1. Guadalajara, 27, R. 1, N 8, f. unnumbered, AGI, Seville.

2. On the rise of South American grain and vegetable cultivation in Spain since the beginning of the seventeenth century and its impact on agricultural cycles and nutritional practices, see: Roel, Antonio Eiras, ed., La emigración española a ultramar, 1492-1914 (Madrid: Tabapress, 1991)Google Scholar; Anes Álvarez, Gonzalo, Cultivos, consechas y pastoreo en la España moderna (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1999)Google Scholar; and María Bilbao, Luis and De Pinedo, Emiliano Fernandez, “Evolución del producto agricola bruto en el País Vasco peninsular, 1537-1850. Primera aproximación a través de los diezmos y de la primicia,” in Prestations paysannes, dîmes, rente foncière et mouvement de la production agricole à l’époque préindustrielle, eds. Goy, Joseph and Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS/Mouton, 1982)Google Scholar. On their diffusion, see Andrews, Jean, “Diffusion of Mesoamerican Food Complex to Southeastern Europe,” Geographical Review 83, no. 2 (1993): 194-204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Herrera, Antonio Urquizar, “Imaginando América: objectos indígenas en las casas nobles del Renacimiento andaluz,” in La imagen del poder. Un acercamiento a las prácticas de visualización del poder en la España Moderna, ed. Mesa, Enrique Soria (Cordoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 2011)Google Scholar.

4. See, for example, Leonhardt Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium from 1542, and Francisco Hernández’s Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae, written in 1570.

5. These designations formed a lexicon of imagery including the already cited term morisco.

6. Anthropologists—namely Raphaël Blanchard in 1908, Nicolás Leon in 1924, Francisco de Las Barras de Aragón in 1929 and 1930, and José Pérez De Barradas in 1948—had already studied the series during the first half of the twentieth century.

7. One of the first historical studies was by Morales, Enrique Soria, “Los cuadros de castas de la Nueva España,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 20 (1983): 671-90 Google Scholar. Studies in the field of art history followed: Concepción Garcia Saiz, María, Las castas mexicanas. Un género pictórico americano (Milan: Olivetti, 1989)Google Scholar; Carrera, Magali M., Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas, 2003)Google Scholar; Katzew, Ilona, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Deans-Smith, Susan, “Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 14, no. 2 (2005): 169-204 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Katzew, Ilona and Deans-Smith, Susan, eds., Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

8. Katzew, Casta Painting, chap. 2; Martínez, María Elena, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” The William and Mary Quarterly (3 ^rd series), 61, no. 3 (2004): 479-520 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Magali Carrera rightly objects to this conceptual simplification in chapters one and four of her book, in which she discusses the notion of “race,” lineage, and calidad, although even she struggles to completely free herself from it. See Carrera, Imagining Identity.

9. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, “Assimilation et antisémitisme racial,” Sefardica. Essais sur l’histoire des Juifs, des marranes et des nouveaux-chrétiens d’origine hispano-portugaise [conference held in 1982] (Paris: Éd. Chandeigne, 1998), 255-92 Google Scholar. See also Nirenberg, David, “Race and the Middle Ages: The Case of Spain and its Jews,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Greer, Margaret R., Mignolo, Walter D., and Quilligan, Maureen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 71-87 Google Scholar. For attempts to relate European and colonial forms of exclusion, see: Julio Caro Baroja, “Antecedentes españoles de algunos problemas relativos al mestizaje,” Revista Histórica 28 (1965): 197-210; Stuart B. Schwartz, “Brazilian Ethnogenesis: Mestiços, Mamelucos and Pardos,” in Le Nouveau monde, mondes nouveaux. L’expérience américaine, eds. Serge Gruzinski and Nathan Wachtel (Paris: Éd. Recherche sur les civilisations/ Éd. de l’EHESS, 1996), 7-28; and James H. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 143-66.

10. Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650),” The American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (1999): 33-68; Renato Mazzolini, “Las Castas: Interracial Crossing and Social Structure, 1770-1835,” in Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870, eds. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 349-73.

11. Schorsch, Jonathan, Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeeth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2009)Google Scholar.

