El Mestizaje

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El Mestizaje

ENDURING RACISM: MESTIZAJE AS A POLARIZING SYMBOL

INTERCULTURALITY AND NORTH AMERICAN MESTIZAJE

In many Latin American nations, October 12, Columbus Day, is known (or has been known) as el día de la raza, “the day of the race” . On this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus made landfall on one of the islands of the Bahamas, in what was to be called the Caribbean Sea. The very next day he described the natives as a generación (generation, connoting ancestry and descent), writing that they “are of the color of the Canarians, neither black nor white.” He carefully noted that they should be good and intelligent servants. On the way back to Spain with his indigenous chattel, the name indios (feminine indias) emerged, because Cristobal Colón, the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, insisted that he had reached India, the gateway to Asia, wherein dwelled the Great Kahn and his kingdom of riches.

On his second voyage in 1493, Columbus carried black slaves, called negro s, as well as sugar cane and cattle to the territory he named Española (now Hispañola, which includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and though he and his fellow explorers, conquerors, and administrators named islands and territories everywhere (ignoring the native Taíno names), he and others routinely used indio as a designation for the diverse populations that could be “profitable” (provechoso is the word used by Columbus) for the Europeans. As the geographical constructions became diversified the cultural constructions of profitable labor became condensed to indio (Indian) and negro (black). In spite of the cultural construction of Españoles (and later

blanco [white]) at the top of an economic pyramid, with African Americans and Indigenous Americans on the bottom, the flow of genes among those of European, African, and Native American descent created phenotypic diversity and a system of multiculture, known in colonial times as las castas (breeds).

RACE, MESTIZAJE, AND THE CASTAS

By 1500 the concept of raza (race) replaced that of generación in the Americas, and the phenomenon of el mestizaje, a category that already existed under various names along the West African coast, emerged in the crucible of European hybridity that stressed the blending of civilization with savagery. El mestizaje means “the blending,” or “the mixing” of “races” and the mixing of “cultures.” But more than that, el mestizaje means “hybrid,” the breeding of the domesticated with the wild to improve the stock, or the “race.” Hybridity, and hence colonial mestizaje, exists where the civilized mixes with the savage or barbarian. Synonyms given in Spanish-English dictionaries for this phenomenon of culturally constructed miscegenation are “half-breed, “crossbreed,” and “half caste.” Mestizos, the result of the hybrid mixing of Spanish or other Europeans with Africans and Native Americans, may derive from the medieval Spanish word mesta, which referred to an association of cattle breeders. What is clear is that concepts of culture and the powerful social construction of race emerge in the idea of el mestizaje.

People in the castas were subdivided again and again into imputed “blood mixtures” according to how they appeared to others. Examples included dark people who were only one part white or light people who were three parts white. Other categories proliferated in Spanish including names such as “wolf,” “throwback,” “near Spanish,” and even “there you are” or “where are you?” The types were so far from a person’s genetic make-up that a couple’s six children might each be categorized as being in a different casta. It was the label of mestizo that encompassed them, that set them off from elite Spanish or whites, as well as from those classed as black and Indian.

As the socially constructed race of mestizo s grew and grew, it remained separate from whites on the top of the economic, social, and political pyramid, and from those classed as indios and negros on the bottom. To paraphrase slightly the words of Ronald Stutzman, writing about the twentieth-century education system in Ecuador, el mestizaje became an all inclusive doctrine of exclusion. Two subdivisions of el mestizaje endured, and a third emerged to confound the entire notion of the tripartite pyramid of white, black, and Indian. One of these was the cultural construction of “hybridity” between white and Indian to produce mestizo.Thisisthe prototype of el mestizaje in many Spanish-speaking nations, especially Mexico. In Guatemala, just to the south of Mexico, such people are known as ladinos. On the other side of the triangle is the cultural construction of “hybridity” between white and black to produce the mulato.Thisword is more complex and more explicitly racist than mestizo. It comes directly from horse and donkey breeding, wherein the cross between the two produces a sterile mule, from whence derives mul-ata (muled). What confounded all of this is the fact that indigenous people and people of African descent also interbred, shared cultural systems, and intermarried. Beginning about 1502, the very first African runaways on the Caribbean Island of Hispañola escaped to the forested hills of the interior, which were occupied by Taíno indigenous people, who called these refuge zones haití, from which derives the contemporary Republic of Haiti. Indigenous people also fled oppression to areas secured by runaway Africans or black people from Spain, who were also enslaved in the Americas as the cultural concept negro (black) fused with esclavo (slave). The mixture without hybridity of indigenous people and African-descended people became known in many places as zambo or zambaigo. They soon came to constitute a confrontation with the European-American notions of hybridity because their socially constructed appearances and cultures owed nothing to the conquerors or colonials. The Spanish crown rejected this category and sought to convert it to mulato.

