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]
A set of casta paintings by Andrés de Islas is typical in the order and combinations of races:
Mestizo is a term used for racial classification to refer to a person of mixed European and Indigenous American ancestry. In certain regions such as Latin America, it may also refer to people who are culturally European even though their ancestors are not. The term was used as an ethnic/racial category for mixed-race castas that evolved during the Spanish Empire. Although, broadly speaking, mestizo means someone of mixed European/Indigenous heritage, the term did not have a fixed meaning in the colonial period. 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, whereas in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese is not, and can even 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 Amerindian 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 Indigenous 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. Historically, the racial cross between enslaved Africans and Amerindians was referred to as a zambayga, then zambo, then sambo.
Casta is a term which means "lineage" in Spanish and Portuguese and has historically been used as a racial and social identifier. In the context of the Spanish Empire in the Americas it also refers to a now-discredited 20th-century theoretical framework which postulated that colonial society operated under a hierarchical race-based "caste system". From the outset, colonial Spanish America resulted in widespread intermarriage: unions of Spaniards, Amerindians, and Africans. Basic mixed-race categories that appeared in official colonial documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spaniard and an indigenous person; and mulatto, offspring of a Spaniard and an African. A plethora of terms were used for people with mixed Spanish, Amerindian, and African ancestry in 18th-century casta paintings, but they are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the Spanish Empire.
Torna atrás or Tornatrás is a term once 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. In the early 21st century, the term castizo has also come to mean mixed-race people with light skin, in comparison to mulattos, pardos, and coyotes, who would be mixed-race people with darker skin.
In Hispanic America, criollo is a term used originally to describe people of Spanish descent born in the colonies. In different Latin American countries the word has come to have different meanings, sometimes referring to the local-born majority.
Miguel Mateo Maldonado y Cabrera (1695–1768) was a Mestizo painter born in Oaxaca but moved to Mexico City, the capital of Viceroyalty of New Spain. During his lifetime, he was recognized as the greatest painter in all of New Spain. He created religious and secular art for the Catholic Church and wealthy patrons. His casta paintings, depicting interracial marriage among Amerindians, Spaniards and Africans, are considered among the genre's finest. Cabrera's paintings range from tiny works on copper to enormous canvases and wall paintings. He also designed altarpieces and funerary monuments.
There is no single system of races or ethnicities that covers all modern Latin America, and usage of labels may vary substantially.
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.
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 Mexico, the term mestizo is used to refer to an identity of those of mixed European and indigenous Mexican descent. Some believe it can be defined by criteria ranging from ideological and cultural to self-identification or physical appearance. According to these criteria, estimates of the number of mestizos in Mexico vary from about 40 percent of the population to nearly all who do not belong to the country's indigenous minorities.
Pardos is a term used in the former Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas to refer to the triracial descendants of Southern Europeans, Indigenous Americans and West Africans. In some places they were defined as neither exclusively mestizo, nor mulatto, nor zambo. In colonial Mexico, pardo "became virtually synonymous with mulatto, thereby losing much of its Indigenous referencing". In the eighteenth century, pardo might have been the preferred label for blackness. Unlike negro, pardo had no association with slavery. Casta paintings from eighteenth-century Mexico use the label negro, never pardo, to identify Africans paired with Spaniards.
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.
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.