A Crillo Mestizo and Mulatto Mosaic
Transcript of A Crillo Mestizo and Mulatto Mosaic
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic:
Crossing Indigenous, European and African representations, images and murals
A paper on Latin American Anthropology
By
Nadia Arbelo, PhD Candidate
Philosophy & Theory of Visual Culture
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Introduction
Anthropology, the study of human beings from origin to the present, divides into many sub-
disciplines, often disparate, at times convergent. As a doctoral student in the interdisciplinary
Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture program, with a limited anthropology background, this
paper will necessarily only touch the surface of that discipline. When its philosophical groundings,
and theoretical approaches cross over into other humanities and social sciences, this research will
seek to find and use such convergences. It also assumes that anthropological studies of Art divide
into subfields of both Social and Cultural Anthropology. Focusing on primary and secondary
source readings from literature on Latin America as a whole, to specific geographical regions, and
with relevance to visual culture, this research will take a holistic and reflexive approach. It will
draw on sources from across disciplines with direct relevance to cultural, social, and political-
economic backgrounds of Latin American Arts.
The work will focus on constructing a solid foundation of background knowledge necessary to
examine public arts, murals in particular (wall arts) as images intended to represent a cross section
of historical, socio-cultural, and political-economic issues. Such art works also assume a high
degree of relevancy to specific peoples, times and places, but may also relate to broader global
issues, such as race, class, colonialism, and oppression. The Revolutionary Cuban concept of
Tricontinental, exemplifies the symbolic alignment of the peoples of Africa, Asia and America del
Sur, still struggling for independence or liberation from under neo-colonial hegemony. While the
study must necessarily address aspects of pre-colonial indigenous imagery and their impacts on
post-colonial murals, it will only take a surface look at archaeological or anthropological work on
what they represent, as more would exceed the research frame. This study will, therefore, only
examine such historical elements that have impacts on contemporary production of mural art. To a
lesser degree it will examine influences from the colonial era, but primarily focus on post-colonial
and national production of public arts, particularly murals, but also some sculpture. It will also
include limited references to literary, theatrical, and cinematic arts as they refer to, or are relevant
to, public visual art. From the colonial era on, artistic production throughout the continent and
surrounding regions has predominantly used European art traditions, methods and materials, with
only limited indigenous influences other than in symbolic content.
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Identifying key Anthropological elements in this work, it draws primarily from, cultural, symbolic,
and political praxis, but particularly sensitive to visual aspect of such sub-disciplines, using
qualitative, descriptive methodologies to deconstruct and re-interpret complexity within an
existential-phenomenology. The text will first focus on deconstructing a Anglocentric symbolic
Black Box approach that packages a simplistic stereotype of the histories and geographies of the
Southern Americas as “Latin America”. The text will then proceed to explore the regions of
Central, South, and Caribbean Americas, to re-interpret their cultural, social and political linkages,
similarities and differences, within a geographical-historical framework. It will use both a
hermeneutic appraisal of selected regions, and a comparative approach to assess continuities of
colonial, post- and neo-colonial dynamics of European and North American influences. One
finding will emphasize an underlying historical dynamic of ethno-national-religious conflicts
pitting a Protestant Anglosphere against a rival set of Catholic Colonial powers — France, Spain,
Portugal. This ongoing contest over power, language and ways-of-knowing (Foucault), impacts all
relations including migration patterns, and majority-minority status. Here a theoretical triptych of
Geertz (Weber), Turner (Durkheim) & Levi-Strauss (de Saussure), that links interpretive symbolic
interaction to structural explanations of how discourses evolve from real world events, and
converge through what Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) labels courte durée (short span), histoire
événementielle (a history of events), and the longue durée approach that “stresses the slow and
often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human
beings”. Derivative of this model and of particular intellectual importance to South America has
been World Systems Theory, in particular the label attached to the current globalized Modern World
Capitalist System (Wallerstein, 2004).
This approach to a holistic analysis of historical developments that involve unequal center-
periphery relations has been immensely popular among South American intellectuals in their
studies of how the USA has structurally undermined indigenous national development throughout
the Hemisphere. Most notably, teoria de la dependencia, based on the Singer-Prebisch Thesis of
unequal exchange, emerged in the 1960’s to be developed as a research paradigm across economic,
political, social, and cultural spheres of activity. While a somewhat conjectural metatheory in this
research, it seems that nominally Roman Catholic cultural systems exhibit decidedly greater
socialist tendencies than what Max Weber labeled as cultural systems imbued with a Capitalist
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Protestant Ethic. In his visual center-periphery model of thick description, Clifford Geertz depicts a
hierarchal circular structure that progresses outward, from values to rituals, heroes, and symbols,
each ring dividing into opposing behavioral traits. Applying this model to successive cultural
divides, South/North, Catholic / Protestant, Socialist / Capitalist, Color / White, Hybrid / Pure, etc.,
creates a roughly approximate description of both Anglo-American and Southern (Latin) American
differences. Such divides might be crudely labeled Brown/White (Mulatto y Mestizo vs. Blanco) to
represent current American political struggles, from the Cuban Revolution to a divided Venezuela,
with popular support for Chavez’s Bolivarian Socialism opposed by a largely “white” upper and
middle classes.
In Mexico’s Chiapas State, the 1990 census recorded 50% of the population as indigenous, after a
large Mestizo influx the 2000 census showed a drop to 35%. The indigenous population divides
into 56 different language groups, 35% of whom do not speak Spanish, and is further divided into
widely diverging syncretic cultural religious practices. Social divides include a large Mulatto-
Mestizo minority descended from 16th century African slaves, while among the relatively small
minority of whites original Criollos share power with late 19th century European immigrants
benefiting from land grants to establish plantations. Late 20th century Protestant missions, mainly
Evangelicals from the USA, have made inroads into a syncretic Catholic majority, and increase
tensions among and within indigenous and Mestizo groups by capitalizing small enterprises to the
exclusion of other group members, or those belonging to other denominations, or not having
converted. Even among Catholics strong divides exist between 1960’s through 1970’s exponents of
Liberation Theology, with its strong commitment to social equity and justice, and more recent
Vatican conservatives aligning with local elites in competition for power with a growth in
Protestant supported local capitalism. In this mosaic of tension and conflicts, including loss of
locally owned agricultural lands to both ecological degradation and incursions of well capitalized
industrial plantation systems, symbolic capital and images predominate in public visual spaces.
From local resistance to global media and symbolic cultural icon status, the indigenous Zapatista
movement (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), emerged in 1994 coinciding with
implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with its charismatic leader
Subcomandante Marcos, cleverly using contemporary social media to propagate an anti-
Globalization message. Zapatistas takes their symbolic identity from Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919),
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Mexico’s revolutionary agrarian reformer and leader of the Southern Liberation Army, who
remains an iconic hero and cultural icon throughout Mexico and beyond.
