‘Significant indeterminacy’ in Mexico’s racial identities: Vernacular dynamics of race identification in the era of the ideology of mestizaje (1940s–1950s)

Abstract

In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the analysis of racism has often followed a ‘strategic essentialism’ that mobilises absolutist languages of race, in order to make inequalities visible. The majority of this academic production attributes a strong explanatory weight to national ideologies of mestizaje as a matter of ‘white privilege’, imposed over ‘brown’ or ‘indigenous’ populations. An alternative emancipatory Mixed-Race Thought, as defended in this article, consists in underlining what I call a ‘significant indeterminacy’ when thinking about racial differentiation: a dynamic that seeks to capture mixture, ambiguity and movement as fundamental elements of racial identification. This perspective understands racial positions and the hierarchies that organise them not only by their more distinctive, ‘essential’ elements, but also through their indeterminate ones. To substantiate my argument, I draw on unpublished ethnographic field diaries elaborated by different anthropologists in Mexico between 1940 and 1960 in rural and indigenous localities, which allow an examination of the ‘racial project of mestizaje’ from the lived experience of those who were, in principle, its main addressees: the country’s indigenous-language-speaking rural inhabitants. This evidence invites a better recalibration of the relationship between mestizaje ideology and racism, by showing that this indeterminacy was not necessarily imposed by the ideology of mestizaje, but could also be organic and even instrumental to local racial identifications. In the conclusion, I argue that a more radical understanding of racism should take into account the ‘significant indeterminacy’ of race, and that it is from these interstitial, contradictory spaces that transversal coalitions and causes can perhaps be imagined.

I claim to be a bastarda; I simultaneously contest the bedrock of the ancestral indigenous universe, as an intact foundation, and the denial of the validity of the multiple indigenous roots; I inhabit this contradiction. (Galindo, 2022: 41)

There is a photo, probably taken by my father, of what I guess was my first day of primary school. It shows a panoramic view of the school courtyard full of boys and girls uniformed and rigorously groomed formed in rows. Like any government school (‘public’ or ‘official’ would be the name in Mexico), it was cost-free, lay and massive. It is not easy to find me, in the middle of more than a thousand of children. There were always between forty and fifty children per group and at least five groups per year. Nonetheless, the mass of children cannot disguise a population whose physical appearance was far from homogeneous, either in terms of skin colour or physical features.

In accordance with the post-revolutionary state project and what has been called its ‘ideology of mestizaje’, education and social life took place in Spanish. If there were any children who spoke an indigenous language, I do not recall that this was ever made public. Besides, it is quite possible that there was bullying, or ‘jokes’ were made based on the physical appearance or ethnic characteristics of children. Even so, no systematic segregation existed. In that school universe, the implicit conditions for ‘fitting in’ in a mestizo identity seemed loose enough to accommodate very diverse sectors in terms of class, socio-cultural background and physical appearance. Although the different kinds of capitals of each child played a role, there I lived what historian Mauricio Tenorio Trillo (2009: 52) has called the ‘cult of being average’, of which the ideology of mestizaje, its national language of belonging, would be the paradigmatic expression.

My mother was born and raised in Mexico City. Her parents came from what might now be called ‘white’ backgrounds, although I don’t recall ever hearing that term: families with high economic capital from the Veracruz region who had lost their property and status with the agrarian expropriations brought about by the revolution (1910–1917). My grandfather managed to study law and, by the time my mother was a child, in the 1950s, they already had a privileged economic position. For the women of the family, however, this situation was accompanied by a markedly unfavourable gender position, conventional in that milieu. When she was 14, her father died suddenly, leaving no estate to guarantee the family’s financial solvency. My mother grew up from then on with limited financial resources, worked from a young age and, although she was the youngest of three children, was in charge of her two brothers and of domestic life, while my grandmother worked. Later, with the support of a government scholarship, she did graduate studies abroad and, on her return to Mexico, she went to work as a professor and researcher at the National University (UNAM), also a free and state institution. She took her social commitment to teaching and to intensive grassroots political work, both within UNAM and in a working-class milieu. Much of my childhood was spent around the strikes, rallies and marches that were the daily routine of university life in the 1970s and 1980s. In those milieus, where workers, students and academics participated together, colour lines did not seem to be the organisers of the social map either.

