Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra “Calidad”

Artist Statement 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. “Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra ‘Calidad’” is the investigation of the cultural and biological forms of “hybridity.” Looking at this concept as a signifier of colonialism, the portraits echo the aesthetic and cultural markers formulated by the Casta paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 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. 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 early seventeenth century, these categories broke down quickly and a caste system based on miscegenation was being defined throughout the colonial realm. “Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra ‘Calidad’” aims to demonstrate that our heritage comes from this mixed ethno-racial colonial social structure. Casta paintings are part of the eighteenth-century colonial Latin America art tradition. Generally presented as a group of sixteen portraits, each painting depicts a racial mixing or mestizaje of the population found in New Spain. The basic formula illustrates a couple with one or two children, who are rendered in a domestic or occupation environment. An inscription describing the ethno-racial make-up of the mother, the father and the child(ren) usually appears as verbiage within the painting or above the family unit. The offspring is given a unique ethno-racial definition. Each of the sixteen ethno-racial mixtures is given a classification, such as “mestizo” (de india y español) or “mulato” (de negra y español). The Castas, as a series of paintings, illustrate a social hierarchy, with the peninsular Spaniards (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. Historians have linked the emphasis on classification and organization found in these genre paintings to the influence of The Age of Enlightenment. The paintings illustrate the typical clothing for the different social classes. They reveal details of architectural space and home life and present meticulous depictions of everyday objects, native flora and fauna and foodstuffs. These depictions speak not only about a fascination with race, but also to the leading philosophical and scientific preoccupations of that period. The fact that the majority of Casta paintings in existence are in Europe rather than the Americas suggests they were collected as souvenirs that illustrate the native plants and diverse peoples of the colonies. The Casta paintings are also attributed to the Costumbrismo art movement which depicted daily life and ordinary circumstances as a type of Spanish folk tradition.

Although the use and purpose for production of Casta paintings remains unclear, these paintings generally suggest a fascination with race and limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) that characterized colonial mentalities. Spaniards used their elaborate system of classification to maintain social and political control, allowing the “pureblooded” to hold the top position in colonial society. I believe that the described colonial caste system still exists as sort of a footprint in our contemporary global culture, and it can be documented through a series of domestic photographic portraits that present various social and ethnic families whose heritage derives from the colonial system of the Americas and the United States. In my mind the Americas as a whole, including the United States, are not only connected historically but also genetically and culturally. It is our lived reality. Like the Casta paintings, this body of work represents household units. However, “Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra ‘Calidad’” does not define the members by means of colonial terminology. Instead, the ethno-racial mixture is represented by a DNA study of the mother and father’s global ancestral migration. All the families depicted in the series trace their ancestry to American colonial communities with possible miscegenation in their past. As collaborators for these familial environmental portraits, the participants consented to share their National Geographic Genographic DNA analysis with the contemporary portrait study. In an effort to reveal social and cultural types, the portraits were photographed either at the subject’s public or private space. The names of the families remain anonymous in an attempt to direct the viewer’s attention away from the individuals and to the genre or calidad of the sitter. Although the series is still in progress, the end result of the investigation will be a collection of sixteen or more portraits that represent the social structure of the colonial calidad as it exist today. The hope is to reveal the footprint of the colonial structure within our contemporary world, which is based on the ethnoracial social structure. The premise is that the longer a family line resides in the United States, the more ethno-racial it will become. Like our national borders, the ethno-racial social structure is and has always been very porous. After all, the Genome Project shows that we all originated out of East Africa and migrated across continents. With current hyper-globalization, all cultures will soon genetically reunite. Chicanos are already globally reunited with the appearance of all racial types in their DNA. As suggested by José Vasconcelos Calderón in 1925, somos “la raza cósmica.” Production of “Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra ‘Calidad’” is funded in part by grants from Transart Foundation, Artist to Artist Fund, New Mexico Artist Match Fund, Hatch Fund and the University of Houston Small Research Grant, with contributions from Chon Noriega, Gilberto Cárdenas, Joe Aker, Surpik Angelini, Celia Muñoz, Sam Coronado, Ann Tucker, Connie Cortez, Ann Leimer, Zoanna Maney, Tere Romo and Rick Custer. With so much gratitude for the donors’ encouragement and support, they are thanked for their generosity.

Kanellos, Nicolas 1/27/2015 10:14 AM Deleted: p

Kanellos, Nicolas 1/27/2015 10:15 AM Formatted: Font:Italic