Casta paintings mapped racial descent onto economic class position

Evidence

So the paintings increasingly exhibit tattered clothing, forlorn and laborweary dispositions as well as impoverished food in representations of the various mixes of Indian and black offspring. In similar vein, the finery of fashion and fare in the paintings of Spaniard mixes with whomever give way to background figures of scrawny mules in the case of mixes involving mulattoes. Race and class mirror as they constrain each other. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1109

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalist painting coded class through skin color during European slavery debates — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 305