil 'the Mexican fruit,' born of the Spaniard and the native. On their behalf [A lo autóctono], they would like to remove everything Spanish from Our Lady--not so much for the Indians' sake as for the work of the Church [lo cristiano]." It's fascinating to learn that, even so early in the colonial era, there was concern that mestizos might perceive themselves as defeat incarnate--a theme that still resonates in Mexican culture--and that at least some in the Church were proactive in doing what they could to prevent that from happening.

Knowing that the image--not the statue, but the meaning--of the Virgen de los Remedios was contested and, in the end, softened so as to deemphasize her associations with the Conquest make this painting all the more interesting. As noted above, the Virgen was brought here by Cortés's men and not "found," as the title of the painting states. I've not found a story describing her being found, but the painting, it seems, depicts the core scene from that story. In any event, such a story would aid in softening her image: the strong suggestion would be that she is not foreign but is of this land. Moreover, such a story would echo that of the Virgen de Guadalupe, who appeared to a recently-converted Indian on the Cerro de Tepayac in what is now north-central Mexico City in 1531, and the painting bears some similarities to the image of Guadalupe.

One could argue--and it has been, I assure you--that such gestures by monks, as well as the Church's general openness to syncretism, were self-serving: the Spanish church and state were in their essence one and the same, that conversion to the one also required the new convert to submit to the Crown as well. But as Serge Gruzinski argues in his compelling book, The Mestizo Mind, to read the early decades of the colonial era in only that way is too simplistic. In those early decades, everyone was in survival mode, and out of that dynamic emerged, piecemeal and contingent upon local circumstance, a people and culture that had not existed before:

Latin America's mestizo phenomenon must . . . be viewed simultaneously as an effort to recompose a crumbling universe and a tendency to make local adjustments to the new frameworks imposed by the conquerors. The two trends cannot be dissociated. Neither is independent of the profoundly perturbed environment described above. (63)

Innocuous though it appears to be, this painting and the narrative it depicts are examples of what Gruzinski describes here.

More to come. In the meantime, if you've read this far you may be interested in this post over at Domestic Issue.

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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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In search of La Malinche

From top: 1) La Malinche Between Cortés and the Indians, 1519; 2) José Clemente Orozco, Cortés and Malinche, 1926; 3) Antonio Ruíz, El sueño de la Malinche (The Dream of Malinche), 1939. All images are from Domestic Issue.

It's difficult to think of a more unifying image in Mexican culture than that of the Virgen de Guadalupe. It's difficult to think of a more contentious one than that of Cortés' translator and mistress and bearer of his son, La Malinche (also known as Doña Marina, Malintzin and, in Laura Esquivel's 2006 novel Malinche, Malinalli--I'll explain the reason for that in a bit). The three accompanying images here bear out the Mexicans' cultural schizophrenia regarding how to think of this person who is so central to their history: each of these images, to the exclusion of neither of the other ones, is fundamentally correct in its depiction of La Malinche. Esquivel (whose best-known novel in this country is Like Water for Chocolate), sums up well the prevailing image and the alternate one that she and other Mexican writers (mostly female, I gather) are working on articulating, in this excerpt from an interview in the magazine Críticas:

In the collective subconscious, Malinche plays the role of the mother and Cortés the father, and if we think that she was a traitor and a whore and that he was a thief and an assassin, what does that make us? I think that it is important to change our perception of the Conquest. We must stop seeing ourselves as “victims” of the Spanish. The process of the conquest was painful, yes, but it was also the basis of a wonderful cross breeding. It was the encounter of two worlds, of two belief systems. The Aztec Empire gave up to an idea, not to a group of soldiers. Their reverence of the Spanish and the way they gave up their empire are proofs of how certain they were that the Spanish were returning gods coming from eternity to reclaim their land and people. The Aztecs must have felt a lot of guilt and fear of punishment for having betrayed the spiritual heritage of the Toltecs, and these feelings influenced the outcome of the Conquest. Similarly, the idea we have about our past affects our self-esteem. How can we ever be good if our parents were so evil? This is the type of thinking that we must change. It is important to revise history, to see it with different eyes and, hopefully, discover that the blood in our veins is the blood of all bloods; that our skin contains all colors; that our eyes contain all glances; that in Mexico, for the first time, the history of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America came together. If we saw things this way, wouldn’t we feel proud of our past?

