Casta painting is a distinctive Mexican genre that portrays racial mixing among the Indians, Spaniards & Africans who inhabited the colony, depicted in sets of consecutive images. Ilona Katzew places this art form in its social & historical context.

While casta paintings can be placed within contemporary European concepts of the exotic and the impetus to classify, Katzew demonstrates that the genre also reveals aspects of the construction of identity and self-image unique to the colonial world."--Jacket.

Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad(status) and raza(lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of castapaintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians. Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and castapaintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies--elite and non-elite--as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.

In Exquisite Slaves, Tamara J. Walker examines how slaves used elegant clothing as a language for expressing attitudes about gender and status in the wealthy urban center of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Lima, Peru. Drawing on traditional historical research methods, visual studies, feminist theory, and material culture scholarship, Walker argues that clothing was an emblem of not only the reach but also the limits of slaveholders' power and racial domination. Even as it acknowledges the significant limits imposed on slaves' access to elegant clothing, Exquisite Slaves also showcases the insistence and ingenuity with which slaves dressed to convey their own sense of humanity and dignity. Building on other scholars' work on slaves' agency and subjectivity in examining how they made use of myriad legal discourses and forums, Exquisite Slaves argues for the importance of understanding the body itself as a site of claims-making.

"Painted in Mexico: Pinxit Mexici, 1700-1790 is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far- reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018. Published in conjunction with exhibition. Exhibition Itinerary: Fomento Cultural Banamex, Mexico City June 28-October 15, 2017 Los Angeles County Museum of Art November 19, 2017-March 18, 2018 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York April 24-July 22, 2018"--Provided by publisher.

Representations of Women in Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico explores the power relations between men and women represented in casta paintings of the eighteenth century. I provide an overview of the genre of casta painting and its relation to the sistema de castas, the social arrangement based on lineages intended to sustain the power of the Spanish elite. I examine how casta scenes reinforce the authority of the Spanish male. The social construction of gender, separate spheres of men and women, and the notion of "true womanhood" are recurrent themes. I argue that casta scenes reinforced the expected norms of female behavior. Social codes of conduct varied by class, and I argue that elite, white women are portrayed as ideal women in contrast to mixed-race women. By focusing on gender, this thesis provides a new perspective on this genre, enriching our knowledge of the life experiences of women in colonial Mexico.

This book deepens our understanding of race and the implications of racial mixture by examining the history of caste in colonial Mexico.

Much of the scholarship on difference in colonial Spanish America has been based on the "racial" categorizations of indigeneity, Africanness, and the eighteenth-century Mexican castas system. Adopting an alternative approach to the question of difference, Joanne Rappaport examines what it meant to be mestizo (of mixed parentage) in the early colonial era. She draws on lively vignettes culled from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archives of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia) to show that individuals classified as "mixed" were not members of coherent sociological groups. Rather, they slipped in and out of the mestizo category. Sometimes they were identified as mestizos, sometimes as Indians or Spaniards. In other instances, they identified themselves by attributes such as their status, the language that they spoke, or the place where they lived. The Disappearing Mestizo suggests that processes of identification in early colonial Spanish America were fluid and rooted in an epistemology entirely distinct from modern racial discourses.

On December 19, 1554, the members of Tenochtitlan’s indigenous cabildo, or city council, petitioned Emperor Charles V of Spain for administrative changes “to save us from any Spaniard, mestizo, black, or mulato afflicting us in the marketplace, on the roads, in the canal, or in our homes.” Within thirty years of the conquest, the presence of these groups in New Spain was large enough to threaten the social, economic, and cultural order of the indigenous elite. In Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico, an ambitious rereading of colonial history, Robert C. Schwaller proposes using the Spanish term géneros de gente (types or categories of people) as part of a more nuanced perspective on what these categories of difference meant and how they evolved. His work revises our understanding of racial hierarchy in Mexico, the repercussions of which reach into the present. Schwaller traces the connections between medieval Iberian ideas of difference and the unique societies forged in the Americas. He analyzes the ideological and legal development of géneros de gente into a system that began to resemble modern notions of race. He then examines the lives of early colonial mestizos and mulatos to show how individuals of mixed ancestry experienced the colonial order. By pairing an analysis of legal codes with a social history of mixed-race individuals, his work reveals the disjunction between the establishment of a common colonial language of what would become race and the ability of the colonial Spanish state to enforce such distinctions. Even as the colonial order established a system of governance that entrenched racial differences, colonial subjects continued to mediate their racial identities through social networks, cultural affinities, occupation, and residence. Presenting a more complex picture of the ways difference came to be defined in colonial Mexico, this book exposes important tensions within Spanish colonialism and the developing social order. It affords a significant new view of the development and social experience of race—in early colonial Mexico and afterward.