12. According to Nicholas Hudson, the word “race” had indeed become the most used and abused term in ethnographic literature toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet, while Hudson’s assertion referred mainly to Europe, the contemporary character of the measures to restrict citizenship to whites in Texas (1845) and California (1849) as well as the policies favoring immigration from northern Europe that were promoted by several Hispano-American states (fifty years before the White Australia Policy) attest to a veritable convergence of views on both sides of the Atlantic. See: Hudson, Nicholas, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 9, no. 3 (1996): 247-64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zúñiga, Jean-Paul, “Le voyage d’Espagne. Mobilité géographique et construction impériale en Amérique hispanique,” Cahiers du Centre de recherches historiques 42 (2008): 177-92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Rodríguez Juárez was almost forty years old at the time and enjoyed a solid reputation as a painter. Four years later, he would receive the prestigious commission for the Altar of Kings in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Mexico City. See Bargellini, Clara, “Juan Rodríguez Juárez,” in Latin-American Lives: Selected Biographies from the Five-Volume Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 880.Google Scholar

14. Morales, Castro, “Los cuadros de castas de la Nueva España Google Scholar.” See also Pierce, Donna, Gomar, Rogelio Ruiz, and Bargellini, Clara, Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521-1821 (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2004), 199.Google Scholar

15. Carlos de Sigüenza described the masses who participated in the Mexico City food riots of 1692 as “a mob of mulattos, blacks, chinos, mestizos, lobos and Spaniards of the lowest type.” Carlos de Sigüenza y Gongora, “Alboroto y motín de los Indios de Mexico,” Seis Obras, ed. William G. Bryant (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1984), 127.

16. In 1742, the population of Mexico City totaled around 100,000 inhabitants, 36% of whom were the product of colonial “interbreeding.” See: Beltran, Gonzalo Aguirre, La población negra de México, 1519-1810. Estudio etnohistórico (Mexico: Ediciones Frente Cultural, 1946), 234 Google Scholar; McCaa, Robert, “The Peopling of Mexico from Origins to Revolution,” in A Population History of North America, eds. Haines, Michael R. and Steckel, Richard H. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 262 Google Scholar; Francisco de Solano, ed., Relaciones geográficas del Arzobispado de México, 1743 (Madrid: CSIC, Centro de estudios históricos, 1988), 2 vols.; and Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 5.

17. González, Andrés Lira and Muro, Luis, “Alzamientos descoyuntados,” Historia general de Mexico (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1987), 1:465-69 Google Scholar; Lorenzo, Ma Pilar Guttiérrez, De la Corte de Castilla al virreinato de México: el Conde de Galve, 1653-1697 (Guadalajara: Disputación Provincial, 1993)Google Scholar; R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Anthony MacFarlane, “Rebellions in Late Colonial Spanish America: A Comparative Perspective,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 14, no. 3 (1995): 313-38; and Natalia Silva Prada, “Estrategias culturales en el tumulto de 1692 en la ciudad de México: aportes parta la reconstrucción de la historia de la cultura política antigua,” Historia Mexicana 53, no. 1 (2003): 5-63.

18. This does not mean that alternative arguments did not exist. The mulatto painter Juan Correa defended the dignity of his color in many different ways. See: Vargaslugo, Elisa and Curiel, Gustavo, Juan Correa, su vida y su obra, vol. 3, Cuerpo de documentos (Mexico City: UNAM, 1991)Google Scholar; de Teresa, Guillermo Tovar, Repertorio de artistas en México. Artes plásticas y decorativas (Mexico City: Grupo Financiero Bancomer, 1995), 1:286 Google Scholar; and Vargaslugo, Elisa, “Los niños de color quebrado en la pintura de Juan Correa,” in Historia, leyendas y mitos de México: su expresión en el arte (Mexico City: UNAM, 1988), 140.Google Scholar

19. In December 1711, Philip V established the Royal Library of Madrid and requested that the viceroy Fernando de Alencastre (1711-1716) send anything that by its size or shape might be considered unusual or extraordinary.

20. Navarro, Moreno, Los cuadros del Mestizaje americano. Estudio antropológico del mestizaje (Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1973)Google Scholar; Comas, Juan, Anthropología de los pueblos iberoamericanos (Barcelona: Labor, 1974), 126-30 Google Scholar.

21. Cambujo and Chino (1725); Sambaygo (around 1730-1750); Albarazado, No te entiendo, tente en el ayre (1740); Quarteron, Calpamulato, Ay te estas (1750); Chino-Cambujo, barsina (1770-1780); Gibaro (1770); and Salta altras.

22. Beltran, Aguirre, La población negra de México, 177 Google Scholar.

23. Mestizo and albarazado in fact belong to the vocabulary of dogs and horses, respectively. The animal etymology often referred to for mulato (from mule) is contested.

