De Español y de India, Mestiza (Casta Painting)

In 18th-century New Spain, painters produced 'casta paintings' — sets of small canvases each showing a father, a mother, and their child, labelled with a specific term for the resulting racial mixture: Español y India → Mestiza; Español y Mestiza → Castiza; Español y Negra → Mulata; and so on for 16+ categories. Cabrera painted the finest surviving series. The paintings look domestic and warm; the ideology is colonial control, an attempt to systematise the population of colonial Mexico. They are the visual expression of the 'sistema de castas' — the caste system — that governed daily life in Mexico for two centuries. Now at Museo de América, Madrid @museo_america