Mestizaje

Mestizaje is a term that means racial mixture. It originates in racist colonial hierarchies that sought to demarcate clear racial boundaries and differences. In the modern period, Latino/a cultural and literary discussions have used the word to connote more varied and richer meanings. It suggests the productive mixing that characterizes the formation of US Latino/a culture. Mestizaje is an affirmative recognition of the mixed racial, social, linguistic, national, cultural, and ethnic legacies inherent to Latino/a cultures and identities. It highlights the idea that cultural mixture represents a dynamic, driving component of Latino/a literature. At the same time, the colonial history implicit in the idea of mestizaje evokes the very real constraints imposed upon mestizo bodies, not the least of which are the racial hierarchies generated during colonialism and passed down a legacy of discrimination and violence. While originally a term signaling race mixing in a colonial Mexican context, mes-

tizaje has come in Latino/a literary studies to underscore the mixture of identities in the Americas. Since the term arises from a history of invasion and, often, sexual violation, the word also highlights the dissonance between identities that allow unequal access to power, social standing, and privilege. More centrally for literary studies, the term signals the mixture of cultures and lived experiences that embody tensions, ruptures, and inequalities. Among the most complex but also productive concepts regarding Latino/a cul-

ture, mestizaje has emerged as a powerful tool for both naming new subjects and recalling destructive colonial encounters. The term, especially in Chicano/a studies, has become a dominant metaphor for understanding the racial, cultural, social, and linguistic mixing that characterizes life in the borderlands. Generally, the term evokes the fruitfully productive crossing that characterizes Chicano/a life and culture. The term suggests that subjectivities emerge out of identities in relation to each other. Other areas of Latino studies may approach the idea of mestizaje in a more

tentative manner. Indeed, some areas in Caribbean studies would likely favor notions such as métissage or creolization to convey mixed-racial identities. The histories of the Caribbean provide a distinct vocabulary to talk about racial mixture, one that is inextricably linked to African slavery in the Americas as well as the varied English, Spanish, and French colonizations of Caribbean lands. These distinct

histories generate different terms for very similar notions of racial mixture and the development of new identities. The theoretical issues raised by the terms mestizaje, métissage and creolization in a Latino/a context posit fluidity and relationship as dominant frameworks for understanding the intersection of identity, culture, and society. As with métissage or creolization, mestizaje marks a cultural mixing that emerges

from the infusion of races and cultures characterizing the social dynamics in the Americas following European contact and invasion. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, for example, marked the beginning of a racially mixed and profoundly unequal society. The social relations developed during colonialism continue through in modified or unaltered forms to the present day. At the same time, because mestizaje emerges from a history of contradiction and ambiguity, it allows for an understanding of culture and identity that incorporates difference and paradox as component characteristics of subjectivity and expression. Mestizaje implies a racial mixture that moves beyond racially marked distinctions to a broader understanding of linguistic, national, and ethnic mixing. It helps name the simultaneous incorporation of a wide variety of social and cultural influences and identities. Mestizaje within a Chicano cultural context derives in part from José Vasconcelos’s

notion of la raza cósmica or the cosmic race, an idea he wrote about in 1925 in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. His essay on the cosmic race represents a new and positive attitude toward mixed-race heritages, of Mexico specifically and Latin America more generally. Vasconcelos (1997 [1925]) argues that under modern conditions, the various races of humans tend to increasingly intermix and will give rise to a new human type. His thought is situated in certain Darwinian-based notions of race, though Vasconcelos sought to move beyond discussions of eugenics and racial superiority. To the contrary, he argued that the erosion of ethnic and racial barriers stands not just at the core of Latin American societies – in the former colonies of Europe to the south of the United States – but as the future of humankind’s development. Significantly, Vasconcelos’s concern with the emergence of this new race centers

on the effect the new race will have on the culture of the world. He believes that the cosmic race will bring about an aesthetic era in which creativity, love, and beauty become dominant social values. Chicano writers and critics incorporated Vasconcelos’s affirmation of the mestizo as the embodiment of a new racial identity that would move civilization forward toward a more just and less exploitative future. He views racial melding as a sign of human enlightenment, the event that would allow for greater understanding and harmonious communication by all humankind. Coterminous with the modern melding of races is the rise of modern forms of communication, which Vasconcelos argues will suppress geographical boundaries, permit greater educational opportunities, and raise the economic standards of all. It is worth noting that anthologies of early Chicano writing often reprinted selections from Vasconcelos’s work, especially those most explicitly focused on his mixed-race theories. Vasconcelos’s idea of la raza de bronce or the bronze race was also incorporated

into Chicano discourse, most tellingly in El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán – presented at the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado, in March

