Lobo (fem. Loba) (Spanish for "wolf") is a racial category for a mixed-race person used in Mexican paintings illustrating the caste (casta) system in 17th- and 18th-century Spanish America.
Lobo (fem. Loba) (Spanish for "wolf") is a racial category for a mixed-race person used in Mexican paintings illustrating the caste (casta) system in 17th- and 18th-century Spanish America.
Lobo does not have a fixed meaning, with possible parents being a black man and an Indian woman, a Cambujo (African/Amerindian) and an Indian woman, a Torna atrás and an Indian woman, a Mestizo and an Indian woman, or a Salta atrás (of African/European ancestry) and a Mulatto woman. [1]
Lobo was a classification used in official colonial documentation, including the Inquisition trials, marriage registers and censuses. [2] One example of a Loba is a mixed-race woman who came before the Mexican Inquisition; she had been given multiple racial labels. She was publicly known as a China, was known to be a parda (a brown-skinned person), who "looked like a loba", suggesting she had visible African features. [3]
There were regional differences in colonial Mexico for racial labeling. For instance, in Xichú and Casas Viejas, in the Bajío region near Querétaro and the Sierra Gorda mountains, where there were resident indigenous populations, as well as blacks and mulattos, locally the people used lobos as a "normative category". [4]
In his examination of marriage patterns from marital registers, Vinson found no records of lobos marrying each other; brides and grooms thus classified chose partners from other racial categories. [5]
In eighteenth-century casta paintings, lobos are usually shown doing physical work and not lavishly dressed, indicating lower class status. In Joaquín Antonio de Basarás's Origen, costumbres, y estado presente de mexicanos y philipinos (1763), the lobo father is a water carrier, while his Indian wife sells chickens. [6] An early 18th-century set of casta paintings shows the Lobo as the offspring of a Black father and Indigenous mother; in the same set, a Lobo father and an India mother have a dark-skinned child labeled a Lobo Torna atrás, meaning the child more closely resembled the Black father. [7]
| Ignacio María Barreda (1777) [8] | Anonymous (late 18th c?) [9] |
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Mestizo is a person of mixed European and Indigenous non-European ancestry in the former Spanish Empire. In certain regions such as Latin America, it may also refer to people who are culturally European even though their ancestors are Indigenous. The term was used as an ethno-racial exonym for mixed-race castas that evolved during the Spanish Empire. It was a formal label for individuals in official documents, such as censuses, parish registers, Inquisition trials, and others. Priests and royal officials might have classified persons as mestizos, but individuals also used the term in self-identification.
Mulatto is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered outdated and offensive in several languages, including English and Dutch. But it does not have the same associations in languages such as Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Among Latin Americans in the US, for instance, the term can be a source of pride. A mulatta is a female mulatto.
Cholo is a loosely defined Spanish term that has had various meanings. Its origin is a somewhat derogatory term for people of mixed-blood heritage in the Spanish Empire in Latin America and its successor states as part of castas, the informal ranking of society by heritage. Cholo no longer necessarily refers only to ethnic heritage, and is not always meant negatively. Cholo can signify anything from its original sense as a person with one indigenous parent and one Mestizo parent, "gangster" in Mexico, an insult in some South American countries, or a "person who dresses in the manner of a certain subculture" in the United States as part of the cholo subculture.
Zambo or Sambu is a racial term historically used in the Spanish Empire to refer to people of mixed Amerindian and African ancestry. Occasionally in the 21st century, the term is used in the Americas to refer to persons who are of mixed African and Indigenous American ancestry.
Casta is a term meaning lineage or race in Spanish and Portuguese. The term has historically been used as a racial and social identifier for mixed-race offspring in the colonial Spanish Empire in the Americas. The Spanish crown created a basic legal division between Hispanic society and Indigenous peoples. In the Hispanic sector were Spaniards, "Indians", Black Africans, and mixed-race castas. Many scholars have examined whether there was a rigid, racially-based, social hierarchy in Spanish America Although a strict racial hierarchy is shown in 18th century "casta paintings," with fixed categories in rank order, created by Spanish American and Iberian painters, extensive archival research does not support the artists' imagined fixity and rigidity of a highly ordered racial system. With the encounter in the New World between European Spaniards, enslaved Africans forcibly brought by Spaniards, and indigenous people, sexual unions produced offspring that colonial officials classified in newly created legal racial categories. Mixed-race categories that appeared in official Spanish documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman; and mulatto, offspring of a Spanish man and an African woman. Many other terms are found casta paintings, for people with variously mixed Spanish, Indigenous, and African ancestry; however, except for official categories of mestizo and mulatto, the plethora of other terms are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the Spanish Empire.
