Forging People: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought (Latino Perspectives) [1 ed.] 0268029822, 9780268029821

Citation preview

Forging People

L a ti n o P e r s p e ctive s Gilberto Cárdenas, series editor

The Institute for Latino Studies, in keeping with the ­distinctive ­mission, ­values, and traditions of the University of Notre Dame, promotes ­understanding and appreciation of the social, cultural, and religious life of U.S. Latinos through advancing research, ­expanding knowledge, and strengthening community.

Forging Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought

People Edited by

J o r g e J .  E . G r a c i a University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

copyright © 2011 by University of notre Dame Press notre Dame, indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu all rights reserved Published in the United states of america

library of congress cataloging-in-Publication Data Forging people : race, ethnicity, and nationality in Hispanic american and latino/a thought / edited by Jorge J.e. gracia. p.cm. — (latino perspectives) includes bibliographical references and index. isBn-13: 978-0-268-02982-1 (pbk.) isBn-10: 0-268-02982-2 (paper) 1.ethnicity—latin america—Philosophy—History. 2. latin america—race relations—Philosophy—History. 3. nationalism—latin america—Philosophy—History. 4. citizenship—latin america— Philosophy—History. i. gracia, Jorge J. e.  F1419.A1F66 2011  305.80098—dc23 2011025678

Contents

Contributors vii Preface xiii 1. Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought Jorge J. E. Gracia

1

Part I. The Colony and Scholasticism 2. The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Race and Personhood 31 Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey Part II. Independence and the Enlightenment 3. Men or Citizens? The Making of Bolívar’s Patria José Antonio Aguilar Rivera

57

4. Andrés Bello: Race and National Political Culture Iván Jaksic a

85

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5. Undoing “Race”: Martí’s Historical Predicament Ofelia Schutte

99

Part III. New Nations and Positivism 6. Sarmiento on Barbarism, Race, and Nation Building Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

127

7. Justo Sierra and the Forging of a Mexican Nation 152 Oscar R. Martí Part IV. Challenges in the Twentieth Century 8. Rodó, Race, and Morality Arleen Salles

181

9. Zarathustra Criollo: Vasconcelos on Race Diego von Vacano

203

10. The Amauta’s Ambivalence: Mariátegui on Race Renzo Llorente

228

11. Mestizaje, mexicanidad, and Assimilation: Zea on Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality Amy A. Oliver

249

Part V. Latinos/as in the United States 12. Latino/a Identity and the Search for Unity: Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia Elizabeth Millán and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez Bibliography Index

271

303 328

Contributors

José Antonio Aguilar Rivera teaches political science in the Division of Political Studies at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas A.C. (CIDE) in Mexico City. He specializes in n ­ ineteenth-century constitutionalism, the history of liberalism, and the intellectual relations between Mexico and the United States. He is the author of El manto liberal: Los poderes de emergencia en México, 1821–1876 (2001); Cartas mexicanas de Alexis de Tocqueville (1999); The Shadow of Ulysses: Public Intellectual Exchange across the US-­ Mexico Border (2000); En pos de la quimera: Reflexiones sobre el experimento constitucional atlántico (2000); El fin de la raza cósmica: Consideraciones sobre el esplendor y decadencia del libera­ lismo en México (2001); and El sonido y la furia: Ensayos sobre la persuasión multicultural en México y los Estados Unidos (2005). In addition, he is coeditor, with Rafael Rojas, of El republicanismo en Hispano­américa: Ensayos de historia intelectual y política (2002). Janet Burke is a member of the faculty in Barrett, the Honors College, and Associate Dean at Arizona State University. She is also a fellow in the Lincoln Center for Ethics. Her field of study is intellectual history. Her most recent publication, with Ted Humphrey, is an edited volume, Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition (2007). Her current projects vii

viii  Contributors

are Liberty in Mexico, with José Antonio Aguilar Rivera as editor and Ted Humphrey, a translation of the work of Mexican public philosophers (forthcoming); and, with Ted Humphrey, The Moral Voices of Their People and a translation and edition of Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Jorge J. E. Gracia holds the Samuel P. Capen Chair and is State University of New York Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo. Among his publications are Images of Thought: Philosophical Interpretations of Carlos Estévez’s Art (2009); Latinos in America: Philosophy and Social Identity (2008); Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (2005); Old Wine in New Skins: The Role of Tradition in Communication, Knowledge, and Group Identity (2003); Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (2000); How Can We Know What God Means? The Interpretation of Revelation (2000); and Hispanics/Latinos in the United States, coedited with Pablo De Greiff (2000). He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Painting Borges: Philosophy Interpreting Art Interpreting Literature, which explores the artistic interpretation of literature. Ted Humphrey is President’s Professor, Lincoln Professor of Ethics, and Barret Professor at Arizona State University. He special­ izes in philosophy and intellectual history. His most recent book, with Janet Burke, is the edited volume, Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition (2007). Among his current projects are, with José Antonio Aguilar Rivera as editor and Janet Burke, Liberty in Mexico, a translation of the work of Mexican public philosophers; with Janet Burke, The Moral Voices of Their People; and, also with Janet Burke, a translation and edition of Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Iván Jaksica is Professor of History at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Director of the Stanford University Program in Chile. His primary research interests are Latin American intellectual

Contributors ix

and political history, especially during the independence and national periods. He is the author of Academic Rebels in Chile: The Role of Philosophy in Higher Education and Politics (1989); Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2001); The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820–1880 (2007), which also appeared in Spanish as Ven conmigo a la España lejana: Los intelectuales norteamericanos ante el mundo hispano, 1820–1880 (2007); and over forty articles in academic journals and books. He is editor or coeditor of seven volumes, including Sarmiento: Author of a Nation (1994); Selected Writings of Andrés Bello (1997); and The Political Power of the Word: Press and Oratory in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2002). His most recent publication is a critical edition of Alberto Blest Gana’s 1897 Durante la reconquista, a novel about the independence period. Renzo Llorente teaches philosophy at Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus. His research centers on issues in social philosophy, ethics, and Latin American philosophy, and he is the author of numerous papers in these and other areas. His recent publications include Beyond the Pale: Exercises in Provocation (2010); the chapter on Marxism in A Companion to Latin American Philosophy, ed. Susana Nuccetelli et al. (2010); “The Moral Framework of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation,” in Ethical Perspectives (March 2009); and “Sobre el humanismo especista de Víctor Gómez Pin,” in Razonar y actuar en defensa de los animales, ed. Marta I. González et al. (2008). He is currently working on the moral foundations of Marxism. Oscar R. Martí is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge, where he teaches Mexican philosophy and critical reasoning. His published works include “Early Critics of Positivism,” in The Blackwell Companion to Latin American Philosophy (2009); “Breaking with the Past: Philosophy and Its History in Latin America,” in The Role of History in Latin American Philosophy, ed. Arleen Salles and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (2005); and several reviews for Isis and Utopian Studies. Currently he is finishing an anthology titled Mexican Philosophers since the Encuentro.

x  Contributors

Elizabeth Millán is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. Her areas of specialization are early German romanticism, Latin American philosophy, and aesthetics. Among her publications are Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (2007), coedited with Arleen Salles; The Role of History in Latin American Philosophy: Contemporary Perspectives (2005), coedited with Jorge J. E. Gracia; Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century: The Human Condition, Values, and the Search for Philosophical Identity (2004); “Borderline Philosophy? Incompleteness, Incomprehension, and the Romantic Transformation of Philosophy,” Yearbook on German Idealism 6 (2008); “A Great Vanishing Act? The Latin American Philosophical Tradition and How Ariel and Caliban Helped Save It from Oblivion,” CR: The New Centennial Review (2007); “Fichte and Brentano: Idealism from an Empirical Standpoint and Phenomenology from an Idealist Standpoint,” Fichte Studien (2007); and “The Revival of Frühromantik in the Anglophone World,” Philosophy Today (Spring 2005). Among her current projects is a book titled Alexander von Humboldt: Romantic Critic of Nature. Amy A. Oliver is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy and Religion, and Associate Professor in Spanish and Latin American Studies, American University. Her areas of specialization are women’s studies, philosophy of literature, and Spanish and Latin American philosophy. Among her publications are Leopoldo Zea’s “The Role of the Americas in History” (1992) and, coedited with María Luisa Femenías, Feminist Philosophy in Latin America and Spain (2007). She is also Latin American Subject Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She is currently working on an English translation of Carlos Vaz Ferreira’s Sobre feminismo, to be included as an appendix in a larger work on Carlos Vaz Ferreira. Arleen Salles is a researcher at Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research interests include ethical theory, moral psychology, bioethics, and Latin American philosophy. Her most recent publications are “Sobre el asco en la moralidad,” in Dianoia (2010); and, with F. Luna, “Moral Incoherence and Hidden Battles: Stem Cell Research in Argentina,” in

Contributors xi

Developing World Bioethics (2010). She has edited four books, the most recent of which is Bioethics: Latin American Perspectives, with M. J. Bertomeu (2002); and The Role of History in Latin American Philosophy, with E. Millán-Zaibert (2005). She is coauthor (with F. Luna) of Bioética en un mundo complejo: Nuevos ensayos sobre temas clásicos (2008). Ofelia Schutte is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. She works in feminist theory, continental philosophy, Latin American philosophy, the philosophy of culture, and Cuban thought. She is coeditor of A Companion to Latin American Philosophy (2010). She has written two books: Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought (1993) and Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks (1984). Among her articles are “Postcolonial Feminism: Genealogies and Recent Directions,” in The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy, ed. Linda M. Alcoff and Eva F. Kittay (2006); “Negotiating Latina Identities,” in Hispanic/Latinos in the United States, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Pablo De Greiff (2000); and “Cultural Alterity: Cross-Cultural Communication and Feminist Thought in North-South Dialogue,” Hypathia 13, no. 2 (1998). Ernesto Rosen Velásquez is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dayton. His areas of research are critical race theory, Latin American and Latino/a philosophy, and political philosophy. He is the author of “Hume’s Racism and His Theory of Prejudice,” forthcoming in the Southwestern Journal of Philosophy; and “Is the Common-Bundle View of Ethnicity Problematic?” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 3 (2011). He is currently working on a book on Latino/a identity. Diego von Vacano is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University. His areas of specialization are political philosophy, political theory, and the history of Latin American thought. He is the author of The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory (2006). He is currently completing a book on the political role of race in the intellectual history of Latin America titled The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity, and Latin American Political Thought.

Preface

The discussion of race in the United States reflects to a great extent the situation in the country. The adoption of the one-drop rule, according to which anyone who has a drop of black blood is considered black, has too often been taken for granted, resulting in a polari­zation that characterizes both the formulation of problems related to race and the purported solutions to those problems: a person is either black or white but not both; there is no in between. It also has tended to move to the background the visible dimensions of race and to pay undue attention to biological and genetic conceptions of it; heredity, rather than appearance, has often been regarded as most significant. Finally, it has contributed to the widespread use of the metaphor of purity associated with whites and of impurity associated with blacks: to be white is to be uncontaminated, whereas to be black is to be contaminated. That a mixture is generally different from the elements that compose it but partakes of them, that races involve gradation and fuzzy boundaries, and that visible appearance plays an important role in racial classifications are facts too often neglected. This model of race takes insufficient note of what much of the world thinks and illustrates the insularity that characterizes some segments of the U.S. community. Indeed, it is seldom that proper attention is paid to the views of other societies. Although the views xiii

xiv  Preface

on race of some European philosophers, such as Kant and Hume, have been studied in some detail, treatments by Latin Americans or Africans, for example, are generally ignored by North American philosophers concerned with race. The inadequacy of this parochial approach becomes clear when one considers how conceptions of race vary from place to place. In Cuba, for example, to be black entails a certain kind of appearance. A person who appears to have mixed black-white ancestry is not usually considered black or white but mulatto. In the United States, according to the one-drop rule, to be black requires only one black ancestor, even if physical appearance tells another story. But in Cuba persons of mixed black and white ancestry who look white are generally taken as white, whereas those who appear black are considered black. Clearly the criteria of racial classification used in the United States and Cuba are different. Similar differences can be found between the views of race in the United States and elsewhere in the world. This neglect of points of view in other parts of the world also applies to ethnicity and nationality. Societies differ substantially in how they establish and think about ethnicity or nationality. Some societies use skin color and physical appearance to establish ethnic and national distinctions; others use lineage or culture. Indian is a racial term generally associated with ancestry in the United States, but in some contexts in South America it is used to refer to culture: to be an Indian indicates that one has not adopted the ways of Europeans, thus carrying with it the disparaging connotations that this entails in the eyes of those who are European or have adopted European culture. Nationality is taken in some cases to be a legal marker—whether involving birthplace or ancestry—and in others to be an indicator of kinship, race, or culture. As in the United States, in some parts of Latin America blacks and mulattoes were denied citizenship because of their race or racial mixture, whereas in other parts of that region it was denied on other grounds, including culture. Considering these differences in conception, it would seem to make sense that theories of race, ethnicity, and nationality need to take into account as many of the various ways in which different societies use these notions as possible. But the tendency in the United

Preface xv

States has been to concentrate on Western European views. This has resulted in inadequate theories, based on cultural and social biases. If U.S. thinking is to make any progress toward an understanding of these phenomena, it needs to go beyond parochial boundaries and consider other societies where race, ethnicity, and nationality also play important roles. How are these notions used in the East, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America? Latin America is especially important because it is the place where Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans first came together in substantial numbers. Indeed, some scholars have made the argument that the concept of race in particular developed in the context of the encounters between these peoples in the sixteenth century. The details of the story have still to be worked out, but one thing is clear: Latin America is significant in this development. And the significance is not restricted to the fact that Latin America is a meeting place of Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans; it involves also the complex subsequent history of racial, ethnic, and national mixture in the region. Scholars who have studied the pertinent populations do not tire of repeating that Latin America is one of the places in the world where mixing has been most prevalent. Developments in Latin America are especially pertinent for the United States because of the large, and growing, population of ­Latinos/as in this country. Latinos/as constitute at present the largest minority group in the United States, surpassing African Americans by increasing margins. And their races, ethnicities, and nationalities are diverse. With regard to race, some Latinos/as consider themselves black, some white, some Asian, and some Amerindian, but most are mixed and view themselves as such. And the cases of ethnicities and nationalities are not very different. Some Latinos/as are Cuban or Colombian born but reside in the United States; others hold double, or even triple, citizenship. Some have parents that are ethnically the same, but others have a variety of ethnic roots. And most identify themselves, or are identified by others, in definite ways while rejecting others. All this creates a need for understanding not only how race, ethnicity, and nationality work in the United States and Latin America but also what Latin Americans and Latinos/as have thought and continue to think of them.

xvi  Preface

The aim of this book is to take a step in this direction by studying how Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and dealt with issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality. How have they thought of racial, ethnic, and national classifications? What have they made of the different divisions of people that developed in the Americas after the initial encounter in 1492? Before that year, Iberians, Africans, and Amerindians thought of themselves in various ways. Some Iberians regarded themselves as Catalan or Castilian; some Africans identified themselves as Mandiga or Cucuyo; and some Amerindians viewed themselves as Maya or Inca. Many of these labels continued to be used both in their places of origin and in Latin America, although meanings changed over time and under new conditions. However, the encounters, followed by the process of European conquest and domination, resulted in the use of other labels, revealing various ways of thinking about them. Consider, for example, criollo/a, peninsular, español/a, negro/a, blanco/a, latinoamericano/a, hispano/a, hispanoamericano/a, indio/a, mestizo/a, mulato/a, cuarterón, venezo­ lano/a, mexicano/a, argentino/a, and chileno/a. Labels such as these identify people, gathering them into groups and contrasting them with others. One of the most notorious efforts in this direction undertaken in Hispanic America was the classification of people into castas, using ancestry criteria. For example, a person whose father was Spanish and mother mestiza was classified as cuarterón, and the offspring of a male Spaniard and a cuarterón female was dubbed quinterón. These labels came about for reasons that are controversial and too many to list here, often having to do with power relations, struggles, conscious and unconscious forces, historical events, and a taxonomic spirit. In many cases they were imposed by some groups on others with particular intentions in mind, but in other cases they were influenced by uncontrollable historical events and forces. In most instances these labels divided people into groups that did not exist before, often reflecting force, coercion, and violence, whence the use of the term forging in the title of this volume. In cases of certain nationalities, for example, it is clear that there has been a concerted effort to create them out of situations that naturally may not have given rise to them.

Preface xvii

Labels and classifications often point to real features of the ­ eople they name, such as a certain cultural heritage, or even a cerp tain geographic origin. Nonetheless, we should not forget that they are human creations that establish boundaries between peoples, uniting some and separating others. When introduced, they also give rise to new historical realities. In Hispanic America to be classified as peninsular, regardless of whether you were Catalan or Castilian, male or female, established a distance between you and those who were not so considered, namely, the criollos/as on the one hand and the “Indians” on the other. Likewise, to be hispanoamericano/a created a gap between you and anyone who was angloamericano/a and those Latin Americans who came from lands that were not part of the Spanish empire. The task of this book is to show how particular thinkers interpreted the meaning of some of the most significant racial, ethnic, and national labels used in Hispanic America and what they contributed to their understanding and development. Why were Bartolomé de Las Casas and Simón Bolívar especially interested in the labels they used to talk about people in Latin America? What did they mean by these labels? What did they think about negros/as and indios/as and their relation to nationality? What labels did they favor, and what was historically and philosophically significant in their views? Latin America is a vast region that includes Brazil, where people speak Portuguese, and the Caribbean, where some populations speak English, Dutch, and French, in addition to various dialects and Creole languages. To try to cover all these areas, with the particular complexities they pose, in a volume of this sort would not have been feasible. For this reason I have left out the parts of Latin America that were not integral to the Spanish empire and have concentrated on those areas that Latin Americans themselves generally refer to as Hispanic America (Hispanoamérica). Even making this major concession to space, I had difficulty coming up with a final list of thinkers to be discussed. Some are obvious: Las Casas, because he was the first author who faced issues of race when he tried to address the rights of Amerindians and Africans; Bolívar, because he struggled with the question of how to forge nations out of the various populations present in Hispanic America after independence; and Zea,

xviii  Preface

because of his understanding of the identity of a heavily mixed Latin American population. But I had to leave out such important authors as Samuel Ramos, whose thinking was enormously important in the context of Mexican identity, and José Ingenieros, whose ideas about Argentinians were quite influential. I have referred to the authors included in this volume as “thinkers” to distinguish them from philosophers. This book is about philosophical thought understood broadly, but not all the authors discussed would be classified today strictly as philosophers. In a good number of cases they were activists, and in others their philosophical thought lacks the rigor that is often taken as characteristic of the discipline. Yet all of them made significant and historically influential philosophical claims about the topics with which this book is concerned. The focus on race, ethnicity, and nationality accounts for the exclusion of gender in the overall discussion. Gender affects members of the same and different races, ethne, and nationalities, whether before or after 1492. This makes it a different kind of category, and one that would require the sort of special treatment in each case that would be impossible in a volume such as this. Still, gender may figure importantly in the discussion of particular thinkers, and so I have left this matter to the discretion of the contributors. The idea for this book arose during a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Latin American philosophy that took place at the State University at Buffalo in summer 2005. The institute was an introduction to Latin American philosophy for American college and university teachers. The last topic explored at the institute had to do with identity, and this led to a discussion of race, ethnicity, and nationality. The great interest that this topic elicited and the insufficient time to deal with it during the institute led me to think of inviting a group of scholars to explore it further. Once the initial drafts of the contributions were completed, we gathered in Buffalo for a two-day workshop to discuss them in more detail before final revisions were undertaken. A work of this nature is possible only because of the cooperation of those who contribute to it, their devotion to scholarship, and their commitment to the project. My thanks, then, go most of all

Preface xix

to the contributors who cooperated fully throughout the process. I am also grateful to Diego von Vacano, who helped with the planning of the workshop that took place in 2007. Finally, I thank the University at Buffalo and its George Hourani Endowment Fund for providing the financial support that made possible the workshop. Jorge J. E. Gracia

[

1]

Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought Jorge J.  E . G ra ci a

Race, ethnicity, and nationality pose many and complex problems. Some of these are practical and others conceptual, but each kind tends to lead into the other. Most of these problems are evident in Latin America, and they have been addressed by a good number of Hispanic American and Latino/a philosophers. In order to understand the views of these authors it is helpful to begin with a conceptual map of some relevant issues that may be raised concerning race, ethnicity, and nationality before we turn to the historical context. Because Hispanic American thought has a long history and displays great variety in periods and approaches, we must say something about its development as well. Finally, we must try to pull together the main strands in the discussion from the chapters in this volume.

Problems Posed by Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality

Some of the most important problems surrounding race, ethnicity, and nationality may be gathered into five general groups: social and political, moral, epistemic, metaphysical, and boundaries and relations. 1

2  Jorge J. E. Gracia

Social and Political Issues The social and political issues are perhaps the most controversial. Two sets of them in particular have been repeatedly noted. One concerns the role of racial and ethnic groups within nations; the other has to do with the usefulness of nations within a larger, regional or global, context. Among the questions that arise concerning the first are the following: What attitude should nations adopt with respect to internal racial and ethnic diversity? Should such diversity be accepted and encouraged, should it be tolerated but discouraged, or should a nation make every effort to eliminate such differences, either by force or persuasion? How can nations maintain political and social unity while being racially and ethnically diverse? Does the political and social unity of a nation require a racially and ethnically homogeneous population? Should political and social decisions and actions be dictated by racial and ethnic considerations? One issue that has attracted considerable attention in the United States has been framed in terms of “the politics of difference.” This expression refers to attempts to make room in U.S. society for groups, including racial and ethnic ones, that do not fit prevailing views of the American nation. It has been common throughout history to think of nations as being composed of racial and ethnic elements. Some nations see themselves as white or Asian, whereas others see themselves as Christian or Muslim. Some Germans set out to purify the German nation of Jews and Gypsies under the leadership of National Socialism, and some Latin Americans have claimed their Spanish and Christian heritage as part of their national identity, thereby excluding black and Amerindian populations. The politics of difference is an attempt to oppose such moves. Opponents of this kind of politics see it as threatening and destabilizing factors to national unity insofar as they assert the identity of certain groups over those of others and undermine the unity of nations. In the United States this has translated into calls to make English the official language of the country and to stop the immigration of non-Europeans because languages other than English and peoples of non-European origin do not fit the ethnic and racial

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 3

profile considered characteristic by the dominant group of U.S. citizens. Similar arguments have been made in other nations, including Hispanic American nations. Other issues have been associated with such questions: Does it make sense to have different nations when they have common racial and ethnic populations? Should nations be divided according to racial and ethnic lines, or should other criteria of division be used? In increasingly closer regional and global contexts, does it make sense to have different nations that have common racial and ethnic populations? Internationalists frequently raise these kinds of political and social issues. They point out that the national political structure is outdated and needs to be changed; nations create more problems than they solve and should be eliminated. Globalization requires the development of new political realities that are more encompassing. The concept of a nation as a sovereign entity, they argue, is as dated in the contemporary world as the concept of the Greek polis. Nations stand in the way of progress and advancement, and the artificial boundaries they establish between peoples interfere with the effective functioning of human societies. The future of the world depends on the development of larger and more comprehensive political systems, for the survival of humanity is contingent on the eradication of conflicts that could escalate and produce a human holocaust, but wars are waged by nations and result from conflicts between nations. Moral Issues Racial and ethnic categories pose moral problems because their use can be harmful to some persons. For example, racial and ethnic labels often have negative connotations, and their use can create a hostile atmosphere for those to whom they are applied, leading to discrimination and oppression. These classifications can privilege some groups over others, giving them an unfair advantage. The use of racial and ethnic categories tends to perpetuate situations of inferiority and domination for certain groups that can then be more easily identified and manipulated. Racial and ethnic classifications contribute to the homogenization of diverse social groups, ignoring

4  Jorge J. E. Gracia

appropriate differences among them and suppressing these differences in both groups and individuals. And racial and ethnic characterizations often contribute to wars, destruction, and bitter conflicts, because they serve to exacerbate divisions among peoples. In short, the classification of people along racial or ethnic lines raises moral concerns insofar as doing so may cause harm to them. Some of the moral problems of nationality mirror closely those concerning race and ethnicity. National classifications serve to place some people below others and to attribute what are considered undesirable features to them. But there are also problems idiosyncratic to nationality. For example, the breakdown of humans into nations may serve the aims of dominant elites who, by controlling the national power structures, are able to exploit certain members of the populations for their own benefit. Moreover, the limited sovereignty accorded to nations today allows horrendous crimes to go unpunished. Sovereignty stops nations from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, precluding the effective opposition to abuses, including genocide, taking place within those nations. In addition, national obligations often conflict with universal duties, which poses serious moral dilemmas. Epistemic Issues The epistemic problems posed by race, ethnicity, and nationality are related to the lack of clear and consistent criteria for distinguishing these categories. The case of race is perhaps most evident, because the criteria used to determine it varies from individual to individual, group to group, context to context, place to place, country to country, and time to time. Differing epistemic racial criteria preclude agreement as to who qualifies as a member of a race and provide the grounds for the argument that racial categories are subjective and hinge on context. The epistemic difficulties posed by the instability of racial criteria are not restricted to the variability of the criteria. There is also the problem of accessibility to the conditions used to satisfy the criteria. For example, the epistemic situation of blacks in the United States is unclear because there are no definite rules concerning degrees of

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 5

mixing. Consider that the one-drop rule commonly used to determine whether one is black is imprecise, for it cannot be effectively and practically determined. Indeed, many racially mixed persons join the white population in the United States every year, because in many cases it is impossible to determine that they had a person of color in their ancestry. Racial criteria generally used are ineffective, whether they involve color, lineage, or culture. The case of ethnicity is even more controversial than that of race, for the epistemic criteria applied to ethne are very often contextual. Consider the case of Latinos in the United States. What is it that we can use to identify them? That they speak Spanish? No, for obviously many persons regarded as Latinos do not speak Spanish at all, or only as a second language. Food? Again no, for there is no food that is common to all Latinos; Cubans and Mexicans, for example, have very different cuisines. Music? Not possible, for similar reasons. Religion? Latinos belong to all sorts of faiths, from Roman Catholicism to Judaism and Islamism to voodooism. Line­age? No, because not all Latinos are tied by descent, and many Latinos have no Latino ancestors, being children of non-Latino immigrants to Latin America. So what universal criteria, or criterion, can be applied to identify Latinos? The epistemic problems posed by nationality are less obvious but still present. Although there are often markers of citizenship for particular nations, there is no uniform set of criteria of nationality across the board. This puts in doubt the possibility of establishing judgments about national identity that apply to every nationality on firm grounds. In some countries nationality is determined by blood relation, but in others it is determined by birthplace, and in others it is established by a combination of the two. But most countries allow a process whereby persons can be naturalized if they fulfill certain requirements that do not have to do with blood or land. Obviously, there is considerable latitude in what determines nationality. Metaphysical Issues Racial, ethnic, and national categories pose metaphysical problems because they appear to be too narrow, skewed, or inaccurate. Do

6  Jorge J. E. Gracia

they reflect anything real outside the mind, or are they imaginative creations resulting from special interests and cultural mores? In the case of race the question comes up because much scientific evidence suggests that race is not a biological reality. It appears to be a social construction and not a characteristic of anything in the world. Some authors go so far as to argue that it is a meaningless and groundless concept, a remnant of archaic science; race is a fictional concept, along the lines of unicorns and centaurs. Racial taxonomies appear to lack objective bases and often reflect personal and social preferences. Until precise genetic studies became possible in the past thirty years, the data on which to base racial classifications were too inaccurate and unstable to support any clear conclusions. Skin pigmentation, cranial configuration, and even blood profiles, among others, proved unreliable. But recent, more accurate genetic studies have not fared much better. To this, some scientists and philosophers add that racial categories arbitrarily place unwarranted emphasis on certain physical features, providing misleading descriptions of people. Why should skin color, for example, be given priority in most racial classifications? Moreover, racial categories homogenize; they make us think of all members of a race as being the same, or very similar, whereas in fact racial groups are diverse, not just because of the differences among their individual members, but also because they contain what appear to be many subgroups. The case of ethnicity is similar. In the first place, it is questionable that clear-cut definitions and understandings of particular ethnic groups are possible. And ethnic categories seem to privilege some at the expense of others. Some argue, for example, that a category such as Hispanic, as used in the United States, seems both inaccurate and to privilege a Spanish, Iberian, and European component. The term Hispanic connotes Spanish or Iberian, and therefore European, giving prominence to this cultural element, in contrast to Amerindian and African elements that are clearly at work in the population so labeled. Finally, ethnic categories, like racial ones, tend to homoge­ nize those to whom they refer, ignoring significant differences. The metaphysical problems posed by nationalities originate in that nationalities appear to be artificial and changing and, therefore,

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 7

more a matter of perception and perspective than of facts. Nations are contrived entities whose boundaries are the result of historically contingent events that are subject to change; they are artifacts produced by humans and therefore subject to human manipulation. Relations between Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality Another set of difficulties concerns the relations between race, ethnicity, and nationality, for they are so mixed that it is not easy to distinguish them. This has led some to argue that they cannot be distinguished and that it is futile to try. The attempt to eliminate the distinction between race and ethnicity comes from two sides: from race, insofar as it is seen as including ethnic elements and therefore as fundamentally ethnic; and from ethnicity, insofar as this is taken to be so permeated with racial elements that it cannot be clearly separated from them. The first might be described as trying to substitute the notion of ethnic race for the notions of race and ethnicity; the second, as doing the same with the notion of racial ethnicity. At least three important considerations complicate the issue. First, historical discussions of race have always included ethnic elements and vice versa. From the very beginning racial and cultural divisions have been intertwined. Blacks have generally been described as being different from whites not only in terms of their physical and genetic characteristics but also in terms of their customs, attitudes, and achievements. Second, race cannot be separated clearly from ethnicity because the physical phenotypes on which it is often based are not easily distinguishable from cultural ones. Most phenotypes in fact are the result of both physical and environmental forces, and racial phenotypes are notoriously so. Third, whenever one tries to separate the notion of race from the notion of ethnicity, race becomes entangled with ethnicity. We need not do more here than refer to the case of the change of name from “black” to “African American” in the United States. In spite of the efforts of blacks to develop a conception of themselves and an identity based on ethnicity through the change of the name, race gets into it so that in fact “African American” has come to mean racially black. In short, race and ethnicity seem to be

8  Jorge J. E. Gracia

hopelessly intertwined and not capable of distinction apart from each other. Unfortunately, matters are not very different when it comes to ethnicity and nationality, or race and nationality. The situation of race, ethnicity, and nationality in Latin America reveals many of the philosophical problems mentioned. The enormous racial and ethnic diversity present in the region raises serious challenges to the philosopher. What kind of political and social structure should be adopted, and what role should the various races and ethne of the region play in it? What is the right course of action concerning these races and ethne? What epistemic criteria should be used to distinguish them? And ultimately, what is it that separates these groups of people? Hispanic American thinkers have grappled with these issues for the past half a millennium, and Latino/a philosophers in the United States are beginning to take note of them. So let us turn to Hispanic American and Latino/a philosophy briefly before we discuss how race, ethnicity, and nationality have been treated in it.

Hispanic American and Latino/a Philosophy

The category “Hispanic” may be understood broadly to include the categories “Spanish,” “Spanish American,” “Iberian,” “Iberoameri­ can,” “Latin American,” and “Latino/a.” Iberian has to do with Spain or Portugal. Iberoamerican refers to the parts of the Americas that were conquered by Spain and Portugal and stayed under their control. Latin American refers to everything in the Americas that is not American (U.S.) or Canadian, even if strictly speaking it should include the French parts of Canada. Indeed, sometimes it even excludes those parts of the Caribbean and South America that were French, Dutch, or English colonies, such as Haiti and Jamaica. Latino/a is most often used to refer to anyone who has Latin American ancestry in the United States, although it usually excludes French, Dutch, or English. Spanish has do to with Spain. Spanish American or Hispanic American involves the parts of the Americas that were former colonies of Spain, although some, including me, argue that it extends to the Portuguese colonies since Hispania refers to the entire Iberian Peninsula, not just Spain. Here, of course, we are concerned

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 9

with Hispanic American philosophy in the restricted sense of the philosophy produced in the lands that at some point were Spanish dominions, and with Latino/a philosophy, that is, the philosophy produced by Latinos/as in the United States. Identity The notion of a Latin American philosophy has been the subject of heated controversy for most of the twentieth century, and in general the issues involved in the controversy apply as well to a Hispanic American philosophy. Five of the most hotly debated foci of the controversy are existence, identity, characteristics, originality, and authenticity. Is there such a thing as Hispanic American philosophy? In what does its identity consist? Does it have any distinguishing marks? Is it original? And is it authentic? There are deep disagreements over the answers to these questions. There are at least three ways of looking at them depending on the approach used: universalist, culturalist, and critical. The universalist views philosophy as a universal discipline, not different from science. The fundamental issue for universalists turns on whether Hispanic Americans have been able to produce the kind of universal discipline that one expects when one has science as a model. Its problems are common to all humans, its method is also common, and its conclusions are supposed to be true, regardless of particular circumstances. Most universalists see Hispanic American philosophy as largely a failure in this respect. The culturalist thinks that truth is always perspectival, dependent on a point of view, and that the method to acquire it is always dependent on a cultural context. Philosophy is a historical, nonscientific enterprise concerned with the elaboration of a general point of view from a certain personal or cultural perspective. Accordingly, the culturalist has no problem accepting a Hispanic American philosophy insofar as Hispanic Americans have engaged in developing views from their perspective as individuals or as Hispanic Americans, using whatever means they have found appropriate to do so. Whether these thinkers are original or authentic or have produced a kind of scientific philosophy are irrelevant matters.

10  Jorge J. E. Gracia

Finally, the critical approach considers philosophy a result of social conditions and closely related to those conditions. Some conditions are conducive to the production of philosophy, or what is sometimes called authentic philosophy, whereas others are not. Unfortunately, proponents of this position see Hispanic American philosophy as a failure in this respect because of the conditions opera­tive in Hispanic America. Hispanic American philosophy is inauthentic and therefore not true philosophy. Some questions concerning the notion of Latin American philosophy were first raised in Latin America in the nineteenth century, but they were seriously explored only at the end of the first half of the twentieth century. By that time Latin American philosophy in general and Hispanic American philosophy in particular had already had a long history, going back four hundred years. Development The history of Hispanic American philosophy may be divided into four periods: the colonial period, the period of independentist thought, the period in which new nations began to function, and the twentieth century, which itself can be divided into several parts. Each of the first three periods is dominated by a particular ideological tradition: the colony by scholasticism, independence by the Enlightenment, and the new nations by positivism. The situation in the twentieth century is more complex and varied. Philosophy began in Hispanic America with the controversy surrounding the rights of conquered Amerindians under the leadership of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Scholasticism, introduced by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores, was the dominant perspective. Among its most important representatives are Alonso de la Vera Cruz (ca. 1504–84), Tomás de Mercado (ca. 1530–75), and Antonio Rubio (1548–1615). But humanism also had some influence, as is clear from the work of Juan de Zumárraga (ca. 1468–1548) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95), among others. The eighteenth century, under the influence of modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, helped prepare the way for the revolutionary wars of independence. The liberal ideas based on the thought

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 11

of the French philosophes were imported to help consolidate independentist views. Authors such as Benito Díaz de Gamarra y Dávalos (1745–83) and Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–87) were influenced by early modern philosophers such as Descartes, but the wave of independentist thought found its greatest inspiration in the Enlightenment. Among those who were most influential are Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), Miguel Hidalgo (1753–1811), and José María Morelos (1765–1815), as well as the late figure, José Martí (1854–95). Once liberation from the colonial powers was achieved in most areas of Hispanic America, the newly constituted nations faced the challenges of making true political units out of the remnants of the Spanish empire. The ideology of choice for this purpose was positivism. This was an eclectic point of view that consisted in a peculiar mix of the thought of several European thinkers, among whom were Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel. The period of positivistic hegemony extended roughly from the mid-nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century. During that time it became not only the most popular philosophy in Latin America but also the official philosophy of some countries. Among the most famous positivists are Gabino Barreda (1818–81), Justo Sierra (1848–1912), José Victorino Lastarria (1817–88), and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88). Andrés Bello (1781–1865) is a transitional figure between independentist thought and positivism, and José Ingenieros (1877–1925) and Enrique José Varona (1849–1933) prepare the way for the revolt against positivism. The situation in the twentieth century may be divided into three periods: from about 1910 to 1940, when the foundations were laid for future developments; 1940 to 1960, when a degree of normality was achieved; and from about 1960 on, when maturity was reached. Contemporary Hispanic American philosophy began around 1910, when positivism declined drastically. By about 1930 the remaining positivists in Latin America were looked on more as museum pieces than as proponents of a viable philosophy that merited attention. The generation of thinkers that followed positivism and rebelled against it constitutes the first phase of contemporary Hispanic Ameri­ can thought. The principal members of this generation, called “the generation of founders” by Francisco Romero and later renamed

12  Jorge J. E. Gracia

“the generation of patriarchs” by Francisco Miró Quesada, are well known: Alejandro Korn (1860–1936) in Argentina, Alejandro Octavio Deústua (1849–1945) in Peru, José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) and Antonio Caso (1883–1946) in Mexico, Enrique José Molina (1871– 1956) in Chile, and Carlos Vaz Ferreira (1872–1958) in Uruguay. Positivism was superseded with the help of ideas imported first from France and later from Germany. The process began with the influence of Émile Boutroux and Henri Bergson and of French vitalism and intuitionism, but it was cemented when José Ortega y Gasset introduced the thought of Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and other German philosophers in Latin America. The impact of this philosophy and of Ortega’s thought was substantial, in particular on the generation that followed that of the founders, called by Miró Quesada “the generation of forgers.” Samuel Ramos (1897–1959), Francisco Romero (1891–1962), and the other members of this generation followed the founders’ course, attacking positivist ideas and favoring in many instances a rather poetic philosophical style that contrasts with the scientistic emphasis of positivism. The main preoccupation of the founders and the following generation was the absorption of European ideas; they wanted to be philosophically up to date. In contrast to the objectives of the philosophers that preceded them, which were for the most part religious, political, or economic, the concern of these thinkers was mostly philosophical. This indicates a radical change in the Hispanic American philosophical tradition, insofar as scholasticism, Enlightenment liberalism, and positivism had objectives that in general were alien to the philosophical enterprise: for scholastics, the primary objective was the apologetic defense of the faith; for liberals, the end was political emancipation; and for positivists, the goal was economic and social progress. In all cases, European ideas were adopted with preestablished ends. With the generation of philosophers born around 1910, selfcriticism entered Hispanic American philosophy. The limitations on originality characteristic of previous generations were also in part the result of the practical difficulties involved in pursuing a philosophical career in Latin America. The contribution of those generations was restricted to a large extent to the importation of foreign thought; originality, therefore, was not achieved except

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 13

occasionally, and in a majority of cases there was no effort to address philosophical problems or relate foreign ideas to the local context. There were exceptions, of course. In Theory of Man (1952), Francisco Romero developed a philosophical anthropology that went beyond the thought of the philosophers in whom he found inspiration, but it was not until the generation of Risieri Frondizi, Eduardo García Máynez, Francisco Miró Quesada, and Leopoldo Zea, among o ­ thers, that originality began to surface more regularly among Hispanic American philosophers and philosophical practice was “normalized,” as Romero would say. This generation’s full impact was not felt until the 1940s. Hispanic American philosophy underwent a fundamental change at this time, similar in many ways to the one it experienced under the founders. Ideas were not just imported; they were also critically examined, and some were discarded while others were modified. There was still plenty of imitation, but in general Hispanic American thinkers did not restrict themselves to the adoption of foreign views, going further and actually developing them. More important still, in many cases they appropriated problems rather than ideas. Another significant development at this time was the appearance of the Pan-American philosopher. Before 1910 the pattern of philosophical exchange in which Hispanic American philosophers were engaged was linear and unidirectional. It consisted in lines drawn between Europe and each Hispanic American country or region in which there was some philosophical activity. The pattern did not involve exchange: ideas came from Europe and were absorbed in Latin America, with little dialogue between the extreme points of the lines; the vector generally pointed in only one direction, toward Latin America. But certain changes were introduced in this pattern with the generation of founders and especially with the next generation. Although the pattern of communication between Europe and Latin America could still be characterized as a one-way street, the philosophical work of Hispanic American thinkers began to draw attention beyond national boundaries. The thought of Deústua, Caso, Romero, and Ramos, for example, began to be known not only in the countries of origin of these philosophers but also in other places in Latin America. Nevertheless, the thinkers themselves remained for

14  Jorge J. E. Gracia

the most part isolated internationally, and the philosophical dialogue in which they participated was national or even local. This situation changed with the generation born around 1910. Some of these philosophers moved easily among the Hispanic American countries; they traveled throughout Latin America, giving lectures and establishing dialogue with other philosophers. I do not want to give the false impression that philosophical Pan-­ Americanism was very strong during this period. Even today isolation is one of the most pervasive characteristics of the situation in which Hispanic American philosophers find themselves. Still there was a change for the better, so that, although the pattern of communication characteristic of the period of the founders was still in force, new lines of communication began to develop. Philosophical Pan-Americanism was the result of many factors, at least one of which should be mentioned: the progressive development of the consciousness of a Hispanic American philosophical identity, in turn a result in part of the consciousness of the growing importance of Latin America in the world and, on the philosophical side, of the introduction in Hispanic America of Ortega’s perspectivism. The preoccupation with an autochthonous Hispanic and Latin American philosophy that began to develop with the founders and gelled, by the time of Ramos and Zea, in a controversy in which practically all important philosophers of the period participated gave impetus to the study and dissemination of the philosophical work of Hispanic Americans in other countries. An important result of philosophical Pan-Americanism was a growing acquaintance among Hispanic American philosophers and an increase in their exchange of ideas. All of this resulted in international agreements among diverse institutions and in publication projects in which philosophers from various countries have cooperated. The decade beginning with 1940 was especially important, because during that time philosophy became institutionalized in most Hispanic American countries. The number of national philosophical societies and centers, institutes, faculties, and departments that had as their exclusive end the teaching and investigation of philosophy increased substantially. Some faculties of philosophy and letters, or of humanities, where philosophy was taught, had existed before, but

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 15

many others were established at this time. The result was that most important universities had philosophy faculties after 1960. The philosophical orientation of the period 1940–60 does not reveal drastic changes. The generation of the founders used French vitalism as an instrument to reject positivism, and the following generation, with Ortega’s help, took charge of the process, incorporating German philosophy and the new ideas introduced by phenomenology and existentialism. In this period Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre constituted the dominant philosophical force in Latin America. To this must be added the renewed impetus of scholasticism. There were few philosophers who worked outside these currents, and the ones who did had no institutional power. The number of sympathizers of philosophical analysis and Marxism continued to grow, but in general Thomism, phenomenology, and existentialism dominated. After 1960 new philosophical currents acquired importance in Hispanic American philosophy. Three stand out: Marxism, philosophical analysis, and the philosophy of liberation. Socialist thought was not new to Latin America. Its introduction can be traced to the nineteenth century. The impact of the socialist ideas of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon (1790–1825) and Charles Fourier (1772–1873), for example, can be clearly seen in the treatise Dogma socialista of Esteban Echevarría (1805–51). In the twentieth century, Emilio Frugoni (1880–1969) in Uruguay and José Carlos Mariátegui (1895–1930) in Peru, among others, adopted a Marxist perspective. Until relatively recently Marxism was a marginal philosophical movement in Hispanic America, but in the past few decades it has acquired importance not only politically but also ideologically. The popularity of the Marxist perspective has made possible its increasing institutionalization and its impact on other philosophical traditions. In contrast to Marxism, philosophical analysis arrived late in Hispanic America and, owing to its technical and academic charac­ ter, has not yet become as popular as other approaches among Hispanic American philosophers. Nonetheless, it has become one of the most forceful philosophical currents in the region. The “philosophy of liberation” is an autochthonous Latin Ameri­ can movement that mixes the philosophical nationalism to which I

16  Jorge J. E. Gracia

have already referred with some Catholic and Marxist ideas. Among its initial important proponents were Enrique Dussel and Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg. Although it is not always clear that proponents of this viewpoint have a common goal, it is obvious that the notion of liberation is one of their fundamental concepts: liberation from the slavery imposed on Latin America by imported ideologies and the development of a genuinely autochthonous thought that results from reflection on the Latin American reality. To this must be added an appendix concerning Latino/a philosophy in the United States. Latino/a philosophy is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States, and it is not until very recently that some Latino/a philosophers have began to work in areas related to Hispanic/Latino issues and to identify themselves as Hispanics or Latinos/as. A few distinguished philosophers of Hispanic or Latin American descent had worked in the United States, including George Santayana and Héctor-Neri Catañeda, but their philosophical approaches and loyalties followed mainstream developments. However, in the late twentieth century a new sense of Latino/a identity in philosophy developed among a growing group of philosophers. Among those who have been identified with this movement are Linda M. Alcoff, J. Angelo Corlett, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Susana Nuccetelli, Eduardo Mendieta, and Ofelia Schutte. These are also the philosophers who have contributed more to the discourse on issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality, in particular through an analysis of identity. Hispanic American and Latino/a Views Each of the periods of development mentioned above makes an interesting and different contribution to the discussion of race, ethnicity, and nationality in Hispanic America. Some of the problems addressed are idiosyncratic to each period, but others persist throughout all periods. Likewise, some of the philosophical perspectives from which these problems are viewed and the kind of solutions offered to them are unique to the periods, but some extend beyond them. The history of Hispanic American thought opens with the controversy raised by Bartolomé de Las Casas concerning the native

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 17

inhabitants of the Americas, whom he referred to as “Indians.” His main concern, as pointed out by Ted Humphrey and Janet Burke, is the rights of these people. Spaniards had come to the Americas as conquerors and had subjugated and enslaved the native populations and forced them to accept Christianity. This subjugation and force was justified in the eyes of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and others through the use of Aristotle and the concept of the barbarian. For Aristotle, barbarians are natural slaves and do not have the same rights as fully human beings. This is the ostensive nature of the issues raised by Las Casas. Underlying these issues, however, is another not explicitly addressed by him, the question of the status of Indians in the Spanish empire. The issue has two dimensions: should they become part of that empire and members of it, and if so, under what conditions are they to be allowed to do so? The first issue is clearly related to the nature of Indians. If they are fully human, then they have to be treated as such, and their possible integration or assimilation into Spanish society should not be in dispute. After all, the Iberian Peninsula was a medley of different “nations”—Jews, Muslims, Galicians, Basques, and so on—and the Catholic Kings were precisely involved in the process of integrating them into a new nation, Spain. But if Indians are not fully human, then they are not entitled to the same rights as humans. The second issue concerns the condition of integration and assimilation. How can Indians become part of the Spanish empire, and perhaps ultimately of the Spanish nation, when they have different customs and religions? Some authors argued that this integration and assimilation was not possible insofar as Indians were naturally slaves. Their status was to remain slaves, or something very similar to that. As such, it is appropriate to impose on them the ways of the Spaniards, in particular, Catholicism. But Las Casas disagreed, arguing that Indians are to be treated with the proper respect owed all members of humanity. So, yes, their assimilation into Spanish society is possible and desirable, but it has to be accomplished appropriately, and their conversion to Christianity has to be through persuasion as prescribed by the Gospels. Finally, for Las Casas, these questions have a paramount moral dimension. Indians had been treated abominably by Spaniards, and

18  Jorge J. E. Gracia

as human beings they deserved better. This accusation is put in highly rhetorical terms intended to change the situation for the better, helping to create the black legend about Spain and its treatments of Amerindians. But it also raises the ethical/legal issue of the proper place for the laws of conquered peoples, and perhaps we could even say of dependent and dominated groups. The topics of national and cultural assimilation are first posed indirectly by Las Casas, and they continued to be a source of discussion and controversy in the history of Hispanic America. From his time on, questions were raised about how to conceptualize the peoples of the Americas and how to find a place for them in the new social and political order. These topics are central to the thought of authors concerned with the political independence of Hispanic America from the Spanish empire, as made clear in the chapters on Bolívar by José Aguilar, on Bello by Iván Jaksica, and on Martí by Ofelia Schutte. By the time these thinkers, inspired by the Enlightenment, were writing, Hispanic American society was clearly divided into at least five groups of people: native-born Spaniards residing in the Americas (peninsulares), descendants of Spaniards born in Hispanic America (criollos), Indians (indios), blacks (negros), and mixes of these. The mixed group was itself divided into many subgroups, including ­mestizos/as, persons of mixed Indian-Spanish heritage, predominant in the Andean regions and Mexico, and mulatos/as, persons of mixed black-Spanish heritage, predominant in the Caribbean and the western coast of South America. Most peninsulares were content with the status quo, which favored them over the other groups. But criollos were dissatisfied with their situation in that they wanted to be treated as equal to native-born Spaniards. Some of them, disillusioned with their second-class status, concluded that the only way to achieve parity was through political independence, although this did not resolve the situation of Indians, blacks, and those of mixed blood. What was to be done with them? The questions that underlay the issues Las Casas had raised at the beginning of the sixteenth century regularly resurfaced in the history of Hispanic American thought. The Enlightenment had put an emphasis on universality and reason, so independentist thinkers saw their task as adapting these

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 19

ideas in ways that would serve to meet the challenges in Hispanic America. Interestingly, they did not adopt a uniform solution and dealt with the problems posed by race, ethnicity, and nationality in different ways. As Aguilar makes clear, Bolívar’s main concern was the forging of nations out of the diverse populations of Hispanic America, but the conditions of this process were fundamentally political. Bolívar did not think that ethnic or racial homogenization was necessary for the unity of Hispanic American nations. Indeed, he did not even think that a particular culture was required. What was necessary was that different elements, brought together by history, be integrated into a harmonious whole. He optimistically believed this was possible in Hispanic America because of the character of the different populations that entered into the mix: Spanish indolence, Indian peacefulness, and black dependence could work together to create an equilibrium in spite of the inequality of numbers between these groups of people, for the aim was political unity, not homogeneity of language, culture, religion, race, or ethnicity. The spirit required to unite a nation was a political inclination toward the general will and a limitation of public authority. Bolívar did not concern himself with issues of morality and rights or racial and ethnic groups, although he unambiguously opposed slavery. Nor was he interested in exploring the nature of race or ethnicity. He concentrated his efforts in the understanding of nationality, which he developed in political terms, making room for diversity, in opposition to the homogeneous model adopted by Mill, among others. Bello’s views differ in some important ways from those of Bolívar. As Jaksica suggests, Bello seems to have adopted an ethnic notion of race, conceived in terms of culture and history rather than heredity and phenotypical characteristics. Arguing against José Victorino Lastarria’s view of the role of racial mixing, or mestizaje, in Hispanic America and the opportunity it presented to correct the abuses of the Spanish government and the Catholic Church, he emphasized the positive role that the Spanish conquest had in cultural terms in the formation of a homogeneous population in Hispanic America. He opposed the position according to which members of the native populations who did not assimilate to the prevailing culture should

20  Jorge J. E. Gracia

be exterminated, but he did not hesitate to argue in favor of isolating and leaving them to self-destruct. This kind of argument appears callous and inhumane, but Bello considered his view a recognition of the inevitable: ideals are fine as such, but the reality in Hispanic America needed to be faced. Another important element in Bello’s view, echoed by others, is the conception of Amerindians as foreigners; the Chilean territory was their place of residence, but he considered them and their customs and culture alien. In order for Amerindians to become part of the nation, they would have to change their culture and adopt the language and ways of the prevailing culture in Chile. With Bello, then, we have an interesting twist to the controversy raised by Las Casas in the sixteenth century. For Las Casas, the central issue was the rights of Amerindians, and these rights extended to laws and culture, because, as human beings, they were entitled to them. But for Bello, the native population did not have rights to maintain their own culture even in the territory they had occupied before the Spanish conquest. The force of history was against them, and their only way to survive was to abandon their ways and become assimilated into the national culture resulting from the conquest. At the opposite end of Bello’s position, and harking back to Las Casas’s emphasis on the rights and dignity of Indians, is the thought of Martí. As Schutte suggests, Martí’s overall emphasis on the dignity of human beings in the context of the struggle for political independence and the creation of the Cuban nation, led him to minimize, and even deny, the importance of racial differences among humans and to emphasize what all humans have in common. Martí’s view advances the discussion of race in Hispanic ­America in several ways. First, he adopts what appear to be two views of race. In one, race is real and identified with all humans: the human race. In another, race is not real, but as we would say today a social construction, which can be easily challenged when one carefully observes human beings in different contexts and societies. In this sense, race has to do with how people look or are perceived. Second, racism also comes in two varieties. In one, it is based on the wrong conception of race according to which there are different races of

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 21

human beings, and it is used to establish hierarchies of rights and values among them. In another, racism is based on phenotypical appearance, and it is used to set right the abuses committed against human beings who happen to look different from others. Underlying these distinctions is the goal that Martí set for himself: to develop an inclusive conception of the Cuban nation in which no citizen is treated differently because of the way he or she looks. Echoing Bolívar, he believed that nations are political, united by concerns, aspirations, and interests, and harked back to some of the concerns and attitudes of Las Casas. The context of Martí and Las Casas was different, as were their styles of argumentation. Las Casas was preoccupied with the abuses of the conquest, the preservation of the rights of Amerindians and their evangelization, and used a scholastic model. Martí was concerned with the unification of a population in order to create a force for independence and eventually a nation composed of citizens who were treated with dignity and had rights as human beings, and his source of inspiration was the Enlightenment and German idealism. But both agreed that the human race is entitled to some basic rights that are universal and independent of cultural and racial differences. And they were instrumental in raising the issues of the nature of race and ethnicity, the moral questions concerning the rights of different peoples under governments, and the nature of nationality. The motivation and perspective of the generation of thinkers that adopted positivism were different in some important ways. Their concern, unlike that of independentists, was not independence but rather the creation and development of new nations and the requirements for it that the diverse populations of Hispanic America entailed. Their views were not informed by the ideals of universality and rationality of the Enlightenment but instead turned to the pragmatic and scientific notions of positivism. In this view nations require order to make the kind of progress they envisioned. So how are they to be conceived, and what is the role of race and ethnicity in them? As Burke and Humphrey point out, it is significant that Sarmiento uses a key term that is related to one that dominated the discourse of Las Casas: barbarism. Las Casas had argued that the

22  Jorge J. E. Gracia

true barbarians in Hispanic America were the Spaniards and not the Indians, for they behaved inhumanly toward the native peoples of the Americas. Indians were civilized, gentle, fully human, and capable of understanding the message of Christ, but the Spaniards were greedy, ruthless, and exploitative and violated the moral code of Christianity. Unlike Las Casas, Sarmiento was not interested in the abuses committed against the native peoples of the Americas by the Spaniards or their rights. His preoccupation was with the prospects for the new nations of Hispanic America. In this, unlike Bolívar, he was pessimistic, for various reasons. First, the geographic environment of the Americas forced the inhabitants to develop living conditions that militated against the development of civilization, which he understood in classical terms going back to Rome. Second, the racial components of Hispanic America also worked against the development of civilization. Sarmiento has a biological and phenotypical understanding of race, in which it is defined by physical characteristics and mental capacities. In his view, the “copper-­ colored” race of the natives of the Americas, to whom he referred as savages, is limited in its mental abilities, being characterized by feelings rather than rational thinking. Blacks also are regarded as inferior to whites, although Sarmiento seems to value them more than Amerindians. The future of the Argentine nation in particular is, therefore, unclear and difficult, and the only way to deal with it is through education and Europeanization. This poses a kind of paradox for Sarmiento. For clearly his racial conception of Amerindians and blacks does not easily tolerate the improvement through education that he envisions. But it must be remembered that there is also an environmental aspect of his view that can, with time and proper direction, be modified. The same emphasis on education that we see in Sarmiento, as noted by Oscar Martí, is the backbone of the other positivist included here, Justo Sierra. Sierra’s interest in history and his pessimism about the future of Mexico in particular and Latin America in general, also echo Sarmiento. As positivists, they saw the key to social progress in science, and the source of scientific development

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 23

and dissemination is education, which they both understood had to be insulated from the influence of the Catholic Church. Moreover, through education and the establishment of educational institutions such as a national university, Mexico and other Latin American nations could form the kind of social and national spirit that would resolve the divisions characteristic of their societies. How are we to forge nations out of societies that are racially and culturally mixed? Only by the development of a national continuity between the present and the past that will prepare the way for a unified future. The unity of a nation has to be forged out of the facts of its history and a proper knowledge of them. The twentieth century brings to the fore different concerns and attitudes on the part of Hispanic American thinkers who discuss race, ethnicity, and nationality. The problems of conquest and colonization, independence, and nation building recede to some extent, and issues of social justice, Latin American identity, and the role of mestizos in society take precedence. A revolt against positivism and its emphasis on order and progress was launched in various countries, and a new emphasis on values and the aesthetic directed much of the effort. Chapters on four key figures illustrate these concerns: on Rodó by Arleen Salles, on Vasconcelos by Diego von Vacano, on Mariátegui by Renzo Llorente, and on Zea by Amy Oliver. Rodó is one of the early leaders of the new approach. His emphasis, as Salles notes, was on Latin American identity and what it had to offer to resist the power of the United States. At least two aspects of this are significant for the topics of this volume. One is the view that Latin Americans constitute a race, which Rodó understood vari­ ously in biological, cultural, and political terms. The other is that this race is characterized by moral values that contrast with the pragmatic and utilitarian perspective adhered to by Anglo-­Saxons and is responsible for the growth of technology at the expense of spiritual ideals. True humanity is characterized by freedom and a moral sense characteristic of European culture, which has been influential in the development of Latin American civilization. Although Rodó recognized the indigenous and black components of Latin American populations, he did not work out their exact contributions to this civilization.

24  Jorge J. E. Gracia

The themes of Latin American identity and its contrasts with Anglo-Saxon identity are also central to Vasconcelos’s view, as von Vacano tells us. Vasconcelos developed a metaphysical system in which reality is understood in terms of a harmony of opposites, and multiple racial composition is another dimension of this principle, where harmony will be worked out among them. Leaving behind the emphasis on nations characteristic of thinkers in the previous century, Vasconcelos argued for the abolition of national boundaries and instead for the development of ethnic or racial associations. In this context, the mission of Latin America is to give the world a new race that will combine the best elements from current races. This race, which he understood, like Rodó, in biological and cultural terms, will be characterized by an aesthetic sense that seeks harmony and greater homogeneity brought about from the integration of heterogeneous elements. This contrasts, as Rodó pointed out, with the utilitarian and pragmatic character of the Anglo-Saxon race. Mariátegui’s approach contrasts in significant ways with that of Rodó and Vasconcelos. Whereas the two latter thinkers put an emphasis on the international and Latin American, Mariátegui, turned to the particular problem of the Indian in Peru. And in contrast to their aesthetic and idealistic emphasis, Mariátegui adopted a Marxist perspective in which economics and materialism are essential. Finally, by raising and concentrating on the problem of the Indian, he put up front an issue that remained in the background for many Latin American thinkers until this time. The problem of the Indian, according to Mariátegui, has to do with their moral and material misery. As Llorente points out, Mariátegui did not distinguish between the problem that the Indian poses for Peruvian society and the problem that the Indian faces because of his position in Peruvians society, and this creates difficulties for his position. The problem of the Indian results from an economic system that has oppressed Indians throughout centuries and becomes critical because of their large numbers. The problem is not racial or ethnic but economic, and its solution is not racial or ethnic mixing and progressive homogenization, as others had proposed, but rather changing economic conditions.

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 25

Like many of the authors discussed here, Mariátegui did not have a clear understanding of race and ethnicity or of their boundaries. Indeed, he often used the terms in ways opposite from how they are used today: race is a matter of culture, and ethnicity is a matter of biological and phenotypical constitution. Moreover, his views about the character of indigenous populations, blacks, and other ethnic or racial minorities, such as the Chinese, were not favorable. He even used the term barbarism, with its ominous history in Hispanic America, to refer to blacks. Following other Latin Americans of the time, he referred to Latin Americans as a whole as a race, and he did the same with the people of the United States and Spaniards. And he paid lip service to the ethnic notion of a nation and of Latin America to which Rodó and Vasconcelos subscribed. But his contribution, which is not always consistently held, was to argue for a nonethnic and nonracial conception of a nation based on politics and economics. The goal for him was not racial or ethnic homogenization but the elimination of an economically oppressive system and the adoption of views that promote it. If Mariátegui saw no solution in ethnic and racial mixing and homogenization and discouraged it in favor of economic and political measures, Zea, as Oliver argues, made ethnic and racial mixing the central point of his understanding of Latin America and national­ity. For him, mestizaje is the key to nationality, and it is the solution to the problem of national unity that had preoccupied political thinkers in Latin America. Indeed, it is the predisposition to mixing that Zea considers an important contribution of the Spanish to Latin America. For, unlike Anglo Saxons, who kept themselves apart as much as possible, Spaniards had a tolerant attitude toward mixing and freely intermingled the native populations racially and ethnically. National unity in Latin America requires the ethnic and racial assimilation of the indigenous population, which in fact they have accomplished themselves. Zea contrasts this with a process in which they would have been assimilated by others. Assimilation provides national unity and eliminates discrimination. In Mexico, a factor other than mestizaje also helped to achieve that unity, according to Zea: the Mexican Revolution brought all parties together in a common goal. Any challenge to unity is to be

26  Jorge J. E. Gracia

discouraged, and Zea explicitly argues against indigenista movements, such as the one that sprang up in Chiapas in the late twentieth century. These movements are a throwback to the situation that anteceded mestizaje and the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican reality is thoroughly mixed, racially and ethnically, and any attempt to see it otherwise is a step backward. Clearly, although Zea pays much attention to authors such as Vasconcelos and applauds their view with respect to Latin America, he is more of a nationalist than an internationalist or a Latin Americanist. Moreover, he stands in opposition to the main thrust of authors such as Mariátegui, for whom the problems of Latin America are fundamentally economic. Latin Americans have lived and worked in the United States from the very beginning. But recently their numbers have increased substantially, and with that also the interest of Latinos/Hispanics in issues of identity, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Some of their concerns are similar to those of Latin Americans living in Latin America, but others are peculiar to their situation as immigrants, residents, or American nationals in the United States. One of their major concerns has been the question of their identity, who they are. Another, reflecting the interest in the philosophy of language that character­ i­zes Anglo-American philosophy, is the question of the labels used to refer to this population. Finally, there is the question of the racial and ethnic composition of the Latino/Hispanic population. As Elizabeth Millán points out, the work of Alcoff and Gracia has opened up new directions in American philosophy, and as Velásquez argues, the work of these two authors and Corlett has initiated an important field of philosophical inquiry. Alcoff has proposed an ethnoracial view of Latinos/as in which their race is not separable from their ethnicity. Corlett rejects the biological view of race but argues for a genealogical criterion of Latino/a ethnicity in the context of public policy. And Gracia defends a familial view of Latino/a identity, in which Latinos/as are conceived in familial and historical terms in which historical facts yield common properties that, nonetheless, may not extend to all members of the group. When it comes to the terminology they prefer, Alcoff rejects Hispanic in favor of Latino/a, whereas Gracia argues in favor of the use of both labels for different reasons and distinguishes their connotations and denotations.

Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought 27 Further Reading

On Race and Ethnicity Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Appiah, Anthony, and Amy Gutmann. Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Boxill, Bernard, ed. Race and Racism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Corlett, J. Angelo. Race, Racism, and Reparations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Gracia, Jorge J. E. Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

On Hispanic/Latin American and Latino/a Philosophy Gracia, Jorge J. E. Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. _____. Latinos in America: Philosophy and Social Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Gracia, Jorge J. E., et al., eds. Philosophical Analysis in Latin America. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984. Gracia, Jorge J. E., and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, eds. Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century: The Human Condition, Values, and the Search for Identity. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004. Mendieta, Eduardo, ed. Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Nuccetelli, Susana. Latin American Thought: Philosophical Problems and Arguments. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. Nuccetelli, Susana, Ofelia Schutte, and Otávio Bueno, eds. A Companion to Latin American Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Nuccetelli, Susana, and Gary Seay, eds. Latin American Philosophy: An Introduction with Readings. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.

28  Jorge J. E. Gracia

On Race and Ethnicity in Hispanic America Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Applebaum, Nancy P., Anne S. MacPherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosem­blatt, eds. Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Graham, Richard, ed. The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Wade, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press, 1997.

