Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

90 reframing latin america
semiotic approach, advances an argument about the genesis of essentialist
thinking and places Latin America at its inception. For that reason, we will
outline the basics of that argument.
The study in question is an academic article written by Jorge Cañizares
Esguerra, a history professor at the State University of New York, Buffalo. 2
He argues that the origin of racial essentialism can be traced to colonial
Mexico and Peru in the 1500s and 1600s. The context for the emergence of
essentialist thinking was the consolidation of a distinct demographic population
within the maturing colonial society known as criollos, or creoles.
These were people of Spanish descent born in the Americas. They considered
themselves pureblooded Europeans, meaning that no one in their families
had intermixed with Indians, though they had been born and raised in the
Americas rather than continental Europe. They were contrasted with the
peninsulares, Spaniards born and raised in Spain who came to the Americas
to administer the colonies but who often did not stay there and returned
home to Europe.
This takes on signifi cance in the context of Spain’s need to justify its
exploitation of Indian populations primarily for labor purposes. At the time
of the Spanish Conquest, people defi ned one another according to how they
interpreted the Bible, astrology, and the natural environment. Eventually,
these would be replaced by more scientifi c arguments based in Europe’s
emergent modernity, but until then they served as the primary tools for defi
ning humanity. The Bible was understood as providing God’s word on how
people were constituted; thus, on the proper social order as well. In a society
heavily reliant on religion, as Europe was in the late 1400s and early 1500s,
the Bible was deemed the fi rst and foremost authority on questions pertaining
to human identity. But the challenge for Spain’s and Portugal’s colonization
of the Americas was that the Bible did not mention the New World or
its inhabitants. Hence, Spanish and Portuguese intellectuals turned to astrological
and environmental interpretations. It was believed that people’s
makeup was determined by the stars under which they were born or the
natural environment in which they were raised. Excessive heat or humidity
had specifi c effects on people, as did dryer, colder climates, and certain
astrological patterns.
At the outset of Spanish colonization, the peninsular/creole divide did
not exist. Basically everyone was a peninsular, and classifying people in
the colonial project was not that difficult; there were only Europeans and
Indians. Even though the Bible did not mention Indians specifi cally, the astrological
and natural environmental arguments allowed Spaniards to comfortably
rest on a distinction between the two. Indians supposedly grew