Pitt Latin American Series

Organizing for Social Change in Latin America

Monica Moreno Figueroa, Peter Wade, Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Peter Wade, Monica Moreno Figueroa

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780822988748

Powerful narratives often describe Latin American nations as fundamentally mestizo. These narratives have hampered the acknowledgment of racism in the region, but recent multiculturalist reforms have increased recognition of Black and Indigenous identities and cultures. Multiculturalism may focus on identity and visibility and address more casual and social forms of racism, but can also distract attention from structural racism and racialized inequality, and constrain larger antiracist initiatives. Additionally, multiple understandings of how racism and antiracism fit into projects of social transformation make racism a complex and multifaceted issue. The essays in Against Racism examine actors in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico that move beyond recognition politics to address structural inequalities and material conflicts and build common ground with other marginalized groups. The organizations in this study advocate an approach to deep social structural transformation that is inclusive, fosters alliances, and is inspired by a radical imagination.

CHAPTER 1

THE FORMATION OF MESTIZO NATIONS

Fernando García, Antonio Sérgio Guimarães, Emiko Saldívar, and Mara Viveros-Vigoya

Mestizaje has figured as an obligatory point of reference in the national narratives of each country in a variety of ways. Practices and ideologies of mestizaje have established the terrain that anti-racist strategies must traverse, with obstacles of denial, minimization, and delegitimation. In this chapter we adopt the nation as the conceptual frame for a comparative approach that foregrounds national contexts of anti-racism, but it is important to balance this with the relational approach taken in subsequent chapters, which address themes common to all four countries.

The same relational perspective is relevant here too, insofar as the four countries share similar colonial histories, in which Iberian conquerors exploited native and enslaved African labor while according intermediate status to large numbers of mestizo offspring within a patriarchal and racial hierarchy, which was structured by concepts of relative “purity of blood” (Hering Torres, Martínez, and Nirenberg 2012).¹ These colonial dynamics created a so-called caste society, in which social strata were differentiated by the perceived degree of genealogical and social proximity relative to three polar positions: indio and esclavo/negro at the bottom and blanco at the top. Especially in the mestizo middle strata, attributions and claims of status and degree of mixedness were flexible and subjective enough to allow tactical maneuvering for individuals. The possibility of successive mixings over several generations also enabled indios, negros, and dark-skinned mestizos to create for their offspring the possibility of overcoming the limits of their parents’ racialized condition (Mörner 1967; Wade 2010b).

This shared colonial legacy was regionally differentiated by economic, demographic, geographical, and political factors, meaning that mestizaje as a practice and an ideology—and allied formations of racism and challenges to it—developed in distinctive ways in each postcolonial country. For example, Brazil imported ten times as many enslaved Africans as all the mainland Spanish American colonies (Eltis and Richardson 2010, 202–3), and in late colonial Brazil slaves were still nearly 40 percent of the total population, while in Mexico the entire Black and mulato (“mulatto”) population was about 5 percent. In contrast, the Indigenous population of late colonial Mexico was about 70 percent of the total, but in Brazil it was less than 6 percent (Alden 1987; Carrera 2003). Another major demographic factor was that, between 1880 and 1930, Brazil received more than four million European immigrants, second only to Argentina’s six million and vastly more than any other Latin American country (Sánchez Alonso 2010).

Alongside these variations, a shared history is evident from the fact that we are able to use a common narrative structure for accounts of the four countries. For each one, it is possible to identify a national narrative of mestizo identity and then trace its destabilization by challenges from below and by the turn to multiculturalism of the 1990s. Finally, in all four there has been some enactment of anti-racist legislation and policies.

NARRATIVES OF MESTIZAJE AND RACIAL FORMATION IN MEXICO

In colonial Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America, processes of mixture created a certain permeability and porosity of racial boundaries. However, this did not mean that racial hierarchies disappeared; they remained the benchmark for the practices and policies of mestizaje in the postcolonial period. With independence in 1810, the colonial “Republic of Indians” disappeared in 1812, meaning Indigenous peoples lost the political, social, and economic control they had enjoyed under a colonial regime that created a nominally separate set of institutions and laws for them. Slavery was abolished in 1821, and as the free Black population integrated into mestizo society, the boundaries of the negro category became increasingly blurred. Ideas of equality, freedom, and private property motivated the actions of both liberals and conservatives in their efforts to govern the country. José María Luis Mora (1794–1850), a founder of liberal thought in Mexico, considered that the privileged status of Indigenous people in the colonial regime made them unable to carry out the “social transactions of life” (Mora 1950, 63). For Mora, the indio of independent Mexico had to become, first of all, a citizen: “In their current state, and until they undergo considerable changes, [the indios] cannot reach the degree of civilization and culture of the Europeans, nor remain as equals in a society formed by the two social groups” (1950, 77). Indigenous people were considered a major obstacle to Mexico’s progress. This view culminated in the Lerdo Law (1856), which classified Indigenous communities, the church, and town halls as “corporations” and legally prohibited them from owning land (Brading 1993, 106).

