Abstract
The colonial category of mestizo was an ideological tool that shaped national identity in the post-revolutionary period in Mexico. The Indian-mestizo axis functioned to organize the ethnic and political interactions of the state. Doctors and anthropologists reinforced this dual taxonomy in studies of human populations, using biomedical markers to produce differentiated descriptions of the Indian and the mestizo. Genomic descriptions have contributed both to the construction of the scientistic notion of the mestizo based on the percentage of Indian, European and African ancestry, and also to the rise of two technoscientific objects that we call the molecular mestizo and the bioinformatic mestizo. Here we describe the interactions between the ideological and scientific incarnations of the mestizo.
Highlights
Postdoctoral researcher at the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas del Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados/Instituto Politécnico Nacional
Racial division in Mexico started to stabilize towards the end of the colonial period into the following categories: Spanish, which included criollos and gachupines; mestizos, Indians and castas – all the other types (Aguirre Beltrán, 1989)
In Mexico, geneticists like Rubén Lisker and León de Garay took the opportunity to investigate human populations (Barahona, 2010), in an attempt to reveal the marks of mestizaje in terms of the frequency of blood groups, molecular variants and G6PD enzyme (Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase of erythrocytes) (Suárez, Barahona, 2011)
Summary
Postdoctoral researcher at the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas del Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados/Instituto Politécnico Nacional. Another strategy, which we could call ‘brown mestizophilia’, involved incorporating the indigenous population into the mestizo body of the rest of the nation via biological crossing and educational acculturation This latter option, defended by liberal factions, eventually prevailed, perhaps due to the failure of white mestizophilia (Lomnitz Adler, 2010; Saade Granados, 2009). At the beginning of the Cárdenas era, the indigenist project narrowed down and clarified the categories of Indian and mestizo (Aguirre Beltrán, Pozas-Arciniega, 1981; Bonfil Batalla, 2004; Villoro, 1950; Bartra, 2005; Saade Granados, 2009) This eventually led to the current crisis in the matrix of outdated meanings related to the Mexican mestizo (Aguilar Rivera, 2001; Tenorio Trillo, 2006, Lomnitz Adler, 2010; Navarrete, 2004, 2011). We seek to understand the continuities and breaks with analogous research in previous eras, especially in the second half of the twentieth century
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