Abstract
Manrique examines how the Mexican television show Crónica de castas (Chronicles of Caste) challenges the official national ideology of mestizaje, which purports all Mexican citizens are of mixed blood and of equal status. Mestizaje has attempted to create a sense of homogeneity across the nation where individuals can identify as members of a unified collective – Mexicans – and in the process has masked whiteness as a site of privilege. Through an analysis of its storylines, dialogue, casting choices and setting, Manrique explores how this show exposes mestizaje as a nationalist fiction disconnected from the Mexican reality. Furthermore, she investigates how the show utilizes the caste paintings of the colonial period in order to shed light on contemporary forms of exclusion and discrimination.
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Notes
- 1.
The hierarchical order in Spain was based on the subordination of state to church and on the ideology of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), which denoted the absence of Jewish or Muslim blood. Anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz-Adler (1992, 264) comments that purity of blood was tied to honour in that ‘it reflected the depth of a lineage’s loyalty to Christianity’ and thence, to an individual’s moral attributes such as trustworthiness and decency. In the colonies, the creole elite translated the principle of purity of blood from religious belief to a de facto social stratification based on skin colour, phenotype and class status, which placed creoles at the top of the pyramid and black people at the bottom (Mignolo 2005, 74).
- 2.
Katzew (2004, 204) comments that because ‘somatic subtleties could never be adequately translated in the media of paint…clothing and other accouterments often appear[ed] as ancillary elements needed to reinforce racial and class distinctions’.
- 3.
Race studies scholar Sara Ahmed (2004) and others (Dyer 1997; Frankenberg 1993; hooks 1990) note that the fact that whiteness remains a taken-for-granted and invisible category allows it to ‘get reproduced as the unmarked mark of the human.’ Whiteness is assumed to represent the universal human condition and as such has the power to define and inhabit the normative.
- 4.
The phrase No seas igualado (Don’t be insolent) works to police boundaries; it is meant to remind people of the place in society where they belong. An igualado is thus perceived to be stepping out of these established bounds.
- 5.
Geography scholar Christien Klaufus (2015, 6) stresses the importance of paying attention to ‘the moral connotations of seemingly neutral policy terms such as “renovation” and “revitalization,” especially in a Latin American context, where the notions of class, race and territory are historically interconnected’. Urban renewal strategies, she continues, ‘often embrace a race- and class-based notion of visual cleanliness, in which street vendors, indigenous people and beggars [are] regarded as “polluters” of the cityscape’ (Klaufus 2015, 6).
- 6.
Although the meaning of naco has changed to the point that it now tends to connote an overall urban kitsch aesthetic, it is also a racialized term (a distortion of the word Totonaco) that is used to degrade indigenous peoples, peasants and others perceived to embody ‘the provincial backwardness’ that Mexico has sought to dispel (Lomnitz 1996, 2001). According to cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis (1997, 2010), the epithet of naco has become ‘one of the main vehicles through which the cultural contempt for the Indians is articulated’ (Monsiváis 1997, 51). Naco is meant to signify people without education or manners, who are insolent, vulgar and graceless (Monsiváis 1997, 53). The naco both attracts and repels because in a country where the majority population is mestizo and indigenous, anyone is potentially a naco.
- 7.
According to historian Linda King (1994), the tendency to refer to indigenous languages as dialects negates ‘their true linguistic nature.’ Many Mexican people consider indigenous languages ‘inferior forms of expression because they are (incorrectly) thought to lack grammar and an alphabet’ (King 1994, 61).
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Manrique, L. (2019). Mestizaje: The All-Inclusive Fiction. In: Essed, P., Farquharson, K., Pillay, K., White, E.J. (eds) Relating Worlds of Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78990-3_6
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