Making sense of promiscuity: race, empire, and mestizaje.
Mauricio Tenorio
Draft. (footnotes to be added)
Reduced to its very basics, mestizaje could be history’s only indisputable law: ceteris
paribus, everybody sleeps with everybody. What one society or country does with the
acostón varies in time and space, but not the very occurrence of mestizaje. Making sense
of this historical fact, promiscuity, has left telling traces in history; many early modern
and modern weighty concepts –Christian, subject, just war, citizens, Empire, identity,
equality, race or nation—somehow had something to do with making sense of
promiscuity.
Promiscuity, of course, has no exclusive historiography. It has been related to
histories of what M Bakhtin called “the low corporal,” as well as to histories of sexuality.
Yet I want to use the basic notion of promiscuity and mestizaje as linked to two different
historical tracks: that of race and empires, and that of the moral and historical weight of
miscegenation in history. Race, as an omnipresent and omni-powerful concept, has
colonized the history of empires, and one can forecast the conclusions of race-and-empire
histories, regardless of whether one deals with the 16th-century Spanish empire or with
the late 19th-century English or American empire. “In the 19th century, the age of
empire,” Thomas McCarthy recently wrote, in what seems to me an emblematic rendition
of what the historiography of race and Empire often offers, “the rapid expansion of
colonialism in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa, fueled a further development of racial
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ideologies, particularly in conjunction with the rise of physical anthropology and
evolutionary biology. In short, there was a continuous interplay between colonialism and
racism, between the establishment of imperial domination and the spread of racial
ideologies.” Equally, Spain becomes the inventor of linajes in New Spain, and the
mother or limpieza de sangre in Tlaxcala or Toledo. In the best version, as in Clare
Corbould’s expression, race and empire become, as the holy trinity, co-substantial: “race
was made by empire just as empire was made by race.” All of which sounds verisimilar,
especially about late 19th-century empires, but a lot less clear for early colonial societies,
and a bit too neat if considering both pre-existent forms of inequality (often related to
lineage) and the inevitability of miscegenation. Early modern empires, such as the
Spanish one, did not impose clear-cut notions of race to sustain domination. More often
than not, they sanctioned existing inequalities rephrasing then according to lasting
European criteria of social differentiations –origins, nobility, religion, and reputation.
Since antiquity, imperial adventures often included forced miscegenation. Robert
de Clari told the story of the treacherous emperor Andronicus who murdered
Constantinople’s noble class and then “took the beautiful women he found and lay with
them by force.” No need to repeat here similar sexual innuendos by conquistadores. The
result: territorial domains in which race is historically unthinkable out of its global, as it
were, imperial imperatives, but in which race –if a real factor of social differentiation—is
only visible for the historian as a local occurrence. And race, as an imperial category that
only acquires existence locally, constitutes an interpretative dilemma. In its local and
temporal specificities, race loses the imperial precision we, historians, often seek. In the
midst of many forms of social differentiation, always in the making at the local level, and
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in the midst of unstoppable and inevitable miscegenation, race and empire lose the
capacity of clear-cut mutual causation.
Thus, miscegenation becomes an optical effect in history. How to make historical
sense of promiscuity? For some histories, promiscuity is the most visible factor; for
others, it is invisible, it is taboo. Within, for instance, the race-obsessed U.S.
historiography, until very recently, miscegenation has been a taboo; the norm has been
the use of race as a way to fix people in well-delimited and separated colors, changing
moral polarities as time goes by. Anti miscegenation laws were passed throughout the
country and by the early 1960s these laws were still enforced in most states. Mestizaje
then was illegitimate sex, as un-American a thing as aristocracy. And until very recently
U.S. historiography has respected the taboo by sanctioning hyphenated ghetto histories
that at one side of the hyphen include a racial fixation –Mexican, African, Asian—and at
the other not promiscuity and miscegenation but simply location –American. That has
been the American way of making sense of promiscuity.
In turn, at first glance, mestizaje seems to be post-revolutionary Mexico’s
successful and more or less official –that is, sanctioned by a state and by intellectual
institutions— way of making sense of promiscuity. As it were, a “postcolonial”
invention. In fact, if the global context of possibilities for making sense of promiscuity
are considered throughout the history of the New Spain and Mexico, sanctioning the
mestizo/mestizaje emerges as the common way of dealing with all sorts of promiscuities
–and this since the incorporation of the terms into the Spanish legal, social, and moral
prose in the 1530s.
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Words tell a story. In 1611, Sebastián de Covarrubias’ Tesoro de la lengua
castellana o española defined mestizo as “el que es engendrado de diversas especies
animales; del verbo misceo, es, por mezclarse.” This was an animal-like definition that
nevertheless included a pervasive reflexive “mezclarse,” an action of self-amalgamation,
and “mesclarse” became not the exception but the norm. Race, in turn, was for
Covarrubias a “casta de caballos finos,” but in linajes “se toma en mala parte, como tener
alguna raza de moro y judío.” Race gradually acquired less negative connotations, and
Cronistas often referred to Indians as good and a noble race with no traces of Jewish or
Moorish features. Casta, by contrast, had acceptable (“Vale linaje noble”) connotations,
linked to castizo, noble, honest, for the term was linked to castus (chaste): “porque para la
generación y procreación de los hijos, conviene no ser los hombres viciosos, ni
desenfrenados con el acto venéreo; por cuya causa los distraídos no engendran y los
recogidos y que tratan poco con mujeres tienen muchos hijos.” But casta gradually
acquired other, less acceptable, connotations, namely, the “mezclarse” of all sorts of
people. More than mestizaje, casta gained the sense of promiscuity, for, history
demonstrated, those “desenfrenados con el acto venéreo” indeed had more children,
ironically shifting the meaning of castas from castizo and chaste to mere products of
inevitable promiscuity.
Mestizo bit by bit became the acceptable way of making sense of promiscuity -but then again always within the global circulation of ideas, fears, social experiments, and
peoples. I want to examine this historical category (mestizo/mestizaje) in the crossfire of
two lasting historical tracks: on one hand, making sense of promiscuity at the local level;
on the other, the durable powers of what I call the global search of the brown Atlantis,
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which refers to the creation of the idea of Mexico, mostly by foreigners but also by
Mexicans, especially between circa 1870 and 1940. Brown Atlantis connoted a racial
obsession—brown—and a place—Atlantis—whose essential reality was not topographic
but moral, constituted precisely by the fact of being simultaneously a robust
presupposition (that Atlantis existed) and a relentless search (it had to be found). Of
course the specific contents of this very modernist category –the brown Atlantis-- cannot
be extrapolated to the 17th or the 18th centuries, but, I submit, the essential logic of such a
search can.
By making sense of promiscuity—understood as a historically specific local
phenomenon—mestizaje acquired, as it were, its positive valence. The enduring, as it
were, imperial search for the Brown Atlantis –undertook mostly but not solely by
foreigners--- granted mestizaje its strong negative charge. Like in a magnetic field, in the
crossfire of these two polarities, of these two historical tracks, mestizo/mestizaje gained
its historical dynamism and strength among elites and commoners alike within Mexican
history and hence beyond.
I. Chemical composition.
Mestizo/mestizaje has presented a relatively stable chemical composition, but its
components have varied in their combinations throughout history. Less than castas,
mestizaje has implied promiscuity, which in turn has connoted illegitimacy and impurity.
