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 José Vasconcelos, Fernando Ortiz, Nicolás Guillén, Gilberto Freyre, and Oswald de Andrade, and naturalized as national discourses from the 1920s through the 1960s and beyond, are derived from … More I do not like this paragraph after all, and must improve the prose

Here is a good article on The Great Gatsby, the movie. Here is a fact from it that I did not know: “an ethnic-American man like Gatsby (born Gatz) would not have been considered “white.” Gatsby is German. I knew Norwegians, Swedes and Finns were ambiguously white, almost as ambiguously so as the southern Europeans, but … More How to read