1In 1696, the president of the Real Audencia court in Guadalajara, Nueva Galicia, answered an urgent request for information that had recently been sent to him by the king of Spain. The request concerned a 1688 case involving a witness described as being “morisco de nacion.” When the court judgment papers reached the Council of the Indies in Madrid, the officers’ harsh reaction revealed the level of their incomprehension: how could such a man—meaning a Christian of Muslim origin, according to the Castilian sense of the term—have succeeded in gaining passage to the Indies? How could he have violated all the legal measures enacted by the Crown, which specifically sought to protect the Indies from the heretical beliefs that such individuals were thought to incarnate? The King’s request specified that once the man’s whereabouts and the circumstances of his arrival had been established, no effort should be spared in immediately banishing him. Clearly embarrassed, the judges in Guadalajara replied that there had been a regrettable misunderstanding: in the Kingdom of New Galicia, they explained, the term morisco “commonly, inappropriately, and improperly” referred to children of “Spanish fathers and white-mulatta mothers.” [1]

2The mistake is interesting on more than one account. Not only does it reveal the way in which local dialects evolved independently in Guadalajara and Madrid, but, through a kind of metaphoric compression, it provides a glimpse into the extremely complex structure of the Hispanic Empire. Such anecdotes make it possible to understand the mutual interactions that, throughout the monarchy, shaped and continually altered the various forms of administrative culture, agricultural and nutritional practices, [2] and imaginaries [3] as well as the substance of philosophical and scientific debates within savant networks. [4] At the same time, each of these spheres crystallized in their own way according to the context so that the local and the imperial were always intrinsically interwoven.

3This article aims to take both ends of this dynamic into account. My approach will be based on the study of the emergence—and rapid proliferation—of an iconographical genre particular to eighteenth-century New Spain, namely the famous casta paintings (pintura de castas)—in English, paintings of mixed-blood peoples—that appeared in a specific area, Mexico’s southern plateau region, during the first third of the eighteenth century. A distinct feature of this tremendous mass of images is its great unity. Despite innumerable variations, such paintings inevitably represent a man and a woman of constrasting physical types accompanied by their child. Beneath these figures appear legends or scrolls on which are inscribed the official designations given to each of the depicted phenotypes. [5]

Casta and “Race”

4Since the early 1980s, [6] interest in the casta paintings has grown steadily. [7] The impressively researched and even erudite studies devoted to the subject have usually focused on the question of patronage and the possible audience for these iconographical statements. The most striking feature of these studies, however, has been the tendency to translate “caste,” defined as the eighteenth-century perception of phenotypical differences between human beings, by the notion of “race.” [8] Such a racial interpretive framework, however, immediately begs another question: how did the colonial world potentially influence the emergence of the notion of race? As soon as the racial question is evoked the crucial role played by the Hispanic world (and occasionally the Iberian world as well) usually arises. This approach is primarily based on two different (sometimes interconnected) themes. The first, grounded in the European experience, contends that “race” is an invention of the Hispanic Renaissance, [9] while the other, embedded in the colonial world, views race and racism as intimately related notions and the inherent product of the Hispanic colonial milieu itself. [10] Whatever the approach, the Iberian (and here Hispanic) experience appear as one piece of a vast puzzle that would seem to form, according to a genealogical reasoning applied to history, the founding moment of the racial question. [11]

5Understood in this way, the question of race and the context in which it first appeared raises both methodological and epistemological issues. Indeed, wherever it originated, it must be recognized that, by the end of the eighteenth century, race had become a valid category, particularly in the fields of natural and political science, for a geographical area broadly encompassing the whole western hemisphere. [12] The very range of this phenomenon suggests that the notion circulated and that there were local variations, which are another way of addressing the issue of what scale is to be considered in historical research as well as the relevancy of the political or cultural entities that researchers define as their “fields” of study.

6In this sense, the notion of “caste” along with its evolution and avatars in different contexts provide an excellent means of empirically broaching this range of theoretical preoccupations. Analyzing the context in which this notion first emerged, the geographical zones or scientific disciplines in which it found practical application, and the very meaning of this category makes it possible to reconsider the role it may have played in crystallizing the notion of race, which entered the vocabulary of naturalists and politicians precisely when the new Hispano-American republics banished the term “caste” from the public sphere and political vocabulary.

Painting the Unprecedented: The Peculiarities of Eighteenth-Century New Spain

7In 1711, almost twenty years after the episode of the “morisco de nacion,” the viceroy Fernando de Alencastre, Duke of Linares, commissioned Juan Rodríguez Juárez, one of the most famous painters in New Spain at the time, [13] to produce a series of fourteen casta paintings. His goal was to show the King of Spain the diversity of physical types that existed in New Spain and also explain the picturesque vocabulary to which they had given rise. [14] The series established what would become the canonical form of this genre of painting.

8In addition to the artists famous for their work in this genre (including José de Ibarra, Luis Berrueco, Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz, Miguel Cabrera, José de Alcíbar, José Joaquín Magón, Andrés de Islas, and Ignacio de Castro), many anonymous reproductions also circulated. Despite varying in quality, each employed similar pictorial and textual conventions. This internal dialogue—which might have ultimately led to the pictorial vocabulary’s autonomy from the surrounding social context—suggests that, in order to understand how this type of representation came into being, one must first look at the most frequently imitated models, particularly the series painted by the genre’s founder, as periods of great iconographic and conceptual ferment.

