Politics, Groups, and Identities

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Hybrid subjectivities, Latin American mestizaje,

and Latino political thought on race

Juliet Hooker

To cite this article: Juliet Hooker (2014) Hybrid subjectivities, Latin American mestizaje,
and Latino political thought on race, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2:2, 188-201, DOI:
10.1080/21565503.2014.904798

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Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2014
Vol. 2, No. 2, 188–201, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2014.904798

Hybrid subjectivities, Latin American mestizaje, and Latino political

thought on race
Juliet Hooker*

Government Department, University of TX at Austin, 158 W 21st ST STOP A1800, Austin 78712-1704, USA
(Received 6 October 2013; accepted 12 March 2014)

This essay interrogates accounts of race in Latino political thought (and hence claims about
how Latinos should approach race in the USA) grounded in a selective borrowing from
Latin American philosophical sources on mestizaje. It argues that the uncritical reproduction
of certain conceptions of mestizaje in Latino political thought ignores the way in which
Latin American ideas about race were developed in direct conversation with US empire and
US racial politics, is at odds with contemporary racial politics in the region, and might serve
to obscure certain fault lines within Latinidad.
Keywords: critical theory; race; Latin America; Chicano/a studies; Latino/a studies; race
studies; political theory; political thought

The trope of Latino exceptionality vis-à-vis US systems of racial classification and modes of race-
thinking has become a standard and seemingly ubiquitous prelude to any discussion of Latino
identity and politics. Indeed, it is common to find arguments in Latino political thought that
Latinos – because they bring with them Latin American experiences of racial mixing that chal-
lenge and disrupt the binary (black–white), static, and overly biological conceptions of race
found in the USA – have key insights when it comes to theorizing race. Latino political theorists
and philosophers as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa, Jorge J. E. Gracia, and Eduardo Mendieta have
engaged with key texts in the tradition of Latin American political thought or drawn on particular
narratives of the region’s history in order to make claims about the privileged perspective vis-à-vis
race that derives from the existential, cultural, and historical position of Latinidad. A central claim
of this paper is that much of Latino political thought’s “borrowing” of concepts from certain
strands of Latin American thinking on race has not been sufficiently self-critical. Specifically,
many Latino political theorists rely on a construction of race in Latin America, and mestizaje
in particular, that: (1) ignores the way in which Latin American ideas about race were developed
in direct conversation with US empire and US racial politics and (2) is at odds with contemporary
racial politics in the region. These omissions have important normative implications, as grounding
arguments about how Latinos should approach race in the USA in positive accounts of Latin
American mestizaje not only ignore the transnational dimension of debates about race in the
Americas, but they also make claims that are directly relevant to debates about racial justice in
Latin America, where these more benevolent reconstructions might have very different ethical
and political consequences.

*Email: [email protected]

© 2014 Western Political Science Association

 Politics, Groups, and Identities 189

The essay adopts a comparative framework, utilizing a detailed analysis of the relationship
between the concepts of mestizaje formulated by Gloria Anzaldúa and the Mexican philosopher
José Vasconcelos to illustrate the appropriation of certain Latin American ideas about race by
Latino political theorists. It shows how Latino Studies scholars, who for the most part have devel-
oped sophisticated and nuanced critiques of US racial politics and Latinos’ positioning within it,
fail to bring the same care and attention to their analysis of questions of race in Latin America.
This selective reading of race in Latin America leads many Latino political theorists to miss a
number of normatively relevant facts about ideologies of mestizaje in the region, namely that
these ideas were often utilized by conservative elites to simultaneously defend the region’s stand-
ing in light of scientific racism, legitimize their rule over racially diverse populations, and obscure
the reality of racism in their countries. As a result, I suggest that while notions of mestizaje and
hybridity in Latino political thought have moved beyond their Latin American philosophical
roots, they still contain sufficient tensions that rather than being derived from overly optimistic
readings of Latin America’s racial history, a more fruitful approach to theorizing contemporary
Latinidad’s complex relationship to race should take as its starting point Latinos’ lived experience
of race in the USA.

Latinos and the dilemma of race in the USA

The claim that Latinos confound US racial categories and have distinct and different understand-
ings of race than other US citizens is ubiquitous in both popular and scholarly accounts of Latinos
and race.1 According to philosopher Eduardo Mendieta, for example:

Hispanics and Latinos are acting as a powerful agent of change in the United States. As people who
resist racialization, even if they were products of racial practices, they are also ineluctably altering the
grammar of U. S. political, social, racial, and even economic culture. (Mendieta 2000, 46)

Similarly, Linda Martín Alcoff argues that Latinos have an especially vexed relationship with
dominant understandings of race in the USA: “we simply don’t fit. Racialized identities in the
United States have long connoted homogeneity, easily visible identifying features, and biological
heredity, but none of these characteristics apply to Latinas/os in the United States” (Alcoff 2000,
24). Part of the problem, as has often been noted, is that the terms Latino or “Hispanic” derived
from US census categories are at best overly broad and at worst incoherent, as they encompass
individuals from multiple countries of origin, ethno-racial identities, etc.2 The anomalous
status of Latinos vis-à-vis US racial categories have led Latino Studies scholars to grapple
with the question of whether and how to think about Latinos as a single group, and of what
kind (i.e. should they be considered an ethnic or racial group or both?).3
Theorists of multiculturalism have also struggled with the problem of how to classify Latino/
as, as they do not fit neatly into the standard typologies used to establish the kinds of rights to
which different minority groups are entitled. The literature on multiculturalism assumes that
immigrant ethnic groups, national minorities, indigenous peoples, and racial groups are all dis-
tinct categories that do not overlap. Will Kymlicka, for instance, has argued that it would be a
mistake to treat Latinos in the USA as a single group given that the category encompasses national
minorities, immigrants, and exiles.4 Puerto Ricans and Chicanos in the Southwest, for example,
constitute national minorities according to his typology (because they were incorporated into the
USA against their will as a result of the Spanish American and Mexican American wars), while
Spanish-speaking immigrants from other Latin American countries are more akin to ethnic
groups. Cubans who left the island after 1959 do not fit neatly into either category, because
they see themselves as exiles, not immigrants. The position of Mexican–Americans is equally
190 J. Hooker