Following power struggles in the aftermath of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, Pancho Villa organized
peasant resistance in the north while Zapata organized peasant in the south, that grew much wider
following a corrupt political subversion of the 1917 Constitution. In 1916 the US Army invaded
Northern Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa’s forces that had staged cross-border raids, heightening
popular resistance to a power elite largely assumed to be subservient to US capital interests in
Mexico and expanding anti-Yankee sentiments. Similar military invasions and occupations by the
US to support puppet regimes and protect commercial interests between 1900 and 1925, include:
Guatemala (1910), Honduras (1911-1912, 1919), Panama (1912, 1918-1920), Cuba (1912, 1917-
1922), Nicaragua (1912-1925), Haiti (1914, 1915-1934), Dominican Republic (1914, 1916-1924),
Mexico (1913, 1914-1917, 1918-1919), to list the major interventions south of the US borders in
the first quarter of the 20th century.
Mexico stands at a pivotal point between USA, Caribbean and Meso-Americas, so too, its symbolic
national identity pivots around its revolutions, first to liberate itself from Spain, and subsequently
from both indigenous and external dictatorial regimes. Deeply etched into symbolic identity is a
military defeat to the USA that lost 50% of its territory, and imposition of a border that separated
former citizens from their national culture and symbolic homeland.
NOTE: the Mexican Republic’s official name is Estados Unidos Mexicanos, which translates into
English as The United States of Mexicans, so to always use the term US instead of USA, as well as
using the term American / America when only referring to the USA and its citizens displays an
arrogance, that can trigger symbolic perception of being Othered, and thus raises indignation
among the rest of countries and peoples of the Western Hemisphere’s second continent, Caribbean
and Meso-America.
Iconic images of Zapata and Villa are part of the Mexican symbolic repertoire of identity shared by
all, except perhaps a tiny minority of elites whose conservative politics, economic values, and racist
attitudes parallel those of their peers across the northern border. Mexican culture, like most of the
Americas evolves from within a mosaic of indigenous, and Spanish or Portuguese Catholic, images.
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But an evolving multicultural includes more than European colonists, settlers and immigrants,
significant minorities of Japanese and Chinese have been part of the ethnic mosaic for well over a
century, as have smaller communities of Arabs and Filipinos, the latter sharing in a Spanish
colonial heritage. Beyond the iconic images of Villa and Zapata, to which has been added Che
Guevara and Subcomante Marcos, popular cultural icons now permeate the visual culture
landscape, perhaps starting with the clown Cantinflas, then during the media and cultural revolution
of the 1960’s, iconic status grew to encompass, actors, musicians, and celebrities, and currently
gangsters and druglords have attained celebrity icon status. The contemporary status of Tattoos has
morphed from gang icons, to celebrity sports and music figures as popular mosaics of images may
emblazon totalities of visible skin. Paradoxical imagery mixes revolutionary icons with Mexico’s
patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Aztec leader Montezuma, and other iconic, indigenous,
and hybrid symbols.
Contemporary Mexican visual culture has no borders, its images, iconic representations and
symbolic display sprawls across into all of neighboring Meso-America, Guatemala and Honduras
being even more impoverished, violent and gang infested than Mexico, with graffiti and Tattoos.
Across the walls of Mexico, Central America, and the USA, segregated communities (barrios), of
hyphenated hybrids (Mexican-Americans) and Central Americans, display a somewhat seamless
visual landscape of murals, low rider muscle cars, iconated sports gear (symbolic brand logos of
Adidas, Nike, Puma, etc. mixed with sports team insignia — Mexican national soccer team jerseys,
or Tigres de Monterrey as often as LA Dodgers), and as much tattooed skin as permissible to
display. It is probable, therefore, that the Chicano Movement (USA born Mexican-Americans) is
producing more than its numerical weight in visual and cultural imagery, particularly in cities
where they represent significantly large segments of the population. In that sense, and as some of
the movement’s leaders claim, the prominent display of Chicano visual culture promotes identity
leading toward a goal of Reconquista. Not intending to return these lands to Mexico, but by
outbreeding the Anglos in much of the Southwestern USA, they would have the demographic
power to create a semi-independent, autonomous political-cultural unit Azatlan that would sprawl
across existing state boundaries. So many of the images displayed in the murals parallel both the
revolutionary murals of Diego Rivera and his artistic contemporaries, and aside from discreet
references to 1930’s USA government sponsored WPA social realist murals, they blatantly draw
from more recent revolutionary murals of Cuba and Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Thus a distinctly
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collective consciousness of revolutionary struggles against el Gigante del Norte (USA) pervades
visual culture across Hispanic MesoAmerica, with an iconic language weaving together symbolic
images representing demands for social, economic, ethnic and racial justice.
With a common language, and repertoire of shared intellectual and cultural heritage, including
literature and other arts, a question arises about the strength of public visual imagery around South
America, especially given similar times of revolutionary fervor and struggles against oppressive
regimes. Each and every South American nation has experienced genocide of indigenous peoples,
suppression of their culture, socio-economic class hierarchies based on Spanish, Portuguese or
other European ancestry and continued divides between haves and have-nots (Brown/White
conflicts). Nearly all continue to suffer from external exploitation by global corporate investors that
control much of their natural resources, while having to stave off overt, indirect, and clandestine
pressures from the USA seeking to influence their internal political processes, economic and
ecological sustainability. But while Argentina has a vibrant literary, visual art, cinema, music,
dance and theatre cultures, iconic displays of identity their public arts lag far behind Mexico. Brazil
also hosts dynamic movements across cultural sectors, including a vibrant cinema industry, and
perhaps with a great need to find expression for some common visual identity through public arts
that display cohesive iconic representations, not much can be identified across the nation’s diverse
regions. Yet the upcoming Olympic and World Cup events may stimulate some attempts, but even
if government sponsors such a production of public arts, where are the people in creating their own
representations aside from traditional folk arts. Aside from graffiti, very little of Brazil’s mural arts
explore significant social themes or stray far from individualistic 1960’s references to global styles
of quasi-psychedelic, op or pop genres, yet the modernist architectural traditions of Brasilia host a
treasure of sculpture, which only government workers and tourists can appreciate. Brazilian Social
realism seems not to have succeeded in popularity, perhaps due to periods of military rule that
veered away from Fascist or Socialist representation, steering a pro-USA capitalist course, with
little resistance expressed in public arts. But images of carnival, samba, football, beaches, bikinis,
and capoeira that absorb creative energies along the coast contrast to the interior’s vast tropical
jungles and arid plains, dominated by gross poverty and violence. Life in the interior changes little
from a long lasting colonial era, unimaginably enormous plantations, cattle ranches, mining and
forestry operations, all rapaciously extract natural resources and profits as quickly as possible, with
little concern for either ecology or the people. Only the absurdity of Brasilia, a Corbusier inspired
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modernist layout of isolated and isolating grand open spaces amidst signature architectures, differs
from the rest of the interior, which exists in conditions like Oscar Lewis’ often quoted “cultures of
poverty and poverty of culture” (Lewis, 1959).
