Chino (casta)

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Casta painting, De Chino e India, Genízara. Francisco Clapera, 18th century Mexico

Chino (feminine china) was a term used in colonial Mexico to refer to people of mixed ancestry. In the eighteenth century, individuals of mixed Amerindian and African ancestry came to be called chinos.[1] A Mexican Inquisition bigamy case in Mexico City labeled one woman variously as a china, loba, and parda, one example of a person shifting racial categorization.[2]  In marriage applications where individuals had to include the names of their parents, chinos tended not to know this information.[3]

When painters produced in the eighteenth century formal depictions of "castes" as envisioned by members of the elite, the term chino appears with no fixed definition. These paintings show father of one racial category, mother of another, and the offspring yet a third category.  In Mexican casta paintings, a ‘’chino’’ could refer to offspring of a Lobo and Negra (pure African); Lobo and India (pure Indigenous woman); Mulatto (European + Negra) and an India; a Coyote and a Mulata; a Spaniard and Morisca (light-skinned woman with African ancestry); and a Chamicoyote and Indian woman.[4]

See also[]

  • Asian Mexicans- also referred to as "chinos" or "indios chinos" during the colonial era

References[]

  1. ^ Slack, Edward R. “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image.” Journal of World History 20, no. 1 (2009): 35-67
  2. ^ Vinson, Ben III. Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press 2018, pp. 64-65.
  3. ^ Vinson, ‘’Before Mestizaje’’, p. 249.
  4. ^ García Saiz, María Concepción. ‘’Las castas mexicanas: Un género pictórico Americano.’’ Milan: Olivetti 1989, p. 26.
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