constructing mestizaje in

latin america: authenticity,

marginality, and gender in the
claiming of ethnic identities

i.
In discussions of ethnic identity, hybridity, and mestizaje, what does it
mean to "go home"? Gloria Anzaldua (1987:22), a poetic spokesperson for
hybridity and resistant mestizaje, says in Borderlands/La Frontera: "if go-
ing home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making
a new culture—una cultura mestizo." So even for Anzaldua, mestizaje is a
second choice, to be taken only if
she is not permitted to go home.
So what does "going home" mean
in this context? And who gets to
decide who is allowed and who is
not? These questions of belong-
ing and authenticity, with their
multiple layers and conflicts, lie
at the heart of our reflections.
If being a mestizo a is, by
definition, betwixt and between,
neither Indian nor Spanish, then
what is the relationship of
mestizaje to questions of authen-
ticity and belonging? The essays
in this volume present us with
some tantalizing answers to this
question. Two conceptually con-
tradictory visions or discourses of mestizaje inhabit these pages, and the
social relationships the authors are describing.

journal of latin american anthropology 2(1)170-181 copyright© 1996, american anthropological association

170 journal of latin american anthropology

florencia e. mallon university of wisconsin/madison

On the one hand, we have mestizaje as a liberating force that breaks

open colonial and neocolonial categories of ethnicity and race. This is a
resistant mestizaje, one that questions authenticity and rejects the need to
belong as defined by those in power. As a discourse of militant hybridity, it
is a counterhegemonic claiming of intermediate identities that, by its very
indeterminacy and flexibility, escapes the use of ethnic and racial categori-
zations for the purposes of social
control. The Q aqchas described
by Abercrombie, Sandino's anti-
imperialist Indo-Hispanic project
as discussed by Gould, the
Chicana constructions of mestizo
identity mentioned by Hale and
Smith, the neo-Indianistas' popu-
list celebration of the cholo
serrano analyzed by de la Cadena
--all these are examples of
mestizaje as a liberating,
counterhegemonic discourse.
On the other hand, mestizaje
also emerges as an official dis-
course of nation formation, a new
claim to authenticity that denies
colonial forms of racial/ethnic
hierarchy and oppression by creating an intermediate subject and interpel-
lating him/her as "the citizen." As a discourse of social control, official
mestizaje is constructed implicitly against a peripheral, marginalized, dehu-

authenticity, marginality, and gender in ethnic identities 171

 manized Indian "Other" who is often "disappeared" in the process. As Gould
points out for Nicaragua, and as has been variously argued for Mexico and
the 1910 revolution, a discourse of official mestizaje may often glorify the
image of the heroic pre-Columbian Indian while demeaning and dehumaniz-
ing contemporary indigenous people.
Of course, neither discourse of mestizaje, whether counterhegemonic or
official, exists in pure form or in isolation. The articles in this volume show
how various options for mestizo/a identity—which in practice may combine
elements from both counterhegemonic and official discourses—are worked
out in specific historical contexts. These options are dynamic and changing,
their implications vary overtime and in relation to each other. Thus, as de la
Cadena argues, the meaning of mestizo or cholo could change dramatically
within the same regional space and in a period of a few decades, from the
most abhorred and illegitimate representative of oppression, to the most prom-
ising and virile symbol of the "new nation." And as Gould suggests, official
and counterhegemonic elements can coexist within the same anti-imperialist
discourse, since Sandino alternatively held out the promise of the new Indo-
Hispanic nation, and asserted that his movement would make "real men"
out of the Indians.
Given the complexity and contingency of all the discursive and political
claims concerning mestizaje, Hale's caution in dealing with the concept in
Guatemala is especially welcome. He explores the difference between the
use of the term mestizo—a. recent, more politically correct and hybrid term
—and of the term ladino, associated in Guatemalan indigenous and radical
discourses with exploitation and lack of authenticity. He suggests that, in
the Guatemalan context where indigenous identity politics and militancy
have been extremely successful, the reactive appropriation of the term mes-
tizo may combine aspects of political or cultural backlash with a certain
creative hybridity.
When comparing this ambivalent Guatemalan mestizaje to the new forms
of politics among contemporary Nicaraguan Miskitu, Hale uses the phrases
"strategic essentialism" and "strategic multiplicity" in order to suggest the
political construction of all forms of ethnic discourse. The ethnic politics of
Nicaraguan indigenous groups during the Sandinista revolution, as well as
the present-day ethnic militance of Maya groups in Guatemala, would be-
long in the category of strategic essentialism. Today's muddier political
options on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast, and (perhaps only potentially?) the
emerging commitment to mestizaje among some Guatemalan groups, would
belong in the category of strategic multiplicity.
Here, however, I would suggest we add another dyad of categories, bring-
ing us back to the question with which I began my comments: "strategic

172 journal of latin american anthropology

authenticity" versus "strategic marginality." If we return to Anzaldua's work,
we find that she moves back and forth repeatedly between a position of
strategic authenticity, as a South Texas born-and-bred, phenotypically
"brown" Chicana, and a position of strategic marginality, as a woman, a
feminist, and a lesbian. As a brown South Texanfroma farmworker family,
Anzaldua can always "go home," even if home, as she points out, is itself a
borderland criss-crossed by racist barbed wire. As a woman, she can only
do so if she leaves behind her feminist politics and her sexual orientation.
Occasionally she claims that her relatively easy ethnic identification actu-
ally frees her to criticize the sexist limitations of her culture; yet at other
times in the book she insists that onlyfromthe margins—whether defined by
gender, race, class, or sexual orientation—can one truly criticize. So some-
times Anzaldua makes counterhegemonic claims through strategic authen-
ticity, and sometimes through strategic marginality. In so doing, she con-
structs very different types of mestizaje.
We may want to explore, in this context, how a claim of essentialism—
indigenous militancy or the Black Consciousness movement in Brazil, for
example—might look different, depending on whether it is madefroma posi-
tion of strategic authenticity or strategic marginality. What has made recent
Latin American indigenous movements so attractive, it seems to me, is pre-
cisely the revindication of an essentialist identity as a liberating strategy, a
move that comesfromthe margins of the system of power. The same is true
of the Black Consciousness movement in Brazil when it has called into ques-
tion that country's myth of racial democracy. Yet what happens when we
vary the lens and look at claims of essentialist identity from within? Can
certain subgroups within an ethnic or racial movement make these claims
from a position of strategic authenticity, thus relegating others to the less
authentic margins of the same movement, basically denying those groups
the right or ability to ever entirely "go home"?
Similar kinds of complexity exist within any claim to strategic multi-
plicity. As de la Cadena shows for Cuzco, the mo-Indianista project of
militant hybridity and multiplicity was intricately layered in terms of au-
thenticity and marginality. In relation to power groups in Lima or to the old
elites in Cuzco, the nQO-Indianistas positioned their project of cultural fu-
sion as strategically marginal. In relation to Indians and male cholos, how-
ever, the Bohemian male Indianistas positioned themselves as the authentic
and truly virile examples of what the new fusion—interestingly enough, to be
accomplished directly upon the bodies of seductive cholas—would entail. So
a strategic claim to authenticity can, under any circumstances, reorder the
distribution of power within a political movement based on discourses of

authenticity, marginality, and gender in ethnic identities 173

 ethnicity. Permission to "go home" to any "imagined community," whether
it be an ethnic group, culture, or nation, will be conditional on who is asking
the question, and on who is doing the imagining.

I would like to turn now to a second set of questions suggested by these

essays, which concerns not only the ethnic discourses of specific political
movements, but the study of ethnicity and ethnic relations more generally.
As several of the authors suggest, we need to think a great deal more sys-
tematically and historically about how we might profitably apply the cri-
tique of the unified subject to our study of ethnic identity and ethnic rela-
tions. Hale, for example, admits discomfort at inhabiting an ill-defined space
between an "insurrectionary subject" and "anything-goes" postmodernism.
Yet in a way, that is the space we all presently inhabit. Are there ways to
make it a more comfortable theoretical, analytical, and—perhaps most im-
portantly—political space?
Our first task may be to reflect on what is really "new" in postmodern
approaches to ethnicity. It is important, in this context, not to give too much
weight to "traditional" or "conventional" approaches. True, as both Hale
and Smith point out, there are many Latin Americanist anthropologists and
historians who have taken ethnic and racial categories at face value. Yet at
the same time, there are theoretical and comparative literatures with a
longstanding presence that have been taking much more flexible and contin-
gent approaches to questions of ethnic identity and ethnic politics. This is
particularly true for the African case, where social scientists from various
disciplines have produced studies dealing with the role of states and ethnic
patriarchs in the construction and enforcement of ethnic boundaries, as well
as the role of women in the creation and recreation of ethnic identities.1
Indeed, it may be worth our while to assess the actual importance of
postmodern approaches to our project of decentering ethnicity. Clearly, a
critique of the unified subject is important to this enterprise. But beyond that
critique, what do we need to know in order to place ethnic relations in his-
torical and political context? Here, as the essays in this volume show, there
is no substitute for some good old-fashioned archival and ethnographic data.
Some of the questions we need to answer can only be approached em-
pirically. Who and what constructs ethnic boundaries and identities, and
under what conditions? What is the role of conflicts within ethnic groups,
especially over the control of material and symbolic resources? How do
conflicts among ethnic groups, over resources but also over rights and privi-