24. Father Gumilla explains in 1741: “You should know that if a woman of mixed ancestry marries a man of mixed ancestry, their children will also be mestizos, and in common speech one calls them tente en el ayre, since they are neither more nor less their parents but remain at the same level.” Joseph Gumilla, Historia natural civil y geográfica de las naciones situadas en las riveras del río Orinoco (Barcelona: Impr. de Carlos Gibert y Tutó, 1741; repr. 1791), 74.

25. Albarazado is a term that describes the color of a horse and, in that sense, also derives from a chromatic lexicon.

26. According to the Diccionario de autoridades: castizo, “lo que es de origen y casta conocida” ... “castiza y real nobleza”; in literature: “estilo castizo. Se llama al que es puro, natural y limado, sin mezcla de voces extrañas o poco significativas.” Diccionario de la lengua castellana en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces su naturaleza y calidad, con las phrases o modos de hablar, los proverbios (Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, 1726), 1:255.

27. The term was supposed to designate individuals having one non-European grandparent in four. See Alvar, Manuel, Léxico del mestizaje en Hispanoamérica (Madrid: Ed. Cultura Híspanica/Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1987)Google Scholar.

28. See Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran’s pioneering study, La población negra de México, or H. L. Bennett’s more recent work, Colonial Blackness.

29. Forbes, Jack. D., Black Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988; repr. 1993)Google Scholar.

30. Of. 4, 1519, Leg. 1, s. f., Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla, Seville; Baylia 209, f. 81, Archivo del Reino de Valencia, Valencia. I would like to thank Fabienne Guillen, who gave me permission to cite these documents drawn from her work on medieval slavery under the Crown of Aragon. On the “esclavos blancos,” see: leg. 147801, 208 [1478] and leg. 148410, 64 [1484], Registro general del sello (hereafter “RGS”), Archivo General de Simancas (hereafter “AS”), Simancas; Indiferente general, 418, L. 1, f. 167v [1505], AGI, Seville. See also Bernard Vincent, “Qué aspecto físico tenían los moriscos?” in Andalucia moderna: Actas II Coloquios de historia de Andalucia (Cordoba: Monte de Piedad y Caja de Ahorros de Cordoba, 1983), II:335-40.

31. de Sandoval, Alonso, De instauranda Aethiopum Salute (Madrid: Alonso Paredes, 1627; repr. 1647)Google Scholar, 1:12 (author’s emphasis). See Franklin, Vincent P., “Bibliographical Essay: Alonso de Sandoval and the Jesuit Conception of the Negro,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 3 (1973): 349-60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. “Relación de la jurisdicción de Pánuco y Tampico,” in Relaciones geográficas del Arzobispado de México, 1743, ed. Francisco de Solano (Madrid: CSIC, Centro de estudios históricos, 1988); 1:216. Note that the terms used here are only distantly related to the terminology of the casta paintings.

33. “Juan Sánchez, ... loro, de casta de negros” (here casta means “stock”). PASAJEROS, L. 3, E. 3923 [1558], AGI, Seville. “Antonio Lopez, [...], buen cuerpo, moreno de rrostro (sic) nariz afilada.” Escribania de camara, 938-A [1663], a list of soldiers accompanying the governor of Chili, Francisco de Meneses, AGI, Seville.

34. Bizzochi, Roberto, Genealogie incredibili: scritti di storia nell’Europa moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995; 2009)Google Scholar; Jouanna, Arlette, L’idée de race en France au XVI^e siècle et au début du XVIIe (Montpellier: Ministère des Universités et de l’Université Paul Valery, 1981)Google Scholar. On the emergence of the rhetoric of bloodlines, see Oschema, Klaus, “Maison, noblesse et légitimité. Aspects de la notion d’‘hérédité’ dans le milieu de la cour bourguignonne (XVe siècle),” in L’hérédité entre Moyen Âge et époque moderne. Perspectives historiques, eds. Van der Lugt, Maaike and de Miramon, Charles (Florence: Sismel, 2008), 211-44 Google Scholar. On the phenomenon of how the extended family was marginalized and the genealogical depth of the direct line was favored, see Sabean, David Warren, Teuscher, Simon, and Mathieu, Jon, eds., Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300-1900) (Oxford: Berghan Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

