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

identity construct #1: race 91
up in an inferior natural environment and under astrological signs that allowed
for their exploitation at the hands of the Spaniards. But after two or
three generations of Spanish people living and raising families in the Americas,
the old classifi cations no longer sufficed. According to the arguments
based on astrology and natural environment, creoles were no different than
Indians.
Not surprisingly, peninsulars recognized this issue, and driven by a need
to preserve the economic basis of the empire and the exploitation of Indian
labor, they began to develop views that discriminated against the creoles.
Basically, they defi ned creoles as lesser forms of humanity for having been
born and raised in the Americas, even though they were physically indistinguishable
from peninsulars. The creoles did not passively accept these
developments. They responded to peninsular discriminations by reversing
the astrological and natural environment arguments, and then by inventing
the idea of racial essentialism. Eventually, this so-called racial divide
contributed to the creole fi ght for independence. Starting in the mid-to-late
1500s, creole intellectuals argued that America’s astrology and nature were
superior to Spain’s. But this argument did not allow creoles to maintain their
supremacy over Indians because in theory Indians now shared the same superior
astrological and natural origins. It was in seeking to resolve this issue
that creoles moved on to the second, essentializing phase of their response.
Creole intellectuals argued that Indians were somehow fundamentally
different from people of European descent. They were not able to defi ne
specifi cally what that difference was, but in so many words it was the internal,
bloodline essence of Indians that set them apart. An explanatory
analogy that one of these emerging creole racialists used was that fi re (from
nature and astrology) responds to green wood (Indians) and dry wood (people
of Spanish descent) differently. Unable to defi ne specifi cally the origin and
cause of this difference, these creole intellectuals turned to physical differentiation.
Suddenly, darker skin, blackish hair, and certain other physical
features (like a larger nose) became markers of Indian identity and essential
inferiority. The modern notion of race in Latin America was born.
Cañizares Esguerra shows the birth of such a discourse. He does not
attempt to explore the possible multitude of discourses that might have
contributed to the essentialist thinking of these nascent creole racialists.
Neither does he try to argue that they invented racial essentialism for the
fi rst time, or that the ideas of these creoles in Peru and Mexico were responsible
for the emergence of racial essentialism throughout Western
modernity. But Cañizares Esguerra’s argument represents a pathbreaking
moment in racial studies. Rooted in a more semiotically driven methodology