The Politics and Performance of Race

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The papers on this panel use a variety of approaches (historical, ethnographic, linguistic and sociological) to examine mestizaje in practice. We take as our starting point that mestizaje signals complex processes of linguistic and cultural blending. This blending creates distinctive social and cultural formations within the context of local, regional and national power relations. Rather than interpreting mestizaje as always and everywhere an ideology of either social control or of liberation, we look at mestizaje as a complex of ideas and identity fragments that engender tensions and create frameworks for various kinds of cultural and political work, including that which goes into remaking racial inclusions and exclusions. To this end, we address various expressions and processes of mestizaje as formative political and cultural configurations that compel particular kinds of practices by a range of people in colonial and modern Latin American. Our contributions to a conversation about these practices include a new reading of the narrative power of the 18th century casta paintings so central to discussions about race in Latin America (Earle); the politics of linguistic ideologies in Mayan writings of late 19th and early 20th century Mexican mestizo elites (Eiss); contemporary afro-indigenousness on Mexico’s Costa Chica as an alternative form of mestizaje (Lewis); and how the “visibilization” of indigenous and afro-descendant peoples in Latin America’s 21st-century censuses has transformed the political significance of mestizaje in the context of national census enumeration (Loveman).

Sub Track

• Afro-Latin/Indigenous Peoples

Chairs

• Laura A Lewis, University of Southampton

• Carlos A Valderrama

Individual Presentations

• Writing Mestizo in Maya: Purity and Mixedness in Maya Language Writings by Non-Indigenous Yucatecans - Paul K Eiss, Carnegie Mellon University

• Indian Allies and White Antagonists: Toward an Alternative Mestizaje on Mexico's Costa Chica - Laura A Lewis, University of Southampton

• Mundos encontrados en el pensamiento y praxis de Teófilo Roberto Potes - Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Bowdoin College

• Delia y Manuel Zapata Olivella Pensando la nación, el mestizaje y lo negro a des-tiempos - Catalina Zapata Cortés, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (Colombia)

Discussant

• Alicia Arrizón, UC Riverside