9The novohispanos painters of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries belonged to a specific milieu situated, in many respects, at the crossroads of several different social groups. Rodríguez Juárez is a typical example: he was proud of being born into a “Spanish Creole” family. He also descended from a long line of painters—in other words, a milieu in which the phenotypical categories evoked by such contemporaries as Carlos de Sigüenza may have resonated or at least helped to conceal situations of social conflict. [15] The painters’ guild, for instance, included among its ranks a large number of masters and apprentices who were explicitly part of the castes, [16] even though the majority of its members usually referred to themselves as “Spanish.” However, it is important to point out that the term “Spanish” referred to a quality, itself defined by an entire group of variables, of which the phenotype was only one element; though this element was certainly crucial at times, it was far from being the single determining factor. In fact, important matters of prestige lay behind what might otherwise appear to be a simple assessment of a person’s physical appearance. Hence, declaring oneself Spanish was a way of affirming one’s integrity, one’s honra: the acceptance of this status by a third party represented social recognition. Despite this inherent ambivalence, contemporaries readily expressed notions of hierarchy and rank—especially during periods of intense social tension, such as the food riots of 1692 [17]—in terms of skin color. [18] Even before the first casta painting had been produced, Jean de Montségur, a French Basque traveler who visited Mexico City in the early eighteenth century, reported in 1708 that his informants had drafted a hierarchical classification of the city’s inhabitants, which included “more than fifteen races” (fourteen castes in addition to the Spanish population)—exactly the same number with which the Spanish viceroy provided Rodríguez Juárez in 1715. Thus, while the governor’s commission appears to convey his intention to collect the “wonders of the Indies,” it also resulted from the interaction between an order received from Madrid [19] and the viceroy’s personal criteria, which were initially informed by the explanations of native inhabitants—either Creole or otherwise—who had convinced him that the phenotypical diversity of the population of New Spain should be classified as one of those “remarkable things” to be collected. In the discussions that preceded the creation of the first series, Rodríguez Juárez himself played a crucial role, co-producing the commission he was assigned. This complex exchange between different parties probably accounts for the fact that the interpretation of casta paintings inevitably refers to composite representations, a palimpsest resulting from the fusion of different discourses within images and texts.

From “Clasificación Colorida” to the Alchemy of Lineages

10Apart from their visual content, the series of casta paintings inaugurated by Rodríguez Juárez in 1715 presents a specialized vocabulary inscribed in the paintings themselves, one that, while laconic, is of major significance. Indeed, the fact that this genre of painting later evolved into one with an increasingly rich proliferation of contextual or narrative elements while increasingly moving away from realistic representation—even the very beautiful paintings of Miguel Cabrera are far from being examples of portraiture—has the effect of conferring greater importance on the textual elements. The emerging nomenclature, which is quite vast (between sixteen and twenty “mixtures” are identified in the different series), is rarely identical from one artist to another. [20]

11These variations are not without interest. First, one notices an ever greater accretion of terms with the succession of different series of paintings between 1715 and the end of the century. Thus, while only one of the categories illustrated by Rodríguez Juárez disappeared (grifo), at least thirteen new ones appeared afterward. [21] This terminological inflation was accompanied by several shifts in meaning that suggest a tendency toward a progressive rigidification of the nomenclature proposed by Rodríguez Juárez. A sizeable conceptual difference separates the legend he conceived for paintings such as De mulato y mestiza produce mulato, es torna atras from the one used in an anonymous series ten years later, De mulato y mestiza, Tornatras. Rodríguez Juárez’s caption only makes sense when situated on an “ascensional” scale from the darkest to the lightest; any “backward” movement implied a regression to the preceding type in a chromatic variation on the game of snakes and ladders. The vignette in the anonymous painting transforms this process into a category or term that is meant to correspond to a specific phenotype. Tornatras thus becomes the name for yet another casta rather than referring to a setback in a progressive scheme. This tendency toward reification seems to be confirmed in most of the subsequent series of paintings. Finally, in addition to the appearance of new terms and various shifts in meaning, it should be noted that the vocabulary presented in Rodriguez Juárez’s casta paintings, with the exception of the most common categories, is distinguished by its tremendous polysemy—if not by its very approximative character—with the same terms referring to different “mixtures” according to each series. [22]

12Analysis of these terms also reveals some of the analogies at work in the process of devising new names. Indeed, while the adjectives mulato, mestizo, and later albarazado probably derive from an animal lexicon, [23] the term torna atrás relates to ideas of improvement and degeneration of stock that are commonly associated with the cross-breeding of animals, though also widely used for crops. To these terms might be added two others that, while not employed by Rodriguez Juárez, were attributed to certain “generations” in later series: saltra atrás (synonymous with torna atrás) and tente en el ayre, which, though technically an adjective describing children who have neither “advanced” nor “regressed” in relation to their parents’ rank, underwent in the casta paintings a process of reification similar to the case of torna atrás described above. [24] Several terms (such as albino, cambujo, chamizo, morisco, and negro, among others) refer to shades in a chromatic spectrum and were used to qualify an individual’s skin color. [25] Finally, the terms castizo and “quadroon,” which, exemplifying the guiding logic behind the choice of these terms, emphasize the idea of lineage. Thus, while the word castizo refers to “good stock” of clear—and even pure—origin, [26] the adjective “quadroon” refers directly to genealogical quarters. [27]

