Lobo

Lobo (fem. Loba) (Spanish for "wolf") is a racial category for a mixed-race person used in Mexican paintings illustrating the caste (casta) system in 17th- and 18th-century Spanish America. Definitions Lobo does not have a fixed meaning, with possible parents being a black man and an Indian woman, a Cambujo (African/Amerindian) and an Indian woman, a Torna atrás and an Indian woman, a Mestizo and an Indian woman, or a Salta atrás (of African/European ancestry) and a Mulatto woman. Lobo was a classification used in official colonial documentation, including the Inquisition trials, marriage registers and censuses. One example of a Loba is a mixed-race woman who came before the Mexican Inquisition; she had been given multiple racial labels. She was publicly known as a China, was known to be a parda (a brown-skinned person), who "looked like a loba", suggesting she had visible African features. There were regional differences in colonial Mexico for racial labeling. For instance, 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, locally the people used lobos as a "normative category".