Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present

Was There Race in Colonial Latin America? : Identifying Selves and Others in the Insurgent Andes

Was There Race in Colonial Latin America? Identifying Selves and Others in the Insurgent Andes sinclair thomson If the enormous, charged literature concerning ‘‘race’’ in twentieth-century social science has shown anything, it is that the category itself is extremely slippery, resisting even the most strenuous e√orts to contain its semantic potency. It has proven easier to take apart than to employ in stable and meaningful interpretation, and yet the e√orts to dislodge altogether the category of race from scholarly or popular discourse have had only partial success , and sometimes even heightened its currency. One of the ways critics have challenged racist thinking is by seeking to remove the aura of ‘‘naturalness ’’ from race. This has been attempted, first, by pointing out that race is a category existing in cultural discourse rather than a natural phenomenon inhering in human identity and verified by science. In this sense, to deconstruct is to denaturalize. Second, historians have sought to demonstrate how ideas of race have come into being and changed over time in connection with major processes in world history (especially stages of colonization , enslavement, and ‘‘enlightenment’’). To historicize, in other words, is to denaturalize. In the mainstream historiography of the Americas, colonial historians have often resorted to the language of race unselfconsciously. They assume that the reader will understand what is meant by such language, and find it unobjectionable or at least an adequate means of expression. Thus, for many historians writing in English and Spanish, colonial history could be conveyed in terms of racial identities, racial divisions, and racial mixture, with limited interrogation of the categories of analysis, their historical validity, and, as Was There Race in Colonial Latin America? 73 Kathryn Burns argues in her essay, the stakes involved for understanding racism past and present. But where the project to historicize has been pursued, the e√ort has led to distinct positions, with the discrepancies between them rarely addressed. One position asserts that contemporary or ‘‘modern’’ notions of race do not emerge until the latter part of the eighteenth century, with the breakdown of feudal statuses and theological orthodoxy, the development of Enlightenment scientific classification, or the expansion of Atlantic slavery. Another position holds that modern notions of race emerged in the nineteenth century , with Darwinist theory, the reconsolidation of social hierarchies within nascent nation-states, or in the aftermath of slave emancipation. In both of these cases, the so-called modern notion is contrasted with earlier notions of collective identity. Frequently, scholars distinguish an earlier (and in some versions more fluid) ‘‘cultural’’ definition of di√erence from a later (and more rigid) ‘‘naturalized’’ definition. The earlier period may be thus seen as lacking in ‘‘racial’’ discourse altogether, with di√erence determined by such things as religion, and hierarchy defined by rationality, letters, and other signs of civilization. Other accounts acknowledge a prehistory of race or elements of protoracial thinking before the era assumed to be modern. In this perspective, for example, the doctrine of ‘‘purity of blood’’ in fifteenth-century Iberia recast religious di√erences in a way that would set the stage for racialization in colonial Spanish America.∞ Hence the earlier conception is defined genealogically , through metaphysical tropes of blood and birth, and located in collective subjects. The later conception taken to be modern is instead de- fined through scientific classification framed in terms of physical biology and physiognomy, and located in the bodies of individual subjects. In noting a distinction of this sort, historians of the so-called early modern period and the so-called modern period can find much on which to agree. The historicizing imperative would be justified since significant di√erences are discerned between one era and another, and the epochal phase of spreading Enlightenment, capitalist development, imperial expansion, and nation-state formation around the turn of the nineteenth century can bear the weight of historical judgment about ‘‘modern’’ racial hierarchy. While alternative positions can be taken, they have gained little ground. The argument that the West has always been marked by racist discrimination or that racism long predates the so-called modern period has received limited scholarly acceptance.≤ The view that scientific racism first emerged in the 74 sinclair thomson colonial Americas, rather than in Europe, has yet to be absorbed. Cañizares Esguerra insists on the originality of this intellectual invention, yet concedes that the...