Metamestizaje and the narration of political movements from the south

Troubling the Essentialist Discourse of Brown in Education: The Anti-Black Sociopolitical and Sociohistorical Etymology of Latinxs as a Brown Monolith

“…To further our South–North positioning, we extract from two prominent mestizaje nationalist discourses, Jose Vasconcelos’s (1925/1997) Cosmic Race and Gilberto Freyre’s (1943/1946) notion of a racial democracy to illustrate how anti-Blackness is deeply fixed in how we have come to think about and discursively reproduce Latinxs as Brown in U.S. educational discourses. In this essay, we emphasize the kinship between Vasconcelos’s Cosmic Race , Anzaldúa’s mestizx hybridity, and the use of Brown in educational discourses as this etymology is more firmly established (Chacón, 2017; Urrieta, 2003, 2017; Urrieta & Calderón, 2019). However, although viewed as less prevalent in the politics of U.S. Latinidad, we also present Freyre’s notion of a racial democracy because historically, the two political philosophies emerged during similar historical periods and functioned together to create a romanticized version of race relations throughout Latin America (Hernández, 2016; Hooker, 2017).…”

“…Utilizing Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latin American perspectives to trouble the anti-Black ethos of Brown as an essentialist racializing discourse functions to examine the ways in which commonly accepted racialized language in U.S. education research can “reproduce an unproblematic mestizaje, assuming it as a natural order of things in both the north and the south” (Chacón, 2017, p. 189). To further our South–North positioning, we extract from two prominent mestizaje nationalist discourses, Jose Vasconcelos’s (1925/1997) Cosmic Race and Gilberto Freyre’s (1943/1946) notion of a racial democracy to illustrate how anti-Blackness is deeply fixed in how we have come to think about and discursively reproduce Latinxs as Brown in U.S. educational discourses.…”

“…Further recounting personal experiences as an Indigenous P’urépecha scholar, Urrieta (2017) noted his indigeneity as “defined by both Mexican and US nationalist structural projects” and consequently situated “between both oppressive systems (nationalist structural and living in diaspora)” (p. 259). Both Chacón (2017) and Urrieta (2017) trace anti-indigeneity through the mestizaje of Vasconcelos (1925/1997) and Anzaldúa (1987), a lineage we further critique in this article through the lens of anti-Blackness. We add to this literature in education, which troubles extensions of mestizaje nationalist identities that serve to subjugate Black subjectivities within accepted conceptions of Latinidad in U.S. education research.…”

“…Political and social inclusivity is often relative to how ideologies of mestizaje, racial democracy, and racial egalitarianism are situated within regional and nation-state–specific racial identity politics (Hooker, 2005a, 2005b, 2014, 2017; Paschel, 2016; Telles & Paschel, 2014). A transnational lens is thus necessary for understanding how the multidirectional movement of these ideas and logics are central to the construction of Latinidad and, more specifically, the U.S. Latinx subject as Brown or mestizx in racialized discursive practices in U.S. education research (Blackwell et al, 2017; Chacón, 2017; Dache et al, 2019; Hooker, 2017; Milian, 2013; Rivera-Rideau et al, 2016; Urrieta & Calderón, 2019). Moreover, situating anti-Black colonial logics, mestizaje, and racial democracy within this transnational frame reveals the underbelly of our racialized discursive practices in U.S. education research.…”

Indian trouble

“…At the same time, it is worth recalling that Chicano/a mestizaje and Latin American mestizaje differ in their political and cultural objectives. For the former, mestizaje is about loss and recuperation to counter US racism, while for the latter it is about disappearing indigenous communities and making the mestizo/a the ideal national subject (see Chacón, 2017). But I wish to clarify that mestizaje is not this essay’s central focus.…”