Forging People: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought

5. Undoing “Race”: Martí’s Historical Predicament

99 [ 5 ] Undoing “race” Martí’s Historical Predicament oFelia scHUtte José Martí’s explicit position on race, as succinctly stated in his short article, “‘My race,’” has been the subject of much recent controversy . the article was originally published in Patria in 1893, in the context of sketching a political course for the revolutionary changes that would free cuba from spanish colonial rule. its context is clearly political, but this does not mean that the larger context grounding his views is not philosophical. We cannot fully understand his political views without understanding how they were integrated into his overall philosophy of existence, as well as the historical parameters and circumstances within which Martí lived and thought, since in some important respects, though not all, they differ from our own time. His ideas were molded in view of discursive frameworks and historical conditions different from ours. no discursive framework, including our own, is free from limitations. While many differences of opinion can be debated within a particular discursive framework, some ways of conceiving the world depend ultimately on a change of basic paradigms so as to allow a “new” understanding of the world and human relations to emerge. Martí supported such a “new” 100 Ofelia Schutte understanding of the world when it came to overcoming racism, colonialism, and the emerging dominance of the United states in the nineteenth century over the rest of the hemisphere. His ideas are so powerful that to this day they are invoked in support of freedom, justice, and a world rid of colonialism and its sequels. Martí’s historical predicament with regard to the question of racism and race is just this: how do you move beyond a historically oppressive paradigm (say, the legacy of colonialism and racism in institutions and ways of thinking) when you yourself are partly a product of the ideological effects of that paradigm? How do you relearn your sociocultural name, as it were? a similar issue arises for feminists who want to move beyond the oppressive paradigms through which the meaning of “woman” or “women” has been established in masculine-dominant societies. We know, at least those of us who have attempted to do so, that some have tried very hard to resignify the very terms that have brought on the oppressions in the past; others have tried to do away with those names altogether and have sought to invent new names or social relationships with which to identify instead. conceiving and living in a world unmediated by such categories as race or gender (when the prevailing meaning of such terms obstructs social justice) involves not just a political position but also a radical shift in understanding the world and human relations. But first one must denaturalize the meaning of the terms that are found oppressive, showing how they are sociocultural constructions that project a misguided picture of what is “natural” or “proper” for persons designated by such terms. Martí was “one of us,” in this sense, even though he lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. He challenged numerous attitudes and concepts that over one hundred years later we still find problematic and/or oppressive. reading him through twenty-firstcentury lenses, we must be cautious and balanced regarding how we approach his argumentation. as far as possible, the reading i offer has kept close to the texts, although the framework and language in which my analysis takes place is clearly contemporary, reflecting my own intellectual location. While Martí accepted relatively conventional understandings of sexual difference, he took an unconventional and anticolonialist Undoing “Race” 101 position on race. in a highly racialized world, he was one of those eminently farsighted persons who conceived of a world in which racism and racial discrimination would disappear from society. But the elimination of racism as a distinct social and political practice does not reflect the full extent of Martí’s thinking on this problem. What Martí actually proposed and theorized was a future republic of cuba where cubans would live in such a way as to observe and promote “the full dignity of man.”1 a practical question emerges from this: how ought a people be governed and educated in consonance with the ideal of full human dignity? How should full human dignity itself be understood? this last question is not something Martí himself discussed philosophically, but it is possible to reach an approximation of his thinking by noticing the...