13As with the term morisco—a Christian of Muslim origin for some, a dark-skinned person of mixed ancestry for others—, the vocabulary of the castes combined the nobiliary imaginary of blood and the entire repertoire of botanical cross-pollination techniques—introducing notions of variety, improvement, and degeneration of stock—with theological considerations and phenotypical observations. It embodied a rationale that drew on scholastic philosophy and the aristocratic culture of western Europe, in addition to practices within the slave trade and the experience of contemporary encounters with Asia and Africa. Indeed, both the geographical location of the Mexican plateau and the terminology of the casta paintings very clearly indicate a close relationship between the world of slavery and the phenotypical nomenclature of these paintings. The connection is first of all human, made clear by the early existence of large numbers of African slaves in the high plains of Mexico. [28] Since the European Middle Ages, in fact, people sold into slavery were distinguished in the slave markets not by their country of origin but by their physical appearance, primarily by the color of their skin. [29] A whole series of chromatic terms thus served to designate individuals and regularly figured in the notarial archives of Spain, Portugal, and Italy: negro, blanco, olivastro, loro (the color of laurel leaves), color de membrillo cocido, and cocho (the color of baked quince) were among the most frequently employed. The case in 1519 involving Catalina, a slave “de color loro” belonging to Doña Catalina de las Casas, or that of Melchor in 1579, a man “de color de membrillo cocido,” are but two examples of a recurrent practice. [30] The expansion of the slave trade only increased the number of such terms. As early as 1627, Alonso de Sandoval, a Jesuit missionary to slaves deported to Cartagena de Indias, resorted to a variety of adjectives to describe the people he evangelized. Speaking of the Fulani of Equatorial Africa (Fulos), Sandoval mentioned “black fulos, fulos who tend toward mulatto or are entirely mulatto, pardos, zambos, brown-colored fulos, loro, chestnut—and dark-skinned fulos, for in this nation one sees all this variety of colors and many others as well, and the same is true for all the black nations.” [31] In this sense, it is interesting to note that in the population records the most overtly color-coded descriptors were first and foremost applied to slaves, as can be observed, for example, in a 1743 slave register from the Santa Clara hacienda in Tampico, in the Gulf of Mexico, in which the slaves’ first names were recorded along with remarks such as mulato prieto (dark-skinned mulatto), mulato blanco, negro atezado (very dark black), mulato aindiado (with Indian features) or achinada (tending toward chino), according to each case. [32]

14Furthermore, descriptions of physical appearance, and especially skin color, frequently appeared in documents designed to regulate travel, such as permits for transatlantic crossing (licencias) and soldiers’ enrollment lists. [33] Could one surmise that, after evolving in the slave trade, such racial designations later passed into general use before being adopted by the very persons they were meant to qualify and finally becoming the names by which all, regardless of one’s conditions, were identified?

15Appearance, however, was not the only criterion by which people were classified and divided. The goal of stating the characteristics of human beings was also accomplished by appealing to genealogy. Here the object was not to describe but to assign qualities to individuals by employing a vocabulary derived from European ideologies of aristocratic lineage and nobility of blood. Roberto Bizzochi and Arlette Jouanna have studied the emergence and subsequent rise of this rhetoric since the end of the fourteenth century for early modern Italy and sixteenth- and seventeenth century France, respectively. [34] According to this logic, lineage, expressed by quarters and genealogical degrees, determined an individual’s quality. Clear traces of this conception may be found in American neologisms such as cuarterón. It is important to note, however, that the Church also favored the notion of genealogical quarters: the Jesuit priest José Gumilla was correct in pointing out that, from the seventeenth century on, the Church required priests in the Americas to classify their flocks in this way, in order to determine the reach of those canonical exemptions—particularly those concerning marriage—enjoyed by Native American novices (Pope Innocent XII’s bull Animarum saluti issued in March 1690). In such cases, genealogical arguments were used to assign individuals to specific groups. [35]

16Both logics are present in the vocabulary of the casta paintings. In fact, genealogical criteria often merged, to the point of melding, with phenotypical judgments, a fusion best exemplified by Rodríguez Juárez’s casta paintings. According to contemporary usage, the genealogical content of these terms served merely to explain the observed differences in physical appearance: in other words, each referred primarily to a physical trait rather than to any kind of genealogy in the strict sense.

17As a case in point, Sigüenza’s description of the rioters of 1692 [36] was mostly interested in color, in the same way that documents such as those referring to Francisco Castellanos, the morisco of Guadalajara cited above tended to refer to individuals by their complexion. Indeed, the only explanation for his being classified as morisco when he appeared as a witness before the court was the color of his skin, which, although his father was a Spaniard and his mother, a mestiza, was exceptionally dark. As stated by another witness when interrogated by the judges of the audiencia:

18

He declared that he knew the said Francisco Castellanos… son of Nicolas Castellanos, a Spaniard, now deceased… and Beatriz Sanchez a mestiza, … and that in this kingdom the children of Spanish men with mestizo women… are called tres albos and not moriscos, since this name is given only to children of Spanish men and white-mulatto women, though given the color of the man in question [Francisco Castellanos] it is very easy to mistake him for a morisco. [37]

19Despite every effort to characterize the witness in genealogical terms, physical appearance ultimately overtook all other factors and alone explained why Castellanos was described as morisco. [38] Yet characterizations based on color, which are by nature highly subjective, were inevitably rooted in individual criteria, since all classifications are by definition relative to the positions occupied by the person performing them. [39] This element of subjectivity explains why the same person could often be described differently in contemporary documents, depending on the context. In this sense, the case of Ignacio de Avendaño, a resident of Oaxaca accused of polygamy in 1712, resembles that of Castellanos: when he was denounced, Avendaño was described as castizo by his first wife, as Spanish by the priest (and Avendaño himself?) at the time of his second wedding, and as mestizo by the witnesses present during the inquisitorial trial. [40]

20Therefore, one must resist the temptation to create a general taxonomy based on either Rodríguez Juárez’s paintings or the major terms used in later series. Such a classification would only obscure the particularities of each set of terms and the ways in which they were used. [41] Indeed, another striking quality of the specific synthesis between genealogical and physical discourses is the clearly vernacular nature of all these terms, as can be seen in the variety of names used in different regions of New Spain at the time. The expression tres albos, for example, which does not appear at all in the surviving casta paintings, seems to have been used only in Guadalajara. The same is true for the terms “quadroon,” ay te estas, and, originally, chino, which were specifically employed in the Puebla region. [42] Since each region had its own terminology, such expressions must have originated in local dialects, which only native speakers used or understood. This observation could be extended to Spanish America as a whole, for each territory had its own specific local characteristics regarding this issue. Yet, the examples of such regional diversity cited by Father Gumilla for the interior plains (llanos) of Tierra Firme (now Venezuela) in the mid-eighteenth century or those recounted by Francisco Berengher, which probably refer to a region of Upper Peru for a relatively late period in history, appear weak when compared to the profusion of dialects in Central America. [43]

