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 th...