This research paper cannot validly examine symbolic cultures, artistic traditions, and public arts in
each nation across the Southern, Central, and Caribbean Americas. Thus, after a brief surface
description, it may be more enlightening to focus mostly on one country, Mexico, as it has been
claimed that Art in the Americas turned on the Mexican Revolutionary Mural tradition of the
1920’s, and has extended into the present. The Mexican murals were the first to significantly
include the ethnography of the country’s indigenous peoples, and later on its immigrants from
Spain and beyond. While revolutionary in form and content, the murals borrowed heavily on
imagery read from pre-Columbian Arts and integrated with elements from familiar religious frescos
commonly found in city cathedrals and trickling down to every village church. It is even said by
some critics, that Mexico’s most iconic female artist, Frida Khalo, was greatly influenced by the
country’s legacy of 18th century religious and portrait arts. But continuing the holistic approach, the
paper now begins a further overview of factors that influenced a generalized ecology of symbolic
representation across the cultural interfaces of social, political, and economic life from colonial
through current eras, with an emphasis on the more contemporary. But as stated earlier,
geographical factors greatly influence and limit historical continuity and shifts.
Cultural Ecologies within Symbolic and Social Anthropology
The label Art represents a symbolic, and an economic product, its production and consumption, and
the values that each society and cultural ensemble places on different Art forms. While some
indigenous artistic and crafts production have continued unabated from Pre-Columbian histories
and geographies, the overwhelming impact of European colonization destroyed many live
indigenous practices, especially those connected to large advanced political economies and their
respective religious practices and imagery. Furthermore those impacts divided indigenous folk arts
from imported European arts and crafts systems, many of which were absorbed and hybridized
within local indigenous cultures. As well, talented and skilled indigenous artists were increasingly
integrated into the colonial arts and crafts production systems, especially in the production of
religious artifacts. This latter manufacture garnered support and training through the missionary
system of social and economic organization as an integral part of a civilizational Christianizing
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process, which in some times and places protected indigenous peoples from rapacious and
genocidal exploitation by governmental and private sectors. Thus whatever the level of local
production, importation, and/or consumption of art, or the degree of Europeanization of indigenous
peoples and their cultural economies, arts were critical to symbolic self-identity, social cohesion or
conflict, and represented transformations into modernization and globalization.
An Overview of Historical Geopolitical Factors: Anglo versus the rest
Complex tensions between England, France and Spain, heightened after Henry VIII (1491-1547)
withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church to found an independent (Protestant) Church of
England. While not the centerpiece of Europe’s ongoing religious, political and social turmoil these
conflicts created a pervasive distrust and conflict that continues today. While less volatile in a
relatively secular England, its violent specter continues to consume Northern Ireland and remains
most decisively active in the United States of America. A core WASP (White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant) population of the USA and its Puritan ethos assumes a belief in being God’s Chosen
People, and North America their Promised Land (Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril
and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (2006). Constructed
as a political-religious ideology extending to encompass the entire Western Hemisphere, and was
reinforced as a national hegemonic policy by the Monroe Doctrine (1823) stating that any further
interference in the Western Hemisphere would be construed as an act of aggression against the
USA, and result in the USA intervening (Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe
Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Duke University Press, 2005).
The 20th century success of the US has engendered a further belief in their God Given Right to a
Hegemonic Global leadership and arrogance toward all outside of a Protestant Anglosphere.
Furthermore, Anglo America occupied a continent already partly explored, conquered and settled
by Spain, perceived as the Anglosphere’s archrival for world power. By later seizing territory from
Mexico thus bringing a sizeable Hispanic population and cultural ethos inside of their borders, the
US has consumed a restive Hispanic/Latino minority with cultural memories embedded in linkages
to a larger Hispanic world. Resulting conflicts are expressed in both preferences for use of their
native Spanish language and demands for social and economic justice, and a grater share in
domestic US political power. The Mexican Revolution and its political mural arts have now
reemerged in the US and are being reinterpreted as Chicano identity in solidarity with opposition to
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the US hegemony over the rest of the Americas. Those murals are the ultimate topic of this
research, which will construct a framework to interpret them as iconic expressions of a Hispanic /
Latino visual cultural that symbolically represents the entire non-Anglo Western Hemisphere.
Contesting the Label Latin America
Why it is important to contest the label Latin America? Although seemingly useful more often than
not, given its predominance in that label represents both a Western Hemisphere and global
demarcation of what the French label Anglo-Saxon hegemony, and what the Anglo-Americans
acknowledge as that same demarcation of a White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant (WASP) world view
encompassing both Anglosphere and predominantly Protestant nations, and their colonial or neo-
colonial possessions worldwide. This brief historical excursion will help to elucidate current
dichotomies and conflicts continuing throughout South and Central America, and the Caribbean, as
well as socio-cultural and political issues in a increasingly divided United States, and less so in
Canada. As a bi-lingual nation, Canadian official documents are published in both English and
French, the latter interchangeably uses two French terms, Amérique latine and Amérique hispanic,
but also cites the origin of those terms, first used in 1856 by a Colombian poet. However, to quote
Yves Lacoste, Le concept d’une Amérique catholique et latine s’opposant à une Amérique anglo-
saxonne et protestante a été repris par l’entourage de Napoléon III. Still today, the French
construction and its more preferable Amérique Hispanic are used interchangeably throughout
Europe, as the later term covers all the southern hemisphere except Brazil, Francophone and Dutch
territories, (Lacoste, ed. Dictionnaire de Géopolitique, Paris, Flammarion, 1995).
Irrespective of its origins, both terms in English, Spanish America and Latin America remain
geographic misnomers because of the range of linguistic diversity, especially when including the
Caribbean. However, correct the assumption of Latin origins for Spanish, Portuguese, and French,
contradictions abound in such a label. Perhaps Amérique catholique might also be contested as no
longer so relevant as it was until more recent changes. But the main contention, which also
somewhat validates the label, concerns the hegemonic use of the term by an Anglo-American ideal
of a WASP world system. This ideal extends a religious-political entitlement to a North American
conquest and settlement by deeply religious North European Calvinists. But it also implies a
conflict within which WASPs are entitled to hegemonic power over Roman Catholicism, Spain,
and all those nations outside of the Protestant sphere.
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The European Protestant Revolution (Reformation, in their own terms), not only separated from a
Universal Catholic Christian church, but tore apart countries, communities and families causing
millions of deaths and untold destruction. As the most powerful state in 16th century Europe,
staunchly Catholic Spain was the iconic representation of evil in the minds of rules and ruled in an
expanding Protestant Europe. English Protestantism in particular, who were to launch both civil
wars, and colonial expansion contesting 16th century Spanish and Portuguese domination of the
nautical world and newly acquired economic control over the resources of Asia, Africa and the
Americas.
