Abstract
Eighteenth-century casta paintings from northern New Spain depict the ethnic and racial combinations resulting from mestizaje, such as mulatto. Casta paintings offer rich insights on the quotidian practices of colonial individuals, including dress, diet, and household practices; this is information that archaeologists desire. Experiences, however, often differed drastically from the world represented in images as individuals reworked colonial categories in identity formation. These paintings represent a static image of a supposedly highly structured and regulated colonial world that was imposed on colonial peoples through their bodies. Visual and archaeological evidence provide different stories, drawn from official versions and lived experiences. Casta paintings, ethnohistorical documents, and material culture are used to explore how the imagined, ordered world depicted in casta paintings meshed with daily life in colonial communities in Spanish Texas and the place of the body in the Spanish colonial world.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Avery, George 1995 More Friend Than Foe: Eighteenth-Century Spanish, French, and Caddoan Interaction at Los Adaes, a Capital of Texas Located in Northwestern Louisiana. Louisiana Archaeology 22:163–193.
Avery, George 1996 Annual Report for the Los Adaes Station Archaeology Program. Department of Social Sciences, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA.
Beaudry, Mary C. 2002 “Re-Vision”: Filling Gaps and Silences in How We Think and Write about Small Finds. Paper presented at the 35th Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Mobile, AL.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, William Nice, translator. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Boyer, Richard 1997 Negotiating Calidad: The Everyday Struggle for Status in Mexico. Historical Archaeology 31(1):64–73.
Callaway, Helen 1993 Purity and Exotica in Legitimating the Empire: Cultural Construction of Gender, Sexuality, and Race. In Legitimacy and State in Twentieth-Century Africa: Essays in Honour of A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan, editors, pp. 31–61. St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, England.
Cannadine, David 2001 Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England.
Castelló Yturbide, Teresa 1990 La Indumentaria de las Castas del Mestizaje (A Study of Dress of the Mestizo Classes). La Pintura de Castas, Artes de Mexico 8:74–78.
Comaroff, Jean 1996 The Empire’s Old Clothes: Fashioning the Colonial Subject. In Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities, David Howes, editor, pp. 19–38. Routledge Press, New York, NY.
Cooper, Frederick, and Laura Ann Stoler (editors) 1997 Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Cope, R. Douglas 1994 The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Deagan, Kathleen A. 1983 Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. Academic Press, New York, NY.
Deagan, Kathleen A. 2002 Personal Portable Possessions, Vol. 2, Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean 1500–1800. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
De Pagés, Pierre Marie François 1791 Travels Round the World in the Years 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, and 1771, Vol. 1, translated from French. J. Murray, London, England.
Ewen, Charles R. 1991 From Spaniard to Creole: The Archaeology of Hispanic American Cultural Transformations at Puerto Real, Haiti. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa.
Galloway, Patricia K. 1991 The Archaeology of the Ethnohistorical Narrative. In Colombian Consequences, Vol. 3, The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, David H. Thomas, editor, pp. 453–469. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.
Galloway, Patricia K. 1992 The Unexamined Habitus: Direct Historic Analogy and the Archaeology of the Text. In Representations in Archaeology, Jean-Claude Gardin and Christopher S. Peebles, editors, pp. 178–195. Indiana University Press, Lincoln.
García Saíz, Maria Concepcíon 1989 Las Castas Mexicanas: Un géneropictórico Americano (The Mexican Castas: A Genre of American Paintings). Olivetti, Mexico City, Mexico.
Greenblatt, Stephen 1984 Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Greenblatt, Stephen 1991 Marvelous Possessions: The Wonders of the New World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Gregory, Hiram F. 1973 Eighteenth-Century Caddoan Archaeology: A Study in Models and Interpretations. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.
Gregory, Hiram F. 1980 Excavations: 1979-Presidio de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Los Adaes Report. Manuscript, Williamson Museum, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA.
Gregory, Hiram F. 1983 Los Adaes: The Archaeology of an Ethnic Enclave. Geoscience and Man 23:53–57.
