Cholo

thumb|A mestizo and Indigenous parents' child was a , traditionally. Casta painting from colonial Peru, 1770. thumb|Casta painting showing 16 hierarchically arranged, Mestizo|mixed-race groupings. The top left grouping uses cholo as a synonym for mestizo. Ignacio Maria Barreda, 1777. [[Real Academia Española de la Lengua, Madrid.]]

Cholo () was a racial category used in 18th-century Spanish America to refer to people who were three-quarters Amerindian by descent and one-quarter Spanish. Its origin is a somewhat derogatory term for people of mixed-blood heritage in the Spanish Empire in Latin America and its successor states as part of castas, the informal ranking of society by heritage. Cholo no longer necessarily refers only to ethnic heritage, and is not always meant negatively. Cholo can signify anything from its original sense as a person with one Indigenous parent and one mestizo parent, "gangster" in Mexico, an insult in some South American countries (similar to chulo in Spain), or a "person who dresses in the manner of a certain subculture" in the United States as part of the cholo subculture.