Genealogy of Racism in Mexico: Technological Devices Of
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GENEALOGY OF RACISM IN MEXICO: TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICES OF RACE AND THEIR TRANSFORMATION IN MODERN MEXICO by Pedro José González Corona APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Dr. Monica Rankin, Chair ___________________________________________ Dr. David Patterson ___________________________________________ Dr. Nils Roemer ___________________________________________ Dr. Whitney Stewart Copyright 2019 Pedro José González Corona All Rights Reserved GENEALOGY OF RACISM IN MEXICO: TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICES OF RACE AND THEIR TRANSFORMATION IN MODERN MEXICO by PEDRO JOSÉ GONZÁLEZ CORONA, MLS DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES - HISTORY OF IDEAS THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS December 2019 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Trying to tell a different history associated with a persistent idea and its transformations has not been easy. Choosing different angles and outlooks from which I could stand, looking at the unfinished past required challenging my own comfort. The main hurdle I ran into was having to adapt to a different philosophy of language. Using a language different from the one my mother taught me became a scary aspect during the writing of this dissertation. Following the Hispanic academic tradition of abstract thinking and expressing such thoughts through long, very long sentences got me against the ropes more than once. How to ask a brain to undo decades of grammar and syntax in my adulthood? My beloved Spanish kept shadowing every sentence I wrote in English. At the end I came to terms with the fact that this is who I am: a person concerned with human rights; worried about racism, discrimination and violence; a person passionate about education; who has an accent while speaking as much as a trace of his native language while writing. Thankfully I had great advisors to guide me. I will always be in debt to Dr. Monica Rankin for inviting me to work at the Center for U.S.-Latin America Initiatives (CUSLAI). Allowing me to teach classes for her and to be part of the organization of CUSLAI’s programs and activities gave me the experience to face the academic world without hesitations. I thank Dr. Rankin for taking the time to correct my work and suggest better ways to express my ideas throughout this dissertation. She showed me how to think and work as a historian, a skill that I will appreciate for the rest of my life. Dr. David Patterson, a mentor who initiated me in the studies that changed my life: Jewish thought. He encouraged me to show my work with pride to the world. iv I want to give special thanks to the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies, and Dr. Nils Roemer. Without his support, my dreams of establishing contacts with academic partners in Latin America would have stayed as dreams, and not the reality they are now. Thank you for trusting me. I would like to say thanks to Dr. Whitney Stewart, who has enthusiastically participated in some of my projects, including this one, and the Race Workshop 2018. This dissertation would not be possible without the support of the School of Arts and Humanities. My deepest appreciation to Dr. John Gooch for letting me know about the opportunity of the Abrams Fund for Dissertation Research, without which I could not have finished my project. Many thanks to Dr. Lidia Gomez from Benemérita Universidad de Puebla, who pointed me in the right direction. Thanks to her, I found the archives that provided the most valuable sources employed in my dissertation. I want to mention some of my dear friends as well. Toni Loftin, thank you for the countless hours of fascinating discussion about politics, language, and Mexico. Jeff Hirshberg, I thank you for the encouragement and moral support. Karl Sen Gupta, many thanks for listening to my disorganized ideas: it was in fact during a lunch we had together in which you questioned my ideas about writing a dissertation proposal that I located my research interest. Thanks to that conversation, I was able to put together exactly what I wanted. Your questions forced me to explain, and explaining gave me clarity. Last but not least, Sarah Valente, thank you for allowing me to have a portion of my academic life in Spanish. Our fellowship as professors is just invaluable, and it makes me improve myself constantly. v Finally, I would like to say thank you to my family. It has been years since we had a normal weekend. Berenice, thank you for the patience beyond the comprehensible. My kids have endured the stress of a father who is always working two jobs, or reading and writing, who has no time for real vacations. Oriana, Max, Bella, and Caro: one day you will understand how important you were for this project. You were my inspiration. November 2019 vi GENEALOGY OF RACISM IN MEXICO: TECHNOLOGICAL DEVICES OF RACE AND THEIR TRANSFORMATION IN MODERN MEXICO Pedro José González Corona, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2019 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Monica Rankin The genealogy of racism in Mexico can be traced to colonial times. This dissertation argues that the framers of the modern Mexican nation-state found useful social practices that I identify as technologies to carry the idea of race throughout the process of construction of the nation and the state. Three main eras defined major changes for the technological devices of race. One of the major changes occurred in the transitional period of pre-Independence Mexico (1767—1810), when the aspiration of emancipation brought by the European Enlightenment met the needs of a country that had been oppressed for almost two hundred years. Local elites faced the challenge of leaving colonial practices behind in order to face the birth of a republican life. The elite’s need of stratification of a diverse society found in the artistic representation of castas a valuable ally. Hence, casta paintings as a technological device of race carried a message of a social taxonomy for a new socio-economic era. A second change followed when the idea of race was affected in the post-Independence era by liberalism and its multiple confrontations with conservative parties and thinkers. In a way, vii liberalism weaponized the idea of race while creating a homogeneous nation for a modern state. The intersection of political power and language was registered in important nineteenth century documents. Newspapers, edicts, journals, bulletins, and even popular sayings reflect how political power expressed in the public sphere carried a racialized message in which the indigenous people appeared as lesser beings, while the criollos, or Spanish descendants, became the model citizen for the nation. A third period of change for the idea of race and its technological devices occurred with the arrival of liberalism in its positivist version. In a country where most of the population was of Indian descent, the only possible discourse favorable to create a unified nation was a narrative of mestizaje. The discourse of one mixed people, symbolized by the mestizo, took over discourses of progress and order vital for the development of the nation-state. Hence, the technological devices of race had two main functions: to make visible all race markers that defined a person in terms of social and economic status, and to make invisible the indigenous origins of the mestizo. Expressions of art, as in casta paintings, or written expressions in the form of journalism, carried clear messages of social classification. From making visible the differences between races to assigning moral value to human groups, and from creating a discourse of a national subject— mestizo—to declaring a war against the Indians of Northern Mexico, this dissertation establishes that the idea of race has been a protagonist in Mexican history, and has transfigured into the perennial and ubiquitous component that fuels the technological devices of race. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................ vii LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 CASTAS, THE SECRET LIFES OF RACE .........................................................22 CHAPTER 3 RACE AND THE MECHANICS OF POWER .................................................... 62 CHAPTER 4 RACE AS POLITICS ..........................................................................................104 CHAPTER 5 THE STATE ........................................................................................................142 CHAPTER 6 A POSITIVIST STATE....................................................................................... 187 CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................233 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................238 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .....................................................................................................246 CURRICULUM VITAE ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Joaquín de Basarás. Origen, costumbre y estado