Mestizaje: “I understand the reality, I just do not like the
word:” Perspectives on an Option
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
To assert people are métissé, that métissage has value, is to deconstruct
in this way the category of métis that is considered as halfway between
two “pure” extremes. It is only in those countries whose exploitation
is barbaric (South Africa, for instance) that this intermediary category
has been officially recognized. This is perhaps what was felt by the
Caribbean poet who, in response to my thoughts on our métissé
Caribbean cultures, said to me: “I understand the reality, I just do not
like the word.” (Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais)1
The heterogeneous and conflictive nature of social components
and cultural practices is by no means exclusive to Latin America. Many
critics argue, however, that these traits manifest themselves in particularly
complex, polyvalent and extreme ways in the subcontinent. Suffice it to
mention the constant focuses of violence (highly ideologized or not), the
juxtaposition of ostentatious wealth and extreme poverty in urban settings,
the co-presence of radically different languages, ethnic groups, historical
temporalities, forms of spirituality or world views that may be found in
the same national territory, in the same region, or even in the same text
(as in José María Arguedas’s El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo).
Inevitably, the extent of this heterogeneity and “conflictivity” has
been attributed first to the circumstances of colonization, that is to say, to
a contact among diverse populations that reached dimensions unheard of
in the history of mankind; to the particularly unprecedented violence
resulting from that contact,2 and the diversity of the sectors affected.
Violence was exerted in physical as well as intellectual or spiritual
relations, in such a way that the “Contact” appeared more akin to extorsion,
________________
1
2
We found it necessary to modify Dash’s translation.
Heightened by the initial demographic catastrophe that resulted from the microbial impact.
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
35
rape, mutilation and imposition (encontronazo), than to an encounter
(encuentro) of cultures and wills.
Paradoxically, the degree of societal heterogeneity and
“conflictivity” has also been attributed to the invaders’ relative familiarity
with cultural heterogeneity, since they were themselves the result of a
long mixing process (among “Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks,
Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs, Berbers, Gypsies and …
slaves of different origins”) (Mörner 13). For centuries throughout the
Middle Ages, their world had been involved in a “strange mixture between
savage warfare and pacific exchange, including miscegenation, between
intolerance and tolerance in interethnic relations” (Mörner 14). This no
doubt prepared the ground for what would be observed in the Americas
during the Conquest. Although forms of ethnic coexistence were
encouraged (like the constitution of repúblicas de indios alongside
repúblicas de españoles), in general, some kind of laisser faire was
adopted, marked as it was by the fluctuations and ambiguities of linguistic
and religious assimilation policy, which served colonial interests by
producing conveniently imperfect subjects, “almost the same but not quite.”
To this colonial framework which set the rules for many centuries
to come, should be added the adjustments made by the governments of
young Latin American nations which, following the emancipation of their
countries, attempted to administer cultural differences. Disregarding a
few episodes of a euphemistic “conquest of the desert” (in Argentina, for
instance), societal heterogeneity has not been seen as the object of
systematic reduction policies—policies of marginalization (as in the United
States with its non WASP elements) (Benítez-Rojo 201), or radical “ethnic
cleansing” (as in nazi Germany) (Fernández Retamar 102).
As a result partly of the prejudice against the so-called hybrid
condition of people born out of the Native-invader contact, but also as a
result of the fact that American practices were judged according to
European principles and categories, the heterogeneity of Latin American
society and cultural practices, that should have been appreciated as a source
of enrichment, was traditionally apprehended in a negative fashion. When
judged by these foreign and artificial measurements, American “identity”
was easily constructed as either deficient or excessive: in short, as a
monstrosity (whose basic feature is hybridity) (Cros 42).
Carmen Perilli’s observation that “representation was marked by
the alterity of the object, in relation to a subject who was defining it from
36
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
outside” (Perilli 1) explains the recurrence of the following theme in both
proto-Americanist (the literate people of the colony), and Americanist
critical discourse (Chiampi 9):3 (Latin)America is different, and what
constitutes this American difference (with respect to the European pole
of reference, perceived as a homogeneous entity) is related to heterogeneity.
This topos has undergone some degree of change, a few of the modalities
of which I shall try to examine.
Numerous ongoing attempts have been made to express “Latin
America” in unitary terms, a practice that is somewhat paradoxical. It is
this paradox that I will address here (Chiampi 10-11). To do so I will use
as my Ariadne’s thread a proposal derived from the work of Antonio
Cornejo Polar that calls for reflection and for collective questioning. In
particular, I wish to focus on the popular concept of mestizaje, a cornerstone
of Latin American discourse, and on the critical reception granted to its
application to the analysis of discursive practices (that include literature).
As will be shown, we may be experiencing a definitive superseding of its
use as a conceptual tool, a stage during which, among other things, the
effects of transnational critical dynamics must be taken into account.
In a discussion paper presented at an important conference in
Tucumán (Argentina) in 1995, A. Cornejo Polar enumerates and briefly
comments upon several options which exist in Latin Americanist discourse
for the purpose of explaining discursive dynamics which would be specific
to the subcontinent. The general objective of this reflection is very clearly
stated as follows: “to produce theoretical and methodological apparatuses
sufficiently strong and subtle to understand a literature (or more generally
a wide range of discourses) whose evident multiplicity generates abundant,
deep and disturbing tensions” (Cornejo Polar 370). We find here a recurring
theme of his critical work: the idea of an irreducible heterogeneity of
Latin American literature that corresponds to radical fractures in the social
sphere. In this regard, his reading goes beyond Bakhtin, to whom he often
refers explicitly, and whose writings, according to Marc Angenot,
“emphasize unilaterally the fluidity, the creative drift, in a representation
of the social as a place where minds … find themselves in permanent
________________
In keeping with Irlemar Chiampi, I am using this term to designate “the critical positioning
on what constitutes America, on the place that History has reserved for it, on its destiny
and its difference with regard to established models of culture [that] characterized the
production of essays by the most distinguished Hispanic-American writers” such as
Sarmiento and even, I should add, as early as Bolívar. (Chiampi 9) Translation of Chiampi
elsewhere in this article is mine.
3
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
37
interaction, a place where legitimacies, hierarchies, constraints, and
dominant characteristics are only taken into consideration insofar as they
give substance to heteroglossia and in the aesthetical order, to the
polyphonic text.” (Angenot 16) In short, Cornejo Polar’s work displays
an acute perception of the discursive interactions marked with tensions
and conflicts on a macro as well as on a micro textual level.4
In the JALLA text, Cornejo Polar starts from the notion of mestizaje,
which he presents first as an analytical tool, as “the most powerful and
extensive concept through which Latin America can express itself”
(Cornejo Polar 368), but which he goes on to describe as an idéologème
providing a “conciliatory synthesis of the various mixtures which
characterize the socio-cultural Latin American body” (Cornejo Polar 368).
Historically, mestizaje was indeed claimed as an American cultural
sign that allowed Latin Americans to assume the racial heterogeneity of
the subcontinent without any inferiority complex (Chiampi 10). Within
this long process that is currently undergoing scrutiny, one can distinguish
several important stages. Theses stages correspond first and foremost to a
use that emphasizes the effects of a physical union, and that, in the majority
of cases, corresponds to the semantic field covered by the English word
“miscegenation.” A second stage, that superposes the first more than it
cancels it out, corresponds to a more emblematic or metaphoric use of the
term (based on the human body/social body analogy,5 and on the
extrapolated link between social body and cultural practices).
If we return to the first stage in this process which we will now
examine in the Hispanic American context, the notion of mestizaje (in the
adjectival form mestizo/a) became necessary early on to designate a social
phenomenon resulting from inter-ethnic fusions, that is to say from unions
between indigenous women and European migrants. If, at first, the fruits
of these unions seem to have been assimilated, either by the father’s social
group or by that of the mother, their rapid increase in number soon rendered
them a distinct group. In this instance, the mestizaje category was neither
preconceived nor imposed by law but was rather a form of designation
________________
“… as Bakhtin noted even within the sign, literary discourse becomes a space that is as
conflictive and contradictory as society itself. From this point of view, it is impossible to
consider a text as absolutely representative of an ideology and of the interests of one class;
it is a place of competition among various and discordant options, that make it a veritable
battle field” (Antonio Cornejo Polar 32-33).
5
In a passage cited above from the JALLA text, Cornejo Polar speaks of the “various
mixtures which characterize the socio-cultural Latin American body” (Cornejo Polar 368).
4
38
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
that grew from a legal gap in the context of a society structured by
genealogical criteria. Two basic categories, the Spanish (including
Peninsular Spaniards, criollos and legitimate mestizos) and the Indians,
were effectively the only groups recognized originally.6 Given that “the
increasingly numerous racially mixed and illegitimate people had not been
anticipated by the early legislators” (Mörner 42), the purpose of any
subsequent legislation was to restrain the rights of the mestizos,7 a new
category marked by the illegitimacy of their birth and by the often
vagabond nature, at least in the beginning, of their way of life.
Mestizaje is thus initially perceived as a stigma because of its
association with illegitimacy, with the frequently furtive or violent—in
any case not sanctified by marriage—circumstances of sexual encounters
between members of different social castes, then between the castas
themselves.8 It is stigmatized also because it rightly appears as a threat to
the organization of social hierarchy, to an order that clearly differentiated
between victors and vanquished, masters and servants or slaves. This
distinction was rendered particularly tangible in the colonial society by
the presence of distinctive phenotypic traits but, more importantly, by
fashion regulations, by specific forms of behaviour, linguistic and rhetoric
codes. It is this order that mestizaje will disrupt—hence the interesting
potential of a modern use of the notion—because it defies polarization
and resists classification. 9
The Andean area provides us with two early examples of
contrasting (and explicit) perspectives on mestizaje, both emanating from
contemporary writers who have pondered the modalities and the individual
and collective repercussions of the inter-ethnic contact. I am referring to
Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales (1609), and to Felipe Guamán Poma
de Ayala. In his Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615), Guamán
Poma developed a strategy aimed at preserving the indigenous populations
________________
To these categories should be added that of the slaves of African origin.
The restrictions and the demands being ever greater for the mestizos of African origin.
8
The word “caste” is used here to mean the “closed and endogamous group in which
membership is decided by birth” (Mörner 7), and also in its colonial sense referring to “all
free men and women of mixed ancestry,” where (as in modern and current use of the
adjective “ethnic” in English) the castas are the others, the “minoritized.”
9
This resistance to classification is paradoxically expressed in the mostly artificial creations
which flourished in the XVIIIth century under the guise of verbal (mestizo, castizo, mulato,
morisco, albino, torna atrás, lobo, zambaigo, ahí te estás, no te entiendo, tente en el aire,
saltatrás, saltatrás cuarterón, saltatrás quinterón etc.), as well as pictorial series (pinturas
de castas), marked by the (formal) influence of Linnaean taxonomy.
6
7
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
39
from the horrors of inter-ethnic blending. In the “letter” he sent to the
Spanish monarch, he tried to convince him to decree the autonomy of an
indigenous “kingdom” of Peru. This kingdom would be preserved from
the mixing with foreign (Spanish) elements in a miscegenation process
which the author rightly forsaw as leading to the disappearance of the
endogamic and hierarchical social order he valued so much. With the
exception of some references to his half-brother, Father Martín Ayala,
qualified as mestizo santo or galardón mestizo (“mestizo saint,” “mestizo
reward”), the term is systematically used in an extremely derogatory sense,
as in casta maldita de mestisos (“damned mestizo caste”) or as in the
series mestizo, cholo, mala casta, mulato, zanbahigo, all terms related to
miscegenation except for the insult “bad caste,” a heterogeneous element
introduced as an equivalent in the list, and which negatively orients its
reading.
In contrast with such a radical position, which expressed the Native
point of view encouraging the official policy of segregation (with its
repúblicas de indios), Inca Garcilaso, in a discourse also structured by
the ethnic identity of the narrator and with a similar purpose of convincing
the European reader to recognize the American subject as his equal, chose
to pay the price of a dilution of differences. In that dilution, the mestizo
condition of the narrator, which is openly assumed in an admirable and
paradoxical provocation, plays a determining role, as A. Cornejo Polar
very precisely indicates, noting
his persistent and even tortured effort to assert the double authority
invested upon him by his mestizo condition, and to affirm this condition
as a major sign for a harmonious, conciliating and totalizing synthesis,
transmuting for that purpose heterogeneous and even belligerent
components into a smooth, seamless homogeneity. (Cornejo Polar,
“El discurso de la armonía imposible” 74-75)
Considered to be a conciliating synthesis, this claim to a double
or multiple American heritage, as symbolized by Inca Garcilaso, spread
throughout the continent once Independence was achieved. Beginning as
an inversion of values which transformed deficiency into plenitude or
stigma into a sign of proudly assumed identity, mestizaje was adopted as
a conceptual tool which would allow Latin America to understand and to
assert itself, from Simón Bolívar’s “we are a small human species” or
José Martí’s “our mestizo America,” to Roberto Fernández Retamar’s
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
40
proclamation of an American difference, and affirmation of historical
continuity:
But within the colonial world there exists a case unique to the entire
planet: a vast zone for which mestizaje is not the accident but rather
the essence, the central line: ourselves, “our mestizo America.”
(Fernández Retamar 4)
According to Irlemar Chiampi, who, in her introduction to La
expresión americana de Lezama Lima, offers a remarkable synthesis of
the evolution of the assumption of mestizaje as a privileged tool, this
process would take place in two (broad) stages, the first one encompassing
works from Sarmiento and Martí, to Vasconcelos and Mariátegui among
many others, in which the answers to the collective quest for identity
varied depending on the historical crises, the political pressures and the
ideological influences. The imaginary constructions were built upon
contrasting claims, to latinity, to indigeneity, even to Latin America’s
foundational bastardy, until a tacit agreement among intellectuals seemed
to have come to a head over the notion of mestizaje:
… if the generation of intellectuals active between 1920 and 1940
still had identity as its main preoccupation, the next generation,
between 1940 and 1960, found the problem more or less resolved.
With the studies of Fernando Ortiz on the processes of transculturation,
those of Reyes on the opening of “Latin America intelligence” to
various influences, those of Mariano Picón Salas on the combination
of European and indigenous forms, those of Uslar Pietri on the alluvial
process of our literary system or with Carpentier’s hypothesis on
American marvellous realism, mestizaje became recognized as our
cultural sign. (Chiampi 10)
As a contrast to the (so-called) homogeneity of the United States,10
on the one hand, and to the European ethnocentric particularities, on the
other, mestizaje represented a distinctive element for Latin America. At
the same time, its negation of the principle of contradiction (as a
“cornerstone of Western logic”) (López-Baralt 20) was paving the way
for recognition of other epistemological paradigms, the first manifestations
of which appeared with the magic realism literary current.
There is however, as A. Cornejo Polar suggests, a much more
troubled dimension to the collective claim to a mestizo identity. It has
been proven extensively that the motivations of the mestizofilia movement
________________
10
See next page.
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
41
correspond, generally speaking, to the defense of its class interests by the
élite. In the Andean area, once again, José de la Riva-Agüero shows the
use of mestizaje as a homogenizing, trivializing, emblem. When referring
to the mestizo chronicler, Garcilaso, he emphasizes the common denotation
of this word as the result of a carnal union, in order to reduce the impact
of the Conquest, moving it from the political and military realm to an
affective, or sexual one:
And since hopes … have to be born or fostered in memories, let us
greet and venerate, as a good omen, the memory of that famous
historian, in whose personality the Incas and the Conquerors fused
amorously … he opened the doors of our own literature and was the
magnificent precursor of our authentic nationality. (Cornejo Polar “El
discurso de la armonía imposible” 77)
With regard to Mexico, the figure of José Vasconcelos immediately
springs to mind as the most famous exponent of Latin America’s inevitable
mestizo fate. Whereas the Cuban José Martí focused on the potential
richness of Latin America’s ethnic heterogeneity, the celebration of
continental mestizaje elaborated in La raza cósmica (1925) holds a peculiar
mimetic relation with regard to the European racialist discourse promoting
white supremacy. Indeed, while hailing the “ultimate end of history”—an
end in which Latin America is predestined to play a central role—as a
“fusion of peoples and cultures” (Vasconcelos 27), Vasconcelos’ program
for the subcontinent is explicitly eugenistic. Meant to overcome “the
contradictory instincts of the mixture of different races” (Vasconcelos
26), the Vasconcelian ideal “mixed race” would be limited, in fact, to a
“drop [of] blood” from the Black (Vasconcelos 31), some “Jewish streaks”
(Vasconcelos 32) etc., in the predominant “white,” “latin” element, meant
also to allow the native component to be resurrected from the past.11
________________
South of the Rio Bravo, it seems to have been a priority to recognize the diverse
composition of the populations, while for a long time in the United States homogeneity
acted as a strong myth articulated first around the negation, or “minoritization” of its non
WASP elements, then around the success of its “melting (pot)” process. The case of Canada
is quite different, with its claim of a fractured origin (with two “founding” peoples—the
French and the English—, and “first” nations—“Indians” and Inuit) and the adoption of
multiculturalism as an almost sacred political principle.
11
“The Indian … would bridge the gap that spans over thousands of years and that separates
Atlantis from our present age, while several decades of aesthetical eugenics could make
the Blacks disappear as well as any people that our natural instincts regarding beauty
would suggest as fundamentally recessive and as a consequence unworthy of survival”
(Vasconcelos 43). Translation is mine.
10
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Catherine Poupeney-Hart
Although Vasconcelos may have been the most famous, by no
means is he an isolated case among American thinkers whose discourse
was frequently articulated along the same axiological and epistemological
axis as the “scientific racialism” promoted at the end of the 19th and the
beginning of the 20th centuries, in a context of colonial expansion by
several European powers. The idea of “racial purity,” which can be
perceived as “an extremely fallacious and aberrant form of classification,
born of the West’s monotheistic obsession with the ‘One’ and the ‘Same’,”
was very conveniently rendered legitimate, and in all logic, hybridization
was reinforced as a negative category (Lionnet 9). Most of the components
of this discourse had already been widely debated over the three centuries
of Iberic colonization in America. It was completed with the mestizaje
proposition, which provocatively inverted (in sometimes quite an
incomplete fashion, as we saw with Vasconcelos) the qualitative terms of
the “European” discourse.
Several critics agree with Cornejo Polar’s denunciation of the
mystifying dimension of mestizaje: for example, Jorge Klor de Alva regards
it as “a powerful nation-building myth that has helped to link dark to
light-skinned mestizos and Euro-Americans in frequent opposition to both
foreigners and the indigenous ‘others’ in their midst. It has been effectively
used to promote national amnesia about or to salve the national conscience
in what concerns the dismal past and still colonized condition of the native
peoples of Latin America” (Klor de Alva 9). More generally, the notion is
perceived as incapable of articulating power structures and contradictions
present in society (Kaliman 1995). Although a contemporary critic like
Agustín Basave Benítez concludes his analysis of the mestizofilia
movement in Mexico by claiming an explicit mestizo future for the country,
once the current problems of the “iniquitous superposition of cultures”
have been resolved, the connotations of the term, its ideological “dead
weight,” seem to invalidate its use for an increasing sector of Latin
American criticism (Basave Benítez 144-145).
This could explain the current proliferation of alternative options
that seek to express more effectively the complexity of intercultural
relations and class conflict. Martin Lienhard’s work, for instance, provides
a striking example of the evolution of the intellectuals’ perception of
mestizaje as a valid, neutral analytical tool into a reticent attitude which
is tending to become prevalent within contemporary Hispanic American
discourse. Mestizaje accordingly occupies a central position in his article
“La crónica mestiza en México y en el Perú hacia 1620,” published in
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
43
1983 (Lienhard 1983), but it is the object of an explicit questioning in La
voz y su huella, a book which nevertheless considers the same corpus of
texts that had been previously described as “mestizo chronicles” (Lienhard
1991). The author, in the latter case, denounces “the fallacy of the discourse
on cultural mestizaje” (Lienhard 96), a discourse that has recuperated the
concept of transculturation, elaborated by Fernando Ortiz in Contrapunteo
cubano del tabaco y el azúcar.12 In response to a growing reticence toward
the conceptual effectiveness of the term “acculturation”—a term coined
to designate the interaction resulting from the contact between two cultures,
but that has come to designate the “inevitable and passive cultural
assimilation of archaic societies by an overwhelming and so-called
universal western culture” (Lienhard 1991: 97), “transculturation”
presented the advantage of emphasizing dynamic and pluridirectional
creativity: it corresponded also to different needs from those prevalent in
the assumption of mestizaje as an identification category:
… while “mestizaje” implied a convivial hybridization of contact zones
in the liberal imagination, “transculturation”[“coined by post colonial
intellectuals who witnessed the advent of socialism and communism
and the crises of the Western world in two successive world wars”]
implied mutual transformations through continual interaction and
negotiation among people of different cultural background. (Mignolo
180)
The stylistic strategy of the very brief text by Fernando Ortiz in
which he introduces his proposal, is quite remarkable, with its games
(almost chiasmus) of stable prefixes and movable roots (“transculturation,
transmutations, transplantation, transit, transcendence, transmigration,
transitoriness, transition etc.”), or of movable prefixes and stable roots
(“deculturation, exculturation, acculturation, inculturation, neoculturation,
transculturation”) (Ortiz 86-90). Ortiz presents us with the destabilizing
measure of a process that is to be perceived as an effervescence, as a
boiling process (Ortiz 90), but not as the achievement of synthesis. 13
________________
This concept was defined by Bronislaw Malinowski as a “process in which a new
composite, complex reality emerges, a reality which is neither a mechanical agglomeration
of characters nor a mosaic, but a new, original and independent phenomenon” (Ortiz,
xxxiii). Translation is mine.
13
This is the conclusion Gustavo Pérez Firmat seems to have reached: “Although at one
point Ortiz states that transculturation names the ‘synthesis’of cultures, the word properly
designates the ferment and turmoil that precedes [his italics] synthesis” (cited by A. BenítezRojo, Repeating Island, 285).
12
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
44
Despite the potential of this notio n, further highlighted by its
acclimatization to the domain of literature in Angel Rama, according to
La voz y su huella, “transculturation” proves to be an imprecise concept
as a result of its incapacity to express the antagonism between subaltern
and hegemonic sectors, and therefore should not be substituted for the
classical term “acculturation.” Throughout the text, however, “hybridity”
seems to provide the strongest analytical option, because it emphasizes
the non-resolution of contradictions. Lienhard illustrates his position very
clearly in his analysis of Crónica mexicana by Fernando Alvarado
Tezozomoc:
Is it a European or an indigenous chronicle? Everything we have
exposed before allows us to say that it is neither one nor the other. It
is neither mestizo if by using this term one wishes to refer to a semiotic
ensemble whose original signs have spun off their respective universes
in order to build a system of new signs endowed with a specific
coherence: to become a mestizo text in that sense Crónica mexicana
lacks indeed a univocal logic which would explain it in all its elements.
If mestizo, on the other hand is the sphere of the hybrid, of the conflicts
between the systems of native signs and those of European origin,
this text would stand as an excellent example to illustrate it. (Lienhard
143)
A similar critical attitude towards mestizaje can be found in The
Repeating Island, in which Antonio Benítez-Rojo activates the
connotations of this term. Other than using the word mestizaje to describe
a process of biological union (as in “modalities of mestizaje involving
these three races” Benítez-Rojo 201), on several occasions in his analysis
of different texts, Benítez-Rojo points out the (ideological) preference
for a homogenizing conception of the term (“mestizo seen as a synthesis”
Benítez-Rojo 127),14 whereas it could have been used to express “a sheaf
of different and coexistent dynamics” (Benítez-Rojo 126). Mestizaje refers
to fragmentation, unsteadiness, unpredictability, antagonism, but is unable
to express it satisfactorily:
Within the realities of a rereading, mestizaje is nothing more than a
concentration of differences, a tangle of dynamics obtained by means
________________
This ideological reference corresponds to the “high regard for mestizaje, the mestizaje
solution [which] involves a positivistic and logocentric argument that sees in the biological,
economic, and cultural whitening of the Caribbean society [being the area he is mainly
concerned with] a series of successive steps towards ‘progress’” (Benítez-Rojo 26).
14
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
45
of a greater density of the Caribbean object … at a given moment in
our rereading, the binary oppositions Europe/Indo-America, Europe/
Africa, Europe/Asia do not resolve themselves into the synthesis of
mestizaje, but rather they resolve into insoluble differential equations
… (Benítez-Rojo 26)
In The Repeating Island, therefore, it is “syncretism” (BenítezRojo 12) which is presented as having the potential for a more satisfying
analytical tool because it does not imply a synthetic resolution of
differences: “A syncretic artifact is not a synthesis, but rather a signifier
made of differences” (Benítez-Rojo 21). According to other Latin
American contemporary writers, although the seme of “chaotic positioning
of cultural signs” that the word carries could make for an interesting
option,15 “syncretism” appears to be mostly relegated either to footnotes
because of its close association with the description of religious
phenomena,16 or to the status of adjective not worthy of any specific
development (Cornejo Polar 369-370). If a general consensus has not been
built around “syncretism,” on the other hand, the recent success of the
“hybridity-hybridization” option which accompanied the enthusiastic
reception of García Canclini’s Culturas híbridas has helped to promote
this lexeme to a privileged status similar to the one mestizaje enjoyed for
such a long time. Obviously, the fact that “hybridity” is a key concept to
post-colonial criticism, which willingly associates it with “syncretism,”17
has contributed to its success. It seems to me, however, that by applying
the notion of hybridity to Latin America as a specific, explicative model,
we have returned in a certain sense to its traditional construction as
monstrosity and as transgression of norms.18
________________
See Renate Lachmann, “El sincretismo como provocación al estilo,” Criterios, 31, 1994:
65-83.
16
As can be seen in the much quoted note from Culturas híbridas by Néstor García Canclini:
“One may find occasional mention of such terms as syncretism, mestizaje and other words
to describe the processes of hybridization. I prefer the latter because it encompasses various
intercultural mixes—not only the racial blends to which the term mestizaje usually limits
itself—and because it enables us to include the modern forms of hybridization better than
the word ‘syncretism,’ a formula that almost always refers to religious fusions or to fusions
of traditional symbolic movements” (García Canclini 14-15, n. 1).
17
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin speak of “hybridity and syncreticity as
constitutive elements of all post-colonial literatures” (15), of “the syncretic and hybridized
nature of post-colonial experience” (p. 41), of the “hybridized nature of any post colonial
society” (74) The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
(London & New York: Routledge, 1989).
18
See next page.
15
46
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
In addition to these notions—mestiza je, transculturation,
syncretism, hybridization—that were perceived at one point as being able
to explain the “heteroclite plurality that would define Latin American
society and culture” (Cornejo Polar, Escribir en el aire 12), but were
unable to create a consensus, other terms have been proposed, like
“anthropophagy” (Oswald de Andrade), “voracity or incorporative
protoplasm” (José Lezama Lima), “phagocitis” (Rodolfo Kush), 19
“creolization” (Edouard Glissant) etc.
However, before (or instead) of joining a growing chorus of
condemnation of mestizaje on the basis of its “incorrectness” (as
insufficient on the theoretical level and potentially dangerous on the social
level), and (why not?) offering my own solution, a quick detour seems
necessary. A brief comparison of the use of the term in other linguistic
areas and in other cultural traditions may perhaps allow us some distance
from the kind of logic that could only lead to an extension of an already
quite impressive number of options—always related, on the other end, to
a construction of (Latin) America as difference.
At this point in the discussion, we should remember the
dependency that Latin Americanist discourse has maintained with regard
to “the massive leveling force of language continuously imposed by the
West—yesterday with French, today with American English”(Glissant). 20
The global phenomenon, which has no doubt grown more acute in recent
years, finds a complement in the fact that the United States has become
the main geographical site of enunciation of this specialized critical
discourse.21 In that context, mestizaje-mestizo’s lack of marketability would
seem obvious, since there is no direct equivalent to the pair in English, as
is the case in French, with métissage and métis. Such a lack of marketability
________________
Mónica Zapata reminds us that “the word ‘hybrid’ is in itself an interesting case of
blending and contamination: in Latin it signifies ‘of mixed blood’ and was originally spelt
ibrida. It then became mixed with the Greek term hybris, meaning ‘excess, immoderation,’
and was spelled hybrida, sustaining the idea that mixture is transgressive.” “Las duplicidades
del sujeto: El señor presidente,” in José Maristany (ed.), Apropiaciones, identidades y
resistencia desde los márgenes, Cahier du GRAL N° 30: Montréal, 1994: 20. Translation
is mine.
19
For a different view see Henry Louis Gates’ critique of Bhabha in “Critical Fanonism.”
Critical Inquiry 17, 1991: 457-70.
20
Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981). Quotation is from English
translation, Caribbean Discourse. Selected Essays, trans. Michael Dash (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1989).
21
See next page.
18
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
47
cannot be considered completely irrelevant when forecasting the critical
fate of the terms, including their possible redemption as analytical tools
in the Latin American sphere itself.
It could be argued that the French word métis has indeed been
integrated in an anglophone context: this context is, however, a very limited
one. Métis refers to the descendants of native women and Euroamerican
men involved in the 18th and 19th century fur trade in the Northwestern
plains of America, who, in spite of their differences, have come to express,
on a few dramatic occasions such as the uprising led by Louis Riel (18701885), and the current campaign for his rehabilitation, a unified sense of
ethnic consciousness.22 The meaning and the use of the term are thus
related to a very precise geographical area.
While miscegenation may be perceived as inconveniently technical
and rigid (since it does not encourage adjectivation), options like halfbreed, mixed-blood, half-caste, cross-breeding etc. cannot be considered
either as satisfying equivalents of mestizo/mestizaje, because of the splitting
in the syntagm itself, which hinders the idea of an organic fusion, so
important for the success of that option, as was argued before. On the
other hand, as Françoise Lionnet rightfully points out, they carry the weight
of a “negative connotation, precisely because they imply biological
abnormality and reduce human reproduction to the level of animal
breeding” (14). From the same etymological point of view, such would
not be the case with métis (or mestizo) if we accept with Lionnet that
… it derives etymologically from the Latin mixtus, “mixed,” and its
primary meaning refers to cloth made of two different fibers, usually
cotton for the warp and flax for the woof:23 it is a neutral term, with
no animal or sexual implication. It is not grounded in biological
misnomers and has no moral judgments attached to it. It evacuates all
connotations of “pedigreed” ascendance, unlike words like octoroon
or half-breed. (Lionnet 14)24
________________
Román de la Campa draws our attention to the astonishing fact that there are “more
professors of Latin American literature (who devote themselves mostly to research, with 6
hours of courses per semester and with middle class salary) in the states of New York and
California alone, than in all of Latin America.” He poses then a question that should be
given some consideration: “If the nation is an imagined community …, what is the nation
that is taught and written by an other?,” “Hibridez posmoderna y transculturación: políticas
de montaje en torno a Latinoamérica,” Hispamérica, XXIII, 69, 1994: 11, n. 19. Translation
is mine.
22
David V. Burley, Gayel A. Horsfall & John D. Brandon, Structural Considerations of
Métis Ethnicity (Vermillion: University of South Dakota Press, 1992).
23 & 24
See next page.
21
48
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
The lack of a “neutral” option in current Anglo-American
expression manifests probably the difficulty this society has in dealing
with the historical reality of “race mixture:” it has also very probably
much to do with the profound White/Black (Black including a very large
chromatic range) fracture existing presently in the United States.
On the other hand, of the foreign terms, mestizo and métis as
such, are extremely limited in the anglophone sphere: they often appear
marked with a distinguishing graphic sign—as is the case here, with the
use of italics—, and may be, in some cases, proclaimed as the manifestation
of an explicitly “borderline” condition, condition of “los atravesados …
the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel,
the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead,” as “new mestiza” Gloria
Anzaldúa provocatively puts it (Anzaldúa 3).
This situation contrasts with its current success in the French
media, in a context of ethnic tension related to the presence of a sizeable
population of North African origin: métissage has become a key word for
the anti-racist discourse, a certain form of banner which expresses less a
claim for recognition of Diversity in the face of an imposition of Sameness
than a demand for equality of consideration and treatment (Taguieff 18).
Métissa ge has also been central in critical discourse from other
francophone areas, notably the Caribbean, and the Martinican writer
Edouard Glissant may be the thinker most immediately associated with
the defense and illustration of a composite, hybridized (explicitly métissé)
conception of cultures. His aim, as he pointed out in Caribbean Discourse,
was certainly not to promote “a category that will by its very nature be
opposed to other categories (‘pure cultures’)” (Glissant 140), but to
underline the inoperative, absurd character of the claim for a single origin
for any given human group. On the other hand, by stressing that métissage
“as an idea is not primarily the glorification of the composite nature of a
people” (Glissant 140), Glissant distanced himself from the Americanist
position we briefly discussed before.
The term métissage is a fundamental (if rather discrete) axis in
Le discours antillais, and it may be indicative of its eventual fortune in
the transnational critical market that the English version by J. Michael
________________
Coincidentally, the French word métissage refers phonetically to the same domain (tissage
meaning “weaving”).
24
Or, as could be added, “mulatto,” whose lexical root and phonetical traits allow for an
easy assimilation to the animal kingdom, and in that realm to its most sterile manifestation,
the mule, reinforcing the idea of radically different human species.
23
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
49
Dash would prefer to erase in favor of “creolization,” an option which has
become prominent in Glissant’s most recent work. As Jean Bernabé,
Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau have made clear for créolité,
the term créolisation offers indeed the advantage of downplaying colonial
or racial connotations, as well as the illusion of harmonious, unifying,
mixture. Accordingly, having at his disposal two words with contiguous
meanings allows Edouard Glissant an important nuance: using what would
seem to be the customary distinction between biological mestizaje
(rendered usually in English as miscegenation) and cultural mestizaje (to
which, as we saw, some authors prefer acculturation, or transculturation),
he posits in fact métissage as an encounter between two different entities
whose effects could be calculated—as they are in cases of biological crossbreeding, of botanical graft—; on the other hand, he insists as seeing
creolization as “a métissage without limits—that is, something whose
elements are multiplied and whose results are unforseeable,” Glissant,
“Beyond Babel” 561) a perpetual movement of cultural and linguistic
interpenetrability preventing essentialist constructions.
While the concept of mestizaje/métissage appears to be losing its
place in current Caribbean critical discourse,25 as well as in other areas,
its alternative options—transculturation, syncretism, supersyncretism,
creolization—, although they are perceived as more appropriate to express
the “kaleidoscopic” character of cultures resulting from the “Contact,”
still stress the possibility of cross-cultural exchange. By contrast, other
interpretative tools of the Latin American discursive dynamics insist on
fractures, on the irreductibility of differences. This type of position is
illustrated forcefully and eloquently by A. Cornejo Polar: among various
suggestions, “contradictory totality” is thus proposed as a historicalhermeneutic category which stresses “the profoundly disgregated and
conflictive character of social relations in the whole region, especially in
those areas where class conflicts mix with ethnic problems.”26 Moreover,
one cannot fail to notice the author’s insistence on “mutual alterity”
(Cornejo Polar, “El discurso de la armonía imposible” 73) as a
(“disturbing”) fate for America, and on the “dramatic impulse of the
unresolved antagonisms,” perceptible even in the very individual subject
________________
See Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, “Métissage. Contours et enjeux d’un concept carrefour
dans l’aire francophone,” Etudes littéraires, XXV, 3, 1992-1993: 93-106.
26
A. Cornejo Polar, “Sistemas y sujetos en la historia literaria latinoamericana. Algunas
hipótesis.” Translation is mine.
25
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
50
producer of discourses her/himself, as a “vehicle for diverse and opposite
voices, located in distinct socio-cultural fields.”
This is not to say that A. Cornejo Polar does not envision
possibilities of exchange,27 but his support for “the exceptionally complex
nature of a literature … which works on the limits of dissonant, sometimes
incompatible, systems,” makes him strongly emphasize those same
incompatibilities or dissonances. In a recent analysis of El zorro de arriba
y el zorro de abajo, which illuminates certain effects of the irreversible
phenomenon of urbanization and transnationalization of Latin American
(in fact, global) cultures, his introduction of the “migrant” category in
critical discourse, as a new subject configuration besides the Indian and
the mestizo, is marked by an acute sensitivity to the heterogeneity of
experiences, even within the same subject (Cornejo Polar, “Condición
migrante...” 102).28 Whereas N. García Canclini stresses communication,
interaction (García Canclini 227), A. Cornejo Polar insists on the fact that
… the migrant stratifies his life experiences and … he cannot nor
does he wish to blend them since their discontinuous nature emphasizes
precisely the multiple diversity of these times and these spaces, their
respective values and deficiencies. (Cornejo Polar, “La condición
migrante” 104)
This emphasis on heterogeneity and irreductibility of practices
and values on A. Cornejo Polar’s part does not posit itself as promoting
difference, nor giving preference to a difference over another. It relates to
a “reading” of social practices which corresponds—as is always the case—
to a particular locus of enunciation, a space where social relations have
been marked by antagonism, incomprehension, skepticism with regard to
the viability of collective projects which would live up to the aspirations
of large sectors of the population. As is also (almost) always the case, this
particular reading is “received” in other spaces (loci) where other projects
are debated—through certainly less dramatic, but nevertheless deeply
unsettling, modes—, where antagonisms, also qualified as irreducible,
are foregrounded.
________________
As when he evokes “the proliferating dispersion of our literature and … the harsh nature
of its constitution, as it is made of misencounters, ruptures and contradictions, but also of
hidden, coincidental intercommunications,” Escribir en el aire (4).
28
Antonio Cornejo Polar, “Condición migrante e intertextualidad multicultural: el caso de
Arguedas,” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana XXI, 42, 1995: 102.
27
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
51
Being a citizen of a country (two nations?) deeply affected by
identity debates, I could not avoid—however problematic this association
may appear—relating certain aspects of A. Cornejo Polar’s position to
the current global discours de la différence, another alternative to the
mestizaje option. This “discourse on/of difference” has extremely diverse
manifestations, the most obvious ones being political claims related to
ethnic, religious or sexual/gender oriented issues. As well as the “assault
of the competing diversities of the world,” it expresses a growing
orientation (in the “Orient” sense of the term, as E. Glissant would say)
(Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers 101) of Western—
including Latin American—societies towards fields usually characterized
as alternative: spiritual practices, alternative therapeutic modalities,
epistemologies or literatures, informal economies, etc.
The French philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, taking the mimetic
relations of French racist-antiracist current expressions as a basis for his
analysis of what he calls the “ideology of difference” and its logic, sees
its double context of emergence in the contemporary forms of
individualism (narcissistic and hedonist centering on “oneself”), and in
the periodic reactions of ethnopluralism, either soft (regionalisms) or
violent (separatist terrorisms), whose common postulate is the absolute
disavowal of universalism. This “fetishism of difference” involves a major
social risk, since it facilitates processes of absolutization of a specific
heritage. It is obviously the case in “atavistic” cultural currents, with their
search, construction and glorification of a single root,29 the stock—souche
in French or cepa in Spanish, as in québécois de souche or español de
pura cepa—becoming then an explicit, valued, and highly exclusive social
marker.30
Differences, antagonisms are irreducible; they should not be
ignored nor camouflaged.31 However, the social, or ethical, imperative of
functioning, of building bridges towards the other, requires that zones of
contact should be investigated: those necessities could be accomodated
________________
Following Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the notion of single root, and the
notion of rhizome, E. Glissant operates a classification of cultures, between “atavistic
cultures,” established on a principle of Genesis and filiation, and composite cultures
articulated on rhizomatic (roots going towards other roots) dynamics (Ibid.).
30
We may paradoxically find other phenomena of ethnic valorization in composite cultures,
as seems to be the case in Canada, with the implementation of multicultural policies leading
to the proliferation of stereotyped cultural characterizations. See Neil Bissoondath 1994.
31
See next page.
29
52
Catherine Poupeney-Hart
by any of the options examined above, including, in some practical cases—
like, for example, the convenience of calling “mestizo chronicles” what
Martin Lienhard, more recently, characterized as “alternative written
literature” in its “Indo-Iberian variant”—the Mestizaje “solution.”
________________
As Slavoj Zizek puts it: “All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to
limit, canalize—to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism
through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis. It is not
only that the aim is no longer to abolish this driven antagonism, but the aspiration to
abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation.” The Sublime Object of Ideology
(London-New York: Verso, 1989: 5).
31
Mestizaje: “I understand the reality ...”
53
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