2. From Spaniard and Mestiza, a Castiza is Born,

1777

To enact their economic and imperial ambitions, Europeans imported millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas, who profoundly influenced both their European captors and the region’s diverse Indigenous peoples. Through a varied process of cultural collision, intermarriage, and creolization, new race-based categories took shape. In eighteenth-century Mexico, blood quotient, or the relative proportions of an individual’s racial composition, fundamentally determined social situation. The emergence of a unique genre of art, casta paintings, addressed Mexico’s mixed-race people. Each scene in a series of typically sixteen casta paintings illustrates different interracial couples and their offspring. As the scenes progress, they transition from the most “superior” families to the least, with Spanish heritage and “purity” of blood elevated above other racial types. These vignettes by Guiol suggest how stereotypes of behavior—ranging from exemplary to depraved—were explicitly linked to race, gender, and class and used to justify an inequitable social order.