complex, because they include both Chicanos from the Southwest and more recent voluntary
immigrants from Mexico whose situation and claims would be more akin to that of ethnic
groups. Given that different kinds of minority groups are viewed as justly entitled to different
kinds of rights in most theories of multiculturalism, Chicanos whose ancestors historically
resided in the Southwest would appear to be entitled to greater terms of accommodation for
their original culture, whereas more recent voluntary immigrants from Mexico would be
subject to more demands for assimilation.5
The question of whether Latinos should be thought of as a single group, and of what kind, is
thus bound up (at least from the perspective of theorists of multiculturalism) with the issue of what
kinds of rights they are entitled to; but it is also related to more fundamental questions about how
to conceive Latino identity and approach Latino politics. Cristina Beltrán and Jorge Gracia
provide two rather different perspectives on this question. Gracia takes as his point of departure
the complexity of Latino identity, but then proceeds to try to find a way to name and identify
Latinos as a group. He advocates the use of the term “Hispanic,” which applies to

the people of Iberia, Latin America, and some segments of the population in the United States, after
1492, and to the[ir] descendants … [its use] does not imply that there are any properties common to all
of us throughout history. Its use is rather justified by the web of concrete historical relations that ties us
together, and simultaneously separates us from other peoples.6 (Gracia 1999, 52)

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Gracia’s preferred term and the definition of the group he
adopts, it is an example of an attempt to identify and conceive of Hispanics or Latinos as a group,
even as he is careful to note that in his definition what unites them is a common history and quasi-
familial bonds, not shared political views, social experiences, etc. Beltrán, in contrast, is more
skeptical of the problematic consequences of thinking about Latinos as a monolithic group
with certain paradigmatic shared experiences, and instead wants to recuperate the political and
theoretical fruitfulness of their lack of homogeneity (see Beltrán 2010).
Setting aside for a moment the questions of how to conceive Latinidad and approach the study
of Latino politics, as an empirical matter Latinos’ apparently exceptional status among ethno-
racial groups in the USA is not so clear-cut. While it is true that Latinos/as defy the standard typol-
ogies in the literature on minority group rights, so too do other groups. African-Americans, for
example, were not voluntary immigrants, but they also do not possess many of the characteristics
Kymlicka associates with national minorities (such as a language and culture distinct from that of
the majority group and a discrete homeland or territory). Moreover, as famously illustrated by Pre-
sident Barack Obama, like Latinos, African-Americans are now a mix of long-standing residents
and more recent African and Caribbean immigrants with different countries of origin, languages,
etc.7 Rather than Latinos being more anomalous than other groups, it might thus be the case that
the problem lies with how the categories themselves have been conceived.8
Ultimately, the trope of Latinidad’s racial exceptionalism is derived less from the vagaries of
US systems of racial classification and more from arguments Latino political theorists have bor-
rowed from certain strands of Latin American thinking about race, particularly notions of mesti-
zaje. In order to assess the usefulness of claims that Latinos/as approach race in ways that
challenge dominant modes of US racial thinking it is thus necessary to trace the Latin American
philosophical sources of these arguments as well as analyze the ethical and political implications
of key silences and omissions in the way that these concepts have been deployed by Latino pol-
itical theorists. Anzaldúa’s theorization of Latinas’ socio-historical position and legacy of racial
mixing as the source of privileged insight about identity and subjectivity in general is a perfect
case in point. The following sections analyze in detail her notion of mestiza consciousness,
trace its indebtedness to José Vasconcelos’ theory of mestizaje, and unpack the ways in which
 Politics, Groups, and Identities 191

his ideas were themselves both informed by US racial politics and developed in response to the
specter of US empire.

The Vasconcelian roots of Anzaldúa’s hybrid subject

The classic account of Latinidad as a privileged form of subjectivity grounded in racial and cul-
tural mixing is Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness developed in Borderlands/La
Frontera. Anzaldúa’s phenomenological account of the privileged knowledge available to certain
kinds of hybrid subjects was formulated on the basis of three key elements of the Chicano/Latino
experience: (1) Chicanos’ hybrid position as a people who straddle the USA–Mexico border, (2)
an account of Latin American mestizaje as a process of racial cultural mixing, and (3) Chicanos’
dual identity caught between Mexican and Anglo cultures in the USA.9 Whether it is strictly the
purview of darker-skinned Chicanas/Latinas or queer Latinos/as or is available to a broader range
of hybrid subjects, for Anzaldúa the perspective of the mestiza is a privileged one:

La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical
reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent
thinking, characterized by movement away form set patterns and goals toward a more whole perspec-
tive, one that includes rather than excludes. The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for con-
tradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity … She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she
operates in a pluralistic mode … nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain con-
tradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. (Anzaldúa 1987, 79)