Table 1

Nomenclature of the Castes in Eighteenth-Century Tierra Firme and Upper Peru [44]

José Gumilla Francisco Berengher I. De Européo é India Dos quartos de cada 1. White father and Mestizo sale Mestiza parte Indian olivastra mother II. De Européo y Quarta parte India 2. Mestizo and white White quadroon Mestiza sale Quarterona mother (six degrees of white and two olivastro) III. De Européo Octava parte de India 3. White quadroon Puchuelle or Puciuelle y Quarterona sale and white mother (seven degrees of white Ochanova and one olivastro) IV. De Européo y Enteramente bianca 4. Puciuelle and white Completely white Ochanova sale Puchuela mother Undefined Terceron Undefined Quinteron Mixed-race father Cholo and Indian mother Terceron father Uru and quadroon mother

Nomenclature of the Castes in Eighteenth-Century Tierra Firme and Upper Peru [44]

21Concerning the regions of Río de la Plata and Chili, the most common parochial and notarial vocabulary amounts to just a few terms, with few exceptions: Español, negro, Indio, mestizo, mulato, zambo, and pardo. [45] While it is possible that other terms existed in spoken language, these were rarely recorded in written documents, as opposed to the example of novohispano.

22The diverse use of this nomenclature thus drafts a cartography within which New Spain seems to occupy a unique position, owing to its particularly rich local casta vocabulary and its early use by well-read individuals. [46] Nonetheless, such terms only gradually gained favor in the written language of New Spain. The case in which Castellanos the “morisco” appeared as a witness only dates back to 1685—though the expression is probably much older—, and the “impure” nature of this term’s use in a judicial context is further emphasized by the adjectives “vulgar,” “inappropriate,” and “abusive,” which the magistrates used to explain it (and to exonerate themselves?). Furthermore, the Relaciones geográficas of 1743 reveals that, at the time, census officials in New Spain were already using expressions occurring mainly in spoken language much more systematically than officials in other parts of the Indies. While five of these terms were commonly employed (Spanish, castizo, Indian, mestizo, black, mulatto) and three less frequently (pardo, lobo, and sambaigo), one official, Pedro de la Vega, who was teniente general of Tochimilco (Puebla), went so far as to assign fourteen inhabitants under his jurisdiction to the categories saltra atras and tente en el ayre, which can only be explained by the visual and textual influence of the casta paintings. [47] Thirty years later, certain official censuses were broadly inspired by them and used a much more extended terminology. The population record for the archdiocese of Mexico City, dated July 26, 1779, thus distinguished twelve different “clases, estados y calidades” among its inhabitants. [48] In this way, the widespread use of caste terminology in everyday speech eventually led to its use in notarized agreements and legal documents. [49]

23Nonetheless, the creative vigor and lexical richness of the spoken language, always contrasted sharply with the Manichaean language found in normative texts. [50] This linguistic exuberance, perceived by many officials as an inextricable mass, was perhaps the expression of a will to individual affirmation on the part of the lower classes, who did not imagine themselves as an undifferentiated magma. [51] The terms used by Antonio de Ulloa to account for the castes of Cartagena in 1748, whom he described as being so numerous “that even they cannot tell each other apart,” [52] seem to express the dichotomy between the vision of a high-ranking official of the monarchy, quick to view them as an indistinguishable mob (“ellos”), and the internal diversity that only those who belonged to this group might possibly be in a position to perceive.

The Dream of Order

24The notions expressed in casta paintings might therefore be construed as a kind of response to Ulloa’s remark: they essentially seem like various attempts to organize the “disorder” of diverse local practices of classification into a supposedly coherent, hierarchical whole. This sophisticated rendering of everyday practices—which can even be recognized in the form of certain casta paintings, in which figures are placed in little cuadretes like objects in a cabinet of curiosities—bear witness to the creation of a specific type of colonial knowledge that crystallized around the idea of the casta. In Rodríguez Juárez’s paintings, this idea appears as a continuous gradation of shades between two poles, dark and light, representing the entire chromatic spectrum of the population of New Spain. This “progression” corresponds particularly well to its abstract representation in the form of a balance of fluids, namely blood, which was conceived as a vector of human qualities—and color. An individual’s quality was therefore determined, much like a cooking recipe, by the relative proportions of his or her constitutive parts, which explains the possibility of “regression.” Nearly sixty years later, one of the protagonists of the Peruano explained this phenomenon in the description of Lima (cited in note 38) by using the image of a glass of red wine gradually diluted by water: the liquid would thus become increasingly transparent and clear, as if the glass had never contained anything but water. [53] This image represented a kind of collective heritage that was widely known and understood by inhabitants of the Spanish Indies, regardless of their origins or social status and the particular form these representations assumed—simple or elaborate—in each region and social class.

25Despite this commonality, the socially differentiated content of the notion of caste should nonetheless be viewed as a fundamental part of the analysis. Both Magali Carrera and Ilona Katzew think that the casta paintings were created for a wealthy audience of Europeans and locals. The most currently used explanation is that, by explaining the hierarchical relations between the peoples of New Spain, they sought to re-establish order in a society that was quickly becoming more and more complex—or, according to Ulloa, chaotic. Though one can easily agree with this traditional interpretation, one should nonetheless be suspicious of any theory that proposes a single explanation in this field. Like all cultural objects, and as art historians have clearly shown, casta iconography was received in different ways, [54] and the meaning of its content was polysemous. Whose point of view then should one consider first, that of rich commissioners (such as the viceroy Alencastre or the bishop Francisco Antonio Lorenzana in 1771) or that of the painters, who generally came from a less privileged background (such as Rodriguéz Juárez and later José de Ibarra or Miguel Cabrera)?