174 journal of latin american anthropology

leges, affect the nature of ethnic identities? What is the role of the state in
inter- or intra-ethnic conflicts, depending on questions of social control,
national security, and the reproduction of power relations?2
Once we begin to think of ethnicity as a project for identity through the
cultural construction of boundaries, we also find that intellectual and politi-
cal mediators are central to the task. De la Cadena and Gould's essays,
especially, deal with this question of mediation by intellectuals and power
brokers. Both suggest, in fact, that new ethnic discourses are often produced
by counterhegemonic intellectuals who are attempting to claim new space in
a crowded and fluid political arena. It is also these intellectuals, sometimes
accompanied by allied "traditional" ethnic leaders, who then police the bound-
aries of a particular ethnic identity, deciding who can "go home" and who
cannot.
The most productive way to connect questions of ethnic boundaries to
questions of authenticity is, in my opinion, through an analysis of gender.
As many of us have heard again and again, gender is not only about women,
but about the social construction of women and men as sexually identified
human beings. In the essays by de la Cadena, Gould, and Hale, a particu-
larly striking gendered "script" of mestizaje occurs again and again: the
"sexual triangle" that pits white or Spanish men in competition and struggle
with Indian men over the sexual control or seduction of Indian women. The
various uses and rewritings of this script stand at the core of many of the
projects of ethnic identity discussed in this volume.
As Smith briefly notes, one classic version of the "sexual triangle" script
as applied to the Spanish conquest of Mexico is the story of La Malinche, a
young woman of elite indigenous background who had been sold into sla-
very by her mother and stepfather and who then served as Hernan Cortes'
translator and mistress. In the most mainstream version of this script, popu-
larized in Octavio Paz's (1959) classic work on Mexican national character,
Malinche is viewed as the original traitor to her race who, through the use of
her body, in essence "allowed" the conquest to occur. She is "La Chingada"
the "penetrated one" and, according to Paz, has defined Mexicans as a mon-
grel and illegitimate race in constant fear of being dominated, chingados,
"penetrated."
In a recent book, Sandra Messinger Cypess (1991) historicizes the main-
stream version of La Malinche's life and actions presented by Paz. Accord-
ing to Cypess, the view of Malinche as traitor emerged only after indepen-
dence from Spain, perhaps first in Xicotencatl, the first novel known to be
published in the postcolonial period. This view was then picked up in sev-
eral other works published during the 19th century, and came to constitute

authenticity, marginality, and gender in ethnic identities 175

 an important gender subtext in modern Mexican literature. But Cypess also
points out that, at various points, a version of Malinche as heroine re-emerges,
justified by the argument that it was she who first made possible the mestizo
Mexican nation.3
Whether Malinche was viewed positively or negatively depended, in
most of this literature, on whether the author was attempting to glorify
Mexico's prehispanic traditions or to praise the creation of a new mestizo
fusion of cultures. In the former case, Malinche was seen as a traitor. In the
latter, she was the precursor of true Mexican nationality. Strikingly, in de la
Cadena's article an analogous dynamic emerges among Cuzco intellectuals
and their views of the actions of two indigenous women during the Spanish
conquest of the Incas.
Two opposing value judgements are put on these women by the Cuzco
indigenistas and the neo-Indianistas. The indigenistas of the early 20th
century saw Indians and the self-defined gente decente as the only proper
ethnic/moral groups. Everyone else was potentially illegitimate, sexually
suspect, and definitely mongrel: in short, mestizo. To go even further, the
indigenistas implied that only the original and pure Inca tradition was "re-
ally" Indian; contemporary Indians were in fact degenerated hybrids and
needed to be redeemed. In their own claim to power and control as a regional
elite, the indigenistas thus suggested that only they, as gentlemen, could
preserve and revindicate the original purity and dignity of Inca history and
language, and only they could redeem the present-day Indian.
In such a discourse imbued with the centrality of purity and morality,
where all forms of hybridity were to be avoided, it is not surprising that Con
Ocllo, the Inca woman who preferred to die rather than submit sexually to a
Spanish man, was glorified. Isabel Chimpu Ocllo, the Malinche-like figure
who was the mother of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the great mestizo Andean
intellectual, was despised for the same reasons as Cori Ocllo was praised.
The neo-Indianistas, on the other hand, were interested in promoting pre-
cisely what the indigenistas despised: hybridity and spiritual fusion. Their
heroine, then, was Chimpu Ocllo who, in this version as in the mestizo-
oriented discourses around Malinche, became the precursor of true mestizo
nationhood.
So far, we have considered the dilemma of conquest and mestizaje from
only one corner of our triangle: that of the non-Indian man. What happens
when we vary the lens? In his stories from Monimbo, Gould provides us
with some interesting clues. In Nicaragua's indigenous communities, he sug-
gests, female sexuality was a principal site of anxiety and contention; for
Indian men, too, saw mestizaje as the ladino/Spanish appropriation of In-

