Casta

Casta (Spanish: [ˈkasta]) is a term meaning lineage or race in Spanish and Portuguese. The term has historically been used as a racial and social identifier for mixed-race offspring in the colonial Spanish Empire in the Americas. The Spanish crown created a basic legal division between Hispanic society (República de Españoles) and Indigenous peoples (República de Indios). In the Hispanic sector were Spaniards, "Indians", Black Africans, and mixed-race castas.^[1][2] Many scholars have examined whether there was a rigid, racially-based, social hierarchy in Spanish America^[3][4] Although a strict racial hierarchy is shown in 18th century "casta paintings," with fixed categories in rank order, created by Spanish American and Iberian painters, extensive archival research does not support the artists' imagined fixity and rigidity of a highly ordered racial system.^[5] With the encounter in the New World between European Spaniards, enslaved Africans (negros) forcibly brought by Spaniards, and indigenous people (indios), sexual unions produced offspring that colonial officials classified in newly created legal racial categories. Mixed-race categories that appeared in official Spanish documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman; and mulatto, offspring of a Spanish man and an African woman. Many other terms are found casta paintings, for people with variously mixed Spanish, Indigenous, and African ancestry; however, except for official categories of mestizo and mulatto, the plethora of other terms are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the Spanish Empire.