ABOUT THIS BOOK

Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized.

Winner, Book Award, Association of Latin American Art, 2004

Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad (status) and raza (lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of casta paintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians.

Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and casta paintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies—elite and non-elite—as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Magali M. Carrera is Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

REVIEWS

"This book effectively integrates art history, literary history, and political and social history. . . . It will appeal to any well-educated reader and scholar of colonial Latin American studies . . . who will find it a unique lens through which to view this period and culture."

— Stacey Schlau, Professor of Spanish and Women’s Studies, West Chester University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Visual Practices in Late-Colonial Mexico
Chapter One: Identity by Appearance, Judgment, and Circumstances: Race as Lineage and Calidad
Chapter Two: The Faces and Bodies of Eighteenth-Century Metropolitan Mexico: An Overview of Social Context
Chapter Three: Envisioning the Colonial Body
Chapter Four: Regulating and Narrating the Colonial Body
Chapter Five: From Popolacho to Citizen: The Re-vision of the Colonial Body
Epilogue: Dreams of Order
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index