Final answer:
Casta paintings were 18th-century artworks that depicted and reinforced the racial and social hierarchy in Spanish colonial society, stratifying people based on racial stereotypes.
Step-by-step explanation:
Casta paintings can best be defined as artwork that stratified Spanish colonial society based on racial stereotypes. These paintings were a genre popular in the 18th century in New Spain, depicting the complex social hierarchy that had arisen from the confluence of different races: Spaniards, Indigenous populations, and African slaves. The artworks were explicitly used to delineate the racially mixed categories of people, often portraying individuals in a way that reflected and reinforced the prevailing social and racial prejudices of the time.
The visual records in Casta paintings typically included families formed by intermarriage among different races, hierarchically arranged to underscore the perceived superiority of the Spanish. Each image in the series was accompanied by text that detailed the racial composition of the individuals depicted. Casta paintings served as a means for the upper classes, particularly Creoles, to establish their status within the colonial hierarchy, as well as a reflection of the larger anxieties concerning race and social order in the Spanish colonies.
Enlightenment-era thinkers influenced the creation of Casta paintings as part of their attempts to impose rational order onto the diversity and perceived disorder of colonial life. The paintings are of historical interest today because they reveal how people in New Spain viewed the interrelated issues of race, lineage, and status during a time when these issues were central to colonial administration and social life.