Arqueología del mestizaje: Colonialismo y racialización en iberoamérica

This dissertation is a critical reassessment of mestizaje, a concept that emerges in the sociocultural and scientific milieu of the criollo elites that engaged in the tasks of nation-building after independence from Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule. Archaeology of Mestizaje is a comparative analysis of racial discourses, sex, and gender in colonial power relations that sets a distinction between mestizaje as a colonial dispositif and mestizaje as a criollo concept. Chapter one traces the context of postcolonial nationalism and biological racism in which the term emerges, and relates it to colonial discourses of blood purity and legitimacy through the analysis of José Vasconcelos\u27s key 1925 essay, La raza cósmica. Chapter two examines four instances of strategic sexual contact between European men and Indigenous women in the period 1500–1532 in Brazil, Hispaniola, New Spain, and Peru to establish that race mixture cannot be separated from the sexual and gender relations that are central to the formation of colonial power relations. Chapter three compares discursive and non-discursive practices by mestizos and mamelucos in Perú and Brasil that were born as a result of this strategy in the context of colonial relations of war, in order to explore earlier, non-criollo discourses on race and race mixture. Chapter tour analyzes visual and iconographical developments of mestizaje in eighteenth-century casta paintings as an emerging criollo discourse. I argue that an archaeology is necessary because nineteenth and twentieth century criollo discourses on mestizaje operate to erase the violence of the colonial past, and that those relations and violence based on gender and race still subsist in the present as part of the process of coloniality of power