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Are Mestizos Hybrids? The Conceptual Politics of Andean Identities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2005

MARISOL DE LA CADENA
MARISOL DE LA CADENA
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis.
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Abstract

Through a genealogical analysis of the terms mestizo and mestizaje, this article reveals that these voices are doubly hybrid. On the one hand they house an empirical hybridity, built upon eighteenth and nineteenth century racial taxonomies and according to which ‘mestizos’ are non-indigenous individuals, the result of biological or cultural mixtures. Yet, mestizos’ genealogy starts earlier, when ‘mixture’ denoted transgression of the rule of faith, and its statutes of purity. Within this taxonomic regime mestizos could be, at the same time, indigenous. Apparently dominant, racial theories sustained by scientific knowledge mixed with, (rather than cancel) previous faith based racial taxonomies. ‘Mestizo’ thus houses a conceptual hybridity – the mixture of two classificatory regimes – which reveals subordinate alternatives for mestizo subject positions, including forms of indigeneity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , May 2005 , pp. 259 - 284
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The author thanks Ana Alonso, Katherine Burns, Judy Farquhar, Charlie Hale, Penny Harvey, Deborah Poole, Suzana Sawyer, Orin Starn, Peter Wade and Margaret Wiener, whose comments and suggestions helped to improve the article.