26Especially for the Creole elite, the casta paintings can be interpreted as a series of visual and textual arguments used to fuel and support the various debates in which they were involved. Such was the case for the question concerning the status of colonial patricians, who affirmed their own nobility in the documents they produced. Since the sixteenth century, the elite of New Spain, like those of other American provinces under the Spanish monarchy, had expressed their social supremacy in the language of the European nobility: after all, were they not frequently composed of encomenderos and their descendants, a word they translated as señores de vasallos? This attitude explains the frequent references to “blood” and genealogy in the imaginary organization of the social body offered by the casta painters. The colonial specificity of this nobility, in both New Spain and Peru, nonetheless lay in its tendency to merge with a particular phenotype. [55] In the absence of social estates—the pechero (commoner) did not exist in the Indies [56]—the nación and the skin color associated with it had become the two main criteria of indicating “noble birth,” a fact that did not fail to scandalize the Castilian hidalgo de Ulloa on his visit to Peru in 1740. Indeed, he denounced this American custom as an aberration—un abuso—and his emotion is still palpable when, deeply shocked, he related how servants had been invited by high-ranking Creoles to sit alongside them at the same table merely because they were European Spaniards. [57] In this respect, Peru, Cartagena, and New Spain were very similar. [58]

27In addition to this aristocratic interpretation, the casta paintings might also be understood as radical assertions of the primacy of nación over patria, or lineage over land, an idea popular with Creoles of all sorts. The paintings, in other words, could be said to visually crystallize the idea that “quality” was linked to characteristics transmitted through filiation. Though such an idea is at the core of any aristocratic ideology of inborn superiority, the American context gives it an additional nuance: each “nation” embodies a group of physical and psychological characteristics (facciones, calidad, and genio were the terms used at the time) [59] transmitted from generation to generation with no relation to birthplace. In this sense, the casta paintings, with their illustrations of the alchemy of alcurnias, ultimately seem to defend the idea that the children of Spanish parents were Spanish, regardless of where they were born. [60] This is exactly what the American Creoles had been asserting since the sixteenth century against those who claimed that the New World had transformed the Creoles and made them ontologically different from their European ancestors. Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta in 1560, Juan López de Velasco in 1574, Fray Bernadino de Sahagún at the end of the 1570s, and Juan Manuel de la Puente in 1612, to cite only the most well-known authors, all speak of the degenerate quality of Spaniards born in the New World. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, this prejudice had become so anchored in the minds of European Spaniards that Father Benito Feijoo (who called this a “common error”) decided to devote the entire sixteenth discourse of his Teatro crítico universal to the defense of Spanish-Americans. [61]

28In New Spain, the Creole population refused to be considered anything other than Spanish. Some of its members, such as the novohispano prelate Andrés de Arce y Miranda in 1746, even went so far as to suggest that the term “Creole” be banished from the Castilian language, since it originally referred to American-born black slaves and was, in his view, not a worthy description of Spanish-Americans. Pointing out that the Nahuatl etymology of the word Gachupin—given to the people of Iberia—signified “a man who wears shoes” (as opposed to Indians), he went on to write: “If such be the case, then we are no less Gauchupines than they, as long as we do not enter in a discalced order.” [62] This insistence on the equal dignity of Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic was not unique to New Spain. It can be found as early as 1682, in texts such as that written by the Peruvian Creole Juan de Meléndez. Offended by the surprise with which his mastery of Spanish was met in Madrid, he replied with the scathing remark: “I did not realize that you were more Spanish than I!” [63] The casta paintings may then be considered a visual facet of these assertions.

29Finally, close study of Rodríguez Juárez’s series and the different terms used in later paintings, along with certain references in the written literature, allows one to perceive an extremely important detail, which is often overlooked or interpreted unequivocally [64]: the visual “demonstration” that the “mixture of different types of blood” can be “washed clean.” The term castizo implies this idea of a gradual “purging,” and, indeed, in certain series of paintings, the repeated introduction of new Spanish blood eventually returned the family line to its original Spanish quality. This assertion appears to be a kind of response to the contemptuous attitude toward Creoles displayed by certain “peninsular” Spaniards, who were as equally imbued with the idea of “noble descent” as those living in the colonies. While the Creoles of New Spain complained that the Europeans referred to them as champurros (“adulterated”), [65] the description of the Peruvian Creoles by Ulloa was quite similar. [66] This sort of redemption by the successive introduction of Spanish blood is extremely important, since it places the Creole response to “Iberian” mockery in the context of an aristocratic economy of blood, whereby “quality” was determined not only by the proportion of “Spanish blood” but also its nobility, capable of purifying the blood introduced into the family line.

30The need to defend this idea was that much more crucial since it had been refuted by some. Indeed, as early as 1746, Arce y Miranda expressed fears about Rodríguez Juárez’s and Luis Berrueco’s paintings, suggesting that “we need to be very cautious that the prejudice [according to which] we are [all] mixed has not influenced the total disregard Europeans display for the works of our greatest writers.” [67] His fears were not unfounded: nearly thirty years later, Pedro Alonso O’Crouley, a Spanish-Irish merchant who traded with Jalapa, spoke unhesitatingly about the indelible nature of “black” blood, which he held was impossible to “purge” even over the course of generations. [68] This last question—though of primarily local concern, since it referred to dilemmas relating specifically to the Creoles of New Spain, whose genealogies often had Native-American or African branches—nevertheless forms part of a much larger debate.

