10/16/08
Mestizaje and Hispanic Identity
The struggle to define their identity has been a part of the experience of Latin Americans and people of Latin American descent since the beginning. During the colonial period, influenced strongly by developments in Spain itself, this struggle took on the form of defining racialized identities. In the Viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru, which covered substantial parts of Spain’s New World territories, racial identity was refined through the casta system, which mapped a highly-ramified terminology onto a set of identities rigidly distinguished through birth and heredity. (Katzew, 2005) Even more widely used during the period, and surviving in one way or another until the present day, was the more generalized terminology of mestizo and mulato, referring to those who were by birth of mixed indigenous and Spanish heritage, and of mixed African and Spanish heritage, respectively.
It was during the independence period, spanning roughly one hundred years from the early 19th century to the early 20th, that the term mestizo came to be used more broadly by nationalist and pan-nationalist writers like Bolívar and Martí to refer to people of mixed European and either indigenous or African descent, in service of the claim that it is this range of racial mixtures which is characteristic, or indeed definitive of, the peoples of Latin America. Despite this explicit broadening of the term, however, and despite the widespread importation of African slaves throughout much of South America and Mexico as well as the Caribbean during the preceding three hundred years, in much of the literature of this period the African presence is unmentioned or even ignored. The choice of the term mestizo in the independentist literature thus hints at one continuing challenge in the struggle over Hispanic identity, namely, to accord an appropriate place in the mix to African heritage and African-influenced cultural forms throughout the Americas.
Vasconcelos and essentialist conceptions of mestizaje
Although the work of José Vasconcelos appeared after the independence period had come to an end, it represents many of its major trends and their 19th-century European context. Vasconcelos’ work mixes nationalist strains with an explicit pan-nationalist ideology. Unlike some earlier writers in this period, Vasconcelos explicitly defines the racial mix he holds to be characteristic of Hispanic people as including African elements as well as indigenous and Spanish ones, and indeed, at least in some passages, a variety of other elements as well (Vasconcelos, 1997: 22, but see, 26 for an important qualification with respect to the presence of black people). Vasconcelos famously holds that this mixing of the races will give rise to a newly-emergent race, the Raza cosmica (Cosmic Race), which is well-suited to take the lead in the new age of love and ‘brotherhood’ into which the world is emerging:
In Spanish America, Nature will no longer repeat one of her partial attempts. This time, the race that will come out of the forgotten Atlantis will no longer be a race of a single color or of particular features….What is going to emerge out there is the definitive race, the synthetical race, the integral race, made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples, and, for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision. (Vasconcelos, 20)
Like the early DuBois and many of his 19th-century compatriots in the United States, Vasconcelos regards each of these races as having certain essential qualities—a ‘gift’ or ‘genius’ that it brings to the mix. Even aside from his mysticism, much of Vasconcelos’ writing expresses classic European conceptions of racial essences, complete with Orientalist tropes. (Vasconcelos, 21-22)
The notion of race he deploys is an essentialist one: it supposes that race membership is conferred in the first instance by descent, and that descent always carries with it a predisposition to certain traits of character and personality, if not phenotype, in the individual case; and a predisposition to certain cultural forms, in the case of the group taken as a whole. This notion is a familiar one in the 18th and 19th centuries, in Latin America as in the United States and Europe. What is distinctive of the strand of Latin American thought under discussion is first, the insistence that the mixing of races can itself generate a new race (and not merely a group of ‘mongrel’ or ‘half-breed’ peoples, as conventional 19th and early 20th-century European and North American wisdom held); second, a corresponding attempt to valorize mestizaje so conceived; and finally, the attempt to link mestizaje thus interpreted to an explicitly Hispanic nationalist or pan-nationalist understanding of identity.
