Abstract
It is my contention that the complexities of race in the New World cannot be adequately understood without a concomitant understanding of metropolitan, European racism. This essay first traces these transatlantic connections through the racial system in the Spanish Americas and then examines their refraction in the writings of an indigenous critic of the Conquista, Guaman Poma de Ayala. Finally, it takes Poma’s denunciation of hybridity as the occasion to interrogate our own critical fascination with the term, and with such figures as Poma himself.
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NOTES
In “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought” (William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 [Jan. 1997]: 143–166), James H. Sweet traces “the foundations of racism in modern Western thought,” but focuses almost exclusively on prejudice against black Africans. Inexplicably, “limpieza de sangre” is barely mentioned.
Documentos notariales referentes a los moriscos 1569–1571, coll. Nicolás Cabrillana from the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Almería (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1978). The reference to “membrillo cocho” (“cooked quince”) is from Document 304, the others are repeated throughout the collection.
Manuel Alvar, Léxico del mestizaje en Hispanoamérica (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1987), 73.
Deborah Root, “Speaking Christian: Orthodoxy and Difference in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Representations, 23 (Summer 1988): 118–134.
On limpieza, see Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Julio Caro Baroja, Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea, 3 vols. (Madrid: Istmo, 1978); Albert Sicroff, Los estatutos de limpieza de sangre: Controversias entre los siglos XV y XVII, Mauro Armiño, trans. (Madrid: Taurus, 1985); and Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, Las clases privilegiadas en el Antiguo Régimen (Madrid: Istmo, 1973).
See my Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
7. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, “Ethnic and Gender Influences on ‘Spanish’ Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review, 4.1 (1995): 153–176.
Stuart B. Schwartz, “Colonial Identities and the Sociedad de Castas,” Colonial Latin American Review, 4:1 (1995): 188.
Schwartz, “Colonial Identities,” 186.
On the contradiction between legal and social status, see Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1967), 60–62.
On the casta paintings, see the catalog for the Americas Society Art Gallery 1996 exhibit, New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America, Ilona Katzew, curator (New York: Americas Society, 1996), especially Katzew’s essay, “Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico,” and J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Mestizaje from New Spain to Aztlán: On the Control and Classification of Collective Identities.”
Mörner, Race Mixture, 45.
By implicitly whitening the castiza women who marry Spaniards, the casta paintings provide evidence for Kuznesof’s claim that gender crucially affected racial categorizations.
The term was coined by Alejandro Lipschütz, in his El indoamericanismo y el problema racial en las Américas (Santiago de Chile: Nascimento, 1944), second edition.
Mörner, Race Mixture, 58 cites a royal decree prohibiting the use of the term.
For the visual dimension of Poma’s text, see Mercedes López Baralt, Guaman Poma, autor y artista (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993).
See Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala [Waman Puma], El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, critical ed. John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, trans. and textual analysis of Quechua Jorge L. Urioste (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980), 4. All references are to this edition and appear in the text by page number only. Translations are my own.
For the problems of clerical misbehavior and its implications for the newly converted Andean population, see Kenneth Mills, “Bad Christians in Colonial Peru,” Colonial Latin American Review, 5:2 (1996): 183–218.
Cholo may mean variously mestizo, descendant of a mulatto, or descendant of a black and an Indian (Alvar, Lexico, 128–129).
For the persecution of New Christians in the New World, see The Jewish Experience in Latin America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, ed. Martin A. Cohen (New York: Ktav, 1971), 2 vols.; and Martin A. Cohen, The Martyr: The Story of a Secret Jew and the Mexican Inquisition in the Sixteenth Century (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973).
Adorno, “Colonial Reform or Utopia? Guaman Poma’s Empire of the Four Parts of the World,” Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, eds. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 357–358.
For a survey of Poma’s attitude toward blacks in the Nueva corónica, see J. P. Tardieu, “L’Integration des noirs dans le discours de Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala,” Revue du CERC, 4 (1987): 40–60.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 358. For the hybridity of Bakhtin’s own notion, see Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 358; Young, Colonial Desire, 21.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (1985): 144–165. The essay is reprinted in Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), from which I cite.
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 112.
Young, Colonial Desire, 25.
For the relations between Cusco and the provinces colonized by the Incas, in comparison to Spanish practices, see Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) and her later article,
“Becoming Indian in the Central Andes of Seventeenth-Century Peru,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 279–298.
J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’ ‘Postcolonialism,’ and ‘Mestizaje,’” in After Colonialism, 243.
J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience,” 243–244.
On the cultural uses of the “pure Indian,” Michael Taussig writes: “But while the phantom figure of the pure Indian becomes the object of desire by the First World, that same Indian tends to be the cause of unease if not the object of erasure in the Third World—as in Guatemala, to cite a well-known instance—no matter how much a certain style of Indianness may be appropriated and promoted by the State in the designs on the currency, a concern for archaelogy, and in the promotion of weavings by Indian women for tourism” (Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses [New York: Routledge, 1993], 142–143).
J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience,” 248–249. See also Silverblatt, “Becoming Indian,” which explores the process by which “Spaniards tried to make ‘Indians’ out of Andeans” (279).
As Alan Sinfield points out, “it is quite hard to envisage a culture that is not hybrid” (“Diaspora and Hybridity: Queer Identities and the Ethnicity Model,” Textual Practice, 10:2 (Summer 1996), 278.
Anthony Easthope, “Bhabha, Hybridity and Identity,” Textual Practice, 12:2 (Summer 1998): 346.
Antonio Cornejo Polar, “Mestizaje e hibridez: los riesgos de las metáforas. Apuntes,” Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 22:47 (1998): 8. My translation.
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© 2005 Philip D. Beidler and Gary Taylor
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Fuchs, B. (2005). A Mirror Across the Water: Mimetic Racism, Hybridity, and Cultural Survival. In: Beidler, P.D., Taylor, G. (eds) Writing Race Across the Atlantic World. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980830_2
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