As WASP settlement expanded in North America the French-British conflicts were viewed as part
of a need for a mushrooming British Empire, it focused on the necessity for also leveraging its
power throughout the Western Hemisphere. Conflicts raged on land and sea. British Privateers were
given Royal contracts to attach Spanish shipping and settlements, while Royal Charters were
granted for both new colonies and conquests of formerly Catholic held islands, whether French,
Spanish or Portuguese. The American War of Independence from the British Empire, changed little
in mentality and politics between the newly independent USA and the rest of the Hemisphere,
except that not only did that State continue conflict with the Spanish and French colonies, but also
against the remaining British Colonies. Deeply embedded within the American WASP psyche was
an Evangelical New Covenant, an identity as God’s Chosen People for the New Testament like the
Jews of the Old Testament, and likewise, all the Americas were a God Given Promised Land, as
Israel had been given to the Jews. From inception through the present, this WASP American
mentality, often labeled as American Zionism, predominates as a subtext throughout the American
identity, even permeating the cultural substructures of non-Protestants and ethnic minority
immigrants. Furthermore, this sense of righteousness and God given entitlement to dominate,
permeates the American political, economic and cultural attitude toward the entire Western
Hemisphere, and extends beyond to a somewhat arrogant attempt at global hegemony (Phillips
2006, Brownson 2008).
Without delving too far into this history of USA as a hegemonic power dominating all of the
Western Hemisphere, grouping and “branding” all the other non-WASP countries as Latin
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America, it should suffice to point out that the most frequently observed graffiti throughout the
Hemisphere over the past century was “Yankee Go Home!”
The colonial era, which began with Columbus’ 1994 voyage, erased most of the pre-Columbian
indigenous religions, state and economic systems, and imposed a political economic system of
slavery, extraction and exploitation of natural resources and indigenous labor. Indigenous labour
declined in many areas due to a genocidal combination of forced labor, punishment for resistance
and imported disease. The Portuguese and Spanish had initiated the Atlantic African slave trade,
with colonization and extermination of the indigenous populations of the Canary Islands and
Azores. The Canary Islands were close to both Iberia and the African coast, with excellent
conditions for valuable sugar plantations, slavery raids into Africa were thus initiated to replenish
labor for Canary Islands plantations. As slavery also proved both profitable and useful to replace
indigenous labor in the New World, the Atlantic Slave trade, plantation and mining systems grew
more widespread and diffused throughout the Tropical and warmer regions of both Caribbean
islands and mainland Americas. A profitable system only outlawed by the last slave empire of the
United States through a Civil War (1861-1865), yet illegal trafficking continued into the Caribbean
and South America, completely dying out by the end of the 19th century.
Thus we must acknowledge a Triple Heritage of European Colonialism in the Western
Hemisphere: 1. Genocide of indigenous peoples along with European colonization and settlement.
2. Appropriation of all lands and natural resources, amidst territorial conflicts between European
States and later inclusion of the USA in the competition.
3. The African Diaspora of Atlantic Slave Trade, and historical discrimination following abolition
of slavery.
Perhaps we can include a fourth heritage of Mestizo / Mulatto or creation and expansion of a mixed
race population. Mexico, for instance, received at least as many African slaves as the USA, yet it is
nearly impossible today to find any significant percentage of Mexicans with overwhelmingly
distinctive Black African physical features, whereas de facto racial segregation continues in the
USA even after the end of legal segregation, and opportunities for integration. Perhaps the
difference has mostly to do with culture and religion, and a uniquely American class structure,
however much denied and attempts to ignore its existence. As the USA still uses racial
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classification for official identity purpose, a majority of Americans classified as “white” the most
prevalent and commonly preferred cultural self-identification is WASP. Other racially “white”
immigrants from Southern and Eastern European, South and East Asians, and still today, Jews,
Hindus, Muslims, and even Roman Catholics, are identified as not quite “real Americans” however
long their arrival, social and economic integration, and citizenship.
While socio-cultural attitudes change over generations, at times rapidly, other more deeply held and
less exposed attitudes continue as subtexts to dominant prevailing values. Although unproven, one
commonly heard anthropological truism is that it takes three generations to establish a trait, which
then only lasts for three generations.”
Deconstructing Latin America as both label and black box
However unfortunate or bizarre, it is difficult to establish a label other than Latin America, for the
entire continent of South America and the Middle American connector to the North, and often even
incorporating the Caribbean. This identity bizarrely, fails to differentiate nationalities, ethnic
origins, race, and even language, which widely differ over a vast geographical terrain of high
mountains, swamps, deserts, tropical rainforests, temperate forests, and islands. Although
threatened and near extinction, hundreds of indigenous languages manage to survive, however
fragmented, creolized or reduced to a pidgin dialect. Of the predominant European languages,
Portuguese is limited to Brazil and a handful of islands, whereas Spanish is recognized throughout
both the South and Central mainland, many Caribbean islands, and is the second most spoken
language in the USA, which claims a Hispanic population officially 18 %, over 55 million residents
(US Census Bureau, 2011) equal the entire population of Mexico. Of these immigrants, a small but
significant number lived in territory originally Mexican, the entire undifferentiated Hispanic /
Latino population includes immigrants of all nationalities, ethnic and racial origins and mixes from
throughout the Hispanic world, not including Portuguese speaking immigrants. The number and
percentages of Hispanics / Latinos doubled between 1990 and 2010, and now exceeds Black
Americans on both counts, and as the fastest growing US population is estimated to reach 30% of
all US residents by 2050.
This rapid growth from both immigration and birthrate merges with deeply embedded historically
ethnocentric fears of Latin language, peoples and Roman Catholicism pushes Anglos (WASPs)
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fear. The decline of “real Americans” who claim WASP status and largely mythic lineage to the
nation’s founders of nation, and again mythically, the largest ethno-religious population, generates
right wing politics and demagoguery. Statistically at the end of the 18th century there were more
German than English speakers residing in the 13 colonies. South Florida, now home to 15% Latino,
largely immigrants from Cuba, the Caribbean and Northeastern corner of South America –
Venezuela and Columbia, contains the third largest, and most diverse Hispanic population of all the
US States. But special Anglos have a particular concern over the Southwestern region, originally
belonging to Mexico prior to the US-Mexican war, including seven states accounting for over 30%
of the land area of the US excluding Alaska. After the 1846 US annexation of Texas war broke out
lasting until Mexico surrendered in 1848, also losing about 40% of its territory to the US.
The US-Mexican war was not a very even contest. Mexico was in shambles beginning with a
decade long struggle for independence, which culminated in the 1821 Treaty of Cordoba. But civil
strife followed with the country was fractured and disorganized. One event that has recently raised
attention was the defection to Mexico of a small but significant number of US troops, mainly recent
immigrants from Europe, a large percentage who were Roman Catholic, including an all Irish, Saint
Patrick’s Brigade. The Mexican Army also included a number of recent European immigrants and
volunteers, especially within the officer classes, with whom American defectors found more ethnic
and religious resonance, whereas they had faced discrimination and ill treatment from a WASP
ethos that dominated the US government, army and civilians.
In short, working south from the middle of the US one encounters predominantly Spanish place
names in states with Spanish names, and while not yet more than one quarter of the population is
Mexican and increasingly also refugees from Central American poverty and conflict, one does not
even have to leave the US border to be in Hispanic America. But just as the South American
continent is an enormous mosaic of greatly differentiated ecosystems and human ecology, so even
the largest of the border states, Texas, is both a melting pot and enclaves of peoples and
ecosystems. On the West Central escarpment the grandchildren of 19th century German settlers still
occupy the same plateau lands and harvest water from the aquifer that their great grandfathers made
fertile with hard work and agricultural know how they brought with them from Europe. That same
set of German communities sprawl across the border into Mexico, where they also still speak their
original German dialect, but Spanish instead of English. Not wanting to get involved and take sides
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in the US Civil War, they crossed into Mexico where they were welcomed and granted land and
citizenship. Today’s Northern Mexican music with its Bass, Accordion, and horns, blares out a
slightly off-key version of German Polka rhythms.
The landscape on both sides of the Rio Grande river border, runs from arid short grass prairie to full
blown desert, its pre-Columbian indigenous peoples lived meager lives clustered around water
sources yet still were mainly semi-nomadic or fully nomadic. Only in the northern Arizona and
New Mexico mountains were more permanent settlements established and corn (Maize) based
agriculture practiced. Spanish explorers and a rather meager stream of settlers brought new crops,
and most importantly domestic animals, pigs, sheep, goats, cattle and horses. This last animal, the
horse would transform the entire Americas, but especially the great plains stretching from middle
North America south into most of Mexico until hitting the Tropical jungles. Like in many parts of
the world, the Horse became more than a vehicle to ride of pack goods, its presence and image was
absorbed as a totemic animal. To the indigenous peoples, it was both a icon of fear resonating with
the brutal Spanish conquest, but to other tribes a liberation and symbol of power and prestige
around which they reorganized their ways of life and livelihood. For the Spanish Hildagos (nobles)
and peasant settlers, the open prairies were much like the Mesta and arid lands of South Central
Spain, where they could range their cattle and sheep.
Cowboy Hats and Boots, Blue Jeans and Silver Belt Buckles
Some cultural and symbolic artifacts cross borders, nationalities, ethnicities, race and class along
the Rio Grande and share a regional culture deep into both countries. A drive through urban Los
Angeles, far afield on the Pacific coast of California, one sees groups of men similarly garbed, most
all Mexican, some having only exchanged a ubiquitous American baseball cap for their Texas
sombrero. These same men and manner of dress can also be seen portrayed on the walls of
buildings around central and eastern LA, murals depicting the current and the ancient, Aztec
warriors, Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata in their wide sombreros, Fra Hidago, priestly icon of
Mexican independence, portraits of young men in muscle shirts, tattoos covering their bare skin,
low riders in red or blue bandanas. So much of the mural icongraphy reflects what you would see
on the streets in front of the tableau, and yet no Chicano LA mural would be complete without
some iconic image of the Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. Which you can
also see tattooed on the bodies of young men and not so young vatos locos (crazy guys), often with
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
16
Pachuco crosses emblazoned in the middle of their foreheads, warnings, these men are dangerous,
they have killed others and have no fear of death, a grinning skull that permeates Mexican culture,
even celebrating a day of the Dead parades with marchers dancing in macabre costumes, masques,
and breaking open skeleton piñatas.
Mexico is the pivot of Central (Meso) America, its cultures, from Indio / Mestizo / Mullato / Criolo
to varied Europeans, reaching down into the steamy tropical lands, peoples and countries to their
south. At a vague point below Panama the South American continent proper shifts political
geography, but with minimal impact of the cultural geographies. Both coasts, Atlantic and Pacific,
grow further apart, the central Cordillera rises more steeply toward the clouds and the snowmelt
runoff rages down gorges filling enormous river basins on the Eastern slopes, and less toward the
Pacific, and a thin coastal stretch of desert plains.
Both coasts were important to Spanish exports. From Atlantic ports its fleets of bulky silver and
gold laden Galleons sailed more directly to Europe, wending their way through the Caribbean. A
sea of islands mixing safe ports with contested waters and ports, dodging English privateers and
multiethnic pirates laying in wait for those treasures. The most heterogeneous region of all the
Americas, then and now, is the Caribbean sea, its islands and neighboring mainland. The American
Atlantic coast stretches from North America’s icy Arctic waters along rocky headlands, proceeds
south to stretches of sandy beaches and swampy coastal lowlands. From its Caribbean middle a turn
south encounters a mix of jungles and beaches, sweeping past vast, powerful tidal flats of the great
Orinoco and Amazon rivers, around the Brazilian headland’s reach toward Africa, and into
Antarctic cooler waters.
Along this enormous stretch of Atlantic coast human settlements mushroomed from European
colonization, mixing peoples; indigenous, immigrants from all of Europe, and the African diaspora.
Still today, the Caribbean islands are a mélange of Spanish, English, French and Dutch languages,
often in creole and pidgin dialects. The only North American Atlantic ports of any long term
historical importance, Charleston and Savannah, collected the majority of their Atlantic slave
traffic, and until the 20th century was as much a Caribbean as North American port, its English
owned plantations sprawling across mainland rice, cotton and sugar estates across the narrow
waters to the islands, creating an Anglo-American-Caribbean culture quite distinct from the
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
17
mainland’s WASP majorities. Anglo Black, Mulatto, Creole, merged with Spanish and French
cultures as islands changed ownership and inter-island trade competed with island to mainland,
while most shipping remained pointed toward Europe until the post-Civil War boom of a newly
resurgent United States of America, launching its trajectory towards world power with the war
against Spain and conquest of both Caribbean Islands, most importantly, Cuba and Puerto Rico, and
the Philippines.
The arc of Caribbean islands nearly touches the Florida peninsula in the north, and stretches xxx
Kilometers south to Trinidad and Tobago off the Venezuelan coast. A stone’s throw southeast
along the same coast, Dutch Surinam and French Guyana challenge the notion of an Iberian
language domination, although French Guyana’s border abuts Portuguese speaking Brazil. Adding
anomalies, the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus first landed, divides between cruelly
impoverished Haiti, its population 99% French patois speaking Black, and relatively prosperous,
largely white and mestizo Spanish speaking Dominican Republic. Still another divided island St.
Martin, belongs amicably to both France and Holland. Thus the Caribbean Island chain connects
the tip of Florida, once Spanish, now a US State, to Spanish speaking Venezuela, a distance of
1,700 sea miles. Although this insular arc includes over 7,000 islands, only about 150 are inhabited,
of which 22 are independent island nations.
Aside from continental South America, the sheer cultural diversity of the Caribbean islands would
keep an army of Anthropologists busy for lifetimes documenting all the cross cultural linkages
juxtaposed to uniquely isolated communities, which can and does simultaneously occur on many
islands. One fact, however, distinguishes relations between islands and the countries of their
colonial past and present. While the USA probably hosts the most diverse Caribbean immigrant
population, with numbers matching or exceeding those islanders who migrated to Mexico, Central
or South American mainland, Europe also has its share. The first large Black population in the UK
arrived with WWII, mainly from Jamaica, but also from other British Colonies. This British
Caribbean population remains today largely than Black African immigrants to the UK from all their
former African colonies. Holland hosts as many Guyanese and other Caribbean immigrants as they
do immigrants from Indonesia. Guyanese come in a mosaic of racial origins and mixes, South
Asians and Africans being the largest number, but also smatterings from other Dutch colonies
around the world, non-Dutch Europeans, and Latinos from neighboring countries. France, with the
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
18
most diverse immigrant population of any European country, maintains colonies, officially
Overseas Territories, worldwide, from Tahiti to Guyana, with a constant flow between France and
their Caribbean and South American territories. Again the ethnic populations of those French
territories are a mosaic of European, African and a smattering of other ethnic mixes representing Le
Monde Francophone.
After defeat by the USA in the 1895 war, Spain ceded all its New World possessions to the USA,
primarily Cuba and Puerto Rico, the rest of its former colonies were by that time already
independent following the Bolivarian model of Criollo (American born Spaniards) led struggles
inspired by the American War of Independence (1776-1783), the French Revolution (1787-1789),
and the early Napoleonic era with its radical Enlightenment oriented changes in European political
geography and state systems. Rousseau and Voltaire were as widely read in America’s Southern
lands as by Jefferson, Franklin, and others in the North, perhaps even more so, as the French,
Spanish, and Portuguese colonies contained as large if not larger proportion of educated elites
spread more widely and in more well established cities than existed in British North America or the
United States.
But not all revolutions and independence movements were led by intellectuals, the first of such
outbreaks following American Independence and French Revolution was in Haiti, a revolt of Black
African Slaves (1791-1804) turned more political and independence by the Mulatto classes,
including well educated children of white masters and Black African slave women. Throughout the
Catholic colonies, race and class, differentiation between European and American birth, and
European nations of origin, were specifically ranking categories that were relatively structured. The
complex mixes of racial origins and mixtures, ethnicity, social class, education and occupation
almost required some classification system of categories for administrative purposes.
Cultural Shifts and Symbolic Transference to the American Colonies
Original Spanish Conquests and exploitation of indigenous human and natural resources was brutal,
causing great upheavals and decimation of indigenous state systems and cultures, and while fully
committed to replacing indigenous religious with Christianity, the missionary priests and monks
often contested the brutality of government and commercial interests. As part of a civilizing
mission, these clerics also brought agricultural, construction, and crafts skills to indigenous peoples
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
19
under their care. Many scholarly clerics and a very few intellectuals among a largely soldier class
of administrators, began to record what they found among these ‘primitive’ indigenous cultures,
finding many of them not so primitive, but rather civilized with various advanced political and
cultural systems. One thing, however was ubiquitous and that was a collective European
consciousness of the supremacy of their civilizational systems, most emphatically religion. It was
the arts that arrived from Europe that were diffused throughout the colonies, with scant respect paid
to indigenous imagery and representations of strange symbolic systems. Thus colonization was a
cultural transformation at the core of which was attempts at a wholesale shift in symbolic
representation, whether in language, art, manners, material and non-material cultural artifacts.
As the 19th century began, Europe was in a political, social, and intellectual turmoil that quickly
spread to its colonial elites then trickled down through urban lower socio-economic classes, and
through the Jesuit and Franciscan missions, even to indigenous villages. These events activated
Enlightenment ideals and transformed concepts of identity triggering an emergent idea of belonging
to a nation as an icon for people of shared geographical territory of birth, ethnicity and language
(Herder & Rousseau). It was not only the settlers of the British 13 North American Colonies who
were seized by these ideas and emotions, particularly those well enough educated to read or to
gather in public or secret places to hear tracts read and to discuss implications for their
communities, families, affiliated associations and circles, and individual selves. Tracts from France,
quickly translated and published in Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, circulated almost as
quickly in the New World Colonies as in Europe. But it was not only philosophical essays and
political writings, but also literature, poetry, and proto-novels that circulated world wide throughout
and across European linguistic communities. Beyond the written word, music and art circulated,
both popular and folk forms for the lower classes, and varied continuously evolving fusions among
popular secular, religious and Royal Court music. But with the ethno-cultural fusions of the New
World and Europe’s Afro-Asian colonies, it is possible to claim that today’s World Music
originated in the late 16th century. At times, European Court music and musicians were absorbed
into the palaces of Ottoman elites, with such fusions transferring back to further inspire European
musicians and composers of varied forms from court to popular. Previous fears of ocean crossings
rapidly changed with Europe’s 16th century expansion, trade and colonization. As with literature
and technology, ocean crossings between Old and New Worlds became viewed as normal part of a
Eurocentric imperialist worldview. All manner of plants and animals were transported around an
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
20
increasingly well-known world system, changing lifestyles, economies, agriculture, cuisine and
diets, and the health of peoples. But disease also followed as bacteria, viral and other forms of
infection, insects and parasites now crossed barriers that had previously been secured by oceans,
climates and distances.
Turning from music and literature to visual art, what Ferdnand Braudel labels and analyses as the
Long 16th Century was a transition from Renaissance to Baroque, or what art historian E. H.
Gombrich critiques as a spilt between the Counter Reformation of Catholic Europe versus the
emergence in Holland of “The Mirror of Nature” coinciding with new philosophical and socio-
political thought. While 17th century Catholic Europe and much of Germany basked in luxurious
ornate cultural artifacts, pomp and ceremony, French thought and English revolutions were paving
the way for an era of Enlightenment, and emerging power of Protestant Europe over a declining
Spanish and German Hapsburg Empire. Ironically, it was Spain’s wealth in New World silver and
gold, along with exile of its industrious Jewish and Muslim populations, and interest on short-term
borrowings from Amsterdam bankers that brought down the Western Hapsburg Empire, and
loosened its control over the American colonies.
One other factor must be calculated into the overall equation of realignment among European
powers and migration to the colonies; Europe’s disastrous Little Ice Age (1550-1850), with extreme
lows around 1650, 1770 and 1850, causing famines, crop failures, diseases, population decline and
political unrest. Around the Northern Hemisphere, British and French North America also suffered
similar difficulties. South America, it seems was also effected by severe cold and snow along the
Cordillera ranges running North-South dividing the continent’s eastern from western watersheds.
Little historical evidence from this period in South America has been found to corroborate overall
impacts or links among specific geographies, nor from local indigenous records.
So, geological and ecological diversity, humid tropics and hot deserts, seemed to have buffered
much of the Southern Americas from the ravages of the Northern Hemisphere’s Little Ice Age, but
spurred migration when possible from Europe to the warmer Americas. While such migrations
included many different individuals and groups from across the socio-economic class spectrum, it
would be evident that the lower classes, especially peasants, were unable to afford such relocation,
thus more affluent, industrious and talented immigrants would have predominated. Spanish
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
21
immigration laws, prevented Protestants from immigrating into the colonies, along with 16th
century regulations against Moriscos or Conversos (Jews and Muslims who had converted to
Christianity). Despite restrictions, a trickle of foreign (non Spanish) mercenary soldiers, priests,
merchants and artisans made their way to Spanish America from mid 16th century onwards. The big
leap in 19th century immigration brought sizable numbers of Germans, mainly Catholics who were
warned away from the US because of WASP prejudices. While German immigration into Dutch
and British colonies faced little opposition, providing they were Protestants, French immigration
divided into Catholics who were welcomed into their colonies, along with a trickle of Jews, but
distinctly differentiated from Huguenots (Protestants) who were much less welcome and generally
opted for Dutch or British colonies.