To these components one can add sinfulness –for mestizo/mestizaje was from the outset
related to religious inclusion and exclusion. And also it has implied degeneration, not
only since the late 19th-century, but starting with medieval humoral medicine. All these
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elements, be aware, are in themselves bipolar: promiscuity, illegitimacy, impurity,
sinfulness, and degeneration necessarily imply sexual and moral virtue, legality, purity,
sainthood, and normality. There are two more components: redemption (i.e., purgatory
limbos, perfectibility, educability, potentia) and direction (i.e., mestizaje for whom, how,
when and until when). To be sure, direction has been an odd component of mestizaje, but
it is hard to miss when examining mestizaje carefully. Odd because if one considers
promiscuity as a matter of fact, mestizo/mestizaje is an uncontrollable variable, thus
senses of direction are absurd; one of course can deny the historical prevalence of
promiscuity –even more absurd.
Allow me to run simple experiments with these elements –promiscuity,
illegitimacy, impurity, sinfulness, degeneration, redemption, and direction—in two
different historical moments, looking at the crossfire between the impulses coming from
the local making sense of promiscuity and those coming from the lasting search for the
brown Atlantis.
II. Mestizos: Purgatory.
Starting in the 1950s, and after a long and global cultural struggle that went back
especially to the 19th-century biological redefinition of race, mestizo became an
unquestionable compliment. Serge Guzinski’s La pensée méstisse (1999) ended with:
“sin embargo, los fenómenos mestizos ofrecen el privilegio de pertenecer a varios
mundos en una misma vida: ‘soy un tupi que toca el laud.’” Nothing better than that, vive
le pensée méstisse. Mestizaje rocks¡ But let’s go back, for our moral evolution is more
twisted than we think.
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Staring in the mid 16th century, the mestizo became the legal, moral, religious,
administrative, political, somehow racial, and sexual challenge for Indigenous and
European institutions. Mestizaje as a racial metaphor was a moral and historical problem;
but it was even more of an institutional problem when it betrayed expectations; that is,
when mestizaje was not necessarily sexual, as the category indeed was for over four
centuries. In fact, mestizaje was in New Spain or in modern Mexico, on one hand, an
inevitable sexual fact; on the other, and more often than not, it was a political and social
positioning that had very little to do with sex.
But there was, from the outset, an undeniable and durable realization, namely,
promiscuity itself: humans were sinners, whether in Mexico City, in Puebla, or for that
matter in 14th-century Granada. Recall the stunning old romance: “Abenamar,
Abenamar, moro de la morería…”
Casada soy, rey don Juan,
casada soy, que no viuda;
el moro que a mí me tiene
muy grande bien me quería."
If men were indisputable sinners, women were thought to possess the devil’s
temptation --what medieval thinkers called “passions” and what a 1920s Mexican bolero
composer called “el hechizo de la liviandad.” For women, as the censor of Las Cartas
de la monja portuguesa in 1781 established, were full of “un amor torpe, lascivo,
sacrilego. . . capaces de encender este pestilente fuego en los ánimos de más candor.” But
no one, not even the Inquisition, thought that promiscuity could be avoided. It could be
controlled but not by denying it or by banning all sorts of relationships, but instead by
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sanctioning them through good Catholic institutions, fiscal policies, and social
reputations. Or, come to think of it, by tolerating it through medieval notions of tolerance,
as it was the case with prostitution in medieval times sanctioned as a lesser evil than
adultery and other worse sins. Thus putas, whose sins could be eventually redeemed, can
be seen in the many representations of Magdalenas in 16th and 17th Spanish paintings, or
as the background of 18th century popular coplas that could accept putas but not the
unaccountable sexual promiscuity of the clergy:
Tanto cura, tanto cura,
tanto puñetero fraile,
tanta monja de clausura,
tanto chiquillo sin padre.
So promiscuity was there, nothing to do about it. Thus from the 16th to the early
18th centuries, various factors were involved in making sense of promiscuity:
1.
First, pre-Hispanic forms of mestizaje, about which we are starting to learn. Like the
Spanish social hierarchy, part of the Mexicas’ stratification was based on lineage, which
often involved mestizaje with other groups as forms of political, military, and cultural
alliances. But mestizaje was not acceptable in all cases, it all depended on specific
circumstances. In the 15th-century, Mexicas sought cultural mestizaje with Tula, but to
mix with mazehuales otomies in Mexico-Tenochtitlan was to risk social degradation.
When the Spaniards, as a matter of necessity, reconstructed surviving Indian nobility,
they saved with that old linajes, old making senses of promiscuity.
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2.
The second factor that conclusively marked the local making sense of promiscuity was
the drastic and rapid demographic collapse and the constant low numbers of peninsulares
in the New World. The imprint of this factor in the social structuring throughout colonial
times cannot be exaggerated. It explains the early sanctioning of mestizaje as a
colonizing policy –if it meant unions among Indian women and Spanish men, adequately
sanctioned by sacraments. Making sense of promiscuity acquired and undue urgency,
which explains new legislation sanctioning mixed-race marriages and also the utopia of
keeping the two republics –that of Indians and that of Spaniards—clearly separated.
The Philippines can be used to explore what mestizaje would have been without
the demographic collapse. As J. L. Phelan shows, the lack of a massive mestizaje in 17thcentury Philippines was the result of a less severe demographic decline in natives –who
had a long history of contact with various diseases. This in turn produced a small, urban
(Manila) Filipino-Spanish mestizo class, and a rather large Chinese-Filipino mestizaje, as
Chinese migration to the Philippines was a lot larger than the low numbers of Spaniards
in the archipelago. As in New Spain, in the Philippines mestizaje meant above all
illegitimacy—lust is lust everywhere, and Spaniards kept Filipino mistresses--, but when
sanctioned by sacraments mestizaje was legally accepted. Moreover, the widespread
institutional and sexual mestizaje of New Spain produced social competition among
mestizos; competition which was a lot less dramatic in the Philippines where the
fundamental distinction was between Christianized and un-Christianized. In such a
context, mestizaje –Filipino (Christianized)-Spanish, but especially Chinese-Filipino
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(Christianized)—was actually encouraged and sought by the crown as a form of
evangelization. For aristocratic peninsulares, however, the option remained Spanish
women. It is not surprising that the opening of the first convent --for the order of
Franciscan Poor Clares in 1621 in Manila--, caused a massive protests among
peninsulares: within two years half of the available female Spanish aristocrats were in the
convent. But in the Philippines mestizaje among Spaniards and natives remained
minimal.
The demographic collapse in New Spain also explains the presence of Blacks, and
the emergence of a small third republic of pardos and Blacks, and thus another challenge
for the making sense of promiscuity. But it also explains a sort of welcoming of
mestizaje by exaggerating the religious and even biological potential of redemption
offered by mestizos. Gregorio Garcia’s influential Orígenes de los indios del nuevo
mundo (1607), based on Aristotelian thought, sustained that mestizos, being by and large
the offspring of Indian women and Spanish men, were welcome subjects and Christians,
for in the long run the male seed would prevail. Beside, marrying Indian nobility granted
social status to Spaniards. In sum, the demographic collapse helps to explain why from
the beginning mestizaje had the possibility of a positive and mighty charge, which
already somehow excluded the Black component, and assumed a policy of redemption
and directionality –only Indian women only Spanish, viejos cristianos, men.
