From the Editor

This issue of Western American Literature features casta paintings, described by art historian Ilona Katzew as “one of the most compelling pictorial genres from the colonial period in Mexico” (5). Casta paintings most commonly consist of sixteen interconnected images of a man, a woman, and one or more children that chart racial mixing in the Spanish New World. There are diverse speculations about the uses to which these images were put; they might, for instance, have helped maintain the sistema de castas, a system of hierarchical social positions that reified class distinctions. Yet they present surprisingly positive representations of the process of mestizaje. Speculating that “casta painting is aligned with the strong sense of criollismo that emerged in Mexico at the end of the seventeenth century,” Katzew reads them as representing “creole pride” (2). She also suggests that the richness of detail in castas results from the painters’ desire to represent colonial Mexico as a land of wealth and abundance, even for those at the bottom of the social ladder.

Some images were painted on separate panels, such as our striking cover image, De mestizo y india, coyote (From Mestizo and Indian, Coyote), by one of the most talented casta painters, Miguel Cabrera. Although intended to be displayed together, these individual paintings have often become separated. Others, such as the image by an unknown artist that introduces Keri Holt’s essay, are painted on a single large canvas. WAL chose casta paintings to accompany Holt’s essay because she explores Timothy Flint’s Francis Berrian, a border-crossing novel set during the Mexican struggle for independence that also represents a racially mixed marriage in positive terms.

Castas typically begin with predicable pairings: from Spaniard and Indian, Mestiza; from Spaniard and Black, Mulatta. Then they quickly become more metaphoric, as in the example of “Coyote” above or “from China Cambuja [Black Indian] and Indian, Wolf.” Partially a product of the Enlightenment, the castas’ efforts to classify race were based on scientific theories of the times, which add a surprising number of “Albinos” into the mix as well as some dubious genetics, as in “From Spaniard and Albino, Return-Backwards [a Mestizo]” and “From Spaniard and Return-Backwards, Hold-Yourself-in-Midair.”

For more information on castas, read Katzew’s fine Casta Painting (Yale University Press, 2004) or visit the collection at the Denver Art Museum, where I first encountered castas on a post-Boulder-WLA-conference visit with Nancy Cook.