Part I

The Colony and Scholasticism

[

2]

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas Race and Personhood Janet B ur k e an d Te d H umph re y

One of the earliest questions to arise among Spaniards from their initial encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World was whether they were to regard and treat them as fully human. Many parties had a significant stake in the answer. If the indigenous were not fully human, they could be enslaved and treated as beasts of burden, helping the Spaniards secure the wealth that had drawn them to the New World. Further, Spain would be justified in conquering the Indians militarily, which would allow the Spaniards to spread the gospel by force and, therefore, more effectively and efficiently. If the indigenous were fully human, however, even if they practiced human sacrifice and idolatry, Spanish warfare against them could not be justified. The preaching of the gospel would have to be carried out peacefully and by example, as Christ had done. Their enslavement and brutal treatment might then be morally censurable. Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar and the bishop of Chiapas, stood at the center of this controversy. 31

32  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

The accusations and denunciations Las Casas leveled at the Spaniards over their treatment of the New World natives gave rise to what came to be known as the black legend of Spain. The accusations leveled at him in turn led to what might be called the black legend of Las Casas. As recent scholarship has shown, the argument continues even today, generally arising under the heading of race and concerning the appropriate relations among races and cultures. Las Casas held consistently that the peoples indigenous to the Americas, “the natives of the New World, whom we commonly call Indians,”1 fulfilled all the conditions for being regarded and treated as fully human, that is, as “men.” Thus, in Kantian terms, they were beings whose value was dignity, not worth.2 Las Casas adopted and developed his position with respect to the native peoples of the New World in part to combat the claims of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and others that they were, according to Aristotle’s classification, barbarians who were slaves by nature, whose status as humans not in a state of tutelage was a matter of debate.3 To articulate his view, Las Casas relied on Scholastic doctrines concerning men and natural law promulgated by the School of Salamanca under the leadership of Francisco de Vitoria.4 The fundamental issue at stake for Las Casas and his intellectual and political allies and Sepúlveda and his allies concerned the inherent or inalienable rights of the Indians. The issues under debate, involving the religious, political, and property rights of the native peoples of the New World, were substantial and concerned matters that had not been previously explored, or had been explored only in analogical ways. The two distinguishable but ultimately inseparable core issues were whether these peoples could rightfully be subjugated to the wills of others and, concomitantly, how they were properly to be evangelized. Las Casas’s defense of the view that the natives of the New World were men underlay his doctrines as to how properly to evangelize them. We have mentioned Las Casas and Kant in the same breath because they share a number of characteristics other than their high regard for the property of humanity in each human person. Most important among these is the intense scholarly attention each has received in his respective literature from his own lifetime to the present, and one has no reason to think that attention to their lives, work,

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  33

and thought will soon diminish. Both have been and will continue to be focal points of hagiographic veneration and searing criticism. Both kinds of commentary point to their targets’ importance, for, as it is said, no thump without a pat. Scholars, historians, and philosophers tend to point approvingly or disapprovingly to Las Casas and Kant as authorities precisely because their presence is so great and so grave that appealing to either as holding the view for which one is arguing assures its importance. Some scholars have commented on both in the most excruciating detail—Hans Vaihinger wrote a twovolume, nine-hundred-page treatise on the first four pages of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and numerous persons have devoted their entire careers to unraveling Las Casas—while others have simply set them up as straw men for the illusions and calumnies they have loosed on the world. Each, finally, has proven too important to remain the exclusive property of scholars. Lewis Hanke, one of the most important Las Casas scholars, has famously said that Las Casas was too great to be left to the Las Casas scholars. Although we make no pretensions to being Las Casas scholars, we do bring to this study backgrounds that allow us to approach Las Casas as outsiders with a broadly based interest in the history of ideas. We seek to place Las Casas and the scholarship that has grown up around his ideas in that broader philosophical and historiographic perspective, so as to shed light on his stance on the nature and standing of the peoples of the New World whom Europeans, in particular, the Spanish, had encountered less than a decade before Las Casas came to the Americas and less than thirty years before he began writing about them to the Spanish crown and his coreligionists. As Anthony Pagden has convincingly argued, Las Casas bears distinctive witness to the peoples of the New World, one that emerges from his commitment to them as a Christian evangelizer. His relation to them by that fact alone required that the Spanish regard and treat them as individuals with a full set of rights that properly pertain to being human. In other words, because Las Casas lacked conceptual schemes that would allow him to classify the New World peoples in terms of genus and species or some other such construction, his only strategy, as a Christian and a product of Scholastic thought, was to argue that those peoples were fit subjects of evangelization, that is,

34  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

potential proper members of the Body of Christ, and thus bearers of dignity who must be treated with respect.5 In the course of his argument, Las Casas makes claims about Spanish treatment of the New World peoples that created hostility and resentment among his contemporaries, especially those who were pressing their own economic interests, that is, their need for labor, at the cheapest possible rates, in their New World enterprises and who, in order to accomplish this, argued that the New World populations ought not to be regarded as fully human and thus could not be evangelized as Las Casas would have them be. In this context of charge and countercharge what came to be known as “the black legend” of Spain arose, and we have now had under the guise of this rubric a multicentury controversy about Las Casas’s views of both the New World native peoples and the Spanish. We address this complex issue that serves both as halo and shroud to the man and his work, taking up both a relatively contemporary defense and restatement of Las Casas’s views and a new version of the black legend, the one that Daniel Castro formulates in his book, Another Face of Empire, which charges Las Casas with a kind of bad faith in his defense of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.6 What we refer to as the black legend did not originate with Bartolomé de Las Casas, but within one hundred years of its first formulation writers came to identify his name with it. The person credited with the first formulation of the “legend,” Francesco Guicciardini, intended it as a criticism of Spain’s policies and what he perceived as the Spaniards’ laziness and hypocrisy. The legend arose as a set of observational criticisms of the Spanish character that had their origin among Italians who interacted with Spaniards, criticisms that persons of other nationalities soon began to repeat and amplify primarily as an attempt to curb Spanish political power and influence. Thus Francesco Guicciardini writes in his Report from Spain: The people are of a saturnine and sullen aspect, dark skinned, small in stature, and haughty by nature. In their own estimation there is no other nation to be compared with them. In speech they extol their own affairs and find clever ways to dissemble as much as they can. They are more inclined to arms than any

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  35

other Christian nation. . . . There is great poverty in Spain. . . . They are not given to letters. . . . Dissimulation is natural to this nation, and it is an art that is very thoroughly developed among people of all classes.7 In Latin America proper, the black legend of Spain came into its own with José Victorino Lastarria, who in his “Investigations Regarding the Social Influence of the Conquest and the Spanish Colonial System in Chile” cataloged the sins of Spain as a colonial power. A corresponding “white legend” of Spain, which had arisen in Europe, emerged in the New World with Andres Bello’s response to Las­ta­ rria, in which he pointed out that Spain was not worse than any other imperial power and, in fact, was better in many ways than, for instance, France, a country widely admired. Las Casas enters “black legend” history with his Brevíssima rela­ ción de la destrucción de las Indias, which he wrote in 1542–43 and which Charles Gibson identifies as “the most frequently published single item in all of black legend history.”8 The Brevíssima’s main qualities are worth rehearsing briefly to establish the foundation. This small book is an episodic account of the brutalities that Spanish conquistadors, encomenderos, and other settlers both systematically and randomly perpetrated on the various indigenous peoples they encountered in the Americas. The kinds and degrees of brutality of which Las Casas accuses the Spaniards differ as a function of the situation. Thus, for instance, among the conquistadors, Cortés, who established the pattern, Pedro de Alvarado, and Francisco Pizarro come in for especially severe censure, Las Casas claiming that each successive conquest was more brutal than the last. Among the encomenderos, Las Casas rarely identifies a specific target, but he invariably cites acts of cruelty driven by Spanish greed and lack of fellow feeling for the indigenous. For the contemporary reader, the main impression one has from reading the Brevíssima is that its characterizations of both the New World peoples and the Spaniards are so exaggerated as not to be credible. Las Casas claims that the book recounts persons and events he has witnessed with his own eyes, yet not only are the descriptions extreme, but they are also often of events and individuals of which

36  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

Las Casas could have known only at second hand. He gives the following account of the nature of the native peoples: All these universal and infinite peoples a toto genere God created to be a simple people, altogether without subtility, malice, or duplicity, excellent in obedience, most loyal to their native lords and to the Christians whom they serve; . . . They are also the most impoverished of nations, those who possess and desire to possess the fewest temporal goods, and thus they are never proud, never ambitious, never covetous.9 Las Casas’s portraits of the New World native peoples are consistent throughout the Brevíssima, and in their laudatory language—notice in the foregoing he portrays them as altogether abiding by the Ten Commandments—they paint pictures either of saints or of romantically idealized individuals and societies, to the extent that one can hardly regard them as real people. In similar fashion, Las Casas demonizes the Spaniards, both the conquistadors and the hacendados, as the following passages illustrate. They would enter into the villages and spare not children, or old people, or pregnant women, or women with suckling babes, but would open the woman’s belly and hack the babe to pieces, as though they were butchering lambs shut up in their pen. (Account 9) The diabolical commendero, they say, sent for an hundred Indians to come before him; and they came like lambs; and when they had come, he ordered that thirty or forty of them have their heads cut off, and says to the others: “I shall do the same to you all, if you do not serve me well or if you leave without my licence.” (Account 84) One can only believe that Las Casas wrote the work with the intent of arousing as complete sympathy for the Indians and as firm moral and religious condemnation of the Spaniards as he could. The work is clearly polemical, intended to arouse emotions on behalf of the

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  37

native peoples and against the Europeans, with the goal of moving the Spanish crown and the Council of the Indies to action. It appeals to the heart, not the head, and as Las Casas’s best known and most widely read work, it casts him and his views in a certain light as well. The most unfortunate feature of appeals to the emotions is that once they are cast into the arena, all are free to respond to them as their emotions, interests, and loyalties dispose them, which is precisely what occurred with the Brevíssima and its author. Both became focal points for unreflective veneration or castigation, and Las Casas, the Spanish friar whose words were used to create the black legend of the Spanish presence in the Americas, became himself, for those Spaniards with proprietary interests in the New World, the object of a black legend. Those with proprietary interests included the full panoply of powers, including the crown, conquistadors, hacendados, and encomenderos, as well as the religious. In the end the Brevíssima portrays the Spaniards and the New World natives as polar opposites of the human family, those who are depraved and those who are all but without moral stain. The important point, however, is that they are the polar extremes of humanity. That the New World peoples were, in Las Casas’s own words, “in toto genere” “men” is a position to which he had come during the years prior to the publication of the Brevíssima. In two works whose manuscripts he wrote over a number of years, In Defense of the Indians and The Only Way, Las Casas, using the intellectual resources and methods available to him, that is, the Scholasticism and the doctrine of natural law as practiced by the School of Salamanca, develops and defends his views on the humanity of the Indians. One sees in Las Casas’s intellectual development with respect to this issue a repetition of his own personal conversion from encomendero as a young man to “Defender of the Indians,” first responding emotionally to Antonio de Montesinos’s sermon castigating the encomenderos for their treatment of their allotted Indians,10 then, sometime later, a full, Pauline-like conversion on their behalf as he was writing his own sermon on the Spanish treatment of the Indians. This second conversion was the beginning of his unstinting polemical and intellectual defense of the New World natives’

38  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

full humanity. His full-throated defense of the Indians’ humanity begins, as so often happens, in a moment of recognition, a moment in which, in his own words, he felt “an instinctive compassion, a grief I felt at seeing a people suffer.”11 One finds the core of Las Casas’s argument regarding the humanity of the Indians in his doctrine of evangelization. From the fact that the Indians are fit subjects for evangelization and from Las Casas’s views as to how they are to be evangelized, it follows that the Indians must be regarded as fully human. These are the positions he develops in The Only Way and in his refutation of Sepúlveda’s position, which occurs in In Defense of the Indians. Sepúlveda never visited the New World; he built his position that the New World peoples were slaves by nature on the reports of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, a royal officer and official historian for Spain, who wrote the Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535) and who reported to the Council of the Indies that, among other things, the natives of the New World were “naturally lazy and vicious, melancholic, cowardly, and in general a lying, shiftless people. Their marriages are not a sacrament but a sacrilege. They are idolatrous, libidinous, and commit sodomy.”12 Such descriptions as these became the basis for Sepúlveda’s and the Council’s view that not only was it morally acceptable to place the native peoples in servitude, denying them all normal rights afforded human beings, but it was also appropriate to convert them to Christianity by whatever means possible, assuming them to have the potential for accepting the gospel. Las Casas could not allow the matter of the Indians’ personhood, their dignity, to remain a simple matter of conflicting eyewitness accounts. Of necessity, he had to ground his defense in the argument strategies and conceptual framework of the time. For this reason, he mounts his defense of the Indians by refuting the claim that they fell under the Aristotelian category of barbarians who were slaves by nature. Of course, this refutation rests on his observations of their behaviors and cultures, but they are observations he systematically organizes and presents so as to speak to the specific characteristics by virtue of which peoples were at the time regarded as barbarian slaves by nature. The New World peoples could not be so regarded because they were

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  39

not ignorant, inhuman or bestial. Rather, . . . they had properly organized states, wisely ordered by excellent laws, religion, and custom. They cultivated friendship and, bound together in common fellowship, lived in populous cities in which they wisely administered the affairs of both peace and war justly and equitably, . . . and could have won the admiration of the sages of Athens. (Defense 43) Las Casas’s characterization of the Indians speaks to the very specific criteria first Aristotle and then, in Las Casas’s time, Sepúlveda and his allies used to identify barbarians who were nonetheless fully human and whom one was obligated to respect as such and against whom one might rightfully conduct only just wars. That is, Las Casas’s position is that the Spanish have neither legal nor moral justification for treating the Indians differently from the way they would treat European and other peoples and nations they recognized as civilized, even if they practiced different customs, organized themselves according to different legal systems, and confessed different faiths. Based on this characterization, Las Casas concludes the Defense by asserting, “They should be ashamed who think to spread the gospel by the mailed fist. Men want to be taught, not forced” (Defense 225). He opens his great work on evangelization with the following words: “It was the will and work of Christ . . . that God’s chosen should be called . . . from every race, every tribe, every language, every corner of the world. . . . The reason is, they are all human beings” (Defense 63). These are the words, finally, by which Las Casas defines his position with respect to the Indians and positions himself for his fellow countrymen’s and coreligionists’ attacks. If the peoples of the New World are humans, not justly subject to any form of oppression or coercion, then those who do coerce and oppress are subject to moral condemnation, and, thus, in Las Casas’s eyes stood the vast majority of the Spaniards. Hence the two forms of the black legend, the one with which Las Casas is credited and the one of which he became the subject. Although the sense of the black legend arose in earlier times, the actual term black legend has a rather contemporary origin, having

40  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

been coined by Julián Juderías in the early twentieth century, but in a relatively short time, less than fifty years, the term seems to have become widely understood and well accepted.13 It was Rómulo Carbia in his Historia de la leyenda negra hispano-americana who seems to have made Las Casas the focal point of the term black legend. Carbia calls Las Casas’s reports of Spanish abuses of the indigenous peoples of the Americas into question by citing testimonies from other early European settlers. He proceeds, then, to accuse Las Casas not only of bias but also of bad faith in his accounts of Spanish activity in the Americas. In the mid-twentieth century a renewed focus on Las Casas’s ideas arose because scholars saw his views as relevant to issues that ranged from various kinds of tyranny to genocide to liberation movements. Further, a sympathy for the American Indian had begun to surface. With the resumption of scholarly life in Europe, Latin America, and the United States immediately after World War II, discussions of the black legend began specifically to organize themselves around Las Casas, his reports from the Americas, and his various defenses of the “Indians,” including his doctrines about the proper scope and limits of the evangelization of indigenous peoples. Las Casas became the focus because of his clear sympathy for and defense of those who stood outside of what he regarded as received culture and institutions, that is, of those who by all accounts were “other.”14 Inevitably, with approving citations of Las Casas, there also arose new criticism of his work in the Americas. The confrontation between Las Casas’s supporters and detractors continues today. Looking at the supporters and detractors historiographically, one sees, not surprisingly, that they tend to reflect the intellectual concerns of their day and their position. In his 1953 article in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Lewis Hanke noted the tremendous differences of interpretation among Las Casas scholars,15 as did Benjamin Keen in his 1971 introduction to Juan Friede’s and his Bartolomé de Las Casas in History; and since that time, in our own day, we find similar divergent opinions. For purposes of this discussion, we have chosen two paradigmatic examples, Gustavo Gutiérrez and Daniel Castro. Both are Peruvians, both deeply identify with the cause of the indigenous, and they write

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  41

within a decade and a half of each other. But in their views of Las Casas, they could not be more opposed. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Dominican priest and theologian, founder of the modern liberation theology movement, saw in the thought of Las Casas the ideas of a man ahead of his time, ideas in defense of native peoples that have meaning as much today as they did in the sixteenth century. “Today,” Gutiérrez writes in his 1992 study of Las Casas, “the native peoples, like the extensive black population of this continent, continue to see their lifestyles, their values, their customs, their right to life and liberty, trodden under foot. We must undertake once more, in our age, the colossal endeavor of Bartolomé de Las Casas if we would forge a liberating evangelization of Latin America.”16 Further, seeing in Las Casas a fellow traveler in liberation theology, albeit anachronistically, Gutiérrez writes, “Despite the obvious distance between historical contexts, Bartolomé’s commitment constitutes a challenge for us today. In our times, too, the rights of the poor and oppressed must be defended according to the guidelines of the Medellín Conference” (456).17 Gutiérrez also experiences the voice of Las Casas as a link between the beliefs of the early church and the church reforms of Vatican Council II in the mid1960s (454).18 The earliest Christian thinkers accepted the religious values that existed, he says, as did Las Casas. Las Casas’s unyielding insistence that the indigenous people’s rights as free rational beings be respected, that they not be coerced into accepting a religion that posits beliefs contrary to their own, not only echoed the ideas of the early Christians but also foreshadowed the reforming messages of Vatican II. Quoting from Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Gutiérrez makes the point that this language merely states what Las Casas defended in his own time, the right of every human person to choose his own religion: The Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that in matters religious no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs. . . . The Synod further declares that the right to

42  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person. (187) Finally Gutiérrez notes, “In the first centuries, the church maintained both the truth of the Christian message and the urgency of respecting free access to that message without interference on the part of civil authority. Las Casas, in his era, and in terms of the problems of the Indies, intuitively adopts these early ideas—as, in its own language, Vatican II will do” (188). By contrast, and not surprisingly, Gutiérrez sees Ginés de Sepúlveda, Las Casas’s great adversary in the Valladolid debates over the humanity of the indigenous, as solidly entrenched in the medieval tradition of thought: “There is nothing theologically new . . . in Sepúlveda’s position [on the salvation of the heathen]. He is only rehearsing medieval theology” (248). The specific messages in the writings of Las Casas that resonate so strongly with Gutiérrez in the era of liberation theology focus on three things: concern for the poor and marginalized and belief in the equality of all persons; freedom of religious choice and its corollary nonviolence as an approach to evangelization; and the gospel as the root and foundation of evangelization. First let us discuss the poor, the marginalized. The concern both Las Casas and Gutiérrez have for the poor and others relegated to society’s refuse is paramount. Gutiérrez speaks of Las Casas as seeing “in the Indian, in this ‘other,’ this one-different-from-the-Western, the poor one of the gospel, and ultimately Christ himself” (56). Las Casas continually reminds his readers and listeners that God loved all persons, especially those most rejected by society. As he states in his Apología, “The Indians are our siblings, and Christ has given his life for them. Why do we persecute them with such inhuman cruelty when they do not deserve such treatment?” (Apología 252–53). He also reminds us that God requires us to love our neighbor. Gutiérrez says of Las Casas that it is his “deep conviction not only that God has created all human beings equal, but that God wills them actually to be treated as such, in all regions of the earth” (Gutiérrez 217). Second, nonviolence. Gutiérrez, responding as he was to an age and place where violence was the common way of forcing people to accept beliefs they could not truly own, would almost of necessity

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  43

have responded positively to Las Casas’s peaceful approach to evangelization. Las Casas’s treatise, The Only Way, whose central thesis is that one can evangelize in only one way, the peaceful way, by persuasion and dialogue, resonates with Gutiérrez. One of Las Casas’s main tenets is that evangelization by force was not the evangelization of Jesus Christ. “What does the Gospel have to do with guns?” he asks in the Apología. “What do preachers of the Gospel have in common with armed thieves?” (117). Gutiérrez, with Las Casas, believes that the indigenous peoples must make their acceptance of the faith in total freedom, that forcing them to accept the faith before their understanding is fully mature is wrong. The intellectual jousting between Sepúlveda and Las Casas over human sacrifice was especially significant with respect to the use of force to suppress indigenous religious beliefs. Sepúlveda, seeing idolatry and human sacrifice as sins against natural law, argues that they are therefore offensive to God and should be punished; hence the war would be just. Arguing back through his Apología, Las Casas says: When unbelievers are discovered to be committing a crime of this kind, they are not always to be attacked by war, although it may be the business of the Church to try to prevent it. But there must be lengthy consideration beforehand, so that in trying to prevent the death of a few innocent persons, we should not move against an immense multitude of persons including the innocent, and destroy whole kingdoms, and implant a hatred for the Christian religion in their souls, so that they will never want to hear the name or teaching of Christ for all eternity. (Quoted in Gutiérrez 190) Third and finally, the Gospels. Core to both Las Casas and Gutiérrez are ideas and action firmly rooted in the Gospels. Las Casas regarded evangelization as the primary justification for the presence of the Spaniards in the New World. It was “the end, or final cause, for which these [Indies] have been granted by the Church to the Sovereigns of Castile and León, who until now have had no stake in them” (quoted in Gutiérrez 194). But the political imperative for evangelization paled before the religious imperative. “Las Casas’s

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inspiration in the gospel and experience in the Indies converge and fuse,” Gutiérrez writes, “accentuating the role of deeds in any Christian testimonial to the God who is love” (161). But then Gutierrez, who faced the challenge of applying the gospel to his own difficult situation, points out that conditions in the New World presented a challenge to Las Casas with respect to the gospel, stirring him to a “rereading that will lead him to interesting theological intuitions, and distance him from the Western, and ultimately comfortable, theology of salvation dominant in his time” (193–94). So, for instance, Las Casas quotes John (10:10) in his argument against violence in matters of religion: “I came that they might have life and have it to the full.” And, as Gutiérrez points out, Las Casas constantly uses one specific text from the Gospel of Matthew to call for justice toward the Indians: “None of those who cry out, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of God but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” As Gutierrez sums it up, Las Casas “allows the light of the gospel to fall on [what is happening, sorrowfully and daily, to the dwellers of the Indies] in order to understand what it is that he must do as a Christian” (270). We come now to Daniel Castro. He is an interesting and important entrant into the debate on the nature and sincerity of Las Casas’s effort on behalf of indigenous peoples because Castro is himself of indigenous American descent, a Peruvian born in the high Andes who came to the United States for undergraduate and graduate education and is now a successful university professor with a distinctive voice, a voice to which, if only because of its provenance, one must pay heed. Castro does not see in Las Casas the blessed figure that Gutiérrez described fifteen years earlier. The core point for which Castro argues is that, however tempted we might be to set Las Casas up as a model of a liberal defense and action on behalf of downtrodden and otherwise disenfranchised peoples, we must not so regard him. In fact, whatever his words and actions might suggest, he was at best ineffective, at worst insincere, more a moral bungler than a successful defender of the rights of indigenous peoples. Hence the new black legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas, not that he condemned Spanish mistreatment of the peoples of the Americas, not that he besmirched the virility and moral uprightness of the Spanish people,

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  45

but that he, Las Casas, is not in fact an individual to be held up as a defender of the dispossessed. Rather, he manifests all the uncaring and arrogance of one who is a member of a dominant culture and who thereby has special access to the truth. Castro presses his indictment in a number of ways. First, “what is often overlooked in the exaltation of Las Casas is his overriding concern to convert the inhabitants of the Americas to Christianity[,] . . . [which] is an act of ecclesiastical imperialism” (Castro 6). “The only explanation for such behavior must be found in his overriding conviction of the innate superiority of his religious beliefs over those of the Native Americans he so wanted to protect” (9). Second, “his most effective praxis was carried out in the context of the Spanish court, not in American Territory. It was at court where he uninhibitedly played out his complex roles as the ‘universal protector of all the Indians of America.’ . . . Despite all impressions to the contrary, his contact with the objects of his affection, the American Indians, was minimal. . . . This divorce from the indigenous people and their culture is partially evident in his apparent lack of interest in learning native languages” (10–11). Third, “while he appears to have been aware of the demographic disaster that befell the natives and the extent of the human genocide obtaining in this emerging world, he either could not see or chose to ignore the cultural genocide” (11). Fourth, “from this perspective, Las Casas’s work develops not with the oppressed, the indigenous people, but within the context of the society of Spanish letrados, the imperial hegemonic culture, working to maintain the oppressive edifice represented by the occupiers” (14; original emphasis). Castro’s summation of his indictment against Las Casas reads as follows: The main difference between Las Casas and the other colonists was his deeply seated belief that the implementation of imperialism—political, economic, and ecclesiastical—could be accomplished through nonviolent means, a departure in form but not in essence from the basic beliefs of his contemporaries. Ultimately, the friar like many modern intellectuals, failed to address the natives’ alienation and socio-cultural dislocation

46  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey

implicit in the forced process of conversion to an alien faith and an alien way of life. (179) And: In our days, the bishop of Chiapas has become the patrimony of the intellectual members of white and mestizo society in Indoamérica more than of the Indian masses. (183) When one places Castro’s and Gutiérrez’s accounts of Las Casas side by side, one can hardly believe they are discussing the same individual, and if one had come to think well of Las Casas given Gutiérrez’s portrait of his work, one has an equally difficult time holding him in esteem in the face of any of the counts in Castro’s indictment. What binds these two portraits is their presentation of Las Casas’s focus on the indigenous peoples of Latin America. This double view of Las Casas leads us directly to the subject of this volume, forging peoples, race, ethnicity, and nationality in Latin American and Latino thought. From the moment of independence when the new intellectual and political leaders of Latin America were attempting to create nations, the indigenous population was among the issues they felt called to address.19 How do we constitute our nations, and what role do the various groups who will make up their citizenries, including the indigenous peoples, play in the life of those civil polities? In modern times, under the influence of the intellectual and emotional currents of liberation theology, Gutiérrez and other theologians faced much the same issue, focusing on justice for the poor, the marginalized, the refuse of society, who deserved a place within the structure. In Castro we see yet another example of Bartolomé de Las Casas as the touchstone for an argument involving indigenous persons still struggling for their place in society. Las Casas is clearly a man with more than a symbolic significance for many ages, many issues. As with Kant, to whom we turn for both negative and positive stimulation when we take up issues of knowledge, rights, or aesthetic judgment, among other issues, Las Casas continues to speak to people on an issue of great importance to him and to us. Whether he exaggerated his accounts

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  47

or spent too much time at court and too little time with the Indians, what the balance was between his activism and his theological writing—these are all relatively unimportant matters in the face of the staying power of his words and the inspiration he seems to have provided for legends, both black and white. It is our hope that this preliminary ordering and analysis of Lascasian scholarship might help uncover the core of this enigmatic friar. Gutiérrez threw down the challenge: Only historical honesty can deliver us from the prejudices, narrow interpretations, paralyzing ignorance, and the deceptions foisted on us by private interests, which lay our history on us like a permanent mortgage instead of transforming it into a thrust to creativity. The recovery of our memory will inspire us to fling to the trash heap as inadequate and consequently useless, the so-called white legend and black legend of what occurred in the sixteenth century. A concealment of the complexity of what occurred in those years for fear of the truth, in order to defend current privileges, or—at the other extreme—a frivolous, irresponsible use of offensive expressions, condemns us to historical sterility. (457) In 1953 Lewis Hanke wrote: Students of the Spanish conquest of America in the future may find it strange that so much controversy existed today—four hundred years after his first treatises were printed in Sevilla—on the true doctrine of Las Casas. They may conclude that all of us who are now attempting to grasp his significance have sought to relate him and his ideas too closely and too arbitrarily to the present world. Standing today on the top of a mountain of controversial writings about Las Casas through the centuries, perhaps we are all inclined to forget that he lived in the sixteenth century and must be judged ultimately as a man of his time.20 In closing, using Kantian contexts, we want briefly to take up two issues, one that bears directly on the interpretation of Las Casas

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in one of his more controversial opinions, namely, how the indigenous of the Americas are to be evangelized and why; and one that deals more with the general problem of coming to grips not just with Las Casas but also with the Americas and its peoples, namely, the very historiographic problematic with which the clash of cultures confronts us. The first issue, evangelization, is the one with respect to which Gutiérrez and Castro are most at loggerheads. For the moment, we do not want to address Castro’s claim that Christian evangelization is ecclesiastical imperialism, for in some sense it surely is. The very foundation on which Las Casas’s doctrine of evangelization rests is the view that the peoples of the Americas are, in fact, men, that is, persons. He states this clearly in two ways: We find that for the most part men are intelligent, far sighted, diligent, and talented. . . . [I]t would be impossible to find one race, nation, region or country anywhere in the world . . . not having for the most part sufficient natural knowledge and ability to rule and govern itself. (Defense 31) The truths of mission all agree that the way of teaching, of drawing people best to God and the knowledge of the truth has to win the mind with reasons and win the will with motives that are compelling and attractive. (The Only Way 113–14) The first passage establishes incontrovertibly that Las Casas regards the peoples of the Americas as men capable of self-determination; the second, in saying that one must appeal to the Indians with respect to both their intellects and their wills, suggests that he regards them as free rational beings, that is, in Kantian terms, autonomous agents, persons, bearers of dignity, who must be respected as ends in themselves, never as mere means to the ends of an other. Of course, the further consequence of this view is that they are precisely the kinds of beings fit to be and become citizens, an opinion that, had it been attended to, would by itself have included them in the activity of nation building that Spanish-speaking Latin America undertook in the nineteenth century.

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So why were they left out? How did they become so marginalized that their voice was and could not be heard. The reasons are many, but we can find one of them in this melancholy footnote from Kant’s little essay, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent.” He writes: Only an educated public, which has existed from its outset down to our own time, can authenticate ancient history. Beyond it, everything is terra incognita; and the history of those peoples living outside it can begin only at the time at which they entered it. This happened with the Jewish people through the Greek translation of the Bible at the time of the Ptolemies, without which their isolated reports would receive little credence. From there (once this beginning has been properly fixed) one can follow their narratives back. And so it is with all other peoples. The first page of Thucydides (says Hume) is the only beginning of all true history.21 This Kantian reflection both clarifies and sets out the challenge to which we have become acutely sensitive, and it is the challenge that Castro clearly points to in the case of Las Casas and the indigenous people, that inevitably in the encounter and clash of cultures, with its misunderstandings, failures to communicate, much less understand and sympathize, we end up in these situations in which one culture comes to dominate and force itself on to another culture. The outcomes almost never have anything to do with right but only with power. And while we can grant Castro’s point that Las Casas’s doctrine of evangelization is imperialistic, Las Casas’s specific expression of his doctrine of evangelization protects him from the harshest versions of that accusation. The greatest service we can perform in trying to get to historical truth with respect to Las Casas is to evaluate him, as well as Gutiérrez and Castro, as thinkers whose analyses flow from the social conditions and intellectual currents of their own time. But relative to Gutiérrez and Castro, we can see that with respect to issues of forging peoples, Bartolomé de Las Casas serves as an indispensable point of reference and icon.

50  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey Life and Works

Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) is among the most important persons to have come early to settle and live in the New World, arriving with his father on the island of Hispaniola in 1502. He was given a grant of land and Indian laborers but was ordained a priest in 1512, less than a year after having heard Antonio de Montesinos’s sermon, delivered on August 15, 1511, admonishing the Spanish colonizers to give up their inhumane treatment of the New World indigenous peoples. Sometime after, writing a sermon on a text from Ecclesiasticus (34:18 ff.), Las Casas had a radical conversion experience, and its result was his call to protect and minister to the New World indigenous peoples. He subsequently spent his life advocating before the Spanish crown, Emperor Charles V, the court, and the Council of the Indies on behalf of the Indians. His first published document on this issue is his An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, which was soon translated and distributed throughout Europe and used by rival colonial powers to condemn Spain’s settling of the New World. In the 1550s, in a famous debate with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in Valladolid, the best written record of which, on both sides of the debate, is In Defense of the Indians. Finally, as “Protector of the Indians,” a title the church bestowed on him officially, he advocated evangelization of the New World peoples as free, rational beings, the position he sets out in The Only Way. Few European figures involved in the discovery and conquest of the Americas have been more studied than Las Casas, and the literature dealing with him is extraordinarily extensive. Nonetheless, scholars have been slow to collect and translate his works. The following list of readings represents a starting point for entering into the mind of this fascinating figure.

Further Reading

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies. Ed. and introd. Franklin W. Knight, trans. Andrew Hurley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003.

The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas  51

_____. In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, Against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered across the Sea. Trans. Stafford Poole, C.M. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974. _____. Obras completas. Ed. Paulino Castañeda Delgado. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988. ______. The Only Way. Ed. Helen Rand Parish, trans. Francis Patrick Sullivan. New York: Paulist Press, 1992. Castro, Daniel. Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas, Indige­ nous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Friede, Juan, and Benjamin Keen, eds. Bartolomé de Las Casas in History. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971. Vickery, Paul S. Bartolomé de Las Casas: Great Prophet of the Americas. New York: Paulist Press, 2006.

notes

  1.  Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, Against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered across the Seas, trans. C. M. Stafford Poole (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 25. Hereafter cited in the text as Defense.   2. Immanuel Kant distinguishes between two orders of value completely different in kind, namely, worth, which is the value borne by objects that are commensurable, and dignity, the value borne by beings whose value is unique to each bearer and thus not commensurable. Dignity therefore pertains to personhood. See Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983).   3.  Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Spanish Dominican philosopher and theologian, was the primary defender at the Spanish court of the view that the New World native peoples were slaves by nature, barbarians, and thus appropriately subject to capture and subjugation to the needs

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and will of the Spanish crown and its proper representatives. He opposed Bartolomé de Las Casas in the debate on this topic at Valladolid in 1550.   4. The School of Salamanca under the leadership of Francisco de Vitoria had become the leading intellectual force in Spain by the midsixteenth century, formulating a distinctive just war theory and arguing that the papacy’s authority in secular matters was limited and could not be used to justify either conquest or enslavement of the native peoples of the New World.   5. Anthony Pagden, in The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), traces the beginnings of the effort to develop language and conceptual schemes that allowed those who came after Las Casas to differentiate among peoples in terms that at present we might call race and ethnicity. However, Las Casas and his immediate contemporaries were not able to draw such distinctions, which means that they were faced with deciding whether groups of individuals were fully human or some cate­gory of barbarian, including those who were Aristotelian slaves by nature, that is, incapable on any level or degree of self-governance.  6. Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Hereafter page numbers of quoted passages are given in the text.  7. Gibson, The Black Legend, 32–34 and passim.  8. Ibid., 73.   9.  Bartolomé de Las Casas, An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. with introd. Franklin W. Knight, trans. Andrew Hurley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 5. Hereafter cited in the text as Account. 10.  With the support of his fellow Dominicans, Antonio de Montesinos delivered his sermon against the enslavement and mistreatment of the Indians the Sunday of the fourth week of Advent, 1511. The sermon expressed the corporate view of the Dominicans working in the Americas. 11.  Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Only Way, ed. Helen Rand Parish, trans. Francis Patrick Sullivan (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 192–93. Henceforth cited in the text as The Only Way. 12.  Quoted from the Historia general, in Paul S.Vickery, Bartolomé de Las Casas: Great Prophet of the Americas (New York: Paulist Press, 2006), 38.

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13. Charles Gibson identified Juderías as the first person to use the term black legend (la layenda negra) in La leyenda negra: Estudios acerca del concepto de España en el extranjero (Barcelona, 1943). See Charles Gibson, ed. and trans., The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). 14. One can find relatively complete accounts of the history of the “black legend” in two works: Gibson, The Black Legend; and Benjamin Keen, “Introduction: Approaches to Las Casas, 1535–1970,” in Bartolomé de Las Casas in History: Toward an Understanding of the Man and His Work, ed. Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 3–63. The latter volume summarizes and considers critically the state of Las Casas scholarship to its date of publication and can for that reason be regarded as authoritative on the state of Las Casas studies at the time. 15. Lewis Hanke, “Bartolomé de Las Casas, an Essay in Hagiography and Historiography,” Hispanic American Historical Review 33, no. 1 (Feb. 1953): 136–51. 16. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, trans. Robert R. Barr (New York: Orbis Books, 1993), 89. Hereafter page numbers of quoted passages are given in the text. 17. The Medellín Conference took place in 1968 in Colombia and officially supported the liberation theology founded by Gutiérrez in 1972. Among the concepts coming out of the Medellín Conference was the designation of social action as the primary method of Christian influence in the world. 18. The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican was the twentyfirst ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. It opened in 1962 and closed in 1965. Among its many reforms was a stated intent to include all individual members of humanity in the Body of Christ regardless of their association with the church. 19. Simón Bolívar, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Justo Sierra, and José Martí all address the issue of how and whether it is possible to accommodate the native peoples of the Americas in postindependence republics. Bolívar and Sierra argue that the indigenous peoples will become members of the republic primarily as a function of acculturative education. Alberdi and Sarmiento are far less optimistic that indigenous peoples can acculturate to the republics

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they envision. Martí, on the other hand, rejects all but out of hand any thought that the indigenous are not to be included in the Latin American republics. 20.  Hanke, “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 149. 21. Kant, Perpetual Peace, 38; original emphasis.

P a r t II

Independence and Enlightenment

[

3]

Men or Citizens? The Making of Bolívar’s Patria Jos é A ntoni o A g u i l a r R i v e ra

Estábamos abstraídos, y digámoslo así, ausentes del universo en cuanto es relativo a la ciencia del gobierno y administración del estado. Simón Bolívar, Carta de Jamaica, 1815

Simón Bolívar is unusual among nineteenth-century Spanish American caudillos for a number of reasons, but one of them is that he approached the task of nation building after independence in a way that sharply contrasts with the strategies followed by others, such as the Mexican patriotas criollos (creole patriots). At the core of his predicament was the fact that Bolívar had some sense of how to forge a polity but very little idea of how to forge a people. This omission is no coincidence. I argue that Bolívar did not believe that he needed a strong notion of racial homogeneity to carry out nation building. Although some critics have argued that Bolívar’s political understandings of state and patria borrowed heavily from classical 57

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republicanism, I argue that he did not conceive of citizenship in classical terms either. Unlike ethnonationalists, Bolívar believed that in the short run cultural homogeneity—unlike political unity—was not critical to the functioning of representative government. On the contrary, he conceived of a patria based on racial diversity and cultural inequality. He constructed a theory of social harmony and cooperation based on deference. This logic ran counter to that of John Stuart Mill, who believed that a common nationality, understood in ethnic terms, was necessary for representative government.

Forging Peoples or Forging Citizens?

It is instructive to start with one of Bolívar’s many failures, perhaps the most significant of them. Bolívar made clear in his address to the Angostura Congress in 1819 that institutions have to be shaped to accommodate the prevailing customs (mores) of a people. He asserted, “Good mores and not strength are the columns of the laws.”1 On these grounds he rejected American-style federalism and political decentralization. While the U.S. Constitution was a marvelous creation, it would not do for all peoples, and certainly not for the unruly Venezuelans. At the core of this belief was Montesquieu’s insight in the Spirit of the Laws that without a powerful structure of such customs, habits, and attitudes—without, that is, a civil society already in place—it would not be possible to create a new republic. According to Anthony Pagden, perhaps this explains why “Montesquieu himself never offered any suggestions as to how the modern Lycurgus might go about doing so.”2 The seminal paradox in Bolívar’s thought was that he acknowledged the importance of mores, realized that South America was wanting in virtue, and still went ahead with his project of constructing a large republican polity. He compelled the constitution makers at Angostura to achieve something unheard of: “You have to constitute men perverted by the illusions of error and by noxious incentives.”3 Bolívar faced the challenge of imagining the communities that could be created out of the collapse of the Spanish empire in America. While there has been some debate over Bolívar’s political

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ideas—was he a liberal or a classical republican?—the truth is that he encountered very early in his career one of the vacuums in liberal theory: the absence of criteria to set boundaries of nationality between human communities. A citizen is a political not a cultural entity. However, as Bernard Yack has argued: Liberal democratic culture itself inspires people to think of themselves as members of prepolitical communities. This is especially true of the rhetoric of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty arguments encourage modern citizens to think of themselves as organized into communities that are logically and historically prior to the communities created by their shared political institutions. The doctrine of popular sovereignty insists that behind every state there stands a people, a community of individuals that makes use of the state as a means of self government and thus has the right to establish the limits of its power.4 However, guidelines for defining what a nation is and who belongs to it are missing in liberal thought. Bolívar perhaps might have turned to republican patriotism. According to Maurizio Viroli, patriotism is the “love of the political institutions and the way of life that sustains the common liberty of the people.”5 Patriotism, according to this view, has a cultural dimension, “but it is primarily a political passion based on the experience of citizenship, not on common prepolitical elements derived from being in the same territory, belonging to the same race, speaking the same language, worshipping the same gods, having the same customs.”6 Republican patriotism differs from civic nationalism in being a passion and not the result of rational consent; it is not a matter of allegiance to historically and culturally neutral universal political principles but an attachment to the laws, the constitution, and the way of life of a particular republic. Bolívar certainly did not lack political passion. However, the problem was that he had little attachment to the “laws, the constitution, and the way of life” of colonial Spain. In fact, Spain was a tyrannical empire, not a republic, and the Spanish American colonies had the corrupt legacy of imperialism; they lacked any self-sustaining republican tradition of their own.

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Spanish Americans, according to Bolívar, had even been deprived of “active tyranny.” He lamented, “The position of the inhabitants of the American hemisphere has been for centuries entirely passive: their political existence was null. We were even lower than servitude and hence it was more difficult for us to rise to the enjoyment of liberty.” Bolívar asserted that states became enslaved “by the nature of their constitution or by the abuse of their constitution. Therefore, a people is enslaved when the government, by its very essence or because of its vices, treads upon and usurps the rights of the citizen or subject. Taking account of these principles we will find that America had been deprived not only of her liberty but also of active and dominant tyranny.”7 In Spanish America even the tyrants were foreigners. “Love of the fatherland,” Bolívar wrote in his Angostura speech, “love of the laws, love of the Magistrates, are the noble passions that the soul of a Republican most absorb. Venezuelans love their patria, but they do not love her laws, because these [laws] have been noxious and were the source of all evil.”8 For Bolívar, neither purely rational civic nationalism nor republican patriotism would do. This same challenge was faced by Mexican liberals such as José María Luis Mora in the early nineteenth century. However, their predicament was lessened by the conscious elaboration of cultural and historical theories of the nation—the mythical narratives of patriotismo criollo of Servando Teresa de Mier, Carlos María de Bustamante, and others. A strong undercurrent of ethnic, racial, and historical thinking—however incoherent—was present from the very beginning in Mexico.9 Yet it must be noted that in Mexico patriotas criollos were in the minority. They did not succeed in providing the symbolic framework for constitution making in the early republic. Most of the framers of the first constitutions relied more on Benjamin Constant than on Quetzalcoatl. As Charles Hale asserts, “Mexican constitutional liberalism in the 1820’s had a strictly criollo orientation.”10 Mexicans like Mora were “civic nationalists,” but with a twist. They believed in the power of universal ideas such as legal equality and constitutionalism to constitute a polity. However, their “civicness” was somehow tainted by their ideas on the racial makeup of their society.11 Mora explicitly asserted that the character of the Mexican nation must be sought in the white population.12 The “short

Men or Citizens? 61

and wretched remains of the ancient Mexican population,” even if they were the source of “pity,” could not be considered the foundations of a progressive Mexican society.13 Mora believed that “every caste of known men has an organization which is peculiar to them, it is in consonance with their character and it influences not only the color of their skin, but what is more important, their physical strength, psychic and industrial abilities. . . . It does not seem plausible to deny the difference, in aptitudes and faculties, between the bronze race, to which the Indians of Mexico belong, and the whites that have settled in the country.”14 Indians were stubborn and not imaginative but also sober and hardworking (although physically they were not very strong).15 These ideas on race and nation suggest a fledging theory of mestizaje based on “whitening,” the mixing of European immigrants with the native population.16 Mora believed that through a concerted effort of European colonization, Mexico could achieve the complete fusion of the Indians and the “total extinction of the castas.” However, the fusion of Indians would be more troublesome than that of blacks: “In the end they [Indians] will follow the same course and will merge in the general mass, because the impulse is there and it cannot be contained nor its course be shifted; but it will take longer and perhaps a century will not suffice to complete the process.”17 According to Hale, “Mora . . . could not conceive that nationality rested in a group other than his own.” Two decades later, Mora, scared by the Indian uprisings of the 1840s, called attention to the pressing need to “fuse all races and colors” by means of colonization enterprises in the already populated regions of the country.18 Bolívar, on the other hand, did not have at his disposal—nor would he have wanted—the symbolic assets of patriotismo criollo. According to Pagden, the assortment of whites, pardos (mestizos or half-breeds), mulatos, and blacks needed, in addition to the satisfaction of their own immediate interests, “an ideology—something that Bolívar loathed as much as Napoleon—that might provide the intellectual foundation for a new state.” That is, a nonpolitical ideology, an ethnocultural and historical theory of the nation. “What men like Viscardo had offered his readers, however illusory in fact, had been a vivid, densely narrative past, that, unlike Bolívar’s republicanism, could easily be linked to just such an ideology. The patria to which

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Viscardo, Hidalgo, and Morelos had appealed was an imaginary one, but the parts out of which it was composed were real enough. Bolívar’s patria, on the other hand, was a political ideal, an ‘Enlightment illusion.’”19 Bolívar had little patience with indigenous mythical constructs, such as the legend of Quetzalcoatl. In his 1815 Letter from Jamaica, he was skeptical of the power of such myths. The English gentleman to whom Bolívar was responding believed that “happy and important changes were often the result of individuals. Do you conceive the effect if an individual appeared to them showing the qualities of Quetzalcoatl, Buda of the Forest, or Mercury, of which other nations have talked so much? Don’t you think that this will tip the balance?”20 Skeptically, Bolívar answered: I think like you that individual causes can have general results; most of all during revolutions. But the one capable of producing the prodigious effects that you propose is not the hero, the great prophet, or the god of Anahuac, Quetzalcoatl. This personage is barely known to the Mexican people and not in a good light, for such is the fate of the vanquished even if they are gods. Only historians and literary men have busied themselves in carefully researching his [Quetzalcoatl’s] origins, true or false mission, prophecies and the end of his career. . . . General opinion has it that Quetzalcoatl is a divine legislator among the pagan peoples of the Anahuac where he was lieutenant of the great Montezuma from whom he derived his authority. From here it follows that our Mexicans would not follow the genteel Quetzalcoatl even if he were to appear to them in the most identical and favorable lights, because they profess a religion which is the most intolerant and exclusive of others.21 Sometimes, Bolívar mused, happy chances could help the cause of liberty. In Mexico even fanatical beliefs could be put to the service of emancipation: Happily the directors of Mexico’s independence have taken advantage of fanaticism with the best of lucks, they have proclaimed the famous Virgin of Guadalupe queen of the patriots

Men or Citizens? 63

and they invoke her at every hardship, and they fly her in their banners. Hence political enthusiasm has produced a mixture with religion which in turn has resulted in an ardent fervor for the sacred cause of liberty. The veneration that this image instills in Mexico is greater than the most exalted veneration that the most skilled of prophets could have inspired.22 But this was far from the rule. Mexico was an exception. In general terms, religious fanaticism was at odds with enlightened liberty. Bolívar was not immune to the appeal of the past, but the history of ancient Americans was not a source of inspiration for him, as it was for Mier and other patriotas criollos; it was rather the fountain of aesthetic contemplation. In Cuzco, Bolívar wrote: Yesterday I arrived to the classical country of the Sun, of the Inca, of the fables, and of history. Here gold is the true sun; Incas are the viceroys and prefects; the fable is Garcilaso’s history; history is the account of the destruction of the Indians by Las Casas. Apart from all poetry, everything reminds me of higher ideas, deep thoughts; my soul is captivated by the presence of primitive Nature, developed by itself, creating its own elements from the model of its most intimate inspirations, without taint of foreign remains, of alien advise, of the whims of the human spirit, or infected by the history of crimes and nonsense of our species. Manco-Capac, Adam of the Indians, left his Titicaco paradise and created a historical society without trace of fable, sacred or profane.23 For Bolívar, the past was past; he had no political use for the Inca. His approach mirrored that of Rousseau when he rhapsodized over the primitive nature of man. The conundrum of Spanish America after independence was similar, according to Bolívar, to that of the Roman world at the collapse of the empire. But in other respects it was, he thought, unprece­ dented. In his Address of Angostura, he told his countrymen: At the time of independence from the Spanish monarchy America found herself in similar conditions to the Roman Empire,

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when such a tremendous mass fell dispersed in the midst of the ancient world. Every part then formed an independent nation in accordance to its situation or its interests. The difference is that those parts reclaimed their first associations. We do not preserve even the vestiges of other times. We are not Europeans; we are not Indians; we are but a mixed species of Indians and Spaniards. Americans by birth and Europeans by law, we find ourselves engaged in a dual conflict: we are disputing with the natives for titles of ownership, and at the same time we are struggling to maintain ourselves in the country that gave us birth against the opposition of the invaders, thus our case is the most extraordinary and complicated.24 Bolívar recognized that ethnic diversity posed a distinct challenge, although the solution to this problem seemed to lie in the realm of politics, in particular in institutions (centralized executive power) and ancient prudence: “Diversity of origins requires an infinitely steady pulse, a infinitely delicate touch to handle this heterogeneous society whose complicated device [artificio] breaks down, divides, and dissolves with the faintest of changes.”25 It is worth noting that this is not a republican preoccupation with contingency, the fear that the fragile republic, based on virtue, succumbs to corruption. Bolívar’s concern is not with fortune but with social order. It was not ethnic heterogeneity per se that he dreaded but the particular mix that Spanish colonization had brought about. Bolívar’s idea of ethnic diversity was a secular version of original sin. As he put it to General Santander in a letter dated July 8, 1826: “Our being has the most impure of origins: everything that preceded us is covered with the dark mantle of crime. We are the abominable product of those predatory tigers who came to America to shed its blood and to interbreed with their victims before sacrificing them—afterward mixing the dubious fruit of such unions with the offspring of slaves uprooted from Africa. With such physical mixtures, with these moral elements, can we place laws above heroes and principles above men?”26 Simon Collier has rightly argued that in Bolívar’s pronouncements, terms such as patria, nation, state, and republic were almost

Men or Citizens? 65

interchangeable. He himself rarely drew distinctions between such concepts. Thus, “aside from its semiautomatic acceptance of the inescapable criteria of birth and geography, Bolivarian nationalism cannot easily be viewed as a narrow or exclusive conception[;] it was not tied to closely defined ethnic, cultural, linguistic, or religious moorings.”27 Certainly, the ultimate criterion of nationality expressed by Bolívar was political in nature. Nationality “was open to all who accepted certain political principles.”28 As Collier notes: The absence of a genuine ethnic or cultural dimension in Bolivarian nationalism is perhaps worth underlining. As we have seen, Bolívar was well aware of the ethnic mixture that underlay Spanish America, and even suggested, in his Angostura speech, that a continuing dose of miscegenation was desirable for the future: “our fathers [are] different in their origin and blood . . . and their skins differ visible . . . the blood of our citizens varies; let us mix it in order to unite it.” Yet there is no suggestion, in this hint of a future raza cósmica, that race of itself is a necessary badge of national identity. Ethnicity was in no sense the touchstone of nationality; other factors, especially political factors, counted too.29 This does not mean, however, that Bolívar had no ideas on the racial and ethnic makeup of his society. Unlike nationalists such as Servando Teresa de Mier and others, he had two different and separate theories of politics and society. He did not believe in the necessity of a homogeneous nation in ethnic terms for a republic to exist, but he did have ideas on race and ethnicity. Bolívar did not simply “ignore” the human components of his patria. In other words, his political thought was not purely political. Bolívar shared many of Mora’s ideas on the backward and miserable condition of the indigenous peoples, but he did not develop a robust theory of race mixing as some early nineteenth-century liberals did in Mexico.30 Moreover, he did not share Mora’s urge to melt the races as an issue of the “utmost importance” for nation building. Why? Part of the answer, I argue, is that miscegenation ran counter to one of Bolívar’s beliefs: natural ethnic and racial inequality. Like

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many other thinkers of the Enlightenment, Bolívar wished to create a polity of free and equal citizens. Legal and political equality was not only possible, but desirable. However, race mixing was eugenics, not a political or legal issue. In fact, to consider race and race relations political was part of the rejected Spanish tradition. Bolívar believed in social inequality as strongly as he believed in civil and political equality. What were his ideas regarding the natural inequality of human beings? In a well-known letter to Santander, dated in Lima on April 7, 1825, Bolívar reflected in turn on a letter he had received from Admiral José Padilla: “Legal equality is not enough for the spirit of the people, as they want absolute equality, in the public and the domestic areas alike; and next they will want pardocracia, which is their natural and unique propensity, in order to then exterminate the privileged class.”31 Three years later Bolívar had Padilla, who was a pardo, or mixed-blood, executed for allegedly stirring a race war in Colombia. According to Aline Helg, on March 2, 1828, Padilla rallied some officers of African descent and told them that if the Ocaña Convention were to adopt Bolívar’s projected constitution “they would kick us” for being pardos.32 Helg writes, “The tragic conclusion of the life of José Padilla illustrates again the double standard that guided the Liberator. From 1826 to 1828, Bolívar pardoned and negotiated with the white llanero José Antonio Páez, despite the fact that the latter headed a full-fledged rebellion of Venezuela against the government in Bogotá, but he executed the pardo Padilla for a three-day bloodless coup in Cartagena.”33 In a similar fashion several years before, Bolívar had punished General Manuel Piar, accusing him of “proclaiming the odious principles of the war of colors to destroy equality.” According to Bolívar, “All that was wicked, all barbarous, all of what was odious has been abolished and in its place we have absolute equality even in the domestic customs.”34

Colors by Numbers

Bolívar had an aristocratic perspective of society. This vision was fully compatible with the principles of legal equality he embraced.

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He believed that the different races that made Colombia could intermix but that in the end racial diversity did not pose a threat to national unity. Why? We can gather some clues in a revealing letter Bolívar wrote to the editor of the Royal Gazette of Kingston in 1815, around the time he penned his famous Letter from Jamaica. Bolívar believed that a particular equilibrium existed between numbers and qualities among the different racial groups that inhabited Spanish America: “Most of the European and American politicians that have reflected on the independence of the New World have felt that the most significant obstacle to obtain it is the difference among the castes that compose the population of this immense country. I dare to examine this matter by following different rules, deduced from positive knowledge and from the experience that our revolution has provided us.”35 Bolívar acknowledged that whites were a minority of the population, but the white population possessed “intellectual qualities” that compensated for this. Moreover, both the moral character and the physical circumstances of the land favored the “union and harmony amongst all the inhabitants, in spite of the numerical disproportion between one color and the other.” A contributing factor to this state of affairs was inherited ethnic deference, a legacy from colonization times: “The first Spaniards in America were seen as superior mortals by the Indians. Such idea persisted, due to superstition, the fear of force, superiority in fortune, the exercise of authority, the culture of the spirit and to many happy accidents. They [Indians] have never been able to see the whites without great veneration, as beings favored by heaven.”36 Note here that oddly enough the Spanish legacy is viewed in a positive light. Even superstition could be useful. Social deference was not only compatible with legal equality, but perhaps even necessary to sustain a diverse social order, especially a numerically imbalanced one. About the legacy of slavery, Bolívar asserted that the Spaniards treated their slaves as “partners in indolence.” The Spanish colonist “does not oppress his domestic servant with excessive work: he treats him as a partner: he educates him in the principles of morality and humanity that the religion of Jesus Christ prescribes.” The proverbial apathy of the Spanish race worked in favor of slaves. As the “sweetness” of the Spaniard is “unlimited,” he “exerts it fully with the

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benevolence that familiarity inspires. He is not goaded by greed nor by necessity that produce a ferocious character and a rigidity of principles that are so contrary to humanity.”37 It took little to satisfy the “needs and passions” of South Americans. Fertile lands and precious metals made life easy for them. According to Bolívar, the abundance and ease of existence favored individual independence: “Since there is a sort of individual independence in these immense countries it is not likely that the factions of diverse races will form in such a way that one of them is able to overwhelm the others. The same extension, the same abundance, the diversity of colors, provides some neutrality to the pretensions and almost nullifies them.”38 However, the causal logic between individual independence and race equilibrium is not fully spelled out in Bolívar’s argument. Was it that members of racial groups were first and foremost individuals, suspicious of warmongering by ethnic entrepreneurs? What exactly tempered the desire of racial domination? Did abundance prevent conflict over scarce resources? Did racial diversity pose significant collective action problems? One thing is clear: Bolívar dealt with these issues as a matter of preserving social order, not as a means of forging a people or a nationality. Indians constituted the majority of the population in many countries, but Bolívar thought that indigenous peoples had a peaceful character. The Indian “only desires repose and solitude: he does not even aspire to lead his own tribe, much less to dominate those of others: happily, even if their number exceeds that of all other inhabi­ tants taken together, this species of men is the one that demands dominance the least.”39 Indians were a barrier or buffer that contained other groups within the population. “The Indian is everyone’s friend because laws had not placed him in an unequal situation.” Indians were not prevented by the laws to climb the social ladder. They could obtain fortune and honor by normal means. For Bolívar, “normal means” meant the acquisition of wisdom and the providing of “services.” However, they were unwilling to acquire “wisdom” and to provide “services.”40 As a consequence of the character of whites and Indians, “we can count on the sweetness of more than half of the population, since whites and Indians make three fifths of the total population and if we add the mestizos who have blood of both, then the proportion grows and the fear of the colors is diminished as a consequence.”41

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Bolívar then turned to African slaves. The African slave in Spanish America, he noted, “vegetates in oblivion in the haciendas enjoying, so to speak, his inaction, his masters’ state and a great part of the goods of freedom, and since religion has persuaded him that to serve is a sacred duty, he was born and exists in domestic dependence, he considers himself in his natural state, as a member of his master’s family, whom he loves and respects.”42 Bolívar knew that Spanish authorities had recruited slaves to fight insurgents. However, he contended that even when “excited by the most seductive incentives,” the Spanish American slave had not turned against his master. The Spaniards had to resort to threats of violence to compel the slaves to serve in their armies. Yet those same slaves “returned to the party of the independents” even when the insurgents had not offered them absolute freedom as the Spanish had done. Bolívar’s reflections on the racial makeup of Spanish American society led him to believe in the possibilities of racial harmony. “We are authorized,” he boasted, “to believe that all children of Spanish America, of every color and condition, profess among themselves a reciprocal fraternal affection, which no plot can alter.” He countered the argument that civil wars had proven him wrong by arguing that civil strife in America had never been the result of caste conflict but of political differences and personal ambition as in other nations.43 The only “color” that had been proscribed in America was the European Spanish, “who is universally and deservedly detested.” Peaceful coexistence was a reality: “Up to this day we observe the most perfect harmony among those who have been born in this soil.” Bolívar attempted to prove that racial heterogeneity was not an insurmountable obstacle. Racial diversity meant in practice that “civilized” people were a minority in these lands. How can a free republic be built by serfs? However, he contended that even if the enlightened part of the population (the whites) was a minority, this did not preclude selfgovernment and liberty. Since the Spanish American population was “balanced,” either by number, by “circumstances,” or by the “irresistible sway of the spirit,” why was it not feasible to establish new governments in that part of the world?44 Were there not in Athens four times as many slaves as citizens? Bolívar asserted that in all of the East, in all of Africa, and in parts of Europe, the number of free men was inferior to that of serfs.

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Bolívar’s idea of a qualitative equilibrium bears some similarity to the idea of a mixed constitution but without the institutional framework that enabled the latter to preserve class balance in Rome. In the Liberator’s case, equilibrium was the result of a balancing act of raw numbers and mores. Although dismissing the importance of majorities, Bolívar never lost sight of the demographic dimension. White and mestizo men had died in the wars of independence. This created an imbalance among racial groups, since black men had not died in the same proportions. The issue of the abolition of slavery in early republican South America is a complex one, but here I am only interested in the role it played in Bolívar’s political thought.45 Already in his 1816 abolition decree, Bolívar proclaimed the “absolute liberty of the slaves who have moaned under the Spanish yoke during the last three centuries,” yet three paragraphs later he conditioned manumission to active military service: “the new citizen who refuses to take arms in order to carry out the sacred duty of defending his liberty, will remain in servitude as will his children under fourteen years of age, his woman, and his aged parents.”46 Bolívar had two very different reasons to free slaves. The first was purely theoretical and was inspired by Montesquieu; the other was practical: the numerical reduction of black men. By recruiting them into the army, he achieved two aims: justification of their freedom in the eyes of their former masters and sheer mortality. In 1820 Bolívar chided Santander for having confused “the liberty of the slaves with the levy [conscription] of slaves for active service.”47 He added, “The political and military reasons that I have to order the levy of slaves are very obvious. We need tough and strong men, who are used to inclemency and fatigue, men who embrace with enthusiasm the cause and the career, men that identify their own cause with the public cause and to whom life is little more than death.”48 Political reasons, Bolívar believed, were even more powerful. He cited Montesquieu’s reflections on “the danger of a large number of slaves”: In moderate governments, it is a point of the highest importance that there should not be a great number of slaves. The political

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liberty of those states adds to the value of civil liberty; and he who is deprived of the latter is also bereft of the former. He sees the happiness of a society of which he is not quite a member; he sees the security of others, fenced by laws, himself without any protection. . . . Nothing more assimilates a man to a beast than living among freemen, himself a slave. Such people as these are natural enemies of the society; and their number must be dangerous. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, that moderate governments have been so frequently disturbed by the revolts of slaves; and that this so seldom happens in despotic states.49 In another letter to Santander Bolívar referred to this insight and complained of the slave owners’ myopia: “Regarding slaves, if they stir up the wasp’s nest, it will happen as in Haiti. The greed of the colonist made the revolution because the French republic decreed liberty and they refused it and by their opposition and resistance they enraged the parties that were natural enemies. The impulse of this revolution is given, nobody will be able to contain it and the most that can be achieved is good direction. The example of freedom is seducing and the example of domestic liberty is imperative and breathtaking.”50 Bolívar thought that history taught that “any free government that commits the absurdity of preserving slavery is punished by rebellion and sometimes with annihilation, as in Haiti.” However, he did not lose sight of Montesquieu’s main concern—that a large number of slaves posed a significant threat to “moderate” governments. He wondered, What means would be more adequate or more legitimate to obtain freedom than to fight for it? Is it fair that only free men die to emancipate the slaves? Would it not be useful for them [slaves] to acquire their rights in the battlefield and that their dangerous number be diminished by a necessary and legitimate means? In Venezuela we have seen the free population die and the captive population remain; I do not know if this is politics, but I do know that if in Cundinamarca we do not use the slaves the same will happen.51

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The idea of social and cultural homogeneity—or sameness—is critical to theories of nationalism. Bolívar’s thought lacked precisely this quality. He had some ideas on how to go about forging polities, but he lacked a theory of how to forge a people. In fact, unlike ethnonationalists, Bolívar did not believe that he needed one. A “national spirit” was indeed necessary for him. The aim of the national spirit was to create “a uniform inclination toward two critical issues: to moderate the general will and to limit public authority.” Bolívar mentioned in his Angostura speech the need to “fuse the mass of the people into a whole,” but what he meant by this was political, not ethnic, unity. His national spirit was not a romantic one. The purpose of this union was to achieve the “sacred respect of the patria, of the laws and of the authorities.” Without this respect “society is in confusion, it is an abyss: it is a singular struggle of man against man, hand to hand.”52 Only in this political context, against the ghost of fragmentation and chaos, Bolívar mentions in passing the idea of mixing the different bloods of the citizens. He did not require ethnic nationalism because he had a theory of how representative government could take hold in an ethnically diverse—and unequal—society. It was the opposite of John Stuart Mill’s theory of representative government and nationality.53 Mill wrote in Considerations on Representative Government (1861), “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences, which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country.” It is instructive to note that Bolívar would only have subscribed to part of Mill’s definition of nationality: A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a nationality, if they are united among themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist between them and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and wish that it should be government exclusively by themselves or a portion of

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themselves. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language and community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all factors is identity of political antecedents, the possession of a national history and consequent community of recollections, collective pride and humiliation, and pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.54 Bolívar’s theory was not universal but rather historically determined. In his view, cultural differences (understood as different habits, mores, and customs) in Hispanic America contributed to social stability. Culture compensated an imbalance in numbers. A legacy of deference in the subordinated classes held dangerous energies in check and allowed for the institutional processing of ethnic diversity. Paradoxically, Bolívar, who elsewhere condemned the cultural inheritance of Spain, believed that by instilling in the lower castes habits of social deference, obedience, and tranquility the Spanish despots had eased somehow the work of the new criollo rulers after independence. The touchstone of Bolívar’s aristocratic theory of self-government was, oddly enough, not social participation but social restraint of the colored population. He endeavored to show that the subordinated castes—Indians, mestizos and slaves—were in general terms not dangerous. His aim was to prove that, given a proper political structure, social participation from below would be limited and therefore manageable for representative institutions. Regarding the subordinated “colors,” he accepted that Indians, pardos, and blacks could not become virtuous citizens in the fashion of classical republics. But then again, he reflected, the historical record showed that classic republics were ruled by only a fraction of their populations. Republics and slavery, he realized, had been perfectly compatible throughout history.

Life and Works

Simón Bolívar lived a short life but one of extraordinary fullness. He was a revolutionary who freed six countries, an intellectual who

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argued the principles of national liberation, and a general who fought a cruel colonial war. Born in 1783 in Caracas (Venezuela), he went to Spain in 1799 to complete his education and for a time was part of Napoleon’s retinue. He returned to Venezuela in 1807 and par­tic­ipated in the resistance juntas. In 1813 he led the invasion of Vene­ zuela (in Mérida he was proclaimed El Libertador), and on August 7, 1813, he proclaimed the Second Republic. He returned to New Granada in 1814 to command a nationalist force. However, due to political disputes with the government of Cartagena, Bolívar fled, in 1815, to Jamaica. In 1817, with Haitian help, he landed in Venezuela and captured Angostura. On September 7, 1821, the Gran Colombia (a federation covering much of modern Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador) was created, with Bolívar as president, and in 1824 he liberated Perú. Bolívar had great difficulties maintaining control of the vast Gran Colombia. He had seen his dream of eventually creating an American Revolution–style federation between all the newly independent republics succumb to the pressures of particular interests throughout the region. He proclaimed himself dictator on August 27, 1828, as a means to reestablish his authority and save the republic, though it increased dissatisfaction and anger among his political opponents. On April 27, 1830, after an assassination attempt in September 1828, Bolívar finally resigned his presidency, intending to leave the country for exile in Europe. He died of tuberculosis before setting sail, on December 17, 1830, in Santa Marta, Colombia. Bolívar’s political ideas are disseminated in thousands of letters (notably the Carta de Jamaica), speeches (Discurso de la Angostura), and constitutional drafts (Bolivia). His political thought was influenced by the French and Scottish Enlightenment as well as that of classical Greek and Roman authors.

Further Reading

Belaunde, Víctor Andrés. Bolívar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolution. New York: Octagon Books, 1978. Johnson, John J. Simón Bolívar and Spanish American Independence: 1783–1830. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1968.

Men or Citizens? 75

Lavalle, Bernard. “Bolívar et les indiens du Perou.” Anuario de Estudios Bolivarianos 3, no. 3 (1994): 153–63. Lynch, John. “Bolívar and the Caudillos.” Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 1 (1983): 3–35. ____. Simón Bolívar: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Masur, Gerhard. Simón Bolívar. 2nd ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969. Safford, Frank. “Race, Integration and Progress: Elite Attitudes and the Indian in Colombia: 1750–1879.” Hispanic American Historical Review 71, no. 1 (1991): 1–33.

