Austin Martin White's research on Casta painting forms the basis for this work on paper. In 18th century colonial Mexico, the ruling class of Spanish settler generations sought to order identities in ways that reflected their interests and channelled the reality of mestizaje, or race mixing... They desired a hierarchy that placed Spaniards in a position over, first, mixed mestizos, then the Indigenous. The sistema de castas became a political and cultural rubric for classifying peoples by their relative proximity to or distance from whiteness. The genre of casta painting emerged to illustrate and help codify such logic.

In his casta-works, White incorporates historical sources and distances himself from them. This approach has personal significance for the artist, whose father recently discovered that his ancestry was not as simple as previously thought. The premise of belonging becomes a source of anxiety, as a hierarchy of subjects dissolves into layers of pigment, acrylic and spray paint on various supports, including a screen mesh often used in construction or sports equipment.