Roberto Benitez

30 April 2012

Contemporary Mestizaje Defined

     In Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church, author Timothy Matovina, in relating the term to the meetings between Spanish conquistadores and Amerindian cultures in Mexico and South America, defines mestizaje as the “dynamic and often violent mixing of cultures, religious systems, and peoples” (Winters). His application of the term effectively describes the era of Spanish conquest and colonization in Latin America, but it lacks an explanation for the continued process of mestizaje, currently defined as mixture of people, culture, and ideas, of people of Latin American descent ongoing in the United States. To that end, the purpose of the research and of this writing is to attain and provide clarification for the term, not only for the reader, but also for the writer who has sought to explain his own mestizaje, inside a contemporary American framework.

A proper investigative technique for a project such as this one is to search for evidence in the era that necessitated the creation of the term mestizaje directly attributed to the creation of the mestizo population. Néstor Medina’s article on the construction of such an identity as this one analyzes the life of a sixteenth-century Peruvian writer nobly born Gómez Suárez de Figueroa who later adopted the Incan name Garcilaso Inca de la Vega. The next exploratory step requires an advance of several hundred years to the present and a review of the current characteristics displayed by the Hispanic American descendants of mestizos like de la Vega. The lens of Thomas Macias, author of a study concerning the perpetuation of Mexican identity, and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Douglas S. Massey, and Frank D. Bean, authors of a study pertaining Spanish language transmission, should provide us with a limited but accurate portrayal.  Ernesto Todd Mireles’s contemptuous, and simultaneously avant-garde, assessment of current attitudes concerning mestizaje will conclude this research and provide us with some interesting forethought.

According to Medina, the initial clash between Spanish explorers and the Amerindian civilizations led to three consequences:

(1) the confrontation catapulted the indigenous into a cyclical process of identity clash, deconstruction, and reconstruction;

(2) victory over the indigenous helped crystallize the Spanish self-perception of superiority; and

(3) Spanish accounts downplayed achievements and insisted on biological and cultural superiority (p. 116).

Prior to laying claim to the label of mestizo, the mixed Amerindian population found itself in an “inbetweenness” due to the dual rejection of their motherly indigenous background and paternal Spanish background (Medina, p. 118). In a manner that has repeated itself throughout the centuries, the subject of Medina’s study, Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, first shamefully rejects his Amerindian heritage and later experiences an epiphany that leads to the prideful and opportunistic embracement of the same.

Gómez Suárez de Figueroa was born after the coupling of a father of Spanish nobility and a mother of Incan nobility; consequently, he led a privileged life that one day provided him with the opportunity to live in his father’s motherland (Medina, p. 119). It was in Spain, that he began to accept his Amerindian heritage after he completed his first work, the Spanish translation of León Hebreos’ Diálogos de Amor, that enlightened him with the concept of an inexorable love between a man and a woman (Medina, p. 120). Despite the internal struggle between the oppressive and oppressed blood in his veins, this passionate portrayal of the intermixture of the sexes led him to a romanticized ideal of the mestizaje of the Spanish and Amerindian cultures (Medina, p. 120). Through Christianity, this newly acquired concept would be the catalyst to the acceptance of the Spanish culture as the superior one that would lead to the advancement of his people to the detriment of their glorious history (Medina, p. 122).

The victory of the Iberian nations over the Amerindian civilizations of Latin America created a new person, the mestizo, who possesses characteristics of ancient nations, mostly racial, and those of the dominant Iberian nation, mostly cultural. As historians have documented in their history books and as witnessed today, the European Hispanic cultures (Spanish and Portuguese) brought forth the virtual extinction of Amerindian languages and religions. After an advance further ahead in time and further north in geography, this research journey finds the behaviors and characteristics of Latinos in the present-day United States next in line for examination.