Beginning in the 1930s, shortly after publication of La Raza cosmica, and continuing until the present time, a network of criticisms of the essentialist understanding of mestizaje and its deployment in an account of Hispanic identity have been raised. In brief, critics have argued that the essentialist understanding of mestizaje provides a foundation for narrowly-defined, utopian nationalist or pan-nationalist ideals that support intolerance and the marginalization of difference, both within mestizaje culture and between it and its component groups. (See sources cited in Miller, 2004)
First, it has been pointed out that the ‘gifts’ of the races were plainly specified in very unequal terms, as the above quotation from Vasconcelos should suggest. The ‘White’ or European contribution to the mix is ‘superior ideals’, ‘superior traits of culture and nature,’ or more specifically, ‘clear mind,” “science,” “control of matter,” rationality, intellect, reason, and “practical talents,’ issuing in ‘railroads, bridges, and enterprises’. However much these need to be modulated by spirituality, emotion, and a concern for justice and non-violence, it is ‘the Whites’ who are ‘a race full of vigor and solid social virtues’, and it is the other races that ‘might be considered inferior’. (Vasconcelos, 17-26) Thus it is the civilization of ‘the white race’ which ‘sets the moral and material basis for the union of all men into a fifth universal race.’ (Vasconcelos, 9) Consequently it is Europeans, or the ‘White’ elements in Latin America, that are expected to take the lead, both politically and in setting the broad agenda for education and cultural development. It is the ‘superior ideals’ of ‘the Whites’ that are to be propagated, although not by the ‘harsh law of [racial] domination…and extinction’ characteristic of North American colonial practices. (Vasconcelos, 25) Moreover, even though the hallmark of the Cosmic Race is its mestizo character, Spaniards are characterized as already-mixed; and it is the Spanish method of ‘the abundance of love that allowed them to create a new race with the Indian and the Black’ (Vasconcelos, 17) that is valorized in his writings, in contrast with the violent and genocidal methods of ‘the Anglo-Saxon.’ (Vasconcelos, 18) Thus the gifts of the already-mixed Spaniards define both the ‘ideals’ and the methods of their propagation for the emergent Cosmic Race. In this respect it was easy to see the essentialist use of mestizaje as simply old wine in new bottles: a validation, if not a valorization, of the old colonial structure of social and political oppression; underwritten by an ideology that only seemed innovative.
Second, critics pointed out that the very notion of a raza cosmica as inherently superior in its synthesis of racial gifts’ privileges those identified as mestizo over those who are identified—or who self-identify—as ‘black’ or ‘Indian’. Indeed, given the tie to a nationalist or pan-nationalist conception of identity, such people are by definition marginal if not inimical to the nationalist or pan-nationalist project. Thus policies designed to support or protect their communities must, unless they are assimilationist in intent (like what is called transitional bilingual education in California today), be a threat to the project itself. Here again the essentialist understanding of mestizaje appears to support the continuing marginalization of the poorest and most discriminated-against segments of Latin American society, defined once again, as in the colonial period, as the racial Other.
This difficulty reveals a second important challenge in the continuing debates over Hispanic identity, namely, to define that identity in a way that does not ratify the continuing marginalization and unjust treatment of indigenous peoples and indeed peoples of African descent as well. The negritude or negrista movement in the Caribbean, and to some extent indigenista movements in various parts of Latin America as well, rejected the terms of this challenge by seeking to valorize the stereotypical traits assigned to these marginalized communities: in the case of Afro-Hispanic communities, for example, ‘unbridled lust’ (to use Vasconcelos’ phrase), the exaltation of emotion over reason, music, rhythm, the associations with the supernatural vision of santería and vodún. The poetry of Nicolás Guillén or Luis Palés Matos is typical in this respect. But in so doing, these movements seem to endorse the essentialist understanding of race that underlies the conception of mestizaje under discussion, thus giving credibility to the complaint that they only succeed in imprisoning black or indigenous communities in the traditional stereotypes, taken. independently of any positive value these are taken to have.
Third, it is sometimes claimed that the deployment of the notion of mestizaje in the project of developing a nationalist or pan-nationalist identity is a utopian one. Even setting aside Vasconcelos’ mystical bent, the project itself is certainly utopian in a literal sense, since it is clearly envisioned by many of its advocates, past and present, both in North and in Latin America, as defining a valued future state. More deeply, however, when underwritten by an essentialist conception of mestizaje, the project seems to regard the erasure of biological and cultural difference via the blending of the races as the key to social harmony. From the point of view of the essentialist version of the ideal, at any rate, current biological and cultural differences must therefore be dysfunctional. The superiority of homogeneity is in this way implicit in the utopian ideal of social harmony. If this is the case, then intolerance and repression of difference, and even genocide, may seem, and indeed in many cases in the history of Latin America have seemed, the proper response, even if the ideal itself does not explicitly include or endorse them.
It must be said, however, that the validity of these criticisms may turn not on the project of linking some conception of mestizaje to nationalist or pan-nationalist ideas of Hispanic identity so much as it turns on the commitment to an essentialist understanding of mestizaje itself. Historically acute though these critical observations are, perhaps their force as objections to the project in question could be blunted if one were willing to adopt an anti-essentialist approach on which mestizo cultural and perhaps even racial identity were conceived as more open-textured and multi-vocal. (Velazco y Trianosky, 2002) Here, then is, if not necessarily a third challenge to any discussion of Hispanic identity, at least a central challenge for those who advocate the project of grounding that identity in some conception of mestizaje: to do so without being drawn into the essentialist quagmire.
