Mestizos Come Home!: Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity
336
Mestizos Come Home!: Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity
336eBook
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Overview
Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity.
A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806158068 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2017 |
| Series: | Chicana and Chicano Visions of the Américas Series , #19 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mestizos Come Home!
Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity
By Robert Con Davis-Undiano
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Robert Con Davis-UndianoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5806-8
CHAPTER 1
The Casta Tradition and Mestizos in New Spain
The Spanish created the casta system of racial classification during their colonial period in the Americas. The fullest expression of that system was a genre of painting called "casta painting," an unusual and powerful art form that articulated racial categories and a strict social hierarchy. The remnants of that system are still having an enormous influence on racial identity and social stratification in the United States and the Americas. While Mexican Americans joined an ongoing Latin American conversation about race, culture, and life in the Americas in the 1960s and after, there is still a need to focus on the original Spanish colonial conception of race and the remnants of that system in contemporary culture.
* * *
In 2000, the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano made the remarkable claim that the modern practice of racism, where an entire community is judged according to its racial identity, originated in the Americas. Racism has taken other forms, but Quijano shows that its modern practice may be a more specialized and recent phenomenon than many have thought. He was speaking neither of discriminatory attitudes coming out of U.S. slavery nor of "white" dominance in the modern era but of a development in New Spain from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This "new" form of racism bears not only on Latin American traditions of racial typing before the modern era but also on Mexican Americans and other mestizos in the present and all whose home is in this hemisphere. He writes that the "idea of race ... does not have a known history before the colonization of America" and adds that "terms such as Spanish and Portuguese, ... which until then indicated only geographic origin or country of origin, acquired from then on a racial connotation in reference to the new identities" (2000, 534).
Quijano's specific claim is that the Spanish virtually invented racism as it is now practiced — a new social order for which "race and racial identity" became the "instruments of basic social classification." Prior to these developments, the world knew racism as applied to a nationality, culture, or the inhabitants of a region irrespective of skin color or physical features. The new standards for racism that the Spanish created in New Spain have informed all racial identity and racial practices in the Americas and indeed in the world since that time. The "new historical social identities in America — Indians, blacks, and mestizos"— were "new" in the sense that these labels had not been used before to name a specific community based on race in a systematic approach to the domination of a people — in this case, a people who would become the source of labor for a whole economy (534).
Those new social identities came about when the Spanish, seeking wealth and religious conversions in the New World, colonized indigenous peoples and later brought Africans into the Americas. There is no reason to think that the Spanish anticipated where these actions would lead or the world-changing processes that they had set in motion. Robert J. C. Young comments that in their eagerness to promote empire in the Americas, the Spanish instead "produced [their] own darkest fantasy — the unlimited and ungovernable fertility of 'unnatural' unions" (1995, 98). The huge wave of "'unnatural' unions," a defining event for New Spain and the history of social and political life in the Americas, meant the rise of new racial and cultural identities and the emergence of new communities within the colonial world.
To cope with the reshaping of New Spain's cultural foundations, the Spanish designed el sistema de casta, the casta system, an elaborate plan for social ranking to monitor and control the outcomes of these immense demographic changes. Comprised of racial and social categories and elaborate schemes for assigning people to those categories, el sistema de casta structured social life in the Americas for almost three centuries. The far-reaching effects of this landmark experiment in social engineering are still having an impact on Mexican Americans and all in the Americas in the way that people understand and live the daily reality of race. It is for these various reasons — mainly the connection between Spanish colonial and present-day racial practices — that an understanding of mestizo identity and race in the Americas must reference this racial innovation from the Spanish colonial period.
While New Spain's indigenous population as a whole declined drastically under Spanish rule, reducing the population by almost 25 million people over the seventeenth century alone (Cook and Borah 1979, 1, 100), in 1811 the overall population of Mexico City reached 169,811, a tripling of the population documented in 1689. This increase came through intermarriage with the Spanish, indigenous, and black people (Carrera 2003, 38). With this population increase in the capital city, and with the high rate of intermarriage, the active mixing of cultures during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries challenged the Spanish to monitor cultural and social changes. The casta system was a way for them to oversee the proliferation of racial identities, the rise of new social classes, and, in effect, keep themselves relevant in terms of actual governance and cultural influence.
Where do we find the beginnings of this important racial history in the Americas? Do we look at Christopher Columbus's governorship of Hispaniola in the 1490s, or the exploits of conquistadors such as Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who created the first permanent European settlement in the Americas in 1510? Do we look at the years 1519–21 and the conquest of Mexico as Hernán Cortés defeated the great Aztec empire, fathered a child with the Nahua interpreter Malintzin, and in 1551 occupied the Yucatán Peninsula? Perhaps we should focus on 1532 as the colonial surge reached its zenith when Francisco Pizarro established the first Spanish settlement in Peru and conquered the Inca Empire.