Under the new liberal state, Indigenous peoples were subjected to a war of attrition: “When Mexico gained its independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, it is estimated that approximately 40 per cent of all land suited for agriculture in the central and southern parts of the country belonged to communal villages. When [Porfirio] Díaz fell in 1911, only 5 per cent remained in their hands. Over 90 per cent of Mexico’s peasants became landless” (Katz 1986, 48). During the period 1840–1860, forty-four rebellions erupted, compared to the eight rebellions recorded during the previous twenty years (Florescano 1996, 376). Although the main claims of these rebellions were land and political autonomy, elites defined these uprisings as racial wars (so-called caste wars) and presented them as a battle between civilization and barbarism. The press and public opinion were permeated by racial fear. A consequence of this was a preoccupation with changing the demography and culture of the country by attracting settlers from Europe, who were supposed to modernize the nation, help to integrate Indigenous people, and guarantee the elimination of “castes” (Florescano 1996; Hale 1968).

These new ideas helped to establish the mestizos, particularly in the growing cities. These people, among whom were ranchers, small businessmen, and mine and industry workers, found the principle of communal landownership unattractive and echoed the liberal call for equity, small property ownership, and local power (Brading 1993, 138). For criollo elites, the mestizo became a desirable ally in countering the presence of Indigenous people in the Mexican population.² The loss of almost half of Mexico’s territory in the war with the United States (1846–1848) and the French invasion (1861–1867) consolidated the idea of mestizaje as a nationalist symbol, used to create a sense of unity in a Mexican society divided by many years of conflict (Brading 1993, 141).

In the late nineteenth century, as a centralized state was consolidated, a vision of the nation as a cultural, racial, and ethnic unit gained acceptance. The state increasingly promoted mestizaje, with policies encouraging education, colonization, and the privatization of Indigenous territories. Vicente Riva Palacio, in 1884, articulated the connections between mestizaje and Mexicanness in racial terms. Riva Palacio thought the mestizo was a superior product of the evolutionary process, and he questioned the accepted equation of purity with superiority and of mixture with inferiority. For him, mestizaje was no longer a path to whiteness but an end in itself. The mestizo, Riva Palacio argued, had “accumulated virtues and vices of the various races and, multiplying over time, acquired the indisputable right to autonomy, forming a new nationality in the territory” (Riva Palacio 1884, 471).

There were more pessimistic appraisals of the national character. For example, Justo Sierra (1848–1912), secretary of education, declared that “the nation carries an impoverished blood in its veins,” producing skepticism, lack of energy, resistance to useful ideas, and premature aging. This condition, he argued in an 1878 newspaper article, could be corrected only with “large amounts of iron, in the form of railroads, and large doses of strong blood, in the form of immigration” (Sierra 1980, 193–94). However, government projects of mestizaje were not enough to compensate for the inequality generated by the various political and social conflicts that eventually led the country to the violence of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920).

After the Revolution, nineteenth-century ideas of mestizaje were reworked to respond to new social dynamics. The anthropologist Manuel Gamio managed to articulate prerevolutionary liberal ideals with the new demands of the postrevolutionary society, combining concerns for national unity and modernization and including new social actors, many of them peasants and Indigenous people. Gamio and his fellow thinkers agreed on the need to build a mestizo nation and to boost the racial evolution of Indigenous people through their assimilation to the more evolved mestizos (Gamio 1916; Saldívar 2014; Walsh 2004). Under this reworked ideology, national identity was consolidated, Indigenous policy based on assimilation was promoted, and the imaginary of a nation without a Black population was extended (Knight 1990). The ideology promoted the idea of equality, while maintaining an economy based on deep inequality and enacting differential development policies that created unequal regions (the whiter north, the mestizo center, and the Indigenous south).

