The symbolics of blood: Mestizaje in the Americas

Abstract

Mestizaje, a significant process of identity formation in Latin America based on presumed race mixture, rests on certain sustaining ideologies about race, class, gender, and sexuality that are specific to Latin America. This essay attempts a preliminary discussion of how mestizaje has affected marriage and gender relations in several Latin American regions as the marital/kinship pattern, together with its sustaining ideologies, changed over time. Questions are asked about differences in beliefs held by different kinds of individuals (mestizos and “whites,” lower classes and elites, women and men) about mestizaje and the sexual and/or kinship relations appropriate between different races and classes. Examination of a few well documented historical cases suggests that what lower‐class mestizos believe about race, class, gender, and sexuality involves resistance to as well as acceptance of elite beliefs about them. It appears that there are also significant differences in beliefs held by mestizo women and men about appropriate female and male sexuality, though we have less information about this.

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