Perhaps no part of the sum total of the historical formation and configuration of Latin American national and regional identity has been as pervasive or comprehensive as the elaboration and employment of the concept ofmestizaje. The genetic and cultural admixture produced by the encounters or “dis-encounters” (desencuentros) between Europeans, the Africans who accompanied them to and in the New World, indigenous groups, and various others who arrived in the Americas from regions such as Asia, was sometimes condemned, sometimes celebrated, but nearly always productive of an animated discussion of what it meant to inhabit the ground on which such...

Although celebrated figures such as Simón Bolívar and José Martí had already posited equations between mixed race and Latin American identity, the 1925 publication of Mexican educator and politician José Vasconcelos’La raza cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana(The Cosmic Race: Mission of the Ibero-American Race) marked the inception of a fully developed ideology ofmestizajethat tied political and aesthetic self-definition and assertion to a racial discourse at both the national and the regional levels. The book elaborated on the slogan Vasconcelos (1882–1959) had coined in 1921 for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City,...

In the prologue toIndología, published soon afterThe Cosmic Race, José Vasconcelos spoke favorably of the specificmestizajeof the mulatto, calling it the “most illustrious document of American citizenship” (6).³

But the place of the mulatto or the mulatta in the rhetoric of Latin American citizenship has not always been as prestigious as Vasconcelos’ comment would suggest. The mulatto usually occupied an ambiguous, overwhelmingly negative, position in narratives of the colony or emerging nation; the mulatto or the mulatta was a threat to unity or coherence, a contaminant, a stain, a temptation, or a force beyond the control...

Perhaps nothing in the contemporary culturescape is at one and the same time as specific and ubiquitous,² as fiercely national and undeniably transnational, as local and as global, as the tango. A vast musical, literary, cinematic, and cybernetic library provides us with a dizzying and contradictory genealogy of tango’s parentage and origins—in Argentina or Uruguay, the two sides of the Río de la Plata, in Cuba or Brazil, in France or in Spain, in Africa. These multiple images of the tango are further refracted in contemporary settings and frames that are global in nature. It is not unusual to...

Brazil’s fame as a showcase of racial mixing is more than a hundred years old. French traveler Gustave Aimard described the country as a “festival of colors” in 1888, writing that only in Brazil had he observed such a “transformation of the people caused by the blending of races.” Later, Sílvio Romero declared Brazil a “society of mingled races” and a “country of mixed blood,” noting that “we are mestizos if not in our blood at least in our soul” (both in Schwarcz,The Spectacle of the Races, 3–5). In the nineteenth century, this mixture was usually lamented by...

In 1928, Ecuadorian culture czar Benjamín Carrión (1897–1979) wrote a long essay titledLos creadores de la nueva América(The Creators of the New America), in which he proclaimed, “My Ecuador, province of America, will feel powerfully the tonic value of the words of José Vasconcelos, the announcer, the prophet, the poet of the warm territories” (49). Carrión was right: Vasconcelos’ ideas had a significant impact in Ecuador, where the discourse ofmestizajehas enjoyed a long tradition that still can be witnessed in numerous aspects of contemporary cultural and political life. Here and elsewhere in the Andes, indigenous...

Buried deep in a long list of “187 Reasons Why Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border,” part of the 1996 collaborative textTemple of Confessions: Mexican Beasts and Living Santosby Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, the reader finds the item “CAN’T CROSS because we’re still waiting to be cosmic” (104). At the turn of the twenty-first century, Gómez-Peña and Sifuentes “confess,” tongue-in-cheek (and sometimes in less-demure positions), what should by now be abundantly clear: Vasconcelos’ grand ideas for an ultimate, harmonious, fifth “cosmic” race that would bring together the best of its constituent members in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin...