Casta paintings

Series of paintings produced in New Spain, primarily in the 18th century, intended to show the consequences of interracial sexual unions.

In the decades after the conquest of Mexico led by Hernan CoRTES, Spanish authorities came to recognize that the residents of New Spain had begun to intermarry. In an age in which a concept of “race” as a biological category had come to be a subject of intense discussion in Spain, imperial administrators and legal theorists became concerned about what they believed was the rise of limpieza DE SANGRE or “impurity of blood.” Specifically, they wondered what would happen if there was extensive intermarriage in New Spain between Iberians, Native Americans, and Africans. The legal code of New Spain developed with this idea in mind, and the result was an obsession with race that became fundamental in Mexico and other Spanish-American holdings.

This 16th-century obsession eventually manifested itself in a specific kind of artistic representation known as casta paintings. These paintings depicted an individual according to what the artist believed was his or her “race,” starting with three ideal types: Iberian, African, and American. The artist then created an image of what a child of such a union might look like, based on a strict idea of taxonomy. The resulting paintings then portrayed the offspring of a marriage, with each individual’s “race” written on the painting itself. For example, sex between an Iberian and a Native American would produce a MESTIZO child, the offspring of an Iberian and an African would be a MULATTO, and a boy or girl produced by the union of a Native American and an African would be a zambo or zambaigo. But the casta paintings did not stop at this level. Instead, the artists crafted a number of images based on the theoretical couplings of other people and gave to each a new name. Painters typically offered 16 possibilities, though some included more. Each figure represented in one of these paintings would be cast in what the artist thought was a fitting outfit, even though such ideas were as ludicrous as the obsession for identifying the precise quantity of one kind of blood or another flowing in any individual’s body. As the art historian Ilona Katzew has written, the series “follow a specific taxonomic progression: at the beginning are scenes portraying figures of ‘pure’ race (that is, Spaniards), lavishly attired or engaged in occupations that indicate their higher status. As the family groups become more racially mixed, their social status diminishes. In addition to presenting a typology of human races and their occupations, casta paintings also include a rich classificatory system within which objects, food products, flora, and fauna are clearly positioned and labeled.”

At their heart, the casta paintings reveal the Spanish obsession with whiteness, specifically the desire to preserve it. In some instances, according to the paintings themselves, it would be possible for the descendants of a mixed marriage to ultimately become “lighter” in a series of unions and theoretically return to the ideal of “white” that the Spanish believed was the most desirable race. More important still, the existence of the paintings demonstrates the long-term obsession with external characteristics of the peoples who came to inhabit New Spain. Yet the paintings give a legitimacy to mixed-race marriages, in contrast to the prohibitions on intermixed marriage that prevailed in most British colonies in North America.

Further reading: Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005); Ilona Katzew, “Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico,” in Katzew, et al., New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America (New York: America’s Society Art Gallery, 1996).