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Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their o...
For centuries, the Chinese have been intermarrying with inhabitants of the Philippines, resulting in a creolized community of Chinese mestizos under the Spanish colonial regime. In contemporary Philippine society, the “Chinese” are seen as a racialized “Other” while descendants from early Chinese-Filipino intermarriages as “Filipino.” Previous scholarship attributes this development to the identification of Chinese mestizos with the equally “Hispanicized” and “Catholic” indios. Building on works in Chinese transnationalism and cultural anthropology, this book examines the everyday practices of Chinese merchant families in Manila from the 1860s to the 1930s. The result is ...
It can come as no surprise that the ethnic makeup of the American population is rapidly changing. That there are political repercussions from these changes is also self-evident. How the changes can, must, and should alter our very understanding of democracy, though, may not be obvious. Political theorist John Burke addresses these issues by offering a “mestizo” theory of democracy and tracing its implications for public policy. The challenge before the United States in the coming century, Burke posits, will be to articulate a politics that neither renders cultures utterly autonomous from each other nor culminates in their homogeneous assimilation. Fortuitously or ironically, the way to d...
The only recent English-language work on Spanish-American indigenismo from a literary perspective, Estelle Tarica’s work shows how modern Mexican and Andean discourses about the relationship between Indians and non-Indians create a unique literary aesthetic that is instrumental in defining the experience of mestizo nationalism. Engaging with narratives by Jess Lara, Jos Mara Arguedas, and Rosario Castellanos, among other thinkers, Tarica explores the rhetorical and ideological aspects of interethnic affinity and connection. In her examination, she demonstrates that these connections posed a challenge to existing racial hierarchies in Spanish America by celebrating a new kind of national se...
The American mestizos, a group that emerged in the Philippines after it was colonized by the United States, became a serious social concern for expatriate Americans and Filipino nationalists far disproportionate to their actual size, confounding observers who debated where they fit into the racial schema of the island nation. Across the Pacific, these same mestizos were racialized in a way that characterized them as a asset to the United States, opening up the possibility of their assimilation to American society during a period characterized by immigration restriction and fears of miscegenation. Drawing upon Philippine and American archives, Nicholas Trajano Molnar documents the imposed and self-ascribed racializations of the American mestizos, demonstrating that the boundaries of their racial identity shifted across time and space with no single identity coalescing.
How much does ethnicity matter to Mexican Americans today, when many marry outside their culture and some canÕt even stomach menudo? This book addresses that question through a unique blend of quantitative data and firsthand interviews with third-plus-generation Mexican Americans. Latinos are being woven into the fabric of American life, to be sure, but in a way quite distinct from ethnic groups that have come from other parts of the world. By focusing on individualsÕ feelings regarding acculturation, work experience, and ethnic identityÑand incorporating Mexican-Anglo intermarriage statisticsÑThomas Macias compares the successes and hardships of Mexican immigrants with those of previous...
This text provides an examination of the cultural development of colonial Latin America, using readings, documents, historical analysis, and visual material, including photographs, drawings and paintings. The illustrations are intended to offer avenues to discussion topics.
Through newly unearthed texts virtually unknown in Andean studies, Indians and Mestizos in the "Lettered City" highlights the Andean intellectual tradition of writing in their long-term struggle for social empowerment and questions the previous understanding of the "lettered city" as a privileged space populated solely by colonial elites. Rarely acknowledged in studies of resistance to colonial rule, these writings challenged colonial hierarchies and ethnic discrimination in attempts to redefine the Andean role in colonial society. Scholars have long assumed that Spanish rule remained largely undisputed in Peru between the 1570s and 1780s, but educated elite Indians and mestizos challenged t...
The Maya of the Yucatán have long been drawn into the Mexican state's attempt to create modern Mexican citizens (mestizos). At the same time, they have contended with globalization pressures, first with hemp production and more recently with increased tourism and the fast-growing influence of American-based evangelical Protestantism. Despite these pressures to turn Maya into mestizo, the citizens of the small town of Maxcanú have used subtle forms of resistance—humor, satire, and language—to maintain aspects of their traditional identity. Loewe offers a contemporary look at a Maya community caught between tradition and modernity. He skilfully weaves the history of Mexico and this particular community into the analysis, offering a unique understanding of how one local community has faced the onslaught of modernization.