Thomas Macias’ study on third-generation Mexican Americans, that is, Americans with at least one Mexican-born grandparent, provides interesting data that displays a similar pattern to that shown in Colombian Latin America; however, this time there is a reversal of the model as it is the existing American culture that seemingly triumphs over the immigrant one. Although “Mexican Americans are an example of a group that maintain a strong sense of ethnic identity and actual ties to the ethnic community” (qtd. Macias, p. 302), it is the current relational factors existent between Mexico and the United States (i.e. continued immigration and proximity) that differentiate third-generation Mexican Americans from third-generation European and Asian Americans (Macias, p. 314). Macias’ study exemplifies this through the following findings:

(1) third-generation Mexican Americans are less Catholic, in quantitative and qualitative measures, than their ancestors are, and they can elect to be Catholic when it is convenient without damaging their identity (p. 311);

(2) third-generation Mexican Americans watch Spanish-language programming to strengthen their ability to speak Spanish but only when outside encounters necessitate or encourage it (p. 312); and

(3) third-generation Mexican Americans give typical cross-generational and cross-national encounters ethnic meaning (p. 312).

Macias creates a paradigm of the Mexican American that progressively and indistinctively distances himself from his Mexican origins while simultaneously experiencing inexorable magnetic societal forces that attract him to his history and maintain his ethnic identity alive (p. 313).

     The study "Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention in Southern California" provides data on an exponential separation of clear Mexican characteristics, in this case, Spanish language fluency and use, from Mexican Americans in the southern United States. This study measures and focuses on the following two factors:

(1) survival curve, defined as “the degree to which immigrants and their descendants in different generational cohorts are able to speak their mother tongue and actually do so” (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 448); and

(2) linguistic life expectancy, defined as the “average number of generations a mother tongue can be expected to survive in the United States after the arrival of an immigrant” (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 448).

The article finds a definitive link between a generational fading of language retention and the United States reputation as a “graveyard for languages” (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 453), and dispels the sometimes-fearful sometimes-hateful belief that Hispanic Americans will turn the United States into a dual-language nation (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 456). The data on linguistic survival provides the following information:

(1)  by generation 3.0 (three or four foreign-born grandparents) only 17 percent of Mexican Americans still speak fluent Spanish (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, ps. 452 and 454)

(2)  by generation 3.5 (one or two foreign-born grandparents) the number decreases to 7 percent (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, ps. 452 and 454)

(3)  if a Mexican immigrant arrives today he or she can expect 5 of every 100 of their great grandchildren to speak fluent Spanish (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 455);

(4)  by the third generation 96 percent prefer to speak English at home (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 455); and

(5)  97 percent of the great grandchildren of Mexican immigrants will not speak Spanish (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 455)

A quick summary on the data on linguistic life expectancy reveals the following pertinent information:

(1)      “no mother tongue can be expected to survive beyond the third generation given the linguistic survival probabilities now prevailing in Southern California” (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 457); and

(2)      “the ability to speak Spanish very well can be expected to disappear sometime between the second and third generation for all Latin American groups in Southern California” (Rumbaut, Massey, and Bean, p. 458).

Both data sets reveal the fact that Latin American, specifically Mexican American, and American mestizaje adapts itself to the dominant culture, but maintains the outward appearance and a surviving ethnic identity of an autonomous existence and resiliency due to relation factors between the United States and its Latin American neighbors. This leads to the question of whether or not the path of the effective suppression of ethnic culture that is mestizaje, as demonstrated by the previously summarized life of Inca de la Vega and the empirical data found in the two separate studies, is the correct one for Mexican Americans to take. Ernesto Todd Mireles provides one answer to this question in his assessment of contemporary Mexican Americans, 'Que te corre la sangre de indio, cabron': The Myths Of Mestizaje And Nation In Pancho Goes To College.