Gloria Anzaldua: the New Mestizaje
In the 20th and 21st centuries, as increasingly-large and diverse Hispanic populations have emigrated from Latin America to the United States, the question of Hispanic identity has taken on a new dimension. In the U.S. the question is not typically posed in nationalist or even quite pan-nationalist terms; but instead in terms of the common identity of strangers who, to one degree or another, have made, or found, their homes in a strange land.
Perhaps because it is free from the nationalist project, the work of recent American theorists of mestizaje like Gloria Anzaldua turns attention away from the essentialist search for common ancestry or mixed lines of descent. For Anzaldua, identity is grounded instead in the concrete experience of Chicanas (Mexican-American women) as women who live between traditional Mexican culture and the dominant Anglo culture of the United States. In the first instance, therefore, her work is a study in the logic of the identity of a particular sub-group of Hispanics. Nonetheless, her conception of mestizaje as grounded in the experience of living ‘in between’ is often regarded as a prototype for Hispanic identity in the United States, and it will be so regarded here. This general way of understanding mestizo identity is sometimes called ‘the New Mestizaje’, a label which will be adopted here.
To live between cultures, for Anzaldua, is to experience ambiguity on a daily basis. The person living in between recognizes, willingly or unwillingly, the authority of two conflicting sets of norms. For the mestizo, the norms of the dominant culture constitute, not simply the alienated external forces that must be reckoned with by every stranger who visits a strange land, but internalized requirements and expectations that shape to some extent their outlook, habits, and choices in ways not altogether unlike the ways that these are shaped by the norms of the ‘home’ culture from which they, or their family, have come. To be mestizo is thus to live a life, whether as an immigrant or as a resident of a territory now dominated by an alien culture, in which there is an internal split in one’s day-to-day experience, and not just a discontinuity from one time or place in one’s life to another (cf. Anzaldua, 1987, 2-3).
The immediate result of living in between, so described, is the experience of a kind of second-order ambiguity as well, involving moments of clarity and distance from both of one’s two cultures, in which one’s detachment enables one to think creatively both about who one is, and about how to regard others. For this reason, Anzaldua sees the mestizo experience as potentially a liberating one (Anzaldua, 22, 55, 79-80).
In contrast to the traditional Latin American understanding, then, mestizaje is constituted for Anzaldua not in terms of mixed blood, but in terms of the multiply-ambiguous experience of daily life. There is a twofold shift in the theorizing of mestizaje involved in her approach. First, there is a substantive shift from a putatively objective understanding of mestizaje in terms of mixed blood to a subjective account in terms of mestizo experience. This shift is of great importance in the discussion of mestizaje, supported as it is by increasingly widespread skepticism about the idea of race as a legitimate scientific category. Second, there is a rhetorical shift, from the notion of a mestizo as someone who is half one thing and half another—a bronze alloy composed of two distinct elements, to use one of Vasconcelos’ metaphors—to the notion of a mestizo as someone who is fully neither. For Anzaldua, to be mestizo is to be “ni chicha ni limonada”, as the saying has it (rendered colloquially: neither fish nor fowl). Mestizos are alienated, not fully identified with either culture. With respect to both cultures, they find themselves experiencing moments of distance and moments of identification.
Anzaldua’s approach has been widely viewed as providing a foundation for a progressive discussion of practical and moral problems of justice, resistance and assimilation—new versions of the very problems discussed above as challenges to the essentialist accounts. Influential as Anzaldua’s work has been, however, there are some risks involved in deploying this understanding of mestizaje to define Hispanic identity, or for that matter, more specific notions like Chicano/a identity. For one thing, there is always the danger of homogenizing the experience of being in-between. If the notion of mestizaje is to be conceived experientially, it is important to emphasize that there are many different ways of being mestizo. Some of them may be more uncomfortable and damaging to the subject of experience, or perhaps more creative and energizing, or perhaps all of these. Some ways of being in between cultures may only create discomfort in certain circumstances. Some ways of being ‘in between’ may allow one to be more or less at home on both sides of the (literal or figurative) border, while still others may ensure that one is never at home anywhere. To be in between is, as characterized above, simply to be in a certain position with respect to the norms of two very different cultures. It would be an all-too-familiar mistake, echoing the criticisms of Vasconcelos given above, to suppose that there is only one way, or indeed only one correct or ‘authentic’ of living this position.
Hidden below the surface of this mistake is of course the danger of essentializing the position of being in between, conceiving the mestizo as some third type of being. This would be to return to the Vasconcelos position. But the power of Anzaldua’s work is that it shows us the potential that being Chicana in America, for example, can have to liberate those so identified from the deadening weight of both the culture of origin and the dominant culture by giving them a potentially-creative distance on each. Her idea, generalized to yield an account of Hispanic identity, is that to be Hispanic is to have the potential to refuse two cultural traditions and the identities that each defines; and to have in consequence the potential to act creatively to define new ways of living. It is precisely not, therefore, to have some particular, ‘third’ nature. Instead, on her view as here generalized, it is to be free to create one’s own. To be sure, this creation is not ex nihilo; it is grounded in the sense of alienation from each of two cultures, in tension with the very internalization of the norms of each that defines being in between.
