for those of you who are not familiar with the castas. casta (spanish: [kasta]) is a term which means "lineage" in spanish and portuguese and has historically been used as a racial and social identifier. in the context of the spanish empire in the americas, the term also refers to a now-discredited 20th-century theoretical framework which postulated that colonial society operated under a hierarchical race-based "caste system". from the outset, colonial spanish america resulted in widespread intermarriage: unions of spaniards (espaoles), indigenous people (indios), and africans (negros). basic mixed-race categories that appeared in official colonial documentation were mestizo, generally offspring of a spaniard and an indigenous person; and mulatto, offspring of a spaniard and an african. a plethora of terms were used for people with mixed spanish, indigenous, and african ancestry in 18th-century casta paintings, but they are not known to have been widely used officially or unofficially in the spanish empire.
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