     Mireles’ article utilizes the summary of the film Pancho Goes to College to recognize mestizaje as the aforementioned suppression and offers many suggestions pertaining to the cultural choices facing Mexican Americans today. Mireles states that mestizaje “will never lead Xicanos or other Meso-American people to intellectual or physical freedom” and that “its job is to maintain the status quo: colonial subjugation” (p. 140). His reasoning of viewing mestizaje in such a negative light is due in part to his interpretation of recent anti-immigrant sentiment across the southwestern United States, the states that border Mexico, as a “backlash against a solidifying Xicano identity” (p. 141). However, he does not dwell on external factors such as popular rhetoric and instead focuses his attention mainly on Mexican American paradigms through the personages found in the film Pancho Goes to College.

The protagonist of the film, oddly enough, a college student named Pancho, represents to Mireles a “de-indianised” mestizo whose apathy towards radical Xicano politics is in effect a rejection of the Xicanada, the whole Xicano community (p. 144). Mireles believes that the existence of Mexican Americans like Pancho that embrace the idea of mestizaje while simultaneously recognizing and discarding his Meso-American identity is detrimental to the Xicano self because “being mestizo is a constant reminder of an alleged defeat and impurity” and that “embracing our own mestizaje is an acceptance of colonial domination” (p. 150).

The suggestions to quell mestizaje and stimulate Meso-American identity include; a “call to understand and identify divisive identity myths,” a message found in the film (Mireles, p. 143), and the facilitation of “internal dialogue that shakes the will of the people, moving them to reject colonial discourses such as mestizaje in favour of Meso-American identity” (Mireles, p. 150). In the final scenes of the film, Pancho finishes the work of the Spanish conquistadores by denying and deriding his Meso-American identity, displaying the trademark apathy that “is deeply rooted in the indigenous defeat over five centuries ago” (Mireles, p. 153).

This brings the research back to the beginning, to the definition of mestizaje; is it the beneficially progressive, but rocky, intermarriage between two cultures that de la Vega believes it to be, is it inevitable given the current conditions present in the United States as the data demonstrates, or is it the recognition and acceptance of defeat at the hands of oppressive colonizers. History’s unpredictability (i.e. its infinite what ifs) does not provide an adequate explanation, it simply recounts the consequential events that have led to the present and presents rational expectations of the future. The data present in the two studies, while illuminating and useful, is naturally cold and disappointing in that it partly delegitimizes Mexican American claims to Catholicism and bilingualism. Mireles, however, supplies the only constructive resource researched for this investigation; he condemns mestizaje because he recognizes the apathy endemic in Mexican Americans, evidenced by ongoing social inequalities, and he advocates the “re-Indianisation” for the unifying purpose of strengthening the identity of Xicanos (p. 139).

“The last battle of the colonized against the colonizer will often be that of the colonized among themselves” (qtd. Mireles, p. 149).

Works Cited

Macias, Thomas. "Imaginandose Mexicano: The Symbolic Context Of

Mexican American Ethnicity Beyond The Second Generation." Qualitative Sociology 27.3 (2004): 299-315. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.

Medina, Néstor. "The Religious Psychology Of Mestizaje: Gómez

Suárez De Figueroa Or Garcilaso Inca De La Vega." Pastoral Psychology 57.1/2 (2008): 115-124. Academic Search Complete. Web. 26 Apr. 2012.

Mireles, Ernesto Todd. "'Que Te Corre La Sangre De Indio,

Cabron': The Myths Of Mestizaje And Nation In Pancho Goes To College." Third Text 25.2 (2011): 139-155. Academic Search Complete. Web. 26 Apr. 2012.

Rumbaut, Rubén G., Douglas S. Massey, and Frank D. Bean.

"Linguistic Life Expectancies: Immigrant Language Retention In Southern California." Population & Development Review 32.3 (2006): 447-460. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Apr. 2012.

Winters, Michael Sean. "Michael Sean Winters Reviews Timothy

Matovina's "Latino Catholicism" | The New Republic:." The New Republic. N.p., 12 April 2012. Web. 26 Apr 2012. <http://www.tnr.com/book/review/latino-catholicism-timothy-matovina>.