Notes

I wish to thank Roberto Mostajo for his help with the research and editing of this chapter.   1.  “. . . las buenas costumbres, y no la fuerza, son las columnas de las leyes.” “Discurso pronunciado por el Libertador ante el congreso de la Angostura el 15 de febrero de 1819, día de su instalación,” in Simón Bolívar, Obras completas, vol. 2, ed. Vicente Lecuna (Havana: Lex, 1947), 1134–35.   2. Anthony Pagden, “The End of Empire: Simón Bolívar and the Liberal Republic,” in Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 149.   3.  “Tenéis que constituir a hombres pervertidos por las ilusiones del error, y por incentivos nocivos.” Bolívar, Obras completas, 2:1136.   4.  Bernard Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation,” Critical Review 10, no. 2 (1996): 200–201; original emphasis.  5. Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1.   6.  Maurizio Viroli, “On Civic Republicanism: Reply to Xenos and Yack,” Critical Review 12, nos. 1–2 (1998): 200–201; original emphasis.   7.  “Se nos vejaba con una conducta que, además de privarnos de los derechos que nos correspondían, nos dejaba en una especie de infancia permanente con respecto a las transacciones públicas. Si hubiésemos siquiera manejado nuestros asuntos domésticos en nuestra administración

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interior, conoceríamos el curso de los negocios públicos y su mecanismo, y gozaríamos también de la consideración personal que impone a los ojos del pueblo cierto respeto maquinal que es tan necesario conservar en las revoluciones. He aquí por qué he dicho que estábamos privados hasta de la tiranía activa, pues que no nos era permitido ejercer sus funciones.” Bolívar, “Contestación de un americano meridional a un caballero de esta isla,” Kingston, 6 de septiembre 1815, in Bolívar, Obras completas, 1:164–65.  8. Bolívar, Obras completas, 2:1149.   9. On patriotismo criollo in Mexico, see David Brading, Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano (Mexico City: Era, 1973). Mora himself, as Charles Hale has shown, was immune to the calling of ancient Aztecs. He believed that Hernán Cortés was the founder of Mexican nationality and that nothing prior to him was important. See Charles Hale, El liberalismo mexicano en la era de Mora (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1994), 221–55. Cortés’s reference on 225. 10. Hale, Liberalismo mexicano, 253. 11.  Yet Mora did not subscribe to the theories of racial superiority. The fact is that “never has it been defined exactly what superiority means.” “Se parte de un principio cierto y se deducen de él consecuencias erradísimas. El principio es que la diversidad de conformación funda la diversidad de facultades, y esto nadie puede dudarlo. Pero de esta diversidad de aptitudes se deduce la superioridad de unas razas sobre las otras y este es un error imperdonable. Téngase presente para resolver esta cuestión que muchos pueblos reputados estólidos por siglos no sólo han hecho después grandes progresos, sino que han sobrepujado también en todos los ramos científicos e industriales a los que antes los veían con desprecio.” Yet education could overcome ancestry and race. The truth, Mora claimed, “is that races improve or worsen with the centuries, as individuals with the passing of years, and that with races as well as with individuals education is all mighty.” José María Luis Mora, México y sus revoluciones, vol. 1 (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1950), 65–66. México y sus revoluciones, 3 vols., was originally published in Paris in 1836. 12. Hale, Liberalismo mexicano, 229. Note, however, that the reasons for this preponderance were not racial (thus Mora does not speak of the white “race” but of the white “population”). It was simply that since whites were at the top of the social and cultural ladder it could hardly

Men or Citizens? 77

been otherwise. Mora asserted, “La población blanca es con mucho exceso la dominante en el día, por el número de sus individuos, por su ilustración y riqueza, por el influjo exclusivo que ejerce en los negocios públicos y por lo ventajoso de su posición con respecto a las demás: en ella es donde se ha de buscar el carácter mexicano, y ella es la que ha de fijar en todo el mundo el concepto que se deba formar de la República.” Mora, México y sus revoluciones, 74; my emphasis. 13. “Sería sin disputa, interesante una descripción circunstanciada de las costumbres, carácter, estado físico e intelectual de estos cortos y envilecidos restos de la antigua población mexicana, pues la opresión en que han vivido tanto tiempo ha excitado en su favor la compasión de todo orbe civilizado, y aun ha extraviado el juicio hasta atribuir exclusivamente al gobierno español y a la dureza de sus agentes lo que en mucha parte depende del aislamiento de la raza de que descienden, cuyos hábitos soci­ ales estuvieron por muchos siglos en entera divergencia y secuestración del resto del mundo civilizado.” Mora, México y sus revoluciones, 63. 14.  “No parece pues que pueda dudarse de la diversidad y aptitud de facultades entre la raza bronceada a que pertenecen los indígenas de México, y los blancos que se han establecido en el país.” Mora, México y sus revoluciones, 64. However, note that Mora also speaks of the “alleged” superiority of the whites over the Indians as false (“privilegios acordados por las leyes para compensar la superioridad supuesta de los blancos”). He chided the so-called protectors of the Indians, Las Casas and Vasco de Quiroga, for believing that the Indians were incapable of self-rule. “Decir que no serán ni son capaces para regirse y gobernarse por sí mismos es un despropósito; lo han hecho por muchos años y esto basta: es verdad que su estado actual y hasta que no hayan sufrido cambios considerables no podrán nunca llegar al grado de ilustración, civilización y cultura de los europeos, ni sostenerse bajo pie de igualdad con ellos en una sociedad de que unos y otros hagan parte, como está sucediendo en muchas de las nuevas repúblicas americanas” (66–67). The so-called inferiority of the Indian was not primordial or racial but rather the result of historical misfortunes, and their condition could be amended by education and progress, in a word, civilization. 15. Mora, México y sus revoluciones, 70–71. On the relation between indigenous communities and the state in Mexico, see Enrique Florescano, Etnia, estado y nación (Mexico City: Aguilar, 1997).

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16.  Mora asserted that blacks were few in numbers and thus posed no threat to whites, as in other countries. Moreover, soon there would be no blacks left due to miscegenation with whites and Indians. “El número de negros que ha sido uno de los elementos que han entrado a constituir su actual población, ha sido siempre cortísimo y en el día ha desaparecido casi del todo, pues los cortos restos de ellos que han quedado en las costas del Pacífico y en las del Atlántico son enteramente insignificantes para poder inspirar temor ninguno en la suerte de sus destinos: desaparecerán del todo antes de medio siglo, y se perderán en la masa dominante de la población blanca por la fusión que empezó hace más de veinte años y se halla ya muy adelantada.” Mora, México y sus revoluciones, 73. 17. “Si la colonización se apresurase, si el gobierno la hiciese un asunto de primera importancia y dirigiese a él todas su miras y proyectos con una perseverancia invariable . . . entonces la fusión de las gentes de color y la total extinción de las castas se apresurarían y tendrían una más pronta y feliz terminación. Mas según el estado presente de las cosas no hay que esperar nada de esto, y es necesario aguardar del tiempo y de otra época más remota, lo que no hay voluntad de apresurar.” Mora, México y sus revoluciones, 74. 18. Hale, Liberalismo mexicano, 246. 19.  Pagden, “End of Empire,” 150–51. For a comparision between Bolívar and Mexican patriotismo criollo, see David Brading, “El republicanismo clásico y el patriotismo criollo: Simón Bolívar y la revolución Hispanoamericana,” in Mito y profecía en la historia de México (Mexico City: Vuelta, 1988), 78–112. 20.  “¿Concibe Vd. cuál será el efecto que producirá, si un individuo, apareciendo entre ellos, demostrase los caracteres de Quetzalcoatl, el Buda del bosque, o Mercurio, del cual han hablado tanto las otras naciones? ¿No cree Vd. que esto inclinaría todas las partes?” Bolívar, Obras completas, 1:173. 21. “Pienso como Vd. que causas individuales pueden producir resultados generales; sobre todo en las revoluciones. Pero no es el héroe, gran profeta, o Dios del Anahuac, Quetzalcoatl el que es capaz de operar los prodigiosos efectos que Vd. propone. Este personaje es apenas conocido del pueblo mejicano y no ventajosamente, porque tal es la suerte de los vencidos aunque sean dioses. Sólo los historiadores y literatos se han ocupado cuidadosamente en investigar su origen, verdadera o falsa

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misión, sus profecías y el término de su carrera. . . . La opinión general es que Quetzalcoatl es un legislador divino entre los pueblos paganos del Anahuac del cual era lugar-teniente el gran Montezuma derivando de él su autoridad. De aquí se infiere que nuestros mejicanos no seguirían al gentil Quetzalcoatl, aunque apareciese bajo las formas mas idénticas y favorables, pues que profesan una religión la más intolerante y exclusiva de las otras.” Bolívar, Obras completas, 1:173. 22. Thus “felizmente los directores de la independencia de Mejico se han aprovechado del fanatismo con el mejor acierto, proclamando a la famosa virgen de Guadalupe por reina de los patriotas; invocándola en todos los casos arduos y llevándola en sus banderas. Con esto el entusiasmo político ha formado una mezcla con la religión, que ha producido un fervor vehemente por la sagrada causa de la libertad. La veneración de esta imagen en Mejico es superior a la más exaltada que pudiera inspirar el más diestro profeta.” Bolívar, Obras completas, 1:173, 174. 23. “[H]e llegado ayer al país clásico del Sol, de los incas, de la fábula y de la historia. Aquí el sol verdadero es el oro; los incas son los virreyes o prefectos; la fábula es la historia de Garcilaso; la historia, la relación de la destrucción de los indios por Las Casas. Abstracción hecha de toda poesía, todo me recuerda altas ideas, pensamientos profundos; mi alma está embelesada con la presencia de la primitiva Naturaleza, desarrollada por sí misma, dando creaciones de sus propios elementos por el modelo de sus inspiraciones íntimas, sin mezcla alguna de la sobras extrañas, de los consejos ajenos, de los caprichos del espíritu humano, ni el contagio de la historia de los crímenes y de los absurdos de nuestra especie. Manco-Capac, Adán de los indios, salió de su paraíso titicaco y formó una sociedad histórica, sin mezcla de fábula sagrada o profana.” Bolívar a José Joaquín Olmedo, 27 de junio de 1825. Simón Bolívar, Cartas de Bolívar 1823–1824–1825 (Madrid: América, 1921), 333. 24. “Al desprenderse la América de la Monarquía Española, se ha encontrado semejante al Imperio Romano, cuando aquella enorme masa cayó dispersa en medio del antiguo mundo. Cada desmembración formó entonces una Nación Independiente conforme a su situación o a sus intereses; pero con la diferencia de que aquellos Miembros volvían a restable­ cer sus primeras asociaciones. Nosotros ni aun conservamos los vestigios de lo que fue en otro tiempo: no somos Europeos, no somos Indios, sino una especie media entre los Aborígenes y los Españoles. Americanos por

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nacimiento y Europeos por derechos, nos hallamos en el conflicto de disputar a los naturales los títulos de posesión y de mantenernos en el país que nos vio nacer, contra la oposición de los invasores; así nuestro caso es el más extraordinario y complicado.” Bolívar elaborated on this topic: “Tengamos presentes que nuestro pueblo no es el Europeo, ni el Americano del Norte, que más bien es un compuesto de África y de América, que una emanación de la Europa; pues que hasta la España misma, deja de ser Europea por su sangre africana, por sus Instituciones, y por su carácter. Es imposible asignar con propiedad, a qué familia humana pertenecemos. La mayor parte de lo indígeno se ha aniquilado, el Europeo se ha mezclado con el Americano y con el Africano, y este se ha mezclado con el Indio y con el Europeo. Nacidos todos del seno de una misma Madre, nuestros Padres diferentes en origen y en sangre, son extranjeros, y todos difieren visiblemente en la epidermis; esta desemejanza trae un reato de la mayor trascendencia.” Bolívar, “Discurso de la Angostura,” in Obras completas 2:1140. 25.  “[L]a diversidad de origen requiere un pulso infinitamente firme, un tacto infinitamente delicado para manejar esta sociedad heterogénea cuyo complicado artificio se disloca, se divide, se disuelve con la más ligera alteración.” Bolívar, “Discurso de la Angostura,” 1141. 26. “El origen mas impuro es el de nuestro ser: todo lo que nos ha precedido esta envuelto con el negro manto del crimen. Nosotros somos el compuesto abominable de esos tigres cazadores que vinieron a la América a derramarle su sangre y a encastar con las victimas antes de sacrificarlas, para mezclar después los frutos espúreos de estos enlaces con los frutos de esos esclavos arrancados del África. Con tales mezclas físicas; con tales elementos morales como se pueden fundar las leyes sobre los héroes y principios sobre los hombres?” Bolívar a Santander, 8 de julio de 1826. Bolívar, Obras completas, 2:1390. The ghost of a race war haunted Bolívar. To Santander he confessed, “We will have Guinea and more Guinea, and I am not joking, those who will escape with their white faces will be very lucky.” He added, “el dolor será que los ideólogos, como los más viles y más cobardes, serán los últimos que perezcan: acostumbrados al yugo, lo llevarán fácilmente hasta de sus propios esclavos” (1391). 27. Simon Collier, “Nationality, Nationalism, and Supranationalism in the Writings of Simón Bolívar,” Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 1 (1983): 42.

Men or Citizens? 81

28. Ibid. “For a man of honor there can only be one patria—and that is where citizen’s rights are protected and the sacred character of humanity respected. Ours is the mother of all free and just men, without discrimination as to background or condition.” Bolívar to Francisco Doña, August 27, 1820, Obras completas, 1:492–93, cited in Collier, “Nationality, Nationalism,” 42–43. 29. Collier, “Nationality, Nationalism,” 43. Likewise, Bolívar wrote in 1822, “I look at America as a chrysalis. There will be a transformation in the physical life of her inhabitants: finally, there will arise a new race out of all the old races, which will produce a homogeneous people.” Cited in J. L. Salcedo-Bastardo, Bolívar: A Continent and Its Destiny (Surrey: Richmond Publishing Co., 1977), 101. The source of this quote is José Gil Fortoul, Historia constitucional de Venezuela, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Caracas: Las Novedades, 1942), 674. 30.  Bolívar wrote to Santander from Cuzco: “Los pobres indígenas se hallan en un estado de abatimiento verdaderamente lamentable.” However, in 1824 he complained to Santander of the Peruvians in these terms: “los venezolanos son unos santos en comparación de esos malvados, y los quiteños y los peruanos son la misma cosa: viciosos hasta la infamia y bajos hasta el extremo. Los blancos tienen el carácter de los indios, y los indios son todos truchimanes, todos ladrones, todos embusteros, todos falsos, sin ningún principio moral que los guíe.” Bolívar to Santander, Pativilca, January 9, 1824, in Cartas Santander-Bolívar 1823–1825 (Bogota: Biblioteca de la Prensa de la República, 1988), 197. 31. The term pardocracia meant for Bolívar mob rule with a racial undertone. Bolívar to Santander, Lima April 7, 1825, in Bolívar, Obras completas, 1:1076. “La igualdad legal no es bastante por el espíritu que tiene el pueblo, que quiere que haya igualdad absoluta, tanto en lo público como en lo doméstico; y después querrá la pardocracia, que es la inclinación natural y única, para exterminio después de la clase privilegiada. Esto requiere, digo, grandes medidas, que no me cansaré de recomendar.” 32. Aline Helg, “Simón Bolívar and the Spectre of Pardocracia: José Padilla in Post-Independence Cartagena,” Journal of Latin American Studies 35 (2003): 459. 33. Ibid., 462. Helg adds, “Padilla, despite Bolívar’s assertion that he was ‘the most important man of Colombia,’ could not transcend the

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limits imposed upon him by his race and class. Because he had often boasted of his pardo identity and his determination to defend his pardo class, he had exposed himself to accusations of pardocracia and of envisaging a revolution on the Haitian model in the Caribbean region” (467). 34. August 5, 1817. “Qué se ha reservado para sí la nobleza, el clero, la milicia. ¡Nada, nada, nada! Todo lo han renunciado a favor de la humanidad, de la naturaleza, y de la justicia, que clamaban por la restauración de los sagrados derechos del hombre. Todo lo inicuo, todo lo bárbaro, todo lo odioso se ha abolido y en su lugar tenemos la igualdad absoluta hasta en las costumbres domésticas. La libertad de los esclavos que antes formaban una propiedad de los mismos ciudadanos.” Simón Bolívar, Proclamas y discursos del Libertador, comp. Vicente Lecuna (Caracas: Gobierno de Venezuela, 1939), 166. 35. Bolívar, Obras completas, 1:179. “Los más de los políticos europeos y americanos que han previsto la independencia del NuevoMundo, han presentido que la mayor dificultad para obtenerla consiste en la diferencia de las castas que componen la población de este inmenso país.” 36. “Observemos que al presentarse los españoles en el Nuevo Mundo, los indios los consideraron como una especie de mortales superiores a los hombres, idea que no ha sido enteramente borrada, habién­ dose mantenido por los prestigios de la superstición, por el temor de la fuerza, la preponderancia de la fortuna, el ejercicio de la autoridad, la cultura del espíritu, y cuantos accidentes pueden producir ventajas. Jamás han podido ver a los blancos, sino a través de una grande vene­ ración como seres favorecidos del cielo.” Bolívar, Obras completas, 1:179; my emphasis. 37. Ibid.: “El colono español no oprime a su doméstico con trabajos excesivos: lo trata como a un compañero; lo educa en los principios de moral y de humanidad que prescribe la religión de Jesús. Como su dulzura es ilimitada, la ejerce en toda su extensión con aquella benevolencia que inspira una comunicación familiar. Él no está aguijoneado por los estímulos de la avaricia, ni por los de la necesidad, que producen la ferocidad de carácter, y la rigidez de principios tan contrarios a la humanidad.” 38. Ibid., 179: “ . . . habiendo una especia de independencia individual en estos inmensos países, no es probable que las facciones de razas diversas, lleguen a constituirse de tal modo que una de ellas logre anonadar a las otras. La misma extensión, la misma abundancia, la misma

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variedad de colores, da cierta neutralidad a las pretensiones, que vienen a hacerse casi nulas.” 39. Ibid., 179: “El indio es de un carácter tan apacible, que sólo desea el reposo y la soledad: no aspira ni aun a acaudillar su tribu, mucho menos a dominar las extrañas: felizmente esta especie de hombres es la que menos reclama la preponderancia; aunque su número exceda a la suma de los otros habitantes.” 40. Ibid., 179–80: “El indio es el amigo de todos, porque las leyes no lo habían desigualado, y porque para obtener todas las mismas dignidades de fortuna y de honor que conceden los gobiernos, no han menester de recurrir a otros medios que a los servicios y al saber; aspiraciones que ellos odian más de lo que pueden desear las gracias.” 41. Ibid., 180: “Así, pues, parece que debemos contar con la dulzura de mucho más de la mitad de la población, puesto que los indios y los blancos componen los tres quintos de la población total, y si añadimos los mestizos que participan de la sangre de ambos, el aumento se hace más sensible y el temor de los colores se disminuye, por consecuencia.” 42. Ibid.: “El esclavo en la América española vegeta abandonado en las haciendas, gozando, por decirlo así, de su inacción, de la hacienda de su señor y de una gran parte de los bienes de la libertad; y como la religión le ha persuadido que es un deber sagrado servir, ha nacido y existido en esta dependencia doméstica, se considera en su estado natural, como un miembro de la familia de su amo, a quien ama y respeta.” 43. Ibid., 181. 44. Ibid.: “Balanceada como está la población americana, ya por el número y por la circunstancias, ya, en fin, por el irresistible imperio del espíritu, ¿por qué razón no se han de establecer nuevos gobiernos en esta mitad del mundo?” 45. On the abolition of slavery in Colombia, see Harold A. Bierck Jr., “The Struggle for Abolition in Gran Colombia,” Hispanic American Historical Review 33, no. 3 (1953): 365–86. 46. Proclamation of June 2, 1816. Bolívar, Proclamas y discursos del Libertador, 148–49. 47. April 18, 1820, Cartas Santander-Bolívar, 85. 48. Ibid., 87: “Las razones militares y políticas que he tenido para ordenar la leva de esclavos son muy obvias. Necesitamos de hombre robustos y fuertes, acostumbrados a la inclemencia y a las fatigas; de

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hombres que abracen la causa y la carrera con entusiasmo; de hombres que vean identificada su causa con la causa pública y en quienes el valor de la muerte sea poco menos que el de su vida.” 49.  Book 15, chap. 12, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu in 4 Volumes, vol. 1 (London: T. Evans, 1777). 50.  May 30, 1820, Cartas Santander-Bolívar, 168. 51.  “¿Qué medio más adecuado ni más legítimo para obtener la libertad que pelear por ella? ¿Será justo que mueran solamente los hombres libres por emancipar a los esclavos? ¿No será útil que éstos adquieran sus derechos en el campo de batalla y que se disminuya su peligroso número por un medio necesario y legítimo? Hemos visto en Venezuela morir a la población libre y quedar la cautiva; no sé si esto es política, pero sé que si en Cundinamarca no empleamos a los esclavos, sucederá otro tanto.” Cartas Santander-Bolívar, 87; my emphasis. 52. Bolívar, Obras completas, 2:1149. “El amor a la Patria, el amor a las Leyes, el amor a los Magistrados, son las nobles pasiones que deben absorber exclusivamente el alma de un Republicano. Los venezolanos aman a la Patria, pero no aman sus Leyes; porque éstas han sido nocivas, y eran la fuente del mal: tampoco han podido amar a sus Magistrados, porque eran inicuos, y los nuevos apenas son conocidos en la carrera en que han entrado. Si no hay un respeto sagrado por la Patria, por las Leyes, y por las autoridades, la Sociedad es una confusión, un abismo: es un conflicto singular de hombre a hombre, cuerpo a cuerpo. Para sacar de este caos a nuestra naciente República, todas nuestras facultades morales no serán bastantes, si no fundimos la masa del pueblo en un todo: la composición del Gobierno en un todo, la Legislación en un todo. Y el espíritu nacional en un todo. Unidad, Unidad, Unidad debe ser nuestra divisa. La sangre de nuestros Ciudadanos es diferente, mezclémosla para unirla.” 53.  John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 19, Essays on Politics and Society: Part II, ed. John M. Robson, introd. Alexander Brady (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 54. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008), 229.

[

4]

Andrés Bello Race and National Political Culture I vá n Ja k s i ca

Little did Andrés Bello know, on the occasion of his inaugural speech at the newly founded University of Chile in September 1843, that his remarks on history—and specifically on the views of the German thinker Johann Gottfried Herder—would eventually force him to address a subject he had preferred to avoid: race. As someone who had lived through the late colonial regime, he was eager to move away from the odious racial distinctions that characterized the legislation of imperial Spain. He wanted to contribute to the building of new nations by promoting concepts and programs of citizenship and legal equality. A worthy effort, indeed, but one that kept running into the realities of a diverse population, divided along the lines of class and race. A restless, contentious, somewhat envious young man who had been born after independence wanted to challenge him, and he picked on the subject of race as the fundamental basis for the building of the new republic. His name was José Victorino Lastarria.1 What Bello said in that inaugural speech concerned the nature of intellectual activity, and specifically the writing of history. The purpose of the university, he said, was to furnish the tools for 85

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Chileans to think for themselves and not to imitate or uncritically transfer the ready-made knowledge of Europe. To illustrate his point, Bello declared that it would be absurd “to adopt Euclid’s theorems without the previous intellectual labor of demonstrating them.” Likewise, the lessons of European historiography should not be adopted without previous historical research. He alluded to Herder as “one of the writers who have most usefully served humanity: he has given history all its dignity by demonstrating in it the designs of Providence and the destinies to which the human race is called on this earth.” That is, he used Herder’s work as an example (wrongly, as it turned out) of “philosophical history,” a historiographic approach that came increasingly under fire by the defenders (in particular, German historians) of a more empirical, document-based methodology. The evolution of historical studies in Europe is certainly more complex, and the terms philosophical, providential, narrative, and empirical were the subject of much debate. But in Chile Bello rendered a simplified version of these discussions in order to make a fundamental point: “Herder himself did not try to supplant the knowledge of events, but to illustrate [and] explain them.” That is, historical knowledge was an end in itself, not a means to an end. At least in what concerned the University of Chile, research would come first, implications or conclusions later. Herder’s contributions, Bello insisted, could not be appreciated “except through prior historical studies.” To offer conclusions without painstaking historical labor would be like “replacing that knowledge by [abstract] deductions and formulas” and offering youth “a skeleton instead of a living representation of social man.” Bello had worked it into the statutes of the University of Chile (article 28) that each year an essay should be presented by and to the faculty “on a subject of significance to the history of Chile, which shall be based on authentic documents, and which shall develop the character and consequences of historical events with imparti­ ality and truth.” He selected Lastarria, his former student and now member of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, as the first presenter who, it was his hope, would launch the type of Chilean history that he advocated. Instead, to his surprise and that of the

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faculty, Lastarria did exactly the opposite of what Bello had outlined in his inaugural speech.2 Lastarria invoked Herder, not to follow Bello’s interpretation, but to reaffirm the notion that history had meaning and direction. “Humanity,” he said, “is a great deal nobler in its essence, and it is destined to far greater ends than can imagine those who believe it to be stupidly subjected to the laws of matter.” Humanity needed lessons to prevent or combat social evils and secure “a happy future” for all. History provided those lessons, and consequently Lastarria urged his audience not to reduce it to “a simple record of past events.” Only such philosophical history could reveal the “fatal consequences of a past deed, the antisocial attitudes that still go on, and the inclinations and vices that are encrusted in the heart of the people, which present insuperable obstacles to the achievement of perfection.” He then went straight to the point: “What is the history of our Republic? What benefit might we derive from its study in order to improve our current situation?” Lastarria answered his own questions by explaining that the story of Chile, much like the rest of Latin America, was the story of colonial oppression and religious bigotry. It was a history of violence and hatred, and there would be no purpose, Lastarria thought, in glorifying isolated events of Indian resistance. Indians had succumbed to abject wretchedness, only to wake into sporadic bouts of deadly warfare and then repeat the same cycle across the three long centuries of colonial rule. What the conquistadors and the colonial officials had not managed to do in the way of subjection of Chileans was accomplished by an intolerant church that promoted blind belief, superstitious practices, and conformity. In the end, “the Chilean people were profoundly debased, were reduced to a state of complete numbness, and were left without a single social virtue, ostensibly at least, because their political institutions were designed to make them slaves.” Such was the concise picture of the origins and formation of Chilean society at the time of independence: depressing, yet terribly real. Lastarria found one area in this dismal history that had the potential for usefulness, and that was the emergence of a cohort of mestizos who, along with other racial mixtures, constituted the

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majority of the population of Chile: they could provide the human basis for a prosperous republic. The oppressive colonial system had treated the mestizos just as badly, or perhaps worse, than the Indians. But independent Chile had an opportunity to improve the lot of this large population. It was not precisely sympathy or empathy that motivated Lastarria, who considered the mestizos “wretched and miserable,” but rather the prospect of making them participants in the “industrial movement now under way in our society.” Race entered obliquely into the argument, which was fundamentally about history writing, but enter it did, along with larger considerations about the dynamics of colonization, independence, and nation building. The context for this debate was provided by Chile’s emergence as a nation-state after independence in 1818. Although the country endured, like most countries in the region, a period of political instability in the 1820s, followed by a period of harsh authoritarianism in the 1830s, it was well placed to build a solid postindependence order. Chile was a small country that was spared the major devastations that wrecked the economies and political designs of larger countries like Mexico and Peru. With mining intact and a growing agricultural economy, Chile was in a position to take advantage of its coastal position to establish important links to the international economy. And then the victory against the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, led by Andrés de Santa Cruz (1836–39), ensured Chile’s commercial and strategic dominance over the South American Pacific coast. But the war did much more than this: it fostered a sense of nationality and unity that helped relax authoritarian rule and undertake a major liberalization effort in the 1840s.3 As an architect of this effort, Andrés Bello was given important responsibilities by the governments of Manuel Bulnes (1841–51) and Manuel Montt (1851–61) for the building of national institutions, most notably the educational and legal systems. Bello brought considerable energy and skill to these tasks, but he was no radical. Change had to come in gradual ways and avoid the sorts of potentially destabilizing polemics that, in his view, were embedded in Lastarria’s arguments. Any awakening of the divisive passions that led to independence and continued afterward, or any calls for

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the radical transformation of Chilean society, would threaten the careful transition to a more liberal polity that Bello had in mind. Even an academic speech advocating new critical historical meth­ o­d­ologies could divert attention from the central tasks of orderly nation building. Consequently, Bello’s reply to Lastarria’s speech was swift. “History is not useful solely for the large and comprehensive lessons of its combined results,” he said. A search for the meaning and directionality of history might obscure its fundamental constituent elements, especially in a country where much basic archival research needed to be done. “What is lost in the breadth of perspective is gained by the clarity and liveliness of the details,” Bello added and mentioned as examples “the domestic customs of a bygone age, the founding of one city, the vicissitudes and disasters of another, the history of our agriculture, our commerce, our mines, the proper appreciation of this or that part of our colonial past.” In fact, and perhaps especially, there was much to learn about the dynamics of conquest and colonization beyond extracting illustrations to condemn the rule of Spain. “Injustice, atrocity, treachery in war,” he pointed out, “have not been committed by Spaniards alone, but by all races in all centuries.” Bello ignored Lastarria’s points about mestizaje, whose positive contribution was the culmination of the latter’s description of the colonial system of Spain. There was something in the premises that bothered Bello, and therefore he refused to consider Lastarria’s conclusion as historically valid, or even relevant. In particular, he questioned whether Spain was different from any other major power in history with regard to the dynamics of war and conquest. Citing Henry Wheaton on the violence of England against Wales, France against Alsace and Franche Compté, and Prussia against Silesia, Bello concluded that they all acted “with the same concern for humanity, the same respect of the rights of men, that powerful states have always displayed in their relations with weak ones.” Spain may have been despotic, but its despotism was closer to that of the Roman emperors: “The same amiable inefficiency of the supreme authority, the same praetorian arbitrariness, the same tendency to consider the throne’s rights divine, the same indifference to industry,

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the same unawareness of the great principles that vivify and nourish human associations, the same judicial organization [and] the same fiscal privileges.” Cruelties, Bello acknowledged, had been committed by Spain, but he insisted that this was part of the dynamics of conquest everywhere. There was a certain tone of impatience in Bello’s question: “have not conquest, and the laws imposed by the victors on the vanquished, often been either a means of civilization or a cause of retrogression and barbarity?” William H. Prescott in the United States made a similar point at about the same time regarding the conquest of Mexico (his book on the subject was published in 1843). Spaniards might have been cruel but no more cruel than the Aztecs themselves in imposing their rule. The parallel goes further, in that both shared a view of the civilizing role of European expansion. “The civilizing mission which moves from east to west like the sun,” said Bello, “and of which Rome was the most powerful agent in the ancient world, was exercised by Spain on a western world that was farther away and vaster.” Spain had given much of lasting quality to its American dominions, from language to architecture to laws.4 Racial mixture was a more difficult subject to address for Bello, but he obviously did not endorse Lastarria’s view of mestizaje. He did refer to race but primarily in terms of culture. “When two races mingle,” he stated, “the idea of the immigrant race will prevail over that of the native race depending on its comparative numbers, its moral vigor, and its higher or lower degree of civilization.” That is, what mattered in racial mixture were the traditions, the “ideas,” and the history of each clashing human society: “The ideas of one people are incorporated into the ideas of another, and as both lose their purity, what was at first a mixture of discordant parts gradually becomes a homogeneous whole.” As examples, he made refe­ rence to the clash between Romans and barbarians, and between Arabs and Spaniards. In both cases, “the races may mingle, but they may mutually reject each other’s ideas.” So “nothing Arabic ever took root in Spain” other than “certain material and purely external details.” Everything that defined the essence of Spanishness, like “religion, laws, the genius of the language, of the arts, of literature,”

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owed little or nothing to the culture of the Muslim invaders, which was “always an exotic plant amid the triple Iberian-Roman-Gothic mixture that occupied the Iberian peninsula.” It was not the indigenous race, then, that explained the independence of Latin America, or furnished the basis for the development of its national identity and institutions. “What caused us to prevail was precisely the Iberian element,” he stated, “the native Spanish persistence collided with itself in the inborn persistence of Spain’s children. The instinct of fatherland revealed its existence to American hearts and reproduced the feats of Numancia and Zaragoza.” Spain, therefore, had given Spanish America the instruments for its own emancipation. There was still much to be done to consolidate independence, especially replacing the ancient and embedded legislation “inherited from the Goths.” But this was different from a racial struggle and certainly different from establishing race as the fundamental basis for nationhood. Bello did, however, leave some room for a consideration of race as Lastarria understood it, but it was tentative and posed in the form of a series of questions, “Is there a peculiar complexion in races, an indestructible idiosyncrasy, so to speak?” Since racial mixture was a demonstrable and even quantifiable fact, “would it not be possible to explain, up to a point, the diversities presented by the character of men and the revolution in the different American provinces by the diversity of the mixture?” The use of the expression “up to a point” shows that Bello saw the other factors—Spain at war with itself in a context of imperial crisis—as explaining more fully the process of independence. And yet he did not want to dismiss racial explanations entirely. “Here is a problem that deserves to be solved analytically,” he said, but on which “we cannot pause because we lack the necessary data.” He was less hesitant talking about the indigenous “races,” which he believed were disappearing, at least in cultural terms: “In the long run [they] will be lost among the colonies of transatlantic peoples, leaving no more traces than a few words that have crept into the newly brought languages, and scattered monuments where curious travelers will ask in vain the name and description of the civilizations that brought them into being.” He did not lament this

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process and indeed thought it both inevitable and, even, desirable. A measured, moderate thinker, Bello was uncharacteristically harsh when he talked about indigenous populations not past but present: “Why kill them, if it suffices to shove them from forest to forest and plain to plain? Destitution and hunger will complete the task of destruction in the long run, noiselessly and without fuss.” Ignacio Domeyko, a Polish scientist who settled in Chile in the 1830s, disagreed. In his book Araucanía y sus habitantes (1845), Domeyko proposed a way to establish better relations with the Mapuche Indians, the largest indigenous group in Chile, whom he clearly admired. He traveled through Indian territory, learned about Indian customs, resources, and views, and shared their meals and stayed under their roofs.5 He did not question the legitimacy of the national state but thought that the process of assimilation of the Mapuche needed to be gradual and was quite likely to be successful given the social qualities of the Indians. He proposed a mission system, designed to attract the Mapuche to the better side of Chilean society and to avoid the military approach that had fared so badly after centuries of conflict. He presented a humane, sensitive, and well-informed view of the current situation of the Indians and the necessity of incorporating them into the fabric of the nation. Bello respected Domeyko, a thoughtful, devout, intelligent colleague who eventually succeeded him as rector of the University of Chile. But he disagreed on the indigenous issue. “The system proposed by [Domeyko] is too slow to deliver any good effects,” he said, “and, if I may say so, has something utopian in it, which is quite at odds with actual experience.” He noted that the two main authorities in charge of implementing the plan, a missionary and a civil official (capitán de indios), would be hard to recruit. There was already a shortage of priests in the country, and there was no guarantee that the civil officials would have the skills and the good intentions to make the plan work. “I am sorry to say it,” Bello added, “but Mr. Domeyko’s plan is a beautiful ideal that will not find easy realization.” He made reference to the experience of the U.S. government with regard to the Indians and asked, “Have they civilized them? Have they improved their situation in any respect?

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All they have done is to remove them from their lands in order to acquire them.” It might be regrettable, he said, but “war has always been the vanguard of civilization and has planted the seeds so that it might flourish.” Those who advocate commerce instead of war, he added, should learn that in human history commerce has been little more than “the first stage of war.” In Domeyko’s plan, “war would sooner or later become an inevitable necessity.” It seems clear that Bello viewed the situation of the Indians under the same light as other historical experiences involving conflicting societies. Those who prevailed were not necessarily better, but simply successful, and their course of action had a certain air of inevitability. Moreover, the winners of today might be the losers of tomorrow, should they encounter societies mightier than themselves or should they be weakened by internal conflicts or vices. The Indians of Chile were no different, and he thought that any attempt to assimilate them would be costly and futile. A unique window into his thinking about these matters is provided by the unusual case of a student, Antonio María Aróstegui, who petitioned the University of Chile in 1849 to count his knowledge of Mapudungu (the language of the Mapuche Indians) as meeting the foreign language requirement for his law degree. After much debate at the University Council, a recommendation was made to the government to the effect that the spirit of the law indicated that the foreign language in question, to qualify, had to contain a reservoir of scholarship that would advance the student’s knowledge in the field. Mapudungu was not among them. The council recognized, however, that the student had a point, in that the law referred only to “a living foreign language.” The time had come, then, to name the languages specifically. Perhaps not surprisingly, the languages proposed, and approved soon afterward by the Ministry of Education, were English, French, German, and Italian. As a compromise, the university would make an exception and accept this student’s knowledge of Mapudungu, if he could find qualified people to test him. What is interesting about these deliberations is that no one questioned whether Mupudungu was a foreign language: it was assumed all along. And it is in this context that we gain insights into

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Bello’s views on indigenous societies. He thought that knowledge of their languages was useful for the following reasons: “The fact that [Mapudungu] is the language of a people who live [enclavado] within our territory, and with whom we have frequent communication in our frontiers, it is important to promote knowledge of their ways.” That is, they reside in Chilean territory, but they are in effect members of a foreign country. Their language was important for practical reasons, “because the great number of their words that have found their way into our language, especially with regard to names of places, rivers, plants, animals, etc., make it imperative for us to promote knowledge of this language as highly convenient in many respects, even under a scientific point of view.” The dynamics of “ours” and “theirs” in Bello’s sentences clearly demonstrates that Indians were not a part of the Chilean nation, though they kept some relations to it, as nature would to civilization.6 What still needs to be explained is why Bello, on the one hand, excluded Indians and, on the other, made no racial justification for their exclusion. Race for him was a mutable, even an optional category that involved commonalities shared in a political and cultural sense. In other words, Mapuches could become Chileans, but Chileans could not be Mapuches in any significant (especially legal) sense. Nor could there be an independent Mapuche state within the national state. Indians would now have to be citizens, subjects to the same laws, educated in the same language, obeying the same authorities, and sharing the same beliefs. Andrés Bello belonged to a generation of criollos who resented their second-class status as subordinate to the peninsular-born in colonial society and who were perfectly aware of the unhappiness of Indians and castas about their own subordinate status. Independence provided the opportunity for creating new political arrangements that would eliminate the main sources of conflict in the Spanish American colonies. Slavery, Indian tribute, corporate privileges based on race were all targeted for removal, either in drastic or gradual ways, but in all cases they were seen as necessary to the foundation of new nations. The aim was to create nations of citizens who would have the same rights and obligations and who would thus have a stake in the formation and preservation of a more just

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political system. For this generation, and especially for Bello, establishing race, or racial distinctions, as the fundamental pillars for the building of nations was more of a drawback than an advance. It is perhaps for this reason that members of Bello’s generation were restless, even impatient, when they had to confront open challenges based on racial arguments. Bello’s rare, somewhat insensitive statements must be seen in that context.

Life and Works

Andrés Bello was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1781. After his university training, he worked for the government of the Captaincy General until the imperial crisis that led to the independence of Spanish America. In 1810 he and Simón Bolívar were commissioned to travel to London to seek the support of Great Britain. Bello remained there for nineteen years, representing the governments of Chile and Gran Colombia. It was in London that he wrote the famous poems on independence and national development that became classics of Spanish American letters. In 1829 he moved to Chile, where he lived the remaining thirty-six years of his life. There, he prepared the treatises that became influential well beyond Chile: Principles of International Law (1832), Grammar of the Spanish Language (1847), and Civil Code of the Republic of Chile (1855). He was a government official in the three successive administrations of Joaquín Prieto, Manuel Bulnes, and Manuel Montt and was in addition elected senator for three consecutive terms of nine years each. He was also founder and rector of the University of Chile (1842), which provided the foundations for the national system of public education. He died in Santiago in 1865.

Further Reading

González Stephan, Beatriz, and Juan Poblete, eds. Andrés Bello y los estudios latinoamericanos. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, University of Pittsburgh, 2009.

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Gracia, Jorge J. E. Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Jaksica, Iván. Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in ­Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Krauze, Enrique. La presencia del pasado. Mexico City: Tusquets Editores, 2005. Kristal, Efraín. “Dialogues and Polemics: Sarmiento, Lastarria, and Bello.” In Sarmiento and His Argentina, ed. Joseph T. Criscenti, 61–70. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993. Meléndez, Mariselle. “Miedo, raza y nación: Bello, Lastarria y la revisión del pasado colonial.” Revista Chilena de Literatura 52 (April 1998): 17–30. Sacks, Norman P. “Andrés Bello y José Victorino Lastarria: Conflicto de generaciones y tensiones intelectuales.” Cuadernos Americanos 2, no. 62 (1997): 183–213. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.

notes

1. The Bello and Lastarria quotations cited in the text come from the following editions: Andrés Bello, Obras completas, 26 vols. (Caracas: La Casa de Bello, 1981–84); Iván Jaksica, ed., Selected Writings of Andrés Bello, trans. Frances López-Morillas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and José Victorino Lastarria, Miscelánea histórica i literaria, 3 vols. (Valparaíso: Imprenta de la Patria, 1868). The critical body of works on Andrés Bello is large, but some of the main sources are cited in the bibliography. On Lastarria, see Alejandro Fuenzalida Grandón, Lastarria i su tiempo (Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1893); Alamiro de Ávila Martel, Antonia Rebolledo Hernández, Luz María Fuchslocher, Javier Barrientos, Norman P. Sacks, and Luis Oyarzún, Estudios sobre José Victorino Lastarria (Santiago: Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1988); and Bernando Subercaseaux, Cultura y sociedad liberal en el siglo XIX (Lastarria, ideología y literatura) (Santiago: Editorial Aconcagua,

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1981). On the polemics of the period, see Efraín Kristal, “Dialogues and Polemics: Sarmiento, Lastarria, and Bello,” in Sarmiento and His Argentina, ed. Joseph T. Criscenti (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 61–70; Norman P. Sacks, “Andrés Bello y José Victorino Lastarria: Conflicto de generaciones y tensiones intelectuales,” Cuadernos Americanos 2, no. 62 (1997): 183–213; and Ana María Stuven V., La seducción de un orden: Las elites y la construcción de Chile en las polémicas culturales y políticas del siglo XIX (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2000). 2. The debate on Chilean historiography has commanded significant attention. See, in particular, Allan Woll, A Functional Past: The Uses of History in Nineteenth-Century Chile (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). Also Stuven, La seducción de un orden; Cristián Gazmuri, La historiografía chilena, 1842–1970, vol. 1 (Santiago: Taurus, 2006); Mariano Picón Salas, “Bello y los estudios históricos en la Universidad de Chile,” in Andrés Bello y la Universidad de Chile, ed. Pedro Grases (Caracas: La Casa de Bello, 1993), 5–71; Joseph Dager Alva, “El debate en torno al método historiográfico en el Chile del siglo XIX,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 28 (2002): 97–138; Ricardo Krebs, “Bello y la historia,” in Instituto de Chile, Homenaje a don Andrés Bello (Santiago: Editorial Jurídica de Chile and Editorial Andrés Bello, 1982), 251–65; and Fernando Unzueta, “Bello, la nueva conciencia histórica y los discursos postcoloniales,” in Andrés Bello y los estudios latinoamericanos, ed. Beatriz González Stephan and Juan Poblete, Serie Críticas (Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, University of Pittsburgh, 2009), 219–43. 3. Important sources on the period are Diego Barros Arana, Un decenio de la historia de Chile, 2 vols. (Santiago: Imprenta y Encuadernación Universitaria, 1905–13); and Simon Collier, Chile: The Making of a Republic, 1830–1865: Politics and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4. On national assessments of the Spanish colonial past, see Enrique Krauze, La presencia del pasado (Mexico City: Tusquets Editores, 2005); Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); and Iván Jaksica, The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820–1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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5. The best source on Domeyko’s travels is his own diary, Mis viajes: Memorias de un exiliado, 2 vols. (Santiago: Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1978). 6. Andrés Bello to Minister of Public Instruction, August 9, 1849, in Obras completas, 21:339–42.

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5]

Undoing “Race” Martí’s Historical Predicament Of eli a S c hu tte

José Martí’s explicit position on race, as succinctly stated in his short article, “‘My Race,’” has been the subject of much recent controversy. The article was originally published in Patria in 1893, in the context of sketching a political course for the revolutionary changes that would free Cuba from Spanish colonial rule. Its context is clearly political, but this does not mean that the larger context grounding his views is not philosophical. We cannot fully understand his political views without understanding how they were integrated into his overall philosophy of existence, as well as the historical parameters and circumstances within which Martí lived and thought, since in some important respects, though not all, they differ from our own time. His ideas were molded in view of discursive frameworks and historical conditions different from ours. No discursive framework, including our own, is free from limitations. While many differences of opinion can be debated within a particular discursive framework, some ways of conceiving the world depend ultimately on a change of basic paradigms so as to allow a “new” understanding of the world and human relations to emerge. Martí supported such a “new” 99

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understanding of the world when it came to overcoming racism, colonialism, and the emerging dominance of the United States in the nineteenth century over the rest of the hemisphere. His ideas are so powerful that to this day they are invoked in support of freedom, justice, and a world rid of colonialism and its sequels. Martí’s historical predicament with regard to the question of racism and race is just this: how do you move beyond a historically oppressive paradigm (say, the legacy of colonialism and racism in institutions and ways of thinking) when you yourself are partly a product of the ideological effects of that paradigm? How do you relearn your sociocultural name, as it were? A similar issue arises for feminists who want to move beyond the oppressive paradigms through which the meaning of “woman” or “women” has been established in masculine-dominant societies. We know, at least those of us who have attempted to do so, that some have tried very hard to resignify the very terms that have brought on the oppressions in the past; others have tried to do away with those names altogether and have sought to invent new names or social relationships with which to identify instead. Conceiving and living in a world unmediated by such categories as race or gender (when the prevailing meaning of such terms obstructs social justice) involves not just a political position but also a radical shift in understanding the world and human relations. But first one must denaturalize the meaning of the terms that are found oppressive, showing how they are sociocultural constructions that project a misguided picture of what is “natural” or “proper” for persons designated by such terms. Martí was “one of us,” in this sense, even though he lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. He challenged numerous attitudes and concepts that over one hundred years later we still find problematic and/or oppressive. Reading him through twenty-firstcentury lenses, we must be cautious and balanced regarding how we approach his argumentation. As far as possible, the reading I offer has kept close to the texts, although the framework and language in which my analysis takes place is clearly contemporary, reflecting my own intellectual location. While Martí accepted relatively conventional understandings of sexual difference, he took an unconventional and anticolonialist

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position on race. In a highly racialized world, he was one of those eminently farsighted persons who conceived of a world in which racism and racial discrimination would disappear from society. But the elimination of racism as a distinct social and political practice does not reflect the full extent of Martí’s thinking on this problem. What Martí actually proposed and theorized was a future republic of Cuba where Cubans would live in such a way as to observe and promote “the full dignity of man.”1 A practical question emerges from this: how ought a people be governed and educated in consonance with the ideal of full human dignity? How should full human dignity itself be understood? This last question is not something Martí himself discussed philosophically, but it is possible to reach an approximation of his thinking by noticing the themes he emphasized as he organized the Cuban Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Cubano), which he founded in 1892 and which he led with the goal of overturning Spanish colonial rule on the island of his birth. The recent controversies about Martí’s position on race often rest on two kinds of concerns, whether taken jointly or separately. The first concern addresses the motivations for the position he articu­lated in “‘My Race,’” the context of which is discussed later. Some think that Martí’s position is due to sheer political motivations, in which case they see it as instrumental reasoning aimed at gaining political power. At the same time, they believe his position lacks a clear philosophical foundation.2 It is easy to refute the latter charge. As I will show here and have also shown more extensively elsewhere, the position Martí articulated in his famous 1893 article is fully coherent with an early grounding of his philosophical thought in post-Kantian German idealist philosophy and the political vision of a free republic that Martí reached as his experience broadened and his thinking matured.3 Once this is demonstrated, it is also evident that his politics (which cannot be denied) are intricately connected to his philosophical and moral outlook. The second kind of concern does not turn on whether he had the correct motivation to end racism and racial discrimination in the Cuban struggle for independence and in the future republic of Cuba or whether his views were disconnected from a philosophical foundation. Rather, it deals with the effects of Martí’s position.

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Could it be that the manner in which Martí proposed to end racism, despite his intent, could result instead in racist effects?4 Because Martí emphasized doing away with racism by focusing on everyone’s humanity and doing away with “the idea of race,” some worry that this type of approach would force us to eliminate racial distinctions or identification, without which people would not be able to organize together against the racism directed at them. In other words, some hold that racial distinctions are necessary to overcome racism and that any view requiring the elimination of such distinctions is racist in itself. As I examine Martí’s position in more detail, attention will be given to this second objection in terms of some clarifications needed to address it. Prior to this discussion, though, it is important to clear the ground to understand the conceptual framework through which Martí addresses the injustices of the world in which he lived. This was a world where such contemporary concepts as “affirmative action” or Afro-Latino identity had not yet been devised, so we must bracket these kinds of concepts for the time being. Instead, let’s see where he stood, a white criollo born in colonial Cuba, son of two Spanish parents, who in his adult life rejected identification with the white race. Because of his personal biography and circumstances, Martí was acquainted with four different kinds of society (speaking in very general terms). He was born and grew up in Cuba, one of the last remnants of the Spanish colonial empire in the Americas. He therefore knew what it was to be a colonial subject. Protesting against colonialism, at the age of sixteen he was thrown in jail by the Spanish regime. When he was released after serving six months, at seventeen he was sent to Spain, where he finished his education some four years later, attaining university degrees in law and in philosophy and letters. After graduation he moved to Mexico and then to Guatemala, countries then politically independent from Spain and characterized by large mestizo/a and indigenous populations. In the interim, he returned to Cuba on a couple of occasions but had to leave due to his overwhelming opposition to Spanish colonial rule. In fact, he was deported back to Spain in 1879. From there he moved to New York, where he lived from 1880 to 1895, at which time he sailed in his final journey to join the revolutionary forces

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in the island, where he died in May 1895. In New York City Martí experienced what it was like to be a Latino/Hispanic in the United States. While exiled he also traveled at various times to Venezuela, Central America, and the Caribbean. In each of these kinds of ­ society—a colonized, slave-holding society in the Caribbean (Cuba), an old colonizing country in Western Europe (Spain), the recently independent Latin American republics with large numbers of mestizo/a and African descendant populations, and the emerging hemispheric superpower, the United States—Martí observed and experienced different power arrangements of racial relations, including, no doubt, widespread instances and forms of institutional racism responding to the colonial legacies found in the four kinds of cultural formations named above. He also doubtlessly met and interacted with numerous people of various races and racial mixtures in different settings and circumstances. Having benefited from this vast amount of experience, what does he conclude about race?

“Nuestra América”

Due to space limitations, I focus on two of his best-known articles, beginning with “Nuestra América” (henceforth “Our America”), first published in New York and Mexico City in January 1891.5 Here Martí states that any observant traveler who has met with different peoples in various parts of the world will conclude that all of them are equally human, that there are no superior or inferior races, and that in fact there are no races (insofar as he reasons that the only race is the human race). In other words, Martí tears to pieces one of the key premises of colonial rule, namely, the notion of race as a category of social classification used to legitimate the colonizers’ supremacy over indigenous and African-descendant populations, whose labor they exploited through slavery and other dehumanizing social mechanisms. Classifying people according to races, he thinks, is an ignorant and mentally sick way to study humanity: “Sickly, lamp-lit minds string together and rewarm the library-shelf races that the honest traveler and the cordial observer seek in vain in the justice of nature

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where the universal identity of man leaps forth in victorious love and turbulent appetite” (OA 297). Here the reference to “libraryshelf races” shows the lack of connection between allegedly scientific studies and human experience; it also shows the limits of getting one’s knowledge through documents that seem to be gathering dust on library shelves. In today’s language, we can say that these classifications are artifices of a colonial enterprise that are then reproduced in the colonies in the interest of those benefiting from the racial stratification operating in colonial and postcolonial societies. Note that Martí discounts the division of humanity into races, not by appealing to theory, but by appealing to “cordial” observation and “honest” (unprejudiced) acknowledgment of one’s experiences as a traveler. Martí deconstructs the totalizing and classificatory power of race as a social category not by appealing to deconstructive theory or to logical argumentation, or to expert knowledge. “Just look and see,” as long as you do so honestly and kindly, he basically tells us. There is no need for a fancy argument or a formal education. In fact, the latter might prevent a person from noticing what really counts. This brings me to the topic of his non-Eurocentric view of education, expressed in the same article. Like many others in his own and earlier generations born in the Americas, Martí came to identify geohistorically in the broadest sense as an American, a term used primarily to distinguish oneself from Europeans and to rally around an independentist identity.6 America, in this sense, was a land where the privileges of “blood” and hereditary nobility were presumably overridden in a turn to accept the humanity of all people. “Superior” and “inferior” in an American context were rid of the mediating criterion of “noble blood,” but this did not mean everyone attained an equal footing. In addition to the construct of race by which some were elevated and others lowered in worth on account of certain physical features and skin color, another means of subordinating one part of the population to others was to associate some with a superior civilization, others with a declining/inferior civilization or with no civilization at all. Of course, the sex/gender system of classification imported from Europe into the Americas, North and South, and some of those systems operating in indigenous societies also made it impossible for

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everyone to attain an equal footing in the new republics given the many ways in which girls’ and women’s freedom has been restricted in masculine-dominant societies. Whether with respect to “blood,” “race,” or “gender,” the more the “superior” values appear natural, or naturalized, the less it is possible to question or overturn them. In this context, natural also means “appropriate to an entity’s own way of being.” It is important to distinguish Martí’s use of natural here from other discursive deployments of this term in modern philosophy, wherein the natural is seen as the domain to be manipulated or superseded by technological intervention. Interestingly, in “Our America” Martí exposed Eurocentrism along with the category of race as a non-natural, artificial way of thinking that needed to be overridden in the liberated republics of what he called “our America” (in place of “Latin America”). Martí juxtaposes the image of the “natural man” to that of the lettered criollo, whose aim is to govern and educate the people according to norms imported from the United States and Europe. Ironically, Martí himself was a lettered criollo, the son of Spaniards who, despite having rebelled against the colonial regime and having been imprisoned for his anticolonialist ideas, attended university in Spain. The adjective our in “Our America” indicates Martí’s disagreement with the Europhiles and Anglophiles who have governed or wish to govern what is known as “Latin” America to the detriment of the interests of many local populations. Contra Sarmiento, his elder Argentine contemporary, Martí rejects not just the binary but also the paradigm “civilization versus barbarism” wherein urban Eurocentric knowledge represents the force of civilization against rural, isolated gauchos, or various farmers, peasants, and village people. This paradigm, as conceived by Sarmiento and in less extreme degrees as well, has been influential in setting up both the educational and the governing system of the postcolonial nineteenth-century Latin American states. In colorful language, Martí counters Sarmiento: “A gaucho’s pony cannot be stopped in midbolt by one of Alexander Hamilton’s laws. . . . To govern well, one must attend closely to the reality of the place that is governed” (OA 290). Moreover, a country must provide the right kind of education to its citizens in order to achieve the best government. “Our own Greece,” he says, referring to the Inca

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civilization, “is preferable to the Greece that is not ours; we need it more” (OA 291). Martí denounces the kind of government arising in “our America” when young people “go out into the world wearing Yankee- or French-colored glasses and aspire to rule by guesswork a country that they do not know” (OA 291). Deploying images and metaphors, Martí celebrates the “natural men” and “native mestizo” who have seen through the artifices, limi­tations, and failures of the Anglo/Eurocentric civilizing paradigms (OA 290). He places his hopes in a new generation of critical thinkers who will realign themselves with local needs because government should lie in balance with the specific needs of those governed (which are not abstractly identical or transferable from one part of the world to another). But he is also concerned that precisely the sequels to colonialism continue to generate imbalance and injustice, thereby blocking the path toward a genuine prosperity for the new republics of our America. Having witnessed the expansionist territorial and commercial trends of the United States especially in the last half of the nineteenth century (preceded by the incorporation of all Mexico’s territories north of the Rio Grande in 1848), Martí deduced that it was urgent to stop U.S. expansionism in the direction of the Caribbean, especially in regard to his native island of Cuba. Following the appropriation of northern nineteenth-­ century Mexico, the United States attempted to purchase Cuba from Spain on a couple of occasions, but Spain opposed the idea. Various gestures toward (or at least rhetoric about) acquiring Cuba persisted through the 1890s. As he stated in the letter to his Mexican friend Manuel Mercado on what was to be the eve before his death on May 19, 1895, Martí indicated that everything he had done up to that day (on behalf of securing Cuba’s independence from Spain) was intended to prevent the United States in the future from extending its hold over the Caribbean and on to “the lands of our America.”7 In 1898, three years into the Cubans’ hard-fought war of independence, the United States intervened. It quickly defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War and took Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from their former colonizer. In “Our America,” written seven years earlier, Martí warned Latin Americans that they had better stand united in the assertion

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of their collective interests and cultural legacies vis-à-vis those of the Anglo-dominated North (OA 296). Martí distinguished this warning against the economic and political imbalance between North and South America, or between their America and “ours,” from any kind of racist appraisal of the differences between one culture, or people, and another. In fact, he was fully aware of the internal cultural differences in both parts of the hemisphere. He attributed the expansionist threat to material circumstances and to factors such as human greed, along with a lack of sufficient knowledge of our America’s diverse cultures, which in turn leads to unequal treatment. But he surely had to realize that similar instances of greed and dismissiveness of the equality of indigenous and Afro-Latin populations existed in Latin America’s postcolonial societies. This is why his critique of Eurocentrism (though not calling it by this name) and his rejection of the category of race remain the strongest pivots in his anticolonialist argument. This critique touches both the North and the South, as well as the relations between them. Martí’s “Our America,” intended for a readership among the lettered classes in Latin America, stops short of indicting their situation of privilege vis-à-vis that of the popular sectors, the so-called masses, and the indigenous and Afro-Latino/a populations. But Martí’s empathy for the humbler and more vulnerable members of society (as individuals, not as abstract “masses”) is evident (plus it is reiterated throughout the vast volumes of his work). His view that governance must stop reproducing a Euro/Anglo-dominant mentality serves as a transition for an alternative conception of social organization in contradistinction to the models that ruled the day.

The Racial Question and Cuba

On January 5, 1892, one year after publication of “Our America,” Martí founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC), during a visit to Key West, Florida, where many Cuban émigrés lived and worked in the tobacco factories. This visit was preceded by one to Tampa, Florida, where on November 26, 1891, he pronounced his famous speech “Con todos y para el bien de todos” (With All and

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for the Good of All) at Tampa’s Liceo Cubano.8 It is in this speech that Martí affirms, “I want the first law of our republic to be the Cuban cult of full dignity of man” (WA 251). He calls the concept of the full dignity of man “un bien fundamental que de todos los del país fuera base y principio” (a fundamental good that would be the base and principle of all [the goods] of the country). He adds that “every true man must feel upon his own cheek the slap upon any other man’s cheek” (WA 251). The speech was a rallying point to arouse the émigré community to join together in the final stage of the revolution that would free Cuba from Spanish rule.9 Martí continued to organize the PRC, whose governance documents were approved by Cuban and Puerto Rican émigrés in April 1892. In that month he was also elected Delegado, or leader of the party, whose mission was to obtain the independence of Cuba from Spain and assist in that of Puerto Rico. In March 1892 he founded and directed the journal Patria in New York to assist in this mission. On April 10, 1893, Martí was reelected PRC Delegate, and only six days later, on April 16, he published “‘My Race’” in Patria.10 Clearly, Martí signed on to this article in his role as the highest political leader of the PRC at a moment when his task was to unite all existing oppositional forces to the Spanish occupation of the island and to undertake the necessary preparations for an all-out war effort. Today we discuss his article for its philosophical contents, but it is important to note its historical context in order to achieve a balanced understanding. The audience for whom “‘My Race’” was written—supporters of Cuban and Puerto Rican independence—was somewhat different from that of “Our America.” The latter’s interpellators include readers in Mexico (where it was published a couple of weeks after it appeared in New York) as well as in other Latin American countries (hence the title “Our America”). At the time he published “Our America” Martí was serving as consul of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, in addition to his many other activities in New York. In other words, we can assume that at least some of his interpellators were meant to be persons interested in the relations between their respective countries in Latin America and the United States. “Our America” is about recognition across differences of broadly contoured

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cultural heritages (Anglo American, Ibero/Indo/African American). But “‘My Race’” comes from the period in which Martí was speaking as the elected leader of the PRC. This means that he was setting a specific vision or course of action (a war of independence against Spain) that he would like to see actualized in Cuba. The goal was to unify as many Cubans in and out of the island as possible toward one common purpose. Martí clearly saw racism as an impediment to national unity. In “Our America” Martí had already questioned the category of race, but not in the context of civil rights or national unity. He had invoked the criteria of honesty and cordial observation to debunk the idea that race somehow defined people as inferior or superior. He had also stated that to divide people against each other by such categories as race was a sin against humanity. Given the changes in audience and speaking positions two years later, once he speaks as the elected leader of the PRC, how does he address the topic of race? Does his concept or approach change? To begin, let’s observe that the title of the article appears within quotation marks.11 This is an important point for understanding its content and one often neglected since the article is reprinted in many anthologies without the quotation marks in the title. The locution “my race” is one that Martí attributes to others (not himself), who use what in his eyes is a mistaken kind of terminology. Martí calls the locution “my race” redundant or useless. Why? He is arguing that human rights cannot be trumped by appeals to racial identity: “No man has any special rights because he belongs to one race or another: say ‘man’ and all rights have been stated” (MR 318). The article “‘My Race’” differs from “Our America” (apart from the former’s focus on Cuba), then, by centering the discussion of the validity of racial categories within the framework of the discourse of rights and entitlements. In contrast, the themes of “Our America” are cultural identity in relation to education, governance, and the imbalance of power between North and South; its message is about distinguishing among the expectations that should govern the idea of Latin America—renamed “our America”—both by Latin Americans themselves and their powerful neighbor to the north. Yet another explicit topic in “‘My Race’” is combating (and understanding) racism and its roots. This is a new topic compared

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to what Martí had covered in “Our America.” To achieve this, he focuses on the discourse of race, on the vocabulary of racism. “‘Racist’ is becoming a confusing word, and it must be clarified,” he states in the opening sentence of the article. His analysis links the use of the term racist to opinions or actions that attribute the explanation of any person’s behavior, or value, to membership in a particular race. In the typical cases, the racist believes he is superior to another person on account of the superiority of his race and/or the inferiority of the other person’s race. Martí considers such explanations both useless and unfair, since they can be seen to result from vanity or lack of information. He argues against their intellectual and moral legitimacy. Yet not all cases of racism are fully intentional, he thinks. Some people are racist out of ignorance. But Martí reasons that ignorance does not justify the prejudices. To correct this ignorance, there is “just” and “good” racism, which he identifies as “the right of the black man to maintain and demonstrate that his color does not deprive him of any of the capacities and rights of the human race” (MR 319). He calls this a “good racism, because it is pure justice and helps the ignorant white shed his prejudice” (MR 319). He also limits such “good racism” to the dialectical strategy of proving a black person is just as human as a white one. It is only because his humanity is denied on account of race, creating a serious injustice, that a black person has the right to appeal to race to disprove the grounds of the injustice and thereby to promote “pure justice.” Martí’s reasoning here seems flawless even if he does not spell out all the premises of his argument. It is flawless insofar as it is fully coherent from the standpoint of a philosophically humanist idealist perspective, which is the one to which he subscribed. One may even argue that at least some materialist extensions or adaptations of this perspective would not necessarily contradict his principle and could be considered friendly additions to his view, even if he himself did not address such issues. For example, it may be argued that a carefully considered policy of affirmative action, such as is found today at some U.S. universities, is justifiable, precisely because unless there is a significant mass of black people in society who are publicly shown to be successful in the best-rewarded occupations

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and walks of life, the entrenched social prejudices of white-on-black racism cannot be overturned. In discussing racism, then, Martí gives attention not only to racism as an object of inquiry but also to some states of mind exemplified in the forms of enunciation using locutions such as “my race.” This in turn acknowledges the problem of language as a filter for human attitudes and behaviors as well as the performative notion of identity as “identification with” something (an idea, a set of values, etc.). He does not think there is something inherent in human nature that preidentifies or constitutes people according to race. In other words, he rejects any kind of racial essentialism, whether biological or metaphysical. “Say ‘man’ and all rights have been stated” he declares, regarding civil society (MR 318). “There are no races[;] . . . the soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color,” he said two years earlier, taking a “traveler’s” perspective on the world (OA 294–95). Martí gets rid of the normative use of the concept of race to judge people one way or another, just as he eliminates the classificatory use of the category of race to sort people into groups (usually then subclassified as inferior or superior) to round them out, separate them, or rank them socially in a racially stratified society. Nonetheless, he seems to accept a type of observational use of the terms black and white, in a manner somewhat analogous to how we might employ the terms tall and short to refer to people whose bodies match those characteristics. Basically, he thinks it is senseless to deem oneself better than another as a human being (or in the capacities that are proper to humankind) because one is black or white (as the case might be). When we enter into such judgments, according to Martí, “race” is irrelevant, except to show that persons of the disadvantaged race can be equally competent and/or morally meritorious as those of the historically privileged race. He also believes that once we eliminate race as an explanation for people’s behavior or capabilities, we will notice that courage and cowardice, generosity and selfishness, and so on, are distributed among humans regardless of color. This last view regarding the measure of people in terms of their moral accomplishments, among others, regardless of race, fits in with Martí’s political ideal of an integrated society in which people

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group with one another according to their common affinities, not their physical characteristics. In “‘My Race’” he argues strongly that to think that political parties should group only people of a certain race (i.e., to endorse racial political separatism in a society such as Cuba where people of many colors live and work in close association) is to betray the notion that political parties should be open to everyone who shares the same interests: “Political parties are aggregates of concerns, aspirations, interests, and characters. . . . What is fundamental in analogous characters merges in parties, even if their incidental characteristics or motives differ” (MR 320). Writing in 1893 and envisioning a new independent republic of Cuba without racism, he observes that “an affinity of character is more powerful than an affinity of color” (MR 320).

Criticisms

Some readers of “‘My Race’” wonder whether, despite his efforts to oppose racism, in rejecting the idea of race he does not worsen rather than improve the path to social justice. This is the second type of criticism I identified at the beginning of this chapter and to which the remaining discussion is dedicated. Here I address two generically stated concerns. First, does it follow from Martí’s criticism of the specific notion of racially exclusive political parties that he also opposed blacks’ political organizing in general? Second, does he oppose the rights of African descendants to explore and promote their cultural heritage? The most reasonable answer to both questions seems to be “No.” I should clarify that Martí did oppose both white-on-black and black-on-white violence.12 But such racial violence is very different from lobbying, educational and cultural activities, and a host of other activities by which people of color can raise their social status and make their political interests known. Recall that Martí states that there is a “good” and “just” racism that helps to educate ignorant whites about the full equality of blacks and which, indeed, can be used to show that blacks are as fully capable as whites and deserve the same rights and treatment. This proviso seems to accommodate the concern that if one simply

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eliminated the concept of race the result would be the reproduction of the same white-dominant society since current values and social structures tilt in their favor. To this it is important to add another very real concern, namely, that socially conservative forces often have deployed the abstract idea of racelessness simply to deny that there is any merit or need to document or rectify racial injustice. But, of course, the context of Martí’s ideas and the very fact that he defended (even if he called it a reverse racism but nonetheless a “good” and “just” one) the appeal to race to overturn the injustices of white supremacy shows that he would have rejected completely this hypocritical conservative posture. Martí also supported the organizational work among blacks that one of his friends in Cuba, Juan Gaulberto Gómez, was undertaking to lobby politicians on behalf of a black constituency (which, for Gómez, included mulattoes like himself). Given his close bond with Gómez, who represented the PRC in Havana while Martí led the party from New York, it is highly unlikely that in “‘My Race’” Martí meant to contradict Gómez’s efforts.13 In fact, in the same journal, Patria, exactly one year earlier, on April 16, 1892, Martí had gone on record to support the mission of Gómez’s newspaper, La Igualdad, which included (citing Gómez) the advocacy of “the ideals of justice, culture, enrichment [engrandecimiento] and freedom of the black race in the island of Cuba.”14 Gómez himself was quite explicit about arguing for integration from the acknowledged position of a black Cuban. His racially situated approach differed from Martí’s, who placed his argument as much as possible beyond or above the idea of race.15 It is important to note that Gómez published an article on race and politics titled “Reflexiones políticas” (Political Reflections) in Cuba on January 28, 1893, less than three months before Martí’s “‘My Race’” appeared in New York City.16 These two articles are complementary and deserve a more extensive reading in each other’s light than I can offer here. There are important differences in perspective despite their apparent similarities. The main reason Gómez’s situated black perspective was compatible with Martí’s is that both men shared an integrationist perspective, although Gómez took an assimilationist view or strategy for reaching equal rights for Cubans, whereas

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Martí, as we see from “Our America” and other writings, including his prolific writings on the United States, is sympathetic to recognizing ethnocultural differences. Moreover, Martí was a revolutionary while Gómez was a reformist. In sum, I do not think we can infer from Martí’s article (especially since Martí does not touch on the topic) that Martí would have opposed black associations, caucuses, the use of public relations, or other mechanisms to press for equality of opportunities and treatment in postindepencence Cuban society. Given Martí’s specific and immediate political responsibilities and goals as the PRC elected leader, however, the views he expressed on April 16, 1893, conform to three principal concerns: creating a fully unified (integrated) force to oppose Spain’s colonial rule, avoiding at all costs a racial war inside Cuba, and laying the foundation for a fully integrated society with the same civil rights regardless of skin color. Although under much pressure Spain had finally abolished slavery on the island in 1886, Martí argued that only with the revolution could blacks depend on racism being struck at its roots in Cuba. A second contemporary concern has to do with the role of ethnicity in relation to race. While it is true that “white supremacy” combines race and ethnicity in a deplorably racist manner in favor of whites, there are other kinds of combinations of ethnicity and race that do not appear to reproduce or foment racism or social divisiveness, in most people’s views. For example, current celebrations such as African heritage or Latino/a heritage events focus on culture in a way that often ties culture and race. African and Afro-­ descendent religions in the Americas also tread this line of ethno­ raciality in which, although some whites are initiated into such religions, the basis for the religious communities’ values and survival across generations seems tied to a strong ethnoracial sense of black identity. Losing the ethnoracial identity that sustains such cultural formations seems to do violence to the groups for whom such values are important not only in individual but in collective terms as well. A reasonable answer to this concern is that the concept of ethnorace as represented in the notion of Afrocubanismo—which, in Cuban history, attained national recognition in the 1920s and 1930s— can best flourish in a society such as Martí laid the foundation for,

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where equality of rights and opportunities are guaranteed regardless of race.17 In such a society participation in activities or associations of an ethnoracial character would be voluntary, within a general political framework of equal civil liberties for all. One problem with the way Martí phrased his opposition to the idea of race is that, without further qualifications, it appears to do away with it altogether and thus in at least some cases appears to violate the sense of humanity held by persons deeply identified with an ethnoracial sense of community or self. In other words, many people do not see their humanity bifurcated between “black” and “human” or “white” and “human” but see their ethnoracial status fused into the concept of the human itself. (For this option to work outside of a racist context, however, both the notion of “the human” and of ethnorace would need to be thoroughly decolonized.) The flip side of Martí’s ability to see through and denaturalize the colonialist idea of race is that there may be other options for undoing the idea of race that he did not consider, at least explicitly. One is to think of race as a socially constructed idea or category, as Martí does (i.e., not a natural kind or a metaphysical essence from which there is no escape), but still allow for political and social conditions that would support the transformation of the prior (racist, colonialist) idea of race into one that blends in with a more materialistic, embodied sense of self and a culturally diverse sense of inclusion within the larger body politic. Given that to a greater or lesser extent this last alternative has gradually become influential throughout the twentieth century, it is not easy for us in our current sociohistorical locations to think we could ever do without it. Just as Martí thought that he could and must live without the idea of race in order to overthrow racism, today many think that we cannot do without it. But are we talking about the same idea of race?

Martí’s Critique of the Colonialist Idea of Race

Perhaps we can contribute to solving Martí’s historical dilemma by qualifying more explicitly what he wanted to address when he referred to the idea of race. An interesting point that Martí mentions

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but passes over without further comment is the complicity between the justification and practice of racism and the acceptance of “the idea of race.” He states that the white man who believes himself superior to the black on account of his race “acknowledges the idea of race” (admite la idea de la raza), thereby “authorizing and provoking” the black man’s racism against him (MR 319; OC 2:299). But we could ask, which idea of race is it that provokes and allegedly legitimates racism on both sides? The qualifier in Martí’s sentence is the linkage between the idea of race and the assignation of s­ uperiority/ inferiority to individuals or members of groups on account of race, as I have tried to explain so far. In other words, the idea of race, as he experienced it socioculturally, was wedded to the notion of white superiority, or in its extreme versions, white supremacy. Martí reasoned logically that such racism is responsible for authorizing and provoking blacks’ racist animosity against whites. He argues in “‘My Race’” that peace demands the end of this idea of race and its resulting animosities and racisms. He is thinking of the idea of race as a mechanism for classifying certain phenotypical features so as to dehumanize or exploit some people, or privilege others. In other words, he was objecting to and denouncing the idea of race prevailing throughout the colonial system and its sequels, which naturalized the concepts of racial superiority and inferiority, the better to legitimate its power and exploit the labor of those marked inferior, as the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano has demonstrated.18 Martí denaturalizes the idea of race just as he denaturalizes a racebased conception of slavery by referring to other historical periods when blond men were enslaved (MR 319). Throughout this article and elsewhere, Martí employs the terms blacks and whites at the same time that he emphasizes the shared humanity that binds all people in a common understanding of human rights. He praises the ways in which blacks and whites have fought and given their lives side by side for Cuba’s independence, and he concludes with the statement that in Cuba “there is much greatness . . . in blacks and in whites” (MR, 321). Is it contradictory, one may ask, for Martí to use the terms black and white to refer to people when he denies the existence of race? Here there is room for different interpretations.

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One option is to distinguish between the (colonialist) “idea of race,” which he refutes because of its dehumanizing and racist effects and because of its false and misinformational character, from the use of black and white in a kind of descriptive way, to refer to phenotypical differences that in themselves are not a sign of any natural or inherent superiority or inferiority in human typology and therefore do not carry any moral or intellectual connotations. If this is the case, as I think it is, one could argue that Martí is appealing to, or founding, a new symbolic order distinct from the one prevailing through colonialism. This new symbolic order would have a very specific purpose for him, namely, that of ruling over the newly independent republic of Cuba, at least in terms of constitutional law. As a “founder” of this future republic, he is already invoking the codes through which the perception of racial differences is to be transformed from a racist one into one freed from racism (or at least “bad” racism). The basic code here is the one he stated in his 1891 Tampa speech: “the Cuban cult to the full dignity of man” (el culto de los cubanos a la dignidad plena del hombre) (my trans.). Under this new symbolic order, whether or not one notices color differences, nothing less than full dignity is to be associated with references to persons of any color. My point is that to refer to someone as “black” or “white” within a symbolic order in which the basic premise and goal is to grant everyone his or her full human dignity is quite different from referring to someone as “black” or “white” under a white supremacist symbolic order. But how could we tell the difference between these two symbolic orders, especially in the historic period of transition between them? Two quick criteria may be derived from his article: (1) examining the presuppositions of the discourse in which racial terms, evaluations, and identifications occur and (2) keeping in mind that before the highest tribunal of reason all men are of one single kind and racial qualifiers are superfluous. Martí as visionary of a just society and as founder of a new political entity, the free Cuban republic, speaks to his contemporaries from the vantage point of this dual perspective. Despite the case that can be made for Martí’s support of a different symbolic order or at a minimum new paradigms through which color differences would be perceived by revolutionary and

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postrevolutionary Cubans, there are many residual elements showing that he was still caught in the paradigms of his time and in some respects did not go against them. For example, the very language (or concept) of transcending color differences is rooted in Enlightenment models of reason and to a great extent in a bifurcation of human identity into the corporeal, or visible, and the spiritual, or invisible. When Martí states in “Our America” that “the soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color” (OA 296), he is speaking within the nonmaterialistic conceptual frameworks and paradigms of his time, including the broadly construed paradigms of many of the world’s religions. He does not require a complete paradigm shift or a new symbolic order to make the point that “there are no races” (OA 296). All he needs to do is to say that we must train our senses to “see” the material world according to higher moral priorities. Martí’s pronounced philosophical idealism is fully recognizable within the historical epistemic constraints of the times in which he lived. It is precisely in the context of the constraints of those paradigms of his time that he accepted that criticisms of his position on race and racism can be most clearly formulated today. A materialist approach may point out that there are two important aspects of the question of race and racism that Martí did not acknowledge adequately in his Patria article: economics and embodiment. Although elsewhere Martí was known for his criticism of the increasing manipulation and exploitation of Latin America’s economy by the United States and he obviously opposed Cuba’s colonial economic (not just political) status with regard to Spain’s colonial rule, in “‘My Race’” he did not link white-on-black racism to economic exploitation. Even when in other contexts Martí pointed to patterns of actual or potential economic abuse, his explanatory framework tended to place the accent for accountability or blame on the nature of the human passions or vices, such as greed. The article “‘My Race,’” for example, avoids any references to the use of economic resources to discourage racism in the future republic of Cuba, although given Martí’s stated priorities for education and for a culture of freedom in the rest of his work it cannot be doubted that he would support such measures. In cases of a direct discrepancy, or conflict, between a materialist and an idealist account of social and human relations,

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it does seem evident that Martí would choose the idealist approach as primary. Hence his approach to undoing racism focuses on resignifying human relationships and social practices, forging a new symbolic order based on love and justice, appealing to moral arguments, attending to the power of language to shape and inspire people’s individual and social identities, and efforts of a similar kind. Martí’s new symbolic order of love and justice replaces the colonialist, authoritarian order of top/down governance as well as govern­ment from a distance (from the metropolises to their respective colonial sites). It is inspired by the needs of humble people at the base and the margins of the colonialist-stratified societies. One of its major strengths lies in its power to withstand the assault of material force. “Trenches of ideas are worth more than trenches of stone,” he famously said (OA 288). Like most men of his social background and time, Martí conceived the political branch of this symbolic order as a fraternal compact. From hindsight and thanks to the women’s movement and other progressive social forces, we know that the fraternal compact is inadequate to resolve other social injustices such as sexism and homophobia. “Fraternity,” for example, must be conceptualized not only across racial divides but also across conventional constructs of sexual difference and sexual orientation, that is, beyond a homophobic and heterosexist cultural imaginary order where the concept “man” is trapped within an exclusively heterosexual construct. Similarly, the idea of the feminine must be liberated from the colonialist, patriarchal-authoritarian symbolic order imposed on our America by the Spanish conquest. While Martí was inclined to consider new ways of relating reason and sensibility, self and society, body and spirit, he remained tied to some central bifurcations of the previous symbolic order, such as that between the private and the public. Yet all central categories of the previous ­masculine-dominant symbolic order require transformation if a ­liberating symbolic order is to be reached. The embryonic new symbolic order that Martí envisioned through the concepts of “our America” and a Cuban republic inspired by the ideas of full independence and a civil society free from racism can best come to fruition once all the dimensions above are considered core topics requiring attention for the attainment of a decolonizing imaginary and symbolic order.

120  Ofelia Schutte Life and Works

José Martí (1853–95) is one of the most important political and literary figures in the history of Latin America and has long been considered Cuba’s emblematic national hero. Born of Spanish parents of humble means in the city of Havana, Martí was incarcerated for his political ideas in 1869 and deported to Spain in 1870. He completed studies in law and in philosophy and letters at the University of Zaragoza in 1874. After living in Mexico and Guatemala, with two intermittent stays in Cuba, he was deported back to Spain in 1879. Subsequently, Martí moved to New York City, where he supported himself by writing extensively as a correspondent for Latin American newspapers and a translator for commercial presses. He wrote poetry and fiction, founded a society called La Liga for the education of people of color, and served as president of the Hispanic American Literary Society of New York. He also served as a consul for Argentina (1887–91) and for Uruguay and Paraguay (1990–91) but resigned due to his increased commitment to free Cuba from colonial rule. In 1892 he founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano and the journal Patria, followed by three years of intensive organizing for the war effort. His death occurred on May 19, 1895, in a skirmish with Spanish forces in Dos Ríos, Cuba. Among ­Martí’s best-known works are El presidio político en Cuba; his journal writings or Cartas de Nueva York; the books of poetry Ismaelillo, Versos Libres, and Versos Sencillos; a children’s journal, La edad de oro; and the political document El manifiesto de Monte Cristi (coauthored with Máximo Gómez). Among his famous speeches are “Madre América” (1889) and “Con todos y para el bien de todos” (1991). His article “Our America” has enjoyed an extensive readership in Latin American cultural studies and philosophy.

Further Reading

Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: University Press, 2006. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

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Martínez-Alier, Verena. Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-­ Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. Montero, Oscar. “José Martí against Race.” In The Cuban Republic and José Martí, ed. Mauricio A. Font and Alfonso W. Quiroz, 95–114. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2006. Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in NineteenthCentury Latin America. Trans. John D. Blanco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Schutte, Ofelia. “Latin America and Postmodernity: Ruptures and Continuities in the Concept of ‘Our America.’” In Latin America and Postmodernity, ed. Pedro Lange-Churrión and Eduardo Mendieta, 155–76. Amherst, NY: Humanity, 2001.

notes

  1.  José Martí, “With All, and for the Good of All” [hereafter cited as WA], in Our America: Writings on Latin America and the Struggle for Cuban Independence by José Martí, ed. Philip S. Foner, trans. Elinor Randal et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 251.  2. See Ada Ferrer, “The Silence of Patriots: Race and Nationalism in Martí’s Cuba,” in José Martí’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies, ed. Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 228–49.  3. See Ofelia Schutte, “La independencia del colonialismo: José Martí y los basamentos de la nación cubana,” trans. Silvia Santa María, Temas: Cultura, Ideología, Sociedad 53 (2008): 156–68.  4. See, e.g., Lillian Guerra, The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). On a separate point, I have avoided discussing Martí’s views in terms of what is known today in the United States as “identity politics.” This discursive framework was unknown to him, and the topic of identity politics itself is highly complex theoretically. As to the relation between politics and identity, in the most general terms, my chapter shows that of course such a relation was foremost in Martí’s mind since identities take place within and across discursive

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frameworks, many of which Martí hoped to change or at least help to resignify.  5. José Martí, “Our America” [henceforth cited as OA], in José Martí: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002), 288–96.   6. See, e.g., Martí’s speech known as “Madre América” (Mother America) delivered in New York on December 19, 1989, to delegates from Latin America attending the Pan-American Congress in Washington, D.C. “Mother America,” in Our America, 69–83.  7. Martí, “Letter to Manuel Mercado,” in José Martí: Selected Writings, 347.   8.  Martí, “Discurso en el Liceo Cubano, Tampa,” in Obras completas [hereafter cited as OC], 25 vols. (Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1963–65), 4:270. Translations from OC are my own.   9. The first war of independence, known as the Ten Years’ War or Guerra Grande (Big War), lasted from 1868 to 1878. This was followed by the Guerra Chiquita (Little War) from 1879 to 1880. 10.  Martí, “My Race” [sic] [henceforth cited as MR], in José Martí: Selected Writings, 318–21. 11. See Martí, “‘Mi raza,’” in OC 2:298–300. 12.  Martí also opposed ethnic violence. He always justified the war against Spain on principle and pointed out it was not a war against Spaniards since there were many Spaniards of goodwill who also opposed Cuba’s colonial status. 13. Lack of space keeps me from elaborating on Gómez’s views and on important distinctions between Gómez’s integrationist views and Martí’s. 14.  Martí, “‘La igualdad,’” in OC 5:49; emphasis mine. 15. Today some will probably think that since, under white dominance, the white race is unmarked and whites can easily fuse their identity with the notion of universal humanity, whereas people of color are rele­ gated to particular types, this discrepancy may be sufficient to explain, for example, why Martí and Gómez take their discursive positions outside and inside racial categories, respectively. While I agree that sociocultural values and ideologies have a very strong influence on our discursive positions, I disagree that people are so completely determined by such constructs that they cannot think or try to act beyond them. In the course

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of my life I have had some (white) friends who so deplore the violence of white-on-black racism that while recognizing their racial privilege, that is, while not acting in denial of it, they have nevertheless rejected their “white” identities altogether and have changed their lifestyles accordingly. I believe Martí was one of these latter types of individuals, except that since his existential priority was to free Cuba from colonialism what he did was to integrate one cause (national independence) with another (racial equality). Thus, for Martí, Cuba’s national independence was grounded in, and would be the foundation for, racial equality. 16. Juan Gualberto Gómez, “Reflexiones políticas,” in Por Cuba libre (Municipio de La Habana: Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad, 1954), 289–93. 17. Alejandro de la Fuente offers this line of argument in A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba ­(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 18. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80.

P a r t III

New Nations and Positivism

[

6]

Sarmiento on Barbarism, Race, and Nation Building Janet B ur k e an d Te d H umph re y

Three centuries and an entire continent separate Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s work and thought from that of Bartolomé de Las Casas, but an examination of their views on the indigenous peoples of the Americas opens an interesting window on the evolution of thinking about race in Latin America from the period of Spanish conquest and colonization to that of postindependence nation building. Las Casas, the sixteenth-century Dominican friar who came to understand his call as evangelizing the native peoples of New Spain, struggled, along with his contemporaries, to understand how these individuals and their cultures, so outwardly different from Europeans, were to be conceived and treated relative to the rest of the human family. Sarmiento, Argentine educator, writer, and president of his country, looked at America’s native peoples with the eyes of one who was deeply involved in trying to understand where these and other peoples of color belonged within the emerging Argentine and other American nations. Although Las Casas and Sarmiento are separated by so much time, space, and history, a single term is central to their discourse regarding these New World native peoples, namely, barbarian/barbarism. Nonetheless, the most important fact 127

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about their discourses—and the moral, social, and political challenges they faced with respect to the American indigenous peoples— is that the significance and weight of the term had shifted during the three-hundred-year period separating them, yet the challenge to the governing assumption of their respective cultures remained largely the same. One can find a fundamental shift in the terms the two men believed contrasted with barbarian/barbarism, and that shift indicates differences in their assumptions about and projects in the New World. Thus, for Las Casas, the appropriate term is Christian, while for Sarmiento the relevant contrast is civilized.1 As one would expect, the shift in appropriate contrast indicates noteworthy changes in attitudes about what is most important to being regarded as fully human. In this chapter, then, we intend first to discuss the shifting sense of “barbarism” from Las Casas’s to Sarmiento’s time; second, to analyze the relationship between the concept of barbarism and that of race; and, third, to discuss what attitudes and actions Las Casas and Sarmiento, respectively, regarded as most appropriate relative to the “barbarian.” The differences are dramatic between a thinker dealing with a new and unexplored reality and a man looking at the same reality when it has become familiar and relatively well known.

The Concept of Barbarism

As with so many issues with which the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries wrestled, the question of who properly fell into the category “barbarian” and its consequent condition, “slave,” goes back to Aristotle’s writings, in this instance to his Politics. Aristotle asks: Is there anyone . . . intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom is such a condition expedient and right . . . ? He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in the rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle is a slave by nature. The use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life.2

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Aristotle’s doctrine of slavery both by law and by nature arises in the context of the economy, that is, of the distribution of the tasks, responsibilities, and goods of a household, a household being a complex organization of greater or lesser size, from a family to a large political entity, a city, state, or nation. For Aristotle, the justice of the bondage of slaves by nature derives from their putative lack of capacity for deliberative or calculative much less theoretical rationality, by virtue of which they require direction from one who can apprehend goals appropriate to an enterprise and determine the course by means of which one can realize those goals. Aristotle argues further, “There is a slave or slavery by law as well as by nature. The law of which I speak is a sort of convention—the law by which whatever is taken in war is supposed to belong to the victors.” He asserts further that “in some sense virtue, when furnished with means, has actually the greatest power of exercising force: and as superior power is only found where there is superior excellence of some kind, power seems to imply virtue.”3 Aristotle justifies both kinds of slavery on grounds of virtue—virtue simpliciter in the first instance, inasmuch as the slave by nature lacks either a kind or degree of the virtue (capacity or power) that marks one as fully human; and relative virtue in the latter case, as being vanquished indicates a relative lack of mastery of the craft of war, which, for Aristotle, is a social art that focuses the elements of statecraft on a culture one either takes as or has found to be hostile. Finally, Aristotle suggests that the notions of slavery and barbarism are closely if not analytically connected. He writes: Hellenes do not like to call Hellenes slaves, but confine the term to barbarians. Yet, in using this language, they really mean the natural slave of whom we spoke at first; for it must be admitted that some are slaves everywhere, others nowhere. The same principle applies to nobility. Hellenes regard themselves as noble everywhere, and not only in their own country, but they deem the barbarians noble only when at home, thereby implying that there are two sorts of nobility and freedom, the one absolute, the other relative.4

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By inference, one can understand Aristotle to assert that the senses of “barbarian” and “fit to be a slave” are culture-centric. One can readily see from these passages that a scholarly culture for which Aristotle was one of the two principal authorities might easily and readily conclude that the newly encountered and conquered peoples of the Americas might well be both slaves and barbarians. This issue arose shortly after the Spanish had established their first colonies in the Americas.

Las Casas and the Valladolid Debate

The debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Las Casas that occurred in Valladolid in 1550 was for Spaniards and their pretensions to empire in the Americas the classic confrontation regarding the standing of the New World natives relative to whether they were barbarians and thus, perhaps, slaves by nature or, on resistance, fit objects of a just war. If they were the latter, as a result of conquest the conquistadors could legally and morally enslave them. The basis for Sepúlveda’s view is his reading of Aristotle, and all his assertions that the “Indians,” the native peoples of the New World, are to be regarded as slaves by nature rest on his adoption almost verbatim of Aristotle’s language regarding these matters.5 Much of Sepúlveda’s evidence regarding the material culture, cultural practices, and personal behaviors of the New World natives came from the reports of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who compared the Indians with the Ethiopians and the Thracians, from whose putative cultural practices he inferred those of the Indians. Using this evidence, Sepúlveda judged the Indians to be barbarians of the lowest order, thus natural slaves, and thus proper objects of a just war should they attempt to rebel against the Spaniards or resist the Spaniards’ efforts to subjugate them. Inasmuch as Ethiopians and Thracians served as classical paradigms of barbarian peoples, one could—if one were so disposed, and apparently Sepúlveda was—directly conclude that the peoples of the New World were both barbarian and slaves by nature. Their resistance to Spanish dominance thus became a prima facie justification for subduing and enslaving them. And this was Sepúlveda’s

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position, even though he himself did not have direct experience of them or of the circumstances under which they resisted the Spanish. In addition, because Sepúlveda’s view served the interests of the Spanish crown, as well, of course, as those of the conquistadors, who were, after all, effectively independent agents holding contracts from the crown to occupy lands and increase Spain’s and their own wealth, it was well received at court and among the conquistadors, even if not by the most prominent theological and judicial minds of the time, those who made up the School of Seville. We do not have a direct record of Sepúlveda’s arguments and exact words at the Valladolid debate because the written manuscript from which he worked never saw the light of day. We are left to infer the views for which he argued from the written text of his adversary, Las Casas, who recorded his systematic, step-bystep refutation of Sepúlveda’s views in In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, of the Order of the Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, Against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered across the Seas.6 The controversy between Sepúlveda and Las Casas is not about race, as this was not a term in use or vogue at the time. The primary distinction with which it deals is between those peoples who are, first and foremost, Christians or at least inheritors of Christian cultural practices and, to a lesser extent, products of a cultural tradition that one can trace back at least to the Greeks and, perhaps, their cultural predecessors; and those who are not Christian in their beliefs, practices, and outlooks. Thus the basic distinction with respect to the discussion of the New World peoples is between Christian and barbarian and not even pagan or heathen, at the time essentially equivalent terms pertaining to those who knew about but remained outside the Christian faith, for example, Muslims. Further, the issue at stake was not so much about whether the peoples of the New World were human, although given the strict definition of “slave by nature,” one might question whether those who belonged to that category were to be regarded as human or as merely humanlike. Rather, the issue was precisely the degree of barbarity one might properly attribute to those peoples, for that would determine how they were to

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be regarded and treated. This is the very issue to which Las Casas turns his attention in the Defense. Las Casas focuses on the issue of barbarism because showing that a given people or nation is not barbarous provides prima facie grounds for denying that without explicit reason or provocation it can be the object of a just war. His argument for not regarding the Indians as barbarians occurs in two stages and on two levels. The initial argument is general, opening with a summative discussion of barbarism and its permutations and ending with the conclusion that, given God’s nature and intent, barbarism in the strictest sense, the sense that Sepúlveda attributes to the Indians, is necessarily rare because it cannot conform with the divine plan for humanity and the world. Las Casas writes: If we believe that such a huge part of mankind is barbaric, it would follow that God’s design has for the most part been ineffective, with so many thousands of men deprived of the natural light that is common to all peoples. And so there would be a great reduction in the perfection of the entire universe—something that is unacceptable and unthinkable for any Christian. (Defense 36) Given that Las Casas is writing for a Christian audience against the views of one who is a professed Christian, this argument strikes at the heart of the matter, even if it does not close the case against Sepúlveda. One must note that the argument about the Indians’ barbarism is not an argument about their humanity. Although barbarians in the strictest sense, the sense of being slaves by nature, lack the rationality to be self-governing, they do possess reason sufficient to recognize and acknowledge the reason of their superiors and thus rise above mere animality, even if they are fit only to serve as bearers of burdens. They are humans and are to be so regarded and treated.7 One finds the core of Las Casas’s argument against Sepúlveda and others of his persuasion in the following eloquent passage: Now if we shall have shown that among our Indians of the western and southern shores . . . there are important kingdoms, large

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numbers of people who live settled lives in a society, great cities, kings, judges and laws, persons who engage in commerce, buying, selling, lending, and the other contracts of the law of nations, will it not stand proved that the Reverend Doctor Sepúlveda has spoken wrongly and viciously against peoples like these . . . ? From the fact that the Indians are barbarians it does not necessarily follow that they are incapable of government and have to be ruled by others, except to be taught about the Catholic faith and to be admitted to the holy sacraments. They are not ignorant, inhuman, or bestial. Rather, long before they had heard the word Spaniard they had properly organized states, wisely ordered by excellent laws, religion, and custom. They cultivated friendship and, bound together in common fellowship, lived in populous cities in which they wisely administered the affairs of both peace and war justly and equitably, truly governed by laws that at very many points surpass ours, and could have won the admiration of the sages of Athens. (Defense 42–43) The final sentence of this passage is filled with Aristotelian code and, in that sense, bears witness to the degree of humanity Las Casas asserts on behalf of the Indians. His claim that the Indians “cultivated friendship” appeals to Aristotle’s doctrine that only the “spoudaious,” the great-souled man or sage, is capable of true friendship, the highest of human relationships. But yet further, his assertion that the Indians lived in well-ordered cities that even Athenian sages would have admired goes to Aristotle’s doctrine that statecraft is the “master” art or science, that is, the art in the service of which men practice all others. Las Casas’s use of these richest Aristotelian moral and political phrases and concepts cannot possibly be coincidental; it can only be intentional. Further, they carry the weight of being the direct, eyewitness account of one who is fit to judge by virtue of his learning and position in the structure of the culture to which he belongs. Thus, although Las Casas denominates the Indians “barbarians,” his sense of the term seems not to carry dehumanizing, pernicious racial, or even unameliorable negative cultural connotations, despite the term itself having such overtones in an Aristotelian context.

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For Las Casas, the term as applied to the Indians seems not even to suggest the view by which Aristotle indicated that the Hellenes regarded other cultures and their nobility to be cultures and nobility only relatively speaking.8 For Las Casas, the sole reason for asserting that the Indians are barbarians is that they are not Christians. To be sure, Las Casas had to believe that in the process of evangelizing the Indians they would give up their traditional cultural practices, in particular, those having to do with religion, although doing the latter would most certainly impact all others, inasmuch as religious practice, in Las Casas’s view, grounds moral and political practice. But the core point remains; Las Casas’s use of the term barbarian in reference to the Indians indicates that they are not Christian but does not, strictly speaking, denigrate their humanity. They are not, for him, an inferior race, nor are they children who have not attained their majority.

Race and Barbarism

Sarmiento conceived of the barbarian quite differently. For him, the contrast between civilization and barbarism was sufficiently absolute that one searches his writing in vain for an account of the process whereby the barbarian might become civilized. With respect to the question of whether certain races were inherently barbarous, Sarmiento repeatedly cites specific sets of environmental and cultural conditions that may underlie or are consistently associated with barbarism, and those are often the conditions under which a given race lives or has lived. The document by which most know Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, articulates the environmental conditions under which the barbarism of Argentine society, culture, and politics arose, conditions inimical to the very possibility of civilization. His description of those natural conditions often carries connotations of what Kant refers to as the dynamically sublime, that is, of natural phenomena that simply overwhelm the senses’ ability to apprehend. In the face of them, one is awestruck but not able to act in such a way as to bring them or oneself fully under control, and one is left in a state of suspense. After his initial, relatively

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disinterested description of the Argentine territory, Sarmiento gives this rather more value-laden account of his response to the territory: The country’s immense expanse . . . is completely unpopulated, and it has navigable rivers that not even a small fragile boat has penetrated. The misfortune troubling the Argentine Republic is its expanse—desert surrounds it on all sides and insinuates itself into its innermost recesses; the solitude, the wilderness lacking all human habitation, are in general the unquestionable limits between its provinces. Here immensity everywhere—immense plain, immense forests, immense rivers, the horizon always indefinite, always blending with the earth between clouds and haze that do not allow one to distinguish from a distance the point where land stops and sky begins.9 If one cannot get one’s physical bearings, as the above passage clearly suggests, then how, in any sense of the term, can one manage? The environment establishes conditions for survival so extreme that they seem to contrive in almost every way against the very possibility of civilization.10 On the one hand, men, constantly beset by wild animals, extremes in weather and geography, and, finally, “savages,” have no choice but to focus on survival. “The insecurity of life, habitual and permanent in the countryside, impresses on the Argentine character . . . a certain stoic resignation toward violent death, which makes of it one of life’s inherent misfortunes” (Fa­cundo 127). On the other hand, the Argentine territory is so vast as to permit inhabitants to spread out at such distances that social intercourse is, at best, infrequent, except among members of relatively small family groups.11 One sees clearly as one reads Sarmiento’s text that he has a certain respect—almost admiration—for those who inhabit Argentina’s vast interior, but he also feels that the attitudes and habits they have necessarily developed living in those conditions militate against the very possibility of civilization, that is, the kind of life that arises as persons come together and begin to develop complex social structures of government, education, and commerce. He describes the social development and education of the young in the following terms:

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The children exercise their strength and for pleasure teach themselves to handle the lariat and bolas, with which they unceasingly harass and chase calves and goats; when they become riders, and this happens immediately after learning to walk, they do some chores on horseback. . . . [W]hen puberty arrives, they dedicate themselves to breaking wild colts. . . . With first youth comes complete independence and idleness. Here begins the gaucho’s public life, I will call it, because his education has now ended. (Facundo 134–35) The irony and poignancy of the final line here is inescapable. “The gaucho’s public life,” that is, one must suppose, the life the gaucho spends in the agora, the space in which Greek citizens conducted the affairs of the polis, except, again ironically, that the agora is the Pampa. Given the complete lack of social interaction, the gaucho’s need to take matters of justice, normally in the form of vengeance, into his own hands, social existence properly so called, civilization, is either at its most rudimentary or nonexistent. The gaucho enters public life at precisely the point at which he has mastered the craft of personal, physical survival, on which he cannot count because he can at any moment be overwhelmed by the physical conditions of his existence. When Sarmiento asserts that Juan Manuel de Rosas has brought the culture of the Argentine interior to Buenos Aires, his point is that Rosas is subverting the kind of life that can and had once existed in the city, civilized life, with the values and traditions of the Argentine interior, that is, with the rule of the caudillo, the strong, charismatic, often utterly ruthless leader of informal armies, which were, for Sarmiento, barbarian hordes. Thus newly independent Argentina found itself in the grip of the arbitrary rule of men, not of law. Again, such a situation not only impedes but also actively destroys civilization. So dire is the situation in Sarmiento’s eyes that he looks to Rosas being cast from power not by any properly political process but by another caudillo, “the boleador, the one-armed [General] Paz” (Facundo 147). Sarmiento’s assessment of Argentina’s situation stirs a profound pessimism, as it recalls for him life in the Near and Middle East,

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where he sees peoples and cultures that in thousands of years have not, by his criteria, reached levels of civilization comparable to those in Europe. The primitive life of peoples, the eminently barbarous and static life, the life of Abraham,[12] which is that of today’s Bedouin, appears in the Argentine countryside. . . . The Arab tribe wandering through the Asiatic solitudes lives united under the command of a tribal or warrior chief; society exists[, as does] . . . religious belief . . . and tribal organization. But progress is stifled because there cannot be progress without permanent possession of the land, without the city. . . . Moral progress, the culture of intelligence, neglected in the Arab or Tartar tribe, is not only neglected here but also impossible. (Facundo 132–33) In his Viajes por Europa, Africa y América, Sarmiento, during a visit to Algeria, reflects on the civilization of the Europeans (French) and the barbarism of the Arabs. Today [this land] does not produce sufficient burrs and thorns to feed a few herds of camels and goats. It is impossible to imagine a barbarism more destructive than that of this people; the rivers that descend from the mountains, far from fertilizing the plains, serve only to turn them into infected swamps; the Arab does not take possession of the land, and one can be thankful if in the area of Oran he throws a few handfuls of grain on the earth, which is more scratched than plowed, and letting it grow in the carelessly prepared soil along with the seed scrub and tuberous plants. Skin diseases gnaw at this people as filth riddles their clothes, and in the midst of this physical misery in which they flounder and the moral degradation of their spirit they harbor a sublime disdain and undying hatred for Europeans. Never have barbarianism and fanaticism managed to penetrate more deeply into the heart of a people and hardened it so that it resists any improvement. Between Europeans and Arabs, there is not now and never will be the possibility of amalgamation or assimilation; the one or the other people will have to disappear,

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retreat or dissolve itself; and I love civilization too much not to desire right now the definitive triumph in Africa of the civilized peoples.13 These complex passages raise numerous issues, most important among them the relation between culture or civilization and race and the fitness of a people for becoming a nation. In general, the contemporary reader would, we assume, like to give Sarmiento the benefit of the doubt by accepting his view, derived from Montesquieu but expressed in more absolute terms, that environments establish near-unalterable conditions that all but determine race and culture. One thus avoids having to conclude that Sarmiento holds straightforwardly racist views. But black letter text seems not to permit this interpretation, suggesting that Sarmiento is a person of his time, as are all of us. He distinguishes among three stages of human development, two of which seem to have a clear racial or racelike distinction. Thus, he writes, “Savages all have skulls of the same size, and they all think the same; that is to say, they do not think; rather, they feel. In the state of barbarism, skulls begin to differentiate; and opinions begin to arise, which is to say, some [individuals] begin to have doubts.”14 Sarmiento thinks of and refers to the natives of the Americas as “savages,” lumping them into the category “the copper-colored race,” of which he claims South America has three main branches, the Quichua or Peruvian, the Guaraní or Missionary, the Pampa or Auracanian (Razas 36–46 passim). The conjunction of references to skull size, race, and savages marks Sarmiento as holding that the indigenous people of the Americas are, in general, savages and, as such, not fit or prepared for civilization: they feel but do not think. Yet Sarmiento differentiates between their suitability for civilization and becoming part of a nation, claiming that the Quichua had long been subject to the Inca and were thus accustomed to submission, whereas the Gua­ raní tended naturally toward submissiveness and therefore were also barbarian, whereas the Arucanian were, of the three groups, “more indomitable, that is to say, more stubborn animals, less apt for European civilization and assimilation” (Razas 46). Fundamentally, then, Sarmiento regards the indigenous peoples of South America as constituting a major barrier to civilizing the

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continent and creating republics, which by their demand for citizenship require thinking and educated peoples. If we regard Sarmiento as representing received opinion throughout the Southern Cone at mid-nineteenth century, and one can support doing so with citations from the works, for instance, of José Victorino Lastarria and Juan Bautista Alberdi, among others, then one sees several important shifts in attitudes toward the indigenous, shifts one can attribute to continuing distance from and sympathy with but greater experience and familiarity with the indigenous peoples. For Las Casas and his contemporaries, including Sepúlveda, the indigenous were barbarians, that is, not Christian, and, moreover, they were regarded as a relatively undifferentiated group, thought of and treated simply as the other, the not-Christian. By the mid-nineteenth century, three hundred years later, the European, criollo, and mestizo experience with the indigenous had been sufficiently extensive to permit and even require thinkers to differentiate among the various indigenous groups, even if those thinkers continued to regard the indigenous as barbarians. However, the sense of the term barbarian had also shifted, as we can see in the foregoing quotations from Sarmiento. Now the contrasting term is civilized, and the foundational content of the contrast has to do with wellsprings of action—feeling for the barbarian, reason for the civilized—and with the fitness and ca­pacity for education. One assumes that when Sarmiento asserts that barbarians feel, he means that they react instinctually to the world and thus live caught up in the present, whereas the rational or thinking person suspends immediate responses in favor of foresightful, goal-oriented, and nonviolent responses to situations.15

National Identity

Sarmiento’s view on the capacity of the indigenous for education differs from that of Las Casas and some of Sarmiento’s own direct and near-contemporaries. As we shall see, Las Casas’s position regarding the evangelization of the barbarian indigenous indicates that he regards them as fully capable of education and, as such, as becoming full members both of the church and of civilized, law-governed

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society. Many nineteenth-century pensadores (thinkers), notably Simón Bolívar and Justo Sierra, held this position as well, arguing that the exigency of the Spanish-speaking Latin American nations was education for all classes but especially for indigenous peoples,16 even while holding that the indigenous of the Americas were not, either through lack of sufficient time or inherent deficiency, prepared for or capable of the education that would allow them to be fully participating citizens of a republic. Sarmiento’s position seems harsher, more definite, namely, that the indigenous with whom he had experience simply were not sufficiently educable to emerge completely from barbarism.17 Sarmiento’s views on race do not stop with his contrast between the indigenous and the European, for, as the result of slavery, one also finds black Africans in the Americas, a group Sarmiento values more highly than the indigenous, though in one passage he describes them as “human mules, that beast on two legs, who stimulates himself with the rhythm of his voice.”18 Acknowledging that blacks had under certain circumstances been friends with and loyal to their criollo masters, he nonetheless sees them contributing to the problems of creating civilized society: “[We] have been presented with the problem of seeing what would be produced from a mixture of pure Spaniards, as a European element, with a strong sprinkling of the negro race, the whole diluted with an enormous mass of indigenous, prehistoric men of limited intelligence, all three elements lacking experience of the political liberties that constitute modern government” (Razas 52). Arising from this conundrum of race and racial amalgamation, for Sarmiento, is the further problem of national identity, inasmuch as the latter is conceptually different from race, even though race and nationality have tended historically to go together, at least in Europe, whose nations remain for Sarmiento and his fellow pensadores the models toward which they look, even if, again in their opinion, they fail to provide full examples of functioning republics.19 On the complex of issues that race and nationality raise, Sarmiento questions in the following manner: Perhaps this is the first time we are going to ask ourselves who we were when they called us Americans, and who we are when

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we call ourselves Argentines. Are we Europeans? So many copper-colored faces disprove this to us! Are we indigenous? Scornful smiles from our light-skinned women give us perhaps the only response. Mixed? No one wants to be that, and there are thousands who want to be called neither Americans nor Argentineans. Are we a nation? A nation without an amalgam of accumulated materials, with neither adaptation nor foundation? Argentines? It would be good to know on what basis and since when. (Raza 23) The most poignant fact about this passage is that Sarmiento wrote it late in life, more than thirty-five years after having published Fa­cundo and fifteen to twenty years after he had served as Argentina’s president. Sarmiento began his analysis of his nation’s problems by pointing to the challenges posed by its physical environment, by the want of population, and especially the proper kind of population to ameliorate the immenseness of the Argentine territory, which made of its interior cities mere occasional dots on a landscape that could not be apprehended and therefore could not be managed and that, therefore, gave rise to life exigencies inimical to Sarmiento’s concept of civilization. In this vastness arose peoples who were estranged from one another, groups with different values who regarded one another with suspicion and contempt. To be sure, by Sarmiento’s time all were properly denominated “Americans” so far as their geographic location was concerned, and in that sense Argentines were Argentines, but, ultimately, that sense provides for Sarmiento and his fellow thinkers only the coldest comfort. They lack a clear sense of who they are, what they can be, and where they fit into world history. This feeling had beset them for some time. One finds Esteban Echeverría expressing it in 1846: For us there is neither law, nor rights, nor fatherland, nor liberty. . . . Wandering and exiled, we pass like the children of Israel in search of the promised land. Here we have the inheritance that has fallen to us by chance: Gloom, humiliation, servitude. Such is they patrimony that the revolution and the fruit of our heroic fathers’ blood and sacrifices have bequeathed us.20

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Sarmiento makes the point slightly differently: “The patria [fatherland] is not just an expanse of land that we have made the exclusive patrimony of one family, tribe, or people, it is a feeling common to the present generation to transmit it to future generations with the memory, love and the tie that unite us to the past” (Razas 138).21 Barbarism, then, is Argentina’s besetting condition, deriving both from its geography and from its resultant population, indigenous, European, and mixed, and for the Argentine pensador the issue is how to ameliorate that condition. The “Generation of 37,” of which Echeverría, Alberdi, and Sarmiento were leading members, argued that Argentina could overcome the barbarism they identified only through Europeanization. For Alberdi, the solution was to attract Protestant Europeans to Argentina, primarily by changing the constitution to be more accepting of them and by waylaying them as they made their way to California in pursuit of gold. For Sarmiento, one created change through education but education in the European tradition, which, one suspects, he regarded as the only education properly understood. Echeverría, although he never formulates a catchphrase on the issue, advocated education as well, arguing that inadequately educated persons ought to be held in a state of tutelage until such time as they demonstrated that they could exercise the responsibilities of republican citizenship.22

Conclusion

As we have seen, and as one might expect, relations with the barbarian became more problematic, more complex in the three hundred years that separated Las Casas and Sarmiento. The very shape of the world had changed. For Las Casas’s generation, the New World natives were a rather undifferentiated “other,” about whom it tended to argue in totalized terms. Race was not an important category for them. The Indians were not Christians; hence they were barbarians. How does one deal with them? For Sepúlveda and his party, one evangelized them in any manner one could, even at sword point. If they resisted, they immediately became the enemy and were

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thus subject to all possible sanctions, including enslavement and death. For the mature Las Casas, the Las Casas who had renounced his encomienda and become “Protector of the Indians,” the Indians were, to be sure, the barbarian other, but they were also “all human beings . . . who have and hold their realms, their lands, by natural law and by the law of nations. They owe allegiance to no one higher than themselves, outside themselves, neither de jure nor de facto. . . . They are of the fourth kind of infidels [faraway nonhostile pagans]” (The Only Way 66). How are they to be evangelized, that is, to be brought into the Christian community? One way, one way only, of teaching a living faith, to everyone, everywhere, always, was set by Divine Providence: the way that wins the mind with reasons, that wins the will with gentleness, with invitation. . . . Christ gave his apostles permission and power to preach the gospel to those willing to hear it, and that only! Not power to punish the unwilling by any force, pressure, or harshness. . . . He decreed punishment in eternity, not time. (The Only Way 77) Sarmiento and his contemporaries, with the perspective of three centuries of European experience with the indigenous peoples and with emerging nineteenth-century scientific perspectives, tend to view them in differentiated racial terms. However, interestingly, education is one of the keys for both men, even though Sarmiento, ultimately, is less optimistic that education will be sufficient to resolve the challenges of national identity and forging peoples. Las Casas’s long experience of the New World indigenous peoples brought him to see them as fully human and thus due all the respect and rights due all humankind. His solution for their transformation was to educate them, to behave toward them as he understood himself to have been commanded to comport himself toward his brothers and sisters. Sarmiento’s attitude toward the barbarian is not so different, although the challenge he sets for himself is more complex. Argentines refer to Sarmiento as the education president, and he is famous for his motto, “To govern is to educate.” But his views on

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education are not simplistic. Although an autodidact, he nonetheless recognizes that education is not only civilizing, but that civilization underlies it, makes it possible, and, consequently, it occurs, normally, only where the conditions for civilization prevail: “A man cannot arrive at the fullness of his moral and intellectual development but through education, and society fulfills the father through the education of his son” (Travels in the U.S. 175). Moreover, the conditions for civilization include both moral and political consciousness of a certain sort. In one rather surprising passage but one that is coherent with his other statements on barbarism, Sarmiento states: In the United States, European immigration is a barbaric element. Who would have believed it! Except for natural exceptions, the European—Irishman or German, Frenchman or Spaniard— comes from the neediest classes, is usually ignorant, and is not accustomed to the republican practices of the land. . . . And so it is that foreigners in the United States are the burden of scandal and the leaven of corruption . . . [in] that nation which for so long has been educated in the practices of liberty. (Travels in the U.S. 191)23 For Sarmiento, creating a nation from the potential constitutive elements one finds in Argentina is a long-term, cultural, social, and political challenge. One has first to confront the immensity of the territory and invest it with the infrastructure by which people can easily and rapidly communicate goods and ideas; one has to create schools by virtue of which the population can become literate and thereby fit to participate as citizens in a republic; one has to eliminate the barbarism of past political practice; one has really to come to grips with the indigenous and not simply dismiss them as various kinds of “savages.” One has, finally, to begin creating in the population a sense of “the fatherland,” the sense by virtue of which diverse persons can come to regard others as neighbors, not foreigners or enemies. Las Casas’s path was more direct, but he and his contemporaries were not able to follow it to the end, nor have subsequent generations been able to do so. The path of Sarmiento

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and his contemporaries is longer and narrower, for it is a necess­ arily secular path, one that requires humans themselves to create the bonds of civilization through which we can relate to one another as sharers of a common humanity.

Life and Works

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88) was arguably the most politically involved and influential of all nineteenth-century South American pensadores. His influence on Latin American literature, education, and social and political thought has been widespread and profound. Although Argentines often refer to Sarmiento as the “schoolmaster president,” scholars of Latin American literature regard his Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism as the work with which properly Latin American literature begins. Born in the capital city of the state of San Juan to parents of the most modest means, he received his education from his parents and an uncle, ultimately assuming responsibility for his own intellectual development, teaching himself, among other things, French and English, which served him well during his extensive travels, some during a period of political exile, the first of which came in 1831, when he first went to Chile. During his second exile, which began in 1840, Sarmiento again returned to Chile, where the Chilean intellectual establishment under the weighty influence of Andrés Bello recognized his literary and intellectual talent and included him as one of its members. He was thus among the founding members of the National University of Chile’s Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, in which c­ apacity he focused on issues of education. He had already published his most influential work, Facundo, which emanated from and helped con­ soli­ date opposition to the longtime Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, who was finally driven from office in 1852, when Sarmiento was again able to return to Argentina. He then served in a number of influential political positions, including that of governor of San Juan and special envoy to the United States. He was elected to a six-year term as president of Argentina, in which position he served from 1868 to 1874.

146  Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey Further Reading

Criscenti, Joseph T., ed. Sarmiento and His Argentina. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993. Donghi, Tulio Halperín. Sarmiento, Author of a Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Obras completas de Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. 52 vols. Introd. Natalio R. Botana. San Justo, BA: Universidad Nacional de la Matanza, 2001. _____. Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. Trans. Kathleen Ross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. _____. Recollections of a Provincial Past. Trans. Elizabeth Garrells and Asa Zatz, ed. Elizabeth Garrels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. _____. Sarmiento’s Travels in the United States in 1847. Trans. Michael Aaron Rockland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. _____. Viajes por Europa, Africa y América 1845–1847, y diario de gastos. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica de Argentina, 1993. Sorensen Goodrich, Diana. Facundo and the Construction of Argentine Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Notes

  1. Of course, for Las Casas and his contemporaries, much if not all the content of the concept “civilized” was included in the concept “Christian.” Nonetheless, that the two concepts had by the nineteenth century come to be rather more distinct suggests a significant cultural shift over the course of three hundred years, as one might expect.  2. Aristotle, Politics, I, 5.  3. Ibid., I, 6. One finds in these passages one of the more vexing conflations of terms at the heart of Aristotle’s moral theory, namely, the sense of “virtue” as capacity, ability, or power and its sense as excellence, that is, as a (morally) praiseworthy development of a power or ca­pacity of which, for humans, the highest is rationality. Because statecraft or politics is the highest application or use of practical rationality and inasmuch as subduing or at least protecting oneself from peoples thought to

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be hostile to one’s polis (or culture) is an essential element of effective statecraft, one can properly evaluate the relative strength and (moral) praiseworthiness of two societies based on their success or lack thereof in war with one another. This is the reason why in a later passage in the Politics Aristotle asserts that enslavement by law, which normally derives from capture in war, is not a simple matter of justification as a mere function of might.  4. Ibid.   5.  For a direct comparison of Sepúlveda’s language with Aristotle’s, see Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Tratado sobre las justas causas de las guerra contra los indios, ed. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and Manuel García Pelayo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1941), 20–23. In The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 109–18, Anthony Pagden writes definitively about the circumstances of the publication of this book and of the author’s intentions, as well as the reasons that the majority of Spanish intellectuals and theologians rejected its views.  6. Translated, edited, and annotated by Stafford Poole, C.M. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). Hereafter cited as Defense.   7. Las Casas begins his treatise on evangelization, The Only Way, with this unequivocal assertion: “They [the Indians] are all human beings. Their minds are very quick, alive, capable, clear.” Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Only Way, ed. Helen Rand Parish, trans. Francis Patrick Sullivan, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 63. Hereafter cited as The Only Way. This point is important for the subsequent discussion in this chapter.   8. The Spanish crown at this time insisted that the nobility of the Aztec and Inca societies be treated as such by the conquistadors, inasmuch as the crown had an interest in defending the divine right of kings, which it attributed at least in relative terms to the nobility of those socie­ ties. This regard for the New World nobility is at least one of the reasons the conquistadors took so seriously the deaths of, for example, Mon­ tezuma and Atahualpa.   9.  Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism, in Nineteenth-Century Nation Building and the Latin American

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Intellectual Tradition: A Reader, ed. and trans. Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007), 126. Facundo hereafter cited as Facundo; Nineteenth-Century Nation Building hereafter cited as Nation Building. 10. As one reads Sarmiento on Argentina’s natural environment one cannot help but recall Hume’s discussion of the conditions under which morality arises. Hume argues that only in circumstances of moderate scarcity do systems of justice and fairness arise; if the environment is overly lush, then systems of distributive justice are not necessary; but if conditions are so extreme as to prohibit all but the most hardscrabble existence, then one is trapped in a Hobbesian state of nature, and terms of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness serve no use. See David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004). 11. One is reminded of the stories of Daniel Boone, who, the myth goes, moved whenever anyone settled within five miles of him because he felt hemmed in. In Travels in the United States in 1847, Sarmiento makes the following telling observation, which tends to fly in the face of a strict interpretation of his geographic theory of barbarism: “The fatal error of the Spanish colonization of South America, the deep wound which has condemned present generations to inertia and backwardness, was in the system of land distribution. In Chile [and other Spanish colonies], great concessions of land, measuring from one hill to another and from the side of a river to the banks of an arroyo, were given to the conquistadors. The captains established earldoms for themselves, while their soldiers, fathers of the share cropper, that worker without land who multiplies without increasing the number of his buildings, sheltered themselves in the shade of their improvised roofs. The passion to occupy lands in the name of the king drove men to dominion over entire districts, which put great distances between landowners so that after three centuries the intervening land still has not been cleared. The city, for this reason, has been suppressed in this vast design, and the few villages which have been created since the conquest have been decreed by presidents.” Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Sarmiento’s Travels in the United States in 1847, trans. Michael Aaron Rockland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 164; our emphasis. Hereafter cited as Travels in the U.S. Ironically, this passage suggests that Sarmiento was at least sympathetic

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to the version of the “black legend of Spain” developed and promulgated by José Victorino Lastarria, Francisco Bilbao, and Esteban Echeverría. That is, all claim that certain colonial policies are the source of social and political pathologies present in the newly independent Spanish-speaking Latin American nations. 12. Compare this passage with Facundo, 134, where Sarmiento comments on the Abrahamic practice of the Christian religion in the isolated regions of the Argentine pampa. 13. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Viajes por Europa, Africa y América 1845–1847, y diario de gastos (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica de Argentina, 1993), 185. 14.  Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonís de las razas in Ameríca, in Obras completas de Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, 52 vols., 37:100. Hereafter cited as Razas. All translations by the authors. 15.  But Sarmiento is conflicted because he also clearly sees the issues at stake in moral terms: “Where it [morality] is imperfect with regard to human intercourse—that is, with regard to those apart from us, the neighbor, the foreigner, and the enemy, classifications which distinguish three degrees of separation—revelation complements it. Legally we are not bound to our neighbors; the foreigner is the material from which slaves have always been made; and with the enemy all human concern ceases and death is dramatically meted out to him as quickly as possible, without remorse. When a man is called ‘enemy’ he stops being part of our species. Neither law nor religion has been able to this day to do anything to counteract the effects of this classification” (Travels in the U.S. 172–73). One sees Sarmiento joining Aristotle and Sepúlveda with these claims, suggesting that “enemy” is conceptually antecedent to “barbarian.” The issue of where “race” stands conceptually in relation to those two concepts remains open. As a specification of “the other,” “foreigner” may well stand closer to “race,” so that the issue whether the foreign race is an enemy remains to be decided in specific instances. Further on, Sarmiento writes, “If one part of the Union defends and maintains slavery it is because in that part the imprisoned, hunted, weak, and ignorant foreigner of color is in the category of enemy, and therefore morality cannot help him” (175). Where “savage” might stand in Sarmiento’s conceptual space is also indeterminate, except that the “savage” is taken for one who is inimically opposed to civilization, either through constitution or through disposition.

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16. At the beginning of Spanish America’s republican life, Bolívar writes, “That all men are born with equal rights to society’s goods is a notion sanctioned by the majority of learned people, as also is the notion that not all men are born equally capable of obtaining every social status. . . . From this derives the effective difference observed among individuals of even the most liberally established society. If the principle of political equality is generally recognized, no less so is that of physical and moral inequality. Nature makes men unequal in ability, temperament, strengths, and character. The laws correct this difference, because they place the individual in society so that education, industry, the arts, the services, the virtues might give him an artificially constructed equality, properly called political and social equality.” Bolívar, “Address to the Angostura Congress,” in Nation Building, 9–10. In a similar vein, Sierra writes, “To convert the native into a social asset . . . , convert him into the principal settler on an intensively cultivated land; blend his spirit and ours through unity of language, of aspirations, of loves and hates, of mental and moral judgments; let shine before him the divine ideal of a fatherland for everyone, of a great and happy fatherland; create in sum the national soul—this is the goal assigned to the effort of the future, that is the program of national education.” Justo Sierra, “The Present Era,” from The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, in Nation Building, 289. 17.  Juan Bautista Alberdi is yet harsher: “Who knows a gentleman among us who boasts of being a pure Indian? Who would not a thousand times rather see his sister or daughter married to an English shoemaker than to an Araucanian nobleman? In America everything not European is barbarian. There is no other division than the following: 1. The indige­ nous, that is to say, the savage; 2. The European, that is to say, we who were born in America and speak Spanish. . . . There is no other division of American man.” Foundations for the Political Organization of the Republic of Argentina, in Nation Building, 204; hereafter cited as Foundations. See also William H. Katra, The Argentine Generation of 1837: Echeverría, Alberdi, Sarmiento, Mitre (Madison, WI/Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1996), 163–67. 18.  Viajes por Europea, Africa y América, 58. 19. In fact, they look to Europe for theories of republicanism and citizenship but to the United States for an example of republican practice. On the other hand, in America, Lastarria argues that Europe is wedded to

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monarchy, while America is inherently republican and, in that regard, far in advance of Europe. See José Victorino Lastarria, America, in Nation Building, 94–98. 20.  Esteban Echeverría, The Socialist Doctrine of the Association of May, in Nation Building, 150. 21.  Raza, 138. This passage puts one in mind of Lincoln’s appeal to the “mystic chords of memory” in his First Inaugural Address, to which Echeverría, Alberdi, and Sarmiento clearly feel the Argentine cannot appeal. 22. In The Socialist Doctrine of the Association of May, Echeverría expresses his position about democracy and citizenship in highly idealized language derived from the French Revolution regarding the brotherhood of all men. One searches in vain for language specifically referring to race, although he does argue that those who for want of education, lack of character, or sheer laziness do not fulfill the conditions necessary to exercise independent judgment must remain in tutelage; that is, although they retain the rights that pertain to being human, they may not, because they have not positioned themselves to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship in a republic. He also argues concomitantly that the republic has an obligation to support individuals in tutelage in their effort to become citizens. Nation Building, 166–72 passim. 23.  In the immediately preceding paragraph, Sarmiento also asserts that barbarism could reassert itself in the western part of the United States if not continually revitalized by acculturated immigrants. One also finds in this passage agreement with Alberdi’s claim that “To govern is to populate,” by which Alberdi means populate with the right kind of immigrant. See, e.g., Foundations, 207–11.

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Justo Sierra and the Forging of a Mexican Nation O scar R . M a rtí

. . . crear, en suma, el alma nacional, esta es la meta asignada al esfuerzo del porvenir, ese es el programa de la educación nacional. Justo Sierra, La evolución política del pueblo mexicano

How do you forge a people? Forges conjure the image of raw ore mixed in hot cauldrons where it melts and loses its identity, is poured into a mold, and becomes a new alloy: Out of the old, something new. Forging a people is all about changing identities, about losing an old and creating a new one. This is the stuff of nation building. It brings to mind an image of violence and destruction, of the conqueror, the soldier. But forging people also evokes the image of the statesman, of someone sensitive to the multiplicity and variegated nature of human beings, of one who wants to create a nation and make One out of many by reason or persuasion. This is the image that befits Justo Sierra. A major figure of the nineteenth-century Mexican intellectual and political landscape,1 Sierra, historian, educator, and legislator, 152

Justo Sierra and the Forging of a Mexican Nation  153

is at the forefront of an influential nation-building project, positivism—a philosophical program that posited a science of society whose task was to induct from facts the sociological laws that could help frame those governmental policies that advance national unity, achieve stability, and promote changes for the benefit of all. This was a modern version of the forging project. In a way, the history of Mexico is an epic of failed forging projects. The Encuentro, the conquest, colonial Nueva España, the early republic, were the stage for unsuccessful efforts at nation building, for they all ended in insurrections, revolutions, and invasions. Why the intractability? Why has Mexico been so difficult to forge as a nation? There were many causes: internally, ethnic2 and linguistic diversity,3 shifting political alliances, and economic difficulties pulled the country apart; and externally, plundering by Spain, France, and the United States exacerbated this fragmentation. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, with Mexico economically in shambles, smarting from the huge territorial losses during the Mexican American War, and recently rid of the French intervention, it became clear to Mexicans like Sierra that national unity was imperative.4 To survive, a modern economic base had to be built, one that would allow the nation to overcome foreign threats and surmount internal division. But to achieve the desired order and progress, they felt, Mexico would have to reinvent itself—to forge anew. For Sierra and for most Mexican positivists, the backward Spanish institutions and ways of thinking imposed during the colonial period persisted well after independence, keeping Mexico divided— politically into liberals and conservatives and ethnically into criollos or creoles, mestizos, and Indians, each with their own allegiances. To save the nation, a break with the past was needed; political and ethnic differences had to be overcome; and everyone had to be assimilated into a common culture and a common language and be subject to the same laws. Positivists argued that the first step to accomplish this integration was education, an education that pointed to a common past, instilled civic virtues, and taught the means for achieving a consensus of opinion about solving the nation’s pressing problems. This chapter examines in some detail Sierra’s views on positivism as evidenced in his historical writings, his conception of a science

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of history and the lessons derived thereof, his efforts in favor of a popular education, and finally his proposal for a national university. I intend to put in relief how his evolutionary positivism informed and defined his forging project, justified some of his political views, and suggested educational reforms as a major resolution of social problems and to hint at the pervasiveness of his influence in contemporary Mexican social policy.

Sierra, Positivism, and History

Positivism was a worldview framed as a philosophy that claimed to explain the enormous changes that industry, powered by capital and directed by science, had effected on the social character, economic power, and political bases of nineteenth-century Europe. In Latin America many intellectuals were convinced that positivism offered not only an explanation for the many pressing social, economic, and political problems of the region, but pointed to new and more effective solutions.5 Like them, Sierra was well acquainted with positivism, its influence being most obvious in his historical works.6 “The science of history,” he writes in the preface to Historia de la antigüedad, “consists of the investigation of the human events that have happened over the course of centuries and the general laws that govern them.” To build the edifice of science, be points out, “a constant investigation of the causes of events is necessary, that is, to find what are the general facts that encompass the relations of phenomena. . . . In history, these higher generalizations can be reduced to the laws of progress and of evolution.”7 Understanding these laws would lead to an understanding of Mexico’s past and present and aid it on the road to progress. The idea that history is a science was fundamental to European positivism. Positivism was first formulated by Auguste Comte, who had set himself the task of synthesizing the philosophical and scientific achievements of the previous centuries in order to apply them to, and improve, the human condition: “Science aims at prediction; and prediction at action,” he wrote.8 For Comte, all knowledge was strictly derivable from sensory experience and thus open to public

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verification. That left no room for religious superstitions, speculations, or abstractions. The subject matter of science encompassed not just the natural but also the social sciences. When scientific methods of investigation are applied to the data of history, they yield the laws that govern human conduct—laws that are both an index of how far a people or a nation have progressed and tools for accelerating that progress. Differences about what constitutes progress and how it comes about gave rise to a second version, to Spencerian or evolutionary positivism, often called evolutionism or social Darwinism.9 Comte had originally asserted that the progress of individuals or socie­ties, even a philosophy, stemmed from the application of a mental template that organizes knowledge hierarchically, from the most abstract to the most concrete, and manifests itself in three discrete historical stages: the mythical, the metaphysical, and the positive. Individuals pass through three stages of mental development: at first they perceive the world as animistic, as ruled by the whims of supernatural beings with human traits; as they mature, they now conceive the world as governed by abstract powers inferable from some ultimate reasons or goals ascribed to the universe; full maturity imposes phenomenal facts as the only form of knowledge, expressible as statistical relations and verifiable by experience. Herbert Spencer, reacting to Comte’s collectivism10—that is, to the primacy of the social whole over the individual—posited instead a slow, gradual development or evolution from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.11 As individuals struggle for survival, they must adapt, else they perish. In this gladiatorial struggle, only the fittest survive—fittest being equated with specific traits such as aggressiveness, strength, cunning, even the capacity to reason or to construct a science. Both forms of positivism claimed to be the most accurate accounts of the human enterprise and set forth competing explanations for the successes and failures of societies. Comtian positivists argued that social progress was a matter of adopting the proper mentality: Societies were backward because its members saw events in reality as anthropomorphically linked to each other, for instance, through prayers; or at the next stage, as results of causes to be subsumed to

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rational explanations in terms of abstractions. For evolutionary positivists, social development was a matter of progressive adaptation to the environment and the survival of the fittest. As organisms—be they single-celled or social structures—they encounter radical environmental changes that can cause their demise unless they acquire or develop characteristics that allow them to cope. Survival of a species will now depend on the ability of those organisms that adapted to transmit the acquired characteristics to their offspring. Likewise, societies evolve as they struggle against natural disasters, famine, or each other, develop coping techniques, and teach them to their descendants. In this struggle, the fit survive, and the fittest emerge as the dominant group. Both Comte and Spencer cast a wide net over historical socie­ ties and concluded that European societies, because of their scientific and industrial development, were the paragon of progress. A distinction has to be made here between two forms of ­nineteenth-century evolutionism: Spencer’s and Darwin’s. Both regard the natural world as an environment with limited resources. In its struggle for survival, an organism has to contend with two external pressures: competition from other organisms and environmental changes. Survival depends on an organism’s having a repertory of skills that help it both prevail over other organisms and adapt to change. According to Spencerian evolutionism, these advantageous survival skills are acquired through competition. Repetition of these actions develops the corresponding organs, a development that is eventually passed on to the species. Evolution is then an inheritance of complexity. In Darwinian evolution, acquired characteristics play a minimal role in the process. Evolution is a chance process: in any large pool of organisms some will develop accidental mutations— genetic alterations that are passed on to the offspring—that might or might not be beneficial. The genetic alterations that happen to help increase a species’ ability to reproduce and increase its numbers are advantageous to survival. This process of natural selection favors the species that has suffered genetic alterations that, as the environment changes, allows for reproduction in equal or greater numbers. In fact, another change in the environment could render the originally beneficial alteration deleterious to the same species’ reproductive abilities.

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Most nineteenth-century historical and sociological accounts were mainly Spencerian. Darwinian evolutionary explanations seemed inadequate for historical writing, since they showed biological change as mechanical and nonpurposive; and a history that narrates human events as a sequence of chance happenings is no history at all. Spencerian evolution considered not just the biological world but also human social organizations as consequences of the struggles of past generations. Sociology and history showed a purpose and a direction, because people learned from individual and collective experiences. In Mexico, social or Comtian positivism had been introduced into political life in 1867 by Gabino Barreda as an educational program to stimulate the development of a scientific temper that would break the stranglehold scholastic philosophy had on the national psyche, solve the pressing political, social, and economic problems, and bring the nation to modernity.12 It attracted mostly prominent well-educated, liberal-minded individuals who regarded Catholicism as the consequence of an obsolete mental stage to be overcome by developing a scientific mind. These individuals were concerned not just with developments in the sciences but also with social issues and discussed them in newspapers such as La Libertad, literary journals, and learned societies such as the Asociación Metodófila.13 However, because of Comte’s injunctions about participation in anything other than true positivist governments, they never tried to form political parties or took an active part in the government, in spite of the radical nature of some of their social positions. About a decade later, evolutionary positivism gained a greater influence among many intellectuals, including some of the power elites in the Porfirio Díaz government. They framed the nation’s social and political backwardness in biological and sociological terms and, less committed to radical governmental intervention on labor and education issues than Comtian positivists, argued that social change is a natural gradual process, a struggle for survival that produces the more naturally fit individuals. Though laissezfaire policy on social and economic issues would be the best road to progress, the proper government policies could always speed up the process by giving the up-and-coming fittest a helping hand. For

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them, the forging project was an evolutionary process, “red in tooth and claw,” in which the fittest would emerge from the struggle to give the nation its identity. Sierra’s positivism was more humanist. He first encountered positivism as a law student at the Colegio de San Ildefonso. President Benito Juárez’s educational reforms of 1867 had turned the college into a science-teaching school, the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, headed by Barreda. Sierra’s preference for literature and poetry made him averse to the scientism advocated there, but he eventually became convinced of the truth of Spencerian evolutionism. For me, there is no question that society is an organism that, though different from others, exhibits undeniable analogies with living organisms, for which Spencer calls it super organism. I find that Spencer’s system, which equates industry, commerce, and government with the organs of nutrition, circulation, and reproduction to higher animals, is true. . . . What is inarguable is that society, like any organism, is subject to the necessary laws of evolution which, essentially, consist of a double movement of integration and differentiation, in a march from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the incoherent to the coherent, from the indefinite to the definite. That is to say, that in every body, in every organism, as it increases its unity or integration, its parts become more differentiated, more specialized, and that this double movement consists of a perfecting of the organism, what in societies is called progress.14 Sierra’s preference for evolutionary positivism over Comte’s social positivism is puzzling, especially for a lawyer and a historian. Comte had laid the foundation of positivism in terms of historical explanations, whereas Spencer took biological explanations as paradigmatic. According to Comte, it is by examining the historical records that the scientist can discover the relevant social regularities called laws. Spencer, however, put evolutionism in a broader frame by insisting that the sociological laws that describe or predict people’s behavior are but instances of more general evolutionary laws already found in nature. Spencer considered history but a branch

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of sociology and subordinated historical style, anecdotal accounts, or empathy to the search for natural laws that describe the struggle for survival of social organisms. As Sierra acknowledged in Ancient History, “History is a developing sociological science.”15 Sierra also shared with Comtian positivists a disdain for philosophical speculation. He saw philosophy—which he equated with scholasticism—as a discourse about abstractions that were not verifiable by experience, and thus to be dismissed as nonsense, a dangerous nonsense for in appearing meaningful, it could be used as a persuasive political tool. But Sierra took pains to distance himself from Barreda and the Comtian positivists. Except for the Panegyric, he rarely mentioned Barreda’s influence. Perhaps he considered the Law of the Three Stages too metaphysical; perhaps evolutionary explanations were more convincing, especially since they relied on the kind of natural necessity assumed of physical events. Nevertheless, Comte’s influence is there, below the surface. For instance, Sierra’s stress on a lay, state education, with its Religion of the Motherland, echoes Comte’s Religion of Humanity, but with Mexican history as its catechism.16 As for Darwin, Sierra was well acquainted with his work,17 defending it and acknowledging its intellectual influence.18 In practice, however, Sierra’s historical accounts are consistently Spencerian, whether in the power of the environment and geography to shape the character of the native cultures, to develop Mexican political institutions, or in the assessment of future direction.

