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The Castas System (Pintura de Castas)


By Xayme - Posted on 09 February 2015

A friend made me aware of this painting/system and thought I'd post it for future references in race terminology found in any documents of those times. This is what Wikipedia says:

Casta (Spanish: [ˈkasta], Portuguese: [ˈkaʃtɐ, ˈkastɐ]) is a Spanish and Portuguese term used in 17th and 18th centuries mainly in Spanish America and Spanish Philippines to describe as a whole the mixed-race people which appeared in the post-Conquest period in the process known as mestizaje. A parallel system of categorization based on the degree of acculturation to Hispanic culture, which distinguished between gente de razón (Hispanics) and gente sin razón (non-acculturated natives), concurrently existed and worked together with the idea of casta.

Here is the painting with "proper titles."

http://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintura_de_castas#/image/Archivo:Casta_painting_all.jpg