Phenotypical Nomenclatures as Inter-Imperial Language

31Besides influencing the internal development of the genre itself, the strong interdependence between image and text that characterizes the pintura de castas [69] makes it necessary to place the genre and its content within existing textual and iconographical traditions that already had a long history on an intercontinental scale well before the first series of paintings appeared in New Spain. Indeed, since the first third of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese in India and Brazil had been using such terms as mestiço, mameluco, and mulato, notions that they explained and illustrated. By the middle of the seventeenth century, there was already a considerable number of texts (both printed and handwritten) dealing with these colonial issues. [70] From then on, the question of “colonial mixtures,” particularly those of Spanish America, occupied an increasingly central place in such treatises to the extent that Thomas Gage even included such a preoccupation in the title of one of his works in 1648. [71]

32By the eighteenth century, the chapter on the diversity of human skin colors—often accompanied by illustrations—had become an obligatory element of any travel narrative or description of the New World. Thus, in his 1708 description of Mexico City, Father Taillandier considered the color of its inhabitants one of the crucial elements of his account, adding that the “mingling” of these “nations” had “created men of so many different colors from white to black that among a hundred faces, hardly any two are exactly alike.” [72] From this point on, every description of the Iberian colonies, regardless of its author’s origin, obsessively dwelled on such demonstrations. In that sense, when the abbot Antoine-Joseph Pernety, describing the garrison at Fort Sainte-Croix in Brazil, remarked in 1763 that, apart from the soldiers, “the other inhabitants are practically all black or Mulatto; every nuance of color may be seen, from black to white,” one wonders whether the assertion refers to a personal observation or to a topos that had become characteristic of the genre. [73]

33These vast fields of written and visual knowledge—disseminated in books, paintings, and engravings—aroused great public interest and rapidly spread from the East Indies to the West Indies, reaching every Spanish, French, and English colony in addition to their mainland counterparts in Europe. Circulating from both one continent to another and one medium to another, the theme of “hybrids” endlessly recurred in studies of colonial life, thus constituting a body of knowledge that must be considered as a whole, so greatly does the intertextuality blur the linguistic and political frontiers of the time. Texts and images produced over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thus firmly established the interpretive framework as well as the semantic and semiological fields that the eighteenth-century casta paintings later inherited.

34Beyond the expression of a shared desire to naturalize social differences, this common colonial language also produced—through its evolution and local specificities—criteria making it possible to draft a cartography of the regions where it exerted its greatest influence. In this sense, the examples of Tierra Firme and Upper Peru demonstrate that the vocabulary of the castes and the acute taxonomical anxiety associated with it was not necessarily adopted by all the peoples of Spanish America to the same degree. Other American territories not under the Castilian monarchy’s rule, however, seem to have developed very similar anxieties about the classification of phenotypes.

35Thus, in the French West Indies, the “mingling of blood” was the persistent motif and provided the interpretive foundation for explaining the diversity of human types observable in these countries. As early as 1658, Father Jean-Baptiste du Tertre began writing his General History of the French West Indies, which included descriptions of the religion, politics, and natural history of these islands, as well as a brief colonial nomenclature of the human types found there: Indiens, Françoys, Noirs, and mulâtres. [74] The author who developed these points in the greatest detail, however, was probably Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry, a Creole from Saint-Domingue who wrote a Description de la partie française de l’isle Saint Domingue (Description of the French Part of the Island of Saint-Domingue) in 1780. Between these two dates, the idea of the mingling of stock contained in Father du Tertre’s treatise was considerably expanded, evolving into a highly elaborate discourse on appearance and belonging. [75]

36In his Description, Moreau de Saint-Méry provides an extremely detailed list of the many designations for the various “combinations” or “colonial mixtures”—to employ his own terms—occurring on the island. [76] There were thirteen such “shades” in all—as in New Spain, this term also explicitly referred to skin color—each bearing a specific name: white, black, mulatto, quadroon, métif, mamluk, quarteronné, mixedblood, sacatra, griffe, marabou, Caribbean or West Indian, and East Indian. The similarity between French-Caribbean vocabulary and caste terminology cannot be coincidental and testifies not only to a shared ideological background but also to exchange and the existence of extended relations between the French West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico, especially through the slave trade and commerce. This dialogue between Mexico and the Caribbean probably resulted in a common culture, as displayed in the convergence of such vocabularies. [77]

37Nevertheless, the most striking similarity is that both Moreau de Saint-Méry and the casta paintings struggle with the question of whether or not the “mixture of blood” could “return” to one of its original sources as a result of successive marriages reinforcing one side of the family ancestry. This question, much more than the preoccupation of determining the exact name for each physical type—an endeavor doomed to fail at any rate, according to Moreau de Saint-Méry himself [78]—was almost certainly the essential concern of these representations and the question with which almost every contemporary treatise on the subject concluded. [79]

38When in 1720—almost five years after Juan Rodríguez Juárez received his first commission—the Académie royale de sciences in Paris sent Bernard Laurenceau de Hauterive, its correspondent in Martinique, a series of “questions concerning natural history,” the question concerning the names used to describe the different phenotypes resulting from the union of Europeans and Africans figured at the top of the list. Yet, symptomatically, the response given by Laurenceau de Hauterive, a Creole from Martinique, displays a greater concern with the issue of the possible return to one of the original stocks than the linguistic subtleties involved in classifying them. In his own words, “the children of mulatto fathers or mothers, called casques, [80] are of a lighter yellow than the Griffes, and it would appear that a Nation originally formed of such persons will return to its white roots.” [81] The author’s preoccupations are in this sense similar to those of Father Jean-Baptiste Labat, who in the same year (1724) explained that “the taint [in the color of quadroons] will have been eliminated by the fourth generation, provided one always continues to unite them with other whites; for, were they to mix with blacks, they would return in the same number of generations to their original darkness.” According to Labat, this phenomenon of the “whitening” or “blackening” of mulattos was due to the fact that “a color is reinforced to the extent that it is coupled with a color of the same type, and diminishes to the extent that it strays from its origins.” [82] Consequently, as early as the 1720s, this question of “return” haunted scientific and scholarly representations of the colonies from New Spain to the French West Indies, and later appearances confirm that it remained a vital issue throughout the entire eighteenth century.

39Hence, it is also this question of a “return” to the “original stock” that underlies the abbreviated schema proposed by the Jesuit José Gumilla in the 1740s (table 1). Many years later this issue was translated into political terms. Similarly, Edward Long explained in his History of Jamaica (1774) that if, according to Spanish authors, four generations of unions with whites were needed for a mixed lineage to return to white stock, [83] in Jamaica only three were considered sufficient for the children of such families to enjoy all the rights accorded to white men. [84] Explicit or not and restrictive to varying degrees, such conceptions linking genealogy, phenotype, and social hierarchy [85] thus appear to have circulated widely from the Gulf of Mexico to the French West Indies, where they were the object of similar codification.

