Depicting Mestizaje : Gendered Images of Ethnorace in Colonial Mexican Texts

Abstract

For over one-quarter of a century, social historians of colonial Latin America have been concerned with issues of identity and difference, especially race, yet few have paid attention to gender as an important factor in social differentiation. This article provides such analysis, exploring the relationships among gender and other identity categories through examination of the construction of gendered ethnoracial categories in a variety of colonial Mexican texts. Kellogg argues that depictions of women of color helped creole elites embrace, however, ambivalently, their mestizaje (mixed-race heritage) as a symbol of Mexican protonational identity.

Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization

“…Nonetheless, some Afrocentric critics have attacked the concept of mestizaje, which they believe represents the erasure of the African black heritage in Latin America (Rosa, 1996). Most historians of race and ethnicity in Latin America subscribe to a more complex understanding of constructions of racial mixture, one where race enters a volatile mix with gender, class, and nationalism (Bolke Turner and Turner, 1994;Doremus, 2001;Gruzinski, 1999;Hale, 1999;Kellogg, 2000;Martínez-Echazábal, 1998). This complexity has endowed "mestizaje'' with different connotations compatible with various Latin American national experiences.…”

"The Only True People" Linking Maya Identities Past and Present

“…25. Most notably Cope (1994), but also see Boyer (1995) and Stern (1996), as well as additional citations on the race-class debate in Kellogg (2000).…”

Maya Ethnogenesis

“…Some historians have argued that the Spanish-"Indian"-African ranking based on phenotype was, when it came to the functioning of social organizations, a Spanish-African-"Indian" system (Lockhart and Schwartz 1983: 130). Others have argued that the growth in the mixed-race population, the people to whom the term castas properly refers, created a social structure in which class played a more significant role than race (most notably Cope (1994), but also see Boyer (1995) and Stern (1996), as well as additional citations on the race-class debate in Kellogg (2000)). The point to be emphasized here is that there was, from the start and increasingly so, a disjuncture between social and cul-tural realities on the one hand and colonial Spanish constructions and perceptions of ethnoracial identities on the other.…”