Casta paintings were a genre of artwork produced in the late 1700s in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Produced for the benefit of the general public in Spain, these works were meant to display the racial diversity of Spain’s subjects. Typically crafted in sets of sixteen, these works purported to document the inter-ethnic mixing between Europeans, Indigenous peoples, Africans, and existing mixed-race populations. In reality, these works of art served to uphold a complex racial hierarchy. They helped cement the dominant status of Europeans and their descendants in the Spanish colonies.