Today, a loose ethno-linguistic network of German identity exists throughout South and Central
America, incorporating many disparate groups of different backgrounds and lengths of residency in
their respective countries. In some cases, such as Mennonite and Anabaptist sects, their religious
community networks are worldwide incorporating groups and even individuals, with varying
degrees of orthodoxy. While many individuals with German surnames are involved in artistic
communities throughout the Americas, it would be difficult to single out any specific representative
genres such as have long been integral to ethnically Spanish artistic and literary endeavors. In fact,
it is possible to identify certain Spanish language writing genres such as the mid 20th century
Magical Realism in literature, film and visual arts, as unique to any specific Latino-American
ethnic group, other than requiring a certain familiarity with indigenous cultures, Spanish literary
history and European surrealism as dominant influences. Although the European educated,
Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges (1889-1986), is often credited with being a progenitor of the
Magic Realism genre. Borghes’ background represents some of the complex ethno-national threads
weaving through South America. From his Uruguayan Criollo mother (purebred Spanish), Jorge
Luis inherited a distinguished lineage, while his father’s mixed Spanish and Portuguese paternal
lineage contrasted with his English maternal heritage. While not wealthy, the family frequently
travelled to Europe, spoke both English and Spanish at home, with an extensive library replete with
English literature. The family moved to Switzerland in 1914 where Jose Luis continued his
education in French and German, taking a degree in 1918, and due to WWI remained in
Switzerland, also living in Italy and Spain.
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
22
While this research has no specific interest in Borges, per se, he is introduced to represent the
prevalence of multi-national, multi-lingual, and cosmopolitan cultures of much of South America’s
well-educated urban middle classes. Another example comes from noted Mexican artist Frida
Khalo (1907-1954), the daughter of Guillermo (Wilhelm) Khalo, a German speaking Hungarian
Jew who immigrated to Mexico at age 19, and after a few years opened a professional photography
studio. Guillermo married Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez (1879-1932), who was the daughter of a
Criollo mother and a mestizo father, and was a strict and devout Catholic, while Guillermo was an
avowed atheist.
Without overly discussing Frida in this paper, both her family background and her marriage to
famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), represents some of what this research attempts to
portray as a relatively common pattern of ethno-cultural mixing throughout all the Americas,
perhaps even more common in the Southern than in the Northern Americas.
An equally if not more important figure in Mexican heroic iconography, Diego María de la
Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez (yes, that
is his full name), also came from a mixed background as his mother, Maria del Pilar Barrientos de
Rivera (1862-1925) was from a Converso family, Jews forced converts to Christianity, but she had
retained much of her Jewish culture, which she passed on to Diego. His Father Diego de la Rivera y
Acosta (1847-1922), was from an old upper class Criollo family of Hidalgo (Spanish noble)
heritage, a propertied teacher, newspaper editor, government inspector. Studying art at the National
Academy before moving to Europe in 1907, Rivera joined a circle of pioneering modern artists,
poets and intellectuals, until returning to Mexico in 1920.
Not all of the important cultural icons of the Southern Americas were born into such “exotic”
families, but fewer were from fully mestizo and/or mulatto backgrounds, and fewer still from fully
indigenous ethnic roots. But whatever their ethnic backgrounds, the tools, modalities, and manners
of arts and culture were European in origin. Simultaneously, a hybridization process called
mestizaje, which then gave way to an era of creolization of the literature produced from the late
colonial period onward.
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
23
Culture challenges politics and vice versa
As the 19th century began, Europe was in a political, social, and intellectual turmoil that quickly
spread to its colonial elites then trickled down through urban lower socio-economic classes, and
through the Jesuit and Franciscan missions, even to indigenous villages. These events activated
Enlightenment ideals and transformed concepts of identity triggering an emergent idea of belonging
to a nation as an icon for people of like geographical birth, shared ethnicity and language (Herder &
Rousseau). From this surge of identity shifts across Europe and the Americas, a sense of nationality
and nationalism began to unify groups around symbolic identities, while at the same time dividing
them over territorial possessions, and establishing new borders to demarcate new nations differing
from previously rather flexible boundaries to colonial administrative units. We social theorists
Benedict Anderson proposes that shared symbolism and language attract a psychological desire for
being part of a larger whole, resulting in syndrome of Imagined Community, which in the case of
the countries and conflicts throughout Iberoamerica, may be considered an Achilles Heel.
Mestizo Mosaic Conclusion:
In developing a discourse on Latin American Art from an anthropological perspective, this
research has covered a broad historical-geographical background,
This research also takes a cue from Cuban writer, curator, art critic, Gerardo Mosquera, one of
the most salient critical thinkers on Art in Latin America. According to Mosquera, Latin
American Art has evolved beyond its historical and geographical stereotypes to position itself
in the global Art World as Art from Latin America (Mosquero, 2003). Earlier, this research
developed Mosquera’s critique of the label Latin America, examining the complexities and
contradictions of that label, from a linguistic, ethnographical, and geopolitical perspective. In
retrospect, it would have been more appropriate to appropriate the label Iberoamerica, less
commonly used term favored by Mosquera, which erases the Spanish-Portuguese divide to
encompass the cultutal-linguistic majority throughout the Southern Americas. Any region will
always have minorities, whether linguistic or otherwise, but few if any places in the world host
a perfectly balanced and integrated multiculturalism. Anglo-America, a term primarily applied
to the USA and Canada, hosts its own contradictions in multilingual populations, especially
Canada with its Francophone bi-lingual federal system, and the USA, as Mosquera points out,
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
24
hosts a Hispanic (Latino / Chicano) population that has already grown to be second only to
Mexico as a country with the largest numbers of Spanish speakers in all the Americas.
In this research Mosquera’s writings were only discovered in the final stages, thus without
rewriting the entire paper, will have to suffice as elements in this conclusion, although it seems
that much of our two approaches coincided.
As an impassioned thinker about the legitimacy of a newly emergent Global Artworld outside
the Anglo-American-European core, and with a focus on Latin America, Mosquera uses the
09/11 NYC attack as a metaphor to deliver a powerful address that should persuade us of
having arrived in a new age in which;
… old post-colonial theories must be retaught and replaced by a concept which is more
appropriate for the present situation. In that respect he proposes to speak “from here” that
artists are entering the global stage: “The challenge is to be able to stay up-to-date in the face
of the appearance of new cultural subjects, energies and information bursting forth from all
sides.” (Editor (Anon), Global Art Museum. Berlin 2011).