40The controversies surrounding the question of human diversity—and the meaning that should be assigned to it—suggest yet another aspect of this debate. The power of Rodríguez Juárez’s theoretical construct resides in the strong link he managed to establish between an imaginary, a taxonomy, and an iconography, which were capable of not only achieving widespread acceptance but also presenting arguments that could be absorbed by different fields of knowledge. In this sense, it is impossible to separate the question of the possibility for a mixed lineage to “return” to either its original “white” or “black” stock from another problem: the apparent contradiction between the Christian dogma of mankind’s common origin and the actual diversity of human types. In 1726, Father Feijoo explicitly raised this point in his commentary on Baron de La Hontan’s New Travels in Northern America. La Hontan evoked the question of the color of the Ethiopians—which, according to a Portuguese doctor he cited, was connatural—as proof of polygenism, which Feijoo of course refused to accept. [86] Yet, the “passage” (tranfiguración in the terms of the Peruano from the El pretendiente manuscript) from one physical state to another over the course of several generations, which was clearly illustrated in the casta paintings, made it possible to overcome what certain authors represented as a fundamental insurmountable difference. Indeed, if it were true, as some of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s contemporaries believed (O’Crouley, for instance), that the “mingling of blood” produced a boundary line extending “to infinity,” [87] how then could the passage from a single humanity with a common origin to the contemporary diversity of physical types be explained? The idea that a lineage of mixed ancestry could, over a series of generations, “return” to one of its original colors amounted to saying that physical characteristics were accidental—Ulloa’s term—and not essential phenomena.

41The late but revealing case of Leopoldo Caldani in turn provides an example of how the notion of caste managed to impose itself as a legitimate argument in the internal debates within other scientific disciplines. [88] An anatomist and physiologist from Bologna, Caldani referred to the American castes in order to support and justify his arguments about the origins of the color of black Africans. Not only did Caldani reason in genealogical terms, but he also called on images—a color illustration representing the faces of an Indian, a mulatto, a zambo, a quadroon, a parda, a chino, and a mestizo, with their “specific” complexions—that ended up acquiring the status of proof. [89] In fact, one of the fields in which this dialogue between colonial experience and scientific investigation was especially evident was the emerging field of biology and particularly the issue of procreation, an area which was being intensely developed throughout the eighteenth century. [90]

The Enigma of Generation

42In eighteenth-century Europe, the question of how living beings were conceived had been the subject of continuous controversy since the Middle Ages. The debate often centered on the same questions. What is the fundamental determinant of generation? Blood or parental seed? The maternal womb? The idea of a “double insemination” implicating both parents in the process of generation, which had existed at least since Hippocrates, was only one of the possible ways of responding to the enigma of conception. Similarly, the idea of male primacy—central to French nobiliary ideology, which counts nobility by degrees, meaning by generations from father to son, ignoring the mother’s side completely—might also be considered the expression of an alternative (Aristotelian?) means of understanding the very essence of genealogical transmission. [91] Paradoxically, the development of techniques of medical observation in the seventeenth century—Antoine Van Leeuwenhoeck first observed spermatozoon in 1677—reignited this debate in the eighteenth century as a quarrel between the partisans of epigenesis and the tenants of preformation, and, within this latter group, between egg preformationists and sperm preformationists, thus proving the difficulty of reaching any kind of consensus on this issue. [92]

43Inhabitants of the Caribbean colonies, on the other hand, from New Spain to the French West Indies, took a very pragmatic approach to these questions. Faced with the doubts of certain scientists and philosophers regarding the intelligence of recognizing the role of both male and female parents in the conception of a new individual, they called on their own experience, which proved to them the fundamental importance of both the paternal and maternal sides. Indeed, the writings of Father Labat often read like a direct response to the preformationist theories of Regnier de Graaf. [93]

44

Let the Doctors maintain for as long as they please that both sexes do not equally contribute to conceiving a child, & that women, like hens, naturally have eggs in their bodies, & that men, like roosters, do no more than detach them and improve the germ. For if this were the case, a Negress would always have black children, no matter the color of the man involved, though we know this to be contrary to our own experience, since we see that with black men they have black children, & with white men Mulattos. [94]

45For the novohispanos as well, the answer was clear: the environment did not determine an individual’s nature, which is why the Spanish did not become Indians in the Indies any more than black Africans became white in Europe. What mattered was the stock of the paternal and maternal lines, as the imagery of the castes graphically explained.

46In the Indies, the insistence on genealogy over environment assumed an additional level of importance. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish medicine was primarily based on the Hippocratic doctrine of humors. [95] Furthermore, because it held that the environment played an important role balancing the humors, this doctrine unleashed all sorts of fantastic theories about the nature of the colonial population, regardless of differences in origin. The environment, in terms of the climate or the skies, [96] was repeatedly evoked to explain differences in individual appearances and character. Such arguments laid the foundations for the different attempts to explain human physical diversity during the early modern era. [97] The intensity of the sun, for example, was often used to explain the color of African peoples, and, in spite of doubts about the validity of this theory, [98] it was continually cited throughout the eighteenth century, whenever necessary. [99]

47The preoccupation with the influence of the constellations and climate on human populations found its equivalent in other territories where European domination (well-established or in progress) raised similar ethnological questions or interrogations regarding “natural philosophy.” According to James Axtell, the problem of the American environment could be reduced to the fear of degeneration, which was common to all colonial societies living alongside native populations. [100] In 1679, this fear led Increase Mather to exclaim: “Christians in this Land have become too like unto the Indians.” [101] This same fear constituted the central theme (loss of oneself) of so many narratives of Europeans or Creoles imprisoned by non-Europeans in a colonial setting. [102] In 1724, Increase Mather’s son, Cotton Mather, likewise explained the strange behavior of New England colonists as the result of climate: the colonists (like the Indians) seemed to be slackening in the way they raised their children, “as if the climate had taught us to Indianize.” [103]