Gregory, Hiram F. 1984 Excavations 1982: Presidio de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Los Adaes (16Na16). Manuscript, Williamson Museum, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA.
Gregory, Hiram F. 1985 Excavations, Unit 227, Presidio Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Los Adaes (16Na16). Manuscript, Williamson Museum, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA.
Gregory, Hiram F., George Avery, Aubra L. Lee, and Jay C. Blaine 2004 Presidio Los Adaes: Spanish, French, and Caddoan Interaction on the Northern Frontier. Historical Archaeology 38(3):65–77.
Hackett, Charles Wilson 1934 Pichardo’s Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas, Vol. 3. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Hall, Martin 1992 Small Things and the Mobile, Conflictual Fusion of Power, Fear, and Desire. In The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz, Anne E. Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry, editors, pp. 373–399. CRC Press, Boca Raton, LA.
Hall, Martin 2000 Archaeology and the Modern World: Colonial Transcripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake. Routledge Press, London, England.
Helms, Mary 1994 Essay on Objects: Interpretations of Distance Made Tangible. In Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, S. B. Schwartz, editor, pp. 355–377. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England.
Hollander, Anne 1993 Seeing through Clothes. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Hunnicutt, Helen M. 1953 Béxar Archives Translations, Vol. 30. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Jackson, Jack 1995 Imaginary Kingdom: Texas as Seen by the Rivera and Rubi Military Expeditions, 1727 and 1767, Jack Jackson, translator and editor. Texas State Historical Association, Austin.
Katzew, Ilona 1996 Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico. In New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America, Ilona Katzew, editor, pp. 8–29. Americas Society Art Gallery, New York, NY.
Klor de Alva, J. Jorge 1996 El Mestizaje from New Spain to Aztlán: On the Control and Classification of Collective Identities. In New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America, Ilona Katzew, editor, pp. 58–71. Americas Society Art Gallery, New York, NY.
Loren, Diana DiPaolo 1999 Creating Social Distinction: Articulating Colonial Policies and Practices along the Eighteenth-Century Louisiana/Texas Frontier. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Binghamton. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.
Loren, Diana DiPaolo 2001a Manipulating Bodies and Emerging Traditions at the Los Adaes Presidio. In The Archaeology of Traditions: Agency and History before and after Columbus, Timothy R. Pauketat, editor, pp. 58–76. University of Florida Press, Gainesville.
Loren, Diana DiPaolo 2001b Social Skins: Orthodoxies and Practices of Dressing in the Early Colonial Lower Mississippi Valley. Journal of Social Archaeology 1(2):172–189.
Mann, Rob 2003 “True Portraitures of the Indians and of Their Own Peculiar Conceits of Dress”: Discourses of Dress and Identity in the Great Lakes, 1830–1850. Paper presented at the 36th Annual Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Providence, RI.
Pichardo, José Antonia 1931 Pichardo’s Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas: An Argumentative Historical Treatise with Reference to the Verification of the True Limits of the Provinces of Louisiana and Texas, Vol. 1, Charles Wilson Hackett, translator. University of Texas Press, Austin.
Pinney, Christopher 1997 Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
St. George, Robert Blair 2000 Introduction. In Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, Robert Blair St. George, editor, pp. 1–32. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Stahl, Ann Brower 1993 Concepts of Time and Approaches to Analogical Reasoning in the Historical Perspective. American Antiquity 58(2):235–260.
Stahl, Ann Brower 2002 Colonial Entanglements and the Practices of Taste: An Alternative to Logocentric Approaches. American Anthropologist 104(3):827–845.
Stoler, Ann Laura 1989 Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31(3): 134–161.
Wylie, Alison 1985 The Reaction against Analogy. In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 8, Michael B. Schiffer, editor, pp. 63–111. Academic Press, New York, NY.
Wylie, Alison 1988 Simple Analogy and the Role of Relevance Assumptions: Implications of Archaeological Practice. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2(2):134–150.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Loren, D.D. Corporeal Concerns: Eighteenth-Century Casta Paintings and Colonial Bodies in Spanish Texas. Hist Arch 41, 23–36 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376991
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376991