After my parents divorced when I was very young, my father had returned to his homeland in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region. Many images circulate about this part of Mexico, almost all celebrating its cultural richness and strong indigenous heritage. Self-Portrait as a Tehuana, by Frida Kahlo, is part of an arsenal of such representations. The history of his family is one of social ascent, made possible by a particular context of capitalist and state expansion that benefited my grandfather in the 1930s, ¹ although he was uneducated, had a ‘dark’ skin colour, came from a poor family, as did my grandmother, and neither of them spoke Spanish as their mother tongue, but Zapotec, one of Mexico’s indigenous languages. In the 1960s my grandmother and most of her children moved to Mexico City. There they finished their studies or worked and married people from the city. This could be the conventional story of modernisation, acculturation, or ‘whitening’ that the post-revolutionary nationalist project wanted to achieve, and which is now denounced as ‘ethnocidal’. It is significant, however, that the rural, indigenous and poor side of my family (my father’s) attained a remarkable social mobility, notwithstanding its scant resources and stigmatised cultural capitals at the same time that the ‘elite’ side of my family (my mother’s) lost its privileges.

Moreover, the linearity of this narrative obscures a central dimension of the process: far from shifting boxes (Zapotec first, mestizo later), this assimilationist process was much more composite and heterogeneous. In my case, this complexity came from the prestige that, in my family, was associated with our Juchitecan, Isthmian, cultural heritage, and which today we would call ‘indigenous’. This was fed, in part, by my father’s younger brother, who became an exceptional figure in the artistic, intellectual and political spheres on a regional, national and international scale, and whose work successfully transmitted this heritage with pride (he never self-identified as an ‘indigenous artist’ even though he was usually seen as one). I exist at the intersection of these somewhat counterintuitive trajectories, which, let’s not forget, were the result of a socio-economic equalisation of both my families brought by the post-revolutionary state project: a prestigious self-representation that came from my paternal ‘indigenous’ family, and the urban middle-class coordinates of my mother, who transformed her double class and gender rupture into a political commitment.

Explaining my family trajectories may clarify, perhaps, my scepticism towards current readings of the ideology of mestizaje in Mexico. As we will see, recent anti-racist literature denounces this nationalist doctrine as a matter of ‘white privilege’, imposed over ‘brown’ or ‘indigenous’ populations. Making explicit the limits of these readings of mestizaje, as I will do, allows me to recalibrate our explanations of racism in Mexico and, more broadly, to nourish a reflection on what emancipatory Mixed-Race Thought might be. ²

Significant indeterminacy in racial positions

In a recent article, Wade (2022a) synthesises a cross-cutting debate in race studies concerning the use of racial categories in social science analysis. Contrary to authors who criticise the use of colour categories in social analysis, his position is that the concept of ‘race’ and other racial categories should be used when examining racism ‘as this acknowledges the specific history of colonialism and the oppression that produced racism’ (Wade, 2022a: 36). ³ This notion of race-as-history has the virtue of distancing the concept from its biological background. However, the instrumentalisation of the concept of ‘race’ to make racism visible can obscure the other historical fact that accompanies colonialism, oppression and racism: ‘the promiscuity – human, social, cultural – of history’ (Tenorio Trillo, 2023: 14), a constant that societies have sought to order – and conceal – precisely through racial classifications. The emphasis on ‘race-as-history’, or on the ‘praise of impurity’, is reminiscent of the two political strategies detected by Mallon (1996: 172, 173) when analysing indigenous movements: ‘strategic essentialism’ claims essentialist identities as a strategy of liberation, and ‘strategic marginality’ refers to claims in which ethnic or racial boundaries are presented as fluid, blurred or unstable. This is the sense captured in the provocative expression of Bolivian feminist María Galindo, whom I quote in the epigraph of this article, when she claims to be a ‘bastarda’.

Building on this distinction, much of the literature and denunciation of racism in Mexico might be associated with ‘strategic essentialism’ in order to make inequality visible. Nevertheless, I contend that an alternative emancipatory project – and perhaps one that resonates more strongly with the majorities in Mexico – is to underline what I call a ‘significant indeterminacy’ when thinking about racial differentiation: Close to the concept of ‘slippery signifier’ proposed by Poole (2004: 41) in her analysis of both race and photography, with this term I refer to a dynamic that seeks to capture contradiction, mixture, ambiguity and instability as fundamental elements of racial identification.

