Mixture’s Speech

Abstract

Mixture in Latin America is a generous plant born of European seeds and American lands. Both the indigenous chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala and the mestizo chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega—each a product of Spain and its colonies—pause to note the wonders and abundance that this fertile hybrid yields. Indeed, the expanded tree is one of Jose Martí’s preferred metaphors for affirming sum and difference: Nature becomes eloquent proof of cultural hybridity. Marti’s tree is metonymic of the new American subject, its classical values and civic promise. Similarly, the intricate Argentinian pampa becomes ungeometric space, synechdocal of its border gauchos found in Sarmiento’s catalogue of difference. Mixture is the production of difference, possessing no stable state in its boundless fluidity: Mixture is, in each subject, a principle of signification through difference. Thus, each of mixture’s practitioners seeks to contextualize it and immediately articulate it for his or her own project. Guamán Poma proposed a bilingual subject—fluent in Quechua and Spanish—as agent of the world’s “Andeanization,” counseling his people to learn writing as a way to preserve the old and reappropriate the new. Writing appeared to him as a tool of mixture, and so he catalogued mixture’s series as testament to a summed knowledge.

Translated by Joaquín Terrones and José Falconi, including the Balbuena and Bello excerpts cited by the author.