Week 3 – The Colonial Experience

The Colonial Experience

With the fall of the Granada, Muhammad XII surrendered to the Spanish catholic monarchs, which brought to an end to 800 years of Muslim control. Jews were told to leave the peninsula or force to be converted to Christianity, which is considered in the modern day as an exercise of ethnic cleansing. Since these two major events, Spain gained national solidarity and imperialistic power.

While on the other side of the continent, there were indigenous people who were viewed as natural slaves by the conquistadors. As conquistador’s cruelty continues, ‘Las Casas’ denounced its action and believed that the indigenous population was the potential converts to Christianity.

Spreading diseases from Europe to the Latin Americas led to a depopulation. It also weakened the indigenous resistance towards the Western powers. At the same time, slaves were imported from the Sub-Saharan Africa region through a slave trade and cultivating agriculture.

Latin America’s population by the mid-1800s was truly diverse, where the indigenous, white and black population were close to equal. However, due to inter-racial marriages, there were mestizos (white and indigenous), mulattos (white and black) and so on.

Casta Paintings were made to manage and observe the differences between the pure and inter-racial family image. In more detail, Cast Paintings comprised of scene series of 16 illustrations of families. However, those paintings became more complicated as it proceeded to the later generation, for example, white and mestizo combination. I agree that the Casta Paintings were created to ensure which types of families ended up in which hierarchical social order.

In the United States, anybody who has a black blood is black, but in Latin America, it is different, according to Casta Paintings, there were many complicated hierarchical classes. The lines between the Casta Paintings were needed because it was so blurry; it was purely to identify which families held more power.

My question here is: If it was so obvious to know that the pure white families were the rich, and the more white bloodline remains gain superiority in social class, why was it necessary to make those? Was it really necessary to view and understand for the Spanish and the conquistador to view social hierarchy classes?