“The Map of the Mexican’s Genome”: overlapping national identity, and population genomics

Abstract

This paper explores the intersections between national identity and the production of medical/population genomics in Mexico. The ongoing efforts to construct a Haplotype Map of Mexican genetic diversity offers a unique opportunity to illustrate and analyze the exchange between the historic-political narratives of nationalism, and the material culture of genomic science. Haplotypes are central actants in the search for medically significant SNP's (single nucleotide polymorphisms), as well as powerful entities involved in the delimitation of ancestry, temporality and variability (www.hapmap.org). By following the circulation of Haplotypes, light is shed on the alignments and discordances between sociohistorical and bio-molecular mappings. The analysis is centred on the comparison between the genomic construction of time and ethnicity in the laboratory (through participant observation), and on the public mobilisation of a "Mexican Genome" and its wider political implications. Even though both: the scientific practice and the public discourse on medical/population genomics are traversed by notions of "admixture", there are important distinctions to be made. In the public realm, the nationalist post-revolutionary ideas of Jose Vasconcelos, as expressed in his Cosmic Race (1925), still hold sway in the social imaginary. In contrast, admixture is treated as a complex, relative and probabilistic notion in laboratory practices. I argue that the relation between medical/population genomics and national identity is better understood as a process of re-articulation (Fullwiley Social Studies of Science 38:695, 2008), rather than coproduction (Reardon 2005) of social and natural orders. The evolving process of re-articulation conceals the novelty of medical/population genomics, aligning scientific facts in order to fit the temporal and ethnic grids of

Genomic Scans of Zygotic Disequilibrium and Epistatic SNPs in HapMap Phase III Populations

“…It also differs from the Africa populations in that it has more significant zygotic LDs. One possible reason is that population MEX comes from an admixture of complex groups with potentially distinct ancestors [ 50 ]. This can be implied from the cluster analysis where population MEX has a probability of 78% to join two groups (CHD and JPT, GIH and TSI).…”

Temporal Patterns of Mexican Migrant Genetic Ancestry: Implications for Identification

“…For example, there can be individuals with minimal European admixture who do not affiliate with an indigenous community. This example highlights the potential disconnect between the genetic inference of ancestry and one's actual ethnicity, which is socially defined and often externally prescribed (Schwartz‐Marín and Silva‐Zolezzi ). Moreover, the statistical associations that enable the detection of these trends linking ancestry to ethnicity by no means provide support for creating definite biogeographic or cultural types.…”

The Molecular Turn in Conservation: Genetics, Pristine Nature, and the Rediscovery of an Extinct Species of Galápagos Giant Tortoise

“…Genetic essentializations of human spatial belonging are a project of geographic representation through which understandings of relatedness and difference are produced (Nash 2005(Nash , 2012(Nash , 2013Livingstone 2010). Study of human origins has sparked intense political debates over national, class, and ethnic identities, as well as the reinscription of race as a biological category (Winlow 2001(Winlow , 2006Marks 2002;Benjamin 2009;Schwartz-Mar ın and Silva-Zolezzi 2010). In distinction to human ancestry tracing, genetic analyses of wildlife become political not through their implications for questions of identity but as they are used as a technology involved in the negotiation of conservation territories and their governance structures (cf.…”