Diversity Reading List

Comment (from this Blueprint): Pérez’s analysis is interesting for the aims of the blueprint for three reasons. First, it is interesting to see the role she grants to spirituality in the fight for social justice, particularly when it comes to gender, race, and ethnicity in the U.S. Second, it is interesting to see whether the emphasis on the connection between aesthetic practices and spirituality might help avoid mestiza aesthetics falling into appropriative practices. Finally, it is important to analyse mestiza culture in the U.S. to see whether it might offer any lessons for mestizo cultures in Latin America.

Comment (from this Blueprint): In this paper, Pitts does two things that are relevant for the aims of this blueprint. First, she understands Anzaldúa to be in dialogue with, and as a continuation of, the Latin American philosophical tradition. In this sense, rather than seeing Latinx feminism as emerging simply from an opposition to the Anglo-American intellectual tradition, she sees it as inheriting and furthering a rich Latin American philosophical tradition that, although problematic at times, has plenty to offer to contemporary philosophical thought, and which has been unfortunately ignored for too long. Second, she brings forward the role that aesthetics plays in theorizing about race and mestizo identities in Latin America, and in the constitution of social identities, as well as the centrality of aesthetics in the Latin American philosophical tradition.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Given unjust social conditions faced by Afro-Latin communities in Latin America, it is important to examine the erasure of Afro-Latin identities from narratives about the constitution of mestizo national identities. While Indigenous identities are appropriated as partly constitutive of mestizo identity, Afro-Latin cultures are often regarded by mestizos as that which is Other. This results not only in the exoticization of Afro-Latinidad, but in the lack of available resources to acknowledge and address racial discrimination faced by Afro-Latin groups in many Latin American countries. Moreover, while Latin American cultures are often regarded as the result of Spanish and Indigenous mixing, it hasn’t been until recently that the African diaspora has been acknowledged as the third root of Latin American aesthetic practices.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Mariátegui’s criticism of the Latin American literary canon is interesting because he brings forward the way in which Eurocentric mestizaje has shaped the aesthetic practices that are regarded as constitutive of Latin American identity. Much like Adrian Piper’s criticism of critical hegemony in the arts, Mariátegui argues that the Latin American literary canon is built on “Hispanism, colonialism, and social privilege” that is passed as a neutral academic spirit. Mariátegui shows, therefore, how even in mestizaje taste remains racialized.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Rosario Castellanos’ examination of mestiza identity as being in-between proves an interesting test to the criticisms of Indigenismo suggested by Villoro. It reveals a complex relation between the mestiza protagonist and the Indigenous cause. Castellanos also offers an opportunity to think about mestizaje from a feminist perspective. When it comes to mestiza, rather than mestizo, consciousness, we find a double displacement. She is out of place insofar as she finds herself in between European and Indigenous cultures. But she is also out of place because, as a woman, she cannot fully be a citizen of the mestizo nation and neither can she go back to an Indigenous culture to which she doesn’t belong.

Comment (from this Blueprint): The coloniality of power at the centre of Latin American societies as analysed by Quijano is key to understanding why a notion like mestizaje is problematic when building national identities in multicultural States. Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power helps explain why even when Latin American identities are purported to include Indigenous and Black culture, mestizaje often involves the “civilizing” force of European rationality. Quijano, therefore, helps in bringing forward the dangers of mestizophilia: the pseudo-integrative spirit of mestizaje into multiethnic, multicultural, multiracial society risks becoming a homogenization under whiteness.