Front Cover: Castas de Nueva España. Oil on canvas (77x49 cm), by Ignacio María Barreda (1777)- Courtesy Real Academia Española, Madrid. With thanks to Miguel Ángel López Trujillo for his help in obtaining the image.
Unlike colonial North America, where racial identity became governed by the "one drop" rule (a drop of African or Indian blood consigned one to the "Negro" or "Indian" category), in the Spanish world from the very beginning race mixing produced new categories that stood apart from the parent lineages. Hence, mestizos and mulattoes formed separate and recognized racial categories. In time miscegenation produced mixes of mestizos and mulattoes, not to mention mixes of one of the parent lineages with one of the new mixed ones. By the end of the seventeenth century this process of commingling the basic blood lines—European, African, Indian, mestizo, mulatto, and lobo (African-Indian mix)—produced what became known as the sistema de castas, or caste system. At the top of this hierarchy stood Europeans (white was not employed as a racial category) , followed by mestizos, and other castas, Africans and, finally, Indians. Unlike the Asian Indian caste system, the Spanish version did not have religious or exclusionary properties. Indeed, as long as there was no acknowledged African blood in one's family, it was theoretically possible for a lineage to return to European status having previously mixed with an Indian bloodline. The eccentricities, not to say absurdities of the system became a fashionable fascination for the affluent sectors of Mexican society in the course of the eighteenth century, leading to the development of a genre of visual art known as casta painting. This unique art holds a treasure trove of information regarding the development of Mexican colonial society across the breadth of the eighteenth century. Changes in dress and social attitudes are clearly discernible over time, including such interesting representations as European women mixing with men of lower caste status. The work represented here, which is roughly contemporaneous with the case of Urbano and Maria Trinidad (see article by Jesús F. de la Teja in this issue), is a marvelous example of the genre, representing not only racial categories but also socioeconomic ones. Note, for instance, that at the upper right a Spanish woman is paired with an African man, but clearly one of high socioeconomic status. Consequently, in reflecting the possible range of racial and social mixing, Barreda's work tells us much of the social fluidity of late-colonial Mexican society. For two recent studies focusing on the interpretation of colonial art, particularly casta painting, see Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and tL· Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Painting (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), and Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth- Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). The story of the painting can be found in Manuel Alvar López, "Las castas coloniales en un cuadro de la Real Academia," Boletín de la Real Academia Española, vol. 78 (Sept.-Dec, 1998), 307-338.
