Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders

2. Mestizaje as Holistic Engagement of Multiple Cultures

 • MestizajeasPoliticalTheory         Mestizaje as Holistic Engagement of Multiple Cultures Historically, mestizaje refers to the commingling of the races and cultures of the African, European, and indigenous peoples in the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas. In contrast to the English decimation of the indigenous tribes in North America, the Spanish conquistadors, especially through the rape and subjugation of indigenous women, begat a new culture and race, particularly in Mexico: “En  nacío una nueva raza [in  a new race was born], el mestizo, el mexicano (people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood), a race that had never existed before.”1 Geographic, historical, and cultural differences in the Spanish and English conquests of the Americas resulted in much more cultural and racial mixing in Latin America than occurred in English North America.Whereas the English conquerors encountered indigenous nomadic tribes that lived off the land, the Spanish encountered rich, densely populated, and highly developed civilizations like the Aztecs and the Incas. In English North America, the colonists brought their families intact to the New World to establish farms in a climate similar to England’s and were motivated by the principles of modern liberal individualism emerging in seventeenth century England. In contrast, the Spanish brought few women with them, and marriages with indigenous women thus became commonplace.2 Indeed, the highly established civilizations of Mesoamerica in many ways reflected the aristocratic, authoritarian order of late medieval Spain, a theme I explore at greater length in chapter .3 Mestizaje as Holistic Engagement of Multiple Cultures •  Even though more racial and cultural mixing occurred in the Spanish than in the English conquest of the Americas, the Spanish, like the English, nevertheless decimated many indigenous tribes through both war and the spread of diseases against which the indigenous peoples had no resistance. Gloria Anzaldúa estimates that prior to the arrival of the conquistadors,  million indigenous people lived in Mexico, but that shortly after Cortés’s triumph this number decreased to less than  million and that by “only one-and-a-half-million pure-blooded Indians remained.”4 Any rendering of the original mestizaje in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America has to take into account the immense suffering endured by the indigenous peoples at the hands of the Spaniards and that the Spaniards were the dominant party in the “mixing.” Without denying these harsh realities, in the Mesoamerican experience there remains a heritage of combining multiple identities not replicated in the English expansion across North America.5 Over the past century Mexican, Mexican American, and Latino scholars have been recasting this historical mestizaje among African, European, and indigenous peoples into an aesthetic moral rationality mutually critical of both the assimilation and separatist models of multicultural relations. To capture this recasting of mestizaje, I turn initially to the great Mexican educator JoséVasconcelos and his articulation of una raza cósmica (a cosmic race)—an integration of the world’s races that is antithetical to advocates of racial purity or materialist uniformity. In the ensuing section I then empirically pinpoint how the rapidly expanding Latino presence in the U.S. Southwest and other parts of the United States is actually even more emblematic of the cultural mixing Vasconcelos had attributed to Mexico and Latin America. In the final section, I then address the optimistic and agonal renderings of el mestizaje nuevo, presented respectively by the Mexican American theologianVirgil Elizondo and the MexicanAmerican poet Gloria Anzaldúa. By synthesizing Elizondo’s and Anzaldúa’s perspectives, we can envision a mestizo democracy whose lateral, egalitarian, and nonmaterialist rendering of multicultural relations () overcomes the lingering sense of European superiority that undermines Vasconcelos’s otherwise noteworthy outlook and () moves us beyond the unum-pluribus divide. Vasconcelos: Mestizaje As Holistic, Aesthetic Rationality In the twentieth century José Vasconcelos, the great Mexican philosopher and educator, moved beyond the literal description of the mixing of the  • MestizajeasPoliticalTheory African,European,and indigenous races in Mexico by painting an aesthetic vision of why the Latin American experience offers a basis for la raza cósmica—a race integrating the world’s races. Vasconcelos’s concern is to synthesize heterogeneous cultures, but in a way that does not culminate in one culture dominating all others. Vasconcelos originally wrote his essay, La raza cósmica, in  in an atmosphere abounding with theories of racial superiority. Many advocated the Darwinian notion of natural selection, especially as they understood...