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Caste Paintings
During colonial times Mexican artists were paid to create "caste paintings." These were tour of duty mementos which Spanish bureaucrats took home to put on the wall. Each painting had a mother, father and child, and were alleged to show what the offspring of various mixes looked like.
The captions in the above paintings say, top, "from mulato and mestiza, quadroon," bottom, "from quadroon and mestiza, coyote." Identifications varied in different sets of "caste paintings." Some, for instance, defined a "coyote" as an Indian and white mix without any African. The lack of a standard in the naming, and the comic scenes, such as the baby getting her bottom cleaned above, strongly suggests that the paintings were primarily intended for insult.
The explanations the Spaniards gave for "Caste Painting" jargon were often designed to ilicit a laugh from the bureaucrats who bought them. For instance, if a light skinned "mulato" known as an "albino" mated with a Spaniard the baby was called a "torna atras" (throw back), meaning that such offspring was expected to "return" to dark skin and African features. The explanation for "mulato" was a word play on "mulo" (mule). It was said that just as the mule is a sterile freak product of a horse and donkey so is a "mulato" a freak. "Coyote" had a similar implication. This caste term derived from the early Conquistador's ignorant belief that a coyote animal was a freak mix of a wolf and a dog.
There were many regional terms. "Jarocho," for instance, is used today to connote any person from around the port of Veracruz. In colonial times it signified a black or mulato from Veracruz. The word is a combination of old Spanish and Arab terms for "silly" and "sh..," which in combination say a person was "a silly piece of sh..".
Many hundreds of "caste paintings" were produced. A number of Mexican museums display caste paintings today as examples of the racism that the nation overcame. There are additional incentives to display them. The Spaniards had controlled colonial art. They believed only whites deserved to be shown. Depictions of the daily life of multiracial working class Mexicans of the late colonial period, the cobblers, black smiths and the like, were almost never made, the main exceptions being the caste paintings .