The ideology also involved the persistent denial among academics and politicians of racial hierarchies and racist practices. With the support of the 1950 UNESCO declaration on race, which suggested replacing the concept of race with that of “ethnic group,” ethnicity and culture became more attractive concepts to explain social relations in Mexico. For example, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán contrasted the situations of Black and Indigenous people in Mexico. The former “did not find major obstacles to integration into national society as soon as legal bases were established; there was no discrimination against them.” In contrast, “the Indian, for whom there was legal equality, is still segregated today, forming multiple ethnic minorities and plural cultures” (Aguirre Beltrán 1969, 54). In Mexico, “cultural differences are much more important than racial distinctions as mechanisms that hinder the integration of the ethnic groups into the national society” (Aguirre Beltrán 1989, 288). Mestizaje, he concluded, was the natural solution to the problem: in order to end discrimination against Indigenous people, it was necessary to create national ethnic unity, which can “only be obtained with the process of gradual and irreversible mestizaje” (Aguirre Beltrán 1969, 63).

THE CRISIS OF THE MESTIZO NATION IN MEXICO

By the time Aguirre Beltrán published his 1969 article, a new generation of anthropologists were denouncing the devastating impact on Indigenous communities of the assimilation and national incorporation (“deindianization”) promoted by state policies of indigenismo and an older generation of Mexican anthropologists (Warman et al. 1970).³ These younger anthropologists saw the domination of Indigenous peoples by the mestizo state as a form of “internal colonialism” (González Casanova 1965), in which colonial structures persisted. One exponent, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, talked in terms of a “Western project of imaginary Mexico,” which had always excluded and denied the “deep Mexico” of Mesoamerican civilization, with “no place for a convergence of civilizations that would . . . give rise to a new project” (Bonfil Batalla 1989, 10). Nevertheless, this idea of a deep Mexico focused on the inheritance (and persistence) of colonial structures as the reason for the continuing subordination of the natives, thus centering attention on the past instead of recognizing that domination persisted because it was favorable to the capitalist accumulation promoted by the liberal state. The critique thus left unchallenged the dominant postrevolutionary narrative of mestizaje.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF ANTI-RACIST POLICIES IN MEXICO

At the end of the 1980s, a profound economic crisis and challenges to the legitimacy of the revolutionary project led to a series of constitutional changes that recognized the political and cultural plurality of the country. Debates around the quincentenary of 1992 generated new perspectives on the origins of Mexico, which ranged from positions promoting a “meeting of two worlds” to more radical positions that spoke of slavery and genocide or that questioned the idea of only two worlds (Chorba 2007). In the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994), plurality, justice, and democracy were cited as founding principles that would prepare Mexico for the future. In this context, the Salinas government signed the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169 in 1989 and reformed the constitution in 1992, officially recognizing Mexico as a multicultural nation and penalizing discrimination based on language and gender. During this time the Black population became more institutionally visible as a result of initiatives to recognize the influence of “the third root” in regional culture (Hoffmann 2006; Vaughn 2005).

These multiculturalist measures went alongside the introduction of neoliberal policies that implied the abandonment of revolutionary promises of redistribution and equity, to be replaced with ideas of participation, free competitive markets, and diversity. For the revolutionary state, mestizaje was the promise of inclusion and social justice. Under the neoliberal state of the late twentieth century, diversity and pluralism represented the promise of equality and democratic participation as part of social competence.

The irruption of the Zapatista Indigenous movement in 1994 showed that the country’s multiculturalism was not enough to dismantle the homogenizing mestizaje project. The uprising changed the relationship between the state and Indigenous peoples, and the myth of victimized and submissive Indigenous peoples was challenged by images of Indigenous people as political actors with economic and social agendas, which demonstrated the failure of the inclusive promises of Revolutionary mestizaje. Assimilationist indigenist policies were replaced by legal frameworks recognizing the cultural rights of Indigenous peoples and by an intercultural education system. The early twenty-first century has been marked by the greater visibility of ethnic diversity and the identity recognition politics of Indigenous and Black groups that demanded greater political control and recognition. However, as with old-style indigenismo, ethnic difference remains the focus of state policy (Hernández, Paz, and Sierra 2004; Saldívar 2006, 2018). Meanwhile, policies of social justice have been displaced by policies focused on vulnerable populations: the racial-ethnic specificity of Indigenous populations (and more recently Black populations) is constructed as a condition of their vulnerability (Saldívar and Walsh 2015).