Sierra, Mexican History, and Identity

Asserting that history is a science was, in Mexico, a radical position. Since the conquest, one of the traditional functions of historical writings had been to justify or favor one political view or another: The chroniclers that narrated the Hispanization of Tenochtitlan interpreted events that led to the founding of Nueva España as signs of a divine providence or proofs of royal wisdom.19 Colonial historians, with few exceptions, continued the practice of enumerating the good works of the church or the crown.20 After independence, conservatives and liberals used history to persuade the reader of the rightness

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of their cause. Conservatives flaunted the glories of a Hispanic past while minimizing the local population’s worth, be they criollos or mestizos.21 Liberals, while acknowledging the virtues of the mestizo, portrayed the criollos as the main architects of Mexico.22 Both regarded Indians with suspicion and considered their presence in the body politic problematic.23 While Sierra was not averse to the charms of historical persuasion, he believed that the main task of history as a science was to determine the social laws that accounted for Mexico’s backwardness and anarchy. But Sierra’s history was a positive science, one that would lead to action. It would help sociology to ascertain the best path to the nation’s evolution—one that, according to Comte, would reconcile orderly with progressive change. It was up to the positive historian to look for the nation’s identity in its articulated values and future aspirations—for its soul. This line of thought had been originally articulated by Barreda in his influential 1867 “Oración cívica.”24 In this speech Barreda argued that history was “a science, no doubt more difficult but subject, like the rest, to laws that rule it and allow the prediction of things to come and the explanation of those that have already passed.”25 The science of history showed that Mexico’s past was not a “collection of incoherent and odd happenings of interest only to the novelist and the curious” but that it followed a thread that, once understood, could guide the reader through “the intricate labyrinth of struggles and resistance, of advance and retrogression that have succeeded one another without quarter in this terrible but prolific period of our national life.” Its function was, he continued “one of presenting this series of apparently strange and exceptional events as a compact and homogeneous whole, as the necessary and fatal unfolding of a latent program.”26 This is the model that Sierra follows in Political Evolution. Unlike the earlier biography, Juárez, where he stresses individuals’ political motives and beliefs, here he concentrates on description and causal scrutiny, taking into account not just polities or ideology but also geographic, economic, and social factors. After a careful recounting and analyzing of four centuries of events, he makes an assessment of Mexico’s history to draw lessons for the future and concludes, “There is such a thing as a Mexican social evolution.”27

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Our progress, made up of foreign elements, reveals, on analysis, a reaction by our social body to those elements so as to assimilate and use them in developing and intensifying our life. Thus, our national identity, because of it contact with the world, has been enriched and made stronger. This is an incipient evolution, no doubt, for when we look back at our condition previous to the final third of the past century we see how far we have come, even in comparison to our neighbors’ progress.28 Of Mexico’s politics he does not make the same assessment. Mexico’s political evolution has been sacrificed in favor of other phases of its social evolution. To demonstrate this it would be enough to show this undeniable fact: there exists no single politi­ cal party, no living, organized group, gathered around a program and not around a man. How many steps have been taken in this direction, only to stop when meeting the government’s suspicions and general apathy: they were factitious attempts. The day a party manages to keep organized, the political evolution would retake its course, and the man, more necessary to democracies than to aristocracies, will eventually emerge—function creates the organ.29 To merge Mexico’s two uneven evolutions, political, economic, and social problems had to be resolved. Politically, Mexico needed a firm leadership to prevent it from returning to the chaos and anarchy that preceded the Reforma. This is Sierra’s justification of Porfirio Díaz‘s political life. Díaz, Sierra argued, had the necessary qualifications: steadfastness, political predictability, and a shared goal with the middle class. Further, under his leadership Mexico had enjoyed a relative peace and a modicum of economic and social progress for more than thirty years. But Díaz’s work was not done. To achieve economic self-sufficiency, Mexico needed to modernize. This could be done through Diaz’s policies of attracting foreign capital, European immigration, and social restructuring. To continue on the path of social progress, Sierra envisions a deeper and more radical change. He points out that at the root

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of Mexico’s problems are the idiosyncrasies and ways of thinking shaped by the inherited colonial institutions and customs. Entry into the modern world would require redefining Mexican identity. And that could only be accomplished by a thorough overhaul of the education system that would replace the teaching of religious dogma with that of the sciences. The new type of education would forge a new generation of productive, self-reliant citizens, a generation that would be in agreement about how to peacefully solve political, social, and economic problems.30 Function, again, creating the organ.

Sierra’s Popular Education Plan

Since the conquest, the Catholic Church held sway over education and had used it at first to convert the natives and later to cement loyalties and maintain its authority. This education served best those who could afford to send their sons to school. Women and the natives were excluded, the first because they were not deemed to need book learning to fulfill their role in society,31 the second because they were considered at the margins of barbarism.32 Education thus became a major factor in entrenching a rigid social stratification. The political authorities who benefited from the resulting stability rarely interfered with this monopoly—the expulsion of the Jesuits, in 1767, the only exception.33 At the primary and secondary levels, students were taught the basic skills and moral values necessary to become good Catholics and serve the crown. At the university level, church-run colleges and universities supplied the needed religious and lay professionals, the architects, lawyers, theologians, or bureaucrats of Nueva España.34 After independence, liberals and conservatives sparred over educational policy, the first proposing an increased government say on what should be taught by whom, the second resisting any liberal inroad to the traditional educational establishment.35 The result was largely a stalemate, and the system remained stagnant until the Reforma, when President Juárez called on Gabino Barreda to join a panel charged with formulating educational reforms. The outcome was the Ley Orgánica of 1867.36

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Barreda’s positivist proposal was indeed revolutionary, and it shook the foundations of the educational establishment. Its selling point was the promise of a new crop of scientifically minded citizens who could serve the nation better. The proposal called for the establishment of a system of technical schools, the Preparatorias, a college-level system of technical schools, that would ultimately set a uniform national curriculum. Applying Comte’s hierarchical account of education, Barreda proposed a plan of studies that stressed the sciences over the liberal arts. It eliminated the study of Latin, literature, rhetoric, music, and so on, from the curriculum, replacing them with mathematics, inductive logic, and the physical and biological sciences. The student would be taught first the more abstract sciences (astronomy, physics, and chemistry), then gradually introduced to the more specific ones (biology or sociology). Barreda saw this as a natural learning progression of the intellect, since it reflected the order in which Comte perceived each discipline as arriving at the positive stage. Predictably enough, the church opposed Barreda’s proposal because of its broad lay approach. Humanists and law students, a young Sierra among the latter, opposed it for its stress on the sciences. These pressures forced Barreda to compromise, and the Preparatoria plan was watered down to allow the teaching of some of the traditional humanities courses. Still, the Preparatoria attracted to its faculty some of the best talent, such as the newspaperman Ignacio Ramírez, the writer Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, and the at first reluctant poet and law student now turned historian Justo Sierra. It produced some outstanding students, among them the jurist Miguel S. Macedo and the economist José Limantour.37 Sierra’s plan of educational reforms was, in the broadest outline, a continuation of Barreda’s Preparatoria program. In his “Panegyric to Barreda,” a 1908 commemorative speech in which Sierra both praises and criticizes Barreda’s work, he acknowledges the wisdom of the older vision. Barreda’s whole ambition, Sierra tells us, was to “establish a national education. For this he created a kind of lay school. Only a lay school can realize a national education. Only such can respect every creed; be neutral before every philosophy. Only such can educate the Republic to have a respect for the highest

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freedom, the freedom of conscience. Only such can establish a religion compatible with every other one, for it is not transcendent, for it is uniquely humane: the Civil Religion, the love for institutions, the soul of the nation.”38 Why? Because only a lay education could truly function as an organ of the state. Through it, the state “goes on creating and maintaining a continuity between the present and the future—the continuity of the nation. Barreda desired to make in this educational establishment something like the nation’s brain trust. Those educated in it should be the ones who would closely influence Mexico’s destinies. For that end he wanted his school to be fundamentally, basically, lay.”39 As a congressman, as subsecretary, and as secretary of education, Sierra wielded more political power than Barreda ever did and was able to push further the positivist education program. Like Barreda’s program, Sierra’s plan called for a popular, scientific, lay, statefunded education. It was to be popular in that everyone, regardless of economic means, would have access to a primary and secondary education. It was to be scientific in that it stressed math and science in the curriculum. And it was lay, meaning neutral to any recognized religion except for idolatry.40 Unlike the Barreda program, Sierra’s did not offer a rigid educational curriculum, except for the teaching of basic Spanish language and quantitative skills and elements of science, with an emphasis on Mexican history and civics. And like Barreda’s, it did not allow the study of religion. Sierra argued that education was to be at the service of the state and its citizens, not of organized religious groups representing a fragment of the nation. When the church voiced its opposition, he fired back, pointing out that “now the Church claims what was lost; this monopoly she wishes for herself, when it cannot have it whole, wants it shared with the state[,] . . . the members of the ultramontane party[,] . . . which want and are succeeding in curtailing the teaching of science in order as to build over it the teaching of scholasticism. In other words, they want to destroy the lay state and win in the schools the grounds they lost in the world of action.”41 As early as 1870 Barreda himself had argued that education can “quickly erase race and origin differences among Mexicans by educating them the same way.”42 Sierra also believed that such

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homogenization was feasible. Being an organ of the state, his popular educational program would eliminate economic and social barriers by providing everyone with the wherewithal to integrate themselves into modern society and become productive. The nation would then gain the needed labor to become economically self-sufficient and strong enough to prevent inner fragmentation and foreign threats. The citizens would in turn enjoy the blessings of freedom and equality, regardless of social class or ethnicity. But could such a plan be carried out in spite of long-standing class and ethnic divisions? By the 1870s Mexican society, when measured by wealth and education, consisted of a ruling elite, a growing middle class, and a very large lower class. Ethnically, criollos formed most of the upper and middle classes, mestizos the middle and poorer classes, while the bulk of the lowest classes were Indians, belonging to the many ethnic groups native to Mexico. Geographically, the poorer classes lived in rural areas, while the upper and middle classes congregated around urban centers.43 Sierra’s educational plan, though claiming inclusiveness of all levels of society, aimed primarily at bringing the poorer segments in line with middle-class aspirations. He believed that in Mexico there were no strict class barriers. “The so-called classes are separated from each other only by the restrictive mobility of money and good manners,” he wrote. “Here, there is no class on the move other than the bourgeoisie.”44 As for the racial divide between those of indige­ nous and of European ancestry, it “is in fact diminishing its hindering influence on the social evolution because between the already conquered and the indigenous races there is a greater admixture which, as we have strongly affirmed, forms the true national family.”45 Thus, for Sierra, national identity will hinge on the growth of a mestizo population. But what of the “indigenous races,” to use his euphemism? The indigenous population of Mexico, because of its size, economic conditions, and ethnic variety, was a major problem. Constituting almost a third of the population, Indians lived mostly in isolated rural areas, in squalor and poverty, suffering hunger and disease, economically exploited and ignorant or unable to improve their lot. They were considered the single largest obstacle to the

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modernization program. What to do? From the 1890s on, a major debate ensued in the press about education and the role of the Indian in society.46 An undercurrent in the debate was the fear of a casta or race war, as a young Sierra had witnessed in Yucatán.47 Several alternatives were explored. The consensus was that the status quo, keeping them in poverty, would not do for they would continue to drag down the nation. The American model of extermination was unacceptable. Many, including Sierra, believed that European immigration might be a solution: Europeans could be encouraged to come to Mexico in order to improve the Indian stock.48 The Díaz regime had made it an official policy but was largely unsuccessful in attracting European immigration. By default, education seemed to be the most acceptable option. Teaching everyone the same curriculum would erase differences and encourage assimilation. The question was, could the Indian be absorbed into a national culture?49 Francisco G. Cosmes argued against indigenous education because it would not cut through the inaccessible recesses of the indigenous race, because it would unjustly deprive families of their children’s much-needed income, and because knowing how to read and write would not change their economic or social status.50 Sierra, however, was adamant about education being the most efficient alternative. It would bring Indians to modernity by teaching them industry, language, and customs and thus assimilate them into the body of the nation. To turn the native into a social asset (it is because of our apathy that he is not one), to make him the principal settler of an intensely cultivated soil, to blend his spirit and ours in forging language, aspirations, loves and hates, moral and mental criteria, and to offer him the ideal of a strong and happy country that belongs to all—to create, in sum, a national soul—is the goal assigned to the future, the program of our national education. Whoever helps in reaching this goal is a patriot; whoever puts obstacles in the way is an enemy.51 Quite clearly, education would be a tool for shaping culture, developing the economy, and uniting the nation. Indigenous identity,

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that is, indigenous customs and language,52 had to take a backseat to, and even eventually be replaced with, a single national language and common customs.53 Thus the indigenous would cease to be a stumbling block to national unity and could become self-sufficient Mexicans who actively participate in the nation’s economy and contribute to the nation’s goals.54 Sierra’s proposal for a universal popular education never materialized. Several factors prevented it.55 First, conservatives and the church opposition successfully held on to primary education. Second, the 1910 political upheaval put an end to the Díaz moderni­ zation policies. Third, and more important, there were simply not enough funds to carry out the project. In a letter to the minister of the treasury, José Limantour, Sierra asked for funding for public education: “For you public education is an administrative branch of the same importance as the rest.” [For me, it is] the most important, the supreme service to the nation. Because, at bottom foreign capital and the government are responsible for the transformation of the country: railroads, factories, businesses, future immigration, and actual commerce all tie us to other nations. If, mired down by this situation of dependence, we do not look for ways to preserve ourselves through the cultivation of oncoming generations of men, the Mexican plant will disappear under the shadow of others more vigorous. When pedagogues say that the schoolteacher makes the soul of a nation, we’re not using metaphors; no; they are saying something rigorously certain. Without schools as modern science understands it, everything that has been done to gain material and economic progress would end in a disaster for national autonomy.56 Sierra did not see clearly all the difficulties inherent in his project to educate the Indian. For one thing, it would be too much to ask a government bent on expediency and material gains to invest its meager resources in the lowest and most inconsequential stratum of society on the promise of unspecified future moral gains. For another, it would be too much to ask a starving people to give up their ways

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of life and their beliefs and adopt alien values and ways of life on a promise of future progress that came from a government that was presently squeezing the life out of them.57 A popular educational reform that fulfilled the needs of the nation would require, and it did, a radical change in the structure and dynamics of Mexican—or any other—society. Such reforms had to wait until after the Revolution, when a new chapter of Mexico’s nation-forging epic opened.

The University

Sierra’s most influential educational project was the founding of a national university. Mexico had boasted of a university since 1553, when the Real y Pontificia was chartered. Modeled after the Spanish universities, it was funded by the crown while the church made available the teaching faculty for the stated purpose of educating the sons of Spaniards and of natives in matters of Catholic faith and other faculties.58 Originally a dynamic institution with a distinguished faculty,59 by the eighteenth century it lagged behind its European counterparts in the sciences and the humanities, weighted down by a single-minded commitment to Scholasticism. After independence, the university became a source of divisiveness when it consistently sided with conservatives in opposing changes that went against the status quo. Liberals reacted by trying to break the church’s monopoly on education at all levels. Though legislating a barrage of reforms, they were largely ineffective in establishing lay alternatives to primary and secondary education. They were successful in shutting down the university, in 1833 by then–Vice President Valentín Gómez Farías and officially in 1865 by the conservatives-backed emperor Maximillian. The outcome was an educational vacuum that could not be filled by the existing colleges or professional schools—Medicine, Law, Agronomy, and Mining. In an attempt to fill this void, the church opened in 1896 a smaller and underfunded version of the old university, the Pontificia, to teach only theology and canon law. Sierra had clearly seen the need for a lay university, one whose main goals was to encourage national unity and achieve scientific progress. During his lifetime, he made two official proposals for its

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creation. He made the first one, as a congressman, in 1881. It was awkward and short-lived and called for a Preparatoria-like scientific institution that purposely excluded the arts and the humanities. In 1910 he presented a second initiative, this time as minister of education, calling for a school of higher studies that would house advanced research in the sciences and the humanities. In this second version, the university would be an official branch of the government, yet be independent of political controls. This means that it would receive financial support from the government, instead of from private or religious sources, that is, the Catholic Church. As such, it would implement those educational policies that benefited the nation as a whole, though it would be independent of primary, secondary, vocational, or adult school directives. The government, however, would grant it autonomy in self-government, in choosing a faculty, in determining entrance requirements, in deciding what to teach and what to investigate. During the university’s inaugural ceremonies, Sierra laid out his vision for a house of higher studies. Ideally, it would “spread the love of science, heavenly love for its serenity and purity, the creator of the ideal, just as earthly love creates the humanities.” Sierra continued, in a less poetic vein, “This school would teach how to investigate, and to think by investigating, and by thinking, and that the substance of the investigation and the thinking should not just crystallize into pure thought but would become a permanent dynamism that can be translated into teachings and action.”60 This would be, he argued, a new kind of university, meant to unify instead of divide, unlike the old Real y Pontificia, which was but a repository of old, dead doctrines, at the service of a dead political structure, and useless for a modern nation. Sierra proposed a faculty in the physical, biological, and historical sciences and literature and language arts: the broadest variety of instruction and the widest distribution of works to keep the nation up to date. True to his word, he included philosophy in the curriculum, a pleading figure that for some time has wandered around our temples, aware of our official doctrines: “From the depths of centuries when the mysterious doors of the sanctuaries of the Orient are opened, she has guided human thought, often blind. With him

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she lay at the foot of the Parthenon, from where she never wanted to depart. She almost lost him during the tumultuous barbarian eras, but reunited she continued to lead, stopping at the doors of the University of Paris, alma mater of a thinking humanity during the Middle Ages.”61 The plan to found the National University met with the disapproval of both the church and, surprisingly, orthodox positivists. The first objected that though it allowed for the study of religions, it excluded the teaching of theology while favoring modern philosophers such as James, Bergson, Schopenhauer, and, Nietzsche. The second group saw the new university as a desertion of the Preparatoria plan of studies and a throwback to the metaphysical stage, for it opened the door to teaching modern metaphysics in the form of monism, dualism, or pluralism. The National University opened in 1910 amid pomp and circumstance. Under the rectorship of Joaquín Eguía y Lis (1833– 1913), it was to appoint a faculty, create several research centers, offer various doctoral degrees, and coordinate the Schools of Fine Arts, Business, Political Science, Jurisprudence, Engineering, and Medicine, the Escuela Normal, and the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria.62 A 50,000-peso budget was earmarked for the founding year, plus 30,000 pesos in matching funds.63 The idea of an autonomous lay university had an enormous impact in Latin America at a time when student movements were emerging and when individuals as different as the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (1872–1917), the Argentine José Ingenieros (1877– 1925), and the Cuban Enrique José Varona (1849–1933) were crystallizing their ideas on education. At home, however, the university did not immediately fulfill Sierra’s intellectual expectations.64 It housed a small faculty that in many instances taught for free and had a limited course offering to only a few hundred students.65 Further, there was little consultation with students, and it still had not incorporated the other important faculties of Medicine, Law, Architecture, and Agronomy. Some felt its creation was but political posturing, others that it did not really represent the needs of the nation. With few exceptions, it was a middle-class male bastion, exclusive of the large ethnic population of Mexico. It would have to wait for the

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dynamic leadership of Vasconcelos to become a truly autonomous university on a national scale and could boast of forging the continent: “Por mi raza hablará el espíritu.”

Assessment

The impact of positivisms in Mexico has been portrayed in dark hues. The Porfiriato’s economic and political excesses certainly justify this attitude. But Sierra’s position should not be judged by the same procrustean standards. In a society stratified by wealth, class, and ethnicity, he put his faith in the power of a growing mestizo bourgeoisie and its willingness share the nation’s benefits. And it was an attempt to offer a better alternative to a people who were doomed to a life of misery by the status quo and whose culture and values would continue to be belittled. In a way, it was still a conqueror’s imposed forging project. Not that the subsequent governments succeeded in solving this conundrum, for they instead offered compromises and delays. It is to Sierra’s credit that in spite of the enormous social and political changes brought on by the Revolution, a generation of scholars carried on much of his forging project, in particular, his belief in the power of a universal popular lay education to create a better class of citizens and the ability of the university to bring its intellectual fruits to the service of the nation. That generation seriously undertook the task of discovering the Mexican soul—its character and ethnicity—in the works of the Ateneistas,66 of Antonio Caso,67 Alfonso Reyes,68 José Vasconcelos,69 and Diego Rivera, and of later generations, for example, Alfonso Caso,70 Manuel Gamio,71 Samuel Ramos,72 and the Hiperión Group.

Life and Works

Justo Sierra was born in Campeche, Yucatán, in 1848. His father was the novelist Justo Sierra O’Reilly and his maternal grandfather, Santiago Mendez, a former governor of Yucatán. At the age of

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thirteen, Sierra moved to Mexico City to study at the college of San Ildefonso. In 1871 he received a law degree but instead opted for literature, writing poetry, short stories, and essays on literary criticism. He was drawn into politics in 1873 when he was appointed secretary to the Supreme Court. He also taught history at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and, in 1878, became professor of history and chronology at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. In 1894 he returned to politics, as minister to the Supreme Court, and from 1905 to 1911, as secretary of public education. In 1911 President Francisco Madero appointed him plenipotentiary ambassador to Spain. Sierra died in Madrid, in 1912. His remains are interred in the Rotunda of Great Mexicans. The best biography of Sierra is Agustín Yañez’s Don Justo Sierra, su vida, sus ideas y su obra. Sierra’s works have been collected in Justo Sierra, Obras completas. Relevant to this chapter are Discursos, vol. 5; Historia de la antigüedad (1880), vol. 10; Historia general (1891), vol. 11; Evolución política del pueblo mexicano, vol. 12; and Juárez: Su obra y su tiempo, vol. 13. The Evolución política has been translated by Charles Ramsdell as The Political Evolution of the Mexican People.

Further Reading

Barreda, Gabino. Opúsculos, discusiones y discursos. Mexico City: Imprenta de Dublán y Chávez, 1877. Hale, Charles. The Transformation of Liberalism in Late NineteenthCentury Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Quirarte, Martín. Gabino Barreda, Justo Sierra y el Ateneo de la Juventud. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1970. Rovira, María del Carmen. “Justo Sierra.” In Una aproximación a la historia de las ideas en México: Siglo XXI y principios del XX, ed. María del Carmen Rovira. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997. Sierra, Justo. The Political Evolution of the Mexican People. With notes and a new introduction by Edmundo O’Gorman, translated by Charles Ramsdell. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969.

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Yañez, Agustín. Don Justo Sierra, su vida, sus ideas, y su obra. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1962.

Notes

 1. Sierra’s presence among his contemporaries cannot be overstressed. He was considered a gifted poet, an outstanding literary critic, a respected historian, and a consummate politician. A contemporary newspaper satire praises him with faint damns. Luchando con noble aliento Ha alcanzado mucha gloria Y es un profesor de historia Que tiene mucho talento Como abogado es de peso, Como poeta se inspira, Pero ha dejado la lira En la puerta del Congreso. México Gráfico, 3 (No. 110). August 10, 1890. Cited in Agustín Yañez, Don Justo Sierra, su vida, sus ideas y su obra (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1962), 86, pl. a.   2. In this chapter, and for the sake of convenience, the nineteenthcentury political classification of ethnicity will be used: Spanish, criollos (Mexicans of Spanish ancestry), Indians (one of the many groups indigenous to the area), and mestizo (mixture of Indian and criollo). This classification was based on the sixteenth-century one in terms of place of birth: Spanish (born in Spain), criollos (born in Mexico but of Spanish ancestry), and naturales (born in Mexico of Indian parentage). By the eighteenth century intermarriage had complicated matters. The Casta paintings were an artistic attempt to render a graphic classification of this messy construct. See La pintura de las castas, Artes de México (México), no. 8, 1998.  3. If language is considered an indicator of ethnicity, over sixtyeight living ethnolinguistic groups can been identified. See Instituto

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Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas (INALI), “Catálogo de las lenguas indígenas nacionales: Variantes lingüísticas de México con sus autodenominaciones y referencias geoestadísticas,” in Diario Oficial de la Federación (Mexico City: Imprenta del Gobierno Federal, 2008), 652 (9): 22–23.  4. Vol. 12 of Justo Sierra, in Obras completas, 17 vols., coordinated by Agustín Yáñez (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1948, 1996), reprints Sierra’s important Evolución política del pueblo mexicano. Begun in 1884 and published in 1900–1902, it was compiled in its present form by Yañez in 1949 and translated by Charles Ramsdell as The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, with notes and a new introduction by Edmundo O’Gorman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969). A more recent edition is Justo Sierra, La evolución política del pueblo mexicano, with a prologue by Abelardo Villegas (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1985).   5.  For Sarmiento’s parallel take on positivism, see also Oscar R. Martí, “Sarmiento y el positivismo,” Cuadernos Americanos 3, no. 13 (1989): 142–54. The classic treatment of the subject is Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind, trans. James H. Abbott and Lowell Dunham (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963).   6. Relevant and very readable are Sierra’s Preparatoria texts: Compendio de la historia general (1878), Compendio de historia de la antigüedad (1879), Historia de la antigüedad (1880), and Historia general (1891), in volumes 10 and 11 respectively of the Obras completas.  7. Sierra, Historia de la antigüedad, in Obras completas, 10:15. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.  8. “Science d’où prévoyance; prévoyance d’où action.” Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols., 5th ed. (Paris: Schleicher Frères, 1907), I:52. For an English translation, see G. Lenzer, ed. and trans., Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975), 88.   9. See Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: Beacon Press, 1992). See also Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820– 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 10.  Herbert Spencer, Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte and Other Essays (Berkeley: Glendessary Press, 1968). 11. Herbert Spencer, First Principles of Philosophy, 6th ed. (London, 1937).

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12. While studying medicine in Paris, Barreda attended Comte’s 1849 lectures at the Palais Cardinal. In 1867 he publicly expressed his sympathy for positivism in the “Oración cívica.” See Oscar R. Marti, Introduction to the Gabino Barreda Centennial Issue, Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies 14, no. 2 (1983): 212. 13. Villegas, Prologo to La evolución, xiv. Still the best account of the development of positivisms in Mexico is Leopoldo Zea, Positivism in Mexico, trans. J. H. Schulte (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974). 14. Sierra, “El programa de la libertad,” in Obras completas, 5:238–39. 15.  “La historia es una de las ciencias sociológicas en vía de formación.” Sierra, Historia de la antigüedad, in Obras completas, 10:15. 16. Villegas, Prólogo, La evolución social, xvii. 17.  His brother, Santiago, had translated The Origin of the Species and was getting it ready for publication in 1880 but was killed in a duel and never saw the project to completion. 18.  For the reception of evolutionary ideas in Mexico, see Roberto Moreno de los Arcos, “Mexico,” in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, 2nd ed., ed. Thomas Glick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 352–56. 19. The best known history of the conquest is Bernal Díaz del Castillo The Conquest of New Spain (1632), trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963). For a fuller discussion, see Oscar R. Martí, “Breaking with the Past: Philosophy and Its History in Latin America,” in The Role of History in Latin American Philosophy, ed. Arleen Salles and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 75–104. 20.  Francisco Cavijero, Historia antigüa de México, with an introduction by P. Mariano Cuevas, 4 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1958–59). 21. Lucas Alamán, Obras (Mexico City: Editorial Jús, 1942). 22. José María Luis Mora, Ensayos, ideas y retratos, Prólogo y selección de Arturo Arnáiz y Freg (Mexico City: Ediciones de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1941); and Carlos María de Bustamante, Cuadro histórico de la revolución mexicana (Mexico City: Imprenta de J. Mariano Lara, 1843). 23. Alicia Castellanos Guerrero, “Para hacer nación: Discursos racistas en el México decimonónico,” in Los caminos del racismo en

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México, ed. José Jorge Gómez Izquierdo (Puebla, México: Plaza y Valdés, 2005), 92–94. 24. Gabino Barreda, “Oración cívica,” in Opúsculos, discusiones y discursos (Mexico City: Imprenta de Dublán y Chávez, 1877), 83 ff. 25.  Barreda, “Oración,” 83. 26. Ibid., 84. 27. Sierra, La evolución, in Obras completas, 12:397. 28. Ibid., 394. 29. Ibid., 395. 30. Sierra, Political Evolution, 368; La evolución, in Obras completas, 12:397. 31. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Response to the Most Illustrious Poetess, Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” in Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden, introd. Ilan Stavans (New York: Penguin, 1997), 13–19. 32. See Francisco Pimentel, Memoria sobre las causas que han originado la situación actual de la raza indígena de México y medios de remediarlas (Mexico City: Imprenta de Andrade y Escalante, 1864). For a similar argument in Argentina, see Domingo F. Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Kathleen Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 33. See Charles E. Ronan, Francisco Javier Clavigero, S.J. (1731– 1787), Figure of the Mexican Enlightenment: His Life and Works (Rome and Chicago: Institutum Historicum S.I. and Loyola University, 1977), 25 ff. 34. Oscar R. Martí, “Le Mexique et la Révolution française, 1746– 1838,” in Les Révolutions dans le monde ibérique, 1766–1834, 2 vols., ed. Robert M. Maniquis, Oscar R. Martí, and Joseph Perez (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux/Maison des Pays Ibériques, Université de Bordeaux III, 1989–92), 2:113–87. 35. Alamán, Historia de México, in Obras, 5:90–101; also Mora, Ensayos, 78–84. 36.  Marti, “Introduction,” 212 ff. 37.  But see Jackie Rice, “Beyond the Científicos: The Educational background of the Porfirian Elite,” Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies 14, no. 2 (1983): 300–301. 38. Sierra, “Panegirico de Barreda,” in Obras completas, 5:394. 39. Ibid., 395.

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40. That is, to native religions practices. See Castellanos Guerrero, “Para hacer nación,” 97–101. 41. Sierra, “Libertad de enseñanza y profesiones,” in Obras completas, 5:36. 42. Gabino Barreda, “Carta al dirigida al C. Mariano Riva Palacio, Gobernador del Estado de México, en la cual se tocan puntos relativos a la instrucción pública,” in Opúsculos, 65. 43.  For the difficulties of reading official statistics to determine class composition, see Judith E. Martí, “Subsistence and the State: Municipal Governments Policies and Urban Markets in Developing Nations: The Case of Mexico City and Guadalajara, 1877–1910” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles 1990), 265–72. 44. Sierra, La evolución, in Obras completas, 12:397. 45. Sierra, Political Evolution, 368. 46.  For instance, La Libertad (México), February16, 1883, 1. 47. Martin Stabb, “Indigenism and Racism in Mexican Thought, 1857–1911,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 1, no. 4 (1959): 417–18. 48. T. G. Powell, “Mexican Intellectuals and the Indian Question, 1876–1911,” Hispanic American Historical Review 48 (1968): 22. 49. Ibid., 23. 50. Stabb, “Indigenism and Racism,” 415. 51. Sierra, Political Evolution, 368; La evolución, in Obras completas, 12:397. 52.  Felipe H. Lopez, “The Construction of Mexican Identity,” Rutgers Law Review 54 (2001–2): 989–91. 53. Pimentel had pointed out, thirty years earlier, some problems with multilingualism. See Pimentel, Memoria, 180–86. 54. In this respect, see Castellanos Guerrero, “Para hacer nación,” 103–6. 55. See also Martín Quirarte, Gabino Barreda, Justo Sierra, y el Ateneo de la Juventud (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1970), 58. 56.  Justo Sierra to José Limantour, in Obras completas, 14:356–57. 57. For the politics of mestizaje, see José Jorge Gómez Izquierdo, “Racismo y nacionalismo en el discurso de las élites mexicanas,’ in Izquierdo, Los caminos, 155–63. 58. “. . . se fundase un estudio e universidad de todas ciencias, donde los naturales y los hijos de españoles fuesen industriados en las

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cosas de nuestra santa fe católica y en las demás facultades.” Jesús Silva Herzog, Una historia de la Universidad de México (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1974), 1. 59. A delightful description of the university can be found in Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, Life in the Imperial and Loyal City of Mexico (1554), facsimile edition with a translation by Minnie Lee Barrett Sheppard (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1953), 25–36. 60. Sierra, “Discurso en la inauguración de la Universidad,” in Obras completas, 5:460. 61. Ibid., 461. 62.  Josefina Vazquez de Knauth, “Mexico: Education and National Integration,” Education and Social Structure Issue, Journal of Contemporary History 2, no. 3 (1967): 203–15. 63.  “Ley Constitutiva de la Universidad Nacional de México,” Diario Oficial del Gobierno, May 31, 1910; June 18, 1910. 64. See Javier Garciadiego Dantan’s excellent study, “De Justo Sierra a Vasconcelos: La Universidad Nacional durante la Revolución mexicana,” Historia de México 46, no. 4 (1996): 769–819. 65. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “La cultura de las humanidades,” in Obra crítica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1960), 595–97. 66. Quirarte, Barreda, Sierra, y el Ateneo, 87–97. 67. Antonio Caso, El problema de México y la ideología nacional (Mexico City: Editorial “Cvltvra,” 1924). 68. Alfonso Reyes, Visión de Anáhuac (Madrid: Índice, 1923). 69.  José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (Barcelona: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925); and Indología (Paris: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1926). 70. Alfonso Caso, La religión de los aztecas (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1936, 1945). 71. Manuel Gamio, Forjando patria (pro nacionalismo) (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1916). 72. Samuel Ramos, Historia de la filosofía en México (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1943); and Profile of Man and Culture in México, trans. P. G. Earle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975).

Part IV

Challenges in the Twentieth Century

[

8]

Rodó, Race, and Morality A rleen Sa l l e s

What constitutes an authentic Latin American identity, particularly in the face of European and North American values and their overpowering influence? How should such an identity be understood? These are topics that seem inescapable in any history of ideas in Latin America and continue to be hotly debated. They were also discussed during the period of state formation, the early 1900s, when several intellectuals felt the need to reaffirm a distinctive collective identity and were instrumental in fueling the valorization of a Latin American consciousness.1 José Enrique Rodó is taken to be one of the key figures in the movement.2 Rodó rallied against the pervasive moral and political power of the United States by doing two things: first, he tried to invert common beliefs about the inferiority of the Latin American “race”; and second, he argued for the existence of a united Latin American community with an unquestionable mission: the moral revitalization of humanity. His goal becomes evident in his classic 1900 piece, Ariel, for a while considered “the conscience of Latin America.”3 In this essay, and later in several short pieces and articles, Rodó calls for the moral and political independence of the continent while at the same time 181

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worrying that the technological and material progress characteristic of the North threatens spiritual values.4 His view attracted substantial attention in Latin America, inspiring a group of writers known as the “arielistas,” and it is recognized as an important source for later nationalist thought. 5 Rodó’s vision rests on two ideas. Human beings as such have the moral obligation to develop the totality of their being; and membership in some races facilitates such spiritual development, as some races (significantly, the Latin American race) are more likely to possess the natural balance of rationality, autonomy, and aesthetic sensibility necessary for the good life. From an ethical perspective he focuses on the human condition and promotes universal ideals, but from a political perspective he is concerned with something more specific: elevating the national standing of Latin American nations. As a result, he sets up a value conflict (universal moral values vs. the Latin American context) that he tried to resolve by highlighting the importance of the spiritual dimension in life and attempting to show that Latin Americans are more perceptive to higher moral values and ideals than other groups of people. But what does Rodó mean by the term race? Understanding his view of race is not easy, for several reasons. In addition to the fact that the notion itself is highly contested and controversial, Rodó himself is not consistent in his use of the term. In some passages he equates race with culture and tradition; that is, he appears to understand it purely in cultural terms. In others he discusses it in almost essentialist terms. Furthermore, sometimes he appears to apply the term interchangeably with homeland (patria) and connects it with national character. Finally, that he often intends the term to be morally prescriptive complicates the matter. Most critical reviews of his best-known work, Ariel, have focused on Rodó’s adoption of a vocabulary of Latin American pride and his words about cultural Americanism.6 His moral universalistic concern regarding the good, virtuous life for human beings is taken as an afterthought, with limited attention to the connection between his view of the good life and his moral and political goal to elevate Hispanic Americans. I believe, however, that it is his moral view that gives him the basis for standing against the discourse of

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the superiority of North America. It is this same view, on the other hand, that underlies his more racist and elitist comments and claims. In this chapter, I take up these issues.

Moral View

Although Rodó explicitly acknowledged the influence of positivism on his thought, he was convinced that positivism raised serious theoretical and practical problems. At the theoretical level, it tended to ignore the significance of ideals.7At the practical level, in Latin America it had often become “a utilitarian empiricism of very low ability, like a cookie cutter intended to flatter, with its apparent clarity of ideas and its limited moral and social range, the narrowest tendencies of common sense” (“Rumbos” 519). He “belongs to the reaction that takes literary naturalism and philosophical positivism as a starting point and without diminishing their fecundity leads to their dissolution into higher conceptions.”8 Thus Rodó believes that “the most interesting, energetic and original directions of the contemporary spirit, in its labor of truth and beauty, converge in idealism, that progressively defines itself and spreads” (“Rumbos” 518). His idealism, or “neoidealism,” tries to restore ideas as “norms and ends of human purposes” in a world where pragmatism and commercial and political concerns dominate (“Rumbos” 521). The privileged role that Rodó gives to ethical ideals in a person’s life becomes apparent in Ariel. The essay, written for the youth of America, revolves around two main topics that complement each other. In the first, he reflects on the “highest (moral and political) conceptions” that Rodó believes people ought to pursue. In the second, he sets out to apply his reflections to the Latin American context and emphasizes the need for a Latin American unity, especially in the face of the pernicious influence of foreign moral and cultural values. Rodó’s discussion of the first topic is characterized by its universalistic tone. He is concerned not just with Latin Americans and their destiny, but with human beings in general and the development of their souls. In this part of the essay, Rodó argues that the moral

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life ought to consist in determining what the human ideals are and trying to embody them at the individual and the social level. The conviction that there is a common human destiny and that “the good of man is to be truly and wholly human” is eloquently expressed in the following passage from Ariel. The profound awareness of the fundamental unity of our natures, . . . must take precedence over the predilections that bind each of us to our different ways of life. This unity demands that the primary aim of each individual should live an unblemished and exemplary life in which nobility and selflessness are communicated before any other faculty. More compelling than any professional and cultural variation is our individual responsibility to contribute to the common destiny of rational beings. (Ariel 41)9 Thus he states that it is a person’s responsibility to “develop to the fullest the totality of [his or her] being” and to realize the “common destiny of rational beings” (Ariel 41). Although aware of the moral complexity of his time and the accelerating speed of technological progress, Rodó still holds that “it is reasonable to hope that all human beings may be aware of the fundamental ideas and sentiments that ensure the harmony of life—the spiritual concerns to which no rational being may remain indifferent” (Ariel 44). What are the human activities that play a role in the good life? Rodó´s words point to the exercise of one’s rationality, spiritual autonomy, and aesthetic sensibility. For Rodó, the truly human life is conceived in terms of thinking and rationality, in terms of ideas. However, this does not mean that sentiments have to be banished from the good life. For Rodó, a fully rational life is one in which all legitimate human activities are in harmony, in which thought, freedom, and sensibility are reconciled. This explains his nostalgia for the classic age, which he sees as embodying all the desirable ideals, including “the wise use of leisure,” ocio, as a means to a unified harmonious personality where the spirit remains free (Ariel 47). It also explains his choice of Ariel as a symbol of what is truly human “reason and noble sentiment[:] . . . the sublime instinct for perfectibility[,] . . .

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noble inspiration in thought[,] . . . heroism in action,” “the ideal toward which human selection ascends” (Ariel 31). Rodó is convinced that ideas have value in themselves, beyond their utility or instrumental value. Change and continual selfre­creation is inevitable but should be achieved through the act of thinking and the renovation of ideals and guided by a free and rational spirit, one that does not yield to “unruly passions or utilitarian interests.”10 This in turn requires a very active and rich inner life where “serene reason prevails” and the spirit is truly free (Ariel 47). Such inner life is not possible when labor is excessive and material development becomes an end in itself. According to Rodó, this is the problem with “the utilitarian attitude”: it requires that people limit their skills and reduce themselves to the automatism of material activities, and in the process it makes “harmonious accord” among all legitimate activities impossible. This is “calamitous to the diffusion of ideals” and incompatible with true moral progress.11 As a consequence, it leads to a “disastrous indifference to the general interests of human kind,” to the mutilation and slavery of their spirit, and to a distorted vision of the beauty of things (Ariel 43). For Rodó, apprehension of beauty responds to an “essential need in rational man” and is intrinsically valuable, in itself deserving of cultivation (Ariel 49). It is also instrumentally valuable, for sensitivity to beauty is an “effective collaborator in the formation of a delicate sensitivity for justice” and inseparable from strength and sound intellectual judgment (Ariel 49–50); it is a source of inspiration for human behavior.12 In Rodó the discussion of the kind of ideals people ought to pursue at the individual level has a political dimension as well. Social ideals exist, and society should be organized so that those ideals are realized. A society organized according to arrangements that are in individuals’ self-interest may be prosperous, but it is not good: it does not bring about a morally desirable lifestyle for its citizens. In his words, “a civilization acquires its character not from a display of prosperity and material supremacy, but from the grandeur of thought and feeling possible within it” (Ariel 60). Accordingly, whether democracies are justified depends on whether they promote

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the capacity of people to be morally superior and allow all individuals to reach their full potential, so that the most talented naturally rise to positions of leadership. In the nineteenth century, democracies displayed a tendency toward the utilitarian and the vulgar. Inspired by materialism, they ended up promoting morally problematic forms of equality. Instead, Rodó believes that democracies could work if “ennobled” by idealism and if willing to give virtue and intelligence the prominence that they ought to have. Ultimately, in an ideal society, democracy, equal opportunity, and social evolution are reconciled with the harmonious development of the individual.

The Latin American Problem

Reflection on moral and social ideals led Rodó to a reflection on what it is to be Latin American and on the moral and political weaknesses of the new nations. In the past, intellectuals like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento had pointed to race to account for some of the problems in the young Latin America nations. Instead, Rodó traces some of those problems to Latin Americans’ alienation from their true character and their servile imitation of foreign models.13 He believed that the lack of a sharply defined personality, the limited collective love of the homeland, makes it very difficult for them to preserve their uniqueness in the face of the strong influence of the United States. North Americans, Rodó noted, were successfully stamping their vision on the rest of the world, and their morally misguided lifestyle was “infecting” the culture in Latin America. “That powerful federation,” he states, “is effecting a kind of moral conquest among us. Admiration for its greatness and power is making impressive inroads in the minds of our leaders and, perhaps even more, in the impressionable minds of the masses” (Ariel 71).14 For Rodó, this kind of imitation is problematic for descriptive, normative, and prudential reasons. Descriptively, Rodó suggests that imitation of some peoples by others is not really possible, for different cultures are somehow tied to different personalities and human traits; that is, Rodó hints that natural differences undergird cultural differences. Consider his words, “The radical mistake [of

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Latin America] consisted not so much in the excessive and candid idealization, or in the blind worship that resulted from faith rather than careful reflection[,] . . . but rather the vanity of thinking that these absolute imitations of one people by another, of one race by another are natural and possible; that the structure of the spirit in each of those human collectivities does not presuppose certain essential features and characters, to which the organic forms of their culture and their political life must adapt” (“Rumbos” 517). From a normative standpoint, Rodó believes that this kind of imitation is wrong because it directly contradicts the moral ideal of inner independence that human beings should strive for and realize. According to him, even if imitation were achievable, getting rid of one’s autonomous personality is morally illegitimate. In the same way that people need to maintain spiritual autonomy in an age of increasing material specialization, societies need to nurture internal independence, realize their own cultural individual destiny (Ariel 73). The opposite constitutes “political snobbery” and “servile abdication,” a tacit admission of one’s cultural inferiority and, Rodó suggests, a moral failure (Ariel 72). Finally, from a prudential standpoint, imitation does not make sense because the model that Latin Americans are trying to imitate is morally flawed (Ariel 74). For Rodó, the United States was a model of industry, a utilitarian society, not a cultured civilization. As a result, he considered that North Americans’ contribution to the development of the spirit was modest at best. North Americans, he argued, are largely indifferent to the ideals of truth and beauty that are essential to living a rational human life. Instead, they have been intoxicated by prosperity and material acquisitions, “the spirit of vulgarity” spreading among them, their civilization creating “a singular impression of insufficiency and emptiness” (Ariel 79). Considering this and convinced that the moral health of Latin America was at stake, Rodó proposed a program of moral regeneration. His goal was to promote a national consciousness that would allow Latin Americans to see themselves as part of a great collectivity for a distinctly moral and political purpose: autonomy from the United States. Rodó bases such a program on the “racial” differences between the North American and the Latin American.

188  Arleen Salles Race and Culture

When examining Rodó’s understanding of race, it is helpful to keep in mind that he wrote at a time when scientific racism was very popular. According to this view, the superiority of certain races was uncontroversial. The notion of race was biologically defined, mainly understood in terms of inherited phenotypical markers, which were assumed to correlate with specific intellectual and emotional dispositions. Talk about race became crucial when theorizing about nations and their character. Racial considerations were used to explain political unrest, the different rates of development of nations, and also to legitimate the power that some nations had over others.15 By valorizing the Latin American “pride of race,” “genius of the race,” and “heritage of race,” Rodó challenged the prevalent racial scale according to which the Anglo-Saxon race was superior and the Latin American race inferior. Instead, he tried to establish a new racial hierarchy, one that showed Latin Americans to be on a higher plane than North Americans. The question, however, is, what does Rodó mean by race? And are the racial traits that he has in mind culturally based and transmitted? Are they innate, inherited biologically? There is some consensus that Rodó in general is not thinking about physical, biological characteristics when using the term race. Emir Rodríguez Monegal points out that Rodó frequently uses “race” as a way to think about cultures, thus casting the debate about races in cultural rather than biological terms.16 What Rodó attempts to revive, Monegal says, is the Greco-Latin tradition, a cultural heritage characterized by the correct moral attitude toward life. Margaret Sayers Peden’s recent translation of Ariel suggests something similar: she often translates the term raza as “culture,” “people,” or “nation,” thus suggesting that Rodó does not have a biological understanding of the notion.17 This interpretation is supported by several passages where Rodó connects the term race to historical continuity, to cultural traditions, to a shared consciousness, to an inherited civilization and a common language.18 In Ariel, Próspero famously claimed, “We, Latin Americans, have a heritage of race, a great ethnic tradition to maintain, a sacred place in the pages of history that depends upon us

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for its continuation” (Ariel 73). A few years later, Rodó referred to Ariel as the “reclaiming of the feeling of race, of the historical Latin ancestry.” (“El nuevo Ariel” 1136). He believed that Latin Americans could only achieve self-understanding through an appreciation of the historical and cultural traditions that define them. An examination of what groups of people he refers to as a “race” and what groups of people he does not specifically identify as such also supports the view that he has a cultural understanding of the notion. To illustrate, it is well known that he spends quite some time, mainly in Ariel, describing the mental and psychological traits of the race from the North and the mental and cultural traits of the Latin American race. But undoubtedly those were not the only “races” to be found in America. There were two other groups of people who had been typically racialized and who represented (and continue to represent) a significant percentage of the population in Latin America: blacks and Indians. Uruguay, where Rodó wrote, was a country of European immigrants who had exterminated the remaining indigenous population decades before Rodó was born and thus was “Indian free.”19 However, the country’s population was racially heterogeneous, blacks constituting a significant minority. And yet Rodó does not discuss blacks as racial others in Ariel, nor does he appear especially interested in focusing on them in general when discussing his program of moral regeneration. Why didn’t he mention blacks in a work that is freighted with references to race? This exclusion can be explained by Rodó’s cultural understanding of the notion and by how blacks were culturally perceived by Latin Americans at the time. In discussing this issue, the anthropologist Peter Wade notes that in the nineteenth century Latin Americans held certain assumptions about the kind of racial and cultural individuals that blacks were. Blacks were rarely held up as the “symbols of a glorious heritage.” Instead, they were more likely to be seen as having adopted a mestizo, national culture and not as having a distinct black culture.20 Furthermore, they were likely to live in big cities, centers of culture, and away from the “cultural backwardness” of the countryside. This allowed for the following: blacks could be devalued and excluded as inferior citizens on the

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basis of their inherited physical markers and at the same time be culturally included. While recognized as phenotypically different, they were not necessarily seen as culturally different. If this is correct, then it was not necessary for Rodó to mention blacks specifically when discussing race in cultural terms, for he was likely to see them as culturally the same.21 His treatment of indigenous populations is different, however, and it is compatible with Latin American thinking on Indians at the time. Wade notes that the literature on race and ethnicity in Latin America has tended to emphasize “a distinct difference between the images of blacks and Indians in debates about the identities of new nations.”22 Indians were generally taken to have a distinct cultural identity. Even if they were as marginalized and discriminated against as blacks, they were seen as being ethnic/cultural others, having ancestral cultures, a distinct social organization, distinct traditions, and, in general, a consciousness different from that of the nation. This would explain why Rodó refers to indigenous populations as “races” and devotes some pages to the “conquered race” in some writings, especially in “Juan María Gutiérrez y su época” and more famously in “Montalvo,” where he provides a description of the Indian, his traditions, his environment, his emotional traits, and his fate. For Rodó, it is not (at least not ostensibly) a somatic issue but rather an ethnic one. Rodó compellingly describes the Indian markets, praises the Indians’ skill at crafts, and invokes their musicality. The Indian, he notes, is a “delicate musician. The harp, invention of his race is his rustic shelter; the flute . . . his sweet relief” (“Montalvo” 31). The psychological portrait of the Indian that he offers is less romanticized. The conquered race is “marked with the stigmas of martyrdom and servility.” Sadness underlies the soul of the Indian: “implacable pain, secular shame have consumed his soul and dimmed his face’s expression”, while “hunger, lashes and brutal effort have debased his soul and body” (“Montalvo” 576). Rodó assigns a collective identity to the Indian, one that has been shaped by the conquest, that is peculiarly his, and that he suggests is transmitted through generations.23 It is not surprising therefore that Rodó refers to indigenous populations as races. However, he is not

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exempt from the cultural prejudices of his time. Indigenous races, he believes, have been intellectually held back to the extent that “apart from the spur punishing whip, the Indian is indolent and languid. There is no promise that he believes, no reward that motivates him. Work, as a voluntary and ennobling activity, does not fit within the structures of his understanding. A concept of rights, love of freedom, he does not have” (576). But does Rodó think of racial characteristics only in social-­ cultural terms? I am not sure. It seems to me that even if Rodó´s system for classifying people racially draws mainly on cultural criteria, it is not clear that he does not believe that some of those traits are to some extent biologically based. In a few passages, he suggests that the racial attributes that account for the moral and intellectual dispositions of people and in turn shape their culture and aspirations are innate: there is even talk of a sort of racial essence. In this, he may have been influenced by the historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, whom he admired. In his writings, Taine’s concern was to understand and define the collective psychology of nations, to determine what its features were and how they interacted with external factors. Taine believed that racial traits were innate and saw races as “means and internal character and temperament so strong that it will indicate parentage even if exterior circumstances interfere and bring about radical changes.”24 The set of external factors, including environmental conditions, that can effect a transformation of the race he called milieu. For Taine, the national character was importantly shaped by race, milieu, and moment, which results from the accumulation of all past experiences.25 Some of Rodó’s statements are compatible with Taine’s view. In Ariel, Próspero states that in the case of North Americans “their very nature denies them the possibility of hegemony. Nature has not gifted them either with a genius of persuasion or with the vocation of the apostle. They lack the supreme gift of amiability, given the highest meaning of the word, that is, the extraordinary power of sympathy that enables nations endowed by Providence with the gift and responsibility for education to instill in their culture something of the beauty of classic Greece” (Ariel 87; original emphasis). In other passages, he suggests some sort of underlying essence that can

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be subject to variations: “through all the evolutions of our civilization, the assimilating force of the race’s character, which can modify itself and adapt to new conditions but can never be essentially distorted, will persist” (“El genio de la raza” 213), and that culture and politics must adapt to certain essential features and characters (“Rumbos” 517). Of course, the preceding does not show that Rodó’s view of race is biological but rather that Rodó’s use of the term is not always clear and coherent. And in this, he is not the exception. In a recent piece Wade disputes the idea that a sharp distinction can be made between biological and cultural understandings of race in Latin America. As he puts it, “When culture is thought of as innate and heritable, and considered as fundamental as a soul or spirit, one wonders where the difference lies between it an something called biology.”26 In Rodó, I would like to propose, the distinction between a cultural and a biological understanding of race is not as sharply defined as it is assumed; often he seems to be combining both. What is important, however, is to understand that even if he believes that there is a sort of racial essence, he also thinks it can interact and be affected by external factors, such as, for example, education. He makes it clear that it is possible to control the social milieu, to shape a race through education. This is why he optimistically discusses the possible moral evolution of the race from the North, which he believes is “far from definitive” (Ariel 89). Próspero states that even if North Americans are naturally unable to display some key virtues that are essential in a rational life, and at present “not even national egoism, lacking a higher motivation, . . . can engender glimmers of idealism and beauty in them,” an education focused on ideals and on an appreciation of higher truths will make them gain liberation from purely material wants and desires and in turn will positively shape their culture (Ariel 80). Not only that: he suggests that materialism and mass production have a negative impact not only on culture but also on the brain itself, leading to its reduction in size. In contrast, thought “in the individual, through continuous activity, . . . will enhance and enlarge the size of the brain that houses it. Thinking races reveal in the increasing capacity of their crania the thrust of that internal activity” (Ariel 94).

Rodó, Race, and Morality 193 The Latin American Race

A reading of Rodó’s work shows that for him there are two factors that account for the moral status of a race. One is whether it has been able to keep the originality of its character; the other is whether it is receptive to moral ideals. In Ariel and other pieces, he makes clear that when it comes to the Latin American race his main worry is the first but not the second factor. He believes that the Latin American race is especially receptive to morally desirable ideals. It is characterized by “the vigorous display of an idealistic sense of life: the frequent presence, in thinking and writing, of spiritual ends, the interest in the nonmaterial and nonutilitarian aspect of civilization.”27 However, in an interesting twist, he states that the ideals that young Latin Americans ought to adopt and preserve (thought, spiritual autonomy, and aesthetic sensibility) are embodied by the European civilization, specifically, the French civilization.28 The problem is, how can this Eurocentric view be reconciled with the significance he gives to the preservation of one’s traditions, the recognition of historical continuity, and the promotion of each culture’s unique values? Rodó’s answer is simple: attempts to secure the moral and cultural independence of Latin America must begin with a recognition of what the source of the Latin American civilization is. He then argues that the uniqueness of the Latin American nations has to do with their own cultural traditions, but those cannot be separated from their true sources in Europe. Thus, in his account, although not European, Latin Americans are the true depository of European moral and cultural values. Insofar as civilized Latin Americans pursue the spiritual values that he believes are part of the Latin American heritage, they are realizing their own cultural/racial destiny. However, while Rodó may have theorized that there is a fundamental unity of Latin Americans, a basic morally relevant Latin sameness that makes its people generally more perceptive to the values necessary for human flourishing, he simultaneously made a clear distinction between those who can apprehend and be moved by higher ideals and those who cannot. The virtues that Rodó believes are needed for a good, rational, and dignified existence are not easily

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achievable and are typically associated with cultured, educated men. Ariel’s Próspero certainly meets the conditions, as do his students. But he also notes that this is not the rule. In a letter to Unamuno he states that in general “Our peoples are lazy (Spain because of its agedness and America because of its newness) when it comes to anything having to do with thinking or feeling deeply, yet while also seeking an impartial stance. It does not matter; those of us who comprise the thinking minority will work on this, so long as there is some enthusiasm, by mutually encouraging one another.”29 For Rodó, uneducated masses need the moral guidance of those who have been enlightened, of those who are thinkers and live a more rational life. Thus in his writings he is not really referring to all Latin Americans, nor is he referring to most of them. Considering the significance he attaches to aesthetic sensibility and spiritual introspection, it is not surprising that he has in mind only a select few individual thinkers. Ultimately, this is also the reason indigenous populations are not mentioned in his program of moral regeneration. Rodó cannot assume that they are culturally the same (as I suggested he does with blacks). He recognizes them as racial (cultural) others, but he also believes that whether for sociohistorical reasons or because of something else their race is not characterized by those traits that are essential for human flourishing. Rodó hints that Indians in general are not “pensadores” (thinkers).30 And since his program of individual and national regeneration in Ariel privileges thought above “other manifestations in life,” he is unable to see how they can play a role in developing the human spirit (Ariel 94). This is not to say that Rodó’s account condemns indigenous populations to permanent moral inferiority.31 But insofar as a very specific set of moral ideals is at the heart of his valorization of the Latin race, it is highly unlikely that he is using the term inclusively.

Race and Patria

Rodó uses the term race in another, more political sense. In a recent study, Gerald Aching reminds us that in the Latin American tradition of thinking about race, at least in the nineteenth century, raza

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“signaled the ability of a transnational people to come into being and fulfill its manifest destiny”; it indicated “the concretization of a pure and unchangeable meaning and identity,” “unanimity of purpose in spite of differences.”32 In this sense Aching believes that the modernist use of the term race borrows from Ernest Renan’s understanding of nationhood. Renan discusses nationhood in “What Is a Nation?” a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne in 1882. In this lecture he enters the debate about whether nations are objective, naturally given entities or deliberately created or constructed for political reasons. Renan sides with the latter view. According to him, the world is not inevitably divided into nations that are in turn determined by racial, territorial, or linguistic considerations. Those are useful descriptors but do not determine nationhood. Instead, he argues that nations derive from and depend on the collective memory of past glories and the present collective desire “to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an individuated form.”33 In describing nations in terms of common glories of the past and a common will in the present, Renan lays the foundation for Rodó’s view that Latin American unity must be based on a true (trans)national consciousness and not on territorial considerations. The idea of nations as “spiritual principles” not determined by language, religion, or geography must have been appealing to Rodó, who is not just concerned with cultural/moral claims but also with promoting the political unity of a diverse Latin America.34 Even if Renan’s view prefigures Rodó’s, it is also true that in his writings Rodó appears to blur the distinction between race and nation so carefully postulated by Renan. Renan notes that there are no pure races, that they are made and unmade, and therefore they have no application in politics.35 Thus Renan’s understanding of nation does not depend on a particular understanding of race. In contrast, at times Rodó appears to believe that it is politically useful to use racial terminology to promote a Latin American consciousness, that the real unity of Latin America can only be achieved by reconciling race and homeland. Thus he employs the term not only in a moral/cultural way but also politically, as a symbol of unity against the North American. As he puts it, “Latin America will be

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great, strong and glorious if . . . it is able to maintain the continuity of its history and the fundamental originality of the race and if, above conventional borders that divide it into nations, it raises the superior unity of the sublime and greatest homeland.”36 It is not simply a question of spiritual and moral unity but rather of political unity as well.37 Despite the distinctions between the different nations, the several cultural, linguistic, and historical ties provided the basis for a continental Latin American nationalism. In his words, “We, South Americans, do not need to talk about Latin America in order to lend credence to the unity of the race: we do not need to call ourselves Latin American to build up a name that encompasses us all because we can call ourselves something that means a much more intimate and concrete unity: we can call ourselves ‘Iberoamericans,’ grandchildren of the heroic and civilizing race that has politically fragmented into two European nations.”38 When Rodó uses the term with this political goal in mind, the relation between this transnational race and the distinct races (in either cultural or biological terms) that inhabited Latin America becomes unclear. It is unlikely that he is suggesting a blending of races, but the lack of discussion of this issue has a problematic consequence: it silences racial diversity.

Final Thoughts

Rodó’s message was timely. As Fuentes has pointed out, his Ariel “appears as the emotional and intellectual response of Latin American thought and Latin American spirituality to growing North American imperial arrogance, gunboat diplomacy, and big stick policies.”39 Rodó proclaimed a Latin American moral and political crisis, described its consequences, and then provided his own solution, one where the notion of “race” played a significant role. Rodó’s solution fits very neatly within Latin American thought at the time and was instrumental in setting the terms for later debates on a Latin American collective identity. It has also been vulnerable to criticisms. Some critics have targeted his intellectual elitism. Others have charged that Rodó has a tendency to overlook the

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role played by the Spanish tradition in shaping the Latin American spirit. Yet others have accused him of propagating stereotypes about the United States and Latin America. And a few critics have worried that he does not devote enough time to a discussion of the specific social conditions of the region and of how the values that he defends can be developed in the Latin American context.40 These well-known objections I will not consider further; the issues raised by them have been sufficiently discussed. Instead, I would like to finish by noting another aspect that seems to follow from an examination of Rodó’s view on race: probably unintentionally, he continued to operate within a paradigm that is racist. Now, I am aware that since Rodo’s use of the term race is typically taken to be cultural, there is a tendency to believe that therefore there can be no racism involved in his view. I disagree. Even if he did not endorse the sort of Eurocentric biological racism prevalent at the time (let us for the sake of argument say that he did not), even if the racial traits he discusses are not innate and biological, the fact is that he continued to offer a racist discourse that strongly suggests that not all races are morally equal, that there are significant attributes that make some races superior to others. It is true that his racist statements are not aimed at cultural or political domination of other nations but instead intend to elevate a region that had been historically relegated. However, considering the impact that Rodó’s views had on Latin American thought, his racial rhetoric may have done more than foster optimism about the future of Latin Americans: it may also have promoted a distorted view of who they really are.

Life and Works

José Enrique Rodó was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1873. He was an essayist, literary critic, journalist, and thinker highly influential to the young intellectuals and idealists of his time. He cofounded the Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales and directed it from 1895 to 1897. He read broadly and was influenced by the works of French, Spanish, and British essayists. He published a number of essays: “El que vendrá” (1897), “La novela

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nueva” (1987), and “Ruben Darío” (1899). One of his main concerns was the spiritual and political unity of Latin America: his best-known work, Ariel (1900), was devoted to the youth of America and discussed his views in much detail. He rejected what he considered the uncritical admiration of the United States and believed strongly in the importance of maintaining Latin American uniqueness. As a journalist and later a politician (he served eight years as a congressman representing the Red Party [Colorados]), Rodó was engaged with the political reality of his country and Latin America in general. In 1906 he wrote Liberalismo y Jacobinismo and later the book, Motivos de Proteo, which he considered the most important of all his writings. In 1916 he moved to Europe as a foreign correspondent for Caras y Caretas. He died in Italy in 1917. A posthumous work is El camino de Paros, a collection of miscellaneous pieces written in 1916 and 1917.

Further Reading

Appelbaum, Nancy, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosem­ blatt. Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Fojas, Camilla. Cosmopolitanism in the Americas. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005. San Román, Gustavo. “Political Tact in José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 36 (2003): 279–95. Stabb, Martin S. In Quest of Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.

Notes

This chapter is a more developed version of a paper presented at the VII Capen Symposium, SUNY at Buffalo, in 2007. I wish to thank the participants of the conference for helpful discussion. Special thanks to Jorge J. E. Gracia, Amy Oliver, and Oscar Martí for reading and commenting on this work.

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  1.  For a discussion of the role of intellectuals in the formation of national identities in Latin America, see Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State (London: Verso, 1999).   2. See Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Introduction,” in José Enrique Rodó: Obras completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967), 19–139; Gustavo San Román, ed., This America We Dream Of: Rodó and Ariel One Hundred Years On (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2001); Yamandú Acosta, “Ariel de Rodó, un comienzo de la filosofía Latinoamericana y la identidad democrática de un sujeto en construcción,” in Estudio preliminar en “Ariel,” 5–30 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones El Andariego, 2005); Arturo Ardao, Rodó, su americanismo (Montevideo: Biblioteca de Marcha, 1970); Mario Benedetti, Genio y figura de José Enrique Rodó (Buenos Aires, EUDEBA, 1966).   3. Alberto Zum Felde, Índice crítico de la literatura hispanoameri­ cana (Mexico City: Editorial Guarani, 1954), 291. Benedetti believes that although “inadeptly embellished,” Rodó’s work often contains good ideas. He quotes Pedro Henríquez Ureña who considered Ariel “the most powerful voice of truth, ideal, faith aimed at America in the last years” (Benedetti, Genio y figura, 98). 4. See, e.g., “Rumbos nuevos,” in Obras completas, 519–24. Henceforth cited in the text as “Rumbos.”   5.  For reception in Spain and the United Kingdom, see Stephen M. Hart, “Rodó and Martí,” and Gustavo San Román, “Rodó in the United Kingdom, or the Power of an Eloquent Summary,” both in San Román, This America. See also Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “La correspondencia con Miguel de Unamuno,” in Obras completas, 1378.   6. See, e.g., Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America,” in Caliban and Other Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). For a more nuanced view of Rodó’s interests, see Ardao, Rodó; and Rodríguez Monegal, “Introduction.”   7. See Arturo Ardao, “La conciencia filosófica de Rodó,” in Etapas de la inteligencia uruguaya (Montevideo: Universidad de la República, 1968).   8. See, e.g., “Rubén Darío,” in Obras completas, 169–92.   9. Compare to Ernest Renan: “Let us not abandon the fundamental principle that man is a reasonable and moral being before he is cooped

200  Arleen Salles

up in such and such a language, before he is a member of such and such a race, before he belongs to such and such a culture.” “What Is a Nation,” in Becoming National, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 50. 10.  Motivos de Proteo, in Obras completas, 308–495. 11. For a discussion of Rodó’s notion of progress, see Iván Jaksica, “The Machine and the Spirit: Anti-Technological Humanism in ­Twentieth-Century Latin America,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 30 (1996): 179–201. 12.  Jason Wilson argues that Rodó’s view that art must have a moral sense is what made Rodó criticize Darío’s poetry as socially irresponsible. See “Replay of Plato: Rodó, Darío and Poetry,” in San Román, This America, 23–35. 13. See also Rodó, “La tradición hispanoamericana,” in Obras completas, 1204. 14. See also Rodó, “El nuevo Ariel,” in Obras completas, 71. Hereafter cited in the text with page number. 15. See Richard Graham, ed. The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 2–3. 16. Rodríguez Monegal, “Introduction,” 100. 17. Compare the following paragraphs as written by Rodó in Spanish to Peden’s English translations: “Así, sobre los dos polos de Atenas y Lacedemonia se apoya el eje alrededor del cual gira el carácter de las más genial y civilizadora de las razas” (“So it was that the most genial and civilizing of cultures turned upon an axis supported by the poles of Athens and Sparta,” 73). “ni siquiera el exclusivismo y el orgullo de raza, . . . pueden tener vislumbres de idealidad y de hermosura en un pueblo donde la confusion cosmopolita y el atomismo de una mal entendida democracia impiden la formación de una verdadera conciencia nacional” (“not even exclusiveness and pride of nationhood . . . can engender glimmers of idealism and beauty” 80). 18. Rodó, “El genio de la raza,” 1149. 19. See Gordon Brotherston, “Rodó Views His Continent,” in San Román, This America, 35–50. 20. Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 30–35. 21. Even if at other times he presupposes a connection between racial distinctions and social hierarchies. That he believes in such hierarchies is

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suggested, for example, in “Montalvo,” where he notes that “el indio saluda como a su señor natural al blanco, al mestizo, al mulatto y aún al negro y sin más que hablarle en son de mando, ya es el siervo de cualquiera” (the Indian greets the white, the mestizo, the mulatto and even the black as his natural master; an authoritarian tone of voice makes him the slave of anybody). Rodó, Obras completas, 576; my emphasis. 22. Wade, Race and Ethnicity, 31. 23.  For a careful examination of Rodó’s view of indigenous populations, see Brotherston, “Rodó Views His Continent.” 24. Leo Weinstein, Hippolyte Taine (New York: Twayne, 1972), 80. 25. Ibid. 26.  Peter Wade, “Race and Nation in Latin America: An Anthropological View,” in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 274. 27. Ardao, Rodó, 147. 28.  For a discussion of this point, see Carlos Fuentes, “Prologue,” in José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 13–30; Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, “A Great Vanishing Act: The Latin American Philosophical Tradition and How Ariel and Caliban Helped Save It from Oblivion,” CR: The New Centennial Review 7, no. 3 (2007): 149–69. It is worth noting, however, that later articles challenge the idea that Rodó actually overlooked the Spanish contribution to the Latin American Spirit. See, e.g., “La España niña” in Rodó, Obras completas, 721–22. 29. Rodó, “La correspondencia con Miguel de Unamuno” (Letter dated October 12, 1900), in Obras completas, 1380. I thank Amy Oliver for the translation of this passage. 30.  For a discussion of Rodó’s treatment of indigenous populations, see Brotherston, “Rodó Views His Continent.” 31. We have seen that he does not condemn North Americans to permanent moral inferiority either. 32. Gerald Aching, The Politics of Spanish American Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 33. Ibid., 52. 34. This is what Ardao, in Rodó, calls “americanismo político.” For a different view, see Miller, In the Shadow of the State. 35. Renan, “What Is a Nation,” 48–49.

