To argue that a good work of art ought to faithfully, that is, realistically depict a concrete referent in the world is to lose sight of the fact this “realism” itself is inextricably linked to an interpretative process— the artist taking, or understanding the world to be a certain way. To speak of the artist’s representation of a given landscape, for example, is to speak concurrently of that artist’s production of it. This production is not, indeed cannot be, value-neutral since it both informs and is informed by socio-historical determinations. This is especially the case for a work of art—or more generally an artistic genre— whose object is indeterminate due to its constitutive otherness. And yet, this unrepresentability, far from inducing silence, is precisely that which draws artists towards the object in hordes. The representation of the unrepresentable, in this case, is not an exercise in artistic inventiveness or creativity, but rather has an explicitly political purpose. This is less a penchant to represent than categorize— it thus attempts to quell the artists—that is, a given cultures— anxieties about the objects essential slipperiness, its refusal to be reconciled with that which already exists. This object, then, can be used — for the purposes of the artist—to adumbrate the social mores of that culture. One can, for example, look at casta paintings in order to better understand the racial prejudices and hierarchies that were prevalent in New Spain at the time of their production. The depiction of social fixity in casta paintings, however, belied a society that, as R. Douglas Cope argues in The Limits of Racial Domination, “retained much…cultural autonomy” to such an extent, in fact, that Indigenous peoples employed “highly localized ethnic referents as late as the eighteenth century” (Cope, 4-5). These paintings, then, were not simply symbolizing already-existing racial categories so much as attempting to establish an epistemological grid through which fixed social identities could be ascribed to persons begotten of inter-ethnic or inter-racial marriages so that this cultural autonomy could be resisted. Casta paintings assuage and calm the colonist by providing the illusion that everything is under control— nothing escapes the watchful eye of the artist. In this essay, I will discuss three casta paintings in light of their contemporary reception (as well as the prejudices that gave birth to them) in Thrall, allowing the aforementioned themes to guide my analysis.

Trethewey deftly unsettles the narrative structure of various casta paintings through poetry that speaks an unwritten, that is, unrepresented history. She speaks in Taxonomy, for example, through and of various persons depicted in casta paintings— “the morisca, the lobo, the chino,/ sambo, albino” (Trethewey). These are, to be sure, for the colonists, scientific categories; a veritable “[g]uidebook to the colony”, scrupulously kept, in which everyone has his place, as it were. There is no room for doubt or error in such a system. The poem continues and the reader is confronted with a line-break after the cataloging of various “mixed bloods”, perhaps expecting the list to continue into the next stanza, but, Trethewey instead writes “the no-te-entiendo—the/ I don’t understand you (Trethewey). One should not understand Trethewey here as simply refusing these categories. Her argument is far more radical. The “I don’t understand you” — this absolute unintelligibility— is immanent to the naming process itself. The emphasis should be placed on the “the” that precedes “I don’t understand you” since it is on the basis of this article that the reader knows that “I don’t understand you” is not an assertion but actually denotes a subject position. “The I don’t understand you” in fact completes the list rather than straightforwardly rejects it. Is Trethewey, then, acquiescing to the colonists’ categories? This is far from the case. It is precisely in completing the list that Trethewey reveals its constitutive, ineradicable incompleteness. As such, Trethewey herself does not aspire, in her poetry, to completeness. She recognizes that this seemingly hopeful counter-narrative is, at its base, a mangled appropriation of the colonist’s own methods. She thus rejects the simplifying hopefulness of counter-narrative by forwarding instead a critical register of hope. Her words, as Olga Dugan argues in Renegade Poetics, Southscapes, and the Poetry of History in Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall”, “prick and wound without necessarily coming together as an orderly and healing whole” (Dugan, 314).

