Peruvian Cloth and Colonization
Arriving in Peru in the early sixteenth century, the Spanish were awestruck by the beauty and ingenuity of the textiles that they saw there. Spanish reports acknowledged the mastery of textile making by Indigenous communities, where the traditional garments became quintessential to the image of the Andean world.
​
Clothing in the sixteenth century could be perceived as an insight into the wearer’s identity (not only outward appearance) being comparable to the spiritual orientations from pre Hispanic Mexico and Peru. Garments had the ability to signify societal roles, class, racial distinctions, and generational racial identities. Colonial officials in Lima attempted to enforce legislation that would limit the clothing options of negros, mulatos, indios, and mestizos: where the greatest pushback came from free castas who used clothing to shape their own sense of place within colonial society.
Between 1761 and 1776, Peru’s viceroy Manuel Amat y Junyent commissioned the Casta series as a gift for king Charles IV’s Cabinet of Natural History. Amat wrote that the illustrations reflected the "notable mutation of appearance, shape, and color that results from the successive generations of mixing with indios and negros..." Although the images do not bear an artist's signature, they have since been presumably attributed to the workshop of Cristobal Lozano, who served as Viceroy Amat's principal painter. Each image features a mother, father, and child.