Spanish functionaries as souvenirs of Mexico. A number of artists of the era created casta paintings, including Miguel Cabrera, José de Ibarra, Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz, Francisco Clapera, and Luis de Mena, but most casta paintings are unsigned. Ibarra, Morlete, and possibly Cabrera were of mixed race and born outside Mexico City. Mena's only known casta painting links the Virgin of Guadalupe and the casta system, as well as depictions of fruits and vegetables and scenes of everyday life in mideighteenth-century Mexico. It is one of the most-reproduced examples of casta paintings, one of the small number that show the casta system on a single canvas rather than up to 16 separate paintings. It is unique in uniting the thoroughly secular genre of casta painting with a depiction of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Production of these paintings stopped after the 1821 conclusion of the Mexican War of Independence, when legal racial categories were repudiated in independent Mexico. Until the run-up to the 500th anniversary of the Columbus's 1492 voyage, casta paintings were of little or no interest, even to art historians, but scholars began systematically studying them as a genre. A set of casta paintings was included in Pedro Alonso O'Crouley's A Description of the Kingdom of New Spain, published in translation in 1972. and were then included in the first major catalog of casta paintings published in 1989. Gallery Biombos, or folding screens Biombos or folding screens became popular among elites in the seventeenth century. Large and meant for display in public and private rooms of elite homes, they had a variety of subject matter, ranging from paintings of historical events, real or imagined, allegorical presentations, and scenes from everyday life in Mexico. Mexico was a crossroads of trade in the colonial period, with goods from Asia and Europe mixing with those locally produced. This convergence is most evident in the decorative arts of New Spain. It was popular among the upper classes to have a main public room, called a salon de estrado, to be covered in rugs and cushions for women to recline in Moorish fashion. Stools and later chairs and settees were added for men. Starting in the seventeenth century when the Manila Galleon sailed regularly from the Philippines to the Pacific port of Acapulco, folding screens or biombos (from the Japanese byo-bu or "protection from wind") were among the luxury goods brought from Asia. They