On the other hand, there is no special magic that flows with necessity from living between. The middle is what one makes of it; and Anzaldua shows us how Chicanas can draw on certain resources in Mexican culture and mythology to make it a site of resistance. This liberatory potential for providing creative insight and resistance, however, may or may not be realized by those who live between. The mestizo position therefore should not be romanticized, as though by its very nature it made one superior, regardless of the character of one’s choices and moral views.
There is another danger, however, that Anzaldua herself may not always fully appreciate. It is undoubtedly very difficult to live suspended in between for long, and the development of Chicano/a culture itself points up the result. Over a single generation, Mexican immigrants in the United States responded to the experience of being in between by creating a third culture of their own, Chicano/a culture. This sedimentation of the experience of immigrants into a full-blown culture is probably unavoidable. Many immigrant groups tend to settle, and, in so doing, create new variants on the old ways, influenced by new surroundings and customs. This is why ‘going back’ after even a few years can seem strange and disorienting. This tendency to create or re-create culture undercuts the experience of living in between.
It is true that, depending on one’s criteria for the individuation of cultures, one might reasonably regard Chicano/a culture not as a distinctively new culture, but rather as a continuation of both Mexican culture and Anglo-American culture at the same time. After all, in any culture each generation is always engaged in the creative reinterpretation of the norms it has internalized. In any case, there has grown up in the United States a Chicano/a culture which, however heterogeneous it may be, embodies like any other culture a set of norms against which Chicano/as can react, and between whose demands and the demands of Anglo culture they can, once again, find themselves living. (Anzaldua’s discussion of sexism and homophobia in Chicano/a culture, pages 16-21 in the work discussed above, should make this clear.) In short, the position of living in between is so far from being essential to the experience of Chicano/as that it may in fact be inherently ephemeral, almost inevitably giving way to the creation of a new or perhaps re-elaborated culture.
Linda Martín Alcoff has argued in favor of a rather different way of understanding Hispanic identity in the United States. She tentatively rejects Anzaldua’s rhetorical shift, mentioned at the outset of this section, from conceiving mestizaje as ‘both combined’ to conceiving it as ‘neither/nor’. In a generalization of the notion of Chicano/a culture as a continuant of both Mexican and Anglo-American cultures, Alcoff proposes that to be mestizo in the United States is to possess a kind of cultural dual citizenship, to be at the same time fully a member of both the dominant American culture and of the Latin American culture of one’s country of origin. She regards this proposal as grounding a legitimate but dual identity that the cultural mestizo can embrace, constituting ‘an alternative positive articulation of mestizo consciousness and identity,’ thus undercutting the psychological discomfort and dislocation of the experience of being in between. (Alcoff, 2006, 280, in reference to one aim of Anzaldua’s work, shared by Alcoff)
In order for this notion of double identity to be successful, however, Chicano/as, for example, must be able to regard themselves as fully Mexican, and as fully American. This has the consequence that there will be Mexicans—many third-generation immigrants to the United States, for example—who do not speak Spanish or ever visit Mexico, and who may not even know of any living relatives still in that country. As suggested above, whether this is plausible depends on one’s account of culture and cultural continuity. For example, if one rejects essentialist understandings of culture, as Alcoff does, and if one defends instead both a historical understanding of what it means to be a member of a particular culture, and fairly porous criteria of cultural identity or continuity through change (Gracia, 1999, 44-69), then it may not be unreasonable to see Chicano/as as Mexican, and, mutatis mutandis, as American as well. This does not mean, however, that many of the conflicts that are now experienced by mestizos in the United States insofar as they conceive themselves as being between cultures will necessarily disappear. Perhaps they will simply be recast as intra-cultural conflicts between those ‘here’ and those ‘back home’, similar to the inter-generational conflicts referred to above and familiar in many cultures. Moreover, it remains to be seen how such an account can ground the liberatory function of mestizaje so strongly emphasized by Anzaldua, namely, that of creating a critical vantage point from which culture, its values, and its constructions can be questioned. (See Velazco y Trianosky, 2002, for a discussion of how such an account might serve this purpose.)
