Racial Hierarchy in Casta Paintings

In the eighteenth Century, Colonial European and Mexican artists were fascinated with the emergence of racial blending within the Spaniard bloodline. Works of art began displaying pieces that portrayed three major groups that inhabited the colony— Indians, Spaniards, Africans and other ethnicities. This new genre of painting was known as Casta painting and portrayed colonial representations of racial intermarriage and their offspring. Traditionally Casta paintings were a pictorial genre that was often commissioned by Spaniards as souvenirs upon their arrival from New Spain (Mexico). And yet, why would such works have so much fascination despite its suggestive theme? It is clear that Casta paintings display interracial groups and couples, but they seem to have a deeper function when it comes to analyzing these works. These paintings demonstrate that casta paintings were created to display racial hierarchies within the era. They depict the domestic life of interracial marriages and systematically categorized through a complete series of individual paintings. It is clear that the fascination of these works reflected the categorizing of new bloodline that have been emerging and displays these characters in a manner that demonstrates the social stereotypes of these people by linking them with their domestic activities and the items that surround them as well. Despite the numerous racial stereotypes that are illustrated in these works, casta paintings construct racial identities through visual representations. Castas depicted marginal statuses in Europe and were structured to identify the groups that were not classified as “Spanish”. Names such as “Mestizo”, “Mulatto” or “Spaniard” did not only describe the physical appearance of an individual but rather these names functioned as a racial label among the “physical, social and moral qualities”. These paintings