AT THE BACK OF THE BUS WITH THE ”TRAGIC MULATTO”
There is a myth of the ”Tragic Mulatto”….While the Spanish and Portuguese colonies had an intricate system of classifying racially diverse people and incorporating them into society, the English colonies did not create a system of ranking race. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies had worked their glossary of terms into their laws in order to distinguish how each classification would be considered before the law. The only reason English laws ever included the term mulatto was to establish that racially mixed blood did not exempt a person from slavery. In Central and South America, a process had been developed which slowly turned the descendants Negroes into white men. In the English colonies there was a firm barrier between whites and those of Negro ancestry. However, once a person had so little Negro blood remaining that they appeared white, society was forced to accept them as white.( Mike Pesant )
Captain Bernardo O’Higgins 1820
…If the Spaniards , during their three hundred years of colonial dominance in Latin America, ruthlessly wrecked the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs, mayas and Incas, for better and worse, they at least, with the overthrow of institutionalized paganism, laid the foundations of a new culture that would survive the various revolutions of the early nineteenth century and eventually develop its own nationalist colorations. Artistically, this culture adhered, until the Mexican renaissance of the 1930′s, fairly close to the European Beaux-Arts tradition, complete with salons and government subsidization.
José Gil de Castro (1785 - 1841) Simon Bolivar
But at the moment of revolt, it provided the revolutionary movement with intellectuals, administrators, and even painters like Peru’s Jose Gilde Castro to record the dramatis personae of the liberation.Known as ”El Mulatto ” Gil de Castro, of African and Spanish origin, rejected the concurrent trends of neo-classicism and romanticism and developed the first consistent art style of the republican movement in Latin America. Direct, naive, and openly admiring of his subjects, he combined a fastidious attention to the details of military dress; including the elaborate medal that the great Chiloean liberator Jose de San Martin received for winning the decisive battle of Chacabuco; with a patriotic fervor that helped him to recreate the famous ”glance of an eagle” of Simon Bolivar, ”the Liberator”, whom he probably painted from a French lithograph.
www.artexpertswebsite.com: ''In those days he painted a number of religious works including the Our Lady of Mercy (1815) and portraits of prominent ladies of the high society. In the 1820s José Gil de Castro, known as “the Mulatto,” rendered the heroes of Peruvian independence in a precise but boldly flattened and brightly colored documentary style with little emotional expression. These works often reflect the colonial portrait formula of including a shield with documentary information in the lower corner of the painting. When he returned to Peru in 1822, he designed the army uniform and painted portraits of leaders of the Independence movement like O'Higgins, San Martin and Bolivar, among others.''
These same highly stylized elements are evident in Gil de Castro,s portrait of the Peruvian martyr Jose Olaya. An Indian fisherman-patriot, Olaya achieved martyrdom in 1823, as the cartouche explains, by preferring death to betrayal. Captured by the Spaniards after he swam seven miles across the bay from Callao to Lima, he swallowed the message he was carrying and refused to inform on his fellow conspirators, even though he was tortured. Olaya is portrayed in festival finery and standing before the cliffs of his birthplace, Chorillos, still clutching the letter he was to deliver to the illustrious Senor Grand Marshal Jose Bernardo Tagle, the Lima patriot leader.
Jose Gil de Castro, Martyr Olaya, 1823. Oil on canvas, 104 x 134 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Lima.
Born in the last decades of the Vice-royalty, Gil de Castro became the official portraitist of Chilean society in the revolutionary period. In addition to painting most of the folk heroes of the time, he served as an artillery captain in Bernardo O’Higgens’s Chilean Independence Army. Beyond that, little is known about him. The experts have still not decided whether he was self-taught or apprenticed to a master of the old colonial school in Lima, or a combination of the two, since as a mulatto he was removed from elite startus in the caste system. Even the date of his death, about 1841, is in much doubt; whether he was disappointed that the revolution did not deliver the pluralistic society it was designed to is lost to history. What is not in doubt is his importance as a painter in a vital and varied art epoch that has been generally neglected outside Latin America.
”In the history of Latin America over the last 500 years or so, the relationships among three races have been a key factor. In the beginning, there were the various indigenous groups. Then came the European colonizers, who later brought black slaves from Africa. The relationships among these racial groups have at times been tumultuous — war, slaughter, subjugation, slavery, exploitation, miscegenation, …
Castro
The administration of the vast colonies was placed in the hands of nationals of the European empires. These administrators were rewarded estates for their efforts, and naturally inheritance rights became a significant issue. As a male may have multiple children with multiple women, the rights of these apparent heirs have to be defined, particularly when some of the mothers were not pure Europeans. Under Spanish rule, the following detailed caste system was instituted in Mexico at one time.
Mestizo: Spanish father and Indian mother
Castizo: Spanish father and Mestizo mother
Espomolo: Spanish mother and Castizo father
Mulatto: Spanish and black African
Moor: Spanish and Mulatto
Albino: Spanish father and Moor mother
Throwback: Spanish father and Albino mother
Wolf: Throwback father and Indian mother
Zambiago: Wolf father and Indian mother
Cambujo: Zambiago father and Indian mother
Alvarazado: Cambujo father and Mulatto mother
Borquino: Alvarazado father and Mulatto mother
Coyote: Borquino father and Mulatto mother
Chamizo: Coyote father and Mulatto mother
Coyote-Mestizo: Cahmizo father and Mestizo mother
Ahi Tan Estas: Coyote-Mestizo father and Mulatto mother
To us, this does seem to be a obsessive-compulsive behavior of an extreme sort. Today, the overt caste systems have been overturned by legislation, but that does not mean that social prejudices and economic exploitation are not present. Even though overt racial oppression is no longer permissible by law, people may still hold personal opinions about members of other races based upon preconceived notions.”
”By now, you’ve likely heard about the Louisiana justice of peace who recently denied an interracial couple a marriage license. The justice’s move has sparked public outcry.After all, no matter his opinions on interracial unions, it’s no longer illegal for mixed couples to marry. Therefore, Keith Bardwell, the justice of peace in question, overstepped his bounds by refusing a marriage license to Terence McKay, who is black, and Beth Humphrey, who is white. Quotes attributed to Bardwell suggest that the justice considers his refusal to grant McKay and Humphrey a marriage license to be an act of conscience.
According to MSNBC.com, Bardwell said, “I don’t do interracial marriages because I don’t want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves. In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer.” Bardwell also commented that he feels neither blacks nor whites accept the children produced by interracial unions. He shrunk away from the suggestion that racism motivated his actions.
“I’m not a racist,” he told the Associated Press. “I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way. I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.” ( Nadra Kareem )
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