1969. It states “the independence of our mestizo nation” and affirms: “We are a bronze people with a bronze culture.” The call for a Chicano nationalist independence in the document reflects the rhetoric associated with the anti-colonial struggles of the period. While this fervor for Chicano nationalism can still be found among certain select groups, the affirmation of mestizaje as a part of Chicano cultural and political action has been widely influential across a broad social spectrum. Equally influential has been Gloria Anzaldúa’s incorporation and modification of

mestizaje to assert a “new mestiza” consciousness, presented in her book Borderlands/La Frontera. “The new mestiza,” Anzaldúa observes, “copes by developing a tolerance for ambiguity” (1987: 79). Her description of the new mestiza emphasizes the need for action at a personal, rather than national, level. While still affirming the idea of collective identities, she also underscores the important intermixing of personal and group identities for the new mestiza: “She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode.” Mestizaje becomes a means by which to incorporate rather than expel influences, identities and relationships. At a cultural level, mestizaje can be seen to represent not just a strategy of incor-

poration – opening expression to a wide variety of forms, heritages, and influences – but also as an affirmation of difference within identity. Mestizaje can be a way of understanding multiple differences within the sameness of identity. Mestizaje recognizes the variety of cultures and races that go into the making of new identities. Anzaldúa articulates the position in a manner that emphasizes the productivity implicit in the position of the new mestiza: “Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (1987: 79). The focus on ambivalence and contradiction encapsulates the contradictions inherent to the idea of mestizaje, which evokes racial categories and undoes them simultaneously. It is the turning “into something else” that is the creative and productive component of Anzaldúa’s articulation of mestizaje. The racial mixture inherent to the experiences of the new mestiza leads to a necessary transformation of the social conditions and contradictions that repress human connection and growth. At stake in discussing the connection between mixed racial identities and trans-

formative social conditions is the need to balance a sense of boundless possibility with an awareness of constraint and historical connection. Mestizaje, as both metaphor and condition in Latino/a culture and criticism, plays a complex role that at once signals change and simultaneously marks how institutions, ideologies, and numerous networks of power inhibit change. The mestizo/a body serves as the site of tenuous, complex, and conflicted change.

Mestizaje roots cultural production and change in the physical memory of injustice and inhuman exploitation, of desire and transforming love. This dimension of mestizaje reflects the idea of racial memory mixed with the sexual and nation-building histories associated with colonization and conquest in the Americas. It suggests a lived and embodied memory of a group identity, connecting present forms of personal and cultural identities with the asymmetrical power relations of the past. Despite these connections to the body and desire, mestizaje in Latino/a critical

discourses is understood as a tactical term. In evoking a racially mixed past, the word helps name a potential new articulation of self that incorporates both self and other. Mestizaje posits a relational way of being that works against notions of duality

or binaries. One way to view this is to consider mestizaje as a relational interweaving of contending discourses and cultural projections, often with a view toward the ways that race and racial difference have inflected the history of Latinos/as in the United States and in Latin America. Mestizaje helps to name a new identity that speaks against erasure or silence due to the dominance of Eurocentric discourses. The emphasis is on multivocality and multiplicity, a daring decentering of discourse, ideas, and identities. On a literary formal level, the idea of racial mixture as a source of multiplicity

and multivocality sometimes manifests itself in mixed linguistic literary expression. Texts interested in the evocation of race mixture as a basis for identity and culture tend to incorporate a variety of languages and genres in a self-conscious artistic manifestation of mixture and multiplicity. Ranging across a broad swath of literature – from the poetry of Jimmy Santiago Baca to the fiction of Junot Díaz, from the essays and novels of Héctor Tobar to the plays and fiction of Denise Chávez, from the novels and poetry of Julia Alvarez to the fiction of Cristina García – Latino/a writers employ, to a greater or lesser degree, a kind of linguistic mestizaje by quoting or playing with Spanish language expressions or by evoking dissonant literary forms. Linguistic and generic play has been recognized, for example, at the heart of Junot

Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). The novel has generated a critical discussion as much for its opening discussion of Antillian doom known as fukú (which may be a term that came first from Africa carried by the screams of the enslaved or from the Tainos as they endured slaughter at the hands of the Europeans) as for the insertion of footnotes throughout the narrative of the novel. The footnotes serve to situate the action and characters of the novel against a backdrop of the Trujillo dictatorship in Dominican history. These linguistic and generic mixings on a formal level serve to express and embody the effects of mixture on racial, cultural, and social levels. Mixture on a formal level signals the contradictory forces that have gone into the creation of Latino/a culture. As Díaz’s novel demonstrates, the use of a formal literary mixture in a Latino/a

context often names and incorporates contradictions because it evokes a history of violence and violation. Racial mixture in the Americas occurred because of the bloody decimation of Native American nations and tribes as well as the trade in brutally enslaved Africans. Mestizaje is thus inflected with the violence associated with imperial expansion and colonial control. There is a persistent evocation of the cultural and historical ties to a past that is never entirely left behind. In part, this connection to the past recalls a history of essentialized and categorical discussions of race and racial identifications, both in Latin America and in the United States. Because the idea of racial mixture is inherently premised on biological reproduc-

tion and heterosexual coupling, the term implies a focus on sexuality and gender as well as race. Gender differentiation has played an important role in current articulations of mestizaje. Chicana and Latina critical discourses have embraced mestizaje as a means to destabilize the unity and coherence integral to racial, social, sexual, and cultural hierarchies. In this same manner, terms such as Latino/a or Chicano/a destabilize the coherence of gendered hierarchies that are sometimes rendered invisible by universalizing terms such as Latino or Chicano. Mestizaje as a critical

cultural term implies an embrace of mixed racial and gendered bodies, highlighting uneven and unequal relations of power. The embrace of a racialized and gendered body – which the terms Latina and

Chicana represent – exposes the processes by which ideological hierarchies naturalize unequal relations of power. Meaning is undone in order to forge new understandings based on a transforming doubleness: for example, engaging both gender and ethnicity in understanding Chicana identity; or considering sexuality and race in articulating mestiza identity; or embracing indigenous ancestry, African influences, and European heritages in conceptualizing Chicano/a conditions. Many Chicana feminists employ the term mestiza as a means of asserting the

hybridity inherent in a gendered Latina identity. This hybridity evokes racial mixture, but it moves beyond this original meaning to suggest differences of all types as points where heterogeneous group identities can be generated. Mestizaje, as a multiracial mixture within a US context of binary racial constructs, serves to resist repressive racial categorization and assert a kind of bridge-building across differences. It becomes a strategic term that elides mixed racial, cultural, and national identities, encouraging a productive and innovative generation of new mestiza identities. One might think of the writings of Sandra Cisneros for literary examples of this

new mestiza identity. Esperanza, the adolescent narrator of Sandra Cisneros’s 1984 book The House on Mango Street, is walking through her Chicago neighborhood with her friends when she turns suddenly: “Look at that house … it looks like Mexico.” Before her friends have the chance to laugh at her, Esperanza’s sister Nenny speaks up: “Yes, that’s Mexico all right. That’s what I was thinking exactly” (1984: 18). Each sister translates her urban space into a familiar referent, locating themselves within a transnational geography that serves to counter the hostile and threatening environment that immediately surrounds them. The fact that both sisters interpret their geographies through similar conceptual grids places them within a shared spatial, cultural, and familial relation. The connection between self, family, and national/ ethnic origin is concretized through their shared interpretive tactics, tactics that place the two sisters simultaneously in the United States as well as in Mexico. Esperanza and her sister assert a relational identity with each other, an identity that likewise asserts a relational national identity between the US and Mexico. It is important, whether employing the notion of mestizaje to describe individual

