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ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffirnffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi eltllpter (0 The Legacy of Conquest and Discovery: Meditations on Ethniciry, Race, and American Politics Gerald Torres They art' the color ofCanary Islanders, neither blach nor white. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (CRISTOBAL COLON), NOTEBOOK, NOVEMBER 10, 1492 Am07Cnli society has no social tee/miglle fOr handlil(fT partly colored races. We haJJe a place fOr the Negro and a place for the white mall: the Mexican is not a Negro, and the white man refUses him an egual status. MAx S. HANDlVlAN, "ECONOMIC REASONS FOR THE COMING OF THE MEXICAN IMMIGRANT" (1930) Mestizaje In The General in His Labyrinth) Gabriel Garda Marquez has Simon Bolivar painfully reflecting on his failed dream to LUmy South America as one nation and dri,'e out the Spanish overlords.I Plagued by feverish nightmares, unable to sleep in the days before leaving Bogota on the Magdalena River, as near to collapse as his dreams, the General can only mutter: "Nobody understood anything."2 Bolivar's dreamed-of unity splinters into feuding and competing national identities that become the demons in his nightmares : "There is no other alternative:' he says. "Either unity or anarchy."3 The polarity of his vision continues to infect the idea of the nation-state, the liberal analog for the construction of "a people." The construction of "the citizen" supplants the notion of "the subject" and through the construction of rules of inclusion broadens the notion of who belongs. By separating the idea of the nation-state from the idea of a people, a broad unity may be achieved. Our nightmarish horrors are Bosnia and Rwanda. The polite version is Quebec. The terror of dissolution and chaos is always real and always with us. The construction of the liberal nation-state posed the question: How can we organize ourselves to make liberty and solidarity two aspect of the same phenomenon?4 Yet for the United States a different question has emerged. Domestically, instead of competing nationalities, has race Copyrighted Material 153 154 Legacy of Conquest and Discovery ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi recreated the divide that drove Bolivar mad and that de Tocqueville noted? Has the problem of race in domestic politics so corrupted the possibility of dialogue that all ethnically based interest group politics must mimic the structure that racial politics has created? I want to address these questions in the context of contemporary Hispanic political identity, and in the context of my thesis that Bolivar's dream of a united "pan-Hispanic" identity may ultimately be fulfilled in North, not South, America and in response to competing racial, not national, identities. To address these questions, however, requires some concern with the problems of conquest and discovery. As will be evident, there is an irony in the topic I have chosen because there is irony in the dream that the various national cultures of Latin America could, by driving the Spanish in1perialists out but retaining the Iberian culture, be combined to produce a non-nationalist (in the sense of local nation-state) pan-Hispanic identity. It is a dream that is as old, certainly, as Simon Bolivar.5 Garda Marquez's novel about Bolivar's last days summed up his frustration at the failure to establish the South American Union. Jose Marti expressed this dream of Latin American unity as well. The General's dream will undoubtecUy first be achieved north of the Rio Grande. That is the principal irony. The combination of the national cultures of Latin America into a version of pan-Hispanic identity will probably be achieved in North America before it is achieved in South America (where, except for the various trade alliances, the dream died with Bolivar). Rather than continue here with a historical overview and analysis of the conquest and discovery of America, I want to bring Bolivar's problem up to date. The change in location of the dream is critical, but it is a virtually identical dream that animates the attempt to generate a stable unity in the face of the centrifugal forces of diverse national identities. My general argument is as follows: 1. A pan-Hispanic identity forged from the many national cultures of Latin America makes sense in the context of the history of ethnicity in the United States.6 Indeed, I want to suggest why such a result may be compelled by the structure of North American thinking about racial identity.7 2. If my hypothesis is correct, the creation of a generalized Hispanic identity may be compelled as well by the structure of...

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