35. At first, the descendants of Indians down to the forth generation were able to benefit from such exemptions. Clement XI later specified that only Indians and mestizos were concerned and that quadroons were henceforth excluded. See Francisco de la Puebla’s letter to the King concerning the edict of June 3, 1697, on Innocent XII’s papal bull, included in: Lizana, Elías, Colección de documentos históricos recopilados del Archivo del Arzobispado de Santiago, vol. 1, Carta de obispos el rey, 1564-1810 (Santiago: Impr. de San José, 1919)Google Scholar, doc. 195, p. 423; Gumilla, Historia natural, 74; and Filippo Salvadore Gilij, Ensayo de Historia Americana, vol. 1, De la historia geográfica y natural de la provincia del Orinoco (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1784; repr. 1965), part IV, bk. 2, part 1, chap. 4.

36. Sigüenza y Góngora, “Alboroto y motín de los Indios de Mexico.”

37. Guadalajara, 27, R. 1, N 8, f. unnumbered, AGI, Seville.

38. Here again, the manuscript El pretendiente reveals the same attitude in the provinces of Peru. The Peruano notes that characterizations based on physical traits were more common: “Many people, using the same language that these people [the castes], ignore the question of origins and call [certain individuals] Black, mulatto, sambo, insulting their dignity and depriving them of the respect they deserve,” El pretendiente, 1528, no. 46, f. 43r, AGI, Seville. This anonymous, truncated manuscript, dating from around 1770, is most likely a version of a work by Gregorio de Cangas, the original of which is held in Peru and was published in 1997. See Vicente Camilo and José Lenci, eds., Descripción en diálogo de la ciudad de Lima entre un peruano práctico y un bisoño chapetón, (Lima: Fondo del Banco central de Reserva, 1997). On the castes as a “clasificación colorida” based essentially on skin color, see Aguirre Beltran, La población negra de México, 163 and 168-69.

39. On these points, see: Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, 51; Jean-Luc Bonniol, “La couleur des hommes, principe d’organisation sociale. Le cas antillais,” Ethnologie française 20, no. 4 (1990): 410-18.

40. Inquisición no. 1733, year 1712-1715, Archivo Histórico Nacional (hereafter “AHN”), Madrid.

41. See the attempt at a general synthesis by Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967), 58. This was taken up by Carrera in Imagining Identity, 36-37.

42. Aguirre Beltran points out that the word cocho was used in Michoacán, cambujo in Oaxaca, jarocho in Veracruz, loro in Chiapas, and zambo in Guerrero. All of these terms refer to a single phenotype, that of the pardo mulatto, a person whose complexion is somewhere between that of black and that of the Native American. See Aguirre Beltran, La población negra de México, 169.

43. The same may be said of Guatemala, despite its proximity to New Spain. See: Muñoz, Jorge Lujan, ed., Relaciones géographicas e Historicas del siglo XVIII del Reino de Guatamala (Guatemala City: Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, 2006)Google Scholar; Lutz, Christopher, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: City, Caste and the Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

44. “Termine indico significante il rimanente o la minima parte.” For Francisco Berengher too, the terms remained unchanged for the descendants of a white father and a black mother.

45. This lexicon corresponds to the terms used in the majority of official documents, as confirmed by the Recopilación of 1684.

46. I will examine the dissemination of these terms and the history of mutual linguistic borrowing between different regions in Central America at greater length in a forthcoming book.

47. De Solano, Relaciones geográficas, 2:481. Another category in the Relaciones is worth mentioning: the gente de razón, which included all of the castes, was used to distinguish them from the Indian population, who were in turn relegated to the lower extremities of this intellectual classification.

48. Españoles, Castizos, Mestizos, Indios, Mestindios, Mulatos, Negros, Moriscos, Lobos, Alvinos, Coyotes, Chinos. Padron de l’arzobispado de México, 1778 [sic], MP-VARIOS, 38, AGI, Seville.