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36. Rodó, “Sobre América Latina,” in Obras completas, 1184. 37. Rodó, “El concepto de la patria,” in Obras completas, 1185. 38. Rodó, “Iberoamérica,” in Obras completas, 689. 39.  Fuentes, “Prologue,” 16. 40. The essay has been judged “a supremely irritating book,” its rhetoric insufferable, by Fuentes (“Prologue,” 16). In his introduction to Ariel, Brotherston states, “A modern English or American reader of Ariel may well feel irritated by Rodó’s way of dealing with abstract subjects . . . We feel a lack of concrete engagement and may even wonder why a Latin American living in Rodó’s time should appear so to isolate himself from the social and political problems of his day.” In Rodó, Obras completas, 1967, 87. See also Millán-Zaibert, “A Great Vanishing Act,” and Fernández Retamar, “Caliban.”

[

9]

Zarathustra Criollo Vasconcelos on Race Di ego von V a ca no

El que sintetiza, aumenta [Whoever synthesizes, also augments] José Vasconcelos, Indología

In trying to explain why Brazilians should be thought of as part of the “Latin” world, Vasconcelos tells of a vignette that he thinks some may find superficial but which for him carries much substance. The story is found in his short essay “El problema del Brasil” (The Brazil Problem). He tells us of his visit to Lima, where one evening he attends a dance performance by a female Brazilian artist. Recalling Nietzsche’s fascination with Bizet’s Carmen, Vasconcelos recounts that the sight of the dancer holds a deep meaning: The spontaneous and intense art of the dancer produced in us a certain joy, like that experienced by someone returning to something of their own but which had been ignored or distant; or as 203

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if, from the depths of our ethnic conscience, new emotions were born which held a happiness never felt before. It was strange but not discordant.1 Vasconcelos writes in the same essay that he believes Kant would agree with him that aesthetic reason would show us that this experience has a philosophical meaning.2 In fact, it is not Kant who can support Vasconcelos’s claim. Underneath this particular claim, and infusing his entire approach to the problem of race, we find an important affinity with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Exploring this affinity can elucidate the philosophical bases of Vasconcelos’s account of race writ large.3 Moreover, while there are important differences between the two thinkers on some key principles, relating them to each other yields a fruitful area of study for the purpose of seeing how race and racialization are part and parcel of modernity. Race is a major issue in contemporary societies, yet philosophy, especially in the canonical European tradition, has yet to provide a cogent account of what it is and why it persists as a problem. Latin American philosophy, however, has grappled with the issue since its inception. Within this tradition, Vasconcelos is a central figure.4 His writings on race are of paramount importance, yet some remain unclear. Within them, we find various influences, from Aquinas to Bergson; yet some appear to resonate with Nietzschean themes if not direct influences.5 It is this resonance that I explore here to see what exactly undergirds Vasconcelos’s thoughts on race. In particular, I would like to explore the ways in which Vasconcelos’s key work on race, La raza cósmica—as well as other, lesser known writings—can be read as Nietzschean-inflected texts. My claim is not that Vasconcelos followed Nietzsche al pie de la letra, nor that he agreed with him on most philosophical principles. To be sure, Vasconcelos is a (perhaps the) leading light in Latin American modernism’s confrontation with race on the philosophical plane. However, it is still unclear what undergirds his vast architectonic, and further philosophical analysis is needed.6 Both Vasconcelos and Nietzsche saw the aesthetic as the underlying metaphysics of life.7 In effect, there is clear evidence

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of a direct line of influence from Nietzsche to Vasconcelos, and we can aver that both ground their philosophical projects on aesthetic bases.8 Vasconcelos makes some references to Nietzsche that are critical. For example, in Indología he expresses his belief that the race of the future will be worthy not because it will create a few “Nietzschean” Übermenschen but rather a “Totinem” (from totus and hominem, Latin for “all” and “man”) of a universal, synthetic humanity.9 Yet beyond these disagreements, there is a basic metaphysical agreement between Nietzsche and Vasconcelos on the value of the aesthetic experience not just in providing a link to the workings of the universe, but also ethical value to man’s existence. Even more to the point, it is the notions of harmony, rhythm, and music that the two share in their worldviews. As Martha Robles tells us, “As soon as [Vasconcelos] began his autobiographical symphony, he gave himself the task of trying to convince following the highest operatic German style: the music of Wagner, mythical invocations . . . and the historical voluntarism that from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche abutted in the paragon of Mexican mestizaje.”10 In one of his key works, Monismo estético (Aesthetic Monism), where Vasconcelos explains the unity of his cosmology and his theory of art and music, we see an explicit indebtedness to Nietzsche. Vasconcelos tells us that his essay on auditive mysticism, integral to this work, came from “an idea from a certain paragraph, in that fount of books, which is called The Birth of Tragedy, written by Nietzsche.”11 Vasconcelos goes on to say that his theory of dance, also of great important to his aesthetics, comes from reading Nietzsche’s first book.12 While much has been made of Nietzsche’s lack of a system, the opposite must be said of Vasconcelos: perhaps under the influence of Augustine and Aquinas, Vasconcelos aimed to construct a vast philosophical edifice where all elements fit together. It is in this light that we can make sense of the two movements in Vasconcelos’s racial harmony. The first can be found in some of his short essays, the second in his well-known work La raza cósmica. From apparent discord to harmony: this is Vasconcelos’s project in his dealing with all phenomena, including racial ideas.

206  Diego von Vacano Vasconcelos’s Essays: An Overture to the Problem of Race

In the 1920s, perhaps more than at any other time, Latin American intellectuals were in constant dialogue with each other even across vast distances. The nascent idea of a single “Latin America” was the topic of debate for thinkers are diverse as José Carlos Mariátegui and Laureano Vallenilla Lanz. Vasconcelos was an éminence grise of this school: before the publication of La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), he was already a well-known figure across Latin America. In some of his short and understudied essays we find elements of a philo­sophical perspective that can explain why race and the aesthetic are cardinal to the Mexican thinker’s intellectual project. Essentially letters to “Peruvian youth,” to “students in Colombia,” and “the children of Mexico,” Vasconcelos’s short essays point to a concern with the future, something quite fundamental to the modernist project. Just as Rodó’s Próspero was an old teacher imparting his lessons in the form of a swan song to the younger generations of Latin Americans in Ariel, Vasconcelos also thinks of himself as a great teacher who must be concerned with the shaping of young minds in order to create a better future. And this is a Latin American future, not one bounded by particular nationalities. This preoccupation with transcending boundaries is part of a larger cultural project that Vasconcelos sees as essential in carrying forth the ideal of a future society that is guided by the aesthetic principle rather than by pragmatism or materialism. The teleology of his project is one where aesthetic life, that is, living according to the dictates of beauty, the appreciation of art, creativity, spiritu­ality, and the impulses of emotion and sympathy, is the aim. All else is secondary, including his racial doctrines. We can see this as we examine the short essays in his Ideario de acción, published in Lima, Peru, in 1924. The Mexican Revolution was the context of Vasconcelos’s life and works, but he never became bounded by it. Rather than remain a Mexican nationalist, Vasconcelos urged the creation of a common Latin American civi­ lization with a higher purpose. Thus we can understand why he writes letters to the youth of the Americas. The harmony that he did

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not see emerge in (post-)revolutionary Mexico, he believed, could be forged at a higher scale, on the plane of all of Latin America. In a speech given in Santiago de Chile, Vasconcelos shows his fundamental opposition to nationalism as something too limited and grounded on coercion.13 At the university’s School of the Humanities, he declared: “I believe that nationality is an expired idea, and in fact above and beyond the motherlands of today—which hardly move me anymore—I can see the flags of new ethnic federations that will work together for the future of the world. I can envision the Iberoamerican flag as one, floating over Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador.”14 Why would a leading figure of the Mexican Revolution, a head of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (the largest national university) and a potential president of the Mexican Republic, speak against nationalism in the aftermath of one of the most tumultuous moments of nationalist fervor the world has ever seen? One could easily imagine that given these institutional and historical roles that Vasconcelos held, he would be one of the staunchest nationalists and anticosmopolitans of his time. Yet he was not; and the explanation lies in the fact that he was a philosopher who valued the aesthetic principle—specifically, the idea of harmony—above all else. Vasconcelos was able to dissociate himself from his roles as a public official and to declare, without prejudice, his deeper values. As he tells us in a speech delivered in Mexico on October 12, 1920, in commemoration of the Día de la Raza, or the discovery of America: “I will speak today having thrown off my mantle of a public servant.”15 While asserting that he speaks as a “Mexican teacher,” his principal message that day is to encourage the idea that Latin American unity will and must prevail over narrow nationalism. In this process, the idea of “nuestra raza” (our race) is central. He understands this idea not merely as a biological term as is often construed in the English word race.16 He means “people” and “civilization”; and this people is the Latin American people, not just the people of Mexico. It is in within this schema that we must locate his understanding of race. It is not that race is the central idea of his philosophy but that it is the fulcrum on which the aesthetic category of harmony turns, insofar as his philosophy applies to the human world. We

208  Diego von Vacano

can see that harmony for him is not only a metaphysical principle but also a social one. Vasconcelos rails against the Porfiriato, but he also believes that tyranny is the bane of the Latin peoples: “Tyranny is the principal cause of underdevelopment for the peoples of Spanish America.”17 Vasconcelos wants social harmony in his ideal state, and for this he seeks the abolition of all sorts of dictatorships because they force social order and prevent freely chosen social bonds that lead, in his view, to harmonious relations.18 Vasconcelos links tyranny and dictatorship—which causes social discord—to the backward tendencies of the Latin “raza,” or people/ civilization. Vasconcelos is thus a progressive or modernist thinker, someone who is quite radical in the sense that he wants to get to the root of what is necessary for the human species, and this he believes is free association. Dictators like Venezuela’s Juan Vicente Gómez, for whom the eminent social theorist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz worked, are “human pig[s]”19 that delay the progress of the Latin “race” toward a harmonious future. Hence, while contemporary racialist thinking in Europe was moving toward fascism, and racism was part of a reactionary program in the United States, the racial thinking of Vasconcelos was in fact progressive if not revolutionary.20 Rather than focus on a primitive or primordial conception of race, Vasconcelos understands it in terms of cultural affinity or, as he often puts it, “sympathy.” For this reason Brazil is part of the Latin world as well. Not only is there an aesthetic bond that Vasconcelos feels when he sees the Brazilian dancer noted above—showing a common note or wavelength on which the Brazilian and Mexican ethos rests—but he also believes there is a common historical dimension.21 In a speech delivered on the occasion of presenting a statue of the Aztec warrior Cuauhtémoc to the republic of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, Vasconcelos underscores the historical ties that link the two nations. For him, the figure of the “Indian” past of the Americas must be recovered. Cuauhtémoc, for Vasconcelos, is a hero, albeit a defeated one. Yet he is also the “creative spell that brings forth a new race, strong and glorious.”22 The glory behind the Aztec leader was his unyielding resistance against the “Sons of the Sun,” the Spanish conquistadores. Vasconcelos understands the birth of the Latin American race or peoples as one that emerges from a tense

Zarathustra Criollo 209

agon, that between the Spaniard and the Amerindian. It is not the product of a happy marriage, an encounter, or even a violation.23 Vasconcelos sees America as born out of a struggle between equal forces. A Nietzschean sense of agonism is at work here; neither side is clearly superior over the other, and the wrestling between the two cultures yields a more powerful third civilization.24 For Cortés, according to Vasconcelos, the resistance offered by Cuauhtémoc must have been formidable. The conquistador must have felt like a brother of his great enemy, a brother for his greatness and pain, and also because from that moment on, it was written on the lands of Anáhuac that there would not be just one race as victorious, but two races in perpetual conflict, until the Republic would put an end to this struggle, declaring that Mexican soil would not be the property of one single skin color, or of two separate races, but of all the races populating the earth, as long as they adjust their form to the Indian-Spanish rhythm.25 We see that for Vasconcelos the harmony and rhythm of the Latin world was produced by an initial stage that was discordant and full of conflict and agonism.26 In La raza cósmica, he tells us that “opposition and fight, particularly when transposed to the field of the spirit, serve to better define the contenders.”27 Just as we see an admiration for Heraclitus in Nietzsche, we find in Vasconcelos a certain awe in the face of two bitter enemies whose power produces a new way of life. And this new way of life is the basis on which all others must rest. The reason for Brazil’s inclusion in the Latin world is that it shares with the rest of Ibero-America the same appreciation for this sense of harmony and rhythm. To be sure, it is not merely musical. It is a rhythm of life, a way of living, a valuation of certain customs and attitudes that differ from others. As Latin Americans, Vasconcelos states, “we will invent the new form [of life] according to our own taste, and we will create a universal way of life, which will nevertheless will have the imprint of our soul’s rhythm.”28 Here we see an evident aesthetic conceptualization of social order, one modeled after aesthetic ideas that Vasconcelos believed to be the solution to

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a modern world of flux, change, and frequent discord. A modern world that was otherwise losing its grasp of beauty. Adumbrating his philosophy of history in La raza cósmica, Vasconcelos writes of three historical stages in his essay “Nueva ley de los tres estados” (New Law of the Three States). In it, he presents a three-tier vision of historical progress in which an aesthetic era supplants a first stage that he calls materialist and a second stage that he calls intellectual. We can thus see that while being critical of the central tenet of modernity, reason, Vasconcelos nonetheless believes in progress, something that is quite modern. Yet this progress is toward a social order that is grounded on people behaving according to an aesthetic logic. This is still a modernist philosophy, since the aesthetic qua independent activity is a modern phenomenon, but one that is guided by a different dynamic from that of competing modernities. For Vasconcelos, the vehicle toward this panacea is the racial harmonization that comes from the unification of Latin America both at the political and at the social level. Politically, he wants to abrade national boundaries in order to create “ethnic federations” of nations that share ethnic roots and practices. At the social level, he wants to strive toward another modern ideal, equality, by pushing forth greater racial miscegenation.29 And this mixing is the result of people heeding the norms of taste and “sympathy,” not reason or the law.30 On the political plane, Vasconcelos associates the first stage with imperialism. “Brute force” unifies disparate peoples, and this does not achieve true, free association. The second stage is more reasonable and is connected to the rise of nation-states. It is a step forward vis-à-vis the first stage, for it aims at greater homogeneity. However, it is still founded on force and self-interest rather than free, uncoerced activity and interaction. It is only in the third stage, located principally in Latin America, that Vasconcelos sees a solution. It is here where “relations between peoples are ruled freely by sympathy and taste. Taste is the supreme law of the inner life, which manifests itself outwardly as sympathy and beauty, and it will become the undisputed norm of public order and relations between states.”31 This utopian vision responds to the very modern problem of why desire, or the longing for something deep, has disappeared from life. A problem that Nietzsche knows too well, as we find in his account

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of the “last man”: modern man as destitute of any deep desire, and satisfied by simple consumption. Vasconcelos sees the same problem and believes that it can be addressed by the recovery of an instinctive sense of beauty that lies deep in the heart of man himself. Hence the emphasis on desire and miscegenation. Unlike La raza cósmica, this essay does have practical suggestions to hasten the arrival of the third stage. Vasconcelos urges greater economic equality; he wants states to carry out modern, functional projects such as the construction of bridges, railways, ships, and other things that will tighten the bonds between nations seen as ethnically related. He also wants the termination of apish imitation of others, especially European (French in particular) and American ways of doing things.32 He advocates free trade and the institution of a Zollverein system that would “be the salvation of our race.”33 Vasconcelos tells us he understands the anti-­Americanism of some of his contemporaries but argues that the unity of Latin America should not be negative: it should be aimed at a creative, positive affirmation born out of common cultural and racial ties. From disparate texts, we see common threads in the works of Vasconcelos preceding his major work on race, La raza cósmica.34 Biological conceptualizations of race are not as prominent as they would become in his most famous book. What we see are the buttresses of a philosophical position. The central one is the notion of the aesthetic, which permeates the essays and shows Vasconcelos to be centrally concerned with the problem of bringing beauty back in against the modernist current going in the opposite direction. Just as Nietzsche sought to provide a justification for life on aesthetic grounds, Vasconcelos struggles with the idea that the waves of modernity tend to do away with beauty. Vasconcelos wants to recover beauty and find a way to make it a social norm. It is under this schema that his racial ideas develop, not the other way around. While Nietzsche urged for a sort of new renaissance of fundamental European values for a transnational cultural project, Vasconcelos similarly wanted a regional integration of his own continent. Latin America would be the place for a rebirth; a rebirth not just of Latin values but also of humanity as a whole. In this project, racial miscegenation understood now more as a natural or biological concept

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would merge with the metaphysical and the political impera­tives in his short essays.

La raza cósmica in Nietzschean Tones

As he writes in the prologue to the 1948 edition of La raza cósmica, Vasconcelos’s aim in this text is to show that “the various races of the earth tend to intermix at a gradually increasing pace, and eventually will give rise to a new human type, composed of selections from each of the races already in existence.”35 This thesis is part of a project combining different methodologies. Didier Jaén rightly states that while “others wrote literature or created art, Vasconcelos tried to construct systems. His aim was that of encompassing within a complete philosophical system, such as Saint Thomas’[,] the glimpses of a Nietzsche or a Schopenhauer, as well as the visions of science.”36 Nietzsche claimed to be a thinker opposed to systematic, structural philosophy. Yet the overall effect of his whole corpus does indeed provide a general architectonic and recurrence of motifs that in fact do create legitimacy for the notion of something that is “Nietzschean.” Pace postmodernism, there is a set of doctrines, methodologies, concerns, metaphors, revaluation of terms, and overall purpose in the opus of Nietzsche that lends it coherence and a degree of systematicity. Nietzsche was a modern thinker: a critic of modernity who nonetheless found it important to point to the defects and crises of the modern world, albeit with a particular perspective intended to be proposed as a better alternative to other philosophical views. His work is not a congeries of dissociated, aimless ideas. Thus the relevance of this thought for modern concerns. One of these is race.37 Perhaps more than any other social concept, race is preeminently modern. There is ample historical evidence that the notions surrounding race emerge only in times we consider modern, that is, at the beginning of the 1500s immediately after the conquest of the Americas by Spain.38 There is some evidence of premodern roots of race and racism.39 But a coherent notion of race only appears pari passu the rise of modernity. Thus the notion of

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modernity is useful for our purposes of understanding what race is and how Nietzsche and Vasconcelos perceive it. Throughout La raza cósmica, the notion of the aesthetic plays a pivotal role in Vasconcelos’s construction of his perspective on race. It forms the normative bedrock of his approach, and it is largely similar to the ideas on the topic held by Nietzsche.40 Vasconcelos expands and builds on this derivation, eventually creating a new notion that is unique but largely indebted to the German thinker’s contribution to an aesthetic worldview. Before as well as after his concern with race, Vasconcelos was arguably more interested in the problems associated with an aesthetic conceptualization of metaphysics, as he wrote Monismo estético in 1919 and Estética in 1936.41 We must recall that the “aesthetic” is a modern construct. Prior to 1785, when the German author Alexander Baumgarten coined the term, the idea of thinking about art for art’s sake, and of the philosophical meanings of beauty per se, did not exist. The other meaning of the aesthetic for our purposes is cognition through the senses. Thus the aesthetic, as a modern concept, refers to art, beauty, and sensory perception. Ideas of art before the Enlightenment did not make artistic contemplation independent of other sorts of thinking. Art was not an object of analysis but rather an integral part of social, cultural, and even political life. This was especially true of antiquity, something that is evident in Plato’s discussion of art. How does Vasconcelos understand the aesthetic? For him, it is the single, most important facet of humans.42 In other words, he believes it is the essence of what it is to be human. It is logically and ontologically prior to the category of the racial.43 More than being rational, practical, or social, aestheticism is what makes us truly distinct from other kinds of beings. By “aesthetic,” Vasconcelos means four interrelated things: being creative, appreciating beauty, being in touch with emotions, and being spiritual. The entire history of humankind, for Vasconcelos, has moved teleologically toward the epoch in which humans will finally be able to be aesthetic beings, freed from practical demands and utilitarian concerns. The aesthetic spirit will reflect itself in real life: “spiral constructions will be raised in useless ostentation of beauty, because the new aesthetics will try to adapt itself to the endless curve of the

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spiral, which represents freedom of desire and the triumph of being in the conquest of infinity.”44 This teleological approach—shown in the symbol of the spiral— is similar to that of Hegel.45 Here we see a departure from Nietzsche, for Nietzsche never wrote a philosophy of history akin to that of Hegel. Yet we must not overstate the distance between Hegel and Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s thought can be seen as significantly inflected by the Hegelian tradition. In particular, the agonistic elements found in the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit are of special value to the Nietzschean model. Indeed, Nietzsche reacts to Hegel, but like Marx, he appropriates some key elements of the Hegelian approach. However, in terms of a philosophy of history, Vasconcelos uses a fundamentally Hegelian structure to define the three key periods of human history in La raza cósmica: the material, the intellectual, and the aesthetic.46 Unlike Hegel, the culminating historical period is not one of otherworldly spirituality; it is one where concrete, organic human beings exist in an aesthetic culture. In other words, Vasconcelos’s vision of the future is very much like something Nietzsche might have written had he been able to achieve his goal of writing a more explicitly political text, as he had expressed on his deathbed. Not only did Nietzsche wish to write a more political tract as he approached the end of his life, but he also intimated an interest in a more global, cosmopolitan view of politics that he termed the question of the “good European,” in other words, the concerns beyond the nation-state and nationalism.47 The parallel with Vasconcelos is quite clear. The Mexican thinker writes La raza cósmica as a response to pensadores (thinkers) who were concerned with national identity and state making, and Vasconcelos proposes a larger, more cosmopolitan (or “cosmic”) view of Latin American cultural identity, similar to Nietzsche’s panEuropean identity. Unlike Sarmiento or Martí, Vasconcelos does not write for a given, particular national group, especially in his key text. While Vasconcelos was very much a key figure of the Mexican nationalist intelligentsia, La raza cósmica is not a Mexicanist text at all. It does not share with Sarmiento’s Civilization and Barbarism a defense of “the national” in Argentina or with Martí’s Cuban

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republicanism a desire to construct a specific nationality. In all three cases, race is a central concern, but whereas Sarmiento uses race as a divisive element (except for this idealization of the gaucho image) and Martí uses race as a way to construct a common Cuban sense of citizenship, Vasconcelos uses race to build a postnational political order in the service of a larger aesthetic purpose for humankind. Hence we can speak of La raza cósmica as a text of rooted cosmopolitanism: it is grounded in the Latin American experience, but it holds a world historical mission. Throughout La raza cósmica Vasconcelos conceives the emotional aspect of the aesthetic as tied to the biological basis that will drive the vehicle of race toward his teleological aim of a postnational and postrational world social order. The central emotions are those of love and desire. With a distinctively rhetorical as opposed to scientific approach that evokes Nietzsche’s style, Vasconcelos argues that the Latin race or people is more attuned to emotions and that this will allow its members to form sexual and matrimonial unions with those of any race, unlike Anglos, for example, who are unable to see the beauty in a Japanese person.48 This is not far from what Nietzsche argues when he says that at the root of the aesthetic sentiment lies the sexual impulse.49 In other words, sexual desire and its form are what generate the instinct for the creativity and judgment of the aesthetic. Creativity, for both Vasconcelos and Nietzsche, is cardinal to the aesthetic essence of man. Nietzsche shied away from terms such as essence or noumenon, but he effectively constructed a conception of human nature that privileged the aesthetic. While Vasconcelos often refers to the creative role of the Latin race in the movement toward a fifth cosmic race, it is here where Nietzsche actually appears less abstract. It is not clear how the Latin race “creates” a new future, beyond the idea of racial miscegenation, which is a more biological, unconscious act. A more convincing account of creativity is one where there is a conscious agent who seeks to produce something new, not someone who generates something against her will. For this reason the Nietzschean incorporation of a Machiavellian notion of virtù in political creativity is cogent. Here Vasconcelos lacks the particular political actors that will be the creative force in

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leading and shaping the new cultural arena defined by Latin patterns and norms. In this respect, Vasconcelos’s vision seems significantly flawed, for the process he advocates seems to lack guidance and direction. Perhaps this may lead it to the eventual failure of Vasconcelos’s cosmic vision. A clear strength of Vasconcelos’s understanding of beauty and a step above that of Nietzsche is its true cosmopolitanism. For Vasconcelos, the positive fact that Latins incorporate all existing ethnic types means that differing views of what is beautiful will be coalesced into the fifth race.50 The criteria for beauty are thus not limited to a particular cultural tradition; they are derived from the mixing of all understandings of beauty.51 Beauty is central to Nietzsche and to Vasconcelos, but for the former, a Eurocentric basis prevents him from understanding that different cultures have different notions of beauty (e.g., asymmetry is central to Japanese aesthetics). By combining miscegenation with the ethnocultural mixing of ideas of beauty, Vasconcelos provides a truly cosmopolitan, global vision of a movement toward a universalist sense of beauty produced not by abstract reason, as in Kant, but by real, biological, historico-social processes in the progress of “miscegenation.”52 Lastly, the aesthetic, for Vasconcelos, has a spiritual dimension. It is here where the departure from Nietzsche is most evident. There is no doubt that for Nietzsche the aesthetic also has a spiritual plane. Human beings are a combination of plant and spirit,53 in other words, organic beings with a spiritual facet. Yet, owing to his radical atheism, Nietzsche is unable to provide a cogent account of secular spirituality. His rejection of Judeo-Christian values is not replaced by a positive contribution that is clearly as spiritual as a religious tradition. He attempts to do so, for this is the purpose of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But the fundamentally rational ideas behind metaphors in this text obviate a direct spirituality that is present, for instance, in Catholic mysticism. Vasconcelos, on the contrary, argues that the Latin race’s leading role in the movement to the fifth race is to a significant extent the result of its Catholic roots. Similarly to Rodó, Vasconcelos rejects Nietzsche’s repudiation of Christianity. In Vasconcelos’s model, spirituality is fundamental, but it cannot be a secular spirituality like

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that of Mariátegui. There is no substitute for religious spirituality. This is because for Vasconcelos the biological process of the mixing of the races must occur out of love; and love, for Vasconcelos, must be understood as a Christian idea of love of one’s neighbor as well as love of one’s enemies (i.e., of one’s racial Others).54 According to him, a Judaic notion of the Chosen, or a Protestant notion of sectarianism, or an Islamic notion of the infidel is simply not able to capture the universalism of the Christian Catholic doctrine of love. Not only did Vasconcelos praise the Catholic Church explicitly for its role in establishing the universalist basis of a Latin American ethos, but the mystical style that appears in some of his writings can be seen as part of the Catholic rational-mystical tradition that goes back all the way to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nietzsche attempts to construct a mystical, secular spirituality in Zarathustra, but the absence of common myths, the negative nature of the Nietzschean “faith” (i.e., it is written against Christianity), and the ultimately philosophical (as opposed to nonrational) bases of the text make it unable to supplant the Christian ethos. Vasconcelos writes, “The history of North America is like the uninterrupted and vigorous allegro of a triumphal march. . . . How different the sounds of the Ibero-American development! They resemble the profound scherzo of a deep and infinite symphony.”55 Recalling Nietzsche’s description of Machiavelli’s writing in musical terms,56 Vasconcelos wants to show that beneath this metaphor of music lies a metaphysics of the inner harmony of the cosmos, to which man can be privy through history. We must recall that for Vasconcelos all of his doctrines were to be harmonized into his meta-theory, that of aesthetic monism. Man can only know the world by comprehending its rhythms, as he explained in his essay on Pythagorism. Not only is the aesthetic the central category of ontological understanding, but more ­specifically—along with Nietzsche—music, rhythm, and harmony are at the core of this process. For Vasconcelos, rhythm is not something purely out in the world; it is something that can be “tuned into” by the human body. Indeed, even the human cell is subject to rhythm: “the cell, in biology, is also shaken by the confused rhythms of its needs and desires.”57 A

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pleasant rhythm is that which corresponds to “cardiac diastolic and systolic functions.”58 Thus the human body itself is governed by this fundamental rhythmic nature of life. If this is the case, then there is a biological basis for particular attitudes to the aesthetic; and different cultures have different ways of cultivating them. In this juncture of biology and culture we find what Vasconcelos means by “race.” The incorporation of diverse elements into a harmonious whole is the main aim of Vasconcelos’s philosophy in general. What he states about the nature of aesthetics, we may infer, can be translated into the field of the social. Aesthetics is “an organized system of heterogeneous elements.”59 And this, for human beings, is perceived through sensory cognition. He calls “image” the totality of sensory perceptions that we have, such that we should not privilege abstract reasoning; rather, humans experience the world through their senses and thereby attune themselves to the order of the world. Color, sound, taste, touch, and smell are the ways in which we perceive the world and arrange it for aesthetic purposes and to make sense of it, according to Vasconcelos.60 Aesthetics is synthesis. Vasconcelos never explicitly tied his philosophy of aesthetics to his philosophy of racial identity. For this reason, much misreading has occurred in the sense of interpreting his writings on race as merely reflecting cultural biases, or literary whims, or even political imperatives (the oft-repeated “construction of the nation” through racial narratives). But in fact it is the specifically philosophical premises of his understanding of the aesthetic that can explain his incorporation of a “racial doctrine” into his holistic philosophical apparatus. If for aesthetics “the secret is in the composition of its elements[,] . . . the art of arranging heterogeneous parts,”61 then we can infer that his ideal social order is also one where diverse, heterogeneous ethnic and racial groups are freely incorporated and synthesized into a whole, by virtue of the aesthetic principle.

Conclusion

“Beyond good and evil, in a world of aesthetic pathos, the only thing that will matter will be that the act, being beautiful, shall

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produce joy.”62 In these unequivocally Nietzschean terms Vasconcelos describes his utopian society of the third, aesthetic stage of human history. And for the Mexican philosopher, it is race that is the vehicle to this future social harmony. “Will is power,” he maintains, a blind power that is liberated in the third stage of history when all races mix together and become one. “It expands into harmony and ascends into the creative mystery of melody. It satisfies itself and dissolves into emotion, fusing itself with the joy of the universe: it becomes passion of beauty.”63 Just as Nietzsche sought to philosophize with a hammer (a tuning fork) to find a harmonious link between man and nature, so too does Vasconcelos want to attune man and history. For Nietzsche, race represents groups of people defined by biological and cultural ties.64 This is the same meaning that is assigned to race by Vasconcelos. Both thinkers exalted miscegenation rather than racial “purity.”65 Neither believes, as late-twentieth-century conventional wisdom holds, that race is “socially constructed.” At root, for them there is indeed a biological basis of race that explains the distinctive characteristics of the main “racial” groups in the world. Writing before the emergence of advances in DNA and genetics, which show the absence of a genetic definition of race, the two thinkers believe race is a group of people with a common biological descent and a common cultural history. In other words, they abrade the distinction between the terms race and ethnicity, in a manner that recalls Alain Locke’s notion of “ethnic race.” Nothing is more dangerous than amateurish attempts to use science for political or social purposes, or for political or social science. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Nietzsche nor Vasconcelos attempted to square their ideas of race with the prevailing “scientific” accounts of race. Nietzsche never gave credence to phrenology or eugenics; he rejected Spencerian evolutionary theory and the idea of the survival of the fittest.66 In fact, many misconceptions about his understanding of race are due to the belief that he endorsed evolution or was anti-Semitic.67 Vasconcelos in effect wrote a tract geared to racial inclusiveness at a time of rising racism in Germany and segregation in the United States. Thus both have to be commended for trying to find

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philosophical approaches to race rather than to act as amateur scientists in seeking to define race through science. For both, “race” is a cultural affair, but one that is premised on the fact that human beings in fact look different along general lines. This question of appearance, of how people look, points to the fundamentally aesthetic nature of the race problem. Rather than to see it as a matter of science, genetics, or biology, or to see it as a religious issue of monogenesis or polygenesis, or as a social matter of social construction, the aesthetic lens that both Nietzsche and Vasconcelos use to think of race tells us that human beings for some reason pay special attention to how things look, appear, feel, and are shaped. The primacy of sensory cognition and experience in making us human is what Nietzsche sought to underscore. Vasconcelos carries this thought through, arguing that human beings indeed follow their aesthetic sense more than their other capacities, and that this will be reflected in the future through the mixing of “racial” types. This Nietzschean idea of the importance of aesthetic or sensory cognition to humans is, I believe, more valuable to our understanding of what race is and to what Vasconcelos meant by race than Nietzsche’s explicit references to the term race. Vasconcelos’s use of the term is fairly traditional; it is not dissimilar to Nietzsche’s use of the term as representing human groups bound together by common descent, cultural history, and geographic location. What Nietzsche seeks to tell us is that at some point in history, physical appearances, somatic form, and phenotypical differences became associated with moral characteristics. It is not that these characteristics are innate but rather that they came to be tied to particular groups using physical criteria.68 Nietzsche seems incorrect in placing this moment in history in a premodern time, for we know now that racialization is modern. Yet his insight into the link between a historically located ascription of moral values according to physical characteristics provides us with an aesthetic basis for understanding racialization. Vasconcelos does not attempt a scientific, religious, social, or even political approach to race. What he does is to take an aesthetic approach, one that is deeply inflected by the Nietzschean lens on this notion—one focused on the implicit phenomenology of race beneath

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explicit references to specific “racial” groups such as the Aryan or Jewish people.69 To be sure, Vasconcelos departs from Nietzsche in some key ways, but he is largely thinking along the same lines. While neither provides an entirely lucid interpretation of the problem of race, we find in them hints about how to find insight in the aesthetic nature of the idea of race rather than to focus on its scientific, analytical, logical, or metaphysical dimensions. In this manner we understand that the rise of racial notions is coeval with the rise of aesthetic thinking, as both are part of the period we know as modernity. In Vasconcelos’s view of the future, we “would feel no repugnance at all if [we saw] the union of a black Apollo and a blond Venus, which goes to prove that everything is sanctified by beauty. On the other hand it is repugnant to see those married couples that come out of the judge’s offices or the temples.”70 Vasconcelos is thus deeply troubled by the retreat of beauty in the modern world and wants to bring it back in through a vehicle he knows well is a modern creation, race. By reading his words in a Nietzschean light, we are led to the view that race and racialization are fundamentally aesthetic phenomena, products of the human anxiety over the loss of beauty in times of accelerated modern rhythms.

Life and Works

Best known as an educator, philosopher, political activist, and essayist, José Vasconcelos was a prominent figure in early twentiethcentury Latin American thought. Born in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1882, he moved to Mexico City in 1897 and spent most of his life there. In 1907 he earned a law degree and began a career as an advocate of positivism. His thought shifted, however, and he became politically active, participating in the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the following years on the side of Pancho Villa and Francisco Madero. Although exiled many times due to the political turmoil, he was appointed secretary of public education in 1921, a post in which he was able to successfully reform the public education system, expand rural education programs, and raise literacy rates. An unsuccessful bid at the presidency in 1929 ended his formal political career

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but not his political activism. Alongside his political involvement, he developed a philosophical system known as “aesthetic monism” and published prolifically throughout his life. He was appointed director of the National Library in 1939 and served in this position until his death in 1959.

Further Reading

Crowley, F. J., ed. The Conservative Thought of José Vasconcelos. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1963. Haddox, John Herbert. Vasconcelos of Mexico: Philosopher and Prophet. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Partin, Emmett M. The Life, Educational Ideas, and Work of José Vasconcelos (1882–1959). Philadelphia, PA: Partin, 1973. Phillips, R. B., ed. José Vasconcelos and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1953. Vasconcelos, José. A Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiography. Ed. William Rex Crawford. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Notes

  1.  “Pero aparte de las relaciones literarias [a Eça de Queiros], el arte intenso y espontánea de la bailarina nos producía goces como de quien vuelve a algo suyo ignorado o muy distante, o como si del fondo nuestra conciencia étnica naciesen emociones de dicha profunda jamás gustada. Aquello era extraño pero no discorde.” José Vasconcelos, Ideario de acción (Lima: Actual, 1924), 62. All translations are my own.   2.  “El problema del Brasil,” in Ideario, 61.   3. No extensive treatment of the Nietzschean themes in Vasconcelos has been carried out heretofore. On the contrary, many scholars, especially in comparative literature, treat Vasconcelos’s writing as “ideological” rather than philosophical. See Marilyn Grace Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 35. However, the two thinkers shared some key themes and concerns beyond aesthetic metaphysics, which is the focus of this chapter. They

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both argued against the abstract reason of Kant and Hegel; saw the centrality of agonism in life; had similar concerns about providing a cogent view of joyous pessimism; admired Indian thought; argued for a regional, continental sense of identity against nationalism; underscored the place of emotion and the body in philosophy; wrote rhetorically; and—not unimportantly—had an enlarged sense of their own importance. What distinguishes them most clearly is the important divergence in terms of religion and politics: Nietzsche was a preeminent critic of Christianity, whereas Vasconcelos was a devout Catholic especially at the end of his life. This led to Vasconcelos’s emphasis on “Providence” and the order of the world, whereas Nietzsche argued against order and telos. In the political field, Vasconcelos was an engagé intellectual, whereas Nietzsche shied away from actual politics.  4. Even Vasconcelos himself appreciated (perhaps to an exaggerated degree) his own significance. He wrote three autobiographical works, one of which was titled Creole Ulysses, which documented every exiguous detail of his life and travels.   5. Nietzsche has no “unambiguous theory of race,” as James Winchester tells us, but we can attempt to see what can be of use to understand Vasconcelos better. See “Nietzsche’s Racial Profiling,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 255.   6.  Much of the secondary literature on Vasconcelos’s treatment of race is carried out in nonphilosophical disciplines, such as comparative literature, history, and cultural studies.   7. Thus this chapter focuses on how Vasconcelos may be read in light of Nietzschean aesthetic ideas rather than on understanding what the German thinker said about Jews, Aryans, or other “races.” The attempt to “de-Nazify” Nietzsche is not philosophically fruitful (contra Jacob Golomb, “How to De-Nazify Nietzsche’s Philosophical Anthropology?” in Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002], 19–20).   8. The aesthetic is not, as Miller asserts, merely “a helpful metaphor.” Miller, Rise and Fall, 32.  9. See José Vasconcelos, Indología (Paris: Agencia Mundial e Librería, 1926), 93.

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10.  Martha Robles, Entre el poder y las letras: Vasconcelos en sus memorias (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), 101. 11. In José Vasconcelos, Obras completas, 4 vols. (Mexico City: Libreros Mexicanos Unidos, 1957–61), 4:12. 12. Vasconcelos also praises Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a book that “has a thousand different themes, which has an ethical rhythm,” for it “awakens slumbering notions; pulls out unsuspected convictions; gives growth to all latent faculties” (Monismo estético, in Obras completas, 4:38). 13. Vasconcelos points to the power of Jewish identity, transnational in character, to show that nationalism is not the supreme form of social cohesion (“Bolivarismo y monroismo,” in Obras completas, 2:366; see also 1378). 14.  “Discurso hecho en Chile,” in Ideario, 37; emphasis added. 15.  “Día de la raza,” in Ideario, 40. 16. There is indeed a biological basis for Vasconcelos, as Manuel Vargas points out referring to his use of Mendel, in “La biología y la filosofía de la ‘raza’ en México: Francisco Bulnes y José Vasconcelos,” in Construcción de las identidades latinoamericanas, ed. Aimer Granados García y Carlos Marichal (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2004), 170. 17.  “La tiranía es la causa principal del atraso de los pueblos españoles de América” (Ideario, 40). 18. See La raza cósmica (Barcelona: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925), 26, where Vasconcelos speaks of “free choice of personal taste” as the guiding criterion of a new society. 19.  Ideario, 40. 20. At the very least, Vasconcelos’s work can be seen as a “riposte to Spencer” (Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America: 1870–1940, ed. Richard Graham [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999], 92). 21. See La raza cósmica, 38: “the mestizo people of the IberoAmerican continent, people for whom beauty is the reason for everything [because of a] fine aesthetic sensitivity and a profound love of beauty.” 22.  Pero también “el conjuro creador de una raza nueva, fuerte, y gloriosa” (Ideario, 44). Vasconcelos also praises the indigenous American peoples in Indología, 86. 23.  Ideario, 191.

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24. Ibid., 73. 25.  “El Bronce del Indio Mexicano se apoya en el granito bruñido del Brasil” (Ideario, 45). 26. Vasconcelos is not unaware of the viciousness of the Spanish in the Americas. He knows of the “atrocious cruelties” perpetrated by the conquistadores (Obras completas, 2:994). 27.  La raza cósmica, 21. 28.  Ideario, 48; emphasis added. 29. Vasconcelos is well aware of the prevalence of racism in modern societies (see “Bolivarismo y monroismo,” in Obras completas, 2:1361, 1370). Equality is part of Vasconcelos’s philosophical system, as he proposes that Pythagorean gnosis represents “the ideal of the equality of all men” (La raza cósmica, 39). 30. Vasconcelos speaks in self-contradictory terms when he also wants to posit that the future will actually have no specific guidelines: “life will be without norms” (La raza cósmica, 29). 31.  Ideario, 54. 32. Vasconcelos is critical of mimetic action; he wants original, creative practices (see Obras completas, 2:1379). 33.  Ideario, 56. 34.  His work Indología, in his eyes, is merely an “expansion” of the ideas of La raza cósmica (See Indología, 55). 35.  La raza cósmica, 3. 36. Introduction, La raza cósmica, xix. 37.  Miller correctly states that the term race is highly indeterminate and problematic (Rise and Fall, 42). 38. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 61–62. 39. See Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 40. However, little research has been done so far on Nietzsche’s views on race. See Menahem Brinker, “Nietzsche and the Jews,” in Golomb and Wistrich, Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? 124 n. 2. 41.  His work Pitágoras, also concerned with the ideas of harmony and rhythm as integral to the human nexus with the world, appeared in 1919.

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42.  His fascination with the aesthetic is visible even in his earliest writings, such as “La estética de Sevilla.” In Pesimismo alegre (Madrid: Aguilar, 1936), 49. 43. In his Indología, Vasconcelos shows he is tired of the topic of race and wants to move to what he considers more important topics such as aesthetics, metaphysics, and religion: “ya no escribiré más sobre estas trilladas cuestiones de la raza y el iberoamericanismo” (Indología, 55). 44.  La raza cósmica, 24. For Vasconcelos, the aesthetic is the central notion of his metaphysics, as he explains in Monismo estético. 45. “Perhaps there is nothing useless in historical developments” (La raza cósmica, 21). 46.  La raza cósmica, 28. 47. See Winchester, “Nietzsche’s Racial Profiling,” 260. 48. See La raza cósmica, 20. 49. Nietzsche believes “the craving for art and beauty is an indirect craving for the ecstasies of the sexual instinct” (WP, 805). 50.  He calls it the “new universal era of Humanity” (La raza cósmica, 39). 51. It may be the case that Nietzsche’s usage of the term breeding may refer to improvement through more miscegenation. See Winchester, “Nietzsche’s Racial Profiling,” 264–65. 52. In Indología, Vasconcelos speaks for universalism, and he believes the Hispanic roots of the conquest allow for a universal conception of the eventual unification of humanity (Indología, 9). 53.  Beyond Good and Evil, 1:15, 23. 54. See La raza cósmica, 35. 55.  La raza cósmica, 21. 56.  Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 28. 57.  “La célula biológica también esta agitada por el ritmo confuso de sus apetencias y anhelos varios” (ibid., 213). 58. Ibid., 206. 59. Ibid., 196. 60. Ibid., 206. 61. Ibid., 229. 62.  La raza cósmica, 19. 63. Ibid., 30.

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64. As Brinker states, “For Nietzsche ‘race’ connotes a combination of spiritual internalizations of historical experience, with the biological mechanism securing their transmission.” (“Nietzsche and the Jews,”124 n. 2). 65. Walter Kaufmann argues that Nietzsche advances racial mixing. See Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 288–89, 293. 66.  Barbara Stiegler, Nietzsche et la biologie (Paris: PUF, 2001), 95. 67.  He believed in the importance of “weakness” in a system. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), sec. 224. 68. See Winchester, “Nietzsche’s Racial Profiling,” 262–63. 69. A failure to see this leads some commentators astray as they to try to compare, unfavorably, Vasconcelos’s writings to empirical social realities rather than to judge them with philosophical criteria (see Miller, Rise and Fall, 35–36). 70.  La raza cósmica, 31.

[

10]

The Amauta’s Ambivalence Mariátegui on Race R en z o L lore nte

The “problem of the Indian” is not, for Mariátegui, merely one social problem among many others afflicting Peru. To the contrary, he regards it as, in his words, “the fundamental problem,” or “the primary problem,” or “a paramount issue.”1 In short, the problem of the Indian was, in Mariátegui’s view, the single most important sociopolitical problem confronting the Peruvians of his day. Whether or not Mariátegui was right to attach such importance to this question—and I should make it clear that I, for one, think that he was—one result of his commitment to this view is that race is a pervasive theme in his sociopolitical writings. Yet it is also a theme that Mariátegui treats with great ambivalence. As I argue below, the reason for this ambivalence, which seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the literature on Mariátegui,2 stems from the apparent inadequacy of Mariátegui’s general framework for analyzing the problem of the Indian. This framework tends to render the ethnic or racial aspect of the question epiphenomenal, effectively reducing it to something of a different nature and thereby denying it real autonomy. At the same time, the many occasional observations 228

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concerning race and Peru’s indigenous peoples scattered throughout Mariátegui’s works tend to suggest that the problem of the Indian defies the analytical constraints of this very framework. This is, at any rate, what I argue in this chapter. The structure of the present chapter is as follows. In the first section, I discuss Mariátegui’s basic theoretical approach to the problem of the Indian—or, as he sometimes calls it, “the indigenous problem”—as developed in the Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality and in other important texts. The central feature of this approach consists in the attempt, from a more or less conventionally Marxist perspective, to reduce the problem of the Indian to a more fundamental injustice rooted in existing property relations. In the second section, I discuss Mariátegui’s conception and use of the term race, as well as his various, more or less occasional comments on the nature of Peru’s various racial and ethnic groups, mestizaje, and the identity of Latin Americans generally. I then argue, in the following section, that many of Mariátegui’s incidental comments on Peru’s Indians, along with his other remarks on race, mestizaje, nationality, and the like, are at variance with the premises underlying what I have called his basic theoretical approach, at least insofar as this approach claims that the problem of the Indian is reducible to a more basic injustice. In other words, I argue that these comments and remarks tend to undermine Mariátegui’s central thesis, since they imply, if anything, that his basic approach is inadequate to the scope and complexity of the problem of the Indian. In the fourth section, I show that Mariátegui’s rather contradictory justifications for Peruvian nationalism merely serve to make this tension or inconsistency in his work appear more acute. My conclusion, accordingly, is that the Amauta—a word that means “sage” or “teacher” in Quechua and is often used to refer to Mariátegui, who founded a journal with this name—fails to resolve the discrepancy that I identify and that the overall impression left by his treatment of “the Indian question” is one of profound ambivalence. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of some interpretive approaches that might enable us to make sense of, and reconcile, the divergent perspectives on the problem of the Indian found in Mariátegui’s writings.

230  Renzo Llorente The Problem of the Indian

As noted above, Mariátegui considers the problem of the Indian— which he defines as “the moral and material misery of the Indian” (Seven Essays 30 n. 1)—the single most important social problem confronting Peruvians. I have already cited some of Mariátegui’s explicit statements to this effect, and the sincerity of these declarations would seem to be borne out by the sheer number of references to this problem, and related issues, over the course of his works. The problem of the Indian is, of course, the theme of one of the Seven Essays, but it is also addressed in the book’s other six chapters and figures quite prominently in the essays on land and literature. On the other hand, we also find significant discussions of this issue in essays included in the collections Peruanicemos al Perú (Let Us Peruvianize Peru), Temas de nuestra América (Themes from Our America), and Ideología y política (Ideology and Politics). So the paramount importance of this problem for Mariátegui would seem beyond dispute. But why, exactly, is it the most fundamental problem, and what is the origin, or rather cause, of this problem? The answer to the first question proves somewhat surprising, at least if we focus on the most relevant texts, such as the Seven Essays. In these texts Mariátegui often appears to claim that the oppression and misery of the Indian is the most fundamental problem for what we could fairly call a tactical reason: the sheer number of people affected. That is to say, it is not the special nature and history of the Indians’ oppression that accounts for its primacy as a political concern but the fact that, numerically, Peru’s indigenous peoples comprise the immense majority of the oppressed class. Thus Mariátegui writes in the article “Indigenism and Socialism” (included in Ideology and Politics): “Socialism orders and defines the demands of the masses, of the working class. And in Peru the masses—the working class—are four-fifths indigenous. Our socialism would therefore not be Peruvian—it would not even be socialism—if it did not show solidarity, first of all, with the demands of the indigenous peoples” (Mariátegui total 249).3 In a similar vein he remarks in the Seven Essays, “Because of the conflict and contrast between his demographic predominance and his social and economic servitude,

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not just inferiority, the Indian deserves to be the focus of attention in present-day Peru” (Seven Essays 272). In these passages, then, Mariátegui plainly does not say that “the problem of the Indian” is the paramount issue because of some historic injustice that was visited on the Indians and that demands urgent redress. There is no suggestion that creole Peruvians bear a historic debt to Peru’s indige­ nous peoples, or anything along those lines. In short, key passages in many of Mariátegui’s most important writings on the Indian question suggest that the significance of the problem of the Indian essentially derives from the number of Indians themselves. If this, then, is the reason—at least as stated in some parts of Mariátegui’s works—for regarding the problem of the Indian as Peru’s primary socioeconomic concern, what is the origin, or cause, of this problem? According to Mariátegui, “the moral and material misery of the Indian is,” as he puts it in his most elaborate examination of this question, “clearly the result of the economic and social system that has oppressed him for centuries” (Seven Essays 30 n. 1). More specifically, it is “rooted in the land tenure system of our economy” (Seven Essays 22; cf. Mariátegui total 221). The problem of the Indian is, in other words, a result of the prevailing system of gamonalismo (gamonalism),4 a form of social and economic organization in which the owners of large latifundios rule in the manner of feudal lords, and indigenous laborers are reduced to a serflike status. Indeed, Mariátegui frequently equates gamonalismo with feudalism, as when he remarks, “What we call the indigenous problem is the feudal exploitation of the native peoples by the large agrarian landholders,”5 or, in contrasting the situation of city and rural laborers, “The urban worker is a proletarian; the peasant Indian is still a serf. The demands of the former . . . represent the struggle against the bourgeoisie; those of the latter still represent the struggle against the feudal system. The first problem that must be solved here is therefore that of the liquidation of the feudal system [feudalidad]” (Mariátegui total 251). (Note that this last statement also serves to corroborate the claim that on many occasions Mariátegui accords priority to the Indian question for tactical reasons.) Let us call this approach to the problem of the Indian, which locates its cause in the existing property relations, the economic model.

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One of the consequences of adopting the economic model to analyze the problem of the Indian is that it effectively denies the autonomy of the problem as an ethnic or racial one. Which is to say, the Indian’s oppression is not, on this interpretation, an ethnic or racial problem at all. As Mariátegui puts it in the text titled “The Problem of the Races in Latin America,” as regards “the situation of the majority of the oppressed blacks or Indians . . . the principal aspect of the question . . . is ‘economic and social’ and tends to be ever more so” (Mariátegui total 193). In a similar vein, he declares, “What we call the indigenous problem is the feudal exploitation of the native peoples by the large agrarian landholders” (The Heroic 96). In short, the economic model’s basic premise is that the problem of the Indian qua ethnic or racial problem is essentially epiphenomenal, and this is one reason that Mariátegui can claim that “in Latin American bourgeois intellectual speculation, the race question serves, among other things, to disguise or evade the continent’s real problems” (The Heroic 94; my emphasis). One might well ask, Why does Mariátegui favor the economic model? The answer lies in Mariátegui’s adherence to Marxism: By reducing the problem of the Indian to a matter of property relations, the Indians oppression is easily accommodated within the explanatory framework of historical materialism; and if this problem is explicable in terms of Marxism, then presumably the theory can account for all of Peru’s major sociopolitical and economic problems. At the same time, this interpretation enables Mariátegui to claim that the remedy he proposes for Peru’s other social problems—socialism—promises a solution to the problem of the Indian as well (The Heroic 100). The same program or project will bring about the emancipation of Peru’s oppressed workers and its oppressed indigenous peoples. If Mariátegui has little doubt that socialism will be embraced and prove successful among Peru’s Indians, it is partly because he finds a “collectivist spirit” (Mariátegui total 187) among them.6 Indeed, he assumes that a kind of communism existed in pre-Columbian Peru7 and that contemporary Indians preserve the spirit of this “Inca communism” in many of their communal relations and agricultural practices.8 In any event, the upshot of Mariátegui’s approach to the problem of the Indian in those texts in which he applies the economic

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model (most notably the chapter on the Indian in the Seven Essays) is that race and ethnicity as such lose much of their political significance. The main implication of this approach is, after all, that the problem of the Indian is essentially reducible to the prevailing property relations and that those aspects that are not amenable to this kind of reduction are relatively unimportant. This type of approach is not wholly implausible, nor is it without its virtues. To begin with, it implies a very progressive, nonessentialist perspective on the Indians’ condition. “The indigenous question is identified with the land question,” Mariátegui writes. “The ignorance, backwardness, and misery of the indigenous people are . . . merely the result of their subservience” (The Heroic 106). Indeed, anyone familiar with the chapter on the Indian in the Seven Essays will recall Mariátegui’s flat dismissal of the notion that the problem to the Indian should be dealt with by means of miscegenation, as some had proposed. Moreover, the economic model’s reductionism implicitly encourages a deemphasis on race and racial consciousness, and in many circumstances this may benefit the oppressed. For example, if there exists a minimal awareness or perception of racial differences, it is extremely difficult for racism to flourish. In addition, the deemphasis of racial differences helps to remove one more impediment to oppressed individuals’ recognition that they share common interests with members of oppressed groups other than their own. Yet whatever the plausibility of this account of the Indians’ oppression, it turns out that it is not the only account we find in Mariátegui. As noted at the outset, there are numerous scattered remarks and observations in Mariátegui’s writings in which the Amauta implicitly acknowledges that the economic model proposed in the Seven Essays fails to do justice to the problem of the Indian. Representing something akin to a return of the repressed, Mariátegui’s incidental remarks on race seem to assert the autonomy or irreducibility of the problem of the Indian—that is, the very things that his basic model and most sustained treatment of the problem (the relevant chapter in the Seven Essays) would seem to deny. Indeed, these remarks reveal that the problem of the Indian is, well, far more problematic than Mariátegui’s most famous statement on it would have us believe. To understand why this is the case, we need

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to look at what Mariátegui has to say about race and the various races found in Perú.

Race

How does Mariátegui conceive of race? The first thing to be noted is that Mariátegui uses the term race (raza) frequently, and on the whole quite promiscuously. This is hardly surprising, given the age in which he wrote, which preceded both Nazism and the appearance of advanced scientific analyses of “race.”9 But how did he himself understand the concept? According to Aníbal Quijano, Mariátegui normally uses race as a synonym for “civilization,” “culture,” or “civilizational development” (Leibner, El mito 49). Nelson Manrique, for his part, agrees with Quijano but points out that Mariátegui is also given to using the term to designate a biological reality, with transmissible genetic characteristics. Manrique underscores, moreover, that whereas Mariátegui rejects any sort of ranking on biological grounds, he does hold that there are clear inequalities with respect to cultural development, so that it is legitimate to claim that one culture is inferior to another (“Mariátegui y el problema” 447).10 This is clear from the following two passages from the Seven Essays: What is important . . . is not the degree to which the mestizo inherits the qualities or defects of the progenitor races, but his ability to evolve with more ease than the Indian toward the white man’s social state or type of civilization. (281) Although the inferiority of colored races is no longer one of the dogmas that sustain a battered white pride, all the relativism of today does not suffice to abolish cultural inferiority. (280) Manrique also suggests that Mariátegui uses etnia (ethnic group) and race in a way that represents the exact converse of their standard contemporary senses, for when Mariátegui employs the term etnia, which is not often, he uses it to refer to biological factors, whereas raza (race) is usually invoked to refer to cultural traits (“Mariátegui

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y el problema” 446). In the last analysis, however, the fact is, as Manrique himself acknowledges (“Mariátegui y el problema” 448), that Mariátegui does not use the term race—or, for that matter, etnia—in a consistent manner, and for our purposes it will be more instructive to consider his specific remarks about Peru’s various ethnic and racial groups. While Mariátegui never undertakes a systematic characterization of “the Indian,” his works contain a number of noteworthy comments bearing on the nature of Peru’s indigenous peoples. In one passage, for example, Mariátegui writes of “the Indian’s stubbornness and resignation, his pantheistic unconcern with the hereafter, his bucolic gentleness, his rustic common sense, and his realistic and austere imagination” (Seven Essays 215; cf. 218, 221). On other occasions he underscores the Indian’s “pessimism” and “enigmatic” nature (Seven Essays 254; Mariátegui total 304). Furthermore, he tells us that Peru’s Indians are “a race of agrarian habits and soul” and that “land was their happiness” (Mariátegui total 22). As for Peru’s other racial groups—although Mariátegui asserts, on one occasion, a “dualism of race” (i.e., creoles/whites and Indians) in Peru (Seven Essays 164), he certainly recognizes that the country’s actual racial composition is far more complex—Mariátegui offers various incidental observations concerning Peru’s black and Chinese populations, that is, the Afro-Peruvians and the Chinese immigrants, along with their descendants. His comments on the Chinese are unflattering: “The Chinese . . . appears to have inoculated his descendants with the fatalism, apathy, and defects of the decrepit Orient. Gambling, which is an element of immorality and indolence[,] . . . is mainly encouraged by Chinese immigration” (Seven Essays 279). Yet if his comments on Chinese immigrants are critical, his appraisal of Peru’s black population is even more unfavorable: “Since emancipation, the Negro has become addicted to his status of liberated slave” (Seven Essays 273).11 As compared with the Chinese, “the contribution of the Negro, who came as a slave, almost as merchandise, appears to be even more worthless and negative. The Negro brought his sensualism, his superstition, and his primitivism. His condition not only did not permit him to help create culture, but the crude, vivid example of his barbarism was

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more likely to hamper such creation” (Seven Essays 282). Blacks, he argues, would “sap the spiritual strength of Catholicism. The Negro slave brought to Catholic rites his fetishistic sensualism and his dark superstition. The Indian, a healthy pantheist and materialist, had reached the ethical level of a mighty theocracy; the Negro, on the other hand, exuded from every pore the primitivism of his African tribe” (Seven Essays 137).12 Perhaps most surprising and puzzling of all are Mariátegui’s misgivings about mestizaje, or racial mixing. One reason that this view is surprising and puzzling is that Mariátegui himself was a mestizo, his mother having been a mestiza (some acquaintances of her family apparently thought of it as “Indian”);13 in fact, in one essay he characterizes himself as “a mix of the Spanish race and the Indian race” (Mariátegui total 524).14 If Mariátegui has a less than favorable attitude toward mestizaje involving Indians and whites, his attitude becomes one of outright condemnation when it is a matter of mixing between Chinese or black Peruvians and Peru’s indige­ nous peoples. “The Chinese and Negro complicate mestizaje on the coast,” he writes in the Seven Essays. “Neither of these two elements has so far contributed either cultural values or progressive energies to the formation of nationality” (279). In another passage from the same text, he adds, “Chinese and Negro admixtures have almost always had a destructive and aberrant effect on this mestizaje” (282).15 What is more, Mariátegui also claims, “The Indian is in no way inferior to the mestizo in his abilities to assimilate progressive techniques of modern production. On the contrary, he is generally superior” (The Heroic 98).

Inconsistencies

To be sure, the remarks quoted thus far hardly constitute coherent conceptions of Peru’s various ethnic groups, and their value as socio­ logical or ethnographic generalizations would seem utterly negligible. Their significance becomes even more dubious when we bear in mind that while Mariátegui views Peru’s Indians as belonging to one race (“the indigenous race,” Mariátegui total 291), he also speaks

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of Latin Americans generally as constituting a race, says the Spanish are a “race” as well, and tells us that the people of the United States make up yet another “race” (see, e.g., Mariátegui total 418, 420, 524). (Note that if Latin Americans, for example, form a kind of discrete racial category, then the sorts of traits that Mariátegui ascribes to different groups of Latin Americans should be considered intraracial distinctions and thus will be of little relevance to the kinds of comparative racial analyses that interest Mariátegui.) All the same, Mariátegui’s generalizations about Peru’s ethnic groups are important and merit our attention for at least one reason: their very inclusion in Mariátegui’s social and political writings suggests that Mariátegui thinks these considerations politically relevant. This interpretation is borne out by the following passages, from the final chapter of the Seven Essays (which is in fact dedicated to literature): What is important, therefore, in a sociological study of the Indian and mestizo strata is not the degree to which the mestizo inherits the qualities or defects of the progenitor races, but his ability to evolve with more ease than the Indian toward the white man’s social state or type of civilization. Mestizaje needs to be analyzed as a sociological rather than an ethnic question. (281) Although the racial question—which has implications that lead superficial critics to improbable zoological reasoning—is artificial and does not merit the consideration of those who are engaged in a concrete and political study of the indigenous problem, the sociological question is another matter. (281) When Mariátegui says “sociological” in these passages, what he has in mind, I submit, is really a “political” concern, as is evident in his reference to the “political study of the indigenous problem” and his interest in gauging the mestizo’s “ability to evolve with more ease than the Indian toward the white man’s social state or type of civilization.” On the other hand, if we turn to those passages in Mariátegui’s works in which he explicitly acknowledges that racial perceptions (and self-perceptions) complicate a socialist political practice, we

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find confirmation of this interpretation of his miscellaneous remarks on race—that is, that he regards race per se as politically important— and thus an additional challenge to the economic model. Mariátegui recognizes, for example, that “the class struggle . . . undoubtedly assumes special characteristics when the immense majority of the exploited are comprised of one race, and the exploiters belong almost exclusively to another” (Mariátegui total 184). He notes, in this connection, that the Indians tend to conceive of their oppressor in racial rather than class terms.16 In a similar vein, he also notes that many self-proclaimed (left-wing) revolutionaries harbor racial prejudices about the Indians and that mestizos are taught to feel contempt for Peru’s Indians and blacks, while blacks, in turn, have been encouraged by their “feudal” and bourgeois masters to feel disdain for the Indians (The Heroic 100; Mariátegui total 183). He also admits that racial divisions render national liberation more difficult, insofar as “the feudal or bourgeois elements in our countries feel the same contempt for Indians, as well as for blacks and mulattos, as do the white imperialists. This racist sentiment among the dominant class acts in a way absolutely favorable to imperialist penetration” (The Heroic 97; cf. Mariátegui total 182).17 Finally, Mariátegui realizes that race is often used as diversionary tactic, with the aim of distracting attention from, as he puts it in a passage cited earlier, the continent’s “real problems” (The Heroic 94; my emphasis). Whatever else one makes of these considerations—which suggest a “racial” explanation that has nothing to do with any alleged biological inferiority18—if they are politically important, then race per se is politically important. But if this is the case, then Mariátegui is in effect conceding that the economic model will not suffice as an account of the Indians’ oppression, and that is the crucial point. All these remarks suggest that race possesses a certain autonomy as a political problem, that it is not entirely reducible to property relations. Or at the very least, we ought to say that Mariátegui’s incidental comments and observations on race suggest that there exists a kind of reciprocal determination between race and property relations. The prevailing property relations generate the principal racial problem, in that they are the source of oppression of a large number of people, all of whom belong to the same racial, or ethnic, group; these relations thus produce an oppressed racial group (a

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particular racial group is the subject of the oppression). At the same time, the Indian’s oppression generates—and perpetuates—the principal socioeconomic problem: the existence of this oppressed group makes Peru’s semifeudal (in Mariátegui’s view) economic system viable and therefore frustrates the emergence of a more advanced socioeconomic arrangement. But however we wish to put it, race thus assumes an importance that it lacks on the economic model.

