Mexico as Mestizo

As I said in my last post, last fall I attended three events on Mexico at the University of Texas at Austin which have, a year later, provoked this series of posts.  In writing this post, I have tried not to assume too much knowledge of Mexican history and Mexican food, but please call me out if I am not clear.

The first event was an exhibit in the small gallery on the ground floor of the wonderful rare book (and more) collection, the Harry Ransom Center.  It made me think about the whole project of defining Mexican, or other nationality, by race.

The immediate purpose of the exhibit, Mexico Modern: Art, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1945 was to emphasize the important role that Americans played in the “Mexican renaissance” –the  outpouring of art in Mexico in the 1920s and 30s–murals painted by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueros, the art of Frida Kahlo, and a profusion of folk art. I had had some inkling of this cross-border interchange but I learned a good bit from seeing it systematically addressed.

The art that so excited American artists and intellectuals on the left was part of a broader political and cultural policy of encouraging the incorporation of the indigenous in mestizo (mixed race) Mexico. At a time in the United States when anti-immigrant feeling ran high and Jim Crow ruled in the south, it is easy to see the why Mexico’s cultural and political moves seemed so promising.  The anthropologist, Frances Toor, for example produced a journal Mexican Folkways from 1925 to 1937 that detailed the customs of ordinary, often indigenous people. Ten years later in 1947 her A Treasury of Mexican Folkways appeared.

The American book review journal (still going) Kirkus Reviews declared that “a dramatist- a motion picture producer- a lecturer, dealing with Mexico, would find this an essential reference tool . . . [its]  most colorful sections deal with fiestas, dances and songs, stories of saints, of heroes, of bandits, descriptions of exotic dances, accounts of customs and their sources.”  And so, I suspect, they have.

Her friend and protégé, Anita Brenner, born in central Mexico, raised in San Antonio where her family had retreated during the Revolution, went back to Mexico and took on the job of explaining the rise and eclipse of the “Mexican renaissance” to Americans, for example, in 1941 in Harper’s Magazine.

Mural by Diego Rivera in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City. CC. O. Mustafin

The aura of this particular interpretation of mestizaje (mixing) was still strong when I first visited Mexico in the mid-1980s. In the United States, I had learned that the important art to see was that of the muralists, though quite why I could not have explained, that the Fonart stores with their hand crafted pots and textiles (artesania) were mandatory destinations, and that I should not miss the Ballet Folklórico de México, though I left slightly let down by how stylized these supposedly indigenous dances were.

I made sure to sample the sauces known as moles, never doubting for a second the standard story that these brought together the chiles of the indigenous with the spices of the Spanish.  I was vaguely aware that post-revolutionary artists and intellectuals rejected the Mexicanized French cuisine that many of them had grown up with and replaced the porcelain dishes that had graced their tables with earthenware, and introduced corn tortillas and tamales.

Only when I moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, did it begin to dawn on me that the “true Mexico” I had sought out as a tourist was in fact just one template for what it was to be Mexican.  Moreover, like so many nationalist projects around the globe, this template had not arisen spontaneously. Rather it had been assembled and promoted by prominent intellectuals with the aim of reunited the country following the Revolution–or Civil War for that is what it was.

Consider just two of these intellectuals: Manuel Gamio and José Vasconselos.  After studying engineering, Manuel Gamio (1883-1960) became interested the indigenous peoples of Mexico, went off to Columbia University in New York to take a Ph.D. with the famous archaeologist Franz Boas, and then returned to Mexico, did the first work on the pyramids at Teotihuacan, and worked in Guatemala and the United States as well as Mexico. His most influential book was Forjando La Patria (Forging the Fatherland) was published in 1916 in the middle of the Revolution.  José Vasconselos, bilingual in Spanish and English, studied law in Mexico, worked in a law firm in Washington D.C., returned to Mexico, became rector of the National University in 1920, and then Director of the Secretariat of Education, reforming both institutions. His most famous book La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race) appeared in 1925.

To make a complex story short, and using terms familiar in the English-speaking world, Gamio and Vasconselos re-worked ideas about race in Mexico that had been simmering since colonial times when it the mixing of Europeans, native Americans, and Africans became a persistent concern. By Independence in 1821, the majority had long been mestizos (mixed race) with some mix of European, indigenous, and African ancestry. Following Independence, as politicians and intellectuals sought to pull the nation together, some argued for policies for shifting the mix to the European pole, others, usually liberals, for upping the indigenous percentage.

Following the Revolution, both Gamio and Vasconselas, for all their differences argued for the indigenous pole. The indigenous should receive more recognition, said Gamio, while Vasconselas argued that the mix of the world’s races in Latin America was creating a new cosmic race that promised to usher in a universal era of humanity.

The practical result of the policy of mestizaje was an emphasis on the arts and humanities rather than science and engineering, on murals to educate the illiterate, on the fostering of arts and crafts, on incorporating what was believed to be creative in the indigenous traditions into mainstream mestizo culture, all ventures that received government support.

Mestizaje has cast a long shadow in Mexico (and indeed in Latin America more generally, but that’s beyond the reach of this short piece). Many foreigners have encountered it in Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz’s long meditation on Mexican identity published as El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) in 1945.  It continues in the stores full of artesania in the town of San Miguel de Allende (a popular retirement destination for Americans), in children dressing up as ‘indios‘ for Independence Day celebrations, in city governments handing out prizes for the best alfenique (sugar work coffins, skulls etc.) at Day of the Dead celebrations.

The best known interpretation of Mexican food is that it brings together Spanish and indigenous traditions. Adela Fernández, daughter of Emilio Fernández, ‘El Indio,’ Mexico’s most famous actor and screen director, (as well as the model for the Oscars statuette), celebrated it in La Tradicional Cocina Mexicana (1999). ( I have always wondered whether anyone, indigenous or mestizo, ever prepared dried beans by cooking, hollowing out, and stuffing).  Diego Rivera’s daughter Guadalupe’s culinary memoir/cookbook  Frida’s Fiestas, (1994) is in the same vein. And when the Conservatorio de la Cultura Gastronómica  sought UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status for traditional Mexican cuisine  in 2010, they prepared did so with a video of the profound importance of corn to Mexican people and food that clearly tugged at the heartstrings of the group I watched it with.

Yet, yet, yet. A hundred years have passed since the end of the Revolution. I left the Ransom Center exhibit, well done as it was, feeling a bit frustrated, irrationally I admit, that for all the dates on the exhibits, it was all too easy to see them as contemporary.

When I moved to Mexico in the early 1990s, I discovered that in the Bajío region where I then lived, traditional dress was rarely seen, indigenous languages rarely heard. Houses were not decorated with artesania and kitchens contained china or plastic ware, steel, enamel and aluminum pots as often as they did earthenware.

Ah, I was often told by visitors. You don’t live in the real Mexico. You should go to Oaxaca or to the Purépecha parts of Michoacán. In a couple of quick phrases, a whole area of the country that, for all its ups and downs had been a thriving place since the Conquest, was dismissed as less than authentic.

I also soon learned from academic colleagues what should have been obvious to me: namely that discussing nationality in terms of race as it was conceived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was rife with pitfalls. Was race determined by biology? If so, how did you determine who was pure and not mixed to use for your baseline? How were you to measure admixture? By skin color, by blood, by genes?  Or was race a cultural matter, a shared language and customs?  Did biological determinations of race map neatly on to cultural ones? If not, which took precedence? And did not the idea of lifting up the indigenous by incorporating them by intermarriage or education into the the wider group mestizos have not just a whiff of condescension?

In short, a hundred years on from the Revolution, for all the appeal the post-revolutionary ideology of mestizaje had held for many inside and outside Mexico, by the twenty first century it was scarcely surprising that fundamental problems were becoming more evident. So it was with relief that the next event that I attended, a talk on the agricultural laborers of the Bajío, turned to a Mexico that was more familiar to me.

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The literature on the Revolution, on Mexican nationalism and on mestizaje is absolutely overwhelming.  As a historian of science, I have found this long article by my fellow historians of science Carlos López-Beltrán  and Vivette García Deister at the National University particularly helpful, though be warned, it is an academic article that assumes familiarity with both the history of biology and Mexican terms for race. “Scientific approaches to the Mexican mestizo.” (2013). História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 20(2), 391-410. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-597020130002000002

For those who would like English-language reading suggestions from a real expert, I’d recommend again what I have already recommended a couple of times on this blog, a long post by C. M. Mayo on her blog Madam Mayo: Reading Mexico: Recommendations for a book club of extra-curious & adventurous English-language readers.

• ← Which Mexico? Which Mexican Cuisine?
• “A meal both more politically American and more philosophical than many of us give it credit for.” →