As Beltrán has persuasively observed, Anzaldúa’s critique of traditional conceptions of subjectiv-

ity simultaneously re-inscribes the position of the mestiza as one associated with a certain epis-
temic privilege and emancipatory potential not necessarily available to other kinds of subjects (see
Beltrán 2004). Beyond the question of the limits of her account of hybrid subjectivity as a model
for democratic politics, however, what is most interesting for our purposes is how Anzaldúa
chooses to represent the philosophical lineage of her theorization of mestizaje. I argue that the
kind of selective reading of Vasconcelos in which she engages is emblematic of the function
often played by Latin American political thought in accounts of Latinos’ epistemic privilege
vis-à-vis race. It operates as a marker, a symbol, that is invoked to signal an alternate historical
racial trajectory, but that is hardly ever seriously analyzed or evaluated on its own terms. Anzal-
dúa, for instance, draws on Vasconcelos without placing his arguments about racial mixing in
Latin America in any kind of historical, political, or philosophical context, in contrast to the
way she carefully plumbs the Chicano/Latina experience in the USA for insights about subjectiv-
ity, racial solidarity, and cultural negotiation.
Because Borderlands/La Frontera intentionally crosses disciplinary boundaries and encom-
passes multiple writing genres, tracing the philosophical sources of Anzaldúa’s account of mes-
tizaje poses something of a challenge.10 One of the few thinkers mentioned by name in the text is
the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, whom Anzaldúa invokes at the beginning of the
chapter where she develops her conception of subjectivity. In the first sentence of the chapter
entitled “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness,” Anzaldúa cites Vascon-
celos by name, recounts his notion of the cosmic race, and describes it as affirming of racial
mixing, as inclusive, and as the harbinger of a new hybrid subject. She writes:

Jose Vasconcelos, Mexican philosopher, envisaged una raza mestiza, una mezcla de razas afines, una
raza de color – la primera raza síntesis del globo. He called it a cosmic race, la raza cósmica, a fifth
race embracing the four major races of the world. Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the
policy of racial purity that white America practices, his theory is one of inclusivity. At the confluence
192 J. Hooker

of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly “crossing over,” this mixture of races,
rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species
with a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollinization, an
“alien” consciousness is presently in the making – a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de
mujer. It is a consciousness of the Borderlands. (Anzaldúa 1987, 77)

One of the most interesting aspects of this passage is the way in which Anzaldúa subtly alters
Vasconcelos’ arguments about the cosmic race to re-position them as speaking to the situation
of Latinos in the USA. Vasconcelos developed his theory of mestizaje in part to validate Latin
American identity against the threat of US imperialism and cultural hegemony (a point to
which I return later); there are thus many references to the USA in The Cosmic Race, but
always in order to set up the comparison with Latin America. He portrayed the USA and Latin
America as discrete, separate entities; there is no consciousness of the border in Vasconcelos’
text, despite the fact that he was clearly very aware of it.11
By playing on some of Vasconcelos’ terms that have a different resonance when viewed in
light of the border, and introducing others such as “crossing over” and “alien,” Anzaldúa
swiftly moves from her initial invocation of Vasconcelos to the development of her own
account of mestiza consciousness without any further direct reference to Vasconcelos. Indeed,
he is only mentioned once more in the text; her second reference to him is in a footnote where
she briefly explains that: “this [the notion of mestiza consciousness] is my own ‘take off’ on
Jose Vasconcelos’s idea” (Anzaldúa 1987, (note 1, La conciencia de la mestiza) 97). Despite
the lack of overt references to him elsewhere in the text, there are various instances where Anzal-
dúa echoes ideas found in Vasconcelos, such as the evolutionary argument that growing multira-
ciality represented the destiny of humanity. In the prologue to the 1948 edition of The Cosmic
Race, for example, Vasconcelos explained that:

The central thesis of this book is that the various races of the earth tend to intermix at a gradually
increasing pace, and eventually will give rise to a new human type, composed of selections from
each of the races already in existence … In short, present world conditions favor the development
of interracial sexual unions. (Vasconcelos 1997, 3)

In Anzaldúa’s work Vasconcelian pronouncements about the mestizo as the epitome of evolution-
ary progress are reframed to refer to the female embodiment of hybrid subjectivity: “En unas
pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza” (Anzaldúa 1987, 80).
Anzaldúa similarly takes up Vasconcelos’ claim that Latin America is the exemplary site of
mestizaje/hybridity (the cradle of the cosmic race), and relocates it to the USA–Mexico border
region. Vasconcelos portrayed Latin America as a zone of contact between races that facilitated
mixing as well as understanding and appreciation of the positive traits of all races. He argued that:

The advantage of our tradition is that it has a greater facility of sympathy toward strangers. This
implies that our civilization, with all [its] defects, may be the chosen one to assimilate and to transform
mankind into a new type. (Vasconcelos 1997, 17)

In a parallel move, Anzaldúa spatially relocates the archetypal site of racial and cultural encounter
to the USA–Mexico border zone, and its Chicana/Latina inhabitants in particular. She writes:
“Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures … la
mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war” (Anzaldúa 1987,
78). Anzaldúa thus transposes Vasconcelos’ arguments about Latin America’s facility for racial
mixing onto the cultural dilemmas of Latina subjects in the USA, but what remains consistent
 Politics, Groups, and Identities 193

across both texts is the portrayal of mestizos as the paradigmatic subjects (and indeed the very
embodiments) of a certain kind of radically egalitarian approach to racial and cultural diversity.

