Casta Paintings: Picturing Social Order in 18th c. Mexico

In 18th-century New Spain (now Mexico), Casta paintings depicted the offspring resulting from the unions of Spaniards, Indians, and blacks Africans as different social groups called castas. This genre of paintings visualize a hierarchical social system that pinpoints race at the intersection of physical, economic, and social spaces. Magali M. Carrera discusses these paintings, their supposed classification of New Spain’s population, and the problematic and contradictory understandings of an individual’s social and political standing that the casta system perpetuated. About the speaker: Dr. Magali M. Carrera is a Chancellor Professor of Art History (Emerita) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her research examines maps and their relationship to nation-building discourses of nineteenth-century Mexico. She is the author of publications on the visual culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico, including Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (2003) and Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practice of Nineteenth-Century Mexico (2011). Explore the artwork on our website: http://ow.ly/BZQQ30snSpk http://ow.ly/iCtB30snSph Subscribe for more from the Philadelphia Museum of Art on YouTube:    / philaartmuseum   Visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art online: http://www.philamuseum.org/ PMA Stories blog: https://blog.philamuseum.org/ PhilaMuseum on: Facebook:   / philamuseum   Twitter:   / philamuseum   Instagram:   / philamuseum   Tumblr:   / philamuseum   TikTok:   / philaartmuseum