Torna atrás or tornatrás is a term used in 18th century Casta paintings to portray a mestizo or mixed-race person who showed phenotypic characteristics of only one of the "original races", such as European or Amerindian ancestry. The term was also used to describe an individual whose parentage was half white and half "albino".
Castizo is a racial category used in 18th-century Colonial Mexico to refer to people who were three-quarters Spanish by descent and one-quarter Amerindian. The feminine form of the word is castiza. The category of castizo was widely recognized by the 18th century in colonial Mexico and was a standard category portrayed in eighteenth-century casta paintings.
Gente de razón is a Spanish term used in colonial Spanish America and modern Hispanic America to refer to people who were culturally Hispanicized. It was a social distinction that existed alongside the racial categories of the sistema de castas. Indigenous peoples, who maintained their culture and lived in their legally recognized communities, and mixed-race people, especially the poor in urban centers, were generally considered not to be gente de razón.
The Museo de América is a Spanish national museum of arts, archaeology and ethnography in Madrid. Its collections cover the whole of the Americas and range from the Paleolithic period to the present day.
Juan Rodríguez Juárez was an artist in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. He was a member of a Spanish family long noted for their accomplishments in the world of painting. His brother was Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez (1667–1734), who was like himself, an established painter in New Spain. He was the son of Antonio Rodríguez (1636–91), a notable Spanish painter. His maternal grandfather José Juárez (1617–1661) and maternal great great grandfather Luis Juárez (1585–1639) were also notable painters in Spanish history and prominent in the Baroque era.
Luis de Mena was a Mexican artist who lived and worked predominantly in the middle of the eighteenth century. Mena painted religious works and has been described as "no more than a journeyman painter in 18th century Mexico." He signed a work entitled "Most Holy Mother of Light", now on display in the Serra Museum in San Diego, California.
An unpublished manuscript entitled Ordenanzas del Baratillo de México was signed and dated in 1754 by Pedro Anselmo Chreslos Jache, likely a pseudonym for an educated Spaniard. It is a satirical piece of eighteenth-century colonial literature written in New Spain, which sought to offer an alternative view of life in colonial Spanish America.
Francisco Clapera (1746–1810) was a Spanish painter who after training in Spain lived and worked in Colonial Mexico. Here he was one of the few foreign painters to create casta paintings, a distinctive Mexican genre that depicts in sets of consecutive images scenes of racial mixing among the Indians, Spaniards and Africans who lived in the Spanish colony.
In the former Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas, pardos are triracial descendants of Southern Europeans, Indigenous Americans and West Africans.
José de Páez (1720–1790) was a Mexican painter of religious images, a history painting of the destruction of Mission Santa Cruz de San Sabá in Texas, and a set of casta paintings in the 18th century. He was of Baltazar de Páez, José is identified student of Nicolás Enríquez. He married Rosalía Caballero in 1753.
Coyote is a colonial Spanish American racial term for a mixed-race person casta that usually refers to a person born of parents, one of whom a Mestizo and the other indigenous (indio).
Ignacio María Barreda was an eighteenth-century Mexican painter, self-identified as university graduate with a Bachiller in philosophy. Mexican art historian Manuel Toussaint noted him for his portraits, including two of elite women, reproduced in his publication, and others of elite religious men. Toussaint believed he might be the official painter for the Seminario de San Camila, His 1777 single-canvas casta painting is an exemplar of this eighteenth-century genre of secular art. It is similar in some ways to the 1750 single-canvas painting by Luis de Mena, which also includes outdoor scenes near Mexico City, particularly the Paseo de Ixtacalco.
José Joaquín Magón was a late eighteenth-century Mexican painter from Puebla de los Angeles.
Pedro Alonso O'Crouley or O'Crowley was one of many Catholics of Irish descent whose relatives immigrated to Spain. O'Crouley is most notable for his 1774 travel narrative of New Spain, Idea compendiosa del Reyno de Nueva España published in English as A Description of the Kingdom of New Spain by Sr. Dn. Pedro Alonso O'Crouley 1774. translated and edited by Seán Galvin in 1972.
Chino was a casta term used in colonial Mexico to refer to people of mixed ancestry. In the eighteenth century, individuals of mixed Amerindian and African ancestry came to be called chinos.