Jose agustin arrieta biography of albert

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The placement of the black dog on top of the white dog perhaps suggests the criolla as victor.

Oftentimes what distinguished racial types from one another was not solely skin color, but rather clothing, accessories, and setting, which alluded to one’s occupation, wealth, and status. The figures are depicted in an outdoor, public marketplace outside of an establishment, a pulquería (a tavern that sells the alcoholic beverage pulque, made from fermented maguey sap) called La Sorpreza, which gives the painting its name.

Drawing on the casta painting tradition

Nineteenth-century costumbrista painting borrows certain tropes from eighteenth-century casta painting.

Both casta and costumbrista paintings also depict racialized social spaces, that is, settings where racial, social, and gender relationships were imagined and visualized. Another possibility is that of a social or racial dispute. He seems to purposefully play with and entice the viewer with his ambiguous title.

The focal point of Arrieta’s composition is the barefooted woman at the center who receives attention from both a small boy (her son?) who tugs at her dress and a man (a suitor?

Each canvas depicted a father and mother of different races, and one to two of their children, and included a label that described the figures (for example, De Espanol, e India, nace Mestiza — From a Spaniard and Indian, a Mestiza is born — Mestiza refers to a child of Spanish and Amerindian parents).

As art historian Ilona Katzew demonstrates, casta paintings followed the Enlightenment trend of classifying and categorizing social and racial types, but also reaffirmed a social hierarchy in colonial Spanish America that privileged white Europeans.[1] In general, the more “white” a family was, the higher they were placed on the socio-racial hierarchical ladder.

Arrieta captured these ubiquitous interactions among Mexico’s diverse populace within his costumbrista paintings.

Social and racial interactions

In La Sorpreza, racial mixes are no longer identifiable by inscriptions as in casta paintings, so costumbrista paintings like Arrieta’s provide other clues to indicate the various social and racial types in the scene.

Here, presumptions about racial differences are displaced from human beings to animals: the black dog tackles the weaker white dog, reminding the viewer of the stereotype that African and Indian races were thought to be subject to uncontrollable streaks of hostility and passion.

This bias was visualized during the colonial era when casta paintings occasionally featured African women acting out aggressively.

4 De español y negra, nace mulata, (No. A este gran pintor mexicano, pionero de la escuela nacionalista, lo rescató José Luis Bello y Zetina en su libro Pinturas Poblanas que escribió en el año de 1943.