Abstract
The Mexican nation was built by the state. This construction involved the formulation and dissemination of a national identity to forge a community that shares common culture and social cohesion. The focus of the article is to analyze the myth of the origin of the nation, mestizaje, as this is a long-lasting formula of national integration. After more than a century of mestizaje, real or fictitious, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples have begun to question the capability of this common origin since it invalidates the origins of many other ethnic communities, especially in the current phase of the nation state, which refers to the recognition of cultural diversity. The myth is propagated by official means and is highly perceived by society, due to its high symbolic content that is well reflected in popular pictorial representations. The final part of the article will refer to the mestizo myth in the imagination of some Indigenous intellectuals and students, who hold their own ethnic myths of foundation or origin.
Highlights
Does the Mexican nation have one or many genealogies? What place does genealogy have as an input in building something in common? The modern world is organized into nation states, but none of them can, in the twenty-first century, boast of being homogeneous in language and culture
The National Survey of Indigenous People 2015 (Gutiérrez Chong 2015) provides a unique national picture, for it reports on the perceptions of mestizos towards Indigenous people
This section uses only two questions from the survey to get a general look at what mestizos perceive in relation to more than 10 million speakers of indigenous languages across the country
Summary
Does the Mexican nation have one or many genealogies? What place does genealogy have as an input in building something in common? The modern world is organized into nation states, but none of them can, in the twenty-first century, boast of being homogeneous in language and culture. In the construction of any nation, cultural and linguistic homogeneity has been imposed at the expense of the diversity and plurality of existing cultures and languages This homogenization is not forever; on the contrary, access to education as a condition for the modernity of the state has promoted the visibility and activism of the unrecognized Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants who have sought for their inclusion in the course of the twenty-first century. The article will address how Indigenous ethnicity becomes part of the symbolic richness of national identity, as well as the integrationist nation-building strategy of the 20th century ideology of the “cosmic race” It will continue with the explanation of the nationalist aesthetic that helped to spread the mestizo content in popular consumption calendars and the Gellnerian tradition of the standardized school (Gellner 1983). While the myth of the mestizo has begun to face various criticisms, the final part will refer to the validity of the myths of origin or genealogies of Indigenous peoples by weighing the results of qualitative interviews and a survey that sought to measure how the mestizo is perceived among Indigenous people
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