Maria Lugones: mestizaje and hybridity
Lugones’ work provides a highly-theorized conception of mestizaje, not intended to apply merely to the case of Hispanics, and in fact, not intended specifically to answer the traditional question about what it is to be a Hispanic at all. Lugones is concerned instead to explore the logic of resistance to oppression through a more nuanced understanding of the nature of ‘interlocking oppressions’, or different forms of oppression that intersect to limit our understanding (and their own) of the identity of the oppressed, and of their options. Ultimately her objective is to find ways for oppressed and marginalized peoples to build true and lasting coalitions. The challenges of justice, repression, and assimilation that appeared in response to Vasconcelos’ work, and that drove much of the recent work by Anzaldua and others, reappear as a driving force in the work of Lugones.
Her work focuses on conceptions of cultural separation and purity, organized around the trope of emulsion as expressing the kind of mixed or mestizo identity that many people in many cultures and sub-cultures have: a mixture that, if it separates at all, separates impurely, with traces of each element remaining in every portion of the mix (Lugones, 121-126). Here again there is a rhetorical shift that enriches the discussion of mestizaje, one that perhaps underwrites a new approach to the practical and moral issues of continuing concern in discussions of mestizaje.
Her most influential idea in this vein has been the notion of mestizaje as involving the experience of ‘world-traveling’, or crossing from one sub-culture to another, where different ‘selves’ or, one might say, different aspects of one’s identity, function in each sub-culture. On her view, for a ‘world-traveler’ resistance to oppression involves (a) resisting the pressures to identify oneself purely with any one of these ‘selves’, particularly when the interests of these selves are conceived ‘thinly’ (Lugones, 85-98); and (b) using the ‘impure’ aspects of oneself to disrupt the homogenizing expectations of many of the ‘worlds’ one inhabits (Lugones, 126-134).
It is tempting to say that Lugones’ work is too highly theorized and not sufficiently attentive to the highly variable details of concrete experience. The turn to abstraction is evident even in the final chapter of Lugones’ book, which is entitled, ‘Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker’, where she tries to develop a theoretical framework for understanding resistance and organization ‘on the street’. At another level, however, Lugones’ work shows how one can write as a Hispanic, conscious of how one draws upon the unique Hispanic experience with mestizaje, to address more general questions of coalition and resistance. It can thus be seen as pointing the way beyond the preoccupation with question of Hispanic identity to broader issues of identity and culture, and the concerns about justice and repression that frequently animate them.
On the other hand, Lugones and quite a number of other post-nationalist, post-modernist writers frequently seem not to appreciate fully the distinction between the concept of mestizaje and broader notions like hybridity or nomadic subjectivity. (Alcoff, 2006: 275-77; Miller, 2004: 144f.) If hybridity is a term of art drawing our attention to the porous or heterogeneous nature of culture, then it describes something to be found in every experience of prolonged cross-cultural interaction, cultural conflict, cultural blending, or domination. It is, if not the common lot of most peoples in most times and places, then certainly, as many proponents of the notion have claimed, the common lot of almost all peoples in today’s increasingly-globalized economy. But to see mestizaje as simply the local instantiation of the pervasive phenomenon of hybridity risks losing what is distinctive about Hispanic cultures, even in the post-modern world, namely, that for much of their history and across otherwise-great changes and variations in culture, the concept of mestizaje has played an explicit and powerful organizing role in social and political institutions, everyday practices, and people’s understanding of themselves and others. The concept is therefore not in the first instance a theoretical one, but a quotidian one. It is self-consciously deployed by Hispanics themselves in order to understand and regulate themselves and those around them. Consequently a theory of mestizaje should be seen as first and foremost a theory rooted in the self-understanding of Hispanics, with all the risks and the potential benefits that critically examining a cultural self-understanding promises.
Implicit in these remarks is a second point of difference between hybridity in general and mestizaje in particular. It does not suffice to make the distinction between the two merely to point out that the use of the latter concept is self-conscious and quotidian, while the use of the former concept is theoretical and removed. Mestizaje is not simply a folk version of a theoretical construct. Talk of mestizo identity is specific to a particular quotidian cultural context or range of contexts. It is the specifically Latin American version, where the hybridity in question is constituted by the gamut of individual and cultural experiences of living in between cultures of Spanish and Portuguese origin, on the one hand; and cultures of either African or American Indian origin (or both), on the other. The salience of these particular forms of living in between, in turn, is a function of the sui generis place of black and Indian racial categories in the American imaginary, both in Latin America and in North America, and the various ideologies that have grown up around the two corresponding, pervasively American forms of race mixing.
The New Mestizaje and race
The departure from essentialist understandings of mestizaje has opened up a variety of new and important lines of inquiry, but it may appear that what has been left behind is the notion of mestizaje as a type of racial identity. Indeed, the various rhetorical and substantive shifts described above might be read as movements away from racial categories, seen as embodying putatively-objective claims about biological nature, and toward categories of self-identification, seen as embodying subjectively-grounded claims about self-understanding against a particular cultural background.
