Depicting Mestizaje : Gendered Images of Ethnorace in Colonial Mexican Texts

Abstract

For over one-quarter of a century, social historians of colonial Latin America have been concerned with issues of identity and difference, especially race, yet few have paid attention to gender as an important factor in social differentiation. This article provides such analysis, exploring the relationships among gender and other identity categories through examination of the construction of gendered ethnoracial categories in a variety of colonial Mexican texts. Kellogg argues that depictions of women of color helped creole elites embrace, however, ambivalently, their mestizaje (mixed-race heritage) as a symbol of Mexican protonational identity.