49. Thus, the emergence of this vocabulary is far from being a “creation of the elite.” In order to understand its origins, one must first situate it within its own complex historical and ideological context. See Müller-Wille and Rheinberger Heredity Produced, 11, n. 43. In this sense, the misunderstandings that resulted when clerks adopted this new vocabulary proves that this nomenclature, contrary to what has sometimes been argued, never constituted a rigid form of classification—still less a “system”—applied in a coherent and systematic manner by the imperial administration. Neither was it employed to establish the rights or duties of each “caste.” The expression “caste system” is nonetheless frequently employed by anthropologists, art historians, and even historians of this particular subject, despite the fact that the majority of these terms never appear in legal or administrative practice. For example, see: Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars”; Katzew, Casta Painting, chap. 2; Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain”; Barbara L. Voss, “From Casta to Californio: Social Identity and the Archaeology of Culture Contact,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 461-74; and Mazzolini, “Las Castas.” On the various attempts to tax the castes, see Luis Ramos Gomez and Carmen Ruigomez Gomez, “Une propuesta a la corona para extender la mita y el tributo a negros, mestizos y mulatos (Ecuador 1735-1748),” Revista complutense de Historia de América 25 (1999): 99-110. On New Spain, see Paulino Castañeda Delgado, “Un problema ciudadano: la tributación urbana,” in Estudios sobre la ciudad iberoamericana, ed. Francisco de Solano (Madrid: CSIC, 1983), 513.

50. Ecclesiastical law, for example, viewed the entire non-Hispanic population as either Indian or non-Indian and further divided this latter group into freemen and slaves. The Council of Lima in 1613 thus set the same parochial fees for quadroon, mestizo, and mulatto freemen, which were higher than those for black or mulatto slaves, who still payed more than free Indians. See Fermín del Pino Díaz, “Historia natural y razas humanas en los ‘cuadros de castas’ hispano-americanos,” in Frutas y castas “illustradas” (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura y Deporte, 2003), 47-48.

51. In Santiago de Chile in 1760, Lorenzo Elguea, a master goldsmith, refused to be enrolled in the city’s battalion of pardos, arguing that the battalion was reserved for sambos, while he was himself a requinteron, a term rarely used in the local documentation. El maestro Lorenzo Elguea al Gobernador de Chile don Manuel de Amat y Junient, Santiago, January 16, 1760, Capitania General collection, vol. 830, fol. 391, Archivo Nacional de Chile, in Anales de Desclasificación, vol. 1, La derrota del aréa cultural 2 (2006), 783-84.

52.Ulloa nonetheless named only five different categories: see Juan, Jorge and de Ulloa, Antonio, Relación histórica del viage a la América meridional, hecho de orden de S. Mag. para medir algunos grados de meridano terrestre, y venir por ellos en conocimiento de la verdadera figura y magnitud de la tierra, con otras varias observaciones astronómicas y phísicas (Madrid: A. Marín, 1748)Google Scholar, vol. I, chap. IV, p. 42. See also Francisco de Solano, Antonio de Ulloa y la Nueva España (Mexico City: UNAM, 1979), 78, 112, and 114.

53. El pretendiente, Indiferente general, 1528, no. 46, f. 43v, AGI, Seville.

54. See conclusion to Katzew, Casta Painting.

55. It is interesting to note that this confusion seems to have crept into the Spanish language. The Diccionario de autoridades, for example, defines the term gente blanca as “people of quality”: “a noble, worthy, respected person ... it is considered to be a natural prerogative and a sign of noble birth.” Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 1:616a.

56. In the words of Don Juan de Valencia, a knight of the Order of Santiago cited as a witness to substantiate the nobility of a Peruvian candidate to the Order of Santiago in 1645: “In the city of Lima distinctions of occupation do not exist between hidalgo knights and plebeians, but ... hidalgo knights of noble blood may be recognized by the general esteem in which they are held.” Fondo Ordenes Militares, Callalleros de Santiago, exp. 3704, f. 4v, AHN, Madrid (author’s emphasis).

57. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Noticias secretas de América, sobre el estado naval, militar, y político de los reynos del Perú, y provincias de Quito, costas de Nueva Granada y Chile (London: R. Taylor, 1747; repr. 1826), part II, chap. VI, pp. 420ff.

58. On the importance accorded by the Creoles of New Spain to European Spaniards, see Michel Bertrand, Grandeur et misère de l’office. Les officiers de finances de Nouvelle-Espagne, XVII^e-XVIII^e siècles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), chap. 5; for Cartagena, see Juan and Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage a la América meridional, I:40-41.

59. Ibid., chap. IV, §61.

60. The anonymous Puebla series of 1750 literally and explicitly illustrated this assertion.

61.Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Teatro crítico universal (Madrid: Blas Moran, 1726; repr. 1775), IV:109.

62. Text sent by Andrés de Arce y Miranda in October 1746 to Juan José de Eguiara y Eguren—author of the Bibliotheca Mexicana, a dictionary of the major authors of New Spain—and conceived as a response to attacks against the creative genius of the Creoles, cited by Castro Morales, “Los cuadros de castas de la Nueva España,” 679.

63. de Meléndez, Juan, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias en la historia de la gran prouincia de san Iuan Bautista del Peru (Rome: Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1682), 1:349.Google Scholar

64. Katzew, Casta Painting, 51.

65. Letter by Andrés de Arce y Miranda cited by Castro Morales, “Los cuadros de castas de la Nueva España,” 679-80.

66. Juan and Ulloa, Noticias secretas de América, part II, chap. VI, p. 421.

67. Cited by Castro Morales, “Los cuadros de castas de la Nueva España” (author’s emphasis).

68. The mulatto (Afro-Indian as well as Afro-European) can “never escape his condition,” since according to Pedro Alonso O’Crouley, “the Spanish element is absorbed and lost” in the case of blacks or mulattos. See: Elena Isabel Estrada de Gerlero, “Las pinturas de castas, imágenes de una sociedad variopinta,” in Mexico en el mundo de las colecciones de arte, vol. 4, Nueva España, ed. Elisa Vargaslugo (Mexico City: UNAM 1994), 7 83; Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 185, n. 8.

69. See the remarks of Pino Díaz, “Historia natural y razas humanas,” 55.

70. Melchisédech Thévenot’s anthology—he had amassed more than 290 manuscripts representing everything that could be known about the world in Europe at the time— provides the best example of the dissemination of such knowledge as well as the interest aroused by this type of literature: see Thévenot, Melchisédech, Relation de divers voyages curieux, qui n’ont point esté publiées ou qui ont esté traduites d’Hacluyt, de Purchas et d’autres voyageurs anglois, hollandois, portugais, allemands, espagnols et de quelques persans, arabes et autres auteurs orientaux (Paris: [various publishers], 1663-1696), 4 volsGoogle Scholar. On Thévenot and his role in creating the Académie royale des sciences et la littérature de voyages, see Nicholas Dew, “Reading Travels in the Culture of Curiosity: Thévenot’s Collection of Voyages,” Journal of Early Modern History 10, no. 1/2 (2006): 39-59.

71. Gage, Thomas, Nouvelle Relation, contenant les voyages de Thomas Gage dans la Nouvelle-Espagne, ses diverses aventures, et son retour par la province de Nicaragua jusques à la Havane ... Ensemble une description exacte des terres et provinces que possedent les Espagnols en toute l’Amérique ... de leurs mœurs et de celles des criolles, des metifs, des mulatres, des indiens, et des negres ... (Amsterdam: Paul Marret, 1648; repr. 1699)Google Scholar.

72. Letter from Father Taillandier to Father Willard of the Company of Jesus, written in Pondicherry, 20 February 1711, in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des Missions étrangères, par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus. Recueil XI (Paris: chez Nicolas Le Clerc, 1715), 119.

73. Pernety, Antoine-Joseph, Journal historique d’un voyage fait aux îles Malouines en 1763 &1764 (Berlin: Étienne de Bordeaux, 1769), 1:150-51 Google Scholar. The turn of phrase itself recalls Father Taillandier’s remark... or even the comments of Amédée Frezier, Relation du voyage de la mer sud aux côtes du Chily et du Pérou fait pendant les années 1712, 1713 et 1714 (Paris: J.-G. Nyon, 1716), 63.

74. du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Français (Paris: T. Jolly, 1667), vol. 2 Google Scholar, treatise VIII, chap. 2, §5, p. 511.

75. It must not be forgotten that the very emergence of the idea of interbreeding, of a mid-state, when talking about one individual’s genealogy—a view so often taken for granted today—in fact represented an enormous conceptual leap. Previously considered as descending from one or the other parent (hypolinearity, hyperlinearity, or exclusive patrilinearity), “half-breed” individuals were only considered as such after the manner of considering these “heterogeneous” unions had radically changed.

76. Such “colorist” terms nonetheless predate Moreau de Saint-Méry’s work by many years: see Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Médéric, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (Paris: T. Morgand/ L. Guérin, 1797-1798; repr. 1875), 93.Google Scholar

77. Certain terms—Black, mulatto, quadroon, métis, griffe, and Indian—are found in both Moreau de Saint-Méry’s work and the nomenclatures of New Spain.

78. For Moreau de Saint-Méry, the question must be decided on the basis of local practices, which were in turn based on social consensus. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, 100.

79. As Edward Long points out, similar terms were often employed: “The Dutch ... add drops of pure water to a single drop of dusky liquor, until it becomes tolerably pellucid. But this needs the apposition of such a multitude of drops that, to apply the experiment by analogy to the human race, twenty or thirty generations perhaps would hardly be sufficient to discharge the stain.” Long, Edward, The History of Jamaica, or General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 261 Google Scholar. Despite supporting different conclusions, both the Spanish and Dutch metaphors rely on a common model to describe the “alchemy of lineage,” one that uses the metaphor of water and especially the metaphor of a laboratory experiment.

80. Here, as in New Spain, the phenotypical terminology seems to be regionally specific. The word casque does not appear in the list of terms presented by Moreau de SaintMéry.

81. Histoire de l’Académie royale des Sciences (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1724), 17-19.

82. Labat, Jean-Baptiste, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique, contenant l’histoire naturelle de ces pays, l’origine, les mœurs, la religion et le gouvernement des habitants anciens et modernes, les guerres et les événements singuliers qui y sont arrivez ... le commerce et les manufactures qui y sont établies (La Haye: P. Husson, 1724)Google Scholar, 2^nd part, chap. VI and citation p. 35.

83. In the words of the Pretendiente: “In this type of generation [people of African descent], the more the descendant distances himself from this origin, the more his color and quality gains in esteem, which explains why the son of a Spanish father and an African mother is unsuited to occupy public offices, while the Requinteron, though of identical origin, being six degrees removed from the latter, is suited to occupy such offices, since, having left his African origins behind, he may rightfully be considered Spanish.” El pretendiente, Indiferente general, 1528, no. 46, f. 42v, AGI, Seville.

84. Long, The History of Jamaica, book II, chap. XIII, p. 261.

85. Ulloa makes this clear when he specifies that, in Peru, “those who are white only by accident occupy positions that should normally be reserved for only the highest-ranking men of quality.” Juan and Ulloa, Noticias secretas de América, part II, chap. VI, p. 421.

86. Feijoo, Teatro crítico universal, 3^rd discourse, §II, 6, pp. 67-68.

87. See Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, 100.

88. In this sense, the milieu in which men such as Antonio de Ulloa and Alonso O’Crouley existed is of fundamental importance. Ulloa maintained close relations, as a correspondent or member, with the Royal Academies of Science in Paris, London, Berlin, and Stockholm. He also founded the Museum of Natural History in Madrid and was the first director of the city’s Botanical Gardens. See Solano, Antonio de Ulloa y la Nueva España, XXXV and 225. O’Crouley, for his part, was a member of several economic and scientific societies (the Real Academia de Historia, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, and the Sociedad Económica Matritense). His cabinet of curiosities in Cadiz was famous. See Estrada de Gerlero, “Las pinturas de castas,” 83.

89. Caldani, Leopoldo M. A., “Congetture intorno alle cagioni del vario colore degli Africani, e di altri populi; e sulla prima origine du questi,” in Memorie di Matematica e Fisica delle Societa Italiana, vol. 8, 1^st part, p. 1799, table XVGoogle Scholar.

90. Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Heredity Produced.

91. Did not Paul Valéry say that nobility was “a mystical property of the seminal liqueur”? See Robert Descimon, “La haute noblesse parlementaire parisienne : la production d’une aristocratie d’Etat aux XVI^e et XVII^e siècles,” in L’Etat et les aristocraties (France, Angleterre, Écosse), XII^e-XVII^e siècles, ed. Philippe Contamine (Paris: Presses de l’ENS, 1989), 353.

92. On Nicolas Hartsoecker’s influence on this debate, see Hartsoecker, Nicolas, Essay de dioptrique (Paris: J. Anisson, 1694), 230 Google Scholar. In this essay, he also develops the idea according to which all future human beings were contained in the sperm of living men, a creationist view the author claims to have communicated to Nicolas Malebranche. See also Correia, Clara Pinto, The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm Preformationists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93. Regnier de Graaf imagined the role of male sperm as simply one of activating the being already preformed in the female egg: see de Graaf, Regnier, Histoire anatomique des parties génitales de l’homme et de la femme, qui servent à la génération, avec un traité du suc pancréatique, des clystères et de l’usage du siphon (Basel: J. G. König, 1672; repr. 1699)Google Scholar.

94. Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique, 2^nd part, chap. VI, p. 35.

95. Foster, George M., “Relationships between Spanish and Spanish-American Folk Medicine,” The Journal of American Folklore 66, no. 261 (1953): 201-17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; López Beltrán, Carlos, “Hippocratic Bodies: Temperament and Castas in Spanish America (1570-1820),” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2007): 253-89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

96. Cañizares Esguerra, “New World, New Stars.”

97. Father Feijoo himself insisted on the influence of climate on complexion and skin color: see Feijoo, Teatro crítico universal, vol. VII, 3^rd discourse, §39.

98. François Bernier, in particular, spoke out against this received idea: see [François Bernier], “Nouvelle Division de la Terre, par les differentes Espèces ou Races d’hommes qui l’habitent,” Journal des Sçavans XII (April 24, 1684): 135.

99. See, for example, Buffon on the color of Spaniards: Leclerc Buffon, Georges-Louis, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du Roy (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1749), III:422 Google Scholar; Buffon, Illustrations de Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, servant de suite à l’histoire naturelle de l’homme (Paris: Imprimerie royale; 1777), 267-68.

100. Axtell, James, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 301 Google Scholar. On the twentieth century, see Anderson, Warwick, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (New York: Basic Books, 2003)Google Scholar.

101. Mather, Increase, The Necessity of Reformation (Boston: John Foster, 1679)Google Scholar, 7, cited by Axtell, Natives and Newcomers, 310.

102. See Bauer, Ralph, “Creole Identities in Colonial Space: The Narratives of Mary White Rowlandson and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán,” American Literature 69, no. 4 (1997), 665-95 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Bauer rightly identifies the hemispherical character of the “colonial” problems raised by Rowlandson and Pineda in their specific contexts.

103. Mather, Cotton, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, ed. Silverman, Kenneth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 397-99 Google Scholar, cited by Axtell, Natives and Newcomers, 314. The letter in question had been sent by Mather to a team of English doctors interested in the influence of climate.

104. Even if the terms are not necessarily the same, farmers have been involved in importing, acclimating, and cross-breeding exotic plants since the dawn of time. The language of these activities is that of stock, breed, improvement, and degeneration. In this sense, see: Étienne, Charles, Agriculture et maison rustique (Paris: Jacques Dupuy, 1564)Google Scholar, book III, p. 187; de Serres, Olivier, Le théâtre de l’Agriculture et mesnage des champs (Geneva: Samuel Chouet, 1600; repr. 1651), 601-2 Google Scholar.

105. Albert Eckhout was one of a group of painters, illustrators, and scientists that accompanied Johan Maurits de Nassau-Siegen after his appointment as governor of the Dutch colony in northeastern Brazil by the Dutch West Indies Company in 1637. See: Buvelot, Quintin, ed., Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil (La Haye/Zwolle: Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis/Waanders Publishers, 2004)Google Scholar; Parker Brienen, Rebecca, Visions of a Savage Paradise: AlbertEckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the images of Tupi and Tapuya men and women directly inspired by Eckhout, see Historia naturalis, book VIII, chap. VI.

106. Antonio de Arellano’s painting of a Chichimec woman, considered by Katzew to be the first example of the casta-painting genre, represents a sort of Indian Madonna and child, the infant holding an ear of corn and an exotic bird in his hands. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the botanical richness of New Spain became a leitmotif in the genre. See Dante Martins Teixeira and Elly de Vries, “Exotic Novelties from Overseas,” in Albert Eckhout, Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil (La Haye/Zwolle: Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis/Waanders Publishers, 2004), 64-107.

107. Lettre de M. Leibniz à M. Sparvenfeld [1696] in Otium hanoveranum, sive, Miscellanea, by Joachim Friedrich Feller (Leipzig: J. C. Martini, 1718), 38, and cited by Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race,’” 252.

108. Feijoo, Teatro crítico universal, vol. VII, § 46 and 53.

109. Müller-Wille and Rheinberger, Heredity Produced, chap. 1.

110. Ibid., 13.

111. Immanuel Kant, “Determination of the concept of a human race,” in Anthropology, History, and Education, trans. Holly Wilson and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143-59.

112. Ibid., 149.

113. Concerning, for example, the curse of Ham used to justify the status of slaves in the Middle Ages before later being employed to justify African enslavement in modern times, see: Freedman, Paul, “Sainteté et sauvagerie. Deux images du paysan au Moyen Age,” Annales ESC 47, no. 3 (1992): 539-60 Google Scholar; Braude, Benjamin, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” The William and Mary Quarterly (3^rd series), 54, no. 1 (1997): 103-42.Google Scholar