Introduction
In 1884, French anthropologist E.T. Hamy purchased a series of colonial Mexican paintings in a Parisian bookshop. He named them les tableaux de métissage (paintings of miscegenation), which was soon translated to Spanish as los cuadros de mestizaje (paintings of miscegenation) or las castas mexicanas (the Mexican castes).
The names stuck, as have early interpretations of the paintings as a visual inventory of the multiple race mixtures of colonial Mexico.
"From Spaniard and Indian woman, Mestiza". 1
The system of castes, in brief, served to keep everyone in their place. Art Historian Ilona Katzew aruges that the idea of the caste system was:
...first, to guarantee that each race occupy a social niche assigned by nature; second, to offer the possibility of improving one's blood through the right pattern of mixing; third, to inhibit the mixture of Indians and blacks, which was deemed the more dangerous to the Spanish social order. 2
1 María Concepción García Saíz, Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano (Milan: Olivetti, 1989): 54. First known casta painting, dated around 1715 Private collection. After García Saíz
2 Ilona Katzew, Casta painting (New York: Yale University Press, 2004): 51.