There is lingering dissent, and outright confusion, over the etymology of the term “raza.” Indeed, as a noun and as an adjective, it conceals and effaces as much as it reveals and illuminates. The Real Academia Española traces the term to the Latin _radía_ or _radíus_ (rod, spoke, or ray), and offers such disparate definitions as _casta_ (caste), _grieta_ (crack in a horse’s hoof), and _raya de luz_ (ray of sunlight). All of these etymological touchstones involve the vocabulary of cartography, race, zoology, and even refracted light, that is, color. The term thus invites postcolonial, ethnic, and critical race studies appropriations of its Spanish medieval resonances and early modern inflections, particularly the colonialist _castas_ taxonomy depicted in the infamous sixteenth-century series of images from “New Spain,” or the Americas. _Castas_ refers to eugenicist hierarchical mappings of genealogy based on early modern notions of race in which the Renaissance idea of “fair beauty” came to carry increasingly more currency in direct proportion to the growth of European empires. In their colonial Latin American iterations, there were sixteen general codifications of _castas_, several of which had their own subcategories that exponentially increased the number of racialized permutations. These ranged from _criollos_ (who...