Cultural Metaphors in the Consumption of Imitation Blue-and-White Porcelain: The Third-Space Identity of the Mestizo Class in Mexico and the Negotiation of Colonial Aesthetics

Abstract

During the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in colonial New Spain, Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, introduced via the Manila Galleon trade, was imitated and reinterpreted by the Talavera pottery of Puebla. This process was more than a transplantation of material culture; it was a cultural practice through which the mixed-race Creole class constructed a third-space identity within the interstices of colonial power. By analyzing the culinary demands, spatial functions, and identity symbolism of Talavera ware, this article reveals how it fused the Eastern aesthetics of Chinese porcelain, Spanish colonial traditions, and indigenous cultural elements into a distinctive Mexican Baroque style. The study finds that Talavera pottery served both as an instrument of the colonial elite’s civilizing narrative and as a visual strategy by which mixed-race groups breached racial and class barriers. Its collage aesthetics challenged the European monopoly on purity and, through the use of everyday objects, rendered identity into a dynamic process of cultural negotiation. This practice illuminates the complexity of multipolar interaction in the early phase of globalization, and the historical logic by which suppressed groups reconstructed their subjectivity through material culture.