The Black component, however, was also negotiated at the local level depending
on circumstances. There was the institution of slavery, which in New Spain did not
exclude baptism. But there were free blacks and pardos everywhere, and making sense of
this “third republic” in an environment dominated by a large Indigenous and mestizo
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population made easy the obliteration of the Black factor. Not in other territories, like
Nueva Granada, where pardos, as M. Lasso has shown, were included and excluded in
the tumoltuos years from 1809 to 1815 according to the complex use of mestizaje as a
way to grant citizens rights in the midst of inevitable promiscuity. By the end of the 18th
century, and especially at the beginning of the independent times, mestizaje became in
Cartagena the way to deal with Blacks. As Lasso shows, in 1804 the influential and
wealthy criollo of Cartajena, José Ignacio de Pombo, called for the promotion by all
means of “the union and mixture of castas, so there will be but one type of citizens
among commoners.” And in 1823, liberal Minister José Manuel Restrepo explained that
castas would be extinguished only by the promotion of racial amalgamation.
3.
A third factor in making sense of promiscuity was the relatively official, though not
imperially sanctioned, notion of limpieza de sangre –a statute that emerged in the
peninsula tightly linked to the exclusion of marranos and moriscos. The statute, as María
Elena Martínez has recently showed, acquired a peculiar translation in New Spain, not
because it was widely applied to marranos there–though it was in some 30 cases between
1571 and 1821—but because it reinforced local obsessions with origins and linaje. This
resulted in a genealogical fever that, though it included what today we would call racial
and ethnic components, was not purely racial or ethnic. It is safe to say that limpieza de
sangre passed from mere policy of religious protection (against Moors, Jews, and
Protestants) to a contingent policy (always varying depending on moments and
circumstances) of assuming political and social positions according to linaje: a society of
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linajeros, of seekers of linaje in a baroque, Catholic, and courtesan milieu. But it is
important to keep in mind, as Josep María Fradera has suggested, that this did not mean
the creation of a sociedad de castas, but the making sense of a sociedad con castas.
Limpieza de sangre seemed to have been translated into a casta system but in fact
the de facto mestizo society made of limpieza de sangre a flexible legal tool through
strong beliefs in redemption and direction. Even in the doggedly studied 18th-century
casta paintings, the sense of both moral and biological redemption is clear. Mestizos
became acceptable, redeemable, either by moral upbringing (education, good behavior)
or by marrying a Spaniard and thus becoming castizos. Limpieza de sangre cum castas
not only offered a redeemable social space for mestizos, but actually offered a unique
space for Indians to become mestizos without miscegenation, and for mestizos to become
whites or Indians. In the same way, by the 18th century, the institution of gracias al
sacar, made of Pardos in Nueva Granada “blancos de la tierra,” that is, Blacks and Pardos
who were institutionally white. So limpieza de sangre was indeed a strong command, but
just one more to manage the local making sense of promiscuity.
Allow me a digression: my friend Jan Szeminsk once told me in the old city of
Jerusalem –in his refined Andean Spanish—“amigo, usted tiene que entender que en
Israel hemos judíos protestantes y hemos judíos católicos, yo soy de estos últimos, y nos
hemos de comer un chancho.” In the same way, in New Spain for long there were
mestizo Indians –mestizos who by linaje or by choice decided to remain in Indian
pueblos or barrios—and mestizo Spaniards –mestizos who by linaje could claim to be
whites, as these things were established by asking vecinos, by reputación. New Spain’s
painting often and proudly depicted these characters, as in the portrait of Felipe Antonio
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de Austria y Moctezuma (anonymous, 1750), which depicted both Indigenous and
European nobility together, minimizing race through mestizaje.
Felipe Antonio de Austria y Moctezuma (anonymous, 1750).
4.
Making sense of promiscuity also included another factor (fourth) --fiscal policies,
deriving from medieval notions of protection, service, and “pactismo” (the pact of the
king with his subjects, especially with his more needy ones). The never truly achieved
república de Indios and república de españoles did produce two distinct fiscal regimes:
one for Indians who, through complicated intermediacies, had to pay tributo to their
señor, to their king, directly; and another in which everyone else (including mestizos) had
to paid different forms of local taxes, but not tributo. Indians in pueblos de indios could
hardly get away with not paying tributo, but, as we are learning, this was not so
burdensome as to produce a massive metamorphosis of Indians into mestizos –a
relatively easy thing to do and which occurred on daily basis in cities and towns. Instead,
slowly but surely the Indian population steadily grew. Tributo was, nevertheless, an
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incentive for mestizaje via miscegenation or via a simple moving out of Indian pueblos
and barrios. Cities were full of Indians cum mestizos, as Luis Fernando Granados has
shown, who were often interrogated but who frequently were able to pass as mestizos by
reputación and thus avoiding tributo. Mestizo craftsmen and professionals, or the
growing mestizo middle classes, were not subjected to tributo, but instead to innumerable
taxes which at the end turned out to be more burdensome than tribute (diezmos,
alcabalas). The very painters of the casta canvases and escribanos, pharmacists, tailors
… most were mestizos, subjected to various local taxes. So mestizaje was not a simple
tributo evasion, it had to be carefully weighed. Many Indians cum mestizos ended up
becoming the leperos in big cities, what today we would call the large informal sectors of
cities, including crime. And as such, the incentive of mestizaje was great, for informal
sectors had to pay neither tribute nor taxes. But leperos, in a society of linajeros, had no
linaje whatsoever. The point to make in this regard is that in matters of taxation, making
sense of promiscuity became a fluid terrain that seemed to work according to complex
local circumstances. But the fact is that in these possibilities of moving in and out of
taxation regimes, the mestizo became a slippery taxpayer, that is, the citizen par
excellence.
5.
A fifth factor involved in making sense of promiscuity was Catholic biblical exegeses. In
this realm, Indians were made and made themselves into the lost tribe of Israel, or were
made or militantly made themselves into novel savages, children in search of souls. And
mestizos became thus vivales, léperos, maleados, that is, noble souls who in view of
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miscegenation or illegitimacy, urbanization or abandonment of good costumes, had lost
innocence; they were, in sum, sinners. In the fatidic year of 1692 –the year of the massive
popular riot in Mexico City--, a report of parroquias argued: “.. se ponen medias y
zapatos algunos valonas, y se crían melenas, y ellas se ponen sayas, y haciéndose
mestizos y se van a cumplir con la iglesia a la Catedral…” and “. . aprenden la lengua
castellana y se hacen ladinos (que es el primer paso para tener atrevimientos, porque
mientras hablan su lengua son más humilde).” That is, there was nothing worse than an
Indian with initiative (a mestizo: a toro toreado).
Biblical exegeses, however, gradually found, had to find, a place for the mestizo,
thanks to ideas of redemption, legitimacy, and direction. After all, there was a natural
space for this lost but redeemable souls, namely, purgatory. Thus the idea of a middle
state, born in medieval Alexandria, refined over centuries as limbus infantium and limbus
partrum, and especially handy over the 14th-century demographic catastrophe, became the
limbo of New Spanishness. Mestizaje, the reign of the middle, of the quasi, of the almost,
of the hybrid, was the purgatory, and to be sure that state was not eternal (only until the
final judgment), but in the meantime it was a great solution for New Spain.