Nationalism

As it turns out, these are not the only considerations, comments, and elements in Mariátegui’s works that implicitly compromise the economic model. His perspective, or rather perspectives, on nationalism also pose a problem for this model. Somewhat surprisingly for a Marxist, Mariátegui defends Peruvian nationalism, though it is, to be sure, a very special variety of nationalism, which he calls a “revolutionary” nationalism. This type of nationalism, he tells us, is merely one of the forms that socialism takes in the politically and economically colonial countries such as Peru, where in some sense the nation does not yet exist or is still in formation, and where, consequently, “the idea of the nation has not yet run its course, nor has it exhausted its historical mission” (Mariátegui total 250; cf. 289). Peru must, then, first become a nation before it can achieve a higher state of social development, and this is, in fact, the reason that nationalism is not fundamentally reactionary in Peru, as it is in Europe (Mariátegui total 250). From the perspective of this nationalism, which rests on an essentially nonethnic conception of nation, there is nothing odd about Mariátegui’s claim to the effect that the indigenous question “presents itself as the question of the assimilation into the Peruvian nation of fourfifths of Peru’s population” (The Heroic 70). That is to say, there is nothing odd—from the perspective of this nationalism—in the claim that the socioethnic identity shared by, say, 70 to 80 percent of the population has little to do with Peru’s national identity. At times, however, Mariátegui casts—and defends—nationalism as a project that consists in a vindication of the Indian, since the Indian represents “the only Peruvianness that has existed”

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(Mariátegui total 289) but a Peruvianness that was thwarted by the Spanish conquest. (This is also a paradoxical notion, in that it suggests that the real Peru existed prior to, and was destroyed with the establishment of, the nation that came to be called Peru.) To simplify a bit, this is a notion of national regeneration captured by the slogan “Peruanicemos al Perú.”19 “The existing Peruvian economy, the existing Peruvian society, maintains the original sin of the conquest, the sin of having been brought forth and formed without and against the Indian” (The Heroic 59; cf. Mariátegui total 304–5; Seven Essays 193). When Mariátegui writes of nation building and nationalism along these lines, he assumes a conception of the nation that is not economic and anti-imperialist but rather ethnic in nature.20 As he writes in the Seven Essays, “The new Peruvianness will be created, using the Indian as its historic cement. Its axis will probably rest on Andean stone rather than on the clay of the coast” (203). And elsewhere in the same text: “The new generation wants Peru to stand on its natural biological foundations. It feels in duty bound to create a more Peruvian, more autochthonous Peru” (171). (In the relevant passages Mariátegui simply ignores black and Chinese Peruvians.)21 From the point of view of this nationalism, Mariátegui’s claim that the Indians must integrate themselves into the non-Indian population makes little sense, as Manrique has pointed out (“Mariátegui y el problema,” 461). Indeed, if we endorse the ethnic conception of nation, why is it the Indian who must change and adapt? The upshot, in any event, is that Mariátegui defends nationalism in terms of modernization and economic development and in terms of ethnic identity, without ever making an effort to reconcile the two conceptions. Indeed, he seems not even to realize that there is a tension involved in championing both notions, one of which is consistent with the economic model and one of which is not.

Conclusion

It should now be clear that we find in Mariátegui’s works two basic, divergent perspectives on the political nature and significance of race and that Mariátegui never resolves this conflict in his thought. In a

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word, when it comes to the problem of the Indian and questions of race and ethnicity more generally, the Amauta displays, on the whole, a certain inconsistency, or ambivalence. Is there any way to reconcile these divergent perspectives, any reading of Mariátegui that avoids these apparent contradictions? One way to avoid the apparent inconsistency would be to interpret Mariátegui as arguing that the socioeconomic transformation implied by the economic model is a necessary condition for the solution of the problem of the Indian but that it is not a sufficient condition. Such an assessment of the Indian’s situation would seem quite plausible: it is difficult to imagine a profound, enduring improvement in the Indians’ situation without a thoroughgoing transformation of Peru’s economic structure; at the same time, in the absence of other changes, the requisite transformation will probably not suffice to eliminate the oppression of the Indians. The trouble with this reading is that Mariátegui seems to hold, especially in the Seven Essays, that a radical economic transformation is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the Indians’ emancipation. Another strategy for eliminating the apparent inconsistency might be to assume that in insisting on the economic model to explain the Indians’ oppression, Mariátegui is in effect attempting to promote a myth in the Sorelian sense. (References to Georges Sorel abound in Mariátegui’s works, and there is no doubt that Sorel had a profound influence on his thought.)22 For Sorel, myths are “expressions of a will to act,”23 compelling images and conceptions of a (future) collective enterprise that serve to inspire, motivate, and mobilize the actors who will be engaged in this enterprise. On this reading, then, when Mariátegui defends socialist revolution as the answer to the Indians’ plight, he is essentially affirming a “myth” that will enable Indians to bring about their own emancipation, insofar as it helps to convince them of their own capacity for political agency. In order for this myth to function effectively, however, the Indians themselves must regard their oppression solely as the result of economic exploitation and domination; and this in turn entails minimizing or neglecting other contributing factors to their oppression (or conceiving of them as by-products of economic oppression). It also requires a uniform self-perception among

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Indians of forming a more or less homogeneous group, and a group that consists of Indians (with homogeneous “Indian” interests). If this interpretation is on the mark and we appreciate the need to foster this sort of self-perception or self-understanding on the part of the Indians, we will hesitate to criticize one obvious flaw in Mariátegui’s approach to the problem of the Indian, namely, his tendency to refer to Peru’s indigenous peoples as though they made up an undifferentiated whole, ignoring altogether the differences and possibly competing interests (based on gender, economic status, etc.) that exist among the Indians themselves. Mariátegui’s tendency to ignore differences among the Indians themselves is evident in his readiness to use the phrase “the problem of the Indian.” This reluctance to disaggregate the different problems within “the problem of the Indian” is related to a final approach that we might follow in attempting to eliminate the apparent inconsistencies in Mariátegui’s views on race. This approach starts from the recognition that the problem of the Indian actually involves, as Manrique points out, two problems, or rather means two very different things: The Indian has a problem, and the Indian is a problem (“Mariátegui y el problema” 460–61). The Indian has a problem insofar as he or she is exploited and oppressed; at the same time, the Indian is a problem for non-Indian Peruvians, insofar as the latter do not know “what to do” with the Indians and tend to view them as a problem (i.e., an inconvenience, an object of incomprehension, an obstacle, etc.). On this interpretation, the economic model would seem to offer a solution to the problem that the Indian has. “What we call the indigenous problem is the feudal exploitation of the native peoples by the large agrarian landholders,” Mariátegui writes; and he goes on to add that “the dynamism of this [capitalist] economy . . . is undoubtedly what makes the [socialist] indige­ nous resurrection feasible” (The Heroic 96, 100). Thus the Indians’ emancipation—from the problem that the Indian has—is essentially an economic question. But what about the problem that the Indian is? Race may be relatively insignificant as regards the problem that the Indian has but not with respect to the problem that the Indian is. If this is the case, Indians may well continue to represent a problem for non-Indian Peruvians even after the former achieve

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their emancipation from economic oppression, and the solution to this problem may well require that non-Indian Peruvians likewise undergo an emancipation of sorts—from some of their own attitudes and beliefs. The point is that many of Mariátegui’s remarks on race and nationalism may represent an effort to address the fact that the Indian is a problem. If this is correct, then his apparent ambivalence is in fact attributable to an attempt to address or treat as one issue what are in fact two problems, which he neglected to clearly distinguish from each other, despite a vague awareness of their difference. This interpretation may well turn out to be the most plausible explanation of the Amauta’s ambivalence concerning the political significance of race. Whether or not this explanation proves satisfactory in the end, it does afford us, at the very least, a point of departure for future research on Mariátegui’s thought on race and revolution.

Life and Works

José Carlos Mariátegui was born in Moquegua, Peru, on June 14, 1894. At the age of eight, he suffered an accident at school, which required nearly a four-month stay in a Lima hospital and produced a permanent disability in his left leg. Unable to continue with formal schooling because of his protracted recovery, Mariátegui began working as a typographer in a Lima newspaper at the age of fourteen. He was rapidly promoted within the newspaper and at age sixteen published his first contribution under the name Juan Croniqueur. In 1916 Mariátegui began to report on parliament for El Tiempo, a newspaper of liberal outlook, and in 1919 he went on to found the radical newspaper La Razón. Targeted for his political activity by the regime of Augusto B. Leguía, Mariátegui went into exile in Europe, where he received a small stipend as a government representative. He spent more than three years in Europe (mainly in France, Italy, and Germany), writing articles for Peruvian newspapers and absorbing the political and intellectual influences that would lead to his embrace of Marxism. Upon his return to Peru in 1923, Mariátegui delivered a series of lectures at the Manuel

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González Prada People’s University. In 1924 an illness led to the amputation of Mariátegui’s previously healthy right leg, and he was thereafter confined to a wheelchair. The following year, he published his first book, La escena contemporánea (The Contemporary Scene). In 1926 Mariátegui founded the journal Amauta. Some of the essays that Mariátegui published in this journal would become the basis for his most celebrated work, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality), first published in 1928, the same year in which Mariátegui founded the Peruvian Socialist Party. In June 1929 he attended the First Latin American Communist Conference in Buenos Aires, and when, a few months later, the government shut down another journal that he had founded (Labor) and the police raided his home, Mariátegui began making preparations to move to the Argentine capital. Before Mariátegui could carry out his plans, however, he died, on April 16, 1930, two months short of his thirty-sixth birthday.

Further Reading

Becker, Marc. “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America.” Science and Society 70 (2006): 450–79. Flores Galindo, Alberto. La agonía de Mariátegui. Madrid: Editorial Revolución, 1991. Melis, Antonio. Leyendo Mariátegui: 1967–1998. Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta, 1999. Ossio, Juan. “El Indigenismo de Mariátegui.” In La aventura de Mariátegui: Nuevas perspectivas, ed. Gonzalo Portocarrero, Eduardo Cáceres, and Rafael Tapia, 469–76. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1995. Quijano, Aníbal. Introducción a Mariátegui. Mexico City: Editorial Era, 1982. Romero, Catalina. “El problema del indio y de los indios en el tiempo de Mariátegui.” In La aventura de Mariátegui: Nuevas perspectivas, ed. Gonzalo Portocarrero, Eduardo Cáceres, and Rafael Tapia, 477–96. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1995.

The Amauta’s Ambivalence 245 Notes

  1.  José Carlos Mariátegui, Mariátegui total, ed. Sandro Mariátegui Chiappe (Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta, 1994), 291 (henceforth cited as Mariátegui total); Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. Marjory Urquidi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 171, 158 (henceforth cited as Seven Essays). The first phrase is actually taken from an article that addresses the situation of Peru’s indigenous peoples, “El problema primario del Perú” (Peru’s Primary Problem). All translations of passages from Mariátegui total are my own.  2. It may be helpful to underscore that the question I shall be considering is not, Is Mariátegui’s Marxist analysis of “the problem of the Indian” plausible or adequate? but Is Mariátegui’s Marxist analysis of “the problem of the Indian” consistent with other reflections on the “problem” found throughout his works?   3. Nelson Manrique points out that according to the 1940 census only 45 percent of Peru’s population was classified as “indigenous” and that Mariátegui himself stressed, in an article published in 1929, that his figure was meant to refer to the socioeconomic situation of four-fifths of the population (“Mariátegui y el problema de las razas,” in La aventura de Mariátegui: Nuevas perspectivas, ed. Gonzalo Portocarrero, Eduardo Cáceres, and Rafael Tapia [Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1995], 461 n. 28; henceforth cited as “Mariátegui y el problema”).  4. A gamonal is a large landowner who also functions as a kind of rural ruler.  5. José Carlos Mariátegui, The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism, trans. Michael Pearlman (Amherst, NY: Humanity, 1996), 96 (henceforth cited as The Heroic).   6. Gerardo Leibner explains, in El mito del socialismo indígena en Mariátegui (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1999; henceforth cited as El mito), the function and importance of ascribing this feature to Peru’s indigenous peoples: “The supposed collectivist or communist spirit inherent in the indigenous peoples of the Andes formed the element of continuity in the myth of indigenous socialism, articulating its three eras [tiempos]: the Incan communist past; the

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present, with its tenacious struggle for the persistence of the community and the traditions of cooperation; and the future of Indoamerican socialism” (50; my translation).   7. Leibner notes that belief in an “Incan communism” was in fact a “hegemonic thesis among Peruvian intellectuals in the mid-1920s” (El mito, 111; my translation). Mariátegui scholar Antonio Melis suggests, for his part, that Mariátegui’s “definition of Incan society as an agrarian communist society serves to emphasize the traumatic change produced by the conquest and colonization” (“José Carlos Mariátegui hacia el siglo XXI,” in Mariátegui total, xxiv).  8. For some of the passages in which Mariátegui refers to the Incans’ or indigenous peoples’ “communism,” see Seven Essays, 29 n. 1, 35, 42, 74–76 n. 15, and 277; and Mariátegui total, 185. An additional reference to “indigenous communism” is mistranslated as “Indian ‘community’” on p. 57 of Seven Essays (see Mariátegui total, 38, for the original Spanish).   9.  Manrique reminds us that the term race (raza) was widely used in discussions of the “social question” until the mid-1930s, before Nazi atrocities led to a rejection of the word in favor of the term ethnic group (“Mariátegui y el problema,” 445). 10. See Mariátegui, The Heroic, 99, for one passage in which Mariátegui states his views regarding inequalities among races. 11. This translation was published in 1971; hence the dated use of “Negro.” 12. Manrique points out that Mariátegui insists on the “primitivism” and “sensuality” of blacks in several texts (“Mariátegui y el problema,” 449). 13.  Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, “José Carlos Mariátegui La Chira: Familia e infancia en Huacho,” in La aventura de Mariátegui, 41. In light of Mariátegui’s own origins, Manrique contends that Mariátegui’s violent rejection of mestizaje constituted the negation of his own identity” (“Mariátegui y el problema,” 459; my translation). 14. In the original Spanish: “Soy una mezcla de raza española y de raza india.” The essay from which this quotation is taken, “Rome and Gothic Art,” was published posthumously. 15. The word this in the passage cited refers to instances of mixing with the indigenous population.

The Amauta’s Ambivalence 247

16. For example, Marátegui acknowledges that “the Quechua or Aymara Indian sees the mestizo, the white, as his oppressor” (The Heroic, 100). 17. In this connection, Mariátegui highlights, in the Seven Essays, an important contrast with the evolution of European society: “In Europe, the feudal lord . . . naturally felt superior to his serfs but not ethnically or nationally different from them. The aristocratic landowner of Europe has found it possible to accept a new concept and a new practice in his relations with the agricultural worker. In colonial [Latin] America, however, the white man’s arrogant and deeply rooted belief in the colored man’s inferiority has stood in the way of this transition” (62). 18. In other words, we might identify the “racial model”—as one alternative to the “economic model”—with two different kinds of explanation. One such explanation would attribute the Indians’ servitude to racial (biological) inferiority. The other “racial” explanation would hold that anti-Indian racism and discrimination are the cause of the indigenous people’s disempowerment. (Of course, the two explanations could also be combined; i.e., they are not mutually exclusive.) Mariátegui considers, and dismisses, the first sort of explanation, which he calls the “ethnic” approach, in the first chapter of the Seven Essays (see 25, 29 n. 1). However, he never really tackles the second variety of “racial” explanation head on. 19. “Peruanicemos al Perú” was the heading for a section in the magazine Mundial, in which section Mariátegui published numerous essays. The editors of Mariátegui’s works later chose the phrase as the title for a posthumously published collection of essays. 20. Mariátegui sometimes brings both conceptions to bear at the same time. See, for example, the essay “Nationalism and Vanguardism” (in The Heroic, 69–74). 21. As for “the Chinese and Negro” populations, “Neither of these two elements has so far contributed either cultural values or progressive energies to the formation of nationality” (The Heroic, 279). 22.  For some analyses of Sorel’s influence on Mariátegui’s thought, see Luis Villaverde Alcalá-Galiano, “El sorelismo de Mariátegui,” and Robert Paris, “El marxismo de Mariátegui” and “Mariátegui: Un ‘sorelismo’ ambiguo,” in Mariátegui y los orígenes del marxismo latinoamericano, ed. José Aricó (Mexico City: Ediciones Pasado y Presente,

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1978). There is also some discussion of this influence in David Sobrevilla, El marxismo de Mariátegui y su aplicación a los 7 Ensayos (Lima: Universidad de Lima, 2005), passim. Mariátegui provides his most extensive statement of his views on the value of myth in the essay “Man and Myth” (in The Heroic, 142–45). 23. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. Thomas Ernest Hulme, ed. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28.

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11]

Mestizaje, mexicanidad, and Assimilation Zea on Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality Amy A. O l i v e r

The Mexican philosopher Leopoldo Zea (1912–2004) wrote about all three of the topics dealt with in this volume, but he ultimately privileged nationality over race and ethnicity. My aim in this chapter is to demonstrate why Zea believes that nationality is the primordial category in forging a people. The argument I develop is that he comes to overvalue nationality as he is finally dismissive of race and ethnicity as factors that to this day can powerfully underlie a people’s identity. I begin with a brief overview of Zea’s thought to show where his philosophical project intersects with race, ethnicity, and nationality and how he came to be concerned with these topics. Specifically, I show how Zea’s analyses of mestizaje (racial mixing), humanism, marginality, identity, and gender led him to frame race, ethnicity, and nationality in ways that meld race and ethnicity into nationality, his Über-category. I then present the views of some of his direct and indirect critics and highlight some of the problems that arise in relegating race and ethnicity to a secondary status, subsumed under nationality. Zea’s overall philosophical project, in my view, involves seeking truth in values such as equality, tolerance, and respect for the 249

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individual as he continues to question that which is considered “universal” by undertaking a “cultural task, which, with increasing comprehensiveness, coordinates diverse human expressions until reaching a profile of the person in which any person can recognize himself or herself and can recognize others.”1 He often employs the metaphor of concentric circles to depict the ways in which truth and comprehensiveness can expand, even as they cannot reach the status of “universality.” With respect to race, ethnicity, and nationality in Latin America, Zea’s overall philosophical project should have much to offer in the way of understanding these topics. In particular, his analyses of mestizaje as a significant Latin American cultural achievement and his development of Mexican, Latin American, and global south identities would appear to lend themselves to insights into race, ethnicity, and nationality. However, Zea’s philosophy of history throws up some significant roadblocks to his understanding of race and ethnicity. He appears to believe that a profound understanding of and respect for Mexican history, in particular, transcends contemporary identity struggles in Mexico if these same struggles were already successfully dealt with by history. Zea’s witnessing of the Mexican Revolution together with his reflections on the course of Mexican history convinced him that Mexico made significant progress with regard to race, ethnicity, and nationhood. As each successive concentric circle of historic progress theoretically incorporated more categories of persons, Zea’s circles also resulted in confining racial and ethnic groups such that, in his terms, they no longer had the option of returning to being outside the circle that had enclosed or incorporated them as a result of a particular historic event. For Zea, history and philosophy are closely linked, which explains in part why he believes that how people think about their historical circumstances can be more important than the circumstances themselves. Zea’s thinking was influenced by the ideas of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Through his teacher, José Gaos, who immigrated to Mexico on the fall of Republican Spain, Zea became familiar with the ideas of Ortega. Ortega’s influence on Zea is evident when the latter affirms that history is not possible without a corresponding philosophy (i.e., history involves theoretical and conceptual expression as a product of a specific period),

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nor is philosophy possible without its corresponding history (i.e., philosophy has a circumstance or context of which it is a theoretical and conceptual expression).2 In the following section we will see how Zea situates mestizaje in a rich, historical context.

From Spanish Miscegenation to Mexican Mestizaje

The Spanish essayist Angel Ganivet wrote, “Spain is a house with two doors,”3 one at the Pyrenees and the other at the Straits of Gibraltar. In addition to Spain’s two doors, we might say that she has many windows along her ample coastline. Throughout history a wide variety of peoples have walked through her doors and climbed through her windows, resulting in a rich melding of cultures and ethnicities. The peaceful coexistence of various religious groups famously characterized certain periods in Spanish history. For Zea, these aspects of the Spanish heritage, miscegenation and the spirit of tolerant coexistence, endure in Latin America.4 Thus, even in preconquest terms, Spain provided for Zea an example for what he would call mestizaje in the New World.5 Zea appeared grateful to Spain for setting the trend of mestizaje, which he viewed as being initially a racial phenomenon that then evolved into a cultural phenomenon. In terms of ethnicity, which he often conflates with race, as do many, he believes that attempting to make ethnic or racial distinctions is useless today because so much mixing has already occurred in Mexico, and much more before that took place in Spain. On this point, Zea cites Jorge Luis Borges: “Latinity makes no sense from an ethnic point of view. Consider the Spaniards who were Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Vandals, Moors, and Jews.”6 Adding to this mix the indigenous peoples of what is today Mexico, Zea concludes that race and ethnicity are no longer relevant.

Mestizaje as Humanist Triumph

In many ways Zea glorifies mestizaje by presenting it as a cultural and ideological achievement. Tzvi Medin has argued that Zea tried to

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extract from the Iberian past as Latin America’s patrimony the Erasmian aspiration to universal equality free of all discrimination, viewing Latin American mestizaje as a key expression of its universalist spirit.7 Zea did not refer directly to the works of Desiderius Erasmus (1467–1536) in his writings but instead to those of Spanish Erasmians such as Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) and Francisco de Vitoria (1492– 1546). According to Angel del Río, the Erasmian tradition in Spain is characterized by a defense of personal religious beliefs, a return to a Christianity devoid of complexities, the practice of charity as the basis for one’s relations with others, and a return to the study of the ancient Greeks, all of which are in opposition to the scholastic traditions of dogmatic religious authority.8 Zea himself wrote that what is most important about Spanish Golden Age humanism is “the spirit of the great Spanish Erasmians whose goal is to create a culture in which the best values of Christianity are joined to the best of modernity. A spirit that is contrary to dogmatism and Hispanic absolutism, which becomes apparent beginning with Phillip II.”9 The Erasmian notion of each individual forming an integral part of a community was what Zea wanted to see emulated in Latin America. On the famous debate between Sepúlveda and Las Casas about the nature of the Indian, Zea wrote, “This is a polemic in which Spanish Christian humanism triumphed by recognizing the humanity of the indigenous and the inherent rights that accompany it.”10 Zea argued throughout his work that Iberian colonialism was racially tolerant and that indigenous peoples assimilated themselves through mestizaje, whereas Western imperialism allowed indigenous cultures to some extent to persist without mixing with them racially. He underscores that indigenous peoples “assimilated themselves” rather than that they were assimilated. Assimilation is the term he used most frequently in his writings, but he used it interchangeably with integration and amalgamation.

On History and Indigenous Identity

Latin American history is a major focus of Zea’s work, and his thoughts about race, ethnicity, and nationality are often closely related to his understanding of how history works. In a recent essay,

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“Individuation of Racial and Ethnic Groups,” Jorge J. E. Gracia reflects on why groups become constituted as unique. He asks, “What is it in history, or what is necessary in history to accomplish this? First, historical events that affect certain people directly and not others; second, the number of events—few isolated events cannot compare to chains or clusters of many events; and third, the significance of the events.” Gracia continues, “The three factors mentioned, when taken together, illustrate how certain historical events effectively tie some people, while at the same time separate them from others, thus rendering the group in question unique through the relations in which they are embedded and the properties that these relations generate.”11 Zea addresses at least two of the factors Gracia identifies. When Zea contemplated what has happened to indigeneous peoples in Mexico, he focused on three major events: the conquest in the sixteenth century, independence from Spain in the nineteenth century, and the Mexican Revolution in the twentieth century. The conquest would certainly appear to qualify as a significant historical event that affected indigenous peoples directly. However, Zea believed that mestizaje, independence from Spain, the Mexican Revolution, and modernity should somehow have mitigated the significance of the conquest for contemporary indigenous peoples. He argues, “The indigenous movement seeks to recover the pre-­ Columbian world and reveal it and exalt its value; but because we are dealing with a culture that is to a great extent lost, the value of the indigenous movement is that of its social and psychological symbolism: [quoting Luis Villoro] ‘more than preserving an actual good, it is driven by nostalgia for a lost presence.’”12 Zea’s philosophy of history, as elaborated in Filosofía de la historia americana (1978), searches for meaning in history. History ceases to be a chronicle of events or a collection of data and becomes a consciousness within the lives of people. European versions of history, according to Zea, while purporting to be “universal,” told the story of some people in the world while ignoring that of others. Zea called this exclusionary bias “Eurocentrism” and attempted to offer a response and complement to European philosophies of history that had been considered “universal history” but had excluded much of the non-European world and made it marginal to the West. Still, while he admits the significance of the conquest as a historical

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event, he believes that independence from Spain and the Mexican Revolution surpass the conquest in importance because they can be viewed positively, whereas the conquest can only be condemned. For Zea, the Mexican Revolution paved the way for Mexican thinkers to theorize Mexican identity, which they called mexicani­ dad, which can be loosely translated as “Mexicanness” or “that which is Mexican.” The Mexican thinker Samuel Ramos, influenced by Alfred Adler, led this line of analysis in the 1930s, and Zea continued Ramos’s efforts in the 1940s and 1950s as the leader of the Hiperión Group, an intellectual circle in Mexico City that systema­ tically addressed the question, What is a Mexican? In these discussions, indigenous topics did not occupy a central place. Indigenous questions did, however, arise tangentially in essays on mexicanidad, Mexican history, and Mexican identity. In 1952 Zea wrote, “Criollos, mestizos, and Indians mix together in the Revolution that symptomatically has been called Mexican. . . . Everyone views the Revolution as their chance for improvement.”13 In 1996 Zea wrote that the Mexican Revolution is “a revolution that involves the powerful force of the mestizo, who dreams with others of making Mexico a modern nation. The mestizo is flower and fruit of the union between the conqueror and the conquered. The mestizo and mestizaje, through which hateful racial discrimination disappears, are in one way or another made possible by the order inherited by Latin America, which is fortunately disappearing.”14 Later in his life Zea set the conquest aside and began to insist that mestizaje and mexicanidad had transcended it and brought Mexico into modernity. In 1999 he wrote, “I do not understand how there can be Mexicans bent on seeing other Mexicans, whom they call indigenous, as different and separate from their world. The more the indigenous are protected, the more they are like certain useful plants and animals that we protect from extinction. How can they be viewed this way by some Mexicans?”15

Negritude and Indigenismo

Because Zea viewed indigenismo (indigenism) as a distant, historical process that is no longer relevant, it can be useful to examine, in

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contrast, how he viewed negritude. He distinguished between negritude and indigenismo as movements that have dissimilar origins. Negritude comes from Africans and African Americans who have suffered discrimination. He argued, “Indigenismo does not come from indigenous people themselves but from a long and complex history that predates the political independence of Latin American nations. It comes from people who are not indigenous, who raise the flag as part of a program to incorporate the indigenous into national communities created by criollos and mestizos. It is the mestizo who will be known as Latin American, he or she who has raised the flag of indigenismo as an unavoidable complement to the affirmation of the concrete human being in Latin America.”16 Zea wrote sympathetically about negritude and extensively cited figures such as Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire. He tended to put negritude on a par with mexicanidad, seeing both movements as relevant twentieth-century quests for identity. Eduardo Nicol has argued that there is a paradox in both indigenismo and negritude: they search for ideality on the basis of race while seeking at the same time to eliminate racial distinctions in society and culture.17 Zea, however, believes that the commencement of mestizaje remedied the racial problem that was initially present in indigenismo by wiping out discrimination, whereas negritude has had to contend with discrimination in modern times.

The Conquest, Mestizaje, and Equality

Zea viewed the conquest as dividing people by emphasizing racial difference. Independence from Spain and participation in the Mexican Revolution, in contrast, brought people together through mestizo consciousness. Initially, according to Zea, racial mixing was problematic: “The conflict between races arises because of the in­ability of peoples to incorporate themselves and progress as an active and not passive part of civilization. The conflict is a result of mestizaje, of the encounter between races and cultures that are unable to assimilate themselves. Iberian colonization is responsible for this mestizaje because the Iberians did not avoid mixing with primitive races, as the whites did in North America. This is the heritage that

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must be confronted and nullified.”18 Zea seemed to conclude that while mestizaje at first proved challenging, it eventually became a major achievement of Latin American civilization. In addition to appreciation of the ideas of the Spanish Erasmian humanists, Zea often quoted José Vasconcelos’s well-known essay, The Cosmic Race (1925). Zea shared Vasconcelos’s enthusiasm for racial mixing as a Latin American phenomenon that promised to create a new “race.” With Vasconcelos and Rodó, Zea believed the cosmic race may be superior culturally because of the Latin focus on the aesthetic experience and heightened spiritual sensibilities. For Zea, mestizaje represented an unquestionable good. He also highlighted José Martí’s seminal essay, “Our America,” in which Martí asserted, “The autochthonous mestizo has conquered the exotic criollo.” Another idea that Zea found attractive in Martí’s essay is the following: “There are no races[,] . . . [only] the universal identity of man. The soul emanates, equal and eternal, from bodies diverse in form and color.”19 Zea also quoted José Carlos Mariátegui: “The supposition that the indigenous problem is an ethnic problem stems from the outdated repertory of imperialist ideas. The concept of inferior races serves the white West in its task of expansion and conquest.”20 Zea’s exalted view of mestizaje and his denial of any indigenous need for a unique group identity in modern Mexico become clear in the following assertions, all made between 1978 and 1996: The race that has formed in Latin America is not an inferior race because it is the sum total of races and cultures.21 Not being white, having a particular culture, far from being an expression of inferiority, comes to be an expression of what makes a person a person; that is, their personality and their individuality. People are equal, but different; they are similar by being individuals.22 The mixing of lineages and cultures, formerly viewed as degradation, is now presented as the race of races and the culture of cultures throughout the most remote regions of the world. This

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extends to Anglo-Saxon America, which is ceasing to be AngloSaxon and is becoming Latinized through the diverse racial and cultural expressions being manifested there.23 The mixing process, which, I insist, is not simply racial, has eliminated the conflict between whites and Indians.24 In any case, the Indian, the mestizo and the criollo, accepting a division that no longer matters in this country, can all leave their situation of subordination by other means in which racial division no longer matters. What matters are Mexicans plain and simple, of one skin color or another, just as they can be tall or short, thin or fat, without any of these things having anything to do with their social situation in modern Mexico and in Latin America, as she continues to define herself.25 While Zea often demonstrated a clear understanding of the ways in which indigenous peoples were devastated and marginalized by the conquest, he believed that mestizaje definitively solved the problem of racial discrimination and that mexicanidad offered everyone the privileges of nationhood. Zea’s optimism regarding the power of mestizaje to eradicate racial discrimination in Mexico is misplaced and could only take shape because he generally failed to address issues of social, legal, and economic justice, as well as other issues relevant to the plight of indigenous peoples that have arisen since independence and since the revolution.

On Race and Gender

We have seen how Zea denies the importance and sometimes even the existence of race and ethnicity in the face of mestizaje and mexicanidad. However, a much more praiseworthy and consistent feature of Zea’s thought involves his examination of gender in the context of race. Beginning in 1952, in his analyses of marginality, Zea noted that Indians, women, and children shared equally marginal status.26 Although he did not develop a separate treatment of the topic of

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women or children, Zea foresaw the ways in which race and gender competed as explanations for marginality and oppression, an issue widely discussed in the twenty-first century. Many theorists of race and gender have differed on which condition, race or gender, is primordial or definitive. For instance, in a recent essay Naomi Zack argued, “I now think that the axis of oppression should be reconfigured from a liberatory perspective in ways that focus on gender.”27 My own view is that race and gender should be seen as equiprimordial, though they usually appear unable to operate with equal force simultaneously. Gender cannot consistently be privileged over race, and vice versa. Thinking about how race and gender work together has proven challenging. In Family Bonds, Ellen K. Feder writes: We may find an image that captures the confounding ­inability to regard simultaneously the operation of race and gender in what are sometimes called “reversible figure-ground” drawings, popu­larized by the Gestalt psychologists. In one of the best known of these drawings . . . a vase is visible against a contrasting background. When we look at the vase, the background recedes, but focusing on this background reveals the distinctive outline of two faces in profile. Despite the fact that the contours of the vase define the faces and vice versa, each image becomes visible only when the other image is forced to the ground; only one is visible at a time.”28 For Feder, such an image helps to show what the equiprimoridal can look like and how it can function in personal psychology or self-analysis. As in the figure-ground drawing, if race is foregrounded gender is backgrounded, and vice versa. Zea’s ability to foresee the need to weigh race and gender against one another, and to explore their relationship to one another, may be his most salient contribution to the contemporary discussion of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Unfortunately, he did not view nationality and race on the same par but decidedly privileged nationality as defining Mexican identity. For Zea, national identity trumps racial or gendered identity.

Mestizaje, mexicanidad, and Assimilation  259 Zea’s Critics

Returning to problematic aspects of Zea’s views on race and nationality, several critics have offered insightful observations that further elucidate the shortcomings. Ofelia Schutte admonishes, “In interpreting Zea’s philosophical perspective, we must be careful not to overlook the fact that as long as the notion of humanity on which he relies is basically a European construct, the mere addition of color or nationality as a qualifying circumstance to this ‘universal man’ will not be sufficient to legitimate indigenous and marginalized ethnic cultures on their own terms.”29 Zea is more concerned with respecting world historical terms than with addressing marginalized ethnic cultures on their own terms. He argues that because mestizos of varying colors built the Mexican nation and had access to jobs, they should now perceive themselves simply as Mexicans and not be tempted by a desire to preserve their preindependence or prerevolution identities. This position does not allow indigenous peoples to define their identity on their own terms but only on the basis of evolutionary national and modern historic terms. Thus, although Zea makes the case for the value of mestizaje as a continuation of the rich tradition of Spanish miscegenation, replete with humanistic values, he sees no room for disagreement from indigenous peoples about the present-day advantages of mestizaje and mexicanidad. Harold Eugene Davis, in Latin American Thought (1972), noted, “In the manner of Ortega, Zea sees that a people acquires freedom to act by first experiencing the full meaning of its history and then, in a sense, putting it aside or transcending it.”30 Davis seems to question how this could work in practice because he also observes, “In some respects . . . indigenismo is a more profound reassertion of the concept earlier expressed by certain independence leaders that the cultural history of America is significantly continuous with that of the pre-Conquest civilization.”31 In a passage from 1972, Davis noted, “In general it may be observed that as long as the native languages continue to be the major means of communication of millions of Latin Americans, as they still are in the late twentieth century, indigenous concepts of religion, ethics, art, community relations, law, and politics will have a significant place. Among these

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various influences the symbolism and language of the plastic arts and of the Indian peasant architecture may well be the most durable survivals. But religious and ethical values will also continue to have an important role in forming the minds of the contemporary generation.”32 Finally, he posed some challenging questions for Zea. If one assumes the truth of the paradox stated by Zea—that Latin Americans struggling in the nineteenth century to rid their mentality of colonialism and imperialism, were unable to do so precisely because they had not themselves fully experienced this colonialism and imperialism—a further question arises. Have Latin Americans in their twentieth century anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism experienced their own history sufficiently to make this ideology in any sense real? Or is this anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, like the anti-Europeanism of the nineteenth century, destined to reveal itself an empty shell? Do the religious, social, and esthetic concepts derived from the Amerindian and Afro-American heritage have useful meaning in the present-day ethnic scene? Do they have validity in relation to present problems, or are they a limiting, restricting inheritance, standing in the way of the self-realization of Latin American peoples?33 In a book published in 2006, Pensadores latinoamericanos del siglo XX, Carlos Piñeiro Iñíguez offers some data for consideration that seriously challenge a number of Zea’s arguments about mestizaje and mexicanidad as having achieved social integration: “According to the Latin American Indigenous Institute, there are some 40 million pure Indians in Latin America, organized in 400 ethnic groups with their own cultures. They make up 8 percent of the total population, with an unequal distribution: 66 percent in Guatemala, 63 percent in Bolivia, 40 percent in Peru and Ecuador, 3 percent in Argentina, and barely 1 percent in Uruguay. 80 percent of Latin American indigenous peoples live below the poverty line.”34 Piñeiro Iñíguez also cites a publication from the National Indigenous Movement of Mexico: We are no longer dealing with the usual indigenismo, but with an Indianism made up of original peoples, an “organizational,

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plural force of indigenous social organizations that seek to resolve secular problems of land holding and obtaining legal, institutional, and social recognition of the collective rights of indigenous peoples, such as self-determination, indigenous autonomy, their own normative systems, forms of government and social structure, public resource allocation, etc., all beginning with self-started research and action.” The workings of Autonomous Zapatista municipalities in Chiapas demonstrate the possibility of putting into practice a similar program, which would undoubtedly bring with it a proposal for a different nation and, consequently, prove difficult for our present nationstates to absorb.35 Zea, in contrast, was dismayed by the 1994 uprising in Chiapas and believed that it was a misguided throwback to the distant past, which would only serve to marginalize its participants further.36 Walter D. Mignolo, in The Idea of Latin America (2005), shares many of Piñeiro Iñíguez’s concerns about the native races of the Americas. Mignolo praises the analysis of marginality Zea pre­ sents in The Role of the Americas in History and sees the ways in which marginality can apply to the indigenous situation. Although Mignolo does not critique Zea’s stance on indigenismo directly, in a section titled “Indigenous People Are Not Necessarily ‘Latin’ and Perhaps Not Entirely ‘Americans’ Either” he states: The Global Trends 2015 report released on December 18, 2000, by the National Intelligence Council noted the potential challenges coming from Indigenous people in the Andean region, Chile, Central America, and southern Mexico as one of the major global trends on the horizon of 2015. Indeed, the continued presence and new “trends” in social, economic, and life organization of the Zapatista uprising (starting in 1994 in Mexico . . . ) mark a crucial turning point in five hundred years of Indigenous struggle against exploitation, domination, and colonization—above all against the totalizing mirage of modern epistemology.37

262  Amy A. Oliver Forging Latin Americans through Subsumption

For Zea, the indigenous in Mexico cannot opt out of the legacy of the conquest, the formation of the Mexican nation-state starting in 1810, or the consequences of the Mexican Revolution starting in 1910. These events are concentric circles that have brought indige­ nous peoples into modernity. For him, the critical legacy is that indigenous peoples and mestizos struggled together, side by side, to achieve independence and the Mexican Revolution, which have ensured that they are full and equal citizens of Mexico. Zea generally subsumed indigenous peoples under his preferred category “mestizos” and subsequently further subsumed them under concepts of the nation-state and the revolution. What Zea did not bargain for were indigenous peoples who would choose not to identify with postconquest modernity, the nation-state, or the revolution. From his point of view, why would people choose to dredge up now-irrelevant historical perspectives and revert to being consigned to the fringes of history when they could instead choose mestizo consciousness and emancipate themselves mentally from the colonial yoke? Can they not set aside the conquest now that they have transcended it through mexicanidad? For Zea, autonomous indigenous movements represent a return to marginality, to Indians being viewed as primitive and backward, with a status similar to that of women or children. He has come close to suggesting that wearing traditional indigenous clothing serves only to objectify Indians by providing a picturesque experience for tourists. From Zea’s perspective, indigenismo is a term that indicates a sympathetic awareness of indigenous peoples. It would have been correct at the time of the conquest to speak of a biological “race” of Indians because mestizaje was just beginning. Today, however, the term indígena is often used interchangeably with mestizo, yet Zea insisted that mestizo was the correct term to use to refer to all Mexicans. He failed to see advantages when others avoided the issue of bloodlines altogether by arguing that indígenas are instead culturally defined—that anyone who lived as an Indian was an Indian. Zea often insisted, according to Piñeiro Iñíguez, that “the efforts of Latin

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America’s liberal thinkers to reject or forget their colonial heritage— without attempting to reappropriate it—has served only to prevent them from assimilating the past and organizing Latin American social life in the other two historical dimensions, the present and the future.”38 However, if the effort to reject the colonial past had been unsuccessful, as Zea argued on many occasions, what kind of thinking can simply set it aside? Returning to the topics of this volume, forging can have two connotations. One is to give shape by means of careful effort, and the other is to heat elements together in a melting pot and beat or hammer them into shape. It seems clear that indigenous Latin Ameri­cans are demanding the former. If Zea’s views are applied to the notion of “forging people,” he seems to condone the use of the second technique if the first does not succeed. He appears to use some shaping to forge mestizaje into mexicanidad when, in fact, not all mestizos have the same view of Mexico’s significant historical events that Zea has. For Zea, nationality, in the context of third world postimperialist consciousness, trumps race and ethnicity. He believed that the nationalist project must progress if Mexico is ever to escape marginality and complete its liberation. Although Zea wrote extensively about identity, which for him involves autonomy, and about the right of peoples to self-determination, history trumps identity in his view. The indigenous in Mexico, for Zea, went through the process of selfdetermination after 1810 when they fought for independence from Spain and after 1910 when they “forged” (assimilated, integrated, and amalgamated) themselves as mestizos mexicanos. In this way, they moved themselves into Zea’s outer concentric circles, and he believed they could not now retreat to their former, marginal status. Zea preferred the notion of a community united by a historical journey from coloniality to nationalistic solidarity. One of the lessons to be learned from Zea is that cultural and social theorists focused on the postcolonial experience of the mid- to late twentieth century can have a lot to say about liberation from imperialist stereotypes but may not, as a result of the process, have acquired adequate sympathy or openness to indigenous cultures. Such sympathy can seem a betrayal of a greater project for thinkers like Zea,

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whereas other social commentators might applaud the resurgence of a local community with the traditions of indigenous cultures.

Life and Works

Leopoldo Zea was a lifelong resident of Mexico City (1912–2004). He was educated at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he received a master’s degree in 1943 and a Ph.D. in 1944. He worked as professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and director of the Center for Latin American Studies (CCYDEL) and was editor of the journal Cuadernos Americanos. He wrote more than fifty books on Latin American intellectual history, many of which have been translated into English, French, Italian, Russian, and other languages. In his early works on positivism in Mexico, Zea demonstrated that while positivism was promoted as an “objective” and “scientific” doctrine that could most efficiently manage society, from the beginning certain members of the middle class reaped the benefits of the positivistic administration of Porfirio Díaz at the expense of the rest of the middle class and society. In addition to being a seminal contribution to the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Latin America, this emphasis on Mexican thought as it affected the nation socially and politically marks Zea’s conviction that philosophy arises from concrete individuals with particular historical circumstances and that “universal” truths are suspect. In addition to his work on positivism, Zea is known for his writings on mexicanidad, mestizaje, and marginality. Zea sought truth in values such as equality, tolerance, and respect for the individual as he questioned that which is considered “universal.”

Further Reading

Medin, Tzvi. Leopoldo Zea: Ideología, historia y filosofía de América Latina. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983. Various. Prometeo 7 (1986).

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Zea, Leopoldo. Dos ensayos sobre México y lo mexicano. Mexico City: Porrúa, 1987. _____. Fin del siglo XX ¿Centuria perdida? Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996. _____. Positivism in Mexico. Trans. Josephine H. Schultze. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974.

Notes

 1.  Leopoldo Zea, La esencia de lo americano (Buenos Aires: Pleamar, 1960), 52. All translations are mine.  2.  Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en México: Nacimiento, apogeo y decadencia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1968), 21.  3.  Leopoldo Zea, Descubrimiento e identidad latinoamericana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1990), 62. “Somos una casa con dos puertas.”  4.  Of the Spanish legacy in Latin America, Zea wrote, “One must assume the peculiar identity of the peoples that make up Latin America. They are Latin because of the spirit that came from Spain and took root in this region, allowing people of diverse lineages and cultures to coexist. This is the same spirit that in Iberia allowed the Visigoth to coexist with the Moor and the Christian with the Muslim and the Jew. It is the same spirit that allowed Rome to create an empire in the Mediterranean, making her waters a bridge between the European, the African, and the Asian.” Descubrimiento, 67.  5.  Zea believed that the “ability to assimilate cultures apparently at opposite poles may be ascribed to the mixture of races. Latin America inherited this attitude from Spain and Portugal together with the Christian way of looking at the world and life, which the West discarded. Spain and Portugal are nations tempered by contact with non-Western cultures and have always been disposed to cultural assimilation without discrimination of any kind. Spain and Portugal are countries of racially mixed origin, of a racial amalgam going back to periods prior to the discovery and colonization of

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the New World.” Filosofía de la historia americana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1978), 202.  6.  Ibid.: “La latinidad no tiene ningún sentido desde el punto de vista étnico. Allí están los españoles que eran iberos, celtas, fenicios, romanos, visigodos, vándalos, moros y judíos.”  7.  Tzvi Medin, Leopoldo Zea: Ideología, historia y filosofía de América Latina (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983), 76.  8.  Angel del Río, Historia de la literatura española, vol. 1 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), 242.  9.  Zea, La esencia de lo americano, 42. 10.  Leopoldo Zea, Fin del siglo XX ¿Centuria perdida? (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), 93. “Polémica en la que triunfó el humanismo cristiano español reconociendo la humanidad de los indígenas y, con ella, los derechos inherentes a la misma.” 11.  Jorge J. E. Gracia, “Individuation of Racial and Ethnic Groups: The Problems of Circularity and Demarcation,” in Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 97–98. 12.  Leopoldo Zea, Fuentes de la cultura latinoamericana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 429–36. 13.  Leopoldo Zea, Dos ensayos sobre México y lo mexicano (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1987), 124. 14.  Zea, Fin del siglo XX, 97–98. 15.  Zea, “Presentación,” in Geopolítica de América Latina y el Caribe, ed. Leopoldo Zea and Mario Magallón (Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), 15. “No entiendo que existan mexicanos empeñados en ver a otros mexicanos, que llaman indígenas, como distintos y ajenos a su propio mundo. Cuanto más protegerlos como se protege a ciertas especies de plantas y animals útiles o para que no se extingan. ¿Cómo pueden ser vistos así por algunos mexicanos?” 16.  Leopoldo Zea, “Negritud e indigenismo,” Latinoamérica: Cuadernos de cultura latinoamericana 18 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1979), 6–7. 17.  Eduardo Nicol, El problema de la filosofía hispánica (Madrid: Tecnos, 1961), 77.

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18.  Zea, Descubrimiento, 60–61: “conflicto de razas . . . que se origina por la incapacidad de estos pueblos para incorporarse al progreso, como parte activa y no pasiva de la civilización. Conflicto que es el resultado del mestizaje, del encuentro de razas y culturas incapaces de amalgamarse. De este mestizaje es responsable la colonización ibera que lejos de evitar el mestizaje con las razas primitivas, como lo evitó el sajón en Norteamérica, se confundió con ellas. Es esta la herencia la que hay que enfrentar y anular.” 19.  José Martí, “Nuestra América,” in Política de nuestra América, ed. Roberto Fernández Retamar (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1979), 43–44. 20.  Zea, Fin del siglo XX, 91: “La suposición de que el problema indígena es un problema étnico, se nutre del más envejecido repertorio de ideas imperialistas. El concepto de razas inferiores sirvió al Occidente blanco para su obra de expansion y conquista.” 21.  Zea, Descubrimiento, 78: “La raza que se forma en la América Latina no es raza inferior por ser suma de razas y culturas.” 22.  Zea, “Negritud e indigenismo,” 5: “El no ser blanco, el tener una determinada cultura, lejos de ser expresión de inferioridad, viene a ser expresión de lo que hace del hombre un hombre, esto es, su personalidad, su individualidad. Los hombres son iguales, pero distintos; semejantes por ser individuos.” 23.  Zea, Descubrimiento, 67: “La mestización de estirpes y culturas, vista ayer como degradación, se extiende ahora como raza de razas y cultura de culturas por las más remotas regions de la Tierra. Se extiende sobre la América Sajona, que va dejando de ser sajona y se latiniza al asumir las diversas expresiones raciales y culturales que allí se van dando cita.” 24.  Zea, Fin del siglo XX, 99: “La mestización que –insisto—no es simplemente racial, ha disuelto la pugna indio contra blanco.” 25.  Ibid., 100: “En todo caso, el indígena, el mestizo y el criollo, aceptando una division que ya no cuenta en el país, podrán por igual salir de su situación de subordinación por otras vías en las que nada cuenta ya esa division racial. Se trata de mexicanos sin más, de un color de piel o de otro, como pueden ser altos o bajos, flacos o gordos, sin que lo uno o lo otro tenga nada que ver con su situación social en el México moderno y en la América que va perfilándose.”

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26.  See Zea, Dos ensayos. 27.  Naomi Zack, “Ethnicity, Race, and the Importance of Gender,” in Gracia, Race or Ethnicity? 120; original emphasis. 28.  Ellen K. Feder, Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 90. 29.  Ofelia Schutte, Cultural Identity and Social Liberation in Latin American Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 127; original emphasis. 30.  Harold Eugene Davis, Latin American Thought: A Historical Introduction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 168; my emphasis. 31.  Ibid., 162. 32.  Ibid., 25. 33.  Ibid., 234. 34.  Carlos Piñeiro Iñíguez, Pensadores latinoamericanos del siglo XX: Ideas, utopía y destino (Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato di Tella and Siglo XXI Editora Ibero Americana, 2006), 76. 35.  Ibid., 76–77. 36.  See the last chapters of Zea, Fin del siglo XX. 37.  Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 115. 38. Piñeiro Iñíguez, Pensadores latinoamericanos del siglo XX, 48.

Part V

Latinos/as in the United States

[

12]

Latino/a Identity and the Search for Unity Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia E li z ab et h M i l l á n and Ernesto Ros e n V e lá squ ez

Recently within the Anglophone philosophical world, the topics of race, ethnicity, and nationality, topics that in the wrong hands have been used to justify oppression and bloodshed, have been used instead to serve the ends of social justice and to enlarge the borders of philosophy itself. Philosophy as a discipline has, for far too long, suffered from a kind of provincialism and all sorts of monsters born of this provincialism (sexism, racism, cultural xenophobia, among others). In taking up the issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality in the context of the problem of Latino/a identity in the United States, philosophers have addressed a philosophical topic central to the Latin American philosophical tradition and transplanted it to a new environment, thereby broadening philosophy and redefining the problem of Latino/a identity. Linda Martín Alcoff, J. Angelo Corlett, and Jorge J. E. Gracia are three philosophers currently working in the United States whose work on the problem of Latina/o identity has shaped discussions of this central 271

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issue within the Latin American philosophical tradition. Since these three philosophers do not share the same view, it is valuable to look at the differences in their positions as a way to crystallize how the discussion of Latino/a identity has developed in the United States. In what follows, we present the ways these thinkers approach the problem of Latino/a identity and discuss how their approaches, carried out in the U.S. context, are different from the discussion of identity in the Latin American philosophical context. We begin with a discussion of a founding figure of the Latin American tradition, then briefly trace the migration of the issue of identity from Latin American to U.S. soil and go on to sketch some methodological differences between Gracia and Alcoff. Gracia puts forth what he calls a “familial-historical view,” to shed light on the problem of Latino identity, whereas Alcoff offers what she calls an “ethnoracial view.” In the second section we discuss Gracia’s familial-historical view in greater detail and explore the metaphysical aspects of the problem of Latino/a identity. The third section considers how treatment of the problem of identity shifts when public policy issues are central, as they are in the work of Corlett. Alcoff’s ethnoracial view is revisited in section four, as we consider the merits of her hybrid approach to the problem of identity. We conclude with a discussion of how these views offer valuable lenses through which to examine the problem of Latino/a identity, a matter that has, since its articulation, vexed thinkers on both sides of the Rio Grande.

The General in His Labyrinth: Bolívar and the Search for Unity

As the territories of Spanish America began to break from Spain’s colonial clutches to form independent nations, a new ordering was put into place and questions regarding the identity of the peoples of the region were articulated. Famously, in his speech at the inauguration of the Second National Congress of Venezuela at Angostura (February 15, 1819), Simón Bolívar trenchantly expressed the identity crisis facing the peoples of the new republic:

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We are not Europeans; we are not Indians; we are but a mixed species of aborigines and Spaniards. Americans by birth and Europeans by law, we find ourselves engaged in a dual conflict: we are disputing with the natives for titles of ownership, and at the same time we are struggling to maintain ourselves in the country that gave us birth against the opposition of the invaders. Thus our position is most extraordinary and complicated.1 This diagnosis of an identity crisis inaugurated a tradition of thought devoted to gaining clarity on what it means to be Latin American, to exist in a “most extraordinary and complicated” position of a hybrid identity. Bolívar “the Liberator” was no armchair philosopher. He successfully led northern South America to independence from Spain and was the founding father of five republics (Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia). As colonial subjects became citizens of newly independent republics, critical issues of identity were bound to take center stage. These concerns with identity were clearly expressed by Bolívar as he grappled with the problem of the mixture of races within his region. Bolívar was certainly not the only thinker to consider these matters, but he did forge a tradition in Latin American thought: a concern with the identity crisis plaguing the region of Latin America in the wake of colonization. Two central documents from his corpus highlight the development of the problem of identity as it was forged during the period of independence. The Letter from Jamaica (1815) responds to the governor of Jamaica’s request for Bolívar’s views on prospects for Latin American liberation and the establishment of one unified nation. Bolívar’s letter is a call to independence of Latin America from Spain. In it, he complains of a state of permanent infancy suffered by the nations of Spanish America and of their dependency on Europe. A major theme of the letter is the problem of what it means to be American. He points to a tension: “In short, though Americans by birth we derive our rights from Europe, and we have to assert these rights against the rights of the natives, and at the same time we must defend ourselves against the invaders.”2 In the letter Bolívar also addressed issues of how to develop a nation of free citizens from a New World

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that had originated under the yoke of Spanish tyranny. Bolívar was concerned with how leaders of newly independent republics could earn the respect of fellow citizens, when the colonial subjects had hitherto been indoctrinated with respect for what was not native to the lands of America. In short, Bolívar is interested in the political and social ramifications of liberation in the wake of colonization. Central to the project of liberation is the matter of settling issues of identity, for the group of people that would comprise the new, independent nation of Venezuela was far from homogeneous: criollos, mestizos, and indigenous. In the speech he delivered to the congress of Angostura in 1819, Bolívar urges his public to bid farewell to Bolívar the Liberator and embrace him simply as a “good citizen.” He argues that Venezuela had been liberated, and now the long task of nation building must begin. He discusses the particular problems that the newly born nation faces in the light of its colonial past and draws attention to what he calls the “racial mixture” of the people of the region while emphasizing the unity that must prevail if the country is to prosper: political equality must trump the physical and moral inequalities that may be present among the people of Venezuela. Bolívar warns that this unity will be challenged on a number of fronts. He was keenly aware that diversity might upset the unity necessary for the progress of the country: “The diversity of racial origin will require an infinitely firm hand and great tactfulness in order to manage this heterogeneous society, whose complicated mechanism is easily damaged, separated, and disintegrated by the slightest controversy” (Letter 70–71). In calling for a move toward the stability and security that will promote social well-being for Venezuela’s citizens, Bolívar calls for “unity, unity, unity” in all areas of life. He writes, “The blood of our citizens is varied: let it be mixed for the sake of unity” (Letter 71). For Bolívar, a concern with race is part of a concern with identity and the project of nation building. Laws should trump all the diversity that threatens to make the project of nation building unmanageable, for laws will secure happiness for the diverse body of citizens and unify the diverse peoples of Venezuela. Bolívar was well aware that racial diversity could, if not properly addressed, become a hurdle on the way to the development of a

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unified, stable nation. The central ordering framework of the nation (its legal code) was written with this concern in mind, avoiding some of the practices of racialization that haunted and continue to haunt U.S. society. From their inception, Latin American nations accepted mestizo identity as a way to achieve some sort of unity. This identity does not quite fit in the context of the United States, where some fiction of “racial purity” still finds currency in many quarters and where the legacy of the one-drop rule still perpetuates social injustice. Alcoff deftly describes the trouble of mapping the categories of race from Latin America onto U.S. racial terrain: The question of Latina/o identity’s relationship to the conventional categories of race that have been historically dominant in the United States is a particularly vexing one. To put it straightforwardly, we simply don’t fit. Racialized identities in the United States have long connoted homogeneity, easily visible identifying features, and biological heredity, but none of these characteristics apply to Latinas/os in the United States, nor even to any one national subset, such as Cuban Americans or Puerto Ricans. We are not homogenous by “race,” we are often not identifiable by visible features or even by names, and such issues as disease heredity that are often cited as the biologically relevant sign of race are inapplicable to such a heterogeneous group.3 As the problem of identity migrated from Latin America to the United States, it was bound to change and adapt to its new environment. The appearance of the problem in the consciousness of philosophers in the United States was also bound to change the field of philosophy itself, forging a new path within it. This new intellectual tradition is not only shaped by rigorous historical work, but it also involves what, to follow Carlos Fuentes’s lead, can be called an act of poetic justice.4 This act returns the Hispanic world to the United States and looks with serious philosophical attention at the role that Latinos/as/ Hispanics play in reshaping current discussions of identity. As Fuentes points out, the Hispanic immigration in the United States is not only an economic and political event; it is “above all a cultural event.”

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A whole civilization with a Hispanic pulse has been created in the U.S.A. A literature has been born in the country, one that stresses autobiography—the personal narrative, memories of a childhood, the family album—as a way of answering the question, What does it mean to be a Chicano, a Mexican American, a Puerto Rican living in Manhattan, a second-generation Cuban American living in exile in Miami? . . . [Latina/o artists] assert an identity that deserves to be respected and must be given shape if it is not visible, or musical beat if it is inaudible. And if the other culture, the Anglo mainstream, denies Hispanic culture a past, then artists of Latin origin must invent, if necessary, an origin. And they must remember every single link that binds them to it.5 With their work on the problem of Latino/a identity, Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia have made aspects of the Latino/a/Hispanic identity visible, and their contributions have in turn reformed philosophy, expanding the field and making it more inclusive. Migrations affect not only individuals but also intellectual traditions, for the migratory subject affects the intellectual spaces she inhabits. In Divergent Modernities, Julio Ramos presents the U.S. Latino migratory subject as the “bearer of traces,”6 so that the “emergent U.S. Latino/a subject, as early as the 1880s, writes on that edge delineated by separation and fracture.”7 As the Cuban thinker José Martí puts this in “Sad Sunday,” “I bear the pain which the whole world observes / a rebellious pain which the verse breaks / and that is, oh sea! The fleeting gull / passing on its way to Cuba on your waves!”8 Martí’s moving and powerful language reflects a condition that continues to challenge Latinos/as/Hispanics today: the condition of separation and fracture, a condition made worse as the problem of identity migrated from Latin America to the United States. Individual immigrants face a microcosm similar to that faced by Latin American philosophy itself, a matter of separation and fracture. Walter Mignolo refers to this condition as the double bind between excessive similarity and excessive difference. In “Philosophy and Colonial Difference,” he writes, “The double bind is the colonial difference and the structure of power that maintains it is the

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coloniality of power.”9 The notion of colonial difference is inspired by an insight from Robert Bernasconi, who describes the situation of African philosophy in the following way: “Western philosophy traps African philosophy in a double bind: either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt.”10 According to Mignolo, philosophy is located on the edge of colonial difference: “To think from the colonial difference means, today, assuming philosophy as a regional practice and simultaneously thinking against and beyond its normative and disciplinary regulations.”11 In short, to “decolonize philosophy,” we must think beyond Eurocentrism. This metaphorical use of the term colonial seems a sensible tool to deal with that “most extraordinary and complicated” position of identity diagnosed by Bolívar himself. And it seems that by thematizing the issue of Latinos/as/Hispanics in the United States, we take important steps in the direction of decolonizing thought: of thinking of subjects in broader ways, of including insights from thinkers too often excluded from our discourse by the philosophical Minutemen of our profession, who would limit the field to a select group of thinkers from England, France, Germany, and the Anglo-Saxon world (which effectively ghettoizes Latin American philosophy), and so of moving in the direction of achieving the goal of making philosophy into a truly global search for truth. It would be misleading to reduce Latin American philosophy to any one set of issues or to essentialize it in any way. Mignolo’s point about colonial difference is merely a useful frame we can use to see some of the reasons that Latin American philosophy has been systematically excluded from the canon for so long, but it cannot and should not be used to dictate content. In “Ethnic Labels and Philosophy,” Gracia expresses skepticism about the move to reduce Latin American philosophy to a set of issues surrounding the colonial experience. He writes, “[We cannot] take very seriously recent proposals by postmodernists, philosophers of liberation and others who claim that what is peculiar to Latin American philosophy is the experience of so-called coloniality or even perhaps marginality.”12 Gracia is skeptical even about the more modest claim that

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Latin American philosophy shares the effects of colonialism with other philosophers, but not with philosophies from Europe and the U.S. . . . The claim has a wonderful rhetorical ring to it, but how does it translate into concrete observations about the philosophy of Latin America? How has coloniality affected the thought of de la Vera Cruz, Romero and Mario Bunge, for example?13 We share Gracia’s skepticism regarding reductionist moves in philosophy, but we can avoid them if we take something like Mignolo’s colonial difference as a frame to understand the mistreatment of the Latin American tradition. While Gracia is clearly correct to question what the content of de la Vera Cruz, Romero, or Bunge’s work has to do with colonization, it seems that insofar as their work is carried out as part of a tradition that has been systematically excluded from mainstream philosophy it does enter the colonial fold. In considering the problem of Hispanic/Latino/a identity, we cannot ignore the role that the legacy of colonization has played in Latin America and that it continues to play for Latinos/as in the United States. What is the price of not giving enough attention to the colonial condition of Latinos/as in the United States? In Alcoff’s reaction to Gracia’s embrace of the term Hispanic we find a critique of his failure to adequately address the colonial condition. Gracia favors the term Hispanic over other ethnic terms for the group of immigrants from Latin American countries. He argues that it is the most adequate term to capture the historical family with ties to the encuentros, a term, moreover, that avoids the trap of a false homogenization of the group and loose, metaphorical use of language. Yet while Alcoff acknowledges some of the benefits of this term, she remains unconvinced that it is the most adequate one to capture the struggles of power and equality that are bound up with ethnic names. Of Gracia’s argument in favor of Hispanic, Alcoff writes: Although Gracia addresses with sensitivity the colonial aspects of the original encounter and its subsequent legacy for the

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peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, he does not address sufficiently, in my view, the more current and recent colonial relations that have structured relationships in the western hemisphere itself. Because of this, he fails to give sufficient importance to the role that ethnic terms have played in cultural, nationalist, and anti-imperialist struggles of Latino particularly in the United States.14 Gracia responds to Alcoff’s criticism on this point by posing the following question: Is Alcoff right in proposing that the use of “Hispanic” is counterproductive because it detracts attention from the present “colonial” condition of Latinos, whereas the use of “Latino” is not insofar as it helps to focus attention on that condition?15 Gracia is quite fair in his answer to this question, conceding that “one can construct a political argument for the use of ‘Latino’ that does not apply to the use of ‘Hispanic,’” and this for two reasons: (1) Latino, unlike Hispanic, has “a regional connotation which has to do with Latin America in particular and which excludes Spain”; and (2) “‘Latino’ also has a connotation of being backwater, marginal, unimportant, and poor,” and as such “there is a place for it in political discourse insofar as its use brings to the fore the disadvantaged condition of a certain group of people and helps in the development of an effective political strategy to address their grievances. Moreover, not using it might cause us to overlook this condition and, therefore, prevent legitimate redress.”16 Gracia’s support of these aspects of Alcoff’s argument in favor of the term Latino brings to mind Bolívar’s caveat that the diversity in Latin America “will require an infinitely firm hand and great tactfulness.” Gracia and Alcoff agree on the matter of the role that a given ethnic label can have in carrying out a political strategy that will help to overcome social injustices. What Gracia denies is that there is any “colonial condition” that must be taken account of between the United States and Latin America. He grants, “Yes there is exploitation of natural resources, yes, there is political manipulation; yes,

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there are cultural influences, and so on. But strictly speaking there is no colonialism.”17 To speak of “colonialism” in a metaphorical way is, for Gracia, counterproductive, for it “introduces imprecision in discourse and results in confusion.”18 Is there room for a metaphorical use of the term colonial in the search for Latino/a identity, in the search for unity in our diversity? Or is Gracia correct that such a use of language undermines our commitment to the “infinitely firm hand and great tactfulness” that Bolívar stressed in dealing with the problem of diversity in the search for unity? As we shall see, part of the answer to this question hinges on what sort of conception of philosophy we embrace. Gracia’s and Alcoff’s work on Latino/a identity provides intellectual space for thinking about issues central to social justice. A loose use of the term colonial gives Gracia pause in part because he suspects that it will undermine the noble pursuit of social justice, through politically charged language that is not philosophically precise. Like Bolívar, Gracia and Alcoff (and as we shall see, Corlett too) are searching for unity, a protective sort of unity that will enable the survival of an important social group. As Alcoff reminds us, “The U.S. pan-Latina/o identity is perhaps the newest and most important identity that has emerged in the recent period. The concept of a panLatina/o identity is not new in Latin America: Simón Bolívar called for it nearly two hundred years ago as a strategy for anticolonialism, but also because it provided a name for the ‘new peoples’ that had emerged from the conquest.”19 For both Alcoff and Gracia, philosophy plays an important role in developing the tools to enable us to come to an understanding of the identity of Latinos/as in the United States, but their views of philosophy are somewhat different, as is their view of the role of the “colonial condition” in that search for identity. In Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality, Gracia writes: Race, ethnicity, and nationality pose one of the greatest challenges to the survival of humankind in the twenty-first century, for they touch the very core of the social fabric, personal identity, and individuality; they influence how we think of others and ourselves; they play a role in our morality and political behavior; and they affect our everyday existence in significant ways.20

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Gracia goes on to argue that groupings based on race, ethnicity, and nationality are often misunderstood, with serious and often deleterious consequences. He goes on to point out that philosophy can lead to a clearer understanding of these groupings and so to solve the problems (or better yet, avoid them in the first place) associated with misunderstanding these groupings. How can philosophy help us with these problems? Consider Gracia’s statement of philosophy’s task: Unlike other disciplines, which are narrower in scope and have developed specialized methodologies, philosophy aims to be comprehensive and lacks a single set of methodological norms. Philosophy tries to produce a comprehensive view that integrates all the knowledge we have, whereas other disciplines attempt to be less inclusive insofar as they are circumscribed by their methodological boundaries and limited subject matter. Another difference between philosophy and other disciplines is that philosophy raises certain questions that are outside the province of all other disciplines. And still a third is that philosophy functions as a watchdog of other branches of human learning. All three differences give philosophy an advantage in the inquiry with which we are concerned here.21 Both Gracia and Alcoff come to the problem of Latina/o identity in order to address a matter of social justice. Yet they have slightly different views of philosophy’s role in this matter of uncovering the sources of inequality that plague humanity. In the opening of Visible Identities, Alcoff tells us, “In this book my goal is to cast serious doubt on [the] suspicion of difference by explicating some of the important features of specific identities: race/ethnicity, sex/gender, and the new pan-Latino identity.”22 Alcoff brings visibility to the pan-Latino identity, weaving these issues into her thought so that a new set of problems can emerge to broaden our field. Moreover, she is aware that the conception of philosophy as standing above or apart from other disciplines must fall if we are to have the tools we need to address the new problems facing us. In this project I join with the new movement of scholars (often working in ethnic studies and women’s studies) who argue that

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the acknowledgement of the important differences in social identity does not lead inexorably to political relativism or fragmentation, but that, quite the reverse, it is the refusal to acknowledge the importance of the differences in our identities that has led to distrust, miscommunication, and thus disunity. In a climate in which one cannot invoke history, culture, race, or gender for fear of being accused of playing, for example, “the race card,” or identity politics, or “victim feminism,” our real commonalities and shared interests cannot even begin to be correctly identified. When I refuse to listen to how you are different from me, I am refusing to know who you are. But without understanding fully who you are, I will never be able to appreciate precisely how we are more alike than I might have originally supposed.23 Alcoff’s embrace of interdisciplinarity contrasts with Gracia’s claim regarding the “watchdog” function of philosophy. Alcoff calls for philosophers to join forces with other disciplines and melt the boundaries that separate us so that we can come to a fuller appreciation of not only other disciplines but also other groups of people. With these different intellectual orientations in mind, let us consider Gracia’s and Alcoff’s specific views on Latino/a identity.

Gracia’s Familial-Historical View

In Latinos in America, Gracia argues that Latinos do not have a property or set of properties that unite them for all times and places.24 Furthermore, the common properties that he finds problematic are significant first-order properties: phenotypic or genetic, such as skin color and capacities, or cultural, such as tastes and values.25 The following nonexhaustive list of properties also need not be shared: being a speaker of Spanish or Portuguese, being conscious of Latino history, being of Iberian or Latin American or Amerindian or African descent, being a citizen or resident in an Iberian or Latin American country, and being a lover of Latin American music or food. Not all Latinos have dark skin or speak Spanish or have curly hair or are family oriented. To think Latinos share one or a set of

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common features would be tantamount to adopting what Gracia calls the “Common-Bundle View” of ethnicity.26 He raises three reservations against it. There is the problem of determining the particular set of features we should identify as pertinent. How and on what bases do we decide on the set of features that members of an ethnic group share? . . . We have no easy way of determining the number of those features required for someone to qualify as a member of the ethnic group. Two? Three? Four? Twenty? . . . We do not know what features will be pertinent in the future. . . . Note that I began by allowing the possibility that in principle there could be such a list of features even if we cannot identify it. Now, however, it should be clear that I do not think this is possible even in principle.27 This text is significant because it claims that there is no way to figure out, in theory, what first-order feature or features would determine the identity and identification of all Latinos independently of the world. And trivial properties, such as that of belonging to the group, or second-order properties, such as that of identity, are not relevant.28 So, then, what is a Latino, and what is a Latino identity? Gracia says: Latino identities are identities of Latino ethne, and Latino ethne are sub-groups of individual humans that satisfy the following conditions: (1) they belong to many generations; (2) they are organized as families and break down into extended families; and (3) they are united through historical relations that produce features which, in context, serve (i) to identify the members of the groups and (ii) to distinguish them from members of other groups.29 What unifies Latinos, according to Gracia, is that the ethnic group shares a unique history that begins in 1492 with the Spanish conquest and continues to this date. On the familial-historical view Latinos did not exist before 1492. In the Iberian Peninsula there were

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Catalans, Basques, Spaniards, and Andalusians. In pre-Colombian America there were Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, Toltecs, and many other indigenous groups. To be Latino it is necessary for an individual to be tied in some way to the historical events that unfolded in 1492.30 Gracia writes, “Particular physical characteristics, cultural traits, language, and so on can serve to distinguish Latinos in certain contexts, although they cannot function as criteria of distinction and identification everywhere and at all times.”31 A pressing question follows from this claim, namely, if there are no first-order features that can determine identity over time and give us ontological clarity regarding the identity of Latinos and further if there are no features that can give us clear and distinct knowledge that x is Latino, then how do we go about defining the group of Latinos at all? In response to this problem, Gracia proposes the familial-historical view of Latinos, an approach to the problem of Latino identity that is centered on a metaphysically unique history and a family resemblance view of feature sharing. On this view, to be Latino one must share some link—have at least one tie or relational feature—to at least one other member in this ethnic group. When an individual has ties with other members in this ethnic group and the relational feature emerges from Latino history, that individual has Latino ethnic identity. The familial-historical view is useful because it provides an objective ground for determining ethnic group membership by basing it in a unique Latino history. Invoking history is fruitful in that it provides a window through which we can understand ethnic groups and various subhistories within Latino history. Furthermore, its nonessentialist claim that it is not necessary for ethnic groups to have discernible features common to all members at all times and in all places is valuable because it makes ethnic membership a very open matter. For example, in a place where all and only Latinos speak Spanish, the language can function as a sufficient criterion of Latino identification even if, in other places, it does not. Likewise, in a society or region where all and only Latinos have a certain skin color, or a certain religion, and so on, these features can be used to pick out Latinos, even if elsewhere there are Latinos who do not share these features.32

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Gracia’s view of Latino identity is also appealing because its family resemblance view of feature sharing allows for incompati­ bility; one Latino might speak Spanish, another Portuguese, but they are both still Latino. The familial-historical view allows for heterogeneity: some members of the Latino ethnic group speak Spanish and others don’t, some have a Mexican parent and others don’t, some are born in Acapulco and others in Texas, yet all these people are Latino. This view is also open-ended: there are many ways that one can belong to the Latino ethnic group; in a given context it might be ancestry or skin color or language or a cultural connection. One could object that the familial-historical view offers too broad a definition of Latino identity, a problem that would be especially thorny for public policy makers. Let us now turn to one such objection and a different approach to the problem of Latino/a identity.

Corlett’s Public Policy View

While Gracia offers a careful metaphysical analysis of the problems surrounding Latino identity, Corlett is a philosopher concerned primarily with the moral and social-political issues that pertain to Latinos in the United States. According to him, becoming clear on what Latinos are matters for purposes of public policy. For instance, in affirmative action debates some argue that Latinos and other minority groups deserve preferential treatment or have group rights. Others argue that given the vagaries of defining who counts as “Latino/a,” it is futile (and might even result in social injustice) to grant special group rights to Latinos/as or Hispanics. Despite the disagreements, both sides assume that Latinos exist as a marginalized group and that social injustices affecting them should be addressed. The differences come down to the details regarding the ways in which those social injustices should be addressed. In Race, Racism, and Reparations, Corlett distinguishes between two kinds of analyses of the problem of Latino/a identity: meta­ physical and public policy.33 The primary aim of a public policy analysis is to classify people into distinct groups in order to apportion rewards and punishments under the law. He focuses on reparations

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for members of ethnic groups that have suffered discrimination in the past on the basis of their ethnicity. In order to achieve justice under the law, reparations of this sort require accurate identification of people along ethnic lines. Furthermore, accurate classifications of ethnic groups are not merely required for reparations; they are also required for other social policies such as affirmative action. Corlett’s theory is meant to apply to various social groups such as African Americans and Native Americans, but we shall limit our attention to the case under consideration, that of Latinos/as.34 According to Corlett, this is what it means to have Latino identity: I argue that for public policy administration considerations, genealogy ought to be construed as both a necessary and sufficient condition of award or benefit. Aside from public policy consideration, however, factors that would go toward making one more or less Latino may include the degree to which one knows and respects a Latino language or dialect thereof; possesses and respects a traditional Latino name; engages in and respects Latino culture or parts thereof; accepts and respects himself or herself as a Latino; is accepted and respected as a Latino by other Latinos; and is construed as a Latino by outgroup members. Like the genealogical condition, each of these conditions admit of degree. Yet while the genealogical condition is both necessary and sufficient for Latinohood, neither of the other conditions is either necessary or sufficient to make one a Latino, that is, for one to be properly classified as a Latino.35 Given that in the United States there is an uncritical notion of race as purely biological and of ethnic groups as purely cultural, it might seem counterintuitive for Corlett to call his ancestral view a theory of “ethnic” identity (for he does ground it on one’s ties to a Latino parent). Corlett breaks from the uncritical notion of race as biological and develops an ethnically based notion of Latino/a identity. He thinks race-talk is problematic in fundamental ways—conceptually and morally.36 As he states, “Indeed, I am a race eliminativist insofar as I see no good reason to retain the language of race in that it can be replaced with a plausible notion of ethnicities.”37

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Corlett is relatively unconcerned with defending a theory of Latino ethnicity aside from public policy. He is skeptical about taking the genealogical condition, understood in terms of Latino ancestry, as a metaphysical dogma. But he is also skeptical about taking other nonancestral conditions, such as the Spanish language and Latino culture, as metaphysical dogmas because not all Latinos speak Spanish, Latino culture is vague, a cultural view leads to a self-identification account of Latino identity that makes it impossible for individuals to be mistaken about their ethnic identity, it is arbitrary which properties count as cultural properties, and the degree to which a cultural property must be possessed by a person to qualify as Latino is arbitrary. For these reasons Corlett is not interested in defending the metaphysical approach and is in fact skeptical of it because he ultimately does not find it workable for purposes of public policy. Corlett is interested only in defending the public policy view of Latino identity that is grounded in one’s ancestral ties to a Latino parent. Approaching Latino identity solely in terms of ancestry has the advantage of providing an objective biological ground for ethnic group membership that is independent of what persons believe they are and what others believe they are ethnically speaking. The pragmatic way in which Corlett understands ancestry is beneficial because what is needed for public policy administration is the a­ bility to trace with reasonable accuracy a few generations or so of the existing genealogical history of ethnic groups targeted for affirmative action.38 For Corlett, although ancestry is a sufficient condition for ethnic group membership, it is not by itself a sufficient condition for distributing rewards. Determining who will obtain bene­ fits requires historical knowledge of ethnic groups. For purposes of public policy, ancestry is important because a person’s ancestral ties to a Latino parent can be traced back to U.S. slavery or other forms of oppression suffered in U.S. history.39 Ethnic groups are thus individuated by their distinct histories of oppression suffered in the United States. Corlett’s view of ancestry is useful also because it rejects the notion of pure genealogical lineages and embraces the idea that all of us have mixed ancestral ties, as he asks rhetorically, “Is not each

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of us a mixture of two or more ethnicities?”40 Corlett’s position opens up various possibilities for understanding Latino identity. One is that I might well be a member of more than one Latino group. Another is that I might be a member of more than one ethnic group (Latino and, say, African American). Yet another possibility is that I might be a member of more than one Latino group and, say, a European American of some sort. Apart from offering clear criteria for who counts as Latino, his degree-laden view of eth­nicity in which one is more or less Latino is not intended to make an evaluative judgment of a person. It urges us to celebrate positively our own and others’ Latinohood, but it also promotes respect for all ethnicities. However, one might express reservations with Corlett’s race eliminativism by raising the following questions: Do we need to eliminate race from our discussion of Latino/a identity? Or is perhaps a hybrid notion, one that fuses both dimensions of ethnicity and race, a more promising tool for dealing with the problem of identity? We shall now turn to a thinker who explores the problem of Latino/a identity in a way that departs in important respects from Gracia’s more metaphysical approach and Corlett’s public policy approach.

Alcoff’s Ethnoracial View

In Visible Identities, Alcoff grapples with a range of issues pertaining to race, gender, and various social identities such as African American and Asian. In chapter 10, “Latinos and the Categories of Race,”41 a discussion of Latino/a identity takes center stage. Here she discusses the status of Latino/a identity.42 Alcoff tells us: There are two aspects of selves that are involved in social identity. By the term identity, one mainly thinks about how we are socially located in public, what is on our identification papers, how we must identify ourselves on Census and application forms and in everyday interpolations of social interaction. This public identity is our socially perceived self within the systems of perception and classification and the networks of community

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in which we live. But there is also a lived subjectivity that is not always perfectly mapped onto our socially perceived self, and that can be experienced and conceptualized differently. By the term subjectivity, then, I mean to refer to who we understand ourselves to be, how we experience being ourselves, and the range of reflective and other activities that can be included under the rubric of our “agency.” These terms public identity and lived subjectivity are generally seen as corresponding to “interior” and “exterior” aspects of selves, without always taking note of the constant interplay and even mutually constitutive relations between each aspect.43 In an earlier article, Alcoff underscores the relations between the two aspects of identity by pushing the claim that they are “interconnected and interdependent but metaphysically distinguishable.”44 Alcoff does not take the internal/external distinction in a literal and limited fashion that reduces identity to a mind/body dualism isolated from its social context. She focuses on the politics of a particular social identity such as Latino/a identity, that is, on how in both the United States and Latin America Latino/a bodies are “interpellated” by ideology and the law, hailed by other historically situated social beings in hierarchical positions of power, and categorized by institutions such as the government, education, marketing, entertainment industries, and other mass media venues.45 Alcoff argues that “it is questionable whether the strategy of using an ethnic term for a currently racialized group will have the effect of reducing racism if it continues to signify race.”46 She supports this with examples. For instance, Jamaicans did not want to call themselves “African Americans.” Although the term was meant to highlight self-created features as opposed to physical features, Jamaicans still believed that the term signified race and hence would bring with it the regular host of problems that come with defining groups based on race. Alcoff then argues, “Like ‘African American,’ the category Latino generally operates as a racialized category in the United States.”47 She supports this with examples of how subgroups of Latinos are racialized. For instance, when the Cuban Marielitos, who were dark-skinned and poor, emigrated to the United States

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they received little or no government assistance and occupied menial jobs. However, when the upper-class, light-skinned Cubans emigrated in the 1960s they received government assistance, language training, educational and business loans, and job placement assistance. For Alcoff, using ethnicity to signify self-created features as opposed to physical ones is not an effective remedy to reduce racism because ethnic terms continue to signify race in such a way that they trump our ethnic self-identifications. Alcoff criticizes the use of ethnicity as a means to disabuse North Americans of their tendency to naturalize and universalize the predominant categories used in the United States because “people may speak culture but continue to think race.”48 For instance, Alcoff draws on Nina Glick Schiller’s case studies from Canada to Brazil. The people in the study speak cultural pluralism and multiculturalism but use the concept of culture in ways that naturalize and essentialize difference. Alcoff writes, “Study after study shows that culturalism operates very similarly as racism to differentiate groups on the basis of essential characteristics that can be hierarchically organized.”49 Another example is “Phyllis Pease Chock’s study of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, [which] shows that even this putatively progressive compilation reified ethnic groups with simplified cultures and uniform histories.”50 According to Alcoff, these studies indicate that although people believe they are thinking outside of race, there is a lingering racial reasoning in their thinking. This racial reasoning manifests itself in the forms of naturalizing, universalizing, reifying, and simplifying culture and ethnicity. Alcoff also points out that using ethnicity does not accurately identify what really holds groups together, because “race, unlike ethnicity, has historically worked through visible markers on the body which trumps dress, speech, and cultural practices.”51 For Alcoff, trumping can be manifested in many ways, and she provides instructive examples. For instance, she offers the example of “AfroCubans, English speaking West Indians, and Afro-Brazilians who are grouped as ‘black’ in ways that often counter people’s own felt sense of identity or primary group alliances.”52 In this case one’s self-identification is trumped by identifications made by others.

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Another example is the differential treatment between the predominantly white, upper-class Cubans who immigrated in the 1960s and the darker, poorer, Afro-Cuban Marielitos who arrived in Florida in the 1980s. While many geopolitical factors account for this differential treatment, Alcoff says that “perceived racial identity often does trump ethnic or cultural identity.”53 Other examples would include cases in which a person’s racial self-identification trumps an ethnic self-identification. Alcoff argues that Latino/a bodies come in all colors, and eth­ nicity is not closer to the truth of Latino/a identity because Latinos/as are racialized in the United States. She also offers examples of how in Latin America Cubans, Mexicans, and other subcategories of Latinos/as are racialized and concludes that the “ethnic option is not fully adequate to the contemporary social realities we [Latinos] face.”54 For her to say that Latino only means ethnicity and that one must be identified by the existing racial categories dominant in the United States is problematic because it gives in to the racial schemas of Anglo America, which are quite different from those of Central America, South America, or the Caribbean. An alternative, for Alcoff, is described as follows: Unlike the category of race, ethnorace might have the advantage of bringing into play both the elements of agency and subjec­ tivity involved in ethnicity, that is, an identity that is the product of self-creation, at the same time that it acknowledges the uncontrolled racializing aspects associated with the visible body.55 From this passage we can glean two aspects of an ethnoracial identity: a subjective aspect based on our lived experience of ourselves and an external public aspect grounded on the visible body. It might be tempting to take this text at face value and interpret it as making the point that the subjective aspect of Latino/a identity maps onto ethnic categories and the public aspect of Latino/a identity maps onto racial categories. But this would not cohere tightly with Alcoff’s remarks about the two aspects of identity being in “constant interplay” and in “mutually constitutive relations.” A more charitable interpretation that coheres more tightly with her remarks

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about identity and with her remark that the two aspects of identity are “interconnected and interdependent but metaphysically distinguishable” would make the view presented in the text open to the idea that both the subjective and public aspects of Latino/a identity map onto ethnic categories and that both aspects of Latino/a identity map onto racial categories. Alcoff’s approach to Latino/a identity is fruitful because it enlarges the way we understand identifications-by-others, and it brings into play the authority of various personal and impersonal structural sources of identification such as the media, government, institutions of higher education, newspapers, and scientists and other historically situated persons in positions of power. Her introduction of the notion of ideology gives her account explanatory power by providing a way to contextualize ideas, giving them a social location. Furthermore, her interest in reducing racism and her position that oppression is basic to our condition enable her to frame the issue of Latino/a identity within a political project that is a more bottom-up approach.

Concluding Remarks

We have focused on an analysis of the work of Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia and how these approaches to the problem of identity migrated from its roots in Latin America. As this problem migrated to the United States, it was also shaped by the intellectual currents here. For example, the work of Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia is part of a larger constellation of issues to which many thinkers in the United States have contributed. We would like, in particular, to comment briefly on the role that Anthony Appiah’s work has played in shaping the field on which questions of identity, race, and ethnic groups take place. Appiah was influential in advocating the shift from talk of groups of people, such as races and ethnic groups, to talk of identities, such as racial and ethnic ones.56 His work, concerned more with blacks as a racial identity and African Americans as an ethnic identity, is pioneering and has particular relevance for the problem of Latino/a identity.57

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Appiah’s skeptical arguments against a biological notion of race produced a critical reaction among African American philosophers and others, a reaction that ushered in a flurry of social constructionist accounts of race and significantly broadened the field of contemporary philosophy of race in the United States. Appiah’s work thus contributed in important ways to clarifying ontological issues surrounding the problem of race, and it has been an important resource when questions about the ontological status of Latinos arise.58 Appiah argues that we should drop talk of races or, for that matter, ethnic groups because they simply do not exist. He suggests that instead of race talk, we should think and speak in terms of identity. The shift to identity talk marked a move away from three senses in which the term identity is typically deployed. The first is the logical sense of identity understood in terms of equivalence, or a = a. The second is the way it is used by philosophers in discussions about the metaphysics of personal identity. In these contexts, identity is used in an ontic fashion to inquire into the essence of what a person is achronically, irrespective of time; synchronically, at one point in time; diachronically, at two or more points in time; and pan-chronically, at all times.59 Gracia’s and Corlett’s views are aligned with this second sense of identity. The third sense is the way in which it is used by reidentification theorists to make sense of the sameness that exists in the midst of change. Appiah uses identity in a way that invokes the ethical dimensions of our lives. Identity involves how aspects of a person’s social identity shape the way one perceives one’s projects and how one acts in the world; what careers one takes up, whom one marries, whom one helps or avoids, what books one reads, and what products one consumes. Introducing this ethical sense of identity marks a shift away from talking about groups of people and instead takes as its starting point the individual person. Alcoff’s discussion of the internal aspect of identity as involving subjectivity has resonance with Appiah’s ethical use of identity, yet it is distinct in that Alcoff draws on the notion of identity as it is used in feminist theory. In order to examine the consequences of the shift in thinking that Appiah’s work effected, let us look at how identity would be analyzed in a concrete example. Take Irma and Poncho Velásquez,

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a Latino/a couple who decide to move and settle in the heart of East Los Angeles.60 They adopt a child, Maria, whose biological parents are Irish. Maria grows up and resides in the area for her first twenty years and voluntarily and frequently associates with other children and youth there, becoming aware of and assimilating various features of Latino culture. She learns to speak Spanish at a very young age and speaks it regularly when she is around other Spanish speakers. Maria willingly participates in various cultural events in the neighborhood. Those who meet Maria for the first time identify her as Latina. Moreover, Maria is socially and politically involved in the Latino/a community, and many Latinos/as and non-Latinos/as identify her as Chicana, a subcategory of Latina. Is Maria a Latina? On the familial-historical view, Maria is Latina because she shares various links with other Latino/as. But on the public policy view, Maria is not Latina because she lacks the appropriate ancestral tie to a Latino parent. On the ethnoracial view, Maria is Latina because her interactions with others in this community have affected her interior life in such a way that she has absorbed a Latina consciousness socially and politically. If Maria relocated to a nearby African American neighborhood in Compton and over time became knowledgeable about African American history, literature, food, dance, style of clothes, and so on, would Maria be African American ethnically speaking? On the familial-historical view, she would be because her ties to other African Americans are objective; they are part of her personal history. Maria would not be African American on the public policy view because she does not have a biological tie to an African American parent. On the ethnoracial view, Maria would be African Ameri­can because others shape her inner life, which involves an African American consciousness. On the public policy view, it is impossible for Maria to change her ethnic identity, but on the familial-historical view and the ethnoracial view Maria can change her ethnic identity as she moves in space and time. All three views are similar in that history plays a role in understanding Latino/a identity, yet they differ in the way in which they deploy the notion. The familial-historical view is concerned with history independently of what is written about it, whereas the

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ethnoracial view is more focused on legitimatizing and delegitimatizing narratives. The public policy view is also concerned with history independently of what is written about it, but given its focus on affirmative action and reparations, the historical reality that is relevant involves U.S. slavery, brutal killings, stealing lands, and histories of U.S. discrimination. Another difference is that Corlett’s view of Latino identity involves degrees; a person may be one-third Irish, one-third Polish, and one-third Mexican. Gracia’s view is not so degree-laden; some individuals are Latino, some are not, and the borderline does not fall along a continuum as it is in Corlett’s landscape. Alcoff’s view is different from both Gracia’s and Corlett’s in that it is more process oriented and more focused on signaling perceptive ambivalences and fractures within our social selves. Methodologically, when Gracia puts forth his familial-historical view he is primarily interested in metaphysics and laying clear foundations so that we can make sense of the more pressing issues about affirmative action, language rights, Latinos in the marketplace, and the status of Latino philosophy. Gracia’s method is different from Corlett’s, which introduces moral issues in order to frame the questions that metaphysics needs to address. Alcoff’s approach is aligned with Corlett’s on this score. However, given Alcoff’s interest in reducing racism, for her, political considerations are relevant for understanding the condition of Latinos/as. Alcoff starts from the reality of oppression and U.S. hegemony, whereas Corlett and Gracia do not begin in the midst of this social-political landscape. What we have tried to sketch is the evolution of a problem that is central to the Latin American philosophical tradition, namely, the problem of identity, a problem that adapted to its new environment in the United States. Whether in Latin America or in the United States, this problem is ultimately part of the search for unity that Bolívar realized was so crucial to nation building. For the sake of political, philosophical, and poetic justice, it is indeed imperative that we give the problem of Latino/a identity its just attention. Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia have offered the “infinitely firm hand and great tactfulness” that Bolívar knew were necessary to deal with the “most extraordinary and complicated” problem of Latino/a identity.

296  Elizabeth Millán and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez Life and Works

Jorge J. E. Gracia Gracia was born in Cuba and immigrated to the United States in 1960. He currently holds the Samuel P. Capen Chair in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He has published widely in the United States, Latin America, and Europe on issues ranging from metaphysical matters concerning individuality to hermeneutics and the role of history in philosophy. He is an expert in medieval philosophy and Latin American philosophy. His book Individuality: An Essay on the Foundations of Metaphysics (1988) was awarded the Findley Prize in Metaphysics by the Metaphysical Society of America. Gracia’s philosophical activity in the area of Latin American philosophy has been crucial for opening the field of Latin American philosophy to scholars in the United States. His book Hispanic/ Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (2000) was the first fulllength philosophical treatment of Latino identity in English. Linda M. Alcoff Alcoff was born in Panama in 1955, to a Panamanian father of Spanish, Indian, and African descent and a white, Anglo-Irish mother from the United States. She describes her family as “postcolonial and postmodernist,” with “an open-ended set of indeterminate national, cultural, racial, and even linguistic allegiances.” Her eclectic biography has informed some of her recent work in race theory and the problem of Latina/o identity in the United States. She is currently a professor of philosophy at Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center. Her main areas of research and publication are continental philosophy, epistemology, feminist theory, and race theory. Her book Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006) was awarded the 2009 Frantz Fanon Prize. J. Angelo Corlett Corlett was born in Brazil and emigrated to the United States in 1975. He is a professor of philosophy and ethics at San Diego State

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University. He is the author of numerous articles and books on race, ethnicity, and ethics. Corlett’s work Race, Racism, and Reparations (2003) was the second book to focus on issues of Latino identity, after Gracia’s Hispanic/Latino Identity. In this work Corlett discusses the metaphysics of Latino, Native American, and African American identities within the parameters of public policy issues such as affirmative action and reparations.

Further Reading

Linda M. Alcoff Alcoff, Linda M. “Is Latina/o Identity a Racial Identity?” In Hispanic/ Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, Race, and Rights, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Pablo De Greiff, 23–44. New York: Routledge, 2000. _____. “Latino vs. Hispanic: The Politics of Ethnic Names.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, no. 4 (2005): 395–408; with response by Gracia. _____. “Mestizo Identity.” In American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity, ed. Naomi Zack, 275–78. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. _____. “On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?” In Naomi Zack, ed., Women of Color and Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. Naomi Zack, 255–61. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. _____. “Philosophy and Racial Embodiment.” In Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi, 267–83. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. _____. “Philosophy and Racial Identity.” In Ethnic and Racial Studies Today, ed. Martin Bulmer and John Solomos, 29–44. London: Routledge, 1999. _____. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Jorge J. E. Gracia Articles by Linda Alcoff, Robert Gooding-Williams, Eduardo Mendieta, Gregory Pappas, J. L. A. García, and Richard Bernstein, with response by Gracia. Philosophy and Social Criticism 27, 2 (2001): 1–75.

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Articles by Linda Alcoff and Lucius Outlaw, with response by Gracia. International Philosophical Quarterly 2 (2008): 231–55. Articles by Renzo Llorente, María Cristina González, Nora Stigol, and Howard McGary, with response by Gracia. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24, no. 2 (2010). Gracia, Jorge J. E. Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. _____. “Individuation of Racial and Ethnic Groups: The Problems of Circularity and Demarcation.” In Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. _____. Latinos in America: Philosophy and Social Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. _____. “A Political Argument in Favor of Ethnic Names: Alcoff’s Defense of ‘Latino.’” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, no. 4 (2005): 409–17. _____. Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

J. Angelo Corlett Corlett, J. Angelo. “Analyzing Racism.” Public Affairs Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1998): 23–50. _____. “Latino Identity.” Public Affairs Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1999): 273–95. _____. “Latino Identity and Affirmative Action.” In Hispanic/Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, Race, and Rights, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Pablo De Greiff, 201–22. New York: Routledge, 2000. _____. Race, Racism, and Reparations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. _____. Responsibility and Punishment. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2008. _____. Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003.

Notes

 1. Simón Bolívar, “Address Delivered at the Inauguration of the Second National Congress of Venezuela at Angostura” [February 15,

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1819], in Selected Writings, ed. Vicente Lecuona and Harold E. Bierck, trans. Lewis Bertrand (New York: Colonial Press, 1951), 69.   2. Simón Bolívar, “Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of This Island [Jamaica]” [Kingston, Jamaica, September 6, 1815], in Lecuona and Bierck, Selected Writings, 65–66. Henceforth cited as Letter.  3. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Is Latina/o Identity a Racial Identity?” in Hispanics/Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, Race, and Rights, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia and Pablo De Greiff (New York: Routledge, 2000), 23–44.  4. Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 343.  5. Ibid., 344.  6. Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 283.  7. Ibid., xxviii.   8.  “Llevo un dolor que el verso compasivo mira, / Un rebelde dolor que el verso rompe / Y es ¡oh mar! la gaviota pasajera / Que rumbo a Cuba va sobre tus oldas! “Domingo Triste,” in Versos Libres (1913), cited by José David Saldívar in his prologue to Ramos’s Divergent Modernities, xxviii.   9.  Walter D. Mignolo, “Philosophy and the Colonial Difference,” in Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 82. 10. Cited in Mignolo, “Philosophy and the Colonial Difference,” 82. 11.  Mignolo, “Philosophy and the Colonial Difference,” 85. 12. Jorge J. E. Gracia, “Ethnic Labels and Philosophy: The Case of Latin American Philosophy,” in Mendieta, Latin American Philosophy, 63. 13. Ibid. 14. Linda Martín Alcoff, “Latino v. Hispanic: The Politics of Ethnic Names,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, no. 4 (2005): 97. 15. Jorge J. E. Gracia, “A Political Argument in Favor of Ethnic Names: Alcoff’s Defense of ‘Latino,’” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, no. 4 (2005): 414. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.

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18. Ibid. 19. Alcoff, “Is Latina/o Identity a Racial Identity?” 317. 20.  Jorge J. E. Gracia, Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), ix. 21. Ibid., xv–xvi. 22. Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6. 23. Ibid. 24. Jorge J. E. Gracia, Latinos in America: Philosophy and Social Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 18. 25. Ibid. 26. Gracia, Surviving Race, 66. 27. Ibid., 67–68; my emphasis. 28. Gracia, Latinos in America, 18. 29. Ibid., 17. 30. Gracia, Surviving Race, 56. 31. Ibid., 64. 32. Ibid. 33.  J. Angelo Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 24. 34. In Race, Racism, and Reparations, Corlett uses the term Latino but does not defend its use. He conveniently adopts it to label the same group that Gracia refers to with the definition of Hispanics that he put forth in Hispanic/Latino Identity. 35. Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparations, 51; original emphasis. 36.  For a critique of the view Corlett espouses in Race, Racism, and Reparations, see Linda Martín Alcoff, “Latino Oppression,” Journal of Social Philosophy 36, no. 4 (2005): 536–45; Charles W. Mills, “Reconceptualizing Race and Racism? A Critique of J. Angelo Corlett,” Journal of Social Philosophy 36, no. 4 (2005): 546–58; Paul C. Taylor, “Three Questions about Race, Racism and Reparations,” Journal of Social Philosophy 36, no. 4 (2005): 559–67. For rejoinders, see Angelo Corlett, “Race, Racism, and Reparations,” Journal of Social Philosophy 36, no. 4 (2005): 568–85. 37. Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparations, 21. 38. Ibid., 133.

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39. Corlett, “Race, Racism, and Reparations,” 574. 40. Corlett, “Latino Identity,” 286. 41. Alcoff uses the label “Latino” mostly in a narrow sense—to refer to one’s situatedness in the United States—and occasionally although very rarely uses it in a wide sense—to refer to those in Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean. She uses this term in both of these fashions because “there can be no decontextualized, final, or essential account of what the [Latino] identity is, given the social basis and the dynamic, historical nature of racialized and ethnic identities.” Alcoff, Visible Identities, 228. 42. It is difficult to track the etymology of the expression,“Latino identity.” The earliest written use I found is in Edward Murguia’s “On Latino/Hispanic Ethnic Identity,” Latino Studies Journal 2, no. 3 (1991): 8–18. The earliest use of the phrase “Hispanic identity” that I found is in Nelson C. and Marta Tienda’s “The Structuring of Hispanic Identity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 8, no. 1 (1985): 49–74. 43. Alcoff, Visible Identities, 92–93; original emphasis. 44. Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” 335. 45. Alcoff draws on the notion of interpellation, a concept first coined by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to describe the process by which ideology addresses the individual subject, thus effectively producing him as an effect. This view goes against the classical definition of the subject as cause and substance: in other words, the situation always precedes the (individual or collective) subject. Interpellation specifically involves the moment and process of recognition of interaction with the ideology at hand. See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 46. Alcoff, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” 241; my emphasis. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 242; my emphasis. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 238. 53. Ibid., 241; my emphasis. 54. Ibid., 230. 55. Ibid., 246.

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56. See Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, ed. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 30–105. 57. Appiah’s publications include, as author, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 21–37; “But Would That Still Be Me? Notes on Gender, ‘Race,’ Ethnicity, as Sources of Identity,” Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 493–99; In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); as an Avenali lecture at Berkeley, with commentary by David Hollinger, Angela Harris, and Jorge Klor de Alva, Identity against Culture; as author, The Ethics of Identity (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). 58.  For some of the contemporary literature on the philosophy of race, see Lewis Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995); Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996); J. L. A. García, “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27, no. 2 (1997): 5–42; Charles Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Sally Haslanger, “Gender and Race: What Are They? What Do We Want Them to Be?” Nous 34, no. 1 (2000): 31–55; Ronald Sundstrom, “Race as a Human Kind,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28 (2002): 91–115; Paul C. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004); Ron Mallon, “Passing, Travel and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race,” Noüs 38, 4 (2004): 644–73; and Robert Gooding-Williams, Look a Negro! (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2006). 59. Identification, an epistemic notion, involves an inquiry into the conditions that enable a knower to identify a person. This too can be approached in an achronic, synchronic, diachronic, and pan-chronic way. 60. This example is originally from Corlett, “Latino Identity,” 283. The example is slightly modified to bring out certain relevant features. We thank Gracia for his suggestions on this case.

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Index

Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, An (Las Casas). See Brevíssima relación de la destructión de las Indias (Las Casas) Aching, Gerald, 194–95 Address of Angostura (Bolívar) comparing Spanish America and Roman Empire, 63–64 on identity crisis, 272–73 on institutions, 58 on nationalism, 60 on nation building, 274 on political unity, 72 Adler, Alfred, 254 aesthetic as guiding principle of future society, 206 Nietzschean idea of importance of, 220 race and, 213 as underlying metaphysics of life, 204–5

Vasconcelos on, 211, 213–16 —definition, 218 aesthetic monism as meta-theory of Vasconcelos, 217, 222 affirmative action, Latinos and, 285 Afrocubanismo, 114–15 Aguilar, José, 19 Alberdi, Juan Bautista on Europeanization of Argentina, 142, 151n23 on Indians, 53n19, 150n17 Alcoff, Linda Martín, 16, 26, 271, 272 ethnoracial view of Latino identity, 288–92, 294, 295 Latino/a identity and U.S. concept of race, 275 life and works, 296 on term Hispanic —rejection, 26 —use by Gracia, 278–79 use of term Latino, 301n41 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 163

328

Index 329 Althusser, Louis, 301n45 Alvarado, Pedro de, 35 Amauta. See Mariátegui, José Carlos Amauta (journal), 229, 244 ancestry, Latino identity and, 287–88 Ancient History (Sierra). See Historia de la antigüedad (Sierra) Angostura Congress (1819). See Address of Angostura (Bolívar) Another Face of Empire (Castro), 34 Apología (Las Casas), 42, 43 Appiah, Anthony, 292–93 Aquinas, Thomas, 205 Araucanía y sus habitantes (Domeyko), 92 Argentina Europeanization, 142, 151n23 lack of sense of identity in, 141–42 Martí consul of in New York, 120 Sarmiento on, 22 —natural environment of, 148n10 —territory of, 135 Ariel (Rodó), 181–82, 198 critical reviews of, 182 on ethical ideals in a person’s life, 183–84, 194 Fuentes on, 196 translation by Peden, 188–89 views compatible with Taine, 191–92 arielistas, 182

Aristotle Las Casas and, 133 Politics, 128–29, 147n3 reading by Ginés de Sepúlveda, 130 slavery doctrine, 39, 128, 129– 30 on virtue, 146n3 Aróstegui, Antonio María, 93 assimilation national and cultural, 18 use of term by Zea, 252 Ateneistas, 171 Augustine, 205 barbarian/barbarism Alberdi on, 150n17 Argentina and, 142 concept of, 128–30 counteracted by Europeanization, 151n23 criteria used to define, 39 enemy versus, 149n15 Las Casas on, 21–22, 127 —contrasted to Christian, 128, 131, 139 Sarmiento on, 21, 127, 134–39 —barbarism of the Arabs, 137 —contrasted to civilized, 128, 139 use by Mariátegui, 25 Barreda, Gabino, 11 head of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, 158 on history, 160 influence on Sierra, 159 positivism and, 11, 157, 175n12 reform of education, 162–63

330  Index Bartolomé de Las Casas in History (Keen and Friede), 40 Baumgarten, Alexander, 213 beauty, apprehension of Rodó on, 185 by Vasconcelos, 216 Bello, Andrés, 11, 85–98 ethnic view of race, 19 on Indians as foreigners, 20 life and works, 95 on positive role of Spanish conquest, 19–20 response to Lastarria, 35 Sarmiento and, 145 Benedetti, Mario, 199n3 Bergson, Henri, 12 Bernasconi, Robert, 277 Bilbao, Francisco, 149n11 black legend of Las Casas, 44–45 black legend of Spain, 34, 39–40 blacks barbarism and, 25 epistemic situation in the United States, 4–5 Mariátegui on, 235–36, 246n12 Mora on, 78n16 racial meaning of African American, 7 Rodó on, 189 Sarmiento on, 140 See also slaves, African Bolívar, Simón, 11, 57–84 forging of nations as main concern, 19 on identity crisis in Latin America, 272–73 on Indians, 53n19 —capacity for education, 140

life and works, 73–74 separate theories of politics and society, 65 travel to London with Bello, 95 See also Address of Angostura (Bolívar) Boone, Daniel, 148n11 Borges, Jorge Luis, 251 Boutroux, Émile, 12 Brazil inclusion in the Latin world, 208, 209 Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Las Casas), 35–37, 38, 50 Brotherston, Gordon, 202n40 Bulnes, Manuel, 88, 95 Burke, Janet, 17, 21 Bustamante, Carlos María de, 60 Camino de Paros, El (Rodó), 198 Caras y Caretas (newspaper), 198 Carbia, Rómulo, 40 Cartas de Nueva York (Martí), 120 Caso, Alfonso, 171 Caso, Antonio, 12, 13, 171 Castro, Daniel, 34, 40, 44–46 Catañeda, Héctor-Neri, 16 Catholic Church and education, 162 —opposition to Barreda’s reform, 163 —opposition to National University, 170 Vasconcelos and, 217 See also Vatican Council II Cerutti-Guldberg, Horacio, 16

Index 331 Césaire, Aimé, 255 Chiapas uprising (1994), 261 Chile history as story of colonial oppression and religious bigotry, 87 postindependence, 88 Sarmiento in, 145 Chinese, 235, 236 Chock, Phyllis Pease, 290 Christianity barbarism opposed to, 128, 131, 139 Vasconcelos and, 216–17 Civil Code of the Republic of Chile (Bello), 95 civilization barbarism opposed to, 105, 128, 139 included in Christianity for Las Casas, 146n1 Sarmiento on, 136, 137 Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 11 Colegio de San Ildefonso (Mexico), 158 Collier, Simon, 64–65 colonialism, racial premise of, 103, 115–19 Comte, Auguste, 11 on history as science, 154–55 influence on Sierra, 159 lectures attended by Barreda, 175n12 on progress of individuals, 155 See also positivism conquest emphasis on racial difference, 255

Las Casas on brutality of, 35 transcended by mestizaje and mexicanidad, 254 consciousness, Latin American, 181 Considerations on Representative Government (Mill), 72 contemplation, aesthetic, 63 “Con todos y para el bien de todos” (With All and for the Good of All) (speech, Martí), 107–8, 120 Corlett, J. Angelo, 16, 26, 271, 272 life and works, 296–97 public policy view of Latino identity, 285–88, 294, 295 use of term Latino, 300n34 Cortés, Hernando, 35, 209 Cosmes, Francisco G., 166 Cosmic Race, The (Vasconcelos). See raza cósmica, La (Vasconcelos) creativity and aesthetic essence of man, 215 criollos, 18, 105, 165, 173n2 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 33 Croniqueur, Juan. See Mariátegui, José Carlos Cuadernos Americanos (journal), 264 Cuauhtémoc, 208, 209 Cuba Martí’s vision for, 21, 101 United States and, 106 —emigrants to, 289–90, 291 wars of independence, 122n9

332  Index Cuban Revolutionary Party. See Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC) cultures assimilation of, 265n5 as compensation for imbalance in numbers, 73 differences undergirded by natural differences, 186–87 Mariátegui on inequalities between, 234 Rodó on race and, 188–92 Davis, Harold Eugene, 259–60 deference, social harmony and cooperation based on, 58, 67 Deústua, Alejandro Octavio, 12, 13 Díaz, Porfirio government of and evolutionary positivism, 157–58 Sierra’s justification for political life of, 161 Díaz de Gamarra y Dávalos, Benito, 11 dignity Kant on worth versus, 51n2 Las Casas and, 32 Martí’s emphasis on, 20, 101, 108, 117 Divergent Modernities (Ramos), 276 diversity, ethnic. See ethnicity diversity, linguistic. See languages Dogma socialista (Echevarría), 15 Domeyko, Ignacio, 92–93 Don Justo Sierra, su vida, sus ideas y su obra (Yañez), 172

Dussel, Enrique, 16 duties, universal versus national obligations, 4 Echeverría, Esteban, 15, 141, 142, 149n11, 151n22 economics Peru, 239 race and, 118, 238 Vasconcelos and, 211 Edad de oro, La (journal), 120 education Bello and, 88 Las Casas on indigenous capacity for education, 139–40 Martí on, 104, 105–6 Rodó on shaping race through, 192 Sarmiento on, 22, 143–44 —indigenous capacity for, 139, 140 education in Mexico Barreda’s reform of, 163 —Sierra on, 163–64 as first step to Mexican integration, 153 reforms —Juárez, Benito, 158, 162 —by Vasconcelos, 221 Sierra on, 22, 159 —plan for popular education, 162–68 as solution to Indian problem, 166 Eguía y Lis, Joaquín, 170 elitism of Rodó, 196 “El que vendrá” (Rodó), 197

Index 333 equality Bolívar on civil and political, 66, 150n16, 274 independence as foundation for racial equality, 122n15 Las Casas and, 42 miscegenation and, 210 in Vasconcelos’s philosophical system, 225n29 Erasmus, Desiderius, 252 Escena contemporánea, La (The Contemporary Scene) (Mariátegui), 243–44 Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (Mexico), 158 Estética (Vasconcelos), 213 ethics, Rodó and, 182–83 “ethnic federations,” 210 ethnicity beginnings of concept of, 52n5 contextuality of epistemic criteria, 5 diversity —Bolívar on challenge posed by, 64 —in Mexico, 153 in economic model of the problem of the Indian, 233 Gracia on challenge of, 280 groups and, 290 harmful use of categories, 3–4 Mariátegui’s use of term, 25, 234 membership, 284 nation and, 240 nineteenth-century political classification, 173n2

problems posed by, 1–8 —epistemic issues, 5 —metaphysical issues, 6 —moral issues, 3–4 —relations between race, ethnicity, and nationality, 7–8 —social and political issues, 2–3 versus race, 114 as signifying race, 7–8, 251, 289 view in the United States, 286 “Ethnic Labels and Philosophy” (Gracia), 277–78 ethnic race, 219 ethnorace, concept of, 114–15 etnia (ethnic group). See ethnicity Eurocentrism exposed by Martí as artificial, 105 of positivism, 156 Rodó on ideals for Latin Americans, 193 Zea on, 253 Europeanization Generation of 37 and, 142, 151n23 Sarmiento and, 22 evangelization Council of the Indies and, 38 Ginés de Sepúlveda on, 142–43 Las Casas’s doctrine of, 32, 38, 43–44, 45, 48, 143 evolution, social, 160–61 evolutionism. See positivism: Spencerian (evolutionary) existentialism, influence of, 15

334  Index Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (Sarmiento), 134, 145, 214 Family Bonds (Feder), 258 Fanon, Frantz, 255 Farías, Valentín Gómez, 168 Feder, Ellen K., 258 feminism, 100 Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo, 38, 130 Filosofía de la historia americana (Zea), 253–54 First Latin American Communist Conference (Buenos Aires, 1929), 244 forging, connotations of term, 263 Fourier, Charles, 15 freedom, Martí’s ideas invoked in support of, 100 Friede, Juan, 40 Frondizi, Risieri, 13 Frugoni, Emilio, 15 Fuentes, Carlos, 196, 202n40, 275 future, Vasconcelos’s concern for, 206 Gamio, Manuel, 171 gamonalismo, 231, 245n4 Ganivet, Angel, 251 Gaos, José, 250 García Máynez, Eduardo, 13 gender, 257–58 education and, 162 Zea on, 249 “Generation of 37,” 142 “generation of forgers,” 12 “generation of founders,” 11, 15 “generation of patriarchs,” 12

Gibson, Charles, 35 Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan Gutiérrez on, 42 on Indians —as barbarians, 17, 51n3 —evangelization of, 142–43 —nature of, 32, 130–31 in Valladolid debate, 50, 130 Gómez, Juan Gaulberto, 113 Gómez, Juan Vicente, 208 Gómez, Máximo, 120 government Bolívar’s aristocratic theory of self-government, 73 of Díaz and evolutionary positivism, 157–58 Martí on education and, 105–6 Gracia, Jorge J. E. American philosophy and, 16, 26, 271 familial-historical view of Latino identity, 272, 282–85, 294, 295 on individuation of racial and ethnic groups, 253 life and works, 296 on reduction of Latin American philosophy to issues of colonial experience, 277–78 use of term Hispanic, 26, 278, 279 use of term Latino/a, 26, 279 Grammar of the Spanish Language (Bello), 95 Gran Colombia, 74 Guatemala, 102, 120 Guicciardini, Francesco, 34–35 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 40

Index 335 on Las Casas, 41–44 on white and black legends, 47 Haeckel, Ernst, 11 Hale, Charles, 60, 61, 76n9 Hanke, Lewis, 33, 40, 47 harmony aesthetic category of and race, 207–8 Bolívar on racial, 69 as metaphysical and social principle, 208 notion shared by Vasconcelos and Nietzsche, 205, 219 Hartmann, Nicolai, 12 Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, 290 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 214 Heidegger, Martin, 15 Helg, Aline, 66 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 85, 86, 87 heterogeneity and familialhistorical view of Latino identity, 285 Hidalgo, Miguel, 11 Hiperión Group, 171, 254 Hispanic defined, 8 use of term by Gracia, 26, 278, 279 Hispanic American, defined, 8 Hispanic American Historical Review, 40 Hispanic American Literary Society of New York, 120 Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Gracia), 296

Historia de la antigüedad (Sierra), 159 influence of positivism on, 154 Historia de la leyenda negra hispano-americana (Carbia), 40 Historia general y natural de las Indias (Fernández de Oviedo), 38 history Barreda on, 160 Bello on writing of, 85–86 of Chile as story of colonial oppression and religious bigotry, 87 indigenous identity and, 252–54 philosophical, 86, 87 role in Latino/a identity, 294–95 Sierra on science of, 154, 160 traditional function in Mexico, 159–60 Vasconcelos’s three stages of, 210–11, 214 Zea on, 250, 252 homogeneity, cultural Bolívar on, 58 and theories of nationalism, 72 homogenization ethnic categories and, 3–4, 6 racial categories and, 3–4, 6 through education, 164–65 human destiny, common, 184 human development, Sarmiento on stages of, 138 humanism influence on Hispanic American philosophy, 10 Zea and, 249, 252

336  Index Hume, David, 148n10 Humphrey, Ted, 17, 21 Iberian, defined, 8 Iberoamerican, defined, 8 “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (Kant), 49 idealism, 183, 186 ideals racial receptivity to moral, 193 Rodó on social, 185–86 Idea of Latin America, The (Mignolo), 261 Ideario de acción (Vasconcelos), 206 ideas absorption of European, 12 value of, 185 identification, 302n59 identity Appiah’s use of, 293 crisis diagnosed by Bolívar, 272–73 cultural, 109 ethnoracial, 291–92 independentist, 104 of Latin Americans in the United States, 26 of Martí as an American, 104 mestizo and unity, 275 national, 139–42 senses of, 293 Vasconcelos on power of Jewish, 224n13 Zea on, 249, 263 See also identity, Latin American; identity, Latino/a; identity,

Mexican; mexicanidad (Mexican identity) identity, Latin American, 23, 181 in Letter from Jamaica, 273–74 Rodó on, 23 Spanish legacy, 265n4 Vasconcelos on, 24, 214 Zea and, 250 identity, Latino/a analyses example, 293–94 ancestry and, 287–88 degrees and, 295 ethnoracial view of Alcoff, 272, 288–92, 294 etymology of expression, 301n42 familial-historical view of Gracia, 272, 282–85, 294 metaphysical versus public policy analyses of, 285–86 public policy view of Corlett, 272, 285–88, 294 public versus lived subjectivity, 288–89 as racialized category in the United States, 289, 291 as search for unity, 271–302 shared history, 283–84 identity, Mexican, 161 dependent on growth of mestizo population, 165 redefined through education, 162 See also mexicanidad (Mexican identity) identity politics, 121n4 Ideología y política (Ideology and Politics) (Mariátegui), 230

Index 337 Igualdad, La (newspaper), 113 imbalance, economic and political, between North and South America, 107 immigration, European in Argentina, 142, 151n23 as solution to Indian problem in Mexico, 166 In Defense of the Indians (Las Casas), 37, 38, 50 refutation of Sepúlveda, 38, 39, 131 independence foundation for racial equality, 123n15 individual, 68 independentism, 11, 18–19 Indians Alberdi on, 150n17 ascription of collectivist spirit, 245n6, 246n7 Bello on assimilation of, 91–92, 93 Bolívar on, 65, 68 capacity for education, 139–40 distinct cultural identity, 190 disappearing according to Bello, 91–92 early controversy about, 16–17 evolution of opinion on, 139 exclusion —by Bello, 94 —from Rodó’s program of moral regeneration, 194 Fernández de Oviedo on, 38 as foreigners, 20 humanity of, 31, 32, 37 lack of social integration, 260

Las Casas and, 32, 37, 127, 131–33 major events in history of, 253–54 Mariátegui on, 24, 235, 242 in Mexico, 165 —and difficulty of modernization program, 165–66 —Sierra on education of, 166–68 Mora on, 77n14 mythical constructs on, 62 new nations and, 46, 53n19 in nineteenth-century classification, 143, 173n2 Rodó on, 190–91 Sarmiento on, 127 —barrier to civilizing the continent, 138–39 —social development and education, 135–36, 138 status in the Spanish empire, 17 Zea on —autonomous indigenous movements, 262 —denial of need for group identity, 256–57 —subsumed under mestizos, 262 See also evangelization; “problem of the Indian” “Indigenism and Socialism” (Mariátegui), 230 indigenismo Davis on, 259 Zea on, 254–55, 262 indios, 18. See also Indians Individuality: An Essay on the Foundations of Metaphysics (Gracia), 296

338  Index “Individuation of Racial and Ethnic Groups” (Gracia), 253 Indología (Vasconcelos), 205, 226n43, 226n52 inequality, Bolívar on natural ethnic and racial, 65 physical and moral, 150n16, 274 social, 66 Ingenieros, José, 11, 170 inherited ethnic deference. See deference, social harmony and cooperation based on integration, use of term by Zea, 252 interdisciplinarity, Alcoff and, 282 internationalism, 3 interpellation, notion of, 301n45 intuitionism, influence of French, 12 “Investigations Regarding the Social Influence of the Conquest and the Spanish Colonial System in Chile” (Lastarria), 35 Ismaelillo (Martí), 120 Jaén, Didier, 212 Jaksica, Iván, 19 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 10, 217 “Juan María Gutiérrez y su época” (Rodó), 190 Juárez (Sierra), 160 Juárez, Benito, 158, 162 Juderías, Julián, 40 justice, social, 23 Latina/o identity and, 281 Kant, Immanuel on the dynamically sublime, 134

“Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” 49 Las Casas and, 32–33, 46 Vasconcelos on, 204 on worth versus dignity, 51n2 Kaufmann, Walter, 227n65 Keen, Benjamin, 40 Korn, Alejandro, 12 Labor (journal), 244 languages attitudes, behaviors and, 111 diversity in Mexico, 153, 173n3 indigenous concepts and, 259–60 See also Mapudungu Lanz, Laureano Vallenilla, 206, 208 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 10, 31–54, 127 compared to Martí, 21 on concept of barbarian, 21–22, 127, 128, 131, 139 controversy raised by, 16–18 on Indians, 32, 37, 127, 131–33 —capacity for education, 139–40 —evangelization, 143 —as free rational beings, 48 life and works, 50 as link between early church and Vatican Council II, 41 in Valladolid debate, 50, 130, 131 Lastarria, José Victorino Bello and, 19–20, 85, 86–87 and black legend of Spain, 35, 149n11 on emergence of mestizos, 87–88 positivism and, 11

Index 339 Latin America problem of, 186–87 racial and ethnic diversity, 8 relation to United States, 279–80 as subject of debate, 206 Latin American, defined, 8 Latin Americans on blacks in nineteenth century, 189–90 dialogue among intellectuals, 206 imitation of North American culture, 186–87 —Vasconcelos on ending, 211 moral values contrasted to Anglo-Saxons, 23 Rodó on, 186 Latin American Thought (Davis), 259–60 Latino/a defined, 8 Gracia on use of term, 279 use of term —by Alcoff, 301n41 —by Corlett, 300n34 Latinos in America (Gracia), 282–83 la Vera Cruz, Alonso de, 10 legends black legend of Las Casas, 44–45 black legend of Spain, 39–40 white legend of Spain, 35 Leguía, Augusto B., 243 Leibner, Gerardo, 245n6, 246n7 Letter from Jamaica (Bolívar), 62, 273–74 Ley Orgánica (Mexico, 1867), 162

Liberalismo y Jacobinismo (Rodó), 198 liberation theology movement, 41, 53n17 Libertador, El. See Bolívar, Simón Liga, La, 120 Limantour, José, 163, 167 Llorente, Renzo, 23, 24 Locke, Alain, 219 Macedo, Miguel S., 163 Madero, Francisco, 172, 221 “Madre América” (speech, Martí), 120 Manifiesto de Monte Cristi, El (Martí and Gómez), 120 Manrique, Nelson on Mariátegui’s use of term race, 234, 235 on number of Indians in Peru, 245n3 on the two problems related to the Indian, 240, 242–43 Manuel González Prada People’s University, 243–44 Mapuche Indians, 92 Mapudungu, 93–94 marginality, Zea on, 249, 257–58 marginalized, the Las Casas and Gutiérrez on, 42 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 228–48 cited by Zea, 256 in debate on “Latin America,” 206 inconsistency on race, 240–43 on Indians in Peru, 24–25 life and works, 243–44 and Marxism, 15

340  Index Martí, José, 99–123 criticisms of, 112–15 on dignity of human beings, 20 on Indians, 53n19 life and works, 120 “Sad Sunday,” 276 Vasconcelos compared to, 214 Martí, Oscar, 22 Marxism influence on Hispanic American philosophy, 15 Mariátegui and, 24, 229, 232 Medellín Conference, 53n17 Medin, Tzvi, 251–52 Melis, Antonio, 246n7 Mendez, Santiago, 171 Mendieta, Eduardo, 16 Mercado, Manuel, 106 Mercado, Tomás de, 10 mestizaje (racial mixing) Bello on Lastarria’s view about, 19, 89, 90 Bolívar on, 274 as key to nationality, 25 Mariátegui’s misgivings on, 236, 246n13 theory of, 61 Zea and, 249, 250, 251–52, 255–57 mestizos, 18, 173n2 Lastarria on emergence of, 87–88 in Mexican society, 165 role in society, 23 unity and, 275 mexicanidad (Mexican identity), 250, 254, 257 negritude on par with, 255

Mexican Revolution (1910) context of Vasconcelos’s life and works, 206 and unity, 25–26, 254, 255 Vasconcelos and, 221 Mexico, 152–78 Bolívar on independence of, 62–63 difficulties of nation building, 153 framers of the first constitutions, 60 linguistic diversity, 153, 173n3 Martí in, 102, 120 national university, 168–71, 264 patriotismo criollo, 60–61 Sierra on social evolution in, 160–61 society in 1870s, 165 traditional function of history in, 159–60 Mier, Servando Teresa de, 60 Mignolo, Walter D., 261, 276–77 migrations effect on intellectual traditions, 276 See also immigration, European; United States: immigration to Mill, John Stuart, 58, 72 Millán, Elizabeth, 26 Miró Quesada, Francisco, 12, 13 miscegenation natural ethnic and racial inequality and, 65 Nietzsche and, 219, 226n51, 227n65 Spanish, 251 Vasconcelos and, 210, 211–12, 219

Index 341 See also mestizaje (racial mixing) Mito del socialismo indígena en Mariátegui, El (Leibner), 245n6 Molina, Enrique José, 12 Monegal, Emir Rodríguez, 188 Monismo estético (Aesthetic Monism) (Vasconcelos), 205, 213 “Montalvo” (Rodó), 190, 200n21 Montesinos, Antonio de, 37, 50, 52n10 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de, 58 Montt, Manuel, 88, 95 Mora, José María Luis on blacks, 78n16 compared to Bolívar, 65 lack of interest in culture prior to Cortés, 76n9 opposed to theories of racial superiority, 76n11, 77n14 on white population in Mexico, 60–61 Morelos, José María, 11 Motivos de Proteo (Rodó), 198 mulatos/as, 18 Mundial (magazine), 247n19 music, 205 “ ‘My Race’ ” (Martí), 99–103, 116 Gómez’s “Reflexiones políticas” complementary to, 113–14 historical context, 108, 109 importance of quotation marks in title, 109 no link between racism and economic exploitation, 118

mysticism, auditive of Vasconcelos, 205 myths Mariátegui’s promotion of a Sorelian, 241–42 patriotismo criollo and, 60–61 National Autonomous University of Mexico, 264 National Indigenous Movement of Mexico, 260 nationalism civic versus republican patriotism, 59 Mariátegui on, 239–40 Vasconcelos’s opposition to, 207 nationality Bolívar and, 19, 65 criteria for, 5, 59, 65 versus ethnicity, 249, 263 versus gender, 258 Gracia on challenge of, 280 mestizaje as key to, 25 Mill’s definition of, 72–73 national spirit, 72 problems posed by, 1–8 —epistemic issues, 4–5 —metaphysical issues, 5–7 —moral issues, 3–4 —relations between race, ethnicity, and nationality, 7–8 —social and political issues, 2–3 versus race, 249, 258, 263 sense of, in Chile, 88 nation building, 21 Bolívar on, 274 difficulties in Mexico, 153 Sarmiento on, 144

342  Index nations dominant elites and, 4 Mariátegui’s view of, 25 Martí’s inclusive conception of Cuba, 21 new —Bolívar as founding father, 273 —and Indians, 46, 53n19 —Sarmiento and, 22 racial considerations and, 2, 188 Renan on, 195 Vasconcelos and abolition of national boundaries, 24 weaknesses of Latin American, 186 natural law, doctrine of, 37 negritude, 255 negros, 18. See also blacks; slaves, African New York, Martí in, 102–3, 120 Nicol, Eduardo, 255 Nietzsche, Friedrich influenced by Hegel, 214 influence on Vasconcelos, 204, 205 miscegenation and, 219, 226n51, 227n65 opposition to systematic philosophy, 212 on root of aesthetic sentiment, 215 Vasconcelos compared to, 211, 216, 222n3 nonviolence, 42–43 North America effect of culture on Latin America, 186–87, 211 See also United States

North Americans, Rodó on, 186 “novela nueva, La” (Rodó), 197–98 Nuccetelli, Susana, 16 “Nuestra América” (“Our America”) (Martí), 103–7, 118 historical context, 108–9 Zea and, 256 “Nueva ley de los tres estados” (New Law of the Three States) (Vasconcelos), 210–11 Obras completas (Sierra), 172 Ocaña Convention, 66 Oliver, Amy, 23, 25 Only Way, The (Las Casas), 37, 38, 43, 50 “Oración cívica” (Barreda), 160 O’Reilly, Justo Sierra, 171 Ortega y Gasset, José, 12, 250–51 “Our America” (Martí). See “Nuestra América” (“Our America”) (Martí) Padilla, José, 66 Páez, José Antonio, 66 Pagden, Anthony on Bolívar, 61 on concepts of race and ethnicity, 52n5 on Las Casas, 33 on Montesquieu, 58 Pan-Americanism, philosophical, 13–14 Panegyric (Sierra), 159 “Panegyric to Barreda” (Sierra), 163

Index 343 Paraguay, Martí consul of, 120 pardocracia, 81n31 Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC), 101 founding by Martí, 107, 120 “ ‘My Race’ ” consistent with Martí’s leadership of, 114 Patria (journal), 99, 108, 113, 120 patriotismo criollo, 60–61 Peden, Margaret Sayers, 188 peninsulares, 18 Pensadores latinoamericanos del siglo XX (Piñeiro Iñíguez), 260 Peru land tenure system and problem of the Indian, 231 liberation by Bolívar, 74 Mariátegui’s justifications for nationalism in, 229, 239 political relevancy of ethnic groups, 237 See also “problem of the Indian” Peruanicemos al Perú (Let Us Peruvianize Peru) (Mariátegui) on “problem of the Indian,” 230 Peru-Bolivian Confederation, 88 Peruvian Socialist Party, 244 pessimism of Sarmiento, 136–37 phenomenology, influence of, 15 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 214 phenotypes, 7 philosophy African, 277 analysis, 15 decolonization of, 277 Gracia on task of, 281, 282

of liberation, 15–16 Martí’s political views integrated into his, 99, 101 Nietzsche’s opposition to systematic, 212 Sierra’s disdain for speculation in, 159 system of Vasconcelos, 205 Zea and, 250 philosophy, Latin American, 9–10 history of, 10–16 —colonial period, 10 —eighteenth century (independentist), 10–11, 18–21 —nineteenth century, 11, 21–23 —twentieth century, 11–12, 23 influences on, 15 —of Enlightenment, 10–11, 18–19 —of positivism, 11 institutionalization of, 14–15 originality of, 9–10, 13 race and, 204 philosophy, Latino/a, 16 “Philosophy and Colonial Difference” (Mignolo), 276–77 Piar, Manuel, 66 Piñeiro Iñíguez, Carlos, 260, 262–63 Pitágoras (Vasconcelos), 225n41 Pizarro, Francisco, 35 Political Evolution (Sierra), 160 politics Bolívar’s theory of, 65 Rodó and, 182 Sierra on, 161 Politics (Aristotle), 128–29, 147n3

344  Index positivism Comtian, 157–58 defined, 154 Eurocentrism of, 156 influence —on Hispanic American philosophy, 11 —in Mexico, 153, 157, 171 —on Rodó, 183 problems of, 183 Sierra and, 153, 158–59 Spencerian (evolutionary), 155, 156, 158–59 types of, 154–55 Vasconcelos and, 221 Zea on, 264 PRC. See Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC) Prescott, William H., 90 Presidio político en Cuba, El (Martí), 120 Prieto, Joaquín, 95 Principles of International Law (Bello), 95 “Problema del Brasil, El” (The Brazil Problem) (Vasconcelos), 203–4 “problem of the Indian,” 24, 228, 230–34 economic model, 231–32 —insufficient solution, 233, 238 —sufficient solution, 241 inconsistencies in Mariátegui’s writings, 240–43 promotion of a Sorelian myth, 241–42 racial model, 247n18 Temas de nuestra América on, 230 as two problems, 242–43

“Problem of the Races in Latin America, The” (Mariátegui), 232 problems posed by race ethnicity and nationality. See ethnicity; nationality; race progress positivists on social, 155–56 Vasconcelos’s belief in, 210 Quijano, Aníbal, 116, 234 race aesthetic and, 213 barbarism and, 134–39, 149n15 Bello and, 90, 91 biological notion of —Appiah’s opposition to, 293 —Corlett’s break from, 286 Bolívar and, 66–73, 274–75 colonialist idea of, 103 —Martí’s critique of, 115–19 culture and —Bello on, 90 —Rodó on, 189 —Vasconcelos and, 208 in economic model of the problem of the Indian, 233 economics and, 238 education and, 162, 192 epistemic racial criteria, 4–5 equilibrium between numbers and qualities in Spanish America, 67, 68, 70, 73 versus ethnicity, 7–8, 290–91 factors of moral status of a, 193 gender examined in the context of, 257–58

Index 345 Gracia on challenge of, 280 harmful use of categories, 3–4 harmonization of and unification of Latin America and, 210 hierarchy and, 116, 200n21 —new hierarchy of Rodó, 188 Manrique on use of term, 246n9 Mariátegui on, 234–36 —ambivalence, 228, 229 —inconsistent use of term, 25, 235, 236–39 Martí on, 20–21, 104 —in “ ‘My Race’,” 100–2 —in “Nuestra América,” 103–4 —observation of different racial relations, 103 —use of term, 215 as modern concept, 212–13 Mora on, 60–61 versus nationality, 195 Nietzsche and, 219 Pagden on beginnings of concept of, 52n5 philosophy and, 204 problems posed by, 1–8 —epistemic issues, 4–5 —metaphysical issues, 6 —moral issues, 3–4 —relations between race, ethnicity, and nationality, 7–8 —social and political issues, 2–3 racial division and national liberation, 238 Rodó on, 182, 188, 189 —inconsistency in, 192 —political sense, 194–95 —racist paradigm, 197 Sarmiento on, 22, 215

theory of mixing (see mestizaje; miscegenation) in the United States, 286 use as diversionary tactic, 238 use to promote justice, 110 Vasconcelos on, 208, 215 —aesthetic approach, 220–21 as vehicle to social harmony, 219 Zea on, 257–58 race, Latin American, 193–94 birth of, 208–9 creative role, 215 distinguished from North American, 187 Mariátegui on, 237 Rodó on, 182 Vasconcelos on, 207 Race, Racism, and Reparations (Corlett), 285–86, 297 use of term Latino in, 300n34 race, Spanish, 237 race war avoiding in Cuba, 114 Bolívar and, 80n26 fear in Mexico, 166 racial characterization and, 4 racial mixing. See mestizaje (racial mixing); miscegenation racism culturalism similar to, 290 good and just, 112 as impediment to national unity, 109 Martí on combating, 109–10 racial distinctions necessary for overcoming, 102 scientific, 188 violence based on, 112

346  Index racist, use of term, 110 Ramírez, Ignacio, 163 Ramos, Julio, 276 Ramos, Samuel, 12, 13, 171, 254 raza cósmica, La (The Cosmic Race) (Vasconcelos), 209, 212–18 cited by Zea, 256 as Nietzschean-inflected text, 204 on three periods of human history, 214 Razón, La (newspaper), 243 Real y Pontificia (Mexico), 168 “Reflexiones políticas” (Political Reflections) (Gómez), 113–14 regeneration, moral, 187, 194 regeneration, national, 240 religious freedom, 41–42 Renan, Ernest, 195 Report from Spain (Guicciardini), 34–35 Revista Nacional de Literatura y Ciencias Sociales (journal), 197 Reyes, Alfonso, 171 rhythm, 205, 217–18 Río, Angel del, 252 Rivera, Diego, 171 Robles, Martha, 205 Rodó, José Enrique, 181–202 influenced by idea of autonomous lay university, 170 life and works, 197–98 Zea compared to, 256 Role of the Americas in History, The (Zea), 261 Romero, Francisco, 11, 12, 13 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 136, 145

Royal Gazette, 67 “Ruben Darió” (Rodó), 198 Rubio, Antonio, 10 “Sad Sunday” (Martí), 276 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de, 15 Salles, Arleen, 23 Santa Cruz, Andrés de, 88 Santander, General Francisco de Paula, 64, 66, 71 Santayana, George, 16 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 127–51 on Indians, 53n19 life and works, 145 Martí distinguished from, 105 positivism and, 11 use of term barbarism, 21–22 Vasconcelos compared to, 214 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15 Scheler, Max, 12 Schiller, Nina Glick, 290 Scholasticism influence on Hispanic American philosophy, 10 Las Casas and, 32, 37 renewed impetus in twentieth century, 15 School of Salamanca, 32, 37, 52n4 Schutte, Ofelia, 16, 20, 259 Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican. See Vatican Council II self-criticism, 12 Senghor, Leopold, 255 sensibility, aesthetic, 184 