The colonist might dream of wholeness, a perfect system, but will always be at least one category shy of his dream, since this category is simultaneously the system’s condition of possibility and impossibility. It is its condition of possibility insofar that it allows the colonist to begin the naming process, to metabolize difference. But it is also its condition of impossibility since it never allows the colonist to finish this process. If this system has a telos, it is one that is essentially comic: the final category reached— “the I don’t understand you” — reveals the ridiculousness of assuming that one might ever reach a final category. She thus restores a sort of revolutionary dignity to the colonized: they are, in such a system, an Other awaiting metabolization, but they also herald the news that this metabolization is to be eternally deferred. Colonial society can know no (epistemological) peace in the face of its Other, which it itself posits. It is in this sense that Trethewey rejects the “catalog of mixed bloods” and critically approaches casta paintings (Trethewey). She rehabilitates not the paintings themselves but the subjects depicted therein. Indeed, one could argue, as Joseph Millichap does in ““Love and Knowledge”: Daughters and Fathers in Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall” that “Thrall becomes Trethewey’s own book of castas” (Millichap, 195). But this rehabilitation, as mentioned above, is carried out in an entirely negative and critical way: she does not offer “putatively “positive” images as a counter to racist taxonomy. Instead, she exposes the process of “seeing blackness” as the central problem” (Jones, 408).

Take, for example, the painting “From Cambujo and Mulatta, an Albarazo is Born” and the manner in which Blackness is depicted in it— the family is shown to be devoid of all dignity, in a state of desperate penury. Casta paintings often depict a domestic setting— and, provided that a Spanish individual is present in the painting, this setting is quite lavish. The family in this painting however— composed of a Cambujo, Mulatta, and an Albarazo— are permanently homeless. The absence of the Spanish, that is, of whiteness, is the absence of a domestic space. The colonized can only occupy the margins of society, eternally wandering. To wander these physical margins is to also occupy the outskirts of culture itself: the colonized have no time for creative pursuits, they are too busy surviving. Notice, for example, the (presumably Spanish) couple playing guitar in the background of the painting. This, of course, is to be contrasted with the couple in the foreground who are in tattered, worn clothes. Even their child, with outstretched arms, hesitates to join them— such is, according to this painting, the fate of a union between two people of darker complexion.

Is this fate radically altered if one of the members of the family were Spanish? This is a question answered by the painting “From Spanish and Black, Mulatta is Born”. Depicted in this painting is violent marital conflict. The Spanish man’s Black wife is grabbing him by the locks of his hairs and wields a kitchen utensil in her other hand in order to strike him. The man is visibly shocked and attempts to distance himself from his wife. Their daughter is in distress and begs for her mother to calm down. This painting, very clearly, serves as a warning. It admonishes the Spanish man who could be so foolish as to marry a Black woman, essentially proclaiming, “if you are to go down this path, expect nothing less!”. The in-born savage nature of the mother— who knows nothing but strife— is demonstrated to be hostile to a domestic, idyllic life. Both of these paintings are thus very similar since they condemn most harshly those marriages that are deemed undesirable. In the first painting, the possibility of such a couple ever entering civil society is immediately foreclosed. In the second, the consequences of forcing such an entry is demonstrated in the form of a discordant marriage— one cannot expect, so the painting tells us, a harmonious union between a savage and an individual endowed with a pure soul. The colonized subjects, in both paintings, are captives of the colonial imagination, their inferiority presented as though it were a natural fact.

How, then, does Trethewey begin the rehabilitative process? In On Captivity, Trethewey reveals that far from being natural, this order is one that is completely contingent and violently enforced. She does this by describing a historical event in which the roles are reversed, so to speak. The “savage” is now the master, whereas the former masters are captives whose bodies are “rendered/plain as the natives” (Trethewey). Is it possible to speak of the natural inferiority, the cowardice, of the settlers in this scenario? Or have they simply found themselves— through no fault of their own— in unfavorable circumstances? Trethewey does not spend any time spewing vitriol or exacting poetic revenge. Nor does she sympathize with the captive settlers. She only observes the irony of their situation. If, in “From Cambujo and Mulatta, an Albarazo is Born”, the family is shown to wear the simplest of clothes, it is in On Captivity that the settlers find themselves in a far more scandalous position— utter nakedness. Was it not in a similar state of nakedness that the settlers first encountered the Natives? Was this lack of propriety not taken as the greatest offense to European sensibilities? Did it not require that the European bring the Native to knowledge of the truth of the Bible? One can read On Captivity—essentially a meditation about the fortuitous swapping of roles— as a speculative response to these questions. Now it is the all-mighty Europeans— not the Native— who, “Naked as newborns” are “brought to knowledge” (Trethewey). And what is the settlers only recourse in such a situation? He has no choice but to cover himself with “the torn leaves of Genesis” (Trethewey). Those hallowed pages that spurred the European on in his effort to civilize the wretched now hang from his naked body. He finds himself in a state that he sought to purge from the world.