identity or cultural innovation, to recall those elements of identity that are torn apart and conflictive in the formation of modern Latino/a societies. Rather than thinking of mestizaje as a harmonious blending of peoples and ideas, Latino/a literary criticism articulates a sense of mestizaje that is critical and that seeks to make present the numerous struggles that remain a part of Latino/a societies along lines of class, race, language, sexuality, gender, and nationality. In short, the terms mestizo and mestiza do not attempt to name smoothly blended, easily hybrid cultural or personal identities. Rather, they name identities sutured together out of a desire for coping, surviving, and (hopefully) triumphing over the unequal colonial legacies embodied by the idea of mestizaje. The uses of mestizaje as a category of analysis depend on context. What mestizaje

may represent in a discussion of US Latino/a culture is distinct from how it is

employed in a Latin American context. In a variety of societies in Latin America, mestizaje represents not an emphasis on creative synthesis and engagement with contradictions inherent to society, but rather a progressive movement from indigenous “primitivism” to modern “civilization.” The mestizo body represents less a melding of a variety of cultures, societies, and races and more a de-indigenization, an affirmation of a bodily present that ostensibly moves toward progress and modernization. In this manner, the mestizo indexes a physical connection to repressive colonial histories that devalue anything having to do with indigenous populations in the Americas. This point seems especially true for Andean nations that are grappling still with the significance of indigeneity and mestizaje in terms of national and social self-identification. Some Andean nations view the mestizo or mestiza as an individual actively seeking

to deny and erase his or her ancestral heritage, or – obversely – as individuals seeking to shed themselves of a disempowered and underdeveloped “primitive” past. The societies of Mexico and Brazil, by contrast, have embraced racial mixing as part of their official discourse about national identity. The successful (even ostensibly color-blind) mixing of their populations is used to assert the level of democratization, civilization, and modernization these countries seek to affirm as central to their unique national characters. The significance of mestizaje in Latin America is, not surprisingly, complex and influenced by distinct historical, cultural, political, and social circumstances. In all these cases, mestizaje represents a means of movement, transformation, and (depending on the situation) an erasure of the past or embrace of the future. In the conceptualization of the mestizo as an agent moving through history into

some new future, a progressive teleology gets produced that posits the indigenous populations as a point of origin in a history that continues to develop but that has left Native peoples of the Americas behind. As such, indigenous peoples have no present agency in history. Rather than serve as actors in a continuing present that stretches to the past and moves toward an imagined but as yet unrealized future, Native populations exist only as actors in a tragic but distant past that serves as a moment of origin for the present-day mestizo. Another effect of a Latin American conceptualization of mestizaje involved in the

dehistoricizing of indigenous populations is an ideology of indigenismo or indigenism. Indigenism is premised on the notion that native peoples, because of their tragic past, need some special recognition for the unique values attached to their identities. Indigenous populations come to symbolize the exotic or romantic elements of new nation-states in Latin America. The native becomes a symbol associated with a glorified concept of pre-Columbian ancestry, an ancestry that serves to make these nation-states unique in the contemporary collective of nations. The romanticizing of pre-Columbian indigenism aligns indigenous populations with the founding of the modern nation-state, but only on a symbolic level. This leaves the concerns of contemporary native populations excluded from modern national agendas. All this is to say that the role of mestizaje in Latin America is no less vexed or complicated than it is in a US Latino/a context. Where indigenism in certain Latin American countries helps perpetuate a parti-

cular ideology of national identification, its manifestation in a US Latino context is

markedly different. While it is true that Latino/a (especially Chicano/a) literary critics have deployed mestizaje as a critical term, a type of biological essentialism that assumes a bodily based racial categorization undergirds the term itself. Yet the deployment of the term is strategic. Its use does not seek to cast indigenous populations into a distant and tragic past (indeed, to the contrary, there is a strong history of mutual support among Chicano/a and Native American activists). Moreover, the use of mestizaje as a critical term does not seek to support the ideology of a nation-state in its articulation of its identity and modern-day agenda. Manifestations of Chicano/a culture have undoubtedly romanticized pre-Columbian

