Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art

Description

The years following Mexican independence in 1821 were critical to the development of social, racial, and national identities. The visual arts played a decisive role in this process of self-definition. Mexican Costumbrismo reorients current understanding of this key period in the history of Mexican art by focusing on a distinctive genre of painting that emerged between 1821 and 1890: costumbrismo. In contrast to the neoclassical work favored by the Mexican academy, costumbrista artists portrayed the quotidian lives of the lower to middle classes, their clothes, food, dwellings, and occupations. Based on observations of similitude and difference, costumbrista imagery constructed stereotypes of behavioral and biological traits associated with distinct racial and social classes. In doing so, Mey-Yen Moriuchi argues, these works engaged with notions of universality and difference, contributed to the documentation and reification of social and racial types, and transformed the way Mexicans saw themselves, as well as how other nations saw them, during a time of rapid change for all aspects of national identity. Carefully researched and featuring more than thirty full-color exemplary reproductions of period work, Moriuchi’s study is a provocative art-historical examination of costumbrismo’s lasting impact on Mexican identity and history. COVER front......Page 1 Copyright Page......Page 5 Table of Contents......Page 8 List of Illustrations......Page 9 Acknowledgments......Page 13 Introduction......Page 16 Notes......Page 147 Chapter 1: Racialized Social Spaces in Casta and Costumbrista Painting......Page 26 Notes to Chapter 1......Page 148 Chapter 2: Traveler-Artists’ Visions of Mexico......Page 46 Notes to Chapter 2......Page 149 Chapter 3: Literary Costumbrismo: Celebration and Satire of los tipos populares......Page 76 Notes to Chapter 3......Page 151 Chapter 4: Local Perspectives: Mexican Costumbrista Artists......Page 96 Notes to Chapter 4......Page 152 Chapter 5: Costumbrista Photography......Page 130 Notes to Chapter 5......Page 154 Conclusion......Page 144 Notes to Conclusion......Page 155 Bibliography......Page 156 Index......Page 170