Ximena Kuzma Mongrut
Week 3
The Casta Paintings remind us that humanity is all about hierarchy. It reflects that it is in our nature to pursue social, political and economic dominance and status. It shows how religion, whiteness and ethnicity became a way of empowerment and the new world the platform for the institutionalization of a “racial” system, which in many ways justified European right to conquest, to enslave and to impose forced labour.
In my opinion casta paintings portray nowadays Latin America’s identity crisis. The Casta Paintings are just a glimpse to a past which shares similarities to our present allowing us to connect nowadays poverty, sexism, alcoholism and illiteracy index to certain ethnic backgrounds and wealth, education and health index to others. Latin American Society has failed to understand its own identity crisis. We feel horrified when we think of ethnic cleansing during colonialism or the holocaust, however we live in a society which is looking to “mejorar la raza”. If the Casta Paintings are controversial due to its feudal-ethnic system, in which a mestizo could born in misery and died in it, it should also alarm us the fact that these values are still the pillars of our society and it should horrify us that Latin America social and economic mobility is still limited by the individual’s last names, physical appearance, native languages and cultural and religious practices.
Latin America blames colonization, Indigenous people are still looking for its independence and outsiders and “natives” are still victimizing an ethnicity that could or could not exist in our present reality. In a society like Latin America, which has born from ethnic fusion, racial hierarchies have become organic to our sociopolitical nature. Individuals boast of their European roots. Being a little more or less white or even a little less “negro” or “indio” could determinate each individual accessibility to its basic rights.
On the other side, Catalina personifies freedom, the idea of being independent from social norms. Her persona is extremely interesting. She was not a feminist, she was definitely not looking for a more just and human society but she also was not defined by the social norms and expectation for a woman in her historical context.
I will conclude saying that from a realistic point of view, I believe that the Casta Painting reflect the essence of human politics which I believe is individuals empowerment acknowledging human diversity. The history of the lieutenant nun reflects that it is possible for individuals to go against social structure although it appears that her goal was her own survival.