Mestizaje: the All-Inclusive Fiction
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Mestizaje: The All-Inclusive Fiction Linnete Manrique-Robles PhD candidate in Media and Communications Goldsmiths, University of London Primary Supervisor: Sara Ahmed Secondary Supervisor: Gareth Stanton Declaration Page Declaration of Authorship: I, Linnete Manrique-Robles, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Date: 5 February 2018 2 Acknowledgements This research project first emerged six years ago. It began as a study of the politics of representation and whiteness in Mexican telenovelas in an MA course at New York University, and evolved into an interdisciplinary piece that explores how race and nation become entangled across different aspects of Mexican national culture with my exposure to postcolonial and critical race studies scholarship at Goldsmiths, University of London. Of particular influence was the course entitled “Race, Empire and Nation,” which focused on how contemporary racial and national formations are intimately linked to longer histories of Western imperialism. The course’s reading list that included Edward Said, Anne McClintock, Achille Mbembe and many others greatly informed the direction of this dissertation. First and foremost, I am grateful to Professor Sara Ahmed for convening this course, for exposing young students to important scholarship and for demonstrating that a decolonized curriculum in academia is not only feasible but necessary. Moreover, I am thankful to Professor Ahmed for acting as my primary supervisor and for offering me invaluable intellectual support and guidance throughout three challenging years. I would also like to thank Professor Ahmed for having founded the Feminist Postgraduate Forum and the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, both of which opened up for me the world of critical feminist scholarship and created safe spaces for a diverse community of women to come together to share their stories. I would like to thank Professor Gareth Stanton for taking on the role of secondary supervisor on short notice and at a crucial time for me. I would like to thank the Media and Communications department and the Graduate School at Goldsmiths for their reliable financial support. 3 Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Professor Sarah Sarzynski and Professor Juan Piñón from my previous academic institution, NYU. The former taught me the importance of treating Latin American popular culture as a serious topic of academic inquiry. It was in her course entitled “Race, Gender and Popular Cultural Theory in Latin America” that I first became aware of how the notions of race and mestizaje in Mexico exist in a complex relationship to histories of colonialism. In this course, I also gained the critical tools needed to make the familiar strange. Perhaps more than others, these two courses have shaped my thinking, writing and the contours of this dissertation. Professor Juan Piñón for his part encouraged me to continue pursuing an academic career and believed I could succeed at a time when I was plagued with doubt. And of course, I am grateful to the new friendships I built while in London, to the old friendships that are scattered throughout the United States and Mexico, and to my family for keeping me together with their patience, understanding and love. 4 Abstract This project examines the historical development of the ideology of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) in relation to the making of Mexico as a nation and the consolidation of the figure of the mestizo as the official national race. I am concerned with how mestizaje circulates and is (re-) produced across the public arena of politics, education and popular culture, and how it becomes part of everyday life. I also explore how mestizaje has been re-imagined with the concurrent rise of neoliberalism and multiculturalism from the 1990s onward. My ultimate goal with this dissertation is to show how race and racism remain implicated in Mexican nationalism as they serve to determine the terms of belonging to the nation. 5 Contents 1 – Introduction 7 2 – Race and Nation in Mexico 41 3 – Making the Nation: The Myth of Mestizaje 67 4 – Dreaming of a Cosmic Race: José Vasconcelos and the Politics of Race 96 5 – The Quest to Define the Mexican National Character 129 6 – Populist Politics: Indigenismo and Educational Telenovelas in Mexico 161 7 – From Mestizo to Multicultural: Debating National Identity in Neoliberal Mexico 199 8 – Chronicles of Race and Class on Late-Night Television 242 9 – Conclusion 271 Bibliography 297 6 Chapter One Introduction “Much of our planet is convulsed with conflicts based on race, regionalism or culture. Mexico, on the whole, isn’t. Our culture is generally inclusive. Almost the entire population of the country is mestizo, of mixed origin, American Indian and Spanish. In some areas (and in some minds), lingering bigotry toward ‘Indians’ persists, but it is by no means widespread.” – Enrique Krauze, Bloomberg View, 2011 “[In Mexico] one discriminates against the poor and not races. Here one discriminates against the indigenous not because of their race but because they are poor.” – Rogelio Naranjo, La Jornada, 2005. “In Mexico, unlike what occurs in the United States, our treatment of blacks has been more affectionate.” – Elena Poniatowska, La Jornada, 2005. I begin with these epigraphs that posit Mexico as a tolerant, loving and inclusive nation, where racial differences are insignificant, to underscore the endurance of the dominant ideology of mestizaje. The term “mestizaje” is derived from the Latin mixtus (meaning “mixed”) and denotes the mixture of different races and cultures. Mestizaje can be deployed as a conceptual category to describe the synthesis of multiple cultures and the subsequent origin of an entirely new culture. As such, mestizaje can be interchangeable with the terms “hybridity” and “syncretism.” However, as I make evident throughout this research project, embracing mestizaje as a free-for-all process of intercultural transformation is problematic because it obscures the fact that this concept is rooted in the histories of colonialism, racism and nation building across the Americas. The principal objective of this dissertation is to explore how the mestizaje ideology, which celebrates the status of being mixed as a positive aspect of national identity, historically developed in twentieth century Mexico and how it persists today. The aim that animates this project is to track what social and political work mestizaje does as it moves from the restricted domains of anthropology, history and philosophy into 7 the more popular domain of television. I am interested in exploring how race and nation become entangled as mestizaje moves across time and space, as well as what histories are evoked by this mobility. In determining the shape and direction of this project, I was influenced by the works of various scholars, such as Anne McClintock, Edward Said, Wendy Brown and Sara Ahmed, who have traced the histories of words to account for what persists in the present.1 Although the focus of the thesis is on Mexico, it should be noted that mestizaje is a phenomenon widespread across Latin America. Historian Nicola Miller notes that Latin American intellectuals, most of whom were predominantly white, were among the first to name and advance archetypes of mestizaje as a reaction against the racial pessimism of European scientific theories, such as social Darwinism and positivism, and contributed to the nation-building projects. She adds that Mexico is considered one of the most successful countries in the region in its efforts to establish a national identity based on mestizaje – to the extent that the terms “Mexican” and “mestizo” became equivalent. The Mexican state embraced mestizaje as part of its larger project of modernization, which sought to assimilate the seemingly backward indigenous peasants into a modern mestizo labor force.2 Anthropologist Ronald Stutzman comments that mestizaje is best understood as “an all-inclusive ideology of exclusion” because while it purports that all Mexican citizens are of mixed blood and of equal status, it is shaped by racial hierarchies that 1 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Edward Said, Orientalism (3rd ed.) (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2015). Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 2 Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 138. 8 privilege whiteness and devalue indigenousness and blackness.3 For example, scholars have pointed out how the African legacy in Mexico has been omitted from the state- sponsored schoolbooks, which contributes to the erasure of blackness from the collective imaginary.4 Representations of indigenous peoples5 in these books for their part focus on the grandeur and glory of the Aztec past, but ignore their heterogeneity and contemporary realities.6 Furthermore, images of white beauty are pervasive in advertisements, television and film.7 As evident in the epigraphs, prominent Mexican intellectuals today continue to rely on the myth of mestizaje to disavow racism, usually by subsuming it under class differences, projecting it outward (the US) and/or framing it as an isolated incident. This points to the need to understand mestizaje as an ongoing project that resonates across the culture at large and affects the everyday life of people. As social anthropologist Peter 3 Ronald Stutzman, “El Mestizaje: An All-Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion,” in Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, ed. Norman E. Whitten (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 45-94. 4 Mónica Moreno Figueroa and Emíko Saldívar, “‘We are Not Racists, We are Mexicans:’ Privilege, Nationalism and Post-Race Ideology in Mexico,” Critical Sociology, (2015): 1-19.