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Representations of Women in Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico explores the power relations between men and women represented in casta paintings of the eighteenth century. I provide an overview of the genre of casta painting and its relation to the sistema de castas, the social arrangement based on lineages intended to sustain the power of the Spanish elite. I examine how casta scenes reinforce the authority of the Spanish male. The social construction of gender, separate spheres of men and women, and the notion of "true womanhood" are recurrent themes. I argue that casta scenes reinforced the expected norms of female behavior. Social codes of conduct varied by class, and I argue that elite, white women are portrayed as ideal women in contrast to mixed-race women. By focusing on gender, this thesis provides a new perspective on this genre, enriching our knowledge of the life experiences of women in colonial Mexico.
Casta painting is a distinctive Mexican genre that portrays racial mixing among the Indians, Spaniards & Africans who inhabited the colony, depicted in sets of consecutive images. Ilona Katzew places this art form in its social & historical context.
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 castapaintings, 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 castapaintings 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.
Focuses on costumbrismo, a cultural trend in Latin America and Spain toward representing local customs, types, and scenes of everyday life in the visual arts and literature, to examine the shifting terms of Mexican identity in the nineteenth century.
Genealogical Fictions examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) over time and how the concept's enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings came to shape the region's patriotic and racial ideologies.
Examining the appropriations and revisions of Indian identity first carried out by Anglo-American engravers and later by early Anglo-American women writers, Cathy Rex shows the ways in which iconic images of Native figures inform not only an emerging colonial/early republican American identity but also the authorial identity of white women writers. Women such as Mary Rowlandson, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Lydia Maria Child, and the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Winkfield of The Female American, Rex argues, co-opted and revised images of Indianness such as those found in the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal and the numerous variations of Pocahontas’s image based on Simon Van de Passe’s original 1616 engraving. Doing so allowed them to posit their own identities and presumed superiority as American women writers. Sometimes ugly, occasionally problematic, and often patently racist, the Indian writings of these women nevertheless question the masculinist and Eurocentric discourses governing an American identity that has always had Indianness at its core. Rather than treating early American images and icons as ancillary to literary works, Rex places them in conversation with one another, suggesting that these well-known narratives and images are mutually constitutive. The result is a new, more textually inclusive perspective on the field of early American studies.
Photographer and artist Delilah Montoya investigates the ethnic roots of contemporary families living in New Mexico and Texas in this thought-provoking collection. Featuring sixteen present-day photographic group portraits along with a DNA study for each clan, Montoya mimics and explores the Latin American art tradition of casta paintings that traced the complex racial mixing of the people of New Spain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Typically presented as a group of sixteen portraits, the casta paintings illustrated the social hierarchy of the times, with the "pure blood" Spaniards at the top and mixed-race mestizos and mulattos at the bottom. Like the colonial-era casta paintings, Montoya's photographs capture her subjects at home and include material objects, furnishings and even pets. But instead of using eighteenth-century terminology, the ethno-racial composition is represented with a DNA study of the matrilineal and patrilineal global ancestral migration to provide additional information about the family's origins. The artist investigates the cultural and biological forms of hybridity and seeks to understand the impact of class structures on social, economic and aesthetic choices in America. Contemporary Casta Portraiture includes an artist statement and essays about Montoya's work. In her introduction, Surpik Angelini says Montoya's work surpasses "nationalist, ethnic categories to suggest instead the making of a cosmic race." Ultimately, this intriguing volume confirms that none of us are very different from each other.
This illustrated anthology brings together for the first time a collection of essays that explore the position of women and the contributions made by them to the arts and architecture of early modern Latin America.
During the nineteenth century, Yucat&án moved effectively from its colonial past into modernity, transforming from a cattle-ranching and subsistence-farming economy to a booming export-oriented agricultural economy. Yucat&án and its economy grew in response to increasing demand from the United States for henequen, the local cordage fiber. This henequen boom has often been seen as another regional and historical example of overdependence on foreign markets and extortionary local elites. In The Making of a Market, Juliette Levy argues instead that local social and economic dynamics are the root of the region&’s development. She shows how credit markets contributed to the boom before banks (and bank crises) existed and how people borrowed before the creation of institutions designed specifically to lend. As the intermediaries in this lending process, notaries became unwitting catalysts of Yucat&án&’s capitalist transformation. By focusing attention on the notaries&’ role in structuring the mortgage market rather than on formal institutions such as banks, this study challenges the easy compartmentalization of local and global relationships and of economic and social relationships.