Lobo (racial category)

Lobo and coyote are derogatory animal names for persons of mixed race.  Lobo does not have a fixed meaning, with possible parents being a Black and Indian woman; Cambujo and Indian woman; Torna atrás and Indian woman; Mestizo and Indian woman; Salta atrás and Mulatto woman.[1] Lobo was a real classification in official colonial documentation, including the Inquisition trials, marriage registers, and censuses.[2] One example of a Loba is a mixed-race woman who came before the Mexican Inquisition who had multiple racial labels. She was publicly known as a China, was known to be a parda (darked skinned person) who “looked like a loba”.[3] 

Lobos were known to be enslaved persons in seventeenth-century Mexico, likely with the mother being a Negra. The status of a child as slave or free followed the mother.[4] In historian Ben Vinson III’s analysis of what he calls “extreme racial categories,” he includes lobos with castizos, moriscos, albinos, coyotes, "mestindios", and chinos.[5]  There were regional differences in colonial Mexico for racial labeling.  Lobos were particularly prevalent as a “normative category” in Xichú and Casas Viejas in  the Bajío region near Querétaro and the Sierra Gorda mountains, where there were resident indigenous populations as well as blacks and mulattos.[6] 

In his examination of marriage patterns from marital registers, there were no records of lobos marrying each other; brides and grooms chose partners from other racial categories.[7] In eighteenth-century casta paintings, lobos are usually shown doing physical work and not lavishly dressed.  In Joaquín Antonio de Basarás’s Origen, costumbres, y estado presente de mexicanos y philipinos (1763), the lobo father is a water carrier, while his Indian wife sells chickens.[8] An early  18th century set of casta paintings shows the Lobo as the offspring of a Black father and India mother; in the same set, a Lobo father and an India mother produce a dark-skinned child labeled a Lobo Torna atrás.[9]

De Lobo y Mestiza, Cambujo. Anon. 18th c. Mexico

A set of casta paintings by Andrés de Islas is typical in the order and combinations of races.

• De Español e India, Mestizo (European white and Indian woman, Mestizo

• De Español y Mestiza,  Castizo (European white and Mestiza, Castizo

• De Castizo y Española, Española (Castizo and Spanish woman, Spanish woman)

• De Español y Negra, Mulata (Spaniard and Black woman, Mulatta

• De Español y Mulata, Morisco (Spaniard and Mulatta, Morisco (light-skinned person of African ancestry)

• De Español y Morisca,  Albino (Spaniard and Morisca, Albino (lightest-skinned person of African ancestry)

• De Español y Albina, Torna atrás (Spaniard and Albina, Torna atrás ("throw back" to blackness))

• De Indio y Negra, Lobo (Indian man,black woman, Lobo "wolf")

• De Indio y Mestiza, Coyote

• De Lobo y Negra, Chino

• De Chino e India, Cambujo

• De Cambujo e India, Tente en el aire

• De Tente en el aire y Mulata, Albarazado

• De Albarazado e India, Barcino

• De Barcino y Cambuja, Calpamulato

• Indios Mecos bárbaros (Barbarian Meco Indians)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Casta paintings.

• castas

• Coyote (racial category)

• García Saiz, Maria Conception.  ‘’Las Castas Mexicanas: Un Género Pictórico Americano’’. Milan: Olivetti 1989.

• Katzew, Ilona. ‘’Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico’’. New Haven: Yale University Press 2004.

• Vinson, Ben III. ‘’Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico’’. New York: Cambridge University Press 2018