Any of these venues and time periods would do, as long as we focus on the racial system that Quijano references. We must begin, in other words, with the families created by the mixing in New Spain of indigenous, African, Asian, and European peoples under the harshest of circumstances. With little social precedent and no official support or encouragement, indigenous, European, Asian, and African people formed families, built communities, raised children, resisted oppression, and courageously improvised New World lives in spite of all of the hardships thrust upon them. How might we examine these unions? Where might we find accounts of them individually and as families?
Shortly after Quijano's (2000) comment about the origins of modern racism in the Americas, a veritable archive of Spanish colonial culture became readily available, an archive that referenced a large variety of interracial families and emerging identities in New Spain. The 2003 publication of Magali M. Carrera's Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings and Ilona Katzew's 2004 Casta Painting put into general circulation a rich gallery of New Spain's families and their offspring. Featuring the lower classes and working poor, these paintings were historical portraits, not of known people, but of racial types from that era.
The format of these casta paintings was always to depict two parents and one or two children and present families as one might have seen them walking on New Spain's streets, in intimate moments of conversation with friends, with work tools in their shops, in their homes, and as they might have looked strolling into a painter's studio to sit for a portrait. These casta paintings especially foreground children, usually one child, as in every case representing an emergent "new" racial identity. These books were not the first to make this rich material available, but their wide dissemination in English made it newly accessible for a large audience.
The Mexican painters who worked in this genre created casta paintings to reflect the official view of race and show how parents and their children, typically young or middle-aged parents and a child of three to eight years old, fit in the larger social context that the Spanish were creating and tried to monitor. Both the quality of the renderings and their historical relevance make them valuable for understanding the social structure and culture, as well as the racial orientation, of New Spain. Also, with no existing single document or formal statement about the casta system's racial categories and terms and no single decree or treatise explaining how the Spanish categorized racial mixes appearing rapidly in New Spain during this period (at least, none so far), these paintings are still the best record of the casta system and the racial categories that the Spanish invented.
Carrera (2003) and Katzew (2004) provide, in other words, ready and unparalleled access to a rich reserve of Spanish colonial culture — views of people with new racial identities, behaviors, body postures, facial expressions, and varieties of clothing, tools, and furniture. With many reproductions of eighteenth-century casta paintings, and offering vital cultural and social insights about Spanish colonialism and life in New Spain, these two books show roughly two hundred families — about four hundred adults and two hundred children. While in the modern era the people depicted in these abundant and diverse paintings will be called simply "mestizos"— the modern name for the Americas' mixed-race people — the casta paintings focus on the precise details of many official racial categories of that time and offer a level of nuance and clarity that portraits and sets of paintings are especially effective at providing.
Created from a Spanish colonial perspective, these casta paintings interpret the complex world of racial identity and new social orders emerging in colonial New Spain. Many were painted anonymously, but well-known Mexican painters of the period — Miguel Cabrera, Luis de Mena, Luis Berrueco, Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz, Andrés de Islas, José de Páez, and José Joaquín — created the best and most revealing of them (Katzew 2004, 3). The quality varied, but the painting's immediate goal was always to categorize and rank the new racial identities appearing in the rapidly expanding, New Spain social system.
The casta paintings were popular and plentiful, and many European visitors bought them as souvenirs. While no one knows for sure, the Spanish probably intended the paintings to be tools to enable a serious reconceptualization of race in the Americas consistent with maintaining social control of New Spain (Katzew 2004, 7). The unintended social consequences of broad racial mixing and the Spanish attempts to categorize those "unnatural" unions in New Spain — "the nightmare of [those] ideologies and categories of racism," as Young calls such institutions, the way the Spanish went about defining and implementing a social hierarchy based on race — "continue to repeat upon the living [today]" as racial categories that still define many contemporary social classes (1995, 28). Moreover, the legacy of the casta system is evidenced in the continuing phenomenon of racial discrimination, oppression, and violence in the United States, and it is for these reasons that casta representations of mestizo identity in New Spain need to be a part of any discussion of what it means for modern-day mestizos, the inheritors of that tradition, to understand the social conditions that shaped racial identities in the United States and this hemisphere.
