WHILE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY caste paintings (cuadros de castas), primarily a Mexican phenomenon, have garnered great scholarly attention and debate, the complementary caste poetry and drama (poesía de castas), primarily from Peru (today Spanish-speaking South America), has been virtually ignored. Caste poems and caste dramas depict illicit sex, abortions, fraud, and disease among members from different caste groups (castas), mixed (mestizos, mulatos, zambos) or unmixed (españoles, indios, negros).1 In so doing, they attempt to co-opt and/or refute ideas, beliefs, and representations of inferior castes and estates that challenge hegemonic ones. They should therefore be approached as constitutive elements of the ideology of the cultural system, to borrow Angel Rama’s extrapolations from Clifford Geertz. Juan del Valle y Caviedes, who was born in Spain in the early 1640s and moved to Peru in the late 1650s or early 1660s, was the best known author of caste poems and also the most biting satirist in the Spanish Indies during the long eighteenth century. In Peru he married and fathered five children, and died between 1698 and 1700. Several caste poems by Valle y Caviedes are included in his collection commonly known as Diente del Parnaso (Tooth from Parnassus).  In this essay I attempt to demonstrate how English-language critical race theory (CRT) paves the way for significant discoveries about how Valle y Caviedes’s conceits join social hierarchy to scientific discourse—and about science’s larger engagement with social hierarchy in the Hispanic early modern period. Alongside that aim, I explore some of CRT’s limitations and the modifications that we need to make when we approach the Hispanic early modern with critical tools developed in modern and postmodern North American contexts.

While many critical race theorists in law schools and across the arts and sciences argue about whether the eighteenth century or the nineteenth century was to blame for the concept of race, I prefer to stay attuned to differences between traditional and modern societies, Anglo- or African-American and Hispanic traditions, and ideologies based upon religion and those rooted in rationalism and empiricism. To dismantle the ideology of the Hispanic early modern I insist upon the distinction between caste and race drawn by anthropologists and sociologists who examine the caste systems in India and Japan, because the social hierarchy of traditional societies was different from the racial hierarchy of modern and postmodern societies. I am firmly convinced, nonetheless, that, if we respect what Stuart Hall terms the “historical specificity” of every social formation (“Race”), key concepts of CRT and critical race studies may be adapted to viceregal or colonial situations for which they were not originally designed.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial formation model is rooted in race as a social formation, an understanding that came out of British cultural studies, especially Hall’s work from the early 1980s. “We define racial formation,” they first wrote in 1986, “as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” They theorized that racial formation occurs “through a linkage between structure and representation.” In their model, racial formation in the United States is inextricably linked “to the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled.” In essence, they took Hall’s Marxist delineation of race as a social formation and substituted “structure” for Hall’s “base” (or “material structure”) and “representation” for Hall’s “superstructure” (or “ideology”). They preserved intact Hall’s emphasis on Gramscian hegemony.  What has made Omi and Winant’s model so well known in critical race studies is their notion of racial project: “Racial projects do the ideological ‘work’ of making these links [between structure and representation]. A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.”

By substituting “caste” for Omi and Winant’s “race” and “racial,” we may engage systematically with caste formations in the early modern Hispanic world that belong to the pre-history of race. On the micro level, it becomes possible to approach caste poetry as a series of local and regional projects that—to paraphrase Omi and Winant—interpreted, represented, and explained caste dynamics, and, at the same time, tried to influence the distribution of jobs, educational opportunities, capital, and basic services. Such modifications and adaptations are crucial, for Spanish New World societies were not racial societies; they were caste societies (sociedades de castas). Caste poems and caste dramas from the late baroque and Enlightenment periods should be seen as caste projects insofar as they link representation to social structure: they seek to legitimate the social hierarchy rooted in caste (casta), religious and professional purity (limpieza de sangre y de oficio), and estate (estamento or condición), and to mock its holes and slippages.

Both Lúcia Costigan and Antony Higgins have viewed Valle y Caviedes’s satire in general as reactionary: the poet was writing against middle-income residents or the working poor in Lima—groups that included mestizos, mulatos, and Spanish professionals—and Higgins singles out mulatos as some of Valle y Caviedes’s favorite targets. On the other hand, Pedro Lasarte has pointed out that praise and blame for the lower and higher caste groups are co-mingled in Valle y Caviedes’s satirical poetry. It is impossible, he contends, to say with any degree of certainty when Valle y Caviedes was in earnest and when he was in jest. The satirist’s caste poems in particular have elicited divergent critical perspectives: where Uriel García Cáceres encounters praise for a non-Spanish surgeon, Julie Greer Johnson and Paula Laschober read racial prejudice. In my analysis, Valle y Caviedes’s caste poetry forms part of the cultural system of Lima (a society of castes), and it is therefore inseparable from hegemony. At the same time, because they are poems rather than paintings, they integrate and extend hegemonic discourses in ways that caste paintings could not.

Though not instantly legible as such, alchemy, animal husbandry, herbal medicine, astrology, and physiognomy were interrelated hegemonic discourses that could appear under their own names or under sundry rubrics: books of secrets, almanacs, books of problems or questions, encyclopedias, and so on. This variegated scientific literature circulated widely in Valle y Caviedes’s time, but its importance to the development of the Spanish New World society of castes, caste poetry, and caste theater has been overlooked. Conceits in Valle y Caviedes’s caste poems require careful analysis of their relation to both scientific discourse and the expression of instability or multiplicity in the late baroque period. Aesthetics and hierarchy are articulated insofar as the instability or multiplicity of both is expressed in conceits. Given that the latter are often puns rooted in the sciences, we may also speak of the articulation of hierarchy and science through poetic conceits. In sum, when we tackle the intersections of poetry, hierarchy, and the sciences in Valle y Caviedes’s caste poems, we must engage with them not just in our capacity as critical race theorists but—also, and equally—as cultural historians with a background in Hispanic early modern literature and science.