CLAUDIO DICOCHEA: REMASTERED
The current work is a series of contemporary caste or “casta” paintings. Casta
painting was popularized as a genre during the 18th century in colonial-Mexico.
Originally meant to record the racial mixing taking place in the New World,
these paintings came in sets that depicted different families from lightest-skinned
to darkest-skinned, very much like a table of elements. The darker-skinned the
parents were, however, the more socially and biologically degenerate the child
was considered, making racial cross-breeding a real problem in the Euro-
colonialist project of empire-building. Still, miscegenation between Europeans,
Native Americans, and Africans was common in the early Americas, though not
always consensual. Mestizaje, as well as the concept of “mixed races,” were born
from this. In response to these developments in cross-racialization, Spaniards
created taxonomic hierarchies to organize the new colonial social structure.
Paintings were commissioned to illustrate and explain the new classificatory
scheme. Their primary audience was European.
My research has inspired me to re-examine this genre in an effort to see how
genealogy, sexual desire, and poverty affect our own structuring of identity. Each
painting takes an original casta as a template to be distorted, in which original
characters are replaced by archetypes from popular media, comics, and world
history. Similar to global music, fusion, or hip-hop, these works lift and sample
from original paintings in order to understand the processes and effects of re-
appropriation. In this manner, we can better understand how such re-
appropriation functions as both a language and a method.
There are several differences between an original casta painting and the ones I am
producing. To begin with, the original sets began with the lightest-skinned
progressing toward the darkest-skinned. The sets located white Spanish males as
a racial ideal, with the conquered Native and African slave being at the end. This
was significant for two reasons. First, the privileged positioning of the Spanish
male established a phallocentric order where the white phallus is expected to
penetrate the dark womb of the lower-ranking racial other, which is specifically
feminized. This symbolism legitimized European conquest as biological or
natural. Secondly, it established a racial order in which skin pigmentation carried
a qualitative measure—the darker one was, the less human one was deemed to be.
The work before you inverts this racial ordering by only depicting unions
between white women and dark men. In place of a hierarchy there is a horizontal
field of endless relationships between the primitive other and the feminine other,
with the figures of the white mother and the dark father masked in stereotypes.
Consequently, the child becomes the product of two racial signifiers reproducing.
But what happens next? What do stereotypes reproduce?
My understanding of art as an emancipatory force leads me to believe that, by re-
contextualizing these visual stereotypes through old casta paintings, their
meaning can be dismantled and broken loose from clichéd identities, thus moving
us towards a different awareness and, ideally, towards socio-political agency. In
that light, remaking old casta paintings is a critique of the role visual arts have
played, and continue playing, in shaping the social constructs of race, gender, and
class. In rearticulating the complicit relationship between 18th century artistic
production and the intellectual regime of the Enlightenment, we can begin
uncovering the dominant ideological structures that guide the work we do today.
painting was popularized as a genre during the 18th century in colonial-Mexico.
Originally meant to record the racial mixing taking place in the New World,
these paintings came in sets that depicted different families from lightest-skinned
to darkest-skinned, very much like a table of elements. The darker-skinned the
parents were, however, the more socially and biologically degenerate the child
was considered, making racial cross-breeding a real problem in the Euro-
colonialist project of empire-building. Still, miscegenation between Europeans,
Native Americans, and Africans was common in the early Americas, though not
always consensual. Mestizaje, as well as the concept of “mixed races,” were born
from this. In response to these developments in cross-racialization, Spaniards
created taxonomic hierarchies to organize the new colonial social structure.
Paintings were commissioned to illustrate and explain the new classificatory
scheme. Their primary audience was European.
My research has inspired me to re-examine this genre in an effort to see how
genealogy, sexual desire, and poverty affect our own structuring of identity. Each
painting takes an original casta as a template to be distorted, in which original
characters are replaced by archetypes from popular media, comics, and world
history. Similar to global music, fusion, or hip-hop, these works lift and sample
from original paintings in order to understand the processes and effects of re-
appropriation. In this manner, we can better understand how such re-
appropriation functions as both a language and a method.
There are several differences between an original casta painting and the ones I am
producing. To begin with, the original sets began with the lightest-skinned
progressing toward the darkest-skinned. The sets located white Spanish males as
a racial ideal, with the conquered Native and African slave being at the end. This
was significant for two reasons. First, the privileged positioning of the Spanish
male established a phallocentric order where the white phallus is expected to
penetrate the dark womb of the lower-ranking racial other, which is specifically
feminized. This symbolism legitimized European conquest as biological or
natural. Secondly, it established a racial order in which skin pigmentation carried
a qualitative measure—the darker one was, the less human one was deemed to be.
The work before you inverts this racial ordering by only depicting unions
between white women and dark men. In place of a hierarchy there is a horizontal
field of endless relationships between the primitive other and the feminine other,
with the figures of the white mother and the dark father masked in stereotypes.
Consequently, the child becomes the product of two racial signifiers reproducing.
But what happens next? What do stereotypes reproduce?
My understanding of art as an emancipatory force leads me to believe that, by re-
contextualizing these visual stereotypes through old casta paintings, their
meaning can be dismantled and broken loose from clichéd identities, thus moving
us towards a different awareness and, ideally, towards socio-political agency. In
that light, remaking old casta paintings is a critique of the role visual arts have
played, and continue playing, in shaping the social constructs of race, gender, and
class. In rearticulating the complicit relationship between 18th century artistic
production and the intellectual regime of the Enlightenment, we can begin
uncovering the dominant ideological structures that guide the work we do today.