To reject the sort of biological essentialism about race represented here by the work of Vasconcelos, however, is not necessarily to reject any and all accounts of what race and racial categories are. The paucity of attempts to integrate alternative understandings of what race is into the contemporary discussion about mestizaje is therefore noteworthy. (But see Bernasconi, 135) Many writers in race theory today hold that, though racial categories may present themselves as embodying claims about biological nature, as a matter of fact they designate and define socially-constructed kinds. On this constructionist view, the real issue about whether mestizaje constitutes a racial category is an issue about whether it does or should figure in the socially-constructed frameworks that define racial categories in a particular time and place. Of course, to the extent that these frameworks are variable, the answer to such a question may likewise be variable. In any case, there is recent work in race theory suggesting that subjective elements have a central place in the social construction of race.
Robert Gooding-Williams has drawn a distinction, in effect, between one’s meeting the socially-defined criteria for membership in a particular racial category (‘being black’, in the case of interest for his discussion), and one’s self-identifying as a member of that racial category (‘being a black person’, in his terminology.) (Gooding-Williams, 1998. Compare Bernasconi’s discussion of Alain Locke’s “dynamic conception of group identity” in the work mentioned above.) One might say that the question of what racial category one belongs to is a matter of objective fact, with the understanding that the categories are socially constructed (compare ‘being from Texas’); and the question of whether one self-identifies with some socially-sanctioned racial categorization is a subjective one (compare ‘being a Texan’, or perhaps ‘being a real Texan’).
Moreover, to use terminology that is not quite Gooding-Williams’ own, one might say that one is fully self-identified with the racial category in which one is placed only under certain conditions. Gooding-Williams says that one ‘becomes a black person,’ i.e. has one’s identity at least partially constituted by one’s being socially classified as black, only if (1) one begins to identify (classify) oneself as black and (2) one begins to make choices, to formulate plans, to express concerns, etc., in light of one’s identification of oneself as black. (Gooding-Williams, 23) He later appears to add a third condition to what is here called full self-identification: (3) the ‘meanings and understandings’ that one assigns ‘to being black’ are ones that have been assigned in awareness of the fact that one lives ‘in a society that has been shaped by black slavery and anti-black racism.’ (Gooding-Williams, 32)
Gooding-Williams does not regard this kind of self-identification as simply a psychological epiphenomenon supervening on already-constructed racial categories. Instead, he says, ‘Individuals so classified contribute to the construction of their racial identities’ through ‘the identifications by which they shape their projects [and their self-understandings] in light of the racial labeling and classifications to which they have been subjected.’ (Gooding-Williams, 22-23) On this account, one might say, the ontology of racial categories contains both subjective and objective elements; and the relation between subjective self-identification and objective socially-constructed categories should be conceived as a dynamic one. The racial categories, their history, and their context ground self-understanding and, in turn, the self- and communal understanding of those who are defined, e.g., as black can in turn help to shape the criteria of application for the category of blackness, or perhaps even the content of the concept itself. (Cf. Alcoff, 182-186)
This account suggests an approach to the relation between race and mestizaje, but with one qualification. Notice that Gooding-Williams’ view, at least as reconstructed here, seems to contain a conservative element: black self-identification requires seeing oneself as a member of the currently-established racial category, ‘black’. Though of course the experience and the responses of self-identified ‘black persons’ may over time alter the shape of the category, the starting-point for black self-identification is the category as currently given. For the self-identified ‘black person’ the category itself is, in this respect, uninterrogated.
