Every footnote could become part of a new paper, and perhaps should. I cut from one footnote:
Scholars like Peter Wade note that mestizaje as ideology has worked as a uniting force in some communities, but Bolivia is now a plurinational state and Ecuador’s most recent constitution gives indigenous peoples their own cultural rights. There is also interesting bibliography on hybrid subjects opting out of the mestizo concensus. Two sophisticated but brief studies which may also serve as advanced introductions to the problem are Piedra (a literary perspective) and Ribeiro (a perspective from the social sciences).
And: my sentence “In contexts where the liminal or hybrid subject is a not a figure of multiple oppression but one of conciliation, the assignation of primary revolutionary work to them actually functions to obscure subaltern representation,” could have a footnote. Several scholars already have responses to what I say here: Anzaldúa is marginal in the United States. But that is my point: she’s not universal, then, and if your defense of the mestiza as necessarily revolutionary is that she is in the United States, then you’re being ethnocentric.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 