native populations and cultures – especially evident in the fond recollection of preColumbian Aztec and (to a lesser degree) Mayan iconography, literature, religion, and philosophy – this has been undertaken largely as a strategy to critique the position of the Latino/a in the US. The use of indigenism, especially among activist Chicano/a students, has enabled the naming of identities developed in response to despair due to positions of disempowerment and alienation. This represents the generation of a tactical identity that speaks against discrimination and exclusion. The poem by Alurista “libertad sin lágrimas” from his 1971 collection Florícanto en Aztlán provides a good example. The poem concludes with an affirmation of “our will / to be men / caballeros / clanes tigres / proud guerrero plumaje / free like the eagle / y la serpiente.” The poem, characteristic of much of Alurista’s work during this period, makes a claim for the idealized dual identity of Chicano mestizaje. The “caballeros” being willed through the poem refer as much to the Spanish horseman of the conquest as they do the idea of gentlemanliness. Part of the Chicano mestizaje that Alurista’s poem invokes suggests connection to the formality and courtly manners of Old World conduct. In addition to this European aristocracy, the “clanes tigres” invokes one of the aristocratic Mexica warrior clans, the jaguar warriors, wearing their “proud warrior plumage.” The poem thus alludes to two worlds of order – the courtly society of Spain, the warrior society of the Mexica – as immediately available loci of cultural pride and, significantly, male identity. Clearly, the evocation of mestizaje in US Latino/a critical discourse engages all the

complexities associated with the term in both the US and Latin America. This is in part why the term is significant in its evocation of the violent and vexed legacy of colonialism in the Americas. The term is a connection and an expression of – as well as a means to challenge and transform in the present – the history of violation and exploitation indexed by the racial hierarchies that are part and parcel of this colonial legacy. The assertion of mestizaje brings into the present the results of a colonial stratification of and obsession with racial categorization. It is from this obsession that present-day mestizos and mestizas arise. Mestizaje represents both historical continuity between the present moment and the past, as well as a recognition and embrace of the ruptures and disruptions that are inherent in the tumultuous history of the Americas since the incursion by European nations beginning in the fifteenth century. Simultaneously, mestizaje recollects the appropriation by Latino/a activists of

those Latin American nationalist discourses that celebrate the indigenous ancestry of its populations. This appropriation was (and is) undertaken to assert an identity resistant to the exploitation, discrimination and exclusion that is part of the US

history of colonialism, especially in the Caribbean and its diasporas and the Southwest and its borderlands. An affirmation of mestizaje asserts a sense of agency within the context of society in the United States where Latinos/as have been positioned as ever alien and foreign, a dangerous contagion ever threatening to violate the borders and laws of the United States. As such, mestizaje reverberates with issues of transnationalism, since the mestiza and mestizo is viewed as always being foreign no matter what national citizenship he or she may claim. The characters in Arturo Islas’s novel The Rain God (1984), for example, experience their identities as simultaneously American and Mexican, sometimes in a contradictory manner affirming the social ascension they feel they have achieved in the Angel family’s migration to the United States while asserting a strong affiliation with Mexico and the complexities of Mexican culture. The family’s life on the US-Mexico border leads many of its members to internalize the social, political, and racial contradictions of the border region that marks them as perpetual foreigners to American eyes. Influenced by the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa, the idea of mestizaje has been

expanded to include the dynamic transformation of not just individual identities, but cultural identities as well. Mestizaje has been seen to be a part of the actual US South Texas border region, but its theoretical implications have been seen broadly, allowing for the representation of a borderlands experience that is about transition, transformation, and growth, a fecund growth often arising from pain, poverty, and violence. Brought to the fore have been issues of race, queer sexuality, national dislocation, class, language, and culture. Also important are the naming of local experience, the cultural and social specificity that cultures and societies in contact engender. Thus the idea of mestizaje has been expanded to understand a broad variety of dynamic experiences that involve cultures in unequal and often contentious moments of contact and mutual transformation. The specific moments of cultural contact, and the unique histories that have cre-

ated areas of contact, suggest that mestizaje is not a term universally applicable to all areas of Latino/a literary studies. Hence, while there are points of comparison between mestizaje and métissage and creolization, these terms do not name the same experiences nor do they evoke the same critical approach toward culture and literature. The histories from which these terms emerge are singular and unique. Mestizaje has become a powerful means of naming the dynamic interconnections between cultures, a relational sense of self-identity, the legacies of colonial encounters, racial inequality, national dislocation, linguistic mixture and innovation, asymmetries surrounding gender and sexuality, and a host of other issues relevant to the study of Latino/a literary texts. It is a powerful yet not a sole term that can name the complex interrelationships between Latino/a bodies, histories, and cultures.