Vasconcelos, mestizaje, and the specter of US imperialism

One of the problems with Anzaldúa’s recuperation of Vasconcelos theory of biological, cultural,
and spiritual mestizaje is her portrayal of it as a paean to racial mixing that stands in contrast to US
notions of race purity, which suggests by extension an implicit contrast between the latter as a
building block of white supremacy and the former as a key element of racial egalitarianism.
Yet this account of Vasconcelian mestizaje as inclusive is only possible by engaging in a rather
selective reading of Vasconcelos’ well-known text, which raises important questions about
how it can serve as the basis for Anzaldúa’s own notion of hybrid subjectivity, with its explicit
commitment to racial egalitarianism. In brief, Vasconcelos’ argument in The Cosmic Race is
that Latin America is the vanguard of a historical movement toward the creation of a fifth race
that will combine all the best characteristics of all previous races.12 Latin America’s “fundamental
characteristic” is that it has produced a “fusion of ethnic stocks,” and as a result it is destined to be
the: “cradle of a fifth race into which all nations will fuse with each other … In this fashion the
synthetic race that will gather all the treasures of History … shall be created” (Vasconcelos
1997, 18–19). The anti-racist implications of Vasconcelos’ celebration of mestizaje are not
clear-cut, however.
One of the problems is that Vasconcelos’ own text at various points undermines the ostensibly
anti-racist implications of mestizaje. As the internal contradictions in the text reveal, Vasconcelos
in a number of instances reproduced or left intact racist evaluations of non-whites as inferior. The
Cosmic Race contains many stereotypical, derogatory descriptions of non-whites; a fact that
undoubtedly complicates or at least should give us pause about the extent to which Vasconcelos’
celebration of racial mixing should be equated with full-blown racial egalitarianism. Consider this
typical passage regarding the benefits of racial mixing:

The Indian, by grafting onto the related race, would take the jump of millions of years … and in a few
decades of aesthetic eugenics, the Black may disappear, together with the types that a free instinct of
beauty may go on signaling as fundamentally recessive and undeserving, for that reason, of perpetu-
ation. (Vasconcelos 1997, 32)

He also describes blacks at various points in the text as “eager for sensual joy, intoxicated with
dances and unbridled lust,” and as examples of “uglier stocks” and “inferior races” (Vasconcelos
1997, 22, 32). Other non-white groups are described in similarly unflattering terms; he cites the
Chinese tendency to “multiply like mice” as a reason for limiting Asian immigration to Latin
America and, in a passage ostensibly celebrating the benefits of racial mixing, refers to the rem-
nants of “sickly Muslim sensuality” among the Spaniards, all the while asking: “Who has not a
little of all this, or does not wish to have all?” (Vasconcelos 1997, 19–22).
Anzaldúa’s omission of these passages in Vasconcelos’ text is emblematic of the way Latino
political thought tends to engage in a selective reading of Latin American sources as well as the
region’s history when it comes to race. The Cosmic Race fails to function as an anti-racist text
domestically, for example, because it does not contain any acknowledgement or critique of
racial hierarchy within Latin America. This is hardly a coincidence. Once Vasconcelos’ arguments
are placed in context it becomes clear that Latin American ideas about race in the first half of the
twentieth century were self-consciously being formulated in light of the threat of US imperialism
and in direct conversation with racial politics in the USA.13 There is thus undoubtedly an anti-
colonial dimension to Vasconcelos’ theory of mestizaje, and even an anti-racist one, at least
194 J. Hooker

when it is viewed in light of the USA’s relationship to Latin America. One of Vasconcelos’ explicit
aims in The Cosmic Race was to challenge negative assessments of Latin America rooted in racist
condemnations of racial mixing as leading to degeneration, a popular premise of the scientific
racism of the time. His defense of mestizaje was thus a defense of Latin American capacity; it
was explicitly designed to refute negative assessments of Latin America because of its large
multiracial population. But Vasconcelos also went beyond simply arguing that mestizaje did not
lead to racial degeneration. He also deployed another popular trope among Latin American thin-
kers in the early decades of the twentieth century confronted with the expansive military, political,
and economic power of the USA: the claim that at least where it came to race relations, Latin
America had successfully avoided the poisonous racial politics of its more powerful Northern
neighbor. The trope of Latin America’s racial advantage vis-à-vis the US thus emerges at a specific
historical moment and serves a certain anti-colonial function for Latin American elites, yet one of
its more problematic consequences is the way in which it tends to elide racism in the region in order
to assert Latin America’s superior racial politics in comparison to the USA.14
It is important to note that Anzaldúa does not reproduce the racial eruptions that plague Vas-
concelos’ text, however.15 Moreover, the conception of hybrid subjectivity she develops not only
reformulates Vasconcelian mestizaje and takes it in entirely novel directions by focusing on fem-
inism and queer sexuality, but it explicitly tries to correct Latin American racial hierarchies that
silence black and indigenous contributions to mestizaje. Anzaldúa’s account of mestiza subjectiv-
ity was clearly formulated as an anti-racist project, as she highlights rather than avoids issues of
racial hierarchy within Latinidad. Anzaldúa argued that acknowledging internal racism is necess-
ary to facilitating alliances between subordinated groups in the USA:

before the Chicano can have unity with Native Americans and other groups, we need to know the
history of their struggle and they need to know ours … each of us must know our Indian lineage,
our afro-mestisaje, our history of resistance. (Anzaldúa 1987, 86)

