Natural’s Not in It: Cultivating Casta in the Late Viceregal Alameda Central
Figure 1. De Albina y Español, produce Negro torna atrás, late eighteenth century. Oil on copper, 18 1/8 x 21 5/8 inches (46 x 55 cm)
What is a painting doing here? Or, better put, why introduce a painting into a conversation about buildings, spaces, and landscapes? Without loss of specificity but for the sake of argument, let's consider this painting—painted on copper sometime around the close of the eighteenth century by a person or persons now unknown to us, likely based in Mexico City and working for a peninsular Spanish client, and conventionally titled after the phrase spelled out on its bottom-center cartouche, De Albina y Español, produce Negro torna atrás—and its landscape: Mexico City's Alameda Central.
That, in brief, is what this is, but now what does it do? Or, more specifically, what does it do for us, people thinking about buildings, spaces, and landscapes in 2024? One: a painting, this painting can offer visual documentation of a landscape, allowing us imagined access to a space as it may have appeared at a moment now passed. Such a use could be pressing, even poignant, when the space in question is no longer extant. That's not the case here. If I simply wanted to make claims about the Alameda, l would likely be better served by walking its paseos in person.
To be fair, these take somewhat different contours than they did at the end of the eighteenth century, but if I wanted to curtail my comments to a historical study, there exist other, more conventionally reliable evidentiary sources on the late colonial Alameda. You could trace its 1769 expansion, for example, through archival documents authorizing the city's expropriation of land formerly set aside for the Inquisition's fieriest sentences or the raft of maps produced during this heyday of Enlightened letradismo.
But painting—a medium with a famously fluid relation to veracity—and this painting—which seems to take special, vertiginous delight in the spatial play of painterly perspective—do something different. To come to what and why: a brief history lesson. Largely, what we have here is a kind of veduta: a topographic image of a city or otherwise-built environment (that is to say, not self-consciously a landscape).
Italian nomenclatural stylings notwithstanding, vedute are common enough across the globe during this period. Our first clue that something less-than-common is happening here, however, comes courtesy of the proffered vantage: it's not quite the classical topographic description from a bird's eye but nor is it immersive, on the street reportage. We're close enough to observe with some degree of anecdotal detail these people and their space but distanced enough that there's no threat of imagined contact.
What this separate but spectacular middle distance provides is a clear view of a woman, child, and man in the bottom-left corner. Not only compositionally but also iconographically, this is a painting about vision. If the man's anteojo (telescope, or literally, “before the eye”) wasn't enough to clue us in that he and his companions ought to be the focus of our gaze, the trio’s placement on a mirador overlooking the Alameda seals the deal.
Figure 2. Cuadro de Castas, eighteenth century. Oil on canvas
Visibility—or, rather, an imagined crisis of visibility—is also central to the familial drama spelled out in the painting’s caption. This signals that what we have here is a cuadro de casta, or casta painting. Imagine the rhythmic regularity of your high school Punnett squares crossed with the prurient pleasures of contested paternity reveals: that’s roughly the remit of these images, which saw their relatively brief flourishing during the final century of Spanish colonial dominion in the Americas. With a kind of pseudoscientific smugness, a series of generally sixteen images would march out the possible combinations of different racial categories (castas) present in what is now Mexico (and in one rare instance, Peru). Casta paintings did not just report back to Madrid's powerful and prurient real-time conditions of racial mixing; rather, these images actively constructed casta as cultural reality: what they re-present is just about as “natural” as a landscape largely reclaimed from a lake and neatly partitioned into twenty-four triangular parterres.
In this painting, we’ve arrived at the plot twist culminating a sequence of unions among “Spanish” and Black persons. Unlike a parallel sequence unspooling the unions of Spanish and indigenous American persons, this does not end with the providential whitening of its final subject but rather a “returned” child of color born to a Spanish and white-presenting couple. The physiognomic implausibility of such a scenario paled in comparison to its reassuring resonance with Jeremiah’s rhetorical inquiry into the immutability of the AEthiop’s skin or, closer to home, ongoing unease over the latent threat of false conversos (in fact, within the sistema de castas, the mother of an albina, like our lady in red here, is a morisca).[1] Thus, the casta trio in our painting allegorizes a crisis of visibility: that is, the unreliability of vision to provide perfect clarity into limpieza de sangre (purity of blood).
