Mestizaje - Origins, Chicanos And Mestizaje, Critique And Reformulation, Spread And Influence, Bibliography
The concept of mestizaje expresses the tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities of its birth in the New World. More important, it is a concept that continues to have spiritual and aesthetic dimensions. Mestizaje refers to racial and/or cultural mixing of Amerindians with Europeans, but the literal connotation of the word does not illuminate its theoretical applications and its more recent transformations. Since its inception in the New World and during those moments when race was a significant factor in social standing, mestizaje has been invoked to remedy social inequality and the misfiring of democracy.
Additional Topics
In 1925 José Vasconcelos, the Mexican philosopher and educator, wrote La raza cósmica both to challenge Western theories of racial superiority and purity and to offer a new view about the mixing of African, European, and indigenous peoples in Mexico and throughout Latin America. The essay was an effort to undercut the maligned position of indigenous people and their material domination s…
In contrast, contemporary expressions of mestizaje emphasize hybrid cultural experiences and the relations of power. The social position of contemporary thinkers somewhat explains the late-twentieth-century formulations of mestizaje. Whereas Mexican philosophers were members of the dominant sectors of society, Chicana and Chicano social critics, artists, and creative writers who reformulated mesti…
While social analysts agree that mestizaje has recuperative properties for Mexican Americans and that it successfully challenges Paz's diagnosis of a mixed nation as pathological, the neoindigenous emphasis can be ironically similar to Western distortions of native peoples, as both rely on a timeless, primordial culture. Chicano/a social critics such as Norma Alarcón and Chon A. Norieg…
Nonlinear thought and unfixed identities have intellectual and political appeal for numerous fields, especially those also influenced by poststructural and postmodern schools of thought. Because of the liberatory dimensions of the concept of mestizaje, it is widely used in postcolonial, ethnic, and feminist studies and Latino theology. Most credit Anzaldúa with creating the aperture for under…
Alarcón, Norma. "Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of 'the' Native Woman." In Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo, 371–382. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1998. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. Aquino, María Pilar, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez. A R…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments Add a comment…