With respect to mestizaje the situation in the United States is quite different. It has certainly been argued that ‘Hispanic’ is, or is becoming, a racial category here (see e.g. the sources quoted in Alcoff, 241-242). The specific question at hand, however, is whether Hispanicity understood in terms of mestizaje has been established as such; and it is probably correct to say that, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries, there is no generally-accepted racial category in the United States that corresponds roughly to the range of contemporary Hispanic conceptions of mestizaje rather than to some more general notion of mixed race. It appears, therefore, that mestizaje subjectively understood creates an identity orthogonal to the current socially-constructed American racial categories. Fully to self-identify as mestizo in the U.S. is thus explicitly to reject exclusive classification in any one of the available racial categories. And, of course, for writers like Anzaldua, this is precisely the point: to be mestizo in the United States is to have a certain subjective understanding of one’s place in reference to the dominant racial schema that is not supported by its objectively-established racial categories. One might say, to adopt a term of Falguni Sheth’s, that mestizaje so understood is inherently an unruly identity. (Sheth, 2008, ch. 1)
It could be argued that it counts as a racial identity nonetheless, for two reasons: First, it is a self-identification built on racial categories, albeit orthogonally. All the accounts of the New Mestizaje discussed thus far locate the mestizo subject with respect to racial categories: as neither one nor the other; or as partially one and partially the other; or as fully both; etc. Second, there is no reason to think that every subjectively-defined racial identity must fit one and only one of the socially-available, objective racial categories, unless one assumes that the fundamental racial categories must necessarily be exhaustive and mutually exclusive. But these are exactly the assumptions that the idea of a mestizo racial identity seeks to challenge. Indeed, perhaps a significant part of the potential power of the notion of mestizaje as a racial identity, deployed in the American context, is its presupposition that racial identities need not track racial categories one-to-one. On the other hand, provided these two points are conceded, perhaps whether one insists on calling it a category of racial identity rather than, say, a category of ethnicity or even of counter-cultural or counter-racial identity does not matter. (But see the discussions in Gracia, 2007)
Of course, there remains the challenge facing any social-constructivist account of race of how to reinterpret or replace North American and Latin American essentialist notions of descent as the mode of transmission for racial identity. This echoes the last challenge mentioned in the discussion of Vasconcelos above, although the problem is not unique to constructivist attempts to frame mestizaje in particular as a racial identity. The work of Gracia, Corlett, and others suggests that it may be useful to explore historically-oriented accounts of racial continuity between generations for this purpose. (Gracia, 1999; Corlett, 2003)
A more difficult question, perhaps, has to do with how regarding mestizaje as a racial identity might affect its liberatory potential. The insight guiding the writers who offer a subjective understanding of mestizaje is that this potential is rooted in the nature of the experience of living in between. In the United States mestizaje, subjectively understood, clearly begins from a potentially liberatory perspective since, as suggested above, to self-identify as mestizo is to begin from the experience of a kind of racelessness. But what are the conditions under which mestizaje so understood can sustain this potential?
First, full-self-identification as a mestizo must involve an understanding, not only of the history of the treatment of the peoples so classified (parallel to Gooding-Williams’ third condition), but also of the fact that the racial categories out of which an objective category of mestizaje might be built in the United States, and out of which it has been built in Latin America, are themselves socially constructed. Mestizaje cannot retain its liberatory potential so long as self-identified mestizos see themselves as frozen into a certain in-between range of character and culture by virtue of their mixed descent. On my one view, the history of the negritude movement shows how an attempt to liberate by exercising the power of racialized self-understanding can fail when it is underwritten by essentialist notions of race. Thus the notion of full self-identification required for the subjective account of mestizaje to do its job must be even stronger than the one here attributed to Gooding-Williams.
Second, full self-identification must involve a disposition to resist the sedimentation of living in between into a full-blown culture, for the reasons given above in the discussion of Chicano/a culture. It is this refusal of a defining culture, along with the New Mestizaje’s underlying refusal of the currently-established racial categories, that opens up the possibility of the sorts of rhetorical shifts in thinking about racial identity that appear in the work of Anzaldua, Lugones, and Alcoff.
Finally, and for the same reasons, insofar as racial categories in the United States begin to change so that mestizo itself becomes an available socially-constructed racial category on a par with being black or being white and with which one can identify, the fully self-identified mestizo must reject that as well. After all, much of the writing of Anzaldua, Lugones, Alcoff and others focuses precisely on the way in which the liberatory potential of mestizaje comes from its resistance of the imposition of any socially-defined racial category, old or new, onto the experience of living in between.
The above conditions are difficult to satisfy, and consequently the liberatory potential of mestizaje will be difficult to maintain, to the extent that it is conceived as a racial identity. The full weight of two sets of socially-constructed racial categories (Latin American and those of the U.S.) militate against the satisfaction of these conditions, as do the pervasive socio-cultural pressures toward regulating and controlling the experience of living in between. Perhaps it is best to think of the experience of living in between as defining a powerful and demanding kind of ideal, toward which some who live between Latin American cultures and Anglo-American culture will aspire, and which, on some occasions at least, will characterize the day-to-day experience of many more. On the other hand, an analogous set of conditions do appear to be satisfied by the increasingly-widespread forms of self-identification described in much of the popular literature of the mixed-race movement.
Mestizaje and pan-Hispanic identity
Clearly much, though by no means all, of the discussion of mestizaje, both in the more traditional essentialist mode and among the proponents of the New Mestizaje, has been motivated by the hope that in some form or other it can be used to define a pan-Hispanic identity.
