A reading of a casta painting

(Note: This post, crossposted here, is part of a larger interest of mine in identifying the characteristics of visual and textual rhetorics of interracial mixing and seeing what larger conclusions we can draw from those characteristics.)
Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Yale, 2004). Amazon link here. Image found here.
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A painting by Dalí

This is a bit outside the concerns of this blog, but not too far afield. While looking at some paintings by Salvador Dalí this morning I ran across this: The Virgin of Guadalupe (1959)

(click to enlarge the image; originally found at Virtual Dalí)
The Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, is not just [...]

Hither and yon: posts from elsewhere

The links that follow are posts that originally appeared at my “home” blog that touch on this blog’s preoccupations and will probably end up being incorporated into the book project, even if only tangentially. Consider this page, then, as being as much a sort of collections of notes to myself as an actual post [...]

Three casta paintings

Attrib. José de Alcíbar, 6. De Español y Negra, Mulato, ca. 1760-1770. Denver Art Museum. Image found here; specifics for this painting from Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.
Two worlds God has placed in the hands of our Catholic Monarch, and the New does not resemble the Old, [...]

Casta paintings

De Español y Negra, Mulato. Image found here.
The “Images” page for Domestic Issue now has three examples of casta paintings (one striking example of which you see here), a genre that was once quite popular during the colonial era but languished as an area of serious academic inquiry until the 1960s. The subject [...]