Quijano's observation about the Spanish approach to race in the Americas helpfully emphasizes the making of race, exactly as Mexican Americans will do in the late twentieth century (see chapter 2), the how of creating mestizo identity and race as social constructs. That focus on process provides insight into the issue of race in the Americas and a basis for understanding its operation. How did race happen in the Americas? There are hundreds of casta paintings that can be called upon for an answer. Each one stages a kind of racial "beginning" and creates the specter of race emerging anew with different racial categories constantly appearing in casta paintings every few years. Each painting says, "Here, look at me, and you will see one of the mixed-race families in New Spain and also the results of that mixing in the child who stands before you."
These paintings are the Spanish colonial version of how race happened in the Americas, and the paintings also show what the casta process produced as a hierarchical racial system, a complex, racialized culture. In these paintings, we peer at bodies and clothes on display within defined aesthetic, economic, and social settings and categories. Like a police lineup with suspects marching through to have their pictures painted, the casta system presents human bodies in a continuum with some people embodying Spanish values and others with dark skin and merely hanging on for dear life trying to be relevant on the margins of Spanish colonial culture and society.
After almost five hundred years, this system of racial typing is currently in tatters, except that many of its principles still define racial identities and continue to divide people from each other. When Young comments that "the apparently ineffaceable, proliferating legacies of racialism continue [to this day] to generate the cultures that produced them" in the first place, we can add that the brown bodies in the Americas are still harvesting crops for low wages, still cutting lawns, still washing dishes, cleaning houses, and tending to white children. Those who employ them are still the privileged class, most frequently with light skin, who are far removed from the reality of low-wage labor — a social scenario disturbingly similar to that of Spanish colonial America (1995, 141).
Quijano's observation also leads to the question of "voice" in the casta paintings. We can try to hear the individual voices of colonial culture in these paintings. What do the voices of the people presented — elites and the lower classes — say about race and social harmony and the potential of social order and disruption in the Americas? We can hear the muted voices of mestizos and other castas in these paintings — "silent" voices that can be heard through channels that the Spanish could not control. Just as the bones and carcasses of the disappeared in Latin America in the twenty-first century speak through forensic clues and hidden circumstances, we can hear the people in the casta social classes who, like bodies hidden after a crime, still try to rise up to speak from these paintings to tell their long-delayed story. We must be patient to hear what the casta people say and what their bodies tell us about how they arrived where they are, what they wanted, and who they still want to be.
We need to understand these four issues in relation to the casta paintings because each can help to explain the legacy of the mestizo presence in the Americans and what it will mean later for mestizos to "come home." Those issues are:
1. How race happened in the Americas.
2. The social outcomes of el sistema de casta in the Americas.
3. What the casta paintings show about the human body in New Spain.
4. The voices heard in the casta paintings — both those of Spanish colonialism and the lower-class voices not officially permitted to speak.
We also need to query the assumptions that the Spanish brought to their understanding of identity for the underclasses, especially their characterization of indigenous and black people as animalistic, degenerative, and monstrous. Those assumptions, too, are part of the tradition of mestizo identity in the Americas, a key part, particularly making the brown body a convoluted and destructive racial puzzle that has been left for us to understand, unravel, and reimagine.
HOW RACE HAPPENED IN THE AMERICAS
We begin with the casta paintings as paintings reflecting what they are as an artistic medium along with the concerns and issues of this period. In spite of their belonging to the casta, formulaic genre, these paintings were often masterful color portraits of New Spain's mixed-race people — craftspeople, merchants, manual laborers, women, men, and children. Usually painted on canvas or copper plates (approximately 80 x 105 centimeters or sometimes smaller), the paintings always came in sets of sixteen (Carrera 2003, 63–65). Like contemporary film storyboards or graphic novels, they were created to be viewed in sequence, starting with the least racially mixed (painting 1) on the top left of a set of sixteen and ending with the most racially mixed figure at the social hierarchy's fringes, the bottom right of that set (painting 16).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mestizos Come Home! by Robert Con Davis-Undiano. Copyright © 2017 Robert Con Davis-Undiano. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
INTRODUCTION: Mestizos, Come Home!,
PART I CRITIQUING THE SPANISH COLONIAL LEGACY,
1. The Casta Tradition and Mestizos in New Spain,
2. In Search of Mestizo Identity across the Americas,
PART II REMAPPING THE MESTIZO COMMUNITY,
3. There's No Place Like Aztlán: Land, the Southwest, and Rudolfo Anaya,
4. Remapping Community: Cinco de Mayo, Lowrider Car Culture, and the Day of the Dead,
5. Recovering the Body: Literature, Painting, and Sculpture,
PART III THE LITERARY RESPONSE,
6. Tomás Rivera and the Chicano Voice,
7. Write Home!: Chicano Literature, Chicano Studies, and Resolana,
CONCLUSION: A Better Future for America,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,