The suggestion here seems to be that for Latinos it is acknowledgement of their own complicated
racial genealogies that will make solidarity possible. In keeping with this position, Anzaldúa gives
a privileged role to indigeneity, unlike Vasconcelos (who either ignored or dismissed indigenous
contributions). Borderlands/La Frontera is peppered with references to indigenous symbols and
concepts derived from pre-Cortesian thought.16
Despite these important differences between their conceptions of mestizaje, it is still necessary
to consider what kinds of tensions are built into Anzaldúa’s argument that mestiza subjectivity is
anti-racist because of its acknowledgement of contradictions, when Vasconcelos’ account of mes-
tizaje sought precisely to deny or gloss over racial hierarchies in Latin America. By not mention-
ing and critiquing the problematic elements in Vasconcelos’ text Anzaldúa engages in a highly
selective reading that is arguably emblematic of the distorted, or at least extremely partial, use
of Latin American philosophical sources in Latino political thought. Beyond this, however,
reading Anzaldua’s attempts to recuperate mestizaje in light of Latin America’s racial history
and Vasconcelos philosophical and political aims (the production of a narrative of Latin American
racial exceptionalism that could ground an anti-colonial critique of the USA) suggests that there
are important caveats about the anti-racist potential of mestizaje that she fails to consider. In other
words, if mestizaje in Latin America did not function as a form of racial egalitarianism, then mes-
tizaje as such is not inherently anti-racist, and the question is then: what is it about how Latinidad
functions within the context of US racial politics that might enable the concept of mestizaje to
“travel” in such a way as to resist or challenge the prevailing racial logic productively? Moreover,
Vasconcelos is representative of one among a number of different strands of thinking about race
within Latin American political thought, which points to a missed opportunity by Latino political
 Politics, Groups, and Identities 195

theorists to recover more radical strains in this tradition on which to base their approaches to race
(see Von Vacano 2012, 16).17 When Latino political theorists base claims about race and Latini-
dad in overly simplistic portrayals of mestizaje, they thus fail to grapple with the philosophical
and political project of mestizaje in Latin America, which was often anything but culturally
inclusive or racially egalitarian.

Mestizaje and racial hierarchy in Latin America

One of the most striking features of Latino political theorists’ engagement with race is the dis-
parity between the great complexity, thoughtfulness, and care with which they address Latinos’
position within US racial systems and the dilemmas of Latino identity, compared to the arguably
less nuanced way in which they engage with questions of race in Latin America. Anzaldúa is not
the only Latino political theorist to selectively draw on certain Latin American philosophical
sources in order to ground arguments about Latino exceptionality vis-à-vis race. In formulating
answers to key questions about how Latinos should approach rights struggles in the USA,
Latino political thought has drawn on a remarkably sanguine account of Latin America’s racial
past. Paradoxically, given the key role narratives of mestizaje are accorded in establishing
Latinos’ racial exceptionalism, historically accurate or complex representations of how these
tropes have functioned in Latin America tend to be absent from Latino political thought, as if
they were immaterial to the overall theoretical project of charting a course for Latinidad vis-a-
vis race. In order to argue that mestizaje can function as a corrective to overly biological and
binary notions of race in the USA (which it well might), Latino political theorists thus end up
claiming that it did function that way in Latin America, whereas there it clearly not only did
not dismantle racial hierarchy, but in fact rather served to cement and reinforce it. By eliding
over several normatively relevant facts, namely the use of myths of mestizaje to obscure
racism and legitimize the rule of dominant groups, Latino political theorists end up reinforcing
a narrative that is increasingly being challenged in the region itself, which places them at odds
with the most progressive forces critiquing racism and cultural exclusion in Latin America.
Perhaps in response to the critiques of narratives of harmonious mestizaje that have emerged
in Latin America in recent years, some Latino political theorists have argued that while these are
contested narratives, the historical accuracy of more benevolent accounts of mestizaje is irrelevant
insofar as they are being deployed as a heuristic device to illuminate the difference between Latin
American approaches to race and those in the USA. This is the position adopted by Eduardo Men-
dieta in an essay arguing that Latinos should resist racialization and thereby transform dominant
modes of thinking about race in the USA. He explicitly stipulates that:

The historical narrative [of Latin American mestizaje] I present is merely propadeutic and heuristic. I
offer one reconstruction. I am sure that there are other ways of reconstructing the contrasts and com-
parisons I am going to make between the United States and Latin America. The core of my argument,
however, is not rooted in my historical reconstruction, but the latter does offer some warrants for the
plausibility of the former. (Mendieta 2000, 47)

This argument is insufficient, not because Mendieta is incorrect in claiming racial systems have
differed in the USA and Latin America, but rather because it ignores the fact that ideas about race
in Latin America and the USA were not developed in isolation. In fact, as we saw with Vascon-
celos, accounts of Latin America’s racial advantage as a result of mestizaje were formulated pre-
cisely in response to the threat of US imperialism. To reproduce such claims today without paying
sufficient attention to the context in which they emerged is thus to practice a kind of willful
naiveté about their philosophical and political aims.
196 J. Hooker

