The Cuban Maja: La Mulata in the Work of Víctor Patricio Landaluze

Spanish artist Víctor Patricio Landaluze came to Cuba in 1850 and spent his career depicting all aspects of Cuban life in prints, watercolors, and paintings. His oeuvre is among the most detailed visual documentation of quotidian life for nineteenth-century Afro-Cubans. This paper explores the complex legacy of Landaluze’s fascination with the Cuban mulata, whose racial ambiguity would come to be seen as the embodiment of Jose Martí's “Nuestra América” and symbolic of Cuba's future. I argue for recognizing the similarities between Landaluze’s portrayal of the mulata and Francisco de Goya’s construction of the Spanish maja. The mulata is representative of Cuba’s racial synthesis and distinction from Spain in a manner analogous to the maja’s popularity as a symbol of Spanish nationalism. By tracing this evolution, I will highlight the relationship between the mulata and the maja as parallel archetypes of femininity with vital significance to the identities of Cuba and Spain. The popularity of Cuba’s mulata rivals the transformation of the maja into Georges Bizet’s Carmen, who would become the most powerful image of Spain’s exotic isolation from the rest of Europe and lives on today at the forefront of Spanish tourism. Europe’s enthrallment with the maja’s personification of Spain’s folklore and sensual allure is mirrored in the Spanish and criollo fascination with the Cuban mulata. Examining Landaluze’s mulata alongside Goya’s maja illustrates the visual migration of these female icons across continents and the evolution of a figure of Spanish nationalism into one of Cuban independence.