So far this is all I have for the writing group but I am starting with a handicap since I first wrote something else, completely different, and it was almost 6,000 words and it already has a “home.”
When before the Congress of Angostura Bolívar proposes to shape nations by mixing the “diverse blood” of the new citizens (1819), he makes a double gesture. The new nations are conceived in racial terms and at the same time situate themselves, at least at the level of public discourse, beyond race and racialization. The mestizaje that would become a primordial sign of Latin American identity is neither a mixture that dissolves differences nor a transgression against hierarchies, but a hyperracial strategy for social control or in other words, a mechanism which keeps racial hierarchies in place while also disabling criticism of them. At stake in this and other key texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not only the formation of national cultures, but also that of the modern racial state.
Latin American theories of mestizo identity also have origins and analogies in Spain, where racial models of Hispanic identity have been proposed from the Renaissance forward. These models took on a new layer with the scientific racism of the nineteenth century. Faced with the Spanish defeat of 1898 eugenicist doctors cited insufficient mestizaje as the cause of the Spanish soldier’s lack of resistance to tropical disease; the Francoist state also offered a culturalist definition of the “Hispanic” race (Goode 2009). The inclusivist model bases national identity on attributes such as language, religion, and “character” and is thus able to embrace a diverse palette of colors and origins. Mixture is not merely tolerated, but is almost required as a strategy for the building of empire and later, the nation. As José Piedra (1987) points out, language and faith were key elements in the imperial “Hispanic” identity from the fifteenth century forward, conferring authority and cultural strength upon Spain and offering syncretic assimilation to its conquered subjects. Piedra writes,
The final result was an “impure,” but unified empire. . . . The fact that the “impurity” of the system was not officially accepted only served to strengthen imperial hold. Furthermore, it would offer outsiders a false sense of accessibility and a similarly false hope of equality within Spain’s implicit, unofficial heterogeneity. (304)
The concept of raza is thus not a merely a particular system of classification, but a racial order in which culture and cultural identity have an important role and the meaning of color varies. It is nonetheless administered by the state as racial, and despite its flexibility as a category, it remains inflected with questions of color and descent. The estatutos de limpieza de sangre, created in 1449 to identify descendants of converted Jews, persisted through much of the nineteenth century. In the Americas, they were used to exclude people of African and indigenous descent from access to education and from some government posts. Latin America’s fabled valorization of mixture, furthermore, coexists with racial hierarchies in which European descent is highly valued. Joshua Lund (2012) discusses mestizaje as a statist discourse that hardly moves beyond race, as it has been purported to do, but rather confirms racialization as a state project.
This is to say that inclusivity does not resolve the problem of racial difference but functions to mask or render unspeakable the mechanisms of exclusion and hierarchization which still persist. The elasticity of the category Hispanic does stand in contrast to the less flexible categories that have operated in the United States or South Africa, enabling José Martí to posit in 1891 the existence of a specifically Latin American cuture where “[n]o hay odio de razas, porque no hay razas” and “El alma emana, igual y eterna, de los cuerpos diversos en forma y en color.” Yet inclusion in the raza hispana does not confer recognition as blanco, as Martí’s own text suggests by positing a Latin American “we” that is contrasted not only to a North American identity but to that of “el indio” and “el negro.” Indeed, when the banner of mestizaje was taken up in the nineteenth century it was done in the interest of national hegemony and not to challenge hierarchies of color and lineage. Bolívar called for mestizaje in the wake of the Haitian revolution, and as Julio César Pino reminds us, “promised abolition to the slaves of Nueva Granada only after the Spaniards had done so, and at the end of his life expressed fears that Venezuela would become a pardocracia.” (1998)
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 