Other Latino political theorists have argued that while the accounts of mestizaje put forward
by Latin American thinkers may have served to obscure racial diversity in the region by imposing
the idea of a homogenous national type, the concept can nevertheless be recuperated and deployed
in different ways. This is the approach adopted by Jorge Gracia, who argues that Hispanics have a
shared history of profound and near-universal mestizaje, which did not entail homogeneity or
amalgamation. He acknowledges that: “this conception of mestizaje is contrary to that used in
much of the Latin American discussion where mestizaje is often used to eliminate or at least to
obscure differences” (Gracia 1999, 109–110). Instead, Gracia wants to argue for a conception
of mestizaje as an egalitarian relationship of borrowing and lending absent power relations. He
describes it as a “two-way street … founded on the tacit acceptance of what the other has to
offer, even in cases in which it originates in a relation of dominator-dominated,” and claims
that mestizaje “can be egalitarian and self-assertive” (Gracia 1999, 118–119). Gracia thus portrays
mestizaje as an egalitarian mode of cultural borrowing and racial intermingling that is not hostile
to difference.
A central element of Gracia’s account of mestizaje is a historical narrative of Latin America as
a space of encounter par excellence, such that cultural and racial diversity became a part of the
very fabric of the region that has been viewed as a de rigueur fact of social life, not a problem to
be managed. Given his preference for conceiving of Latinidad as encompassing people of Hispa-
nic descent in Iberia, Latin America, and the USA, it is not surprising that this trope of Latin
America as a space of harmonious encounter is especially prominent in Gracia’s Hispanic/
Latino Identity. He refers to 1492, the founding moment after which it makes sense to speak
of “Hispanics,” for example, as the “point in history when we came together … the encounter
of Iberia and America” (Gracia 1999, 50–51, emphasis added). Gracia acknowledges that the
members of the group he wants to call Hispanics did not come together on equal terms, and
that there are problems with the language of encounter that he adopts (Gracia 1999, 89–90).18
He also recognizes that “the encounter between Europeans and Amerindians was one of the
most cataclysmic and catastrophic events – especially for Amerindians – in the history of human-
kind” (Gracia 1999, 100). He mentions the “atrocities committed during the encounter,” but notes
that some Iberians (such as Bartolomé de las Casas) denounced these atrocities early on (Gracia
1999, 60–61). Framing the issue in this way misses the point, however, which is not that all Spa-
niards and Portuguese were perpetrators of the evils of the conquest, but rather that the facts of con-
quest and colonization mean that there is serious symbolic violence, and significant ethical and
political implications, to representations of this event as an “encounter” (with all the peaceful con-
notations of the term) when peoples on equal footing “came together” (which similarly implies
some sort of voluntary association). This is probably not how Gracia would characterize the con-
quest, but these are the implications of the rhetorical terms he chooses to adopt, especially when one
considers the history of the use of the trope of encounter and harmonious mestizaje in Latin America
itself.
The idea of mestizaje as a process of harmonious fusion that began during the colonial era has
been both a standard element of Latin American political thought and a highly contested one, pre-
cisely because of the undemocratic character of the political projects it has often served to legit-
imize. In Nicaragua, for example, descriptions of the country’s national identity and culture as the
result of the harmonious fusion of European and indigenous elements put forward by Conserva-
tive political thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s served to naturalize and justify patriarchal con-
ceptions of political power concentrated in the hands of the descendants of criollo families that
allegedly embodied this political ideal. Emblematic of this portrayal of mestizaje as a process
entirely devoid of power relations, as fusion on equal terms, is the claim by Pablo Antonio
Cuadra (one of the country’s most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century) that:
 Politics, Groups, and Identities 197

There are two separations which are the premises of Nicaragua’s existence as a cultural entity: the
separation of the Spaniard from his native world and the separation of the indigenous people from
their cultural and existential world … Once these two separations take place a simultaneous
process of fusion of these two currents begins and in the measure that this fusion goes indigenizing
the Spaniard and Hispanicizing the Indian in Nicaragua, the new limits of what will later be known as
“Nicaraguan culture” become clearer and more defined.19 (Cuadra 1963, 9)

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, these claims, which had become established tenets of the coun-
try’s official nationalism, were challenged and critiqued by political thinkers associated with San-
dinismo who sought to show how the trope of harmonious fusion not only downplayed
indigenous resistance to the conquest, but also served to mask the violence and conflict inherent
to the process.20 They rejected the Conservatives’ characterization of Nicaraguan history as
beginning with “a dialogue” between a Spanish conquistador and an indigenous cacique, and
instead argued that the country’s “history began with the fierce struggle of the Indian against
the Spanish colonizer, which was sustained – without any dialogue – during the three centuries
of Iberian domination” (Wheelock Román 1974, 1). Clearly, characterizations of the historical
process of mestizaje as peaceful dialogue and encounter between two (or more) cultures,
versus as the result of forcible conquest and colonization, have played an important role in
struggles over the kinds of political systems (authoritarian or more inclusive of popular or
non-white populations) that have been constructed in Latin America.21 The point is that these
are contested representations within Latin America itself, and they are contested precisely
because they have consequences in terms of how political and racial power are distributed.
Indeed, Latino political theorists in the USA who adopt benevolent accounts of mestizaje
stand in sharp contrast to the strong criticisms of such narratives by increasingly vocal contem-
porary indigenous and black movements in Latin America, which tend to argue that theories of
harmonious mestizaje have served to legitimize racial hierarchy and discrimination in the
region. The approach of many Latino political theorists to race – which seems to be to empha-
size hybrid subjectivity and fluid identities drawing on Latin America’s history of mestizaje – is
thus out of step with what are arguably the most progressive forces struggling against racism
and cultural hierarchy in Latin America: self-identified black and indigenous movements that
are striving to remake their countries in order to address the racial discrimination and social,
political, and economic exclusion that have characterized Latin American societies to varying
degrees.22 There are scholars who suggest that mestizaje in Latin America might have contained
more emancipatory possibilities than has been acknowledged by black and indigenous activists
and recent scholarship on race in the region, however.23 Yet these efforts to temper Latin Amer-
ican critiques of mestizaje seem to be a response to the juxtaposition between its current dis-
avowal in the region and the exaltation of hybridity outside it (including in Latino political
thought).
Positive as well as negative accounts of Latin American mestizaje are thus part of a transna-
tional debate about race in the Americas that is directly relevant to struggles for racial justice in
both the USA and Latin America. If the emancipatory or transformative move in the USA is for
Latinos to resist race and embrace mestizaje and hybridity, in Latin America it is quite the oppo-
site: those who are struggling against racism and cultural hierarchy do so on the basis of an expan-
sive critique of mestizaje and narratives of harmonious encounter. This suggests that the political
and ethical valences of mestizaje are not a given; it is appealing in the US context given the way
the combination of the one-drop rule and a racial imaginary focused on a black/white binary has
obscured multiraciality, but in Latin America it served a very different purpose. Moreover, benign
reconstructions of Latin America’s racial past also have important consequences for who can
identify with a Latino identity constructed on that basis in the USA.
198 J. Hooker

