casta

thumb|upright=1.3|. A casta painting showing 16 racial groupings. Anonymous, 18th century, oil on canvas, 148×104 cm, , , Mexico

'''' () is a term which means "lineage" in Spanish and Portuguese and has historically been used as a racial and social identifier. In the context of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, the term also refers to a now-discredited 20th-century theoretical framework which postulated that colonial society operated under a hierarchical race-based "caste system". From the outset, colonial Spanish America resulted in widespread intermarriage: unions of Spaniards (), indigenous people (), and Africans ().