Gender components in myths of mestizaje

Smith, Carol A. “Myths, Intellectuals, and Race/Class/Gender Distinctions in the Formation of Latin American Nations”. Journal of Latin American Anthropology . September 1996, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 148-169.

Smith examines how "mestizaje" emerged linked to nationalist ideology but has also been appropriated in different ways by the identity politics of some "new social movements" in Latin America.

The myth of mestizaje entails at the same time the illusion of homogeneity and the affirmation of internal racial hierarchies. Hegemonic national culture needs to be produced and controlled by state institutions. Mestizaje is presented as the "natural" or biological basis for the project of a national culture, and it is then a key ideological and mythical component of nation-building processes in LA. However, as subaltern subjects have more access to the means of production of images and discourses about them, they can manipulate these meanings.

Smith is specially interested in the gendered components of mestizaje, as "myths of mestizaje create gender/sexual distinctions and rankings" (156). She identifies a matrix of gender/ethnicity within myths of mestizaje that aligns mestizo, Spanish and criollo men with virility, in opposition to Indian men as powerless and emasculated. In the meantime, Indian and mestiza are aligned together as sexualized and fertile ('chingada') in opposition to Spanish and criolla women who are absent in the myth, but implied as the 'gente decente'. This means that gender actually divides mestizos in different ethnic identities. When the response to this myth from the women affected by it is to try to prove their sexual respectability to navigate the whitening scheme, then Smith argues that "they do not frankly confront the real issue in the myths affecting them: the right of all women to situate themselves politically (and ethnically) irrespective of their marital and reproductive situation or their sexual conduct". (160)

New identity politics in LA, claims of subaltern subjects like the Mayan movement in Guatemala, suggest that mestizaje is a way more complex of a process, and that it was not as successfully completed as it was thought before. In the other hand, women's movements and feminist movements show a case of fragmented identity politics. This has been according to Smith both the strength and the weakness of these movements.

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