The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500-1600. Amazon link here.
I still haven’t finished reading Russo’s book, but it’s a measure of the value it has for me that a quick perusal of the last chapter persuaded me to ::sotto voce:: copy it. It was either that or incur the wrath of the good people at the U. of Kansas’ Watson Library’s interlibrary loan department for being late in getting their book back to them. Anyone who likes Serge Gruzinski’s book The Mestizo Mind (an important book for Russo’s work) and/or is looking for a very different way of looking at and thinking about the artistic production of New Spain in its first century will want to look at this book.
Given that Russo’s book’s coverage ends where it does, she does not mention casta paintings. However, as I have thought about her close, attentive discussions of maps serving as not only accurate renderings of physical space but also as their indigenous or mestizo makers’ attempts to make new, conceptual sense of their home, which, now that the Spaniards have arrived, has caused their land to be turned upside-down (a phrase she quotes at least two indigenous and mestizo chroniclers as using), it occurs to me that we could also discuss casta paintings in those same terms. They, too, were made mostly by mixed-race people; they, too, were the visual records of a Crown-sanctioned attempt to impose order on a bewildering variety of racial combinations; and/but they, too, they seem to be about more than the business of reinforcing the Crown’s legal, political, and social hierarchies. (This seems especially true of the paintings done toward the end of the colonial period.) In other words, the casta paintings can be said to serve as kinds of maps, as well, complete with “directions” (in the form of the names of some of the different castas), that also reflect at some level their makers’ own sensibilities as they paint people whose racial types they know–indeed, as they occasionally paint their own racial types–types, moreover, that didn’t exist before the arrival of Europeans and, later, people of African descent.
Below the fold, I have examples of three casta paintings that I hope will help illustrate what I am getting at.
Domestic Issue 