Throughout this research, however, two elements were less well treated; firstly, contemporary
arts of indigenous and underrepresented minorities, and secondly, arts of the Latin America’s
Women and Feminist critiques. To address both, Mosquera notes that the Arts in Latin
America have grown beyond the label and realities of Latin American Arts to shift into a truly
global Artworld, and no longer representing older stereotypes such as nativist, social realist, or
politically revolutionary. But in this globalization certain artists and genres may have
specificity, not to any stereotype, but to specificity, a relevancy to time and place of their
conceptual and actual production.
As has been noted, so many artists from Latin America have always shifted back and forth
between their countries and Europe, not only Spain or Portugal, but in Colonial times mainly
among any or all Catholic countries. From the onset of a Postcolonial era, their horizons
widened to encompass a broader reach, inclusive of the Gigante del Norte, as the USA became
a significant player in the late 19th century world of Art and its and commercial markets.
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
25
Although from ethnically mixed indigenous-European family backgrounds, both Frida Khalo
and Diego Rivera were artistic celebrities in Europe and the USA, Rivera having developed
much of his conceptual oeuvre in Paris among pioneering modernists. But what was developed
in this research was a primary ethno-religious conflict between Anglo-WASP and Latino-
Catholic world cultural systems, and woven into an Iberoamerican ethos evolving to permeate
much of its arts. That said, the revolutionary culture of independence movements throughout
the Southern Hemisphere was as deeply indebted to the Anglo-American ideals, which fostered
that war of independence, as to the French Revolution. Both movements, however, as was
pointed out earlier in this research, were even more indebted to the Humanistic ideals of
Rousseau and Voltaire, and Nationalist ideas of Herder. But while Anglo-America sided with
their British cousins against Napoleon, Iberoamerica was inspired by Napoleonic ideas,
although turning away from his aggressive militarism, especially after his conquests of Spain
and Portugal. But the Bolivarian wars for independence from Spain also followed a Napoleonic
model, although supported by British and American gold, weapons and mercenaries.
Did Iberoamerica’s postcolonial era immediately transform its arts? The answer is a shift to
heroic representation of male leaders, much in the former lineage of portraying their Iberian
rulers, and especially iconizing their Hispanic forbearers, the Conquistadores. But by the 19th
century, after 300 years of colonization, the European population was ethnically and
linguistically diversifying. As has already been discussed, refugees from Europe’s ongoing
wars and religious conflicts boosted both general populations and the industrial-technical
capital with engineering, manufacturing, and agrarian expertise. Although Protestants were still
few and far between, inspired by Europe’s Napoleonic and nationalist movements, Masonic
orders were proliferating among the elites.
Here it is noteworthy that these Revolutionary ideals and representations of heroic figures,
battles, political and national insignia, coincided with ongoing ideological, political, social,
cultural, and territorial conflicts among and within these emergent nations. While arts in the
early postcolonial era changed little in either form or content, religious and secular
representations remained as before except that strong anti-clerical iconoclastic movements had
arisen, and would continue to haunt regional political revolutions and civil wars well into the
20th century.
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
26
Although many critics speculate on the role of a conservative Catholic culture as the reasons
that female artists were latecomers as producers and having a voice in Iberoamerica’s
Artworld. But a subtext begins to emerge as to the roles of women in consuming art and setting
aesthetic styles, especially among the elites, as families often journeyed to Europe, even
sending some daughters abroad for education, which was still lacking in these new countries.
The older educational systems were exclusively male establishments, predominantly founded
by religious orders, especially Jesuit universities. With traditions of the elites and emerging
bourgeoisie sending their sons to Europe for university education, and occasionally a few
daughters, founding public education was a low priority among these nations struggling to
develop their resources, industries and commerce. Among the elites, home tutors were the
norm for educating females, although convents also offered more advanced education, albeit
not in a very broad range of subjects beyond religion, literature and history.
When observing the limited number of female artists in modern times, Frida Khalo stands out.
While a universal Mexican public education was equally open to girls up to and including
university and academies (music and visual art), few female graduates were involved in the
production of Arts, a good marriage being the preferred norm until well into the mid-20th
century. Among the political-artistic circles frequented by Frida Khalo, more females were
accepted as companions of male artists or political activists, than in their own right. During the
1920’s, however, women’s rights movements in European and USA, spread to Latin America,
especially as those movements succeeded in winning women the right to vote.
While the 20th century social and economic changes established a wider market for arts and
artists, entrance to arts education still largely served a privileged social sector, now open to
sons and daughters of the petty bourgeoisie, and with occasional scholarships to support
talented individuals from less well off families. The idea of making a living as an artist was
only emerging for males, and less attractive to females without financial support from families,
husbands or patrons, the latter usually having strings attached such a concubine status. An
instructive example of the independent woman artist, is Coco Chanel, who as the pioneer
female fashion designer, provided a model for talented, creative, ambitious and assertive,
females, as without her series of patron-lovers, it is doubtful if she would have had entrée to
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
27
the necessary client circles. Even more difficult that a successful career in fashion design,
however creative and radical Coco, was unassisted access to the circles of arts production and
commerce, and full acceptance.
Whatever the uphill struggle for women artists, even more difficult was coveted entre into the
closed circles of male art historians, experts, critics and writers, as exemplified by the ratios of
female graduates in art history, criticism or curatorial fields, to academic and professional
employment and publications. While those ratios are changing to the greater equity and
opportunity for female expertise, both within feminist theory , and outside of that self-
constructed gender ghetto, the global sphere divides into differential degrees of opportunities
among unequal national distributions. The ration of female arts experts, curators and university
appointments in Latin America lags behind most of Europe and the USA.
As this research paper intends to establish a background for the PhD dissertation research on
Frida Khalo, it has hopefully covered most of the geo-historical, social, economic, and political
arenas that impacted on Mexico at the period of time that Frida emerged as, arguably, the most
significant woman artist in all of Iberoamercia. This preliminary work has set a framework
within which a mosaic of multi/inter-disciplinary approaches can be applied in the study, to
interpret both her existential career as artist-writer, and subsequent emergence as a cultural
icon. It is difficult to compare Frida among either a historical or contemporary population of
female Latin American artists, a slim minority, especially working outside of conventional
portraiture, pictorial, and religious forms. Therefore, as my academic intent is to produce a
doctoral dissertation of scientifically valid work, out of which will result publishable material
within the fields of philosophy and theory of visual culture, my focus will take more of a
hermeneutic than comparative approach. That said, Frida Khalo was not only a unique and
uniquely female artist, but considerably ahead of her time, which is in part why her work has
achieved current iconic status. Frida’s work represents an integrative approach that
encompasses numerous indigenous, Mestizo/Criollo, and European elements, from within the
history and diversity of Latin American art, but from a uniquely Mexican viewpoint, and yet
equally global in its forms and contents. From within an existential phenomenological
framework, my intent is thus to closely read both woman and work, and subsequent iconic
status and commodification
A Criollo, Mestizo, and Mulatto Mosaic
28
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