Colonial Casta paintings envisioned unmixable barbarian Indians beyond redemption.

Evidence

These are represented as hostile, untrustworthy warriors, going about largely naked and inscribed with ritualistic facial tattoos emphasizing their fierceness. They are heathens beyond reach. A minor part of the Casta canon, the best-known paintings by Miguel Cabrera from the 1760s and Ramon Torres from 1780 depict “heathen Indians” and “barbarian Indians” respectively. The object of repeated, incessant, and futile calculations to convert, they leave administrators frustrated, even bewildered. What to do with the “Wild Man”? — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1116

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘racial outside’ as the category of the unmixable, unassimilable barbarian in Latin American racial ideology.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘racial outside’ as unassimilable barbarian parallels the tamarisk/Osage-thorn theme in ‘Grafting & Growth’ of what cannot or should not be grafted — the unmixable as infrastructure the system cannot absorb.