The liberator of northern South American from colonial rule, the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar (1783– 1830), drew explicitly on this inverted triangle within a pyramidal triangle to create an ideology of continental unity against Spain (but not against whiteness), throughout South America. Together with the call for a liberation of enslaved peoples to serve the cause of an Americas revolution against colonial rule, he also championed a racial unity bound to common hybridity of the people of the continent. This ideology of hybridity, perhaps ironically, contributed directly to both the commemoration of Columbus Day as the día de la raza and the nationalist and continent-wide concept of el mestizaje. But following the revolutions, the idea of oneness shattered in the face of the exclusions of indigenous people, on the one side, and the African-descended people, on the other. Another ideological force was necessary to forge unity within the diversity created by the Conquest and the 300 year-old colonial regimes.

THE COSMIC RACE

In The Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race (2004), Marilyn Grace Miller introduces the hubris of the Mexican educator, philosopher, and politician José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), who coined the figure of speech la raza cósmica (the cosmic race) to refer to the hybridized and whitening peoples of Latin America.

Although celebrated figures such as Simón Bolívar and José Martí had already posited equations between mixed race and Latin American identity, the 1925 publication of Mexican educator and politician José Vasconcelos’ La raza cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana (The Cosmic Race: Mission of the Ibero-American Race) marked the inception of a fully developed ideology of mestizaje that tied political and aesthetic self-definition and assertion to a racial discourse at both the national and the regional levels (p. 27).

Vasconcelos specifically contrasted ideologies of Latin America, as epitomized by the homogenizing vision of Simón Bolívar, with those of North America (the United States), as characterized by James Monroe. The former saw beauty and spiritual redemption in the concept of mestizaje, in its power of lightening or improving races, while the latter saw the darkening menace of miscegenation and sought to conquer those of darker skin living in Latin America and the Caribbean through what is, to Latin Americans, the infamous Monroe Doctrine. Vasconcelos spelled this out in his book Bolivarismo y Monroísmo: Temas iberoamericanos (Bolivarism and Monroism) in 1937. His first edition of La raza cósmica was published in Paris in 1925, then in Mexico in 1948, and again there in 1966, a span of some forty years, during which period the doctrine of mestizaje, and its accompanying, if often implicit, insistence on blanqueamiento, (whitening—in racial and cultural terms) and “improving the race and culture,” became an undergirding theme of Latin American developmentalism, permeating every area of life.

According to Miller, the slogan “Por mi raza hablará el espíritu” (the spirit will speak through my race) was to replace the fractured unities drawn together in revolution by warlords, heroes, and political bosses, and thus restore the Mexican people to a new homogeneity. Along the way, a united continent of Latin Americans opposed to the missions of the imperial north was to emerge. The tragic flaw in this “cosmic race” notion as hubris for national identity or for a continent-wide movement of self-identity was the issue of blanqueamiento, and of its corollary concept mejor la raza (improve the race). Those classed as mestizo were stigmatized for their hybridity with Indian “blood,” or (less frequently in most countries) with African-descended phenotypes, both often referred to as la mancha, or “the stain” (of race).

