From the moment of its supposed “discovery,” Europeans struggled to understand the Indies as place, a space embedded in networks of social and historical relations and reproduced through imaginative geography. Ilona Katzew’s book, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, derives from and examines visual examples of this tradition of imaginative geography. As with all geographies, this book is formed as a journey with an itinerary that guides the viewer/reader through both visual and...