July 19, 2004

Coding Mestizaje

Mandatory reading: If you want to understand America's racial future and the role Latinos -- specifically Mexican Americans -- play in its calculus, do yourself a favor and peep Gregory Rodriguez's article from yesterday's Los Angeles Times "An Unsettling Racial Score Card." Casting a spotlight on the current LACMA exhibition on Mexican caste paintings (castas), Gregory illuminates their significance in portraying race and mestizaje (racial mixing):

    Casta paintings are perverse family portraits. They depict the race of the mother, father and offspring. Works of art and natural history, they also are instruments of racial oppression, the product of a white supremacist ideology that sought to control and provide a hierarchy for rampant racial mixing.

    The paintings delineated racially mixed Mexicans according to their distance from the purity of European whiteness. They sought to educate viewers on the social consequences of forging interracial alliances. Certain combinations could help mixed families regain a semblance of whiteness. Others would only lower a family's status. If a woman of Spanish-Indian heritage married an Indian man, her child would be demoted in the social scale and might be labeled as a salta atrás—or a jump backward.

    The offspring of these mixed unions—from the mestizos and the mulattoes to the zambos and the chinos—were forced to survive in society's in-between spaces. Deprived of a stable place in the social order and without firm roots in any one heritage, the racially mixed learned to thrive amid social, racial and cultural ambiguity.

Nevertheless, he makes it clear that while casta paintings attempted to codify various racial combinations into some kind of caste system, they neither mirrored nor prevented mestizaje as practiced by Mexicans in daily life:

    For years, scholars believed that colonial Mexicans actually lived according to this intricate system of racial castes. They mistook these paintings as depictions of social reality. But the categories enshrined in casta paintings never came close to reflecting the variety and dynamism of colonial race relations. And while the minority white European elite was obsessed with racial purity, most Mexican commoners were not.

    But while widespread mixture made enforcement of a true caste system impossible, the notion of a racial hierarchy did nonetheless influence the nation's self-image. Today the relative absence of dark-skinned actors on Mexican television is a legacy of this tradition. Some Latin American-born advertising executives have imported this prejudice to the United States. Their advertisements routinely feature light-skinned models in campaigns designed to target a Latino population that is distinctly heterogeneous.

Incidentally, as Gregory takes a swipe at Latin American media heads, you should also know this exhibit is actually being sponsored by Univision (I'm pretty sure he knows too). So what does mestizaje portend for America's racial self-image?

    Ironically, given the United States' own tragic history of race relations, Mexican Americans have gradually liberated themselves from the pigmentocracy of the mother country. Perhaps the most significant legacy of the Chicano Movement was to remove the shame of brownness.

    --
    Despite their billing, the casta paintings do not "celebrate" mestizaje. Their original intent was to reveal its dangers, and today they remain unsettling. There is little doubt that the American future will be mixed, and that is a far cry better than the racial segregation of our not-so-distant past. But the casta paintings, products of colonial Mexico, are nonetheless poignant reminders of the struggles that lie ahead here in the United States. While mestizaje will continue to break down racial and ethnic barriers, it will also sow confusion and instability; some identities will be lost while others will be born. We must resist the inevitable efforts to impose order on this chaos.

Read the whole thing.

Now if that weren't enough, Gregory's also got another engaging piece in today's L.A. Times on the trend of "white in-flight" back into L.A.'s urban core neighborhoods. Read that one here. Prolific bastard! (j/k, buddy)

Hat tip to Manny Gonzalez

Posted by thomas at July 19, 2004 11:49 AM | TrackBack