There are a variety of ways in which this might be accomplished in the United States, provided that one expects no more precision than is appropriate to the subject matter of group identity-claims. For example, one might delimit, very roughly, a group of people who either (a) have emigrated from their homes in Latin America to, or otherwise found themselves in, the United States, or (b) are descended from people who have so emigrated or so found themselves. Such a broad, objective delimitation might also suffice to pick out a group who are to some extent disposed, in virtue of tradition and upbringing, to deploy variants of some subjective notion of mestizaje, already familiar to one degree or another from its use in Latin American contexts, in order to understand their own racial and cultural experience in the U.S. Hispanics would then be those people whose lives and histories displayed both this objective feature and a disposition toward such a subjective form of self-understanding. (Cf. Corlett, 2003)
Naturally, this approach will legitimize a correspondingly broad range of experiences of being in between as legitimately mestizo experiences, underwriting in turn a wide range of interpretations and understandings of what is involved in subjectively self-identifying as Hispanic. But perhaps this is as it should be. Perhaps the real question of what interests—or indeed what cultural forms and values—Hispanics in the United States have in common on any particular occasion or issue should be left open for debate by an account of Hispanicity. Moreover, by leaving these questions open, the proposed account undercuts the frequently-heard objection to embracing a pan-Hispanic identity, namely that it involves the erasure of national, ethnic, linguistic, and other differences among Hispanics.
Whether a similarly-broad approach in which perhaps geography or overlapping cultural histories, together with a tendency to deploy some notion or other of mestizaje in the understanding of self and other, could underwrite a workable conception of Hispanicity in Latin America, is a question best left for another time. Suffice it to remark that the long-standing presence in Latin America of powerful, entrenched, and largely ahistorical objective categories of mestizo identity make this a much more difficult question, at least if a mestizo conception of Hispanicity is not simply to reinscribe the history of intolerance, injustice and marginalization that have traditionally marked the deployment of essentialist notions of mestizaje. In Latin America, to be mestizo is clearly not to begin from the experience of racelessness. In this respect the Latin American struggle to liberate oneself and one’s community through the subversive re-interpretation of mestizo identity is much more akin to the struggles of African-Americans than it is to the in-between experience faced by Hispanic immigrants to this country.
GREGORY VELAZCO y TRIANOSKY
Gregory Velazco y Trianosky is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. For the past ten years much of his research has focused on issues about race, ethnicity, and identity. He also maintains his strong interest in virtue ethics.
References
Alcoff, Linda Martín. (2006). Visible identities: race, gender, and the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anzaldua, Gloria. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Press.
Bernasconi, Robert. (2007). “Ethnic Race”. In Jorge Gracia. (Ed.) Race or ethnicity: on Black and Latino identity. (pp. 123-136) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Corlett, J. Angelo. (2003). Race, Racism, and Reparations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gooding-Williams, Robert. (1998). ‘Race, multiculturalism and democracy’. Constellations, 5, 18-41.
Gracia, Jorge J.E. (1999). Hispanic/latino identity: a philosophical perspective. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Katzew, Ilona. (2005). Casta painting: images of race in eighteenth-century mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lugones, Maria. Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions (feminist constructions). New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Miller, Marilyn Grace. (2004). Rise and fall of the cosmic race: the cult of mestizaje in latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Sheth, Falguni A. Forthcoming, 2009. Toward a political philosophy of race. Albany: SUNY Press.
Vasconcelos, José. (1997). The cosmic race/la raza cosmic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Velazco y Trianosky, Gregory. (2002). ‘Beyond mestizaje: the future of race in America’. In Herman DeBose and Loretta Winters. (Eds.) New faces in a changing America: multiracial identity in the 21st century. (pp. 176-193) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Suggested Further Reading
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. (1993). In my father’s house: Africa in the philosophy of culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
_______________, and Gutmann, Amy. (1998). Color conscious. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
_______________, and Gates, Henry Louis. (Eds.) (1995). Identities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bernasconi, Robert, and Dotson, Kristie. (2005). (Eds.) Race, hybridity, and miscegenation (history of American thought). New York: Thoemmes Continuum.
_______________, and Lott, Tommy. (2000). (Eds.) The Idea of race. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Forbes, Jack D. (1993). Africans and Native Americans: The language of race and the evolution of red-black peoples. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Goldberg, David Theo. (1993). Racist culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Gracia, Jorge J. E. (2008). Latinos in America Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hacking Ian. (2000). The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hannaford, Ivan. (1996). Race: the history of an idea in the West. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Omi, Michael, and Winant, Howard. (1986). Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge.
Root, Maria P.P. (Ed.) (1986). The Multiracial Experience. Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage Publications.
Zack, Naomi. (1994). Race and mixed race. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
_____________. (1995). American mixed race: the culture of microdiversity. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Zenón Cruz, Isabelo. (1974-75). Narciso descubre su trasero: el negro en la cultura puertorriqueña [Narcissus discovers his backside: the Black in Puerto Rican culture] (2 vols.) Humacao, PR: Editorial Furidi.
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