176 journal of latin american anthropology

dian women's sexuality, and thus the breakdown of the system of indigenous
patriarchy. The story of an Indian woman interested only in men who would
allow her to "whiten" herself, as well as the many tales of indigenous men
who rented out their daughters to whiter men in order to "improve" the race,
denote the ambivalence and complexity attached to ethnic resistance by In-
dians themselves. That the Indian woman in the first story ended up jilted by
all her whiter lovers, only to return to her community to be shunned by all
her compatriots, provides a satisfying revenge for the male elders usually
charged with maintaining and policing ethnic boundaries.
Gould also makes clear that masculinity was the political stock-in-trade
among indigenous leaders fighting to claim authenticity for their faction
within Indian communities. It is interesting to note how one faction of Indian
leaders associated with outside politics criticized a rival by calling him
cochon, which Gould translates as homosexual. But as Roger Lancaster
(1992) argues in his work on Nicaraguan masculinity, cochon is not simply
"gay" in the same sense as in the United States. In Nicaragua, cochon is the
partner who assumes the "feminine" position in a homosexual encounter,
and the only one of the two to whom the stigma of homosexuality is at-
tached. When the term is used by one Indian elite faction to criticize a rival,
cochon could very well have similar connotations to chingada/o, in the sense
of being the "penetrated" one, the one who is weaker, the one who is domi-
nated, and ultimately the one who has sold out his or her people to an out-
sider.
The only entirely silent partner in this triangular dance of mestizaje is
the Indian woman, the central protagonist of the drama since her body serves
as the "ground" on which the conflicts between groups of men will occur. As
Lata Mani (1990) has argued in the case of widow immolation in colonial
India, the woman is never the actual subject of these conflicts, for she never
acts on her own behalf. Instead, she is the ground, the goal or the prize in
struggles among men. She is, at times, in de la Cadena's parlance, the se-
ductive chola who will submit to the virile Bohemian intellectual and thus
make possible the project of cultural fusion. Other times she is the stoic and
patient martyr who silently suffers the oppression of her people or, again in
de la Cadena's example, endures the wild sexuality and blows of the Indian
man. But at least in the essays of this volume, the Indian woman does not
speak for herself.
It was especially in this context that I wondered, with regard to Hale's
essay, how to think about the case of Rigoberta Menchu (1984). Menchu is
certainly the opposite of the silent Indian woman. And yet when, how, and
why does she speak? It seems to me that Menchu's silence is broken by the

