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The Casta paintings of Colonial Mexico : the politics of constructing social order through art

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

This thesis examines the conceptual structures and political contexts of race mixture depicted in Las Castas Mexicanas, a genre of colonial Mexican painting. The first chapter places this genre in historiographical perspective, and provides the conceptual contexts within which this author analyzes the paintings. The second chapter examines the social order represented in the paintings, specifically in terms of race and gender. The third chapter traces commonalities between the Casta paintings and Old World systems of measuring and diagramming social differences. The fourth chapter places the Casta paintings within a political debate about the control of art, and argues that this genre can be seen as part of a larger political process of the struggle for power between Spain and her colonies

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Pooley, Rachel Vanessa
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Castañeda, Antonia

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • Open
  • Copyright © is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works.
Language dc:language
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:tdl-ir.tdl.org:2152/77395

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Texas Digital Library
Base URL
tdl-ir.tdl.org/server/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-27
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Pooley, Rachel Vanessa. The Casta paintings of Colonial Mexico : the politics of constructing social order through art. 1996. https://hdl.handle.net/2152/77395