Mexicanidad, Myth or Reality?

• In Event: Latina/o Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 6: Race, Ethnoracial Formation, and Boundary Making

Abstract

This paper explores how race and racialization, nation-building projects, and hegemonic ideologies manifest themselves through material practices like fashion and aesthetics, an understudied topic in the sociologies of empire, race, and intersectionality. I address how these ideologies and projects hold and permeate power over what is deemed to be a “proper” citizen-subject with specific attention to mestizaje and raza cosmica or the cosmic race. Modern nation-building projects, like mestizaje and raza cosmica are based on violence and enacted through several forms like, eugenics and erasure. Eugenicist movements like raza cosmica an evolution of Spanish Caste hierarchy of mestizaje—have continued as a violent act since the 1920’s (Vasconcelos, 1925). I demonstrate how this power is maintained and circulated through contemporary neoliberal capitalist politics that are intricately linked to modernity and nation-building.
Sociologists have paid particular attention to language, ideology, and interaction when analyzing the case of mestizaje in Mexico but have ignored the crucial role fashion and aesthetics have played in understanding the co-constitution of race, gender, class, and national “identity” (Amado, 2012; Sue, 2013). While queer sociology (Moussawi and Vidal-Ortiz, 2020) has argued the first two waves of queer theory neglect whiteness and racial hierarchy, I expand this to look at fashion and aesthetics as serious sites of nation-building, racialization, and contestation. I do this by examining not just the micro (Gomez-Parra, 2025) but moving across scales between the macro and micro embodiments of racial/eugenic nation-building projects. Analyzing fashion and aesthetics, opens an avenue to expand how we theorize the multi-dimensional processes of modern conceptions of nationhood and nation-state making. By studying how symbols and imagery of mestizaje are envisioned and promoted through embodied practices, I ask, what type(s) of Mexicanidad are being embraced, contested, conditionally accepted, or rejected under mestizaje eugenics? I pursue this question by pushing the bounds of what is understood as normativity expanding the discipline of queer sociology (Moussawi and Vidal-Ortiz, 2020).

Author

• Isabelle Zazueta, University of Illinois