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Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience

Author: Peter Wade
Date: 2005
Size: 19 pages (116 KB)

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Summary

How do people live the process of racial-cultural mixture? By adopting an approach that focuses on the everyday, this paper emphasises the ways in which mestizaje (mixture) as a lived process involves the maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and homogeneity. In so doing, it highlights the way in which notions of inclusion and exclusion in processes of mixture are intertwined and challenge essentialist notions of identity.

The author regards the two dominant assumptions made within discourses on mestizaje as overly simplistic. These assumptions centre on mestizaje primarily as a nation-building ideology. He maintains that by looking at mestizaje as a lived process, it can be conceptualised as an interweaving process, which form a ‘mosaic’ at the level of the person, the family and the nation. Three case studies are employed to illustrate this argument: Colombian popular music, Venezuelan popular religion and Brazilian popular Christianity.

The case studies reveal the following:

• Some individuals of mixed parentage prefer not to identify as black or white but as a ‘mix’ – simultaneously identifying as both.
• Mestizaje has difference and sameness, homogeneity and heterogeneity, inclusion and exclusion as constitutive elements.
• Mestizaje represents an inclusive process since it creates spaces for racial diversity within the family.
• Mestizaje is subjected to moral evaluations rooted in racial hierarchies that corresponded to the domination of whiteness over blackness.
• Mestizaje has multiple meanings; it can represent a mosaic of different elements and processes, which can be manifest within the body and the family, as well as the nation.

The paper draws the following conclusions:

• Lived experience demonstrates the importance of the simultaneous co-existence of different racialised elements rather than an undifferentiated fusion.
• The concept of mestizo includes spaces of difference as a constitutive feature, while also providing a notion of sameness through a sense of shared mixed-ness.
• Blackness and indigenousness are still subjected to hierarchical orderings and made to occupy inferior locations, are discriminated against and/or rendered exotic.
• The elites and middle-classes want to re-establish hierarchical distinctions of race in order that distinctions remain intact, contrary to the goal of homogenisation suggested by the ideological conception of mestizaje.
• Mestizaje is a space of struggle and contest to see what and who is going to be included and excluded and to what extent existing value hierarchies can be disrupted.

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Source: Wade P., 2005, 'Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience', Journal of Latin American Studies, Volume 37, pp. 239-257
Author: Peter Wade , peter.wade[at]manchester.ac.uk