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

identity construct #4: nation 137
Gobineau’s treatise does not rise out of a vacuum. The discourses of his
era informed his essentialist presuppositions of a natural hierarchy of races,
as well as of a world that can be broken down into racially pure and impure
nations. His theories, in turn, helped to shape competing discourses.
Although Gobineau’s racial nation was just one variant within the hermeneutic
discourse of defi ning national essence, it was a particularly powerful
one, as evidenced by the fact that his theories acquired widespread recognition
during the nineteenth century and gained a prominent place in Nazi
ideology.
Latin America, too, was deeply infl uenced by racially derived notions of
national identity, which predate Gobineau. Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo:
Civilization and Barbarism (1845), is just one example. 2 Throughout most
of Latin American history, race and nation have been almost inseparable
as concepts. Even in the nationalist period of the fi rst half of the twentieth
century, when populist-oriented politicians and intellectuals articulated a
new vision of the nation based on broader inclusiveness, race and racial
identity were paramount, especially regarding the mestizo (a mix of Spanish
and Indian). Sometimes this celebration of mixing, or mestizaje as it has
come to be called, was overtly racial, as in the appeal by José Vasconcelos
(1822–1959), a Mexican writer and politician, to the racially mixed person as
the highest form of human existence, the new “cosmic race.” Other times
it was defi ned in more cultural terms. But in either case, the new mestizo
nationalism excluded as often as it included because mestizo inevitably got
confl ated with a racial type that did not accord status to Indians or Africans.
Not surprisingly, these newly imagined mestizo societies had a diffi
cult time shaking their white supremacist heritage rooted in hermeneutic
essentialism, and lighter skin color continued to be privileged.
In contrast, Louis Pérez approaches national identity as a competition
of ideas rather than of bloodlines. In the introduction to his On Becoming
Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture, Pérez, who has an endowed
professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a
scholar of Cuban history, lays out the premises for a semiotic interpretation
of national identity and applies it Cuba. Pérez immediately dispenses with
the notion of origins and essences by defi ning national identity as “not . . . a
fi xed and immutable construct but rather [a] . . . cultural artifact . . . almost
always in fl ux,” a defi nition reminiscent of Hall’s process of identifi cation. 3
With specifi c regard to Cuban national identity, Pérez focuses on the interaction
of the United States and Cuba from the 1850s to the 1950s and
the process of “cultural infl ection,” whereby North American culture—
Hollywood fi lms, technological advancements, consumerism, etc.—shaped