Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra "Calidad"

As a Chicana artist, my own personal quest in image-making is the discovery and articulation of Chicano culture, and the icons which elucidate the dense history of Aztlán. My artistic vision is an autobiographical exploration, but one that has far-reaching implications for my community and the preservation of its unique history. As a Chicana artist, my work, interpreted as an alternative to the mainstream, stands as a personal statement that evokes an identity. I aspire to originate the artist's voice. My work, however, is more than a personal statement, for it is rooted in and informed by history.

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Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra "Calidad" is an investigation of cultural and biological forms of "hybridity." Looking at this as a signifier of colonialism, the photographic portraits mimic the aesthetic and cultural markers suggested by the casta paintings of the eighteenth century in present-day familial settings of New World multicultural communities. The idea is to witness the resonance of colonialism as a substructure of our contemporary society that was constructed by an imposition of sovereignty. According to Reinhardt, this is a "wholly optic affair":

. . . the optical unconscious can alert us to complexities and perplexities often overlooked in analyses of certain important features of politics and visual culture. One of these features is "race," a visual artifact carrying a singularly powerful charge. Whether as ideology, institution, or lived experience, race is of course not made only by visual means, but its inequities and indignities remain tightly bound to ways of seeing human difference and organizing the perceptual field. To the rich critical tradition arising from that insight, [Walter] Benjamin's optical unconscious offers at once a contribution and a potentially destabilizing challenge. On the one hand, stressing the unseen elements in visual experience may broaden our sense of how race is constructed. On the other, it poses the puzzle of how the invisible can be part of "visual construction."¹

Sovereignty relies on orchestrating gazes for the display of power (from imperial spectacles to televised political addresses to walls erected at national borders) that ultimately promotes a collective body. Yet through the "optical unconscious,"² subtle intransigent discourses can be detected. Colonial discourse produces the colonized social reality as one that is never fixed into an era, but instead that reality passes on in time as appropriated, translated, re-historicized and read as new signifiers. Clearly this process riddles through the colonial casta painting tradition as well as the present Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra "Calidad".

Colonial society emerged out of a mixed ethno-racial social structure. In the years following the conquest of Mexico in 1521, most people in the New World fell into three distinct ethno-racial categories: First Nation (Indigenous people), peninsular Spaniards (European) and Africans (both enslaved and free). By the late seventeenth century, these categories broke down quickly and a caste system based on miscegenation was defined throughout the New World colonial realm. More specifically, as the colonial discourse was deployed through surveillance, that is, as the gaze of the colonizer towards colonial bodies a socio/racial hierarchy conformed to the European ideas of the "Other."

Casta paintings presented a group of sixteen portraits, with each painting depicting a racial mixing or mestizaje of the population found on the American continents. The basic formula illustrated a married couple with one or two children, who were rendered in a domestic or occupational environment. An inscription describing the ethno-racial make-up of the mother, the father and the child(ren) usually appeared in writing within the painting or above the family unit. The off-spring was given a unique ethno-racial definition. Each casta is given a classification, such as "mestizo" (de india y español) or "mulato" (de negra y español). The castas illustrate a social hierarchy, with the peninsular Spaniard (español) located above the First Nation (indio) and African (negro) family units. The lighter or more European the ethno-racial mix, the closer it is positioned to the peninsular Spaniards.

There were two conditions that separated the Spanish elite from "Others": non-elite that was raza/lineage...