Article review of Dr. Rebecca Earle: The Pleasures of Taxonomy Casta Paintings Classification and Colonialism. Race, Caste, and Identity in Mexico, Latin America and the world. Presentation highlighting human migration, color, race base status, social status, racist captions in casta paintings.

1. The Pleasures of Taxonomy
Casta Paintings Classification and Colonialism

2. • Questions to ponder:
• What percent of worlds population is of African Descent?
• How many races are there in the world?

3. Rebecca Earle FBA is a
historian, specializing in the
history of food and colonial
and 19th-century Spanish
America. She is a professor
in the Department of History
at the University of Warwick

4. Historical Context
In the early 18th century Franco Davila had just completed
three volume of cataloging his collection stones, minerals,
fish and plants into a coherent classification and Carl
Linnaeus had created a seven level hierarchical system of
classification.
Taxonomy is a branch of science that classify plants and
animals.
This system was pre-Origin of Species which would not be
written until 1854

5. Thesis - Casta paintings cataloged the human heterogeneity of
Spain New World empire by organizing its inhabitants into families
and these families in larger series.
Dr. Rebecca Earle calls the Casta painting imaginative fiction.

8. • The Casta paintings created a caste system in The Americas based on
color of skin with Blacks being at the bottom.
• This color based system is still in place in most countries in Central
and South America.

9. Spaniard and a Albina = throwback
The Mexico Inquisition
affirmed that Blackened
blood never disappeared
because experience shows
that by the third, fourth and
fifth generation it pullulates
so that two white produce as
black called tornatrd -
saltards or throwback.

10. White Negro
• White children (albinos) born to
black parents is evidence that
humanity was originally white and
white was the primitive color of
nature. (Throwback)

11. Dr. Earle found theories of thinkers back in the 18th
century that would be validated in the mid 20th century
• A Spanish military official Jorge Juan took a tour to
South American notice that the New World climate
corrupted the Spaniard who lived there so that they
came to resemble locals in color

12. • Feijoo Montenegro observed in 1730 that dark skin was due to the
effects of climate.
• Louis Leclerc in his book Histoire Naturelle that the descendants of
Black people transported to colder climate would eventually turn
white
• Geneticist today in 2022 affirms that skin color is due to
environmental adaptation and Latitude

13. • The distinctive treatment of Africans ancestry in casta paintings
similarly resonate with the increasing interest in the 18th century to
isolate the black body as fundamentally different (code for inferior)
from other bodies whether that concern is express through language
of humors, anatomy or scriptures.
• Physicians begin to probe the inner recesses of cadavers in search of
the origin of black skin.
• Scholars of the Enlightenment claim that different species could not
produce fertile offspring

14. • Dr. Earle suggest that the Casta paintings are in essence the works of
imaginative fiction. The paintings tell stories about the lives of
imagined colonial subjects whose sexual and reproductive practices
are displayed for our viewing.
• The paintings emphasize certain combinations as significant and
silence others to produce representation of human diversity that
highlight its underlying unity.
• They invite the viewer to imagine the emotions surrounding the birth
of this dark-skin child to his pale parent
•

15. •In summary Casta paintings are imagined narratives
of interracial colonial sexuality and the intimate
domestic worlds it engendered. As such they are
about pleasures as much as they are about control
or the interconnection between pleasure and
control by the colonial elites.
•Dr. Earle contends that the paintings were created as
a control mechanism to maintain order and a power
hierarchy system based on race.

16. Taxonomy Chart – Only One Race called Human
Race. All so-called race are social construct.

17. Migration of Anatomical Modern Humans
Khoisan Tribe Migrated from Afrika 65-75k years ago and populated the
world. All non-Afrika people groups are descendants of the Khoisan Tribe.
https://tinyurl.com/human-
cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_xTG6VXlIQ

19. White Parents give birth to Black child – Sandra
Laing Story has been made into movie .