Mexico, from Mestizo to Multicultural: National Identity and Recent Representations of the Conquest (review)

The wave of constitutional makeovers that swept many Latin America nations in the last two decades has given way to governmental, cultural and material changes and to countless studies, prognostics, and revisions enough both to anchor and confound as we revisit the past. Some of the constitutional alterations, for instance, have sought to address colonial and neocolonial injustices by recognizing existing multicultural national fabrics and creating programs and policies that acknowledge historical grievances at the same time as they promote a cultural politics of inclusion. In some cases and at the same time, however, the living past has arisen to remind Latin American nations of ongoing inequality and racism and to cast doubt on or shake the foundations of new cultural projects and promises furthered by new amendments and charters. Mexico makes for a fascinating case in point in this respect, for among Latin American nations it occupies a singular space, ever so manifestly immersed in its own identitarian vacillation, ever so corporeal in its daily historical crossroads. One recent study of Mexican identity and its representation is Carrie E. Chorba's Mexico, from Mestizo to Multicultural: National Identity and Recent Representations of the Conquest, an eclectic yet compelling look at the various crises that visited the Mexican nation as its intellectuals responded to new and old dimensions emerging in the Mexican cartography during the last two decades at the turn of the twentieth century and before and after the 1992 Quincentennial of Christopher Columbus's arrival to the continent and European subsequent colonization and settlement. Chorba's book examines an array of cultural artifacts (novels, films, cartoons, plays, transnational economic projects and political transition narratives) in order to engage the various ways in which the lettered city responded during this time to the origins or perceived vulnerabilities of Mexican identity, a process of self-introspection intensified by both the Quincentennial and by neoliberalism. In assembling a varied set of artistic responses to the crises of Mexican identity Chorba's book is able to follow a revealing and at times insightful path chronicle of this period.

Identified after ex-president Carlos Salinas de Gortari's constitutional change in 1992 defining the Mexican nation a "pluricultural composition sustained originally in its indigenous population" this renewed crisis deeply deepened, Chorba argues, after the Chiapas revolt of the Zapatistas in 1994, which staged and denounced publicly to Mexicans and to the world their grievances, speaking not just of insidious institutional and cultural disregard and destitution of indigenous communities in Mexico; but also of a country in search of itself and ill at ease with nationalist, unifying ideologies such as those mestizaje had incarnated, whose synthetic pragmatism was destabilized and called into question. Carlos Monsivais restated this perception about Chiapas in 1998, as did other Mexican intellectuals, namely that the Zapatista movement had transformed in a dramatic way the Mexican cultural landscape, the impact of which represented perhaps "a big cultural, social, and political change."

Chorba's book joins a compilation of scholarly work that casts a wide net over diverse cultural artifacts at very discreet issues, namely the dissolution of nation-states, globalization as an extension and expression of Western modernities, and national identities in crises. The book is divided in 5 chapters, the first of which is both an overview of the book and an extended and well-woven introduction to the history of Mexican nationalist discourses and their critical corollaries leading up to 1992, the year the Quincentennial.

Chapter 1, titled "The Trauma of Mexico's Mestizo Origins," starts with a short analysis of the legacy of Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude and critiques to the analogy of rape he advocated in defining Mexican identity and Mexico's traumatic origins. Paz's return to this seminal text is, however, absent in Chorba's book. The chapter goes on to analyze Ignacio Solares' romantic fictionalized interpretation of the encounter between the native Indian woman and the Spanish conquistador in the...