coldhearted scientist وداد

If mestizaje in the colonial period was a strategy supporting hispanization and European hegemony, the nineteenth century nation-states harnessed it to marginalize blackness and indigeneity yet more thoroughly than the colony had done (Mariátegui 1928, Lund). The mestizo as idealized citizen-subject supported, and did not contest elite hegemony; alliances were with the lighter, not the darker classes. These were also the eugenicist years, when the new republics sought to “whiten” by encouraging European immigration. At the same time the Amerindian as symbol and mestizaje as trope affirmed Latin American originality, authenticity, and difference from the United States and Europe (Martínez-Echazábal 1998).

It is in the twentieth century that this racialized discourse becomes cultural, and mestizaje becomes a trope for the nation. The cultural identities consolidated by writers like Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, Gilberto Freyre, and José Vasconcelos, and naturalized as national discourses from the 1920s through the 1960s and beyond, are derived from these earlier formulations but their national cultural emphasis is new, as is the warmth of their pride in mixture….

Axé.