By 1800 a quarter of Mexico’s population was racially mixed

Evidence

The paintings on the surface are edenic family portraits almost invariably of husband, wife, and single child (or occasionally two children) in domestic settings or scenes of nature. They reveal the order of racial rankings explicitly by characteristic inscriptions describing the racial typification of parents and the consequent racial characterization of the child offspring. But they reiterate also the relative usualness of such mixing – by century’s close, Pat Seed calculates, fully a quarter of Mexico’s population was mixed – and the fading of at least robust formal state restriction, even in the face of social status long tied to European preferences for “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre/limpeza de sangue). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1089

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did Pat Seed arrive at the quarter-of-population figure, and did it vary regionally across Mexico?
• XREF: The ‘edenic family portrait’ surface masking a ranked caste grid evokes the way other colonial visual genres (e.g. natural history plates) naturalized social hierarchy — connects to broader iconography-of-empire readings.