There is, however, one might argue, to the painting “From Spanish and Mestiza, Castiza is Born” an almost redemptive quality. It is not a representation of poverty nor marital conflict. Rather, one observes an elegantly clothed couple. The Spanish husband points beyond, carrying a rifle on his shoulder. Here we have a portrait of the vigorous, restless conquistador who ventures into the unknown. The wife bows her head obligingly, holding her daughter to her breast. This painting, one might continue, finally represents Indigeneity in a good light. Trethewey criticizes this position in the poem Taxonomy. That the Spanish admit someone of Indigenous ancestry into their ranks does not speak to their emancipatory ambitions. The Mestiza is only tolerated because she has Spanish blood, and can be used for the purposes of re-introducing purity back into a bloodline: “from a Spaniard and an Indian/a mestizo;/ from a mestizo and a Spaniard,/ a castizo;/ from a castizo and a Spaniard,/ a Spaniard” (Trethewey). The mestiza and her daughter, the castiza, are instrumentalized for this purpose. If she is tolerated it is only because she bears this potential, and must be coaxed into actualizing it— she is purity twice removed. She is tolerated insofar as she promises her own negation. She gives birth not to someone like herself, but someone who heralds this negation, who is one step closer to attaining the wholeness of purity. She gives birth, then, so that there is no longer anyone like her. She is caught in a system that is “unethical… due to a propensity to exert power over the Other, defining and thus reducing the Other to what she is not, annihilating difference” (Valenzuela-Mendoza, 338). It is this absence of a proper ethical relation (in the Levinasian sense), as Valenzuela-Mendoza argues, that results in the instrumentalization of the mestiza mother, her being treated as an object. The castiza, too, is in the most precarious of situations. There is, for her, no “[anxious balance] between love and knowledge”, since the self-annihilating knowledge she bears does not “[incline] towards love” — she can never know maternal love because she is required to “turn toward the father… to the promise of blood… to purity” which is only “one generation away” (Millichamp, 196; Trethewey). In doing so, she slips from “her mother’s careful grip” (Trethewey). This painting, far from representing Indigeneity in a good light, reproduces “the mind of the colony” (Trethewey).

Casta paintings, then, were in a sense, a guide on how to navigate unprecedented difference in a community— a propaedeutic for discerning “purity” amidst innumerable so-called impure persons. To read them differently, to look for signs in them of an emancipatory logic, is something that Trethewey, in Thrall, sternly warns against. One must instead turn to Indigenous art if one searches for a site of resistance.

Works Cited

Cope, R. Douglas. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720. University of Wisconsin Press, 2010.

Eloisa Valenzuela-Mendoza (2019) ‘The wages of empire’: American inventions of mixed-race identities and Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012), African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 12:3, 337-354, DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2019.1611321

Trethewey, Natasha D. Thrall: Poems. Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

JONES, META DUEWA. “REFRAMING EXPOSURE: NATASHA TRETHEWEY’S FORMS OF ENCLOSURE.” ELH, vol. 82, no. 2, 2015, pp. 407–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24477792. Accessed 26 Mar. 2023.

Millichap, J. (2013). “Love and knowledge”: Daughters and fathers in natasha trethewey’s thrall. Southern Quarterly, 50(4), 189-207,224. Retrieved from http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2Flove-knowledge-daughters-fathers-natasha%2Fdocview%2F1464666755%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D14771

Olga Dugan. “RENEGADE POETICS, SOUTHSCAPES, AND THE POETRY OF HISTORY IN NATASHA TRETHEWEY’S THRALL.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 98, no. 2, 2013, pp. 304–19. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.98.2.0304. Accessed 26 Mar. 2023.