A finger in the wound

Nelson, Diane. “Introduction: Body Politics and Quincentennial Guatemala”. A Finger in the Wound. Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. . Pp. 1-40. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

In her study of race relations between Mayans and "ladinos" in Guatemala, Nelson makes some very key observations that can be used to analyze the situation of Chileans dealing with political violence at the aftermath of Pinochet's dictatorship. For instance, the fact that racial differences are portraited by the state as dangerous for national unity. Also, that individual bodies are disciplined so as to produce the "body politic", because efforts to form a national "whole" require material proof on material bodies by racial, sexual and gender marking. In the attempt to "fix" conflictive racial relations, the state circulates the metaphor of the family and of conviviality at home: we all have to live in the same house. This metaphor of the (nuclear, patriarchal) family contains both the power asymmetries and the intimacy of conviviality, where the "Indian" is coded either as female (a bad wife that leaves her husband and children) or as a "problem child". To speak of racial difference is a finger in the wound and for state representatives, it is better to forget and erase those differences under an homogeneous national identity.

Comments

  1. JonJuly 19, 2009 at 2:40 AM

    Hmm. I'm not entirely sure that race (or the discourse of racial difference) has been so important in Chile. Do you disagree? Were, for instance, supporters of the UP stigmatized as racially different?

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  2. Manuela Valle-CastroJuly 22, 2009 at 9:11 PM

    I wanted to use Nelson not so much to make the argument that racial difference is the main discourse articulated during the dictatorship and transition, but rather to use Nelson's idea that the violence inflicted on some bodies is constructed as necessary to defend the wholeness and unity of the 'national body'.

    However, I am convinced that race has been relevant during the dictatorship and transition inasmuch has been entangled with class. For instance, this is evident in a scene in the Chilean film Machuca (2004) by Andres Wood, when young boys from the poblaciones come to sit in a class full of middle and upper class boys of a private school. This scene makes visually evident that class difference is racialized, and that upper-class boys are aware of their racial privilege and entitlement. I think that still in Chile, racial difference is frequently mobilized in the context of class difference to assert the elite's moral superiority.

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