It's possible to trace the life journey or provenance of this and other cuadros de casta only in the most general terms: It’s probable, then, that a Mexico City painter or painters created this and fifteen accompanying panels for patrons in Spain or a viceregal functionary heading back that way (this might help to explain the copper substrate, valued in the period for its durability through overland and oceanic travel). And it’s in facilitating the transatlantic, intra-imperial travel of the Alameda—or, at least, a pictorial proxy thereof—that this painting proves its compelling worth to a conversation about space, landscape, and their interpolation in the construction of race.
There exists a robust and incisive literature analyzing the work of gardens and other designed landscapes in early modern colonial empires: Put (overly) simply: gardening on stolen land is a power move; it defies the logic of colonization based in profit—seizure of lands for the saleable products they provide—by insisting, superficially, on its own purposefully purpose-less-ness. This is not the extraction of resources from the land but rather an investment of capital and (generally other people's) labor into its improvement with no expectation of a conventional capital return. The establishment and maintenance of the Alameda by Spanish colonial authorities beginning in 1592 (making it the first post-conquest public park in the Americas) certainly fits snuggly within this framing.
“Casta paintings did not just report back to Madrid’s powerful and prurient real-time conditions of racial mixing; rather, these images actively constructed casta as cultural reality: what they represent is just about as “natural” as a landscape largely reclaimed from a lake and neatly partitioned into twenty-four triangular parterres.”
Figure 3. Plano de la ciudad de México mostrando su división en cuarteles mayores y menores, 1782. Engraving, 29.5 x 26.5 cm
For instance, within a half-dozen years of the establishment of the Alameda for the public life and recreation of the city’s “vecinos” (citizens), the viceroy demanded an architectural solution enshrining it as a “private place guarded and fenced by a sufficient ditch,” encircled with fencing and accessible through a single entrance and exit equipped with a “secure and permanent fixed key and lock”—all to keep out “horses, other beasts, and herd animals large and small,” of course (Atas del Cabildo, 1896). Even a century on, our painter takes delight in these edifices, rimming the park plane with fastidiously delineated ironwork punctuated by passages of white stuff extending upward into elegantly elongated crenellations (in a pattern common to the policing of public space through the present, when these built interventions failed to achieve their discriminating aims, successive civic administrations would pass legal ordinances barring “all kinds of blanketed people, beggars, the barefoot, nude, and indecent.”)
But the construction of sufficient ditches and walls and other world-building acts of colonial landscaping are—without the second-order intervention of mobile visual analogies like this one—limited in their effects to a relatively small, geographically curtailed audience: those moving through, around, or at least eyeballing the space. But if you chop down a tree in the forest to prove your proprietorship and only the remnants of the people you dispossessed of that forest and a small smattering of your fellow settlers see.
Figure 4. Biombo de La Conquista de México y Vista de la Ciudad de México, late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Oil on canvas and gold leaf
I’m of the mind that one might profitably delineate any number of paintings and prints via a similar line of reasoning. It’s a two-step operation: complementing the physical seizure and architectonic terraforming of stolen land with translation into a mobile imaginary capable of bringing a little piece of empire home for European audiences. But what’s generous about this image as a starter is that it says the quiet part aloud: literally painting a scene of racecrafting into the corner of an image of the Alameda as well-ordered walled garden for transport from colonial outpost to metropole. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Alameda as an actually existing landscape evinced the accretion of generations of built interventions dedicated to the imposition and maintenance of order on racialized bodies. This conjunction of a casta scene—the ultimate fearful fantasy of colonial racial disorder made flesh—with a landscape view that takes subtle formal delight in the very artificiality of the scene it portrays provided an audience far removed from the spatial reality of the Spanish colonial project in the Americas a unique understanding of the Alameda’s role as public proving ground for the construction of racial hegemony and control.
Notes
[1] The repurposing of the label “morisca” in colonial Mexico's sistema de castas to refer to not necessarily a female “Moor” or a Muslim woman but rather the daughter of a (white) Spanish and biracial union points to the slipperiness of social categorization and ideas of race between religion and geographic origin on both sides of Spain’s early modern empire.
Citation
Emily E. Mangione, “Natural’s Not in It: Cultivating Casta in the Late Viceregal Alameda Central,” PLATFORM, October 7, 2024.
