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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title (Dis)Claiming Mestizofilia: Chicana/os Disarticulating Euromestizaje Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5jn8937q Author Palacios, Agustin Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California (Dis)Claiming Mestizofilia: Chicana/os Disarticulating Euromestizaje By Agustín Palacios A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Laura E. Pérez, Chair Professor José Rabasa Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres Universtiy of California, Berkeley Spring 2012 Copyright by Agustín Palacios, 2012 All Rights Reserved. Abstract (Dis)Claiming Mestizofilia: Chicana/os Disarticulating Euromestizaje by Agustín Palacios Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Laura E. Pérez, Chair This dissertation investigates the development and contradictions of the discourse of mestizaje in its key Mexican ideologues and its revision by Mexican American or Chicana/o intellectuals. Great attention is given to tracing Mexico’s dominant conceptions of racial mixing, from Spanish colonization to Mexico’s post-Revolutionary period. Although mestizaje continues to be a constant point of reference in U.S. Latino/a discourse, not enough attention has been given to how this ideology has been complicit with white supremacy and the exclusion of indigenous people. Mestizofilia, the dominant mestizaje ideology formulated by white and mestizo elites after Mexico’s independence, proposed that racial mixing could be used as a way to “whiten” and homogenize the Mexican population, two characteristics deemed necessary for the creation of a strong national identity conducive to national progress. Mexican intellectuals like Vicente Riva Palacio, Andrés Molina Enríquez, José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio proposed the remaking of the Mexican population through state sponsored European immigration, racial mixing for indigenous people, and the implementation of public education as a way to assimilate the population into European culture. I argue that although Mexican Americans inherited this Eurocentric formulation of mestizaje, by the mid-1960s their specific social position as a negatively racialized and economically exploited population in the United States allowed self-identified Chicana/o activists and intellectuals to depart significantly from, and in some cases, clearly critique inherited Eurocentric conceptions of racial mixing and racist views of indigenous people. Chicano/a discourse of mestizaje and indigeneity is not an uncritical reproduction of dominant Mexican mestizofilia and indigenismo, it is a collective, and sometimes deeply personal, exploration of mixed race ancestry that sought to recuperate, and in some cases, center the indigenous. Chicano/as’ historical and practical context made some of their claims to indigeneity, including those dealing with spirituality, not only oppositional, but also decolonizing. Through an interdisciplinary approach grounded in Chicano/a studies, this study critically examines a broad array of texts by Mexican and Chicana/o intellectuals, including political speeches, historical texts, and literature. 1 Dedication To the memory of Alfred Arteaga (1950 – 2008), and to all the women who have nurtured and guided me, including Professor Laura E. Pérez, my mom Rosa López, mi nana Oliva Luna, and mi amorcito corazón Alejandra Oseguera. i Acknowledgements First and foremost I must recognize the Chair of my committee, Laura E. Pérez, for her guidance, support, and encouragement during this arduous process. I am grateful for all her constructive criticisms, edits, and for not giving up on me, even when I was ready to give up on myself. I will also like to thank the other members of my committee, Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Professor José Rabasa, for all their comments and ideas. Although they both had moved to work with, and inspire, students at other universities, they did not abandon me in this project. I also need to thank my mentor Alfred Arteaga, who from 2001 to his passing in 2005 helped me in more ways that I can mention. His passion for life and poetry continues to inspire me. I would also like to express my gratitude to my family and friends. My wife Alejandra has always been supportive, without her taking care of our two children while I sneaked away to work on my dissertation, I would never had finished. And to my life-long best friend José López, who was always ready to listen to my ideas. Lastly, to my mother, compared to the amount of work and sacrificed she gave to raise my sister and me, writing a dissertation is no big deal. ii Table of Contents Chapter One. The Chicana/o (Dis)Claiming of Mestizofilia 1 Chapter Two. Making “Indians” and “Mestizos” in Colonial Society 27 Chapter Three. Mestizofilia and Indigenismo During the Porfiriato 50 Chapter Four. (R)Evolutionary Mexico: José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio 73 Chapter Five. (An)Other Geography: Aztlán 102 Works Cited 124 ! iii CHAPTER ONE The Chicana/o (Dis)Claiming of Mestizofilia Mestizofilia, a term coined by contemporary Mexican historian Agustín Basave Benítez (1992), refers to the nationalist ideology formulated by white and mestizo elites after Mexico’s independence. This ideology proposed that racial mixing could be used as a way to “whiten” and homogenize the Mexican population, two characteristics deemed necessary for the creation of a strong national identity and national progress. Although Mexican Americans inherited this Eurocentric formulation of mestizaje in the 19th and early 20th century, by the Civil Rights era their specific social position as a negatively racialized and economically exploited population in the United States allowed Chicana/o activists and intellectuals to depart significantly from, and in some cases, clearly critique inherited Latin American but sill Eurocentric conceptions of racial mixing and racists view of indigenous people, dark “mixed” people, and other “people of color.” Chicanos/as of the 1960s and 1970s both claimed and disclaimed Mexico’s official discourses of mestizaje.1 This dissertation traces the dominant configurations of cultural and biological mixing, referred to in Latin America since Spanish colonization as mestizaje, in the work of Mexican and Chicano/a intellectuals. By interrogating this transnational intellectual history, this dissertation seeks to make a critical intervention into contemporary Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/o discourse on mestizaje and indigeneity. This discursive history entailed the examination of a broad array of texts, including political speeches, historical texts, and literature. Historically, “Chicana/o” refers to the political and cultural identity that emerged out of the Chicano/a Movement(s) of the 1960s and 70s. An important sector of Chicana/o intellectuals not only actively rejected Anglo-centric assimilation, but they did so by proposing a re-valorization of Mexican and indigenous history and culture, while affirming the civil and human rights of people of Mexican descent in the United States.2 Chicano/a historians re-interpreted Mexican and United States history in ways that included the voices and experiences of previously marginalized and racialized groups, particularly those of indigenous and Mexican descent. As Chicana scholar Norma 1 The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law (1996) defines disclaim as: “to reject or relinquish a claim to (as an interest in an estate)” and disclaimer as “a refusal or disavowal of something that one has a right to claim; specif: a relinquishment or formal refusal to accept an interest or estate” (140 - 141). 2 Although the terms “Chicana” and “Chicano” have at times been used as synonyms for Mexican American, in this dissertation I use them to refer to those who self- identify as Chicana/o and who hold a political position critical of forced assimilation and U.S. racism. In their Dictionary of Mexican American History (1981), Matt S. Meier and Feliciano Rivera defined “Chicano” as a “controversial term made popular by activists in the 1960s referring to Mexican Americans and especially to those who demonstrate a militant pride in their ethnicity” (83). 1 Alarcón notes in her essay “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘The’ Native Woman” (1990): The appropriation and recodification of the term Chicano from the oral culture was a stroke of insight precisely because it unsettled all of the identities conferred by previous historical accounts. … Thus, the demand for a Chicano/a history became a call for the recovery and re-articulation of the record to include the stories of race/class relations of the silenced, against whom the very notions of being Mexican or not-Mexican, being American or not-American, being a citizen or not a citizen had been constructed. (63-64) For movimiento era Chicana scholars like María Linda Apodaca, this meant retelling women’s historical roles in ways that did not reaffirm the racism and/or sexism of patriarchal nationalist narratives like those sometimes found in el movimiento. In her 1977 essay, “The Chicana Woman: An Historical Materialist Perspective,” Apodaca included class in the analysis of gender and sexual oppression of Chicanas, an oppression that also translated into exclusion from the historical record: The two basic factors