‘Significant indeterminacy’ should not be confused with the celebration of hybridity, nomadism or ‘border crossing’ as the future of humanity. ⁴ As Parker and Song (2001) point out, it is problematic to postulate the inherent superiority of Mixed-Race-ness, besides the fact that it is a type of racial identification that continues, ‘accentuating ancestral loyalties as the genealogy of identity’ (Parker and Song 2001: 9). ‘Significant indeterminacy’ is more akin to Judith Butler’s ‘precarious life’, understood as a common substratum, with which to withdraw and resist the power effects produced by the project of recognition (Butler, 2009: 137–65) – or what philosopher Nancy Fraser calls ‘non-identitarian recognition’. Her project is radical in that she is not satisfied with simply making positively visible characteristics of collectives divided into previously instituted and increasingly watertight compartments. On the contrary, she advocates for a political project seeking to transform the entire institutionalised identity configuration (Fraser, 2000). ‘Significant indeterminacy’ is then intended to account for how people – and not only mixed-race people – ‘inhabit contradiction’ (Galindo, 2022: 41). This is a perspective that is not limited to an ‘intersectional’ understanding of inequalities (Crenshaw, 2023), but seeks to highlight the fact that racial categories and belonging are constituted not only by more distinctive, ‘essential’ elements, but also by more confused and diluted ones.

Essed (1991) has pointed out the importance of understanding ‘everyday racism’, that is, to recognise racism not only as a structure or an ideology but as ‘a process that manifests itself in the relationships and situations of everyday life’ (1991: 69). Bordering on this perspective, my strategy in the following pages is part of a broader, ongoing research programme that aims to explore identity and racial dynamics at local, vernacular and everyday scales in Mexico between 1940 and 1960, when the ideology of mestizaje developed as a nationalist social identity. Before the ideology of mestizaje did its work of rearranging racial positions, what were the vernacular positions of identification? Was mobility between categories an imposition or was it organic to local forms of racial identification? What was the value of internally mixed identities on which the ideology of mestizaje was preached (and now criticised)? What, then, is the role of mestizaje in contemporary racism?

To answer these questions, I develop a ‘historical ethnography’ (López Caballero, 2017) in which I use historical data not only to reconstruct and interpret past situations but also as a laboratory to test my own anthropological questions. I draw, then, on my current research in history, based on unpublished ethnographic field diaries elaborated by different anthropologists in Mexico between 1940 and 1960. These rich and exceptional sources allow an examination at the ‘project of mestizaje’, not from the point of view of those who conceived it, but from the lived experience of those who were, in theory, its main addressees: the country’s indigenous-language-speaking rural inhabitants. ⁵ The vernacular practice of distinction and identification in the town of Zinacantán, Chiapas, in the early 1940s, problematises the presupposed transparency of the racial and identity positions as understood by the current anti-racist agenda, and productively destabilises its assumptions about the ideology of mestizaje.

Before looking at my documentary evidence, I offer a contextual section, where I present briefly what the ideology of mestizaje is and how current literature on racism reads it. ⁶ In the conclusion, I will connect these debates with a larger Mixed-Race Thought.

The cosmic race strikes back?

Few topics about Mexico have as much ink spilt on them as mestizaje. ⁷ After the revolution that founded the 20th-century Mexican state (1910–17) with a relatively successful project of redistribution and social justice for the masses, mestizaje became the language of nationhood and the mestizo the ideal subject of the nation. It was, besides, the obligatory destiny that promised the whole population a ‘kingdom in the middle, a domain of the half-breed … of the hybrid’ (Tenorio Trillo, 2023: 91). That doctrine and the common sense it instituted established that Mexico’s population, given its diversity of origins – indigenous, African, European – is fundamentally mestizo, that is, mixed.

Although the ideology of mestizaje had the imprint of the racialist thinking of the first half of the 20th century (‘the Indian race’ would have mixed with the ‘Spanish race’), this ideological programme did not place the idea of race at the centre of the ‘great national problems’, which tended to be explained mainly in terms of class and of socio-cultural differences, for example, language in the case of Indigenous Peoples (who, let’s not forget, were citizens and legally equal to the rest of the population). This marginalisation of race from the public life was not only a dictate of official discourse. Among the many mass mobilisations and even guerrilla movements throughout the 20th century, racism was not a cause that was raised, denounced or that aroused the masses – indigenous, peasant, working-class, urban. ⁸ Today, the state has abandoned the assimilationist language of mestizaje as a condition for full nationhood in favour of a strategy of recognition, as seen, for example, in the inclusion of the pluricultural character of the nation in the Mexican Constitution. Even so, the social map of identifications still places the mestizo subject at the top, as the ideal type of nation, and mestizaje is still perceived as the main characteristic of the Mexican nation (Sue, 2021: 67, 68).

Denunciations of racism began, more or less, with the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (1994) and the subsequent (unmet) demands for self-determination for Indigenous Peoples. ⁹ As happened on a global scale, a decisive push to give visibility to this social problem, and some reach outside the academy, came with the global wave unleashed by the death of George Floyd in the United States (2018). However, the contrasts between the two contexts are not minor: in the United States, the massive and transversal Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was expressed at a national level and had a very large number of participants, not only Black but also white and of other ‘races’. ¹⁰ In Mexico, on the other hand, the social demands that the majorities are making (such as an end to violence, gender equality or a higher income) do not give a prominent place to racism, neither as a main problem, nor as a language for denunciation. ¹¹ There are, of course, social organisations and collectives working for recognition and against racism. ¹² The debate, however, is dominated by academics, artists and intellectuals, living mainly in Mexico City, with high cultural capital and, for the most part, with income levels that place them in the highest socio-economic percentiles in the country. Nevertheless, the various actors involved in the denunciation of racism (inside and outside the academy) achieved an important result, going against the national common sense and highlighting the urgency of analysing and denouncing racism for a better understanding of the country’s inequalities. ¹³

Despite the variety of methodologies and objects of study in this literature, the majority of this academic production considers the ideology of mestizaje promoted and institutionalised by the Mexican post-revolutionary state in the early 20th century as a determining factor – for some the only one – in explaining the persistence of racism to the present day. It is surprising then that, given the weight that the ideology of mestizaje has in explaining racism, this literature has not interrogated it more systematically, especially in terms of how it was experienced, adopted, adapted or rejected at the local level. ¹⁴

The sequence establishing the relationship between the ideology of mestizaje and racism most commonly found among authors is as follows:

the state promoted the creation of a new citizen that would result from the process of mestizaje. This new citizen would be a member of the so-called ‘cosmic race’, as conceived by then Minister of Education José Vasconcelos (1948 [1925]). The mestizo as the subject of national identity was presented as the embodiment of the new modern Mexico (Gamio, 1916). (Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka, 2016: 520) ¹⁵

The ideas of Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos and the anthropologist Manuel Gamio would become ‘the key to assimilationist policies [that would give rise] to the same race and culture: the mestizo’ (Gall et al., 2022: 132). In sum, concludes another author, ‘[it] is at this point [after the revolution of 1910 ] that mestiza identity was “imposed” on all inhabitants as the preferred subject of national identity, ideologically reconstructed to create a new sense of nation’ (Moreno Figueroa, 2010: 390, italics added). ¹⁶

It is undeniable that these two intellectuals advocated a ‘mestizo’ citizen who would synthesise the different ‘elements’ that made up the population in a post-war context (the revolution culminated in 1921), and that their ideas were very influential. However, even if these intellectuals had had at their command the entire state apparatus to implement their projects (which was not the case), ¹⁷ these chronologies do not explain how this ‘racial project’ would have been ‘imposed’ on the masses (who, by the way, had just revolted throughout the country and would do so again at the end of the decade against the state’s religious prohibitions). ¹⁸ Is this not a ‘top-down’ interpretation that attributes all agency to the ideology and project of the elites, presupposing that the masses had no scope for action and therefore offered no friction or might even have been interested in making this project their own?

In addition to being conceived as a successfully imposed ideology, the celebration of mixture and racial indeterminacy it promoted would have had effects – seen as negative by most authors – on racism. Some situate these effects as a denial or masking of racism. According to one specialist, ‘the rhetoric of mestizaje disavows race and racial hierarchies, based on the narrative that mixture erased racial distinctions’. In doing so, ‘the rhetoric of mestizaje not only produces and empowers racist practices; it also conceals them by denying the existence of racism in Mexico’ (Ortega Domínguez, 2022: 2613, italics added). ¹⁹ Thus, by blurring racial inequality and privilege, the ideology of mestizaje denies racism because it presupposes that ‘ethnic, racial and social differences would be overcome by the emergence of the new citizen: the mestizo (man)’ (Saldívar Tanaka, 2022: 19).

For other authors, mestizaje not only concealed racism but also the ‘racialised others’ themselves, specifically Afro-descendant populations and, in a different way, Indigenous Peoples: ‘The ideology of mestizaje exalted the mestizo […] and promoted […] a de-Indianisation of the native peoples […]. This ideology excluded populations of African origin from the national discourse’ (Masferrer León, 2023: 33). ²⁰ For others, mestizaje was in reality a false promise of inclusion and mixing, since it actually ‘became a social identity of privilege’ (Carlos Fregoso, 2016: 21), Following another author, mestizaje allowed ‘the whitened elites [to] not cease to use skin colour as an index to exclude […] groups of different origin and to confirm and strengthen the supremacy of the elites who defined themselves as white’ (Navarrete, 2022: 144–5). Or, in a more complex wording: ‘Black uncovers Mestizo as the White position within the Mexican racial economy’ (Jerry, 2023: 183). According to these interpretations, ‘mestizo’ should be understood as the misleading term with which the racial position of ‘white’ is named, so it would be heuristic to speak of ‘white-mestizo’ (for example in Saldívar Tanaka, 2022: 15; Solis and Güemez, 2021).

Thus, almost imperceptibly, in the wake of the denunciations of racism, ‘mestizo’ has ceased to be the result of an ideological project, a national utopia or an artificial subject of Mexican nationalism, and has become an actual ‘race’ that barely disguises its exclusionary and discriminatory whiteness. It is by following this logic that I understand the idea of ‘passing towards “whiteness”’ for the Mexican case (Moreno Figueroa, 2010: 391). Thus, in a paradoxical turn of events, thanks to the current anti-racist denunciations, we can no longer see mestizaje as an indeterminate ‘mix’ but as what it would really be: a ‘white’ race, in its aspiration and in its criteria of belonging. Vasconcelos’s much criticised ‘cosmic race’ would have finally emerged. ²¹

In the next section I use anthropological field diaries to reconstruct, as far as possible, interactions and identity positioning in a locality now widely recognised as indigenous. In doing so, I aim to respond to these perspectives on mestizaje and thus substantiate my argument of significant indeterminacy as a central aspect of racial positions.

Local practices of identification in the era of the ideology of mestizaje

The field notes and field diaries I analyse here were elaborated by the nine members of the first anthropological expedition, set up by the Escuela Nacional de Antropología (ENA) as an exercise aimed at training the first generation of anthropologists. ²² It was organised by the American anthropologist Sol Tax, who was then a visiting professor, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. The researcher, who was not yet a professor at the University of Chicago, had worked in the Guatemalan highlands with his friend and colleague Robert Redfield. He suggested conducting fieldwork in the Tzotzil ²³ town of Zinacantán, Chiapas, a region at that time turned in on itself and represented as largely indigenous. ²⁴ The expedition took place in 1942, in the midst of the period of consolidation of the post-revolutionary regime, twenty-five years after the massive armed uprisings and the signing of the Constitution (1917) that founded it, and a little more than twenty years since the publication of Manuel Gamio’s Forjando Patria (1916) and José Vasconcelos’s essay La raza cósmica (1925), the two inescapable references when speaking of the ideology of mestizaje in Mexico, as we have seen. ²⁵

Thus, in addition to Tax, eight students took part in the expedition, who would eventually become important figures in the discipline in Mexico. Three were Mexican: Fernando Cámara, Gregorio Rosas and Ricardo Pozas, and five were foreign students: Calixta Guiteras (Cuba), Miguel Acosta (Venezuela) and Pedro Carrasco (Spain), an immigrant from Sweden, Barbro Dahlgren, and another from the United States, Ann Chapman. Finally, at the urging of Sol Tax, Emanuel Palacios, who was not a student at the ENA but worked in the Department of Indigenous Affairs (DAI) and attended Tax’s class as an unregistered participant, joined the class. ²⁶

The foreign students had diverse cultural and intellectual backgrounds, although they coincided in their curiosity about the indigenous world and their left-wing political militancy. Guiteras, Acosta and Carrasco were exiles, persecuted in their countries of origin for political reasons. Dahlgren and Chapman had arrived in Mexico guided by curiosity about the indigenous world and its aura of exoticism. As for the four Mexicans, with the exception of Cámara, they all were the children of peasants or rural teachers. All three had themselves been rural teachers and defended an emancipatory political project for the masses. Cámara, for his part, came from a prominent Yucatán family and, like many members of the elite in that region, spoke Maya. Indeed, in several passages of his diary, he uses this language to find equivalents with Tzotzil. It is striking that on several occasions he refers to the inhabitants of Zinacantán as his ‘brothers of race’.

Zinacantán was a small town in the highlands of Chiapas. There, the effects of the revolution had barely made a dent in the rigid social order, controlled by a semi-feudal elite living in San Cristóbal las Casas and in a symbiotic relationship with the labour force coming from the towns surrounding the city and identified as ‘Indians’, ²⁷ mainly Tzotzil-speaking. It was an ultra-stratified society, with levels of exploitation and poverty possibly more accentuated than in the rest of Mexico. The region also maintained a mutually dependent relationship with the coffee farms in the Soconusco lowlands, towards the Pacific coast. Eventually the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute) began its activities there (1951); at about the same time, the Harvard Chiapas Project (1957–80) and the University of Chicago’s ‘Man in Nature Project’ (1960–64) also set up in the region. In the 1990s, it was in the neighboring region of ‘las cañadas’ that the armed uprising of the EZLN (the Zapatista Army of National Liberation) took place, disrupting the entire region. ²⁸

When going through the hundreds of pages of the eight students’ diaries and Tax’s own, the absence of today’s identity vocabulary, dividing the social universe between ‘indigenous’ and ‘mestizos’, is remarkable. Specifically, the category ‘mestizo’ is not used by the inhabitants of Zinacantán and the category ‘indigenous’, commonly used by the students and the anthropologist, is not used locally. ²⁹ This data makes it possible to historicise the social divisions that are more familiar to us today. But, above all, it also shows the gaps between the discourses and policies of the elites in the country’s capital and their impact or presence in the rural areas that were supposed to be affected by them. ³⁰

To name the people whose mother tongue was Spanish and, in many cases, belonged to the privileged sectors of the region, the categories used were the colonial terms ‘ladino’ or ‘caxlán’ (the latter is a neologism derived from the term ‘Castilian’). ³¹ These terms were used to refer to the inhabitants of the small highlands city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, who controlled the region in political and economic terms. Also included were the representatives of the state government in each village called ‘municipal secretaries’, as well as the few non-Tzotzil-speaking villagers.

Although the category ‘indio’ or ‘indito’ appears, the most usual one by which the inhabitants of Zinacantán, mostly monolingual Tzotzil speakers, designated themselves was ‘Zinacanteco’. ³² This category referred to a belonging that coincided with the territorial limits of the village and that expressed the most literal sense of ‘native’: born in this place. It therefore marked a distinction with those who were not natives of Zinacantán, including the inhabitants of other Tzotzil-speaking villages. This distinction appears recurrently, in particular with regard to the inhabitants of the neighbouring town of San Juan Chamula, who are called ‘Chamulas’. This localised identity denied the possibility of a common belonging, despite the fact that they shared not only the language but also the structural position of subordination to the city and to the ‘non-indigenous’ economy. Indeed, multiple testimonies make it clear that Zinacantecos did not consider themselves to share the same ‘identity’ (nor ‘race’) as Chamulas. About them it is said that ‘the Zinacantecos lived in constant fear that they [the Chamulas] were going to come and kill everyone here’ (Guiteras, 1942–3: 116); they are the ones who do the jobs that no one wants (Guiteras, 1942–3: 130); they are witches (Pozas, 1942–3: 37–8) or ‘they are savages and very bad’ (Rosas, 1942–3: 32). In the market in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Guiteras notes that her informant, María:

does not have the idea of a linguistic unity with the other peoples who speak the Tzotzil language. I realised this when talking about the Chamulas: she says that she understands them, but not the people from other villages. She has never said that they speak the same language. (Guiteras, 1942–3: 123)

Thus, the antagonism between Zinacantecos and Chamulas fractures, to a certain extent, the contemporary understanding of ‘indigenous’ as a common identity for all the non-Spanish speakers.

Not only is the ‘indigenous’ / ‘mestizo’ division not documented in these sources, but the categories used by the inhabitants do not refer to rigid or clearly delimited racial positions. For example, anthropologists record on multiple occasions how their informants affirm that Zinacantecos and ladinos ‘are the same’. Speaking about two North American missionaries living in a hamlet in Zinacantán, one informant states that they already speak Tzotzil and ‘that they are already Indians’ (Dalhgren, 1942–3: 57). Petrona, for example, a woman from Zinacantán with whom Calixta Guiteras works on several occasions, ‘insisted that Indians and Ladinos are the same’. She said: ‘the proof of this is that they are baptised in the same font. If the ladinos speak badly of the Indians, it is because of the clothes we wear’ (Guiteras, 1942–3: 27). ³³

A particularly expressive dialogue about this was recorded by Pedro Carrasco when talking with a Zinacanteco. Carrasco was a young Spaniard, recently landed in Mexico as a refugee from the Civil War. His origins could be visible not only in his phenotype but also in his accent when speaking Spanish:

They recognised that zinacantecos and ladinos are the same people, distinguished only by their dress and language. I asked if they would take me for a Zinacanteco if I dressed like them. Antonio said yes. I pointed out that Indians don’t have beards like me, but he said that it doesn’t matter; what I do have to take off are my glasses. To my indication that I couldn’t see well without them, he replied ‘Ah, then you’re fucked.’ (Carrasco, 1942–3: 60) ³⁴

It goes without saying that these statements do not mean that there were no social or racial hierarchies, or that Zinacantecos were on equal footing with ladinos, nor that this perception was shared by ladinos. Still, given the terms of the current debate, these testimonies, while discursive and addressed to the anthropologists, do not place either physical features or skin colour at the centre as social markers of raciality or ethnicity. Nor do they claim or conceal an identity with explicit, defined and clearly differentiated profiles and content, threatened by the imposition of the ideology of mestizaje. On the contrary, the ideal that is recurrently claimed is that of a ‘sameness’ between ‘Indians’ and ‘ladinos’.

This discursive level of categorising and differentiating was, as always, accompanied by heterodox practices and positions. Thus, for example, while speaking Spanish was undoubtedly an important marker of social differentiation, this criterion was not absolute either. Although they remained in the minority and with a very partial knowledge of the language, several inhabitants of Zinacantán spoke it. For their part, many ladinos spoke – or at least understood – Tzotzil. The students also recorded categories such as ‘indio-ladino’, ‘ladino aindiado’ or ‘indio aladinado’ with which their informants introduced themselves. Numerous marriages between Indians and ladinos are also recorded, and, above all, numerous shifts between these categories were documented. ³⁵

A young informant explains to one of the students the practice of the Zinacanteco greeting which consists of bowing the head to receive a blow on the forehead from the hands of the oldest person. But the informant clarifies: ‘this is observed if one is dressed in zinacanteco but as [I] am already leaving the dress behind, “I don’t like to bend down”’ (Rosas, 1942–3: 218, italics added). Also, one informant narrated ‘that his parents are Chamula but that he has adopted the culture of here [Zinacantán], and that no one frowned upon [him] since he changed his clothes’ (Dahlgren, 1942–3: 38, italics added). In the same vein, another student notes: ‘Down the hill […] lives a group of Chamulas … Pedro [one of them] is a true Zinacantecan now, because he dresses like one, gives contributions in Zinacantán […] and has been […] Mayordomo del Rosario [a religious position]’ (Acosta, 1942–3: 150). This transit also occurs among ladinos: Carmen Osuna, for example, is a man who speaks fluent Spanish. The anthropologist Miguel Acosta states that ‘he looks and dresses like a ladino’, yet the informant declares himself ‘to be indigenous to Zinacantán’ (Chapman, 1942–3: 5). It is then worth noting that these testimonies do not reinforce ontological, stable, purified forms of identity belonging, or those with rigid or exclusive contents against which mestizaje would have done its blurring work.

A final testimony narrated by the anthropologist Sol Tax is revealing of the important contextual dimension of vernacular practices of differentiation. As well as adding to the testimonies that show the shifting dimension of categories, this one illustrates the point of view of the ladinos of San Cristóbal. Tax was at a party given for an influential politician in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Next to him sat a woman who self-identified as a ladina and who belonged to the powerful families of the region. As a young singer appears on stage, Tax records the following conversation:

‘Look’, said the woman. ‘That boy’s an Indian’; … ‘But’, I said, ‘his clothes are ladino.’ ‘Yes, that’s how he was brought up; he is an Indio aladinado.’ ‘But then, how can anybody tell he’s an Indian?’ I asked. ‘His face, a more ordinary physiognomy [a more ordinary look]. You never lose that, you know.’ But does he enter in the ladino society? ‘Oh, of course; we all know he is an Indian but we … treat him like a paisano.’ (Tax, 1942–3: 43)

While noting the authoritarian paternalism of this conversation, where the identity of a third party is vertically established, the testimony interests me for at least three reasons. The first is the contextual dimension of the idea of race. The identification of the young singer is inaccessible to Tax from his previous experience in Guatemala; for him clothing would be a central criterion to distinguish ‘Indio’ from ‘ladino’, since the singer’s physical appearance was not enough. The second is the ambivalence of this woman’s perspective. She can affirm that, from the perspective of the elite of San Cristóbal, there are elements that ‘you never lose’, thus suggesting a strong determination of origin and physical appearance. But this does not prevent her from asserting that these traits are not important for ‘entering the ladino society’. Third, neither the woman’s view nor Tax’s view of the whole situation operates on absolute, determinant, objective or coherent categories, but on a significant indeterminacy.

This evidence allows us to productively problematise the premise, shared by current anti-racist literature, that contemporary racism in Mexico is explained primarily – for some, exclusively – by the racial project of the ideology of mestizaje. First, by showing that the ideology of mestizaje was not ‘imposed’ by the elites of Mexico City in a linear and friction-free fashion. In fact, the reorganisation of racial identifications and positions promoted by this project was a long and tortuous process that confronted racial hierarchies at the regional level and whose outcome in rural and indigenous regions has yet to be studied. Second, the identity or racial positions of ‘Indians’ and ‘ladinos’ are described by Zinacantecos as relatively diffuse and porous, which does not mean that there was no racism, but that the ideology of mestizaje sometimes operated over indeterminate, elusive racial positions. And, third, mobility between identity positions was part of racial identification practices and experiences at the local level. Indeed, both the erasure or invisibilisation of clear identity positions and the movements between them, rather than the impositions of the ideology of mestizaje, could in many cases be organic to local forms of identification. In short, racial identifications operated on the basis of a ‘significant indeterminacy’ rather than, or together with, the strategic essentialism with which they are explained today.

Conclusion

Historically, much North American or Anglo-American scholarship has conceived of the ideology of mestizaje in Latin America as an alternative to bipolarisation and racial conflict, particularly in contrast to the United States (Cunin, 2002). Probably in response to this narrative, which has been further instrumentalised in the official discourse of Latin American nation-states to minimise racism, contemporary anti-racist literature has followed a ‘strategic essentialism’, in a sense exacerbating the polarities between racial positions in order to make their inequalities visible.

These interpretations have been effective in drawing attention to the existence of racism in countries such as Mexico, and in exposing the racist undercurrents of certain ideologies or discourses of political and intellectual elites in the region. However, they fail to take into account everyday, local and more contradictory social dynamics, such as those of a public school like mine (and of the vast majority of children in this country), where the exclusion and racism of the nationalist project, with all its limitations, made room for very broad social sectors and racial positions. They also ignore regional variations and their different chronologies, as the cases of Zinacantán and Jamiltepec show. Finally, they minimise the masses’ adherence to the ideology of mestizaje as a simple deception, assuming, implicitly, that subaltern sectors are passive recipients of other people’s projects. In sum, these interpretations call for a better understanding of the social history of the ideology of mestizaje and the introduction of other explanatory factors for racism in Mexico, such as the reconfiguration of the state through neoliberalism, which is shielded from criticism in these analyses. But, most importantly for my argument, by polarising racial positions and adopting a strategic essentialism, the anti-racist agenda in Mexico throws the baby out with the bathwater: it loses sight of the fact that the ambiguous, blurred and contradictory dimensions of the racial positions attributed to the ideology of mestizaje are not exclusive to it. These ‘bastardised’ dynamics of identification, as Galindo (2022) calls them, appear in the local dynamics of racial identification. There, racial categories and positions were not watertight, but highly porous, multiple and ambiguous, with a high degree of indeterminacy.

Demonstrating the relevance of ‘significant indeterminacy’ in racial positions is useful in reminding us of their shifting and unstable dimensions, currently obscured by the dominant strand of anti-racist interpretation in Mexico. The perspective that I have defended here also opens up an analytical space to recognise that, within the very identity or racial position of ‘mestizo’, there is an enormous variety of experiences, some oppressive and others liberating (Hoffmann and Rinaudo, 2013), alternative (Lewis, 2016) or even counter-hegemonic (Varela Huerta, 2023). Finally, the contribution of this perspective for radical thinking about race and inequality is not to expand the number of racial categories that have been increasingly narrowed down and purified. On the contrary, a transgressive Mixed Race Thought is about bringing to the centre of analysis the diffuse spaces between racial positions, undefined or constantly redefined by people’s transitions between them. Attention to the significant indeterminacy of racial positions, to their ambivalent and unstable edges, is indeed not unique to so-called mixed-race people. Rather, the analytic productivity of mixed-race positions lies in showing that naming oneself in terms of its ‘essential’ elements can become a situated option and not the only legitimate way to constitute oneself as a political subject. Coexisting in the indeterminate and elusive, but vital and dynamic, liminal spaces between racial positions is perhaps what may allow us to find political engagements through difference that can make our reality more equitable and less oppressive.