Identidades in English No 4, December 2014 | Page 75

Fig. 1c. Juana Borrero (1896).
Los pilluelos. [The Rascals]. Painting. Oil on canvas
Fig. 1b. Víctor Patricio Landaluze (1881).
Historia de la Mulata. [History of the Mulatto Girl]
Engraving. Lithograph

Basque painter Víctor Patricio de Landaluce’s
ouevre, both on canvas and graphic (for cigar
boxes), reveal and exemplify the period’s colonial, slave-owning mentality. It also constructs a
base mockery of the black race.
Landaluze covers any and all possible ground,
from the cruelty of satire to the mulatto woman’s
sensual attraction. She is converted into a sex object, which creates the concomitant stereotype of
the mestiza woman who is naive, promiscuous or
servile by nature, and easily succumbs to the very
first adulation, the first insinuations made regarding her beauty. “Vida y muerte de la mulata” [Life
and Death of a Mulatto Woman] and “Historia de
una mulata” [Story of a Mulatto Woman] are devastating examples that reaffirm his view of her as
a happy, sensual and promiscuous being.
By the second half of the nineteenth century,
writer and painter Juana Borrero (1877-1896) creates “Los negritos” [The Little Blacks] (1896) or

“Los pilluelos” [The Little Ragamuffins], a 30.1
x 20.9 inch oil on canvas in which there is yet another view of blacks as friendly and happy people
despite their poverty and misery. All criticism of
this painting highlights the technical-artistic talent and potential of the young painter, her virtuosity in executing a scene according to the
romanticism so prevalent at the time, her style of
costumbrismo. It goes out of its way to praise her
talent for treating an uncommon topic within the
arte academe: three black children or three mischievous, hungry scrappers are imbued with a
sense of friendliness towards those who, despite
their misfortune, have not forgotten the innocence
and joy of playing pranks.
This pictorial incursion garnered the critics’
goodwill. In addition to being an important literary figure in her time, she was always plagued by
the question: “what happened to the three little
black kids?”

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