The instrumentalization of Indigenous and Black identities to serve as a mechanism to access benefits and services has occurred alongside a trend to make inequality visible through statistics that take account of ethnic and racial difference. This has led to a growing discussion of racism in Mexico, with discrimination based on skin color and racial identity being considered in addition to discrimination based on ethnicity. However, the recognition of racism has been limited by the reluctance to use racial categories such as white, mestizo, and Black, invoking the same arguments as were used in the mid-twentieth century. This debate has permeated discussions about the inclusion of the Black population in the 2020 census, where the use of the word “Black” has been questioned (mainly by mestizo academics), with the proposal that the appropriate term should be “Afro-Mexican” or “Afro-descendant,” since these do not have racial (colonial) connotations but, rather, refer to common origins and a cultural identity. Resistance is greater when it is suggested that using the categories mestizo and white can help explain how ethnic-racial inequality is reproduced in practice, as was evident in the INTEGRA Network’s statement about the results of the 2016 national intergenerational social mobility survey carried out by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, where racial categories were used.⁴ The statement argued that the use of these categories “preserves the beliefs that races exist, and it converts ethnic, cultural and physiognomic differences of human groups into races” (Red INTEGRA 2017).⁵ This resistance to talking about racism using racial categories resonates with the characteristic precepts of Revolutionary “raceless” mestizaje by demobilizing and limiting discussions about racism and anti-racist actions.

Together with the persistence of the Revolutionary ideology of mestizaje, the ways in which the issue of racial inequality has been tackled by neoliberal multicultural policies have also been influential. On the one hand, there is the rights perspective, where the emphasis is on the restitution of rights that have been historically denied (e.g., to Indigenous and Black people or to women). This perspective displaces a deeper recognition that racial inequality is not only due to lack of rights, the restitution of which is therefore not the solution. On the other hand, also inadequate is an individualistic and behavioral perspective proposing that the problem of racism can be solved with changes in attitude (promoting recognition and tolerance of the other) and nondiscrimination policies that regulate relations between individuals, without taking account of deeper structural issues.

BRAZIL, A MESTIZO NATION?

Brazil has often been seen from a European and North American perspective as a quintessentially mixed nation, and although it certainly has a very mixed population, for the country’s elites the question of a mestizo national identity has not been straightforward. Modern Brazil began in 1841, with the reign of Emperor Pedro II, which laid the foundations for a Brazilian national culture, bringing to Rio de Janeiro young European artists and scientists who, together with the Brazilian elite, defined and symbolically represented the nation’s future. In Brazil, French writers and journalists in particular were influential in shaping the idea of the nation as an entity that subsumed race and people to create a sense of historical and political belonging, built by culture and civilization (Schwarcz 1993). In contrast, other observers highlighted the fact that the “races” that made up the Brazilian people involved not only various European peoples, as in France or Britain, but peoples of diverse continental origins. In this usage, “race” could have a stronger meaning, defined by European imperialism and colonialism as peoples not just of different civilizations and cultures but of different essential origins (Arendt 1951).

Two versions of Brazilian thinking about race and nation are well known. The first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, at the height of the impact of scientific racism on Brazil (Skidmore 1974). This theory of whitening asserted the dominance of white racial qualities over others and proposed that the mixing of races in Brazil would eventually lead to the formation of a new white race. At this point, the idea of a mestizo nation began to take shape—but mestizo in the strict sense of the cross-breeding of peoples, not the emergence of a national meta-race.

The second variant appeared in the second decade of the twentieth century, and its name, “racial democracy,” became more popularized than its ideological content. For the São Paulo modernists of the 1920s, the leadership of the white race was still a necessary condition to prevent democracy from becoming anarchy. As a result they did not emphasize mestiçagem (mixture) very much. However, this version, due mainly to São Paulo’s isolationist tendencies, was superseded in the 1940s by Gilberto Freyre’s idea of “ethnic democracy,” which was popularized as racial democracy by Arthur Ramos and was quickly accepted by foreign writers as a key characteristic of the Brazilian nation (Guimarães 2007). In this version, racial democracy both enabled and was the result of the mixing of races, eventually leading to the formation of a moreno (brown) meta-race.

The chronological shift suggested by these two variants is too simple, however, as can be seen by comparing different ways in which “white” was defined in the context of ideas about mestiçagem. The idea of mestiçagem could be both linked and not linked to the ideal of whitening. On the one hand, when whiteness was considered in terms of civilization and culture, diverse racialized phenotypical characteristics could be encompassed in the category branco and it made no sense to speak of mestizos as a specific racial group. This is how we should understand the writer Joaquim Nabuco’s famous letter to his colleague José Veríssimo in 1908 after the death of Machado de Assis. Veríssimo had described Machado...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Formation of Mestizo Nations
• 2. Anti-Racism, Intersectionality, and the Struggle for Dignity
• 3. Bodily Anti-Racism: What Bodies can “Do” to Contest Racism in Public Spaces
• 4. Territory and Anti-Racism
• 5. Upward Mobility, Professionalization, and Anti-Racism
• 6. Giving Meaning to Racial Justice: Symbolic uses of Law in Anti-Racist Struggles
• 7. Anti-Racism in Mestizo Societies
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index