Mestizaje: The All-Inclusive Fiction

Abstract

Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to Professor Sarah Sarzynski and Professor Juan Piñón from my previous academic institution, NYU. The former taught me the importance of treating Latin American popular culture as a serious topic of academic inquiry. It was in her course entitled "Race, Gender and Popular Cultural Theory in Latin America" that I first became aware of how the notions of race and mestizaje in Mexico exist in a complex relationship to histories of colonialism. In this course, I also gained the critical tools needed to make the familiar strange. Perhaps more than others, these two courses have shaped my thinking, writing and the contours of this dissertation. Professor Juan Piñón for his part encouraged me to continue pursuing an academic career and believed I could succeed at a time when I was plagued with doubt.And of course, I am grateful to the new friendships I built while in London, to the old friendships that are scattered throughout the United States and Mexico, and to my family for keeping me together with their patience, understanding and love. AbstractThis project examines the historical development of the ideology of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) in relation to the making of Mexico as a nation and the consolidation of the figure of the mestizo as the official national race. I am concerned with how mestizaje circulates and is (re-) produced across the public arena of politics, education and popular culture, and how it becomes part of everyday life. I also explore how mestizaje has been re-imagined with the concurrent rise of neoliberalism and multiculturalism from the 1990s onward. My ultimate goal with this dissertation is to show how race and racism remain implicated in Mexican nationalism as they serve to determine the terms of belonging to the nation. 11 dissertation. In the first section, I draw from the scholarship on archives to discuss the decisions involved in assembling my own archive around mestizaje, such as which texts and time periods to include and which to exclude in order to make the archive manageable. The second section takes my first unit of analysis, which includes essays and monographs of an anthropological, philosophical, historical and sociological nature, to explore the relationship between intellectuals and the state. I examine the role of intellectuals and the state in consolidating mestizaje as the basis of Mexican nationalism in order to emphasize that texts do not exist in isolation, but are entangled with other historieshistories of the state and its institutions, for example. The third section takes the second unit of analysis, which includes television programs and films, to investigate the importance of the mass media in reinforcing a single, mestizo national identity. Since my aim is to track the history of an idea and where that idea travels, I review my research materials here in order to underscore how they have fundamentally shaped the dissertation from the outset. In the final section, I provide a self-reflexive discussion on how...