Mestizo Nations: Culture, Race and Conformity in Latin American Literature (review)

In the last decades, there has been a gradual but persistent shift of emphasis within critical theories linking nationality with questions of racial identity, away from preoccupations with political economic structures of domination, towards a broader conceptualization in which race and racism are linked to ideas of postmodernity. Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities in 1983, there has been an increase of interest in theorizing modernity in terms of racialization. Consequently, more thorough consideration has been given to the arbitrary constructions of Western selves and non-Western others in the context of modernity, not simply as a system of political-economic domination, but as involving the materiality of cultural differentiation.

An important consequence of this broadening of research endeavors or race-related issues is a more articulated appraisal of the cultural factor. This in turn has forced theories of race, racism and racialization to engage in critical re-examinations of adjacent issues of ethnicity and ethnocentrism and nationality and nationalism. Race, ethnicity, and nationhood are three concepts which cannot be by-passed in any attempt to theorize the cultural and social forms of modernity. Slowly but steadily the message seems to be that racism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism, are more than simple pathological excesses of modernization. In the wake of this recognition, there has been a resurgence of interest in cultural difference.

Juan E. De Castro's Mestizo Nations links race, ethnicity and nationhood in order to explore the construction of nationality in Latin American and Chicano literature and thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the discourse of mestizaje—which proposes the creation of an homogeneous culture out of American Indian, black, and Iberian elements—De Castro dedicates the first two chapters of his book to place mestizaje within a cultural perspective that moves away from concepts such as "transculturation" and "hybridity." Indeed, De Castro points out correctly that "if transculturation and hybridity attempt to analyze Latin American heterogeneity, the discourse of mestizaje uses that heterogeneity paradoxically to imagine a common past and a homogeneous future" (9). While contemporary critics have warned against the use of mestizaje as a category in literary analysis, noting that it offers harmonic images of what is obviously disaggregated and contradictory, De Castro argues appropriately "that it is precisely these harmonic images that must be analyzed in order for the contradictions and aporias that lie hidden beneath the smoothness of identity to be brought into focus" (10). Consequently, De Castro's analysis of the discourse of mestizaje aims "to uncover the social and cultural oppositions hidden by its [mestizaje's] veneer of homogeneity" (10).

Mestizo Nations could be read as an attempt to demonstrate that the contradictions of mestizaje can be fully understood through the cultural perspective associated with both postmodernism and multiculturalism. In this book, De Castro investigates a wide range of literary texts and comments on culture, varying from the nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist José de Alencar, and the Peruvian Ricardo Palma's fictionalization of national difference, to the twentieth-century historical and sociological essays of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui and the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre. After exploring the works of these well-known Latin American intellectuals, De Castro moves on to connect the discourse of mestizaje with such recent examples as the Cuban dance band Los Van Van's use of Afrocentric lyrics; Richard Rodriguez's interpretations of North American reality; and points of contact and divergence between José María Arguedas's novel The Fox From Up Above And From Down Below and writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Julia Kristeva.

As the reading of Mestizo Nations progresses, the association of mestizaje with a postmodern inclination to use non-novelistic texts in the imagining of Latin American national identities finds a critical resonance in De Castro's work. Yet despite the interest that postmodernity has in...