For many reasons, I'd prefer not to wade too deeply into this passage, the reasons being implicit in the passage itself: no matter how she is read, La Malinche ends up being understood as a synecdoche of the Mexican people. To begin to talk about the historical figure is, inevitably, to begin either to psychoanalyze a people and their culture or to project onto them through her. As with so much else I have found myself telling other people when talking about Mexico, we in the United States have no comparable figure.

I'll have more to say in a future post over at Domestic Issue on La Malinche as a historical and cultural figure--I have more reading and thinking to do before that post will be ready. I'm writing this post now because I'm approaching the end of Esquivel's novel, finding it aesthetically disappointing, and comparing it to the (to my eye) fascinating, very different depictions of La Malinche in the images you see here, and wondering what went wrong with her novel.

Almost every review of Malinche I've looked at today begins by saying something along the lines of, Anyone who attempts not only to novelize Malinche's life but to offer a re-imagining of her as an on the whole sympathetic figure is risking a great deal. That part is exactly right, as evidenced by Esquivel's words above. To the extent that I, as someone who deeply respects Mexican culture, have any say in this that ultimately matters, I'm more than sympathetic to Esquivel's intent. If anyone needs persuading of the potential healthiness of this, have a look sometime at "The Sons of La Malinche," the chapter of The Labyrinth of Solitude in which Octavio Paz discusses how La Malinche is something of an anti-cult among Mexicans, having led to a devaluing of the Mother in favor not of the Father but of the macho, the dominant-male. It's this depressing and unfortunately correct take on Mexican culture that Esquivel's novel is writing against. Her quarrel is not with Paz; both make clear in their respective way that the traditional cultural thinking about La Malinche is an ugly and even destructive self-victimizing.

All this material is also, you'd think, the ideal sort of raw stuff for a novelist intent on reassessing his/her culture: the unquestioned symbolic Mother of Mexico. So, then, what went wrong with Esquivel's novel? The bibliography that accompanies it is one indication that she has done her homework; one thing she recently uncovered is that some early sources give her protagonist the name "Malinalli," a Nahuatl word for a kind of grass. Something I learned from Esquivel's novel for which I'm grateful is that Malinche, the Nahuatl word for "chief" or "boss," was actually how the Aztecs addressed Cortés; Malinalli, because she served as his translator, was seen as something like Cortés's proxy: hence La Malinche. But maybe the research is indirectly to blame. According to Jay Parini's New York Times Book Review of Malinche, Esquivel's novelistic imagination is bound by the research she's conducted rather than informed by it. (Also, like me, Parini suspects a clunky translation.) But I personally find her choice of a 3rd-person omniscient narrator, along with the fact that many crucial events are narrated in retrospect, to be the problem. Too often, the sense I have of Esquivel's Malinalli is precisely that: it's her Malinalli we're reading and not the woman revealing herself through her thought and action. (I know, I know. But this novel isn't some sort of meta-fiction in which there's interaction between the author and her protagonists.) We almost never see her actually wrestling with her confusion, whether it be over why she was sold into slavery as a child or why she finds Cortés simultaneously so repellent and so attractive. When we do, it's at a remove: we're told about it and not shown. Moreover, Esquivel's narrator also lets us into Cortés's mind; personally, I'd have preferred that he remain as much a mystery to us as he does to Malinalli--especially given the novel's goal of revealing her in a new way to the reader. Nor do we see much beyond the platitude that words can heal or wound on Malinalli's vital role as Corté's translator. That may be because Esquivel, intent on depicting Malinalli as something like a bridge between Spanish and indigenous culture, wants as much as possible to avoid reminding her reader of just how instrumental her translating was to aiding Cortés's defeat of the Aztecs.

In short: for such a risky undertaking, Esquivel's Malinche is a very timid book. That could be, though, precisely because she knew it to be a risk. Anxious not to offend, her novel ends up not satisfying this reader, at least.

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