Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America*

In the mid seventeenth century, Doña Isabel Uypa Cuca, a woman of a noble Inka lineage, lived in and created a culturally and biologically hybrid household in the city of Cuzco, Peru. She married a man of Spanish descent and they gave birth to two daughters. She wore clothing of Spanish bayeta, Chinese silk, Andean cotton and alpaca fiber; the material was cut and tailored according to both European and Andean fashion. Her belongings were stored in locked wooden cedar chests as well as Inka urpus (pottery vessels). The walls of her home juxtaposed the images of Christian saints with the likenesses of preHispanic Inka emperors. Yet in her own accounts of her possessions there appears no suggestion that her particular heterogeneity was in any way remarkable to either her or her contemporaries. Rather it is we who recognize, name, and remark on hybridity here. Because cultures are collective, they are inherently heterogeneous. Millennia of travel and trade have insured that mixing and interaction is the norm; examples of truly isolated societies are rare in the extreme. Yet in every society certain mixtures become naturalized over time, losing their visibility and potency as mixtures, while others continue to be marked as such. The latter apparently disclose signs of their disparate origins; they stand out from the norm and seem to require acknowledgement, if not also explanation. They also require naming. Recently the term “hybrid” has been used. Although some scholars have resisted applying the words “hybrid” and “hybridity” to cultural forms, many others have adopted them as a way of acknowledging the mixed descendancy of certain objects and practices. It is the selectivity currently exercised in the discourse of hybridity that prompts this essay. Beyond this, we find that in present academic discourse the word “hybrid” and its cognates evoke quite particular—especially political—connotations. This paper thus addresses the implications of choosing, or not choosing, to recognize and name hybridity in visual and material culture. In approaching the subject this way, we seek to examine the politics of recognition (and, perhaps, mis-recognition) rather than determine the value or appropriateness of applying the term “hybridity” to distinct cultural manifestations. Since the Iberian cultures now glossed as “Spain” were expansionist, scholars who have studied colonial societies in Spanish America have confronted the