48This anxiety about the possible transformation of individuals induced by life on the American continent drew part of its argument from examples in the vegetal world. Acclimation, species, and “degeneration” were all terms that were current among botanists (and farmers!) [104] and which also provided a means of thinking about human nature. A clear filiation therefore existed between the first representations of castes and the natural history that developed in the wake of early explorations on the American continent. From Francisco Hernández to José de Acosta, who placed man at the center of his Historia natural y moral de las Indias, the marvels of the Indies included the human world as well as the plant world. In 1648, the Historia naturalis Brasiliae of Wilhelm Piso, Jean de Laët, and Georg Marggraff, in addition to providing a summary of available knowledge by Spanish authors (particularly Hernández and Acosta), included a vast description of the “natural world,” including plants, fish, birds, snakes, quadrupeds, insects, and “natural inhabitants” of the Indies. This “total vision” was perfectly expressed in the paintings produced at the same time by Albert Eckhout in Dutch-occupied Pernambuco, some of whose work is reproduced in the engravings included in the Historia naturalis. [105] From then on, references to the American natural landscape in even the earliest casta paintings were neither accidental nor academic but logical. [106] Describing the natural environment amounted to explaining the type of men it produced, a relationship of dependence clearly expressed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1696: “This does not prevent us from asserting that all the peoples of this world make up a single race that has been altered by the different climates, as we see beasts and plants change their nature, improve, or degenerate.” [107] Even Feijoo wondered why, if wheat and cabbage show signs of degeneration when planted far from their native environment, it should not be the same for men. [108]

49The use of botany for understanding human phenomena is sometimes justified by the fact that it allowed scholars to benefit from scientific experiments normally impossible to perform on human beings. [109] In this respect, the European colonies again provided late seventeenth—and eighteenth-century mankind with a vast laboratory of human experimentation. In this regard, Rodríguez Juárez’s original synthesis constitutes a sort of colonial reinterpretation of old and new questions about human conception. In both words and images, Rodríguez Juárez and his successors crystallized the contributions of the novohispanos to the debate on human generation—a controversy that largely centered on the question of determining their place in humanity. Their argument was founded on the idea of an “essence” passed on from father to son without interference from the milieu, an essence that was nonetheless capable of being “diluted” (mixed) and purified and which found expression in the word “blood.” According to this view, blood intrinsically characterized each “group,” but these groups were tacitly understood as phases within a single chromatic spectrum that ranged from darkest to lightest. The question concerning the internal divisions within this continuum—and the consequences they had on individual honor—remained a subject of debate, usually resolved on a case-by-case basis according to each specific context. The desire to create rules governing the various parts of this political body explains the “sociophysical” and taxonomic aim of the casta paintings, which attempted to present castas as the result of a systematic law of heredity, deforming the observed reality of the often unpredictable character of phenotype inheritance if need be. These specific visual and textual examples thus, in the name of experience, fueled the vast controversy over nature versus nurture and the dominance of stock or milieu, which preoccupied scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. This very dialogue helped to construct a specific field of knowledge. [110]

50When, in 1785, Immanuel Kant first determined the difference between the notions of species and race, he in fact managed to synthesize a number of themes that had been circulating for some time, amongst which the casta imaginary played a key role. [111] According to Kant, each “class” (race) within the human species was determined by a specific, invariable stock or “germ.” The ability to procreate with one another characterized members of the same species. But if it were true that parents of the same class (race) did not necessarily replicate their own physical traits in their children (two dark-haired parents could have a blond child), those of different groups—of different colors—would always reach a compromise, as in the case of mestizos or mulattos, who were a blend, in equal proportions, of both their parents. According to Kant, this “unfailing heredity” both characterized and revealed the frontiers between races. The Kantian law of a “necessary half-breed generation” [112] was thus largely inspired by the colonial imaginary related to color—and therefore depended on the notions and images it had made available—, without which it would be incomprehensible. Neither European nor colonial, but rather a sediment of multiple references and experiences, the model proposed by Kant consequently figures as one of the various expressions of this “Atlantic” realm of knowledge.

51Therefore, beyond the controversies over the existence (or not) of race before race and the debates about the American or European origins of contemporary racism, the emergence—over the course of a few decades and across an area that during the first half of the nineteenth century included the entire western hemisphere—of a hegemonic paradigm explaining human diversity and discrediting many previous explanations undoubtedly constitutes a central phenomenon. Its rapid appearance suggests that the idea landed on extremely fertile ground in both the Catholic and the Protestant worlds as well as in western Europe and the New World. The terrain seems to have been prepared by an epicenter stretching from Mexico to the French Antilles, where the colonial specificities were expressed through the well-tried vocabulary of extraction, blood, and lineage, which was particularly alive in societies of conquest. The physical appearance of the inhabitants of these countries made it possible to find a new way to express an ancient practice, namely the habit of grounding social and cultural differences in nature itself. [113] The colonial imaginary of color and “caste,” such as it appeared in Rodríguez Juárez’s paintings in New Spain, was simply a local and particularly exacerbated expression of a preoccupation common to all colonial societies. Linking skin color and genealogy, this learned vision firmly established the essentialization of the phenotype as an organizing principle of the social world across the common language of aristocratic virtus and blood. The intelligibility of this theoretical construct—in the sense that its meaning could be easily understood by the actualization of a shared patrimony of practices and knowledge—explains its ability to circulate and be translated as well as its capacity to permeate new intellectual systems.

52Consequently, while caste terminology attests to the solid interconnections existing within a “Caribbean space,” which extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the French West Indies, the rapid acceptance in the Western hemisphere of the new notion of race attests to the integration of another sphere of knowledge, in which scientific elites speaking various languages and living on several continents shared in a collective imaginary enriched by the colonial experience.