Re-conceptualizing Latino political thought on race

If the seemingly uncritical adoption of a romanticized narrative of Latin American mestizaje
by some US Latino philosophers appears highly problematic when viewed in light of contem-
porary anti-racist struggles in Latin America, it might also serve to obscure certain fault lines
within Latinidad in the USA. Do Latin American conceptions of mestizaje really provide a
more emancipatory foundation for racial politics in the USA such that it is necessary to turn
to them to ground claims about potential Latino contributions to the theorization of race?
According to Diego Von Vacano, for example, the “synthetic paradigm” of race (which he
claims is distinctive to Latin American political thought) “has ethical value for modern, multi-
cultural societies,” because it offers a socially constructed, fluid understanding of race that does
not posit racial groups as discrete and immutable entities (2012, 19, 160–164). While Von
Vacano is careful to note some of the problematic consequences of the synthetic paradigm
in Latin America detailed above, claims such as his that revalorizations of mestizaje can be use-
fully transposed to the US context also raise fundamental questions about Latino identity. One
such question is whether the recourse to mestizaje will serve to obscure existing racial hierar-
chies within Latino communities and continue to render invisible the existence of black and
indigenous Latinos within Latinidad. How can indigenous Latinos identify as Hispanic, for
example, if doing so means adopting the kind of historical narrative of harmonious encounter
espoused by Gracia? A second key question is whether doing so bypasses more fruitful alterna-
tive foundations for Latino political thought on race. For example, instead of heuristic excur-
sions into Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, could an analysis of Latinos’ lived
experience of race in the USA serve as a better way to ground Latino contributions to theoriz-
ing race?
Not all Latino political theorists have argued that the role of Latinos should be to transform US
racial thinking on the basis of Latin America’s more progressive history of racial mixing; by way
of conclusion I thus want to point to three potential alternative sources for rethinking Latino pol-
itical thought on race, all of which engage directly with the racial politics of Latinidad. One
alternative suggested by Linda Martín Alcoff is to focus on how Latinos are racialized in the
USA. She points toward an alternative phenomenology of Latinos and race grounded in their
lived experience of racialization in the USA (where phenotypically varied as they are, Latinos
are viewed as part of a non-white racial group) that can then be compared to that of other subor-
dinated racialized groups (see Alcoff 2006, 227–247).24 Another potential source for Latino pol-
itical thought on race could be to highlight the experiences of those groups rendered invisible by
traditional narratives of mestizaje, such as black and indigenous Latinos. The emerging scholar-
ship on Afro-Latinos, for example, emphasizes the way in which different notions of race move
across and between transnational communities that span the USA and Latin America, as well as
Afro-Latinos’ negotiations between blackness and Latinidad given that both are often assumed to
be mutually exclusive (Dzidzienyo and Oboler 2005; Flores and Román 2010). Finally, plumbing
the fissures within Latinidad – especially those produced by national/regional/and social class
hierarchies – might be another avenue to ground theorizing about Latino contributions to the
praxis of race in the USA that is anchored in their lived experience. The literary scholar
Claudia Milian, for example, has argued for the need to interrogate the way that certain identities
and experiences (black, brown, indigenous, Central American) have been obscured in dominant
constructions of Latinidad and Latino studies (see Milian 2013). All of these suggestions for an
alternative theoretical approach to the complex racial politics of Latinidad tread a similar path to
the one gestured to by Anzaldúa’s brief comments on how cross-racial solidarity among Latinos
and other subordinated racial groups in the USA could be forged on the basis of exploring each
group’s internal hierarchies and knowing each other’s histories. Such an approach would also be
 Politics, Groups, and Identities 199

more consistent with the poignant realization that drives Latino political thought’s engagement
with race in the first place: the philosophical potential embodied in the lack of homogeneity
within Latinidad.