The Puerto Rican poet and social critic Fortunato Vizcarrondo, in his satirical and ironical writings (published in his book of poems Dinga y Mandinga), summarized this stigmatizing affect of ancestry with the poem “¿ y tu agüela, a’onde ejtá?” The Spanish is folk Puerto Rican for ¿ y tu abuelo, adonde está? (where is your grandfather from?, or figuratively, “where are you hiding your ancestors?” ) meaning “you may be lightening but we know you descend from blackness.” The latter is signaled by the concepts of “Dinga” and “Mandinga,” representing different African peoples well known by Iberians until the term negro came to subsume them. In some parts of Latin America the very concept of mestizo refers to the darkening of racial features, not lightening. This is the colonial notion of “throw back.” In fact, the figure of speech (common in both Puerto Rico and Cuba) “lo que no tiene de dinga tiene de mandinga” (what you don’t have of the Dinga you have of the Mandinga) denies “whiteness” to the majority of people. Hybridity, in other words, cuts both ways: People who are lightening may be said to be upwardly mobile toward desired phenotypic and cultural features, or they may be backsliding into their darker indigenous- or African-descended roots.

ENDURING RACISM: MESTIZAJE AS A POLARIZING SYMBOL

In the Andes of Ecuador and Peru, where the indigenous people far outnumber those of African descent, this phrase becomes “lo que no tiene del inga tiene de mandinga” (what you don’t have of the Inca you have of the Mandinga). To move from the “racial” to the “cultural” stigma, one may say or write, “quien no toca la flauta, toca el tambor” (who doesn’t play the flute [indio] plays the drum [negro]). These ditties stigmatize those classed as mestizo as either indigenous- or African-descended, or as a mixture of both. A very prominent liberal intellectual, Osvaldo Hurtado (1939–), the one-time president of Ecuador and one-time head of the Leftist Democratic political party in Ecuador, also favors the phrase in his often reprinted and updated book Political Power in Ecuador (1980, p. 325). He explicates the phrase by stating that it refers to that which is “in the blood,” which can be overcome only by cultural whitening. When he was president of Ecuador, Hurtado coined the phrase indomestizaje to refer to the populace of the country, but not to those of his upper-class position. By doing so, he consciously omitted all traces of African-descended peoples from the nation’s cultural make-up.

It should be clear by now that the doctrine, or ideology, or hubris of el mestizaje is best regarded as a polarizing symbol. From the standpoint or perspective of elites and those who are upwardly mobile with aspirations to adopt elite values, mestizos are those in the middle to lower rungs of a social ladder who have shed indigenous or African descended cultural orientations, values, dress, speech, or physical features. For those in the middle, however, who choose to move upward, blanqueamiento is their aspiration and mestizaje is their stigma. To those self-identifying as indigenous or black, mestizos are those who have shed their cultural orientation for a position to which they aspire, but which they cannot attain. This is the living dilemma of those whom many sociologists and journalists call the clase mestiza.

COUNTERFORCES TO “WHITENING” IDEOLOGY

There are many forces that work contrary to the doctrine of el mestizaje in Latin American nations. According to David M. Guss, in his book about Venezuela titled The Festival State (2000), mestizaje constitutes what many call the myth of racial democracy, the false nationalist premise promulgated by essentially white people (los blancos, or blanquitos) that Venezuelans do not have a perspective of “race” : “the language of mestizaje masks unequal social relations between blacks and whites wherein blanqueamiento or ‘whitening’ is the unstated physical and cultural goal” (p. 61). Not only have blacks been subject to exclusion on the basis of mestizaje ideology in Venezuela, so too have its approximately 50,000 indigenous people. The fiery and controversial president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, changed the October 12 (Columbus Day) celebratory figure of speech from the día de la raza to el día de la resistencia indígena (the day of indigenous resistance) in 2002. By doing so, President Chávez was seeking to conjoin those against elitism and classism, against “whitening” as a key to upward mobility, as “indigenous.” Thus far, those so categorized seem to accept this imagery and constitute a formidable political base.

Chávez prides himself in being of mixed heritage— black and indigenous—and he does not promulgate a doctrine of mestizaje. Rather, he regards himself as pardo, here meaning the mixing of Afro-descended people and indigenous-descended people. He proudly informs his followers, most of whom (if not all) are from lower classes and who are noticeably darker complexioned than those in upper socio-economic brackets, that his father was mixed Indian and black and that his grandmother was a Pumé Indian. This is a significant change in Latin American perspectives on “self” and “other,” particularly

for someone at the pinnacle of executive power and privilege. It marks the first time in Venezuelan history that a president has proclaimed himself to be pardo and to identify with those who have been and are pardo.

