The Study of Latin American "Racial Formations": Different Approaches and Different Contexts

The Blood of Guatemala: a History of Race and Nation. By Greg Grandin. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Pp. 343. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity In the Dominican Republic. By David Howard. (Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner, 2001. Pp. 227. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Race and Politics In the Dominican Republic. By Ernesto Sagás. (Gainesville: University Press of florida, 2000. Pp. 164. $49.95 cloth.)

A Nation for all: Race, Inequality, and Politics In twentieth-Century Cuba. By alejandro de la fuente. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. 449. $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism In Urban Brazil. By Robin E. Sheriff. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Pp. 264. $22.00 paper.)

Mestizaje,mulataje, and other notions of "race" and cultural mixings have played a central role in "official" and dominant imaginations of Latin American national identities from the end of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. these ideologies of national identities have usually downplayed the importance of contemporary racism by proclaiming the myth of "racial democracy" ("En nuestro país no hay racismo porque todos nosotros tenemos un poco de cada sangre en nuestras venas"; "In our country there is no racism because we all have a mixture of different bloods running in our veins"). At the same time, these ideologies have marginalized and marked as others the individuals and communities that do not fit—phenotypically and culturally—the prototypical imagined, national, and hybridized (modern) identities.

A long tradition of scholarship on nationalism has emphasized the "homogenizing processes" of the ideologies of national identity from the end of the eighteenth through the first half of the twentieth centuries. According to Benedict Anderson, for example, "national cultures" help(ed) to accommodate and resolve differences by ideologically constructing a singular "national identity" (Anderson 1991 [1983]). too often, scholars writing on nationalism have failed to recognize a contingent phenomenon of nationalism that elides a superficial reading and that contradicts its homogenizing ambition: the creation of one or various "others" within and without the limits of the "national space." Indeed, to secure unity and to make their own history, the dominating powers have always worked best with practices that differentiate and classify. their ability to select or construct differences that serve their purposes has depended upon the possibilities for exploitation that emerge in the dangers contained in situations of ambiguity (see Asad 1993, 17). Discrimination against the colonized subject became refined as distinction based on excellence and as an ideology deployed against the colonized and dominated subject, socially and culturally constructed as inferior and different, if not repugnant and obscene.

An archaeology of such Latin American ideologies of national identity shows that despite their self-proclaimed antiracism and apparent promotion of integration and harmonious homogeneity (Quijada 2000), they constitute little more than narratives of white supremacy that always come with an attendant concept of whitening (blanqueamiento or branqueamento). Early Latin American foundational texts about mestizaje, written by "white" and white-mestizo or Ladino intellectuals, clearly demonstrate that the discussions of race and cultural mixings have been grounded on racist premises and theories that were very popular in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. these texts were usually inspired by Spencerian positivism, unilineal evolutionism, polygenism, eugenics, and social Darwinism. their arguments were based on an understanding of society as a social organism, which functioned similarly to biological organisms. Latin American (white, white-mestizo, and Ladino) intellectuals, who were convinced of the superiority of the so-called white race vis à vis blacks and "reds," deployed organistic notions and ideas of diseases and infection to support their claim to the inferiority and dysfunctionality of black and indigenous populations in their societies.

Many Latin American intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared the idea that race mixing...