Translated by Catherine Jagoe.LÓPEZ-BELTRÁN, Carlos; GARCÍA DEISTER, Vivette. Scientific approaches to the Mexican mestizo. História, Ciências, Saúde -Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro. Disponível em http://www. scielo.br/hcsm.
AbstractThe colonial category of mestizo was an ideological tool that shaped national identity in the post-revolutionary period in Mexico. The Indian-mestizo axis functioned to organize the ethnic and political interactions of the state. Doctors and anthropologists reinforced this dual taxonomy in studies of human populations, using biomedical markers to produce differentiated descriptions of the Indian and the mestizo. Genomic descriptions have contributed both to the construction of the scientistic notion of the mestizo based on the percentage of Indian, European and African ancestry, and also to the rise of two technoscientific objects that we call the molecular mestizo and the bioinformatic mestizo. Here we describe the interactions between the ideological and scientific incarnations of the mestizo.Keywords: mestizaje, biomedicine, Mexico, population genetics, genomics.Carlos López-Beltrán, Vivette García Deister 2 História, Ciências, Saúde -Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro I n biopolitical terms, the Spanish word mestizaje (meaning a racial-cultural mixture between Europeans, indigenous Americans and/or Africans) defines both a type of biocultural process and also its result: a fusion (or confusion) of different lineages (Schmidt 2003; Ventura 2010). The fusion of mestizaje is peculiar because it is mediated by sex and kinship (it is reproductive) and because in it two human groups, usually described racially and of different origins, converge through both their germinal fluid and their habits. The difference between one type of convergence and the other is founded on the different mechanisms of intergenerational inheritance involved. Usually, we tend to distinguish between biological and cultural inheritance; the former is responsible for the stability (and variation) of the phenotype and the latter for the ethnic identity of groups. Biological inheritance is likewise associated with the racial ramifications of humanity, while cultural inheritance is linked to ethnic diversification. At different times and in different contexts, common usage of the notion of mestizaje tends to distinguish or conflate these categories, but in the modern period the ubiquitous dichotomy between culture and biology has favored a split between the two. Scientific understanding of (racial) biological mestizaje has therefore been the province both of physical anthropology and of human biology (Fortney, 1977;López-Beltrán, 2004;Wade, 1997).A comprehensive reconstruction of the historical and cultural trajectories of Mexican mestizaje does not yet exist, although many episodes are well mapped. The colonial period is characterized by the arrival on the social and political scene of primary 'racial' mixtures (the mestizo, the mulatto and the lobo) and many other intermediate, unstable ones, both in terms of whitening and ...