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Description
As a result of colonial global commerce and the transatlantic slave trade, an increasing mulato/a population emerged creating an expanding social hierarchy in colonial Latin America. A mulata in this time and place is defined as a female born of African and Spanish ancestry or of African and Portuguese ancestry. It is estimated that approximately 250,000 to 500,000 Africans were brought to Mexico as slaves. Cuba also experienced an economic boom due to the insatiable sweet tooth of Western Europe. This strategically located island demanded a sophisticated system of engineering to process the sugar cane, as well as, a plantation system of slavery that increasingly required more slaves from Africa. Yet, the contributions regarding art historical discussions of mulatas in colonial Latin American art have been sparse providing few considerations of gender, race, or sexuality. Mulatas traversed a tempestuous sea of increasing fear and anxiety by the Spanish elite, as well as, struggled with gendered subjectivity and the inscribed image of the mulata body. These efforts to control are seen in the casta paintings of Mexico and on the cover of cigar boxes called marquillas in Cuba. The mulata is portrayed stereotypically as a mythically oversexed siren and sometimes as a subject of domestic tranquility. While I examine casta paintings servicing as propaganda for the crown to discourage mestizaje or miscegenation as a means of controlling its population, this thesis also examines the possibility of a less myopic approach by examining themes of sexuality, religious morality, and colonial psychosexual tropes of domination. I also examine the mulata body as a sign signifying the proto-nationalist through racial syncretism and religious iconic imagery in Cuba where she is represented and dually worshipped both as Catholicism's Virgen de la Caridad and as Santeria's Orixa Ochu_n. While examining themes of apparitions in the Marian tradition I also introduce a case divergent from this tradition in Brazil's Assumption of the Virgin, with King David and angelic choir. I am interested in locating modes of relation to the self, which in the case of mulatas also includes discussing different domains of knowledge such as slavery, manumission, domestic employment, and courtesanry. This work examines techniques of power and "governmentality" in the everyday lives of mulatas who used their bodies, mysticism, magics, and other domains of knowledge to liberate themselves. By focusing exclusively on the mulata body, there is an intentional recognition, a resuscitation of a body that has been somewhat trivialized or caricaturized in the hegemony of the social imaginary.