Chávez hails from the southern plains, or llanos, of Venezuela, an area long known for its black and indigenous mixtures, and for its spirit of rebellion. The liberator Simón Bolívar marched through these llanos negros (black plains, as they are known by some in Colombia) with an army of Haitian black soldiers, collecting another army of pardo warriors who swept through the Colombian llanos to their west. This turned into a successful campaign to free what is now Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador from the yoke of colonial rule. But, in the end, Bolívar promulgated a doctrine of mestizaje, fearing the force of the indigenous and black people upon whom he depended during the revolution. Slaves were freed, but they were neither socially nor culturally liberated.

By bringing the power of the rebellious mixed-race pardo into the national scene, Chávez is spearheading a cultural-ethnic revolution, based on the actions of Simón Bolívar but divorced from the ideology of mestizaje. This is the cultural dimension of his revolución bolivariano (Bolivarian Revolution) that complements his goal of a populistclassist-socialist revolution. Other social movements resonate with that of Venezuela. For example, in Ecuador and Bolivia, indigenous people are forcefully seeking to exorcise the image of the whitening mestizo from their lexicon of self-liberation, and they are striving to change the national celebration of the Day of the Race to “500 años de resistencia” (500 years of resistance). The polarization of the two perspectives on the Day or the Race, which also constitutes the polarized perspectives on the celebration of mestizaje, places in strong relief a major cultural tension permeating many Latin American countries during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

INTERCULTURALITY AND NORTH AMERICAN MESTIZAJE

Perhaps ironically, as the ideology of el mestizaje gives way to an ethos of interculturalidad (interculturality) in nations undergoing transformations to respect for the plurality represented by, especially, those of indigenous and African descent, the early to mid-twentieth century forces of cultural blending are making inroads in the United States. Near the end of her book on this subject, Miller writes:

“Mestizaje has repeatedly proven to be a flawed doctrine of Latin American identity that nonetheless continues to distinguish Latin Americans from their Northern neighbors. At the same time, it is newly mobilized and empowered through electronic diffusion that renders it ever more ubiquitous, so that its ideology is now pervasively felt in the United States, that same national and cultural power it was fashioned to repel” (Miller 2004, p. 142).

The transformation of mestizaje to interculturality in many Latin American nations, and its transformative manifestation among Chicano and Latina movements in the United States, suggests that the phenomena of Latin American interculturality and North American mestizaje stem from the same roots and have merged to become the same overall phenomenon. In Latin American nations, interculturality stresses a movement from one cultural system to another, whereas social and cultural pluralism and hybridity stress the institutional separation forced by the blanco (white) elite on diverse peoples. The latter is national, regional, and static; the former is local, regional, global, and dynamic. Latin American mestizaje emanates from the top of social hierarchies and stifles creativity and the celebration of difference within a nation state. But in North America, the semantics change, for the ethos—probably born in the Mexican Revolution—is a bottom-up appreciation of the multiple experiences shared by peoples of other Latin American nations within the United States.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Columbus, Christopher. 1989. The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–94. Transcribed and Translated into English with Notes by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Forbes, Jack D. 1993. Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Fuentes, Carlos. 1992. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Guss, David M. 2000. The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hurtado, Osvaldo. 1980. Political Power in Ecuador. Translated by Nick D. Mills, Jr. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Miller, Marilyn Grace. 2004. Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Mörner, Magnus. 1967. Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown.

Stephens, Thomas M. 1999. Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology, 2nd ed. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Stutzman, Ronald. 1981. “El Mestizaje: An All Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion.” In Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, edited by Norman E. Whitten Jr. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Vasconcelos, José. 1925. La raza cósmica, misión de la raza iberoamericana. Paris: Agencia Mundial de Librería.

Weismantel, Mary J. 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Whitten, Norman E., Jr., editor. 2003. Millennial Ecuador: Critical Essays on Cultural Transformations and Social Dynamics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Norman E. Whitten Jr.

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism