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

92 reframing latin america
that considers human bodies as signifi ers to be assigned signifi cation, and
sensitive to the idea of essentialism, Cañizares Esguerra was able to read
the writings of these creole intellectuals in a new way. Consequently, he
illustrates Latin America’s participation in the creation of modern Western
racial essentialism.
Social constructionists and semioticians certainly recognize the incredible
durability of racialist arguments over the past fi ve hundred years. They
take note of how racialist essentialism was globalized along with the spread
of Western modernity. But they are also quick to point out that racialist
ideas, being social constructions or discourses, are highly fl exible and adapt
to local and regional needs; thus, they tend to focus much of their research
efforts on fi nding these variations.
Despite the steady onslaught of social constructionist arguments, racialist
views have proven highly resilient; indeed, so has racism. But in the
latter half of the twentieth century, owing to populist political movements
and the realization of the horrors of the Holocaust, the legitimacy of racism,
and even of racialism, has been in retreat. But human beings have still
needed ways to explain the distinctions that typify the complex fabric of human
coexistence. So as references to race have declined, alternative terms
have risen instead. Arguably, ethnicity is now the most widely accepted and
commonly used among these.
Ethnicity is supposedly a more neutral term that lacks the historic legacy
of race and refers to cultural identity or place of origin rather than immutable
traits in the blood. Even for those people who have no awareness
of the concept of essence, the term seemingly avoids essentializing people
and instead defi nes them with respect to their cultural grouping. Thus, according
to this approach, people of African descent in the Americas are no
longer defi ned as being part of the black race but as belonging to cultural
groupings, such as of African American, or African Caribbean, or African
Brazilian, depending on where they lived and what cultural group nurtured
their identity.
Ethnicity is the subject of the excerpt by Peter Wade, a professor of social
anthropology at the University of Manchester, who has devoted much of his
professional life to the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Wade’s
main argument is that ethnicity suffers from many of the same essentialist
foundations as does the term race. Wade demonstrates how essentialism, as a
sort of foundational modernist discourse, has affected the issue of ethnicity.
Wade’s discussion is particularly important in the context of Latin America,
especially to the issue of mestizaje, which we will defi ne at greater
length in our discussion of nation. But briefl y, mestizaje originally referred
to the racial mixing of Indians and Europeans that began with the Spanish