Casta

Casta, Spanish and Portuguese for 'lineage', was a label of descent and standing in colonial Spanish America, chiefly for people of mixed Spanish, Indigenous and African ancestry. The basic mixed categories in official documents were mestizo, generally the child of a Spaniard and an Indigenous person, and mulatto, of a Spaniard and a black African. Spaniards and mestizos paid no tribute and could be ordained; free black people, Indigenous people and other castas paid tribute and were barred from the priesthood. Historians now question whether a rigid 'caste system' existed: the casta paintings of the 18th century, which set many mixtures out in a fixed order under labels rarely used in practice, may have been an attempt to order a more fluid reality.