Pinturas de castas. Misioneros y voluntarios blancos (Caste Paintings. White Missionaries and Volunteers)

Daniela Ortiz is an artist and activist whose work discusses concepts such as nationality, racialisation, social class and gender to analyse colonial, capitalist and patriarchal power, the fight against institutional racism and the system of migratory European control, and to spotlight her critical stance towards white feminisms.
In this particular project, Ortiz recovers the colonial pictorial genre of “casta painting”, broadly cultivated during the eighteenth century in the viceroyalties imposed in Peru and Mexico. The aim of these paintings was to illustrate, in a series of up to sixteen paintings, the social and ethno-racial pyramid in those colonial territories, resulting from processes of miscegenation and political projects of structural racism and whitening. In accordance with ethnic origin and mixing through inter-racial blood relations, a hierarchical table outlining social strata and professions was erected and defined under racist criteria. Racialised people would be on the lowest rung, ascending gradually in social prestige to reach the position of the white man. In-between, racist language to define these ethnic mixes would coin disparaging terms of classification: half-caste, mulatto, Morisco, “throwbacks” (in reference to colonial racial mixing).
Upon her critical return to genre with a series of “white castes”, Ortiz employs iconographic elements from casta paintings to draw up a classification of different kinds of political whiteness — white servicemen and police; white bourgeois businessmen; the white Left; white fascists — and neocolonial practices in the present which cross through the lives of racialised migrant people and post-colonial societies.

Suset Sánchez Sánchez