Jacques Le Goff shows how a rather bizarre and marginal interpretation of the
afterlife became the Augustinian idea of purgatory in the 11th and 12th centuries. In the
Middle Ages, however, representations of the purgatory, states historian Paul Binski,
were still rare. With the Reformation, and after the Council of Trent, purgatory was
instituted as dogma and became not “a trivial elitist concept in the age of the reformation
but, rather, one of the chief local points of popular religion” in Spain (Carlos M. N. Eire).
Three medieval Iberian thinkers were vital in this gradual transformation, Isidoro de
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Sevilla, Julián de Toledo, and Tajón de Zaragoza. They ruminated on the purgatory’s
biblical basis, on its actual location, and on the role of redemption by punishment of the
death and praying of the alive ones. The purgatory became the par excellence middle
stage, the equalizers, the blender: “the middle good and the middling bad receive their
just deserts in the middle (media autem bona et mala in medio).” This was a middle of
the road that, through penitence and “suffrages,” offered salvation. It required, of course,
intermediaries –saints, virgins—and “suffrage,” but it offered redemption. It is said that
in his will Philippe II left funds for the celebration of 30,000 masses for the salvation of
his soul in purgatory, and Quevedo argued that the nuns of Santa Teresa got him out of
the purgatory in matters of days. Wonderful invention this purgatory was.
New Spain emerged at the peak of the belief in purgatory in the 16th and 17th
centuries. Images of Rubens-like purgatories circulated throughout the Catholic world,
opposing Protestant austerity and inflexibility in the management of evilness. These
many images depicted the purgatory as a middle space between heavens and hell, with
people in the midst of flames as a form of purification from their sins. These many
representations of purgatory often depicted marks of status –papal mitres, royal crowns—
to show that even those who appeared pure on earth might be relegated to this in-between
realm, all differences leveled in purgatory, earthly appearances could conceal less than
holy souls. But in Europe, representations of purgatory rarely include depictions of racial
marks. In New Spain, almost all representations of purgatory included racial marks, for
the instructions were clear. As the prominent 16th-century Spanish painter Francisco
Pacheco wrote, depiction of the purgatory ought to include “los accidentes naturales y
comunes como son blanco, negro, rubio etcetera y todos los que han tenido, tienen y
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tendrán todos los hijos de Adan. Dije naturales, pues los casuales como ser tuerto, cojo y
manco, no se verán así aunque sea en los condenados.” Thus, as historian, Jaime Morera
has shown, in New Spain representations of purgatory became very common and
popular: “en la hoguera padecen la misma suerte blancos, indios, mestizos, mulatos y
negros. Es en este penar dentro del incendio que la desigualdad en el mundo de los vivos
se convierte en igualdad escatológica.” Moreover, purgatory representations were also an
imperial devise against other empires, especially the Protestant one, as Luther had
vehemently opposed that garish thing: purgatory. Beside Protestants opposed the very
idea of representing hell or heavens. Thus Covarrubias defined purgatory as that middle
stage of salvation, about which “han escrito mucho los católicos contra los herejes.”
Purgatory was apropos space for a promiscuous society of castas, and the adequate
response to the imperial, religious, and social challenge post by Protestantism.
Thus, for instance, Juan Correa’s late 17th-century rendition of purgatory in the
Parroquia --curiously, of Santa María Magdalena, in the State of Mexico-- or the
rendition of the purgatory by painter Miguel Cabrera in the Church of San Francisco
Javier, Tepotzotlán, both displayed a purgatory full of brown souls being somehow saved
by God’s intermediaries –saints and the virgin. Of course through our inevitably
genotypic lenses these become racial representations, that is, Indians. But try to imagine
yourself as a parishioner, either criollo, peninsular, mestizo or any other casta; would you
have felt “llamado” by the image? Hard to say yes, harder to say no, but I submit that
these ambiguity was intended, for so depicted purgatory was precisely the paradise of
moral, social, as it were, racial promiscuity and ambiguity. In it, as in New Spain’s
society itself, the bodies represented (always nude) could be of course Indians, but also
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anything else. For purgatory was a mestizo place, the place of redemption and direction –
subjected to tributo, diezmo, salvation, education, arrepentimiento. These images, I
think, do not depict a purgatory of Indians, but a purgatory of somehow –not necessarily
sexually—mestizados: mestizos sensu stricto and, also, mestizado Indian and Spaniards.
Hence mestizaje won a solid biblical exegesis. I suspect, though I cannot prove it, that as
such purgatory and mestizaje acquired somehow a wider social acceptance. So
understood purgatory sounds to me as comfort zone for mixed common people who,
aware of their intrinsic sinful nature, on one hand, idealized the anorexia, body
punishments, and mysticism of saints; and, on the other, believed in and feared the devil.
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Juan Correa, piece of El Purgatorio, Parroquía de Santa María Magdalena,
Tepetlaoxtoc, Estado de México (17th century)
Miguel Cabrera, details, Almas del Purgatorio, Iglesia de San Francisco Javier,
Tepotzotlán, Estado de México.
7.
Finally, humoral medicine, Hippocratic-Galean and Aristotelian sciences were also an
important factor in making sense of promiscuity in New Spain. As historians Urcelay
DaCal and David Nirenberg have shown, since medieval times lessons learned from
horse breeding became the basis of human racial distinctions. Through notions of
degeneration derived from Hippocratic-Galean medicine, New Spaniards as a whole
became inhabitants of promiscuity, of tropical hit, of bizarre culinary habits and religious
syncretisms. To be sure, according to these theories mestizaje could hardly be accepted.
19
However, as late 19th-century Mexican scientists did with modern biological racial
thought, New Spaniards twisted their theories, because within those ideas not only
mestizos had no place, but neither criollos.
In the late 18th century, rationalism prevailed in New Spain; racial, cultural,
linguistic, and legal promiscuities were fought through new and, one could say, more
modern ideas. Linguistically, the original command by Charles V to make of Spanish the
language of the entire Empire, was followed by Philippe II declaration of Nahuatl as
official language of New Spain, only to once again make of Spanish the official language
in the times of Philippe IV. By the 18th century, the Bourbon rationalist attempts to once
again homogenize language use with Spanish failed in the midst of various widely used
mestizo language: a Hispanized and generic Nahuatl, among many other native
languages, and a bizarre and bastardized Spanish already unrecognizable by the
Peninsulares who often considered that no criollo spoke proper Spanish.
In the midst of this rationalist attempts, race then acquired as much importance as
the fight against popular religiosity, which were full of hybridisms and theatricality.
Then criollos articulated what David Brading called criollo patriotism, rewriting not only
their history but their biology --the great Aztec past, the biblical origins of New Spain,
and the biological effects of a wild nature in their bodies. They manipulated the European
theories they practiced in order to relocate the criollo in the same position as the
peninsular. But in doing so they also did something that in the long run had tremendous
consequences: they relocated the mestizo as the Mexican, for they could only claim their
criollo patriotism by making it a creole patriotism, by mestisizing their origins: criollos
who loved their Aztec past, their peculiar natural scenarios, their tortillas and chiles, their
20
bizarre syncretism in language, the arts, and religion. Criollos who were proud of the
purity of their impurity.
In sum, in terms of making sense of promiscuity at the local level it would be hard
to argue that the mestizo had no place, that he/she was simply the bête noir, the
ontological anomaly of the order depicted by casta paintings.
