Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820 (DVD) by Dana Leibsohn, Barbara E. Mundy (review)

Vistas is a resource for teaching the visual culture of colonial Spanish America. Like an art history textbook, it provides access to objects, images, and buildings that enliven stories of social interaction and political change in a particular time and place. But unlike a traditional textbook, the project is presented as a DVD that allows for multiple ways of engaging with its gallery of over 300 high-quality digital images, its selections from primary text sources, and the contextual and interpretive material provided by the authors. All texts are provided in both Spanish and English.

The DVD's rich content is organized into six themes that could serve as instructional units; these are presented in an order that hints at an ambivalence toward chronology as an organizing principle. For example, "Making Sense of the Pre-Columbian" is the first theme, but in the accompanying narrative the authors stress the multiplicity of ideas about the pre-Hispanic past that have circulated from the sixteenth century to the present. "'The pre-Columbian," they argue, "was—indeed, still is—a constantly shifting concept." The authors present images ranging from pre-Columbian architecture at Teotihuacan to Antonio de León y Gama's eighteenth-century image of Coatlicue, and texts ranging from Cortés's description of Aztec Tenochtitlan (1520) to an excerpt from the nineteenth-century writings of Guillermo Dupaix. The other themes are similarly trans-historical. In "Reckoning with Mestizaje," the authors argue that "today, reckoning with mestizaje evokes not only the dark history of discrimination but also the richness and complexity of cultural interaction that took place over three hundred years."

Coursing through all of the themes are ideas about indigenous agency and social stratification. For example, "The Political Force of Images" introduces the concept of viceregal rule and the hierarchy of political officeholders in colonial Spanish America, arguing that "the experience of political force was most keenly felt through images, objects, and rituals." The survey narrative tempers this statement with the observation that "the lack of political power was also conveyed through the visual." In "Patterns of the Everyday," the authors point out that "the rituals and spaces of daily life were often set up for, or by women." Noting that the objects that survive from the Spanish colonial period "often privilege the wealthy," they suggest that a more complete vision of the socioeconomically stratified colonial culture emerges "if we ask who made such precious things and how their materials were obtained."

"Mechanics of the Art World" stresses the interaction of the makers of objects and images, many of whom, the authors note, were indigenous, with patrons; their participation in guilds and workshops; and their use of both local and imported materials. Here, ideas about materiality and labor demonstrate instances of social inequity in the form of "the endemic use of poorly paid or forced labor" and "the wide-scale loss of pre-Columbian art making traditions." On the other hand, as the authors note in "Otherworldly Visions," "the Church was unable to erase native histories" and "access points to the sacred were also difficult for Church leaders to fully anticipate."

Vistas is an engaging Digital Humanities project that should give publishers of textbooks pause as they contemplate their futures. It is easy to imagine using this resource in the classroom, although technical difficulties—the DVD repeatedly "quit" unexpectedly, and the gallery of images, which are hosted on a Luna site, was not always available—would first have to be resolved. These problems, however, are not insurmountable. An abbreviated version of the project, with lower-quality images and limited text, is available online at http://www.smith.edu/vistas/index.html; the format here is considerably more accessible, flexible, and user-friendly than the DVD.