Notes
1. A typical article on Latinos and the census in the New York Times, for example, argued that there is a

sharp disconnect between how Latinos view themselves and how the government wants to
count them. Many Latinos argue that the country’s race categories – indeed, the government’s
very conception of identity – do not fit them. The main reason for the split is that the census
categorizes people by race … But Latinos … tend to identify themselves more by their ethni-
city, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs. (see Navarro 2012)

2. Currently the Latino/Hispanic category in the US census is not a racial category, as those who identify
as Latino can still also choose to check one or more of the existing racial categories (black, white, etc.).
There is a change being considered for the next census converting Latino into a racial category,
however. This proposal from the Census Bureau has generated significant controversy among many
Latino organizations. Some oppose the change because they argue that Latinos are multiracial and con-
ceive their identity in cultural and ethnic (not racial) terms, while others fear that racial hierarchies and
asymmetries within Latino communities, and the existence of specific sub-groups such as Afro-
Latinos, will be re-invisibilized if they are no longer allowed to also designate a racial identity (see
El Nasser 2013).
3. Throughout the paper I use the term “Latino/a” to refer to populations of Latin American descent living
in the USA. Unlike the US census, I do not understand Europeans from Spain or Portugal as part of this
group, and I also differentiate them from people still living in Latin America, whom I refer to as Latin
Americans throughout the essay.
4. According to his systematic theory of minority group rights, national minorities deserve full protection
from the state because they possess full-fledged societal cultures and have generally been incorporated
into multination states against their will, through conquest or colonization; they thus cannot be said to
have chosen to become members of the multinational states in which they now find themselves. Immi-
grant ethnic groups, in contrast, are entitled to certain polyethnic rights (financial support and legal
protection for certain practices associated with particular ethnic or religious identities) but not to
other collective rights open to national minorities, such as self-government, because in most cases
they voluntarily decided to leave their homelands as individuals or family groups to become part of
another state, and therefore cannot in all fairness expect to recreate their original societal culture in
a different society (see Kymlicka 1995, 49–58).
5. It is ironic that according to the precepts of multicultural theories of justice Chicanos in the Southwest
would have the most rights to the preservation of their original language and culture, given that they are
one of the Latino communities in the USA that is most assimilated to Anglo culture and is less likely to
speak Spanish (the latter often as a result of forced Anglicization in public schools).
6. Usage of the terms Hispanic and Latino reflects the larger debate about how to define the parameters of
the group. While they tend to be used interchangeably, Gracia includes Europeans from Spain or Por-
tugal within his definition of Hispanic, so those whom I call Latinos in this essay would be a part of the
larger group that he refers to as Hispanics.
7. For a discussion of recent black immigrants to the USA and how they are viewed in relation to domi-
nant representations of African-Americans, see Greer (2013).
8. For a critique of the clear-cut distinctions between different types of minority groups presumed in most
theories of multiculturalism, see Hooker (2009).
9. Presumably Anzaldúa viewed the notion of mestiza consciousness as extending to Latinos as a whole
rather than being restricted to Chicanos in particular. The text is ambiguous on this point, however,
hence the persistent question of whether the hybrid subjectivity she describes is available to non-
Latinos or even differently positioned Latinos: i.e. would upper-class, fair-skinned, straight Latinos
experience the kinds of dislocations she describes as constitutive of mestiza consciousness?
10. Anzaldúa’s text was also influenced by Chicano nationalist discourses (see Beltrán 2004, 597–602).
11. As a young boy Vasconcelos lived in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, on the Mexican side of the border, and
attended an English-language primary school in Eagle Pass, Texas, until the age of 14.
200 J. Hooker

12. There are other important texts in which Vasconcelos develops his ideas about race and Latin American
identity; I provide only a very abbreviated sketch of his arguments about mestizaje in The Cosmic Race
here, as this is a widely read text.
13. Between 1890 and 1925 there were 35 different instances of US military intervention (i.e. troops on the
ground) in Latin America. This led many Latin American intellectuals to worry about the dangers to
Latin American culture and identity posed by US imperialism.
14. One of the clearest examples of this is José Martí’s famous essay, “My Race,” published in 1893, in
which he argued that Cuba did not have a race problem while indicting and cataloguing the various
racial fault lines in the USA (see Martí 1999).
15. I borrow the concept of racial eruptions from Hale (2006).
16. In the chapter on mestiza consciousness, for example, in addition to Vasconcelos she also references
the concept of nepantilism (which is described as derived from an Aztec word meaning torn between
ways) and the Aztec goddess Coatlicue (see Anzaldúa 1987, 78, 84). Like other Chicano writers
(including the older nationalists that she both draws upon and critiques, and many of her feminist con-
temporaries), Anzaldúa deploys an overly romanticized portrayal of indigenous peoples that looks to
the past rather than to contemporary indigenous movements, even as she does give a privileged role to
indigeneity.
17. Von Vacano identifies Vasconcelos as one of the key Latin American thinkers to have formulated a
“synthetic” approach to race.
18. While Gracia is correct that “encounter” is in some ways an improvement over “discovery,” I think
“arrival” would be an even better term.
19. I purposefully turn to an example drawn from a different Latin American country here to demonstrate
both the breadth of political thought on race in the region, and how local intellectual debates and pol-
itical struggles shaped discourses of mestizaje in different countries. For a discussion of how political
theorists might approach the question of how political ideas travel, see Gordy (2014, 1–16).
20. Sandinista thinkers tended to portray this primarily (although not exclusively) in terms of social class
conflict.
21. For a more detailed discussion of the role played by different conceptions of mestizaje in various
strands of Nicaraguan nationalism in the twentieth century, see Hooker (2005).
22. The scholarship on the struggles of black and indigenous movements in Latin America in recent
decades to gain rights to the preservation of their cultures and to redress racial discrimination is
quite extensive. A few noteworthy examples include: Hanchard (1994), Paschel and Sawyer (2009),
Safa (2005) and Yashar (2005).
23. See, for example, de la Cadena (2005) and de la Fuente (2001).
24. There is increased empirical research on Latino/African-American relations, for example, that could be
used to ground such theorizing; see Telles, Sawyer, and Rivera-Salgado (2011).

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