Week Three: Casta Paintings and Catalina de Erauso

Catalina de Erauso is really a story of more than just gender, but she is also a story of the New World following the influx of conquistadores. Her ability to perform a variety of jobs such as lieutenant, merchant, and farmer reveal the pure amount of opportunity for Spanish men within the New World. As we have discussed many made the journey in hopes of becoming elite or wealthy as the social stratification within the New World was at its beginning phase. It seems as though there was a sort of desperation to create these old systems of order within new environments as the Casta paintings suggest. The detailed nature of the Casta paintings reflect a kind of desperation to have hierarchy as people are divided and subdivided into as many categories as possible. Of course these paintings favor the conquerer as the superior race yet I found it interesting how the indigenous woman was positioned higher in society than the African woman. It speaks to the intensity of anti-black racism but the argumentation that the natives were "natural slaves" seems like it could've complicated this narrative. In the end it didn't matter to the Spanish who was placed where in the hierarchy because they were always at the top.

I wasn't totally sure how to feel about Catalina de Erauso. On one hand she represents the sort of destruction of gender construction as she is able to not only live independently but be rather successful in each profession she undertakes. Yet at the same time she is extremely violent, not only to the natives but anyone who crosses her. In this sense I don't find her a particularly inspiring or cunning leader as she seems to be largely reactive. I was shocked by the fact that she killed her brother and still throughout the entire endeavor never revealed that she was his sister. I did really wonder how her story could stop so abruptly in Mexico. Do they know where her remains are? Did she marry? Did she live out the rest of her life as a man?

The story of Catalina makes me, if anything, want more stories of female figures within the New World. Recently I have been reading about Malinche, the translator and eventual spouse of Cortes. The different ways that women were able to engage in conquest seem pertinent yet not much studied.

Comments

  1. JonSeptember 16, 2019 at 12:50 AM

    "The different ways that women were able to engage in conquest seem pertinent yet not much studied."

    I think this is a good point, and that it's also a good point to say that Catalina de Erauso's story is in some ways a bit troubling. Yes, she personally may have liberated herself from one set of gender constraints... but she hardly struck a blow against current conceptions of masculinity, did she?

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