Download Handout Four: Mixed and Hybridised Identities

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Week Six Handout
Session 4
Anthropology of Latin America
Indigenismo and mestizaje: mixed and hybridised identities
Aims:
 To explore issues of racial mixing
 To look at indigenismo, especially in Peru
Objectives:
 To understand the paradoxes of early 20th century indigenismo
 To consider whether ideologies of racial mixing are progressive or
exclusionary.
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Introduction
 mestizos
Mestizaje as nation-building
 indigenismo
Cuzco and the photography of Martín Chambi
Introduction
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Is an ideology of mestizaje, which celebrates indigenous and European ancestry, progressive?
Or does it mask exclusionary practices which discriminate against indians (and blacks)?
Mestizos
“In fact it is plausible to argue that it was precisely because the relationship between mestizos and
indians was not securely a class one that ethnic difference became so important a means for mestizos
to legitimate their domination over the indians. This would help to explain the paradoxical nature of
mestizo identity which in some cases seems to reside in nothing more secure that not being indian.
(Olivia Harris 1997)
Mestizaje as nation-building
During the Colonial Period, power rested in being Spanish and creoles, American-born Spaniards
much resented this. During much of the nineteenth century power rested with the landowning
creole elite.
As these mixed-race people gained political power in the beginning of the 20th century they were
faced with a problem of legitimacy: they could not claim whiteness and European civilisation as
the basis for their dominance but nor could they claim authenticity as indigenous people.
Mexico after the Revolution.
Raza Cósmica – the Cosmic Race
Manuel Gamio and Vasconcelos.
Cortés and Malintzin (La Malinche)
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Indigenismo
Indigenismo, the glorification of the indian part of national identity
Different positions could be take within indigenismo from incorporationist to indianist.
Indigenismo and the glorifying of the mestizo are part and parcel of the same national
ideology.
Film: Martín Chambi
Questions:
 What were the indigenistas attempting to achieve in Cuzco?
 How was Martín Chambi typical of indigenistas?
 How was he an exception?
 How did Chambi’s artistic project contribute to indigenismo?
 Why did the chichería figure so prominently in indigenista circles.
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Interrogating mestizaje and indigenismo
Read from Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound 1999, pp.224-5.
Mestizaje emerges from a double bind of prohibition and incitement. The racist discourse
that depicts Indians as ugly or smelling bad (one of the essentialising and hostile bodily markers
differentiating Indians in ladino discourse), conjoined with the contradictory demand to “whiten”
(extramaritally, of course) “the race” – powerfully influence both the racing and gendering of ladino
men and indigenous women. The race that is to be “whitened” are the Indians, who become
strangely isomorophic with the nation, as this demand to whiten is braided into discourses of
national progress. In turn, the demand may carry both a reassurance and an anxiety for the ladino
men it leans on. The reassurance is that they are white enough themselves to “improve” the
Indians; the anxiety, of course, is that they are never white enough...
One friend of mine said that every ladino man he knows will insist that he has slpet with an
indigenous woman, and every one of them claims that the woman initiated it. “To be a man,” he
said, “they have to have had sex with and india, but they could never admit that they desired it.
That would undermine their racism.” Many ladino men said that they had heard, and friends of
theirs had suggested, that other men harboured a sexual fascination for indigenous women in
traditional dress. This led, they said, to a booming trade for prostitutes who dressed that way. As
my friend said, “But it hs to be the really, real thing. The full traje, and the women have to look
Indian.” This does not mean that most prostitutes are indigenous. The emphasis on the “really
real” here – on a cultural marker like clothing and the Indian “look” – suggests the slippage of
identity and the crucial intervention of fantasy. The boying of the ladino boy is itself incited
through race, gender, and kinship regulations that offer different licit and illicit desires and
pleasures – which in turn gives rise to mestizaje.
Questions:
 How does this relate to La Chingada, of Cortés and Malintzin (La Malince)?
 Why and in what ways is mestizaje sexualised?
 How does the process of mestizaje affect men and women differently?
 How can the ideology of mestizaje be profoundly racist?
 How can the ideology of mestizaje be progressive?
Theme for thought
"The ultimate and paradoxical aim of official indigenismo in Mexico was...to liberate the country from
the dead-weight of its native past, or, to put the case more clearly, finally to destroy native the culture
which had emerged during the colonial period."
David Brading Manuel Gamio and Official Indigenismo in Mexico BLAR 7 p.88. 1988.
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