Juan Correa's studio work was well known by historians of New Hispanic art; however, it was thought, at least until the 1980s, and in spite of signposting by Carrera Estampa, ${ }^{2}$ that only a very few 'negros' and 'mulattos' had managed to attain guild master status, and still fewer had achieved widespread recognition and prestige.  
In the 1980s a group of art historians decided to carry out an investigation into the life and works of Juan Correa and to catalogue his output, both in Mexico and in other Latin American countries. ${ }^{3}$ It was confirmed on the basis  
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[^0]:    2 Translator's note - the Carrera Estampa is a Mexican guild dealing with the regulation of crafts and arts with Spanish antecedents.
3 The results of this study were published in various volumes; one of them revealed all the archived documents found, on which the majority of the data revealed in this text has been based. Elisa Vargas Lugo and Gustavo Curiel, Juan Correa, su vida y su obra. Cuerpo de documentos, tome III, (Juan Correa, his life and work. Documentary body, tome III) Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1991.  
of documental sources that Juan Correa was a mulatto, that his mother had most likely been an oriunda ('native black') from Africa and that his father was a Creole also 'dark-skinned', a well-known barber-surgeon of the Inquisition. On the basis of this information, and thanks to a series of documents in the possession of the work study team of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the life and works of Juan Correa was located and published, and became a watershed in the assessment of the situation and qualities of Afrodescendent peoples in New Hispanic society, of the possibilities of social and economic mobility that existed, and of the diverse and complex family networks and blood relationships that were established during that period.