Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience

Abstract

The ideology of mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America has frequently been seen as involving a process of national homogenisation and of hiding a reality of racist exclusion behind a mask of inclusiveness. This view is challenged here through the argument that mestizaje inherently implies a permanent dimension of national differentiation and that, while exclusion undoubtedly exists in practice, inclusion is more than simply a mask. Case studies drawn from Colombian popular music, Venezuelan popular religion and Brazilian popular Christianity are used to illustrate these arguments, wherein inclusion is understood as a process linked to embodied identities and kinship relations. In a coda, approaches to hybridity that highlight its potential for destabilising essentialisms are analysed. Rethinking mestizaje as embodied experienceThis article explores a key concept in the complex of ideas around race, nation and multiculturalism in Latin America, that of mestizaje -essentially the notion of racial and cultural mixture. I address mestizaje not just as a nation-building ideology -which has been the principal focus of scholarship on the issue, but also as a lived process that operates within the embodied person and within networks of family and kinship relationships. I consider how people live the process of racial-cultural mixture through musical change, as racially identified styles of popular music enter into their performing bodies, awakening or engendering potentialities in them; through religious practice, as racialised deities possess them and energise a dynamic and productive embodied diversity ; and through family relationships, as people enter into sexual and procreative relations with others identified as racially-culturally different, to produce ' mixed' children.This approach emphasises the ways in which mestizaje as a lived process, which encompasses, but is not limited to, ideology, involves the maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and homogeneity. Scholars have recognised that mestizaje does not have a single meaning within the Latin American context, and contains within it tensions between sameness and difference, and between inclusion and exclusion. 1 Yet a scholarly concern with mestizaje as ideology has tended to privilege two assumptions: first, that nationalist ideologies of mestizaje are essentially about the creation of a homogeneous mestizo (mixed) future, which are then opposed to subaltern constructions of the nation as raciallyculturally diverse; and second, that mestizaje as a nationalist ideology appears to be an inclusive process, in that everyone is eligible to become a mestizo, but in reality it is exclusive because it marginalises blackness and indigenousness, while valuing whiteness.Both assumptions are too simple. Firstly, nationalist ideologies of mestizaje contain and encompass dynamics not only of homogenisation but also of differentiation, maintaining permanent spaces, of a particular kind, for blackness and indigenousness, and ...

Thinking ‘Post-Racial’ Ideology Transnationally: The Contemporary Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Americas

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“…Almeida, 2000;Sansone, 2003) e na Colômbia (cf. Wade, 2005) demonstraram como esse discurso funciona como uma construção multifacetada que conecta diferentes padrões de coexistência intercultural. Os achados de Peter Wade, baseados em seus estudos de música na Colômbia, religiosidade popular na Venezuela e cristianismo popular no Brasil, são particularmente valiosos a esse respeito.…”

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