III. Purgatory’s crossfire
Only by considering, if succinctly, this making sense of promiscuity in the crossfire of
three centuries of European searches of the brown Atlantis in New Spain can one
understand why mestizo/mestizaje was such a dynamic and powerfully devise for
inclusion and exclusion. For from the 17th century on, two European orientalisms merged
in views of New Spain: first, the consideration of Spain as a barbarian, backward,
Moorish-like, sensual but brutal entity; and second, the search for pristine environments,
lost innocence, untouched purity, noble savages, and barbarians in state of nature. This
potent combination produced the many accounts of the degenerative nature of the
Americas’ landscape, of the inferiority of criollos and mixed races, of places where
promiscuities among peoples, things, and ideas prevailed. No need to recall the writings
of Raynal, Roberston, Gibbon, Buffon, and many, many others. It has been shown, by
David Brading, Anthony Pagden, Jorge Cañizares, among others, how much of criollo
patriotism was but a reaction to these potent interpretations. Such Jesuits as Juan de
Velasco (for Quito), Juan Ignacio Molina (for Chile) and Francisco Xavier Claviejro (for
New Spain), launched a potent intellectual response to those interpretations, maintaining
not only their equality as criollos vis-à-vis Europeans, but also New Spain as a great
21
reservoir of Christian naiveté, purity, and potential for redemption. For as Locke put it, at
the beginning the entire world was America, that is, the entire world was a mess, was
mestizo. And this is why mestizo/mestizaje, during colonial times, was a charged
magnetic field used in order to escape the relegation of New Spain to the status of a
second class west or a third class East–as it was not even India or China. That is why
mestizaje was by definition an escape from both Spanish and Indian purities but also
from Blackness. It was a redeemable space, a purgatory, which with the right direction
could lead to heavens: to new Catholic kingdoms –as the criollos wanted-- or also to a
modern nation states, a direction maybe not imagined by criollos but their trickery put in
motion the unstoppable magnetic field of mestizaje. This radically contrasted with what
mestizo/metizaje was for Europe: simply hell.
IV. Mestizos: nationalizing purgatory.
Starting in the 1880s, mestizaje gradually became not one but the only way of making
sense of promiscuity in order to build a modern nation state. The contention could sound
a bit heterodox, as scholars are used to conceive the cult of mestizaje as a truly postrevolutionary, that is, 1920s and 1930s, Mexican phenomenon. In fact, as Claudio
Lomnitz, Roger Bartra and others have shown, post-revolutionary mestizofilia was but
Porfirian mestizofilia in steroids. The steroids were provided by the massive participation
of all sorts of commoners in the Mexican Revolution, of course. But the metastasis of
mestizofilia was only reached, once again, by a peculiar articulation of mestizaje in the
crossfire of making sense of promiscuity in Porfirian and early revolutionary times and
the new global search for the brown Atlantis between the 1870s and the 1930s. A search
22
that --in an era of mighty racial theories, all sorts of avant-gardes, the decline of the west,
and social revolutions-- found and founded, in a lasting fashion, the hitherto most
accomplished and enduring version of Mexico as the brown Atlantis.
Over the second part of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th
century, making sense of promiscuity meant incorporating many of the above-mentioned
factors that went back to the 17th but especially to the 18th century. Porfirian new
summaries of the national past reconstructed criollo patriotism, secularizing the old
Catholic pity and the paternalistic views of Indigenous people; that is, they appropriated
the old purgatory, but added at least four new factors to make sense of promiscuity: the
nation-state (a new essential goal to redirect all making sense of promiscuity), modern
science (in essence, race), education (the new crucial version of redemption), and
immigration (a new biological, cultural, and economic version for the intrinsic sense of
direction that promiscuity had implied).
Between 1870 and 1820, the new biologically-based understanding of race was
widely read in Mexico. Spencer, Haeckel, Darwin, German law, Pasquale Macini, U.S.
and English new anthropology, Ludwig Gumplowicz.. . all these authors and theories
were known and discussed in Mexico. But Mexican historians, writers, anthropologists,
politicians, and even poets had to manipulate all that. Making sense of promiscuity
according to the new racial theories was to totally obliterate the possibility of existence
for a people, a nation, a state, of de facto promiscuous peoples and scenarios. Once again,
no one attempted to deny the latter fact.
By 1909, one of Mexico’s pioneer modern sociologists and founder of
mestizofilia, Andrés Molina Enríquez, through global racist theories sustained, as an
23
optimal development, the evolution from the criollo to the mestizo Mexico. At the same
time, for instance, in the U.S. Herbert Croly spoke of the U.S. path from Jeffersonian
individualism to the essentially democratic pioneer of the West –the ideal American who
was, as Molina’s mestizos, adventurous, pragmatic, courageous, and possessed “freedom
for intercourse.” The democratic U.S. pioneer was the per excellence American, but like
Molina Enriquez, Croly sought direction. Both Croly and Molina advocated for a central
commanding State to tame the uncontrollable individualism and mess of mestizos and
pioneers.
Indeed, starting in the 1860s with Francisco Pimentel and Manuel Orozco y Berra,
a huge debate about mestizo/mestizaje began in Mexico. It was not a debate about the
possibility of mestizaje, a fact that no one attempted to deny or stop. It was not even a
debate about whether mestizaje was good or bad, but about nation, citizenship, and state
in view of the inevitable mestizaje. This is, I believe, not a minor difference. It was a
controversy about how to define such mighty concepts as the modern Mexican nation, the
Mexican citizen, the Mexican State, el pueblo mexicano. How could there be a nation and
a modern pueblo if there are not enough persons, if the population is stagnant or
declining, and the actual inhabitants are linguistically, racially, and culturally
heterogeneous? For there was no doubt: in the second part of the 19th century, if nation
and state had to be pronounced it had to be done in the modern language of race like
never before, in Mexico, the U.S. or any other nation.
Of course these debates were about offering a racial solution to something that
could not be articulated otherwise. Thus it is not that the idea of the national Mexican
was “racialized” in Porfirian times, because, as a modern entelechy, a national character
24
had never had a non-racial existence. At most, what the racial turn of the second part of
the 19th-century did with the national character was --as the beans that are never fritos but
refritos--, to re-racialize the character that started to be fully racially defined in the 18th
century.
These debates lasted decades. The winners were the astute, the treacherous ones,
the cheaters, the bad readers of Spencer and Darwin, the empollones that studied and
twisted the racial theories they needed to argue the unarguable: the mixture of races was
not only a good thing, but a very good thing, at least for Mexico; it resulted in a better
natural selection of the best fitted. And the mestizo --that character who was maybe
unintentionally advanced by 18th-century criollo patriotism--, became in Porfirian times
the Mexican per excellence, the future for whites and for Indians. Almost all Porfirian
mainstream scientists, intellectuals, and politicians eventually welcomed the triumph of
the mestizo, but not without redemption, which for almost all of them meant education.
All that happened long before the Revolution, with people like Vicente Riva Palacio,
Genaro García, Ricardo García Granados, Fracisco Bulnes, Emilio Rabasa, Justo Sierra,
Alfredo Chavero, Julio Guerrero, Luis Wistano Orozco, and Andrés Molina Enríquez.
By the time the first post-revolutionary mestizofilico arrived, Manuel Gamio, the table
was already set.