authenticity, marginality, and gender in ethnic identities 177

 forces set into motion by a new political coalition, a radical coalition of
indigenous people and progressive ladinos whose very success brings down
upon the peasants unspeakable suffering and repression. Menchu loses most
of her family in the army massacres, beginning with her father's death in the
Spanish embassy in 1979. She experiences the physical disappearance of
her community in the military occupation of the highlands. Finally, in the
midst of her loss and grief, she renounces marriage and children, the corner-
stones of a Maya woman's individual identity, because she cannot imagine
living a normal life in such abnormal times. What does it mean to speak
under such circumstances, and what does it mean for our understanding of
indigenous identities?4
When women themselves speak about their position on a map of ethnic
identities, the reference points shift radically. In Menchu's story, Indian women
are not the long-suffering, quiet martyrs or repositories of culture they are in
men's stories. Instead we are drawn to the image of Menchu's mother, the
travelling political organizer who entered through women's kitchens into
their hearts and heads. We remember the horrible death reserved for Menchu's
mother, the soldiers keeping relatives away from her body, prohibiting a
decent burial, perhaps especially because she had transgressed boundaries
by making women's "proper" gendered spaces-motherhood, the kitchen-
subversive.
In Chicana revisions of La Malinche, Malintzin is neither the treacher-
ous mistress of the conqueror nor the sacrificial mother who lent her body in
order to create the mestizo race. She is instead the translator, the first woman
to cross boundaries and find she belonged nowhere. She is, in essence, the
first Chicana, the first mestizo whose very body is marked as the boundary
between warring cultures.
In Cuzco mestizos' constructions of themselves, they battle the associa-
tion of their identity with disease, public immorality, lack of hygiene and of
social control. Instead, they assert an image of themselves as matriarchs, as
household partners, as mujeres delpueblo (women of the people) who struggle
for respeto, for respect and the recognition of their decency. In a particularly
striking move, they use the discourse of immorality against their oppressors:
atrevimiento, the public daring or scandal of which they are accused by
municipal officials, becomes their weapon of struggle as they take to the
streets in political demonstrations.
Perhaps women are so often silent in the gendered scripts of ethnic iden-
tity and ethnic struggle because, when they speak, the categories themselves
explode. Or, as in the case of the Mayas of Guatemala, is it only after the
categories explode that women can speak? As some recent contributors to

178 journal of latin american anthropology

rethinking nationalisms have argued, the very boundaries between "inside"
and "outside" are questioned when we view nations through a gendered lens.5
An analogous shift occurs in the case of ethnic boundaries.
We can only begin to imagine, at this point, what ethnic and political
secrets might still come to light. As Chicana revisions have imagined her,
Malintzin questioned the very legitimacy of the categories that made her a
traitor. A traitor to whom, she asks? To the people who sold me into slavery
in the first place? To the people who gave me as a gift to newly arrived
strangers? To the strangers who helped me forge a new identity? Or to the
Aztec warriors whose words I knew how to translate? To whom, indeed. As
the women who were pawned by their male relatives to other lineages in
19th century East Africa knew so well, women often have no ethnic identity
of their own.6 Yet if they are supposed to be the tabula rasa, the ground onto
which men inscribe ethnicity or national identity in their struggles for power,
what happens when the ground moves and speaks?
Certainly, more of the silences and complicities in any system of domi-
nation or conquest come to light. As in the case of Mexico, how many times
have the negotiations and collaborations among factions of warring elites
been kept quiet by blaming the treacherous or seductive woman? As
poignantly represented by Ranajit Guha (1986) in a recent article, how many
times have women's own attempts to defend, support or protect their female
relatives been complicit with the system of domination itself? In the end, as
Teresa De Lauretis (1990) has suggested, perhaps the foregrounding of gen-
der in discussions of identity will make it impossible to "go home" at all. Is
this the source of our discomfort with "anything goes" postmodernism? Can
we still claim a more liberating intermediate space?7
The answer, as always, is historical and political. As we have seen in
the cases of Rigoberta Menchu and the Cuzco mestizos, women provide
answers from a position of strategic marginality within a political move-
ment, whatever that particular movement's claim to identity might entail. In
a somewhat different yet analogous case, the title of a pioneering anthology
of Black feminist writings published in the United States was: All the Women
are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us are Brave (Hull et al.
1982). We need continuously to reclaim the sense of community and the
clarity of vision to be brave. Hopefully, the work we do will ensure that the
brave do not always have to be the same ones.

authenticity, marginality, and gender in ethnic identities 179

 notes
1. For an introduction to some of these issues and concerns, see Mallon (1993).
2. The questions raised in this paragraph were inspired by the work of Paul Brass, especially Brass
(1985).
3. See Cypess (1991) especially pp. 1-13. As Cypess points out, the references to Malinche in the
early historical texts about the Spanish conquest were generally positive and full of praise (pp. 27-38). For
discussions of later more positive views, see also pp. 68-92.
4. It is worthwhile noting that, in the original Spanish, the title is "Afe llamo Rigoberta Menchuy
asi me nacio la conciencia" a phrase with which Menchii both "names" herself and claims access to
human and political consciousness. It is precisely in the context of suffering and destruction, such a title
implies, that this kind of naming and consciousness become possible.
5. See, for example, Cobham (1992) and Layoun (1992).
6. On the revisions of Malinche, see especially Norma Alarcon (1983,1989), Phillips (1983) Cypess
(1991:138-52). On the pawning of women in East Africa, see Wright (1975).
7. See also Mallon (1994).

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