UCSB history professor Sarah Cline’s LASA-award-winning essay deconstructs an iconic colonial Mexican casta painting of racial hierarchy

By Sonia Fernandez / UCSB In 18th-century Mexico, casta paintings were all the rage, as the bloodlines of Spanish colonizers and of the colonized indigenous, black and mixed-race populations mingled and American-born Spaniards sought to define themselves apart amid increasingly blurry racial…