Thus making sense of promiscuity meant simply the sanctioning of mestizaje
understood as various allegories: survival, purity of the supreme impurity, cult of the
halfway, anti-democracy, violence, and mueganismo.
1.
25
Survival was the embodiment of the mestizo as Realpolik, as the mutated entity able to
survive in the bizarre Mexican land. That is, the mestizo as the opportunist, as the
classless people whose only available path was the nation. For many, this was the way of
making sense of promiscuity and the idea was: con estos bueyes había que arar. No one
ought to dream of erecting Athens in Mexico. The future was imagined as the total
triumph of the mestizo, redeemed by education. In the midst of racial wars everywhere
in the world –Cuba, the Phillipines, China, India, the Balkans--, the mestizo was carefully
advanced as a mere Mexican solution, not for universal acceptance. It was realpolitik:
the ad-hoc citizens for Mexican scenarios. This was such a powerful articulation that lo
mestizo was reconstituted as a race in itself, according to the new racial vocabulary. A
new racial pure identity reached not by democratic or liberal means but by a de facto
sexual laissez faire. That is, if promiscuity was allowed to do its work (the invisible hand
of lust) the mestizo would win. Mestizo was a new race of survivors, for after all Mexico
was and is the country of survivors against all odds. But it was not articulated, not until
the 1920s, as a superior race –as white supremacy and other racial supremacies were
advanced simultaneously.
2.
By making sense of promiscuity in this way, hence, Porfirians created a new purity out of
impurity. That is why Porfirian, and thus post-revolutionary, ideologies of mestizaje,
were conceived as profoundly anti-American, anti-Chinese, anti-Black. As purgatory was
a way to oppose Protestantism, mestizaje was a way to oppose the U.S. For instance,
when talking about Indians and mestizos in Mexico, Porfirians had no problem in
26
advocating total mestizaje and even more, by bringing immigrants of the right kind
(direction). But the same thinkers –such as Molina Enríquez or Gamio himself—
vehemently opposed and denied the mestizaje of Mexicans with other peoples in the U.S.
when examining migration of Mexicans (all mestizos) to the U.S. –a trend that went back
to the gold rush and only accelerated with railroads. For them, mestizos somehow ought
to keep their new achieved status of purity, their Mexicanness. By the 1930s, Molina
Enríquez saw two tracks in making sense of promiscuity, one that “pretende llevar a los
principios mestizos, o sea a la futura realidad, hacia las formas estructurales copiadas de
la cultura occidental, sobre todo de los criollos de las ciudades; y la otra sobre todo la
india y la mestiza del campo, hacia la formas patriarcales definidas de la cultura oriental.”
But Mexico as mestizo nation had a new racial superiority: “Si los Estados Unidos llegara
a dominar por las fuerzas económicas todo el continente americano, México llegará a
dominar a los Estados Unidos por su fuerza cultural… Los Estados Unidos, país
esencialmente occidental, no podrán crear una cultura; pero nosotros que con la cultura
occidental, llevamos los acentos orientales, sí podemos crearla. Para tener una cultura se
necesitan dos fuerzas opuestas y los Estados Unidos no tienen más que una.”
3.
The mestizo was a theorizing of faits accomplis, and as such it meant a cult of half ways.
Porfirian mestizofilia went back to that supreme colonial middle of road mestizo space:
purgatory. This allowed mestizaje to metamorphosize into many things: mestizo meant
of course anti-criollo, also anti-catrines, anti-high class, and also anti-Indians --a praising
of the middle, of the commoner, of the average. For Mestizaje, either in colonial
27
purgatories or in Porfirian mestizofilia, was a way to emphasize circumstances not
identities. This cult of mediania allowed for great compromises with liberal and
democratic principles, with racial ideas, and with God. Mestizo meant an acceptance of
the almost: almost democratic or almost totally authoritarian or fascist, not total private
property, not all state propriety not all communal property. This cult of half ways offers
two important clues to understand the success of mestizaje. It allowed a postrevolutionary coorporativist regime to naturally make of mestizaje into something very
powerful and lasting: mestizaje became the other name of a modern, if corrupt, welfare
state. And it explains the relative easiness –hard to prove-- with which mestizaje was
popularly consumed in a dynamic and changing market of social identifications.
4.
But since colonial times violence was intrinsic to promiscuity. As a sexual metaphor
mestizaje at times had meant strength, rape: “los excesos celulares,” wrote Molina,
“producen una molesta inconsciente pero intensísima… la mujer a su vez, formada de la
masa misma del hombre como con toda exactitud dice la tradición bíblica, para recibir y
dilatar la masa celular segregada, la recibe con placer, sufre todos los efectos de la
molesta que ella causa por sí misma y cuando ya está en condiciones de seguir una vida
relativamente independiente, la expulsa a la vez con el dolor de un arrancamiento y con la
satisfacción de un alivio.” For these Porfirian intellectuals, this kind of violence
constituted the organic one that mestizaje naturally implied. For as in Germany, the U.S.
or Spain, the ethnic formation of the nation implied violence. Porfirian peace assumed
this kind of violence and translated it, like in the U.S., Argentina, and Brazil, into ethnic
28
wars against barbarians in the frontiers, against enclaves of no Mexicanization, of no
mestizaje.
5.
Finally, making sense of promiscuity in Porfirian times meant to consider the mestizo the
origins of what Fernando Escalante has called Mexican social mueganismo.1 Mestizo
became an individual that through formal and informal means (friendship, ethnic
solidarity, family, religion) tended to form mueganos, that is, sweet, functional, if
somehow chaotic, social units; as it were, real communities, though excluding the
democratic connotations the term possesses in English. Part of mestizos’ survival success
relied on their evolution, like wolves, to hunt in packs. Many of our contemporary
assumptions about communal Mexican values come from the possibility of making
mestizaje the basis of mueganismo.
V. Depicting mestizos.
Making sense of promiscuity in Porfirian and early post-revolutionary times was this
messy and yet powerful mestizofilia. But note something: it was not only the sanctioning
of a racial entity, but also of desire itself. It was now permissible to feel desire for brown
bodies, which in painting was best embodied as a modernist twist to baroque
representations of the brown body, especially in the telling depictions by the great
Porfirian painter Saturnino Herrán.
1
Muegano: traditional Mexican sweet --clusters of either flower flakes or pop corn put
together using brown sugar as glue.
29
Saturino Herrán, El nacimiento de los volcanes (1900s).
Herrán, through eroticism and modernist stylizations, represented brown bodies of
ambiguous gender, racial or social statuses, and in such an ambiguity grew the image of
the generic, the Mexican. After Herrán, everywhere –in book illustrations, murals,
canvases, photos, sculpture—the mestizo became the universal generic, the Mexican. It
was as if declaring over the linajero craft –no more searches of any racial or social purity.
Indians were glorified and depicted in many ways, but over a background of universal
mestizaje. The many of 19th and 20th-centuries milagros that were located in churches
throughout the country –depicting generic characters, Mexican, somehow mestizos, with
captions in vernacular Spanish--, assumed race and racism as an uncomplicated issue.
Mexico was mestizo, and being mestizo gradually meant access to a large welfare state.
Rather than the well-known artistic images of Mexican post-revolutionary arts, the cover
of the official textbooks that were freely distributed for more than five decades clearly
depict the goal of ending the role of linajeros in depictions of Mexico. Whatever were
30
the official intentions of the brown Madona in the covers of public schools’ textbooks,
what is clear is that she did not represent a quota of casta or of an ethnia meant to boost
the self-esteem of brown people. The image meant to encompass consensual marks of
Mexicanness that were that, consensual, precisely for their misplaying of the importance
of race through mestizaje.
Another example is the 1950s symbol of the IMSS –Social Security National
Institute--: a mestiza Madonna covered by the national eagle (designed by F. Cantú). The
access to medical care offered by a mestizo mark was proof of the end of searches of
linajes. The woman image served as purgatory: good for all regardless of color or class.
In the same way, in the Centro Escolar Revolución, constructed in 1933-1934 in what
used to be the inferno of the Belém prison, the sculpture of a generic looking woman, a
teacher, surrounded by children –in a way resembling old images of souls in the
Purgatory--, displayed the legend “Educar es redimir.” The we have it --the divine
couple, mestizaje and redemption (education) embodied in the monument at the entrance
of a model public school constructed by the revolutionary regime at the peak of Mexico’s
post-revolutionary official mestizofila. Or a mural, but one that was located at the lobby
of the Oncology hospital of the National Medical Center in the early 1960s, by Siqueiros:
a Mexican woman being treated by brown doctors and by a cobalt pump. This is the
fantasy of no-race-problem through mestizaje as a metaphor of the welfare state. An
unreal but not a bad idea.
31
32
VI. The Mestizo at the Crossfire
This lasting mestizofilia came to be, and can only be understood in its strength and
potentia, by considering it in the crossfire of the global search for the brown Atlantis in
Mexico. In 1907, Dr Raphael Anatole Emile Blanchard from the French Academy of
Medicine, wrote about what he called the mestizo paintings, that is, the 18th-century casta
paintings which are today invariably included in any U.S. Latin American history
textbook. Blanchard argued –wrongly I believe-- that mestizos were left with no real
social place within New Spain’s social hierarchy. Thus, he believed, Spanish authorities
sought to measure the grade of “mesticidad”. “Castilian pride,” thought Blanchard, could
not stand promiscuity. Before Blanchard, E. T. Hamy, one of the founders of 19th-century
33
physical anthropology, had studied similar paintings, which were found in a Paris
Museum, and he interpreted them as scales of degeneration. Nothing to do about that: no
one, in the U.S., France, England, Germany or Spain, between, say, 1850 and 1920 could
conceive that racial miscegenation was biologically, culturally or morally commendable.
Consider this: the last anti-miscegenation law was repelled in the U.S. in 2000. Even 20thcentury U.S. great scholars devoted to Mexico, found mestizaje a bit too hard to swallow.
As late as 1967, J. L Phelan, one of the most prominent U.S. historians of colonial
Mexico in the 20th-century, saw mestizaje as a sort of psychoanalytical handicap: in New
Spain “the mentality of mestizos was plagued by psychological insecurity, resentments,
and frustrations created by their ambiguous cultural situation.” One wonders to what
extent this was the psychological insecurity of 17th-century mestizos or the racial
insecurity of a 20th-century U.S. historian, who nevertheless, like 18th-century criollos,
saw possibilities of redemptions in mestizos: “Although the process of miscegenation
imposed severe psychological and cultural tensions on both the Indians and the mestizos
which are visible to this day, the mestizo character of Mexico’s culture offers promising
and unique possibilities of development and growth.” Measure the size of the Porfirian
daring and imprudence vis-à-vis this lasting ideas. Mesizofilia, for all its racist, antiBlack, anti-Chinese, anti-American connotations, was in fact an extremely radical way of
making sense of promiscuity.
Because for foreign views the mestizo was the ontological anathema of the brown
Atlantis. For those views, the mestizo was the corrupted brown, the bad Indian, the worst
aspects of the terrible and backward Spaniard. Indeed foreign views of Porfirian and
34
early post-revolutionary Mexico can be considered the works of new linajeros in search
of racial linajes, for only in such a way their brown Atlantis could survive.
Before providing examples of these new casta paintings produced by the modern
search of the brown Atlantis, I feel compel to deal with two peculiar 20th-century U.S.
views of Mexican mestizaje. One, has to do with Mexicans in the U.S., and another with
the only –up to the 1930s-- enthusiastic consideration of the mestizo by an American –the
ill-known U.S. radical woman, Evelyn Trent.
1.
Porfirian and early revolutionary mestizofilia was both reinforced by the very condition
of neighboring the U.S. and appropriated in odd ways by the U.S. racial legal system.
The constant flow of Mexican and U.S. citizens between the two territories reinforced
self-identification of Mexicans as mestizo: not Black, not Asian, not Spaniards, nor pure
Indians…. Mexicans. In 1921, in Arizona, Joe Kirby nullified his marriage with
Mayellen –a Mexican-American—by proving that she was Black. When interrogated, she
said her mother and father were Mexicans, “What do you mean by Mexican… Indian, a
native?” asked the judge. “I don’t know what is meant by Mexican…” she responded.
The purgatory, limbo, mestizo existence of Mexicans made of Mexicans in the U.S. what
mestizos were in the hierarchical structure of colonial times, that is, a matter of daily and
local negotiation.
From the 1830s to the present, not one of the many anti-miscegenation laws
specifically included Mexicans. At times Mexican could prove to be white, at times they
were considered Orientals or Mongoloids or Blacks. But it all depended on specific
35
circumstances –class, region, language, skin color, gender. The prominent 1941 case
(Pérez v. Sharp) was advanced in California not because Andrea Pérez was Mexican but
because she was considered white, and her husband was Black. Andrea defended her notwhiteness in order not to be vulnerable to California anti-miscegenation law. Mexicans
could not be fully and always accepted as anything in the U.S., so they defended their
limbo status, at times claiming Spanish descendants, at times above all denying any
Asian or Black traces in their linaje. Of course, lynching people of Mexican descent -according to William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, there were more than 500 men of
Mexican origins lynched in the U.S. from the 1870s to 1930s-- became the expression of
what historian Richard Hofstadter called in the 1950s ethnic nationalism, an expression
of anguish about lost status and extinction. But it would be hard to argue that the vast and
growing Mexican population in the U.S. were caught in the same no negotiable cage as
Blackness. In turn, mestizaje in Mexico clearly functioned as ethnic nationalism --except
for some well-known cases, Mexico’s history has no record of massive lynching or
killing of U.S. citizens, but it does offer ample evidence of the killing and harassment of
Spaniards and Chinese.
2.
In turn, the only case I have found of a U.S. resident in Mexico City before the 1930s
who praised the mestizo, was a radical communist woman, Evelyn Trent, the wife of the
Bengali founder of the Mexican Communist Party, M. N. Roy. She published her unkown
book Mexico and her People in installments in the English section of El Heraldo in
Mexico City in 1919. The book constituted a search for an exotic utopia, but a modernist
36
one with no idealistic endorsements, nor racial rejection or racial idealization of the
Mexican Indigenous population. It was, in fact, one of the very few foreign pre-1930s
books that advanced a unique, positive, and realistic view of what Trent called the
mestizos who were, for her, the “real” Mexicans.
As Molina Enríquez, Trent called urban mestizos “the middle class,” considering
them real pragmatic republicans who were ready to experiment with, and appropriate, any
available local or global trend. This was “the middle class which formed the unhappy
link between oppressed barbarism and civilized oppressor, sharing the blood of each but
belonging to neither, and whose soul awoke the first vague conception of national entity
and who first called himself with a sense of pride, Mexican, in place of the opprobrious
mestizo or Creole.” This consideration of the Mexican sharply contrasted with the
common kind of “progressive” or “racist” hatred of the mestizo. Hart Crane, Stuart
Chase, Robert Redfield, A. Artaud, Edward Weston and Carleton Beals disliked the
mestizo as an unauthentic, urban, character. Mexicans were not, for Trent, the
stereotypical exotic characters that countless Americans, and her Bengal husband M. N.
Roy, believed them to be. She did not expect Mexico to become endlessly more
Indigenous and, thus, more “real.” For her the Mexican was, in fact, a pragmatic political
character who tries, errs, succeeds, fails, and learns: “the Mexican of today is quick to
glimpse new ideas and his mind is a receptacle for impressions from every source…he is
not imitative.” Thus, she observed, anything and everything could be found in Mexico,
from the Pullman car, electric light or futuristic art to decadent literature and “the atheism
and new thought cults that flourish in Mexico side by side with indigenous institutions
and beliefs.” Trent’s book was meant to demystify those concepts based on a two-fold
37
axis that, on one hand, recognized the pragmatic empowering of urban dwellers, thus
granting them the possibility of democratic national experimentation; and on the other,
saw the need for a new internationalism that could stand up to the common enemies of
materialism and consumerism: “The Mexican of post-revolutionary Mexico has few
prejudices; he may take on new ideas and fashions, but that is no reason, to his mind, for
abandoning the old. The adjustment from one to the other is often difficult, frequently
absurd, yet someday there will be a welding that will make his civilization as unique as
his race—unless the spirit of commercialism, which hourly encroaches, reduces him to
the same dead level of monotonous materialism that has turned the modern world into an
international league of money changers.”
In sum, this was a U.S. radical woman, married with a “color” man, who priesed
mestizaje in 1920 Mexico. But Trent was truly an exception, even among the communists
who became fascinated with Mexico.
VII. New Casta Paintings.
Let us deal with crossfire of the new casta paintings. I could reconstruct a series of
(literally) renewed casta paintings from these modern orientalist linajeros for the reader
to sense how enduring and common this view was. I could start in 1860 or 1880, but let
us start in 1909. A picture in W. E. Carson’s Mexico, the Wonderland of the South
(1909), labeled “The Ancient Races,” depicted people who could have been from
anywhere but were, according to the author, the ancient races. The same book included
pictures of “Typical women of the upper class,” in sharp contrast with “Indians” in public
schools. The book did not allow Mexicans to be mestizos: 99% of Mexicans were
38
Indians, though they would not admit it. In 1925 a book about Mexico included the
picture “Aztec Indian,” which was a carefully staged studio picture of what could easily
be any urban child, indigenous or not, a mestizo. The artistic account of Mexico by U.S.
modernist photographer Paul Strand was also a sort of ethnographic account of Mexican
castas, as he, together with U.S.-Australian photographer Anton Bruehl, escaped the city
and took trips to shoot “authentic” types. In 1941 a writer from the southern U.S.,
Hudson Strode, visited Mexico to repeat the same old story about Mexico City. There he
met Diego Rivera, left the city for Patzcuaro, and found Prisciliano, a boatman at
Patzcuaro lake. “I know [he is] authentic Tarascan and not a studio creation,” he argued.
The picture: a handsome brown man in a 1940s proletarian outfit who, by decree of the
observer, was a pure Indian. Of course the photo used cacti as background. He might
have been “pure,” but after all what was and what is a pure Indian? Mestizaje was a
taboo. Antoni Artaud sought hallucinations of authenticity in the peyote of Tarahumara
Indians, but hated the mestizo (his adjective) local teachers who, unlike him, spoke
Tarahumara language.
Though one could present countless pieces more for this puzzle of modern casta
painings, allow me to finish with a very late image: Herbert Cerwin’s 1947 picture These
are the Mexicans, a truly contemporary casta painting including the criollo, the mestizo,
and the pure Indian —a typical rendition of Mexico as a utopia of racial specificity.
Mexicans, in sum, were either not Mexicans—bourgeois Europeans or mestizos—or
Mexicans belonged to a racial structure that the cities and modern times both created and
contradicted. And this was as recent as 1947.
39
W. E. Carsons, Mexico The Wonderland of the Sourth (1909). The ancient races.
40
“Aztec Indian,” in Frank G. Carpenter, Mexico (1925). New York, The
Macmillan company, 1909.
Pure Tarascan Indian, Hudson Strode, Now in Mexico (1947).
Contemporary Casta Paiting. Herbert Cerwin’s These are the Mexicans (1947).
In the crossfire of this search of the brown Atlantis and the Porfirian making sense
of promiscuity, mestizofilia emerged as Mexico’s nationalistic, political, and social
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proposal as a modern nation-state. It was, again, mestizaje understood as deindianization, and also was a form of anti-Blackness. But it was also a sophisticated
discourse of citizenship for a poor, racially diverse, and heterogeneous country. It was
definitely –as the ideas of the melting pot or multiculturalism are-- a racist solution for
the problem of local racism. But its real sense and power is only obtained by considering
it within the above-explained crossfire with the search of the brown Atlantis.
End.
The mestizo has remained, through different argumentations, the local cooking of
cosmopolitan ingredients in order to support different state-ordered projects; but always
as a local solution in constant adaptation and struggle with the unstoppable global
ingredients. Then came the post-revolutionary appropriations of this mestizofilia, a
making sense of promiscuity in the middle of a local massive urbanization and
industrialization, in the crossfire of the first global anti-racist and culturalist wave. Then
Mexico’s mestizofilia boomed for the first time not only as a Mexican solution, but also
as the solution for the race problem in many countries. In order to get there, it was not
more Mexican making sense of promiscuity that was needed –there was enough; instead
what was needed was such pecata minuta as a Nazi Germany, a holocaust, and things
alike which in turn changed the dislike of mestizos sustained by the searchers of the
brown Atlantis. Mestizos was finally at least aesthetically and intellectually cool.
But, as I have tried to show, these matters do not obey our actual sense of moral
evolution, that is, from limpieza de sangre to mestizofilia, from slavery and apartheid to
Obama, from mestizofilia to multiculturalism. For today, once again, Mexico’s making
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sense of promiscuity through mestizofilia has been weakened by the decline of the
welfare state. If mestizaje no longer means access to public education, health care, or
favors from a corrupt but inclusive coorporativist regime, it makes very little sense. And
this decline has been caught in the crossfire of a multicultural turn –a form of neoHasburg limpieza de sangre-in the endurable searches of the brown Atlantis. Starting in
the 1990s, mestizaje became the bête noir of NGOs, U.S. anthropologists, and
progressive neo-indigenistas in Mexico and elsewhere. The search for the brown Atlantis
has become the secret search of new purity. Current multiculturalism and alike talking of
race is also a race and empire kind of thing. Thus once again, mestizaje is anathema in
Mexico, Guatemala, and other places. But that is another story. Truth be told, very long
ago promiscuity in its many versions had made obsolete and absurd any substantive
notion of racial, ethnic or cultural mixture. Promiscuity won centuries ago. When mixture
has prevailed for so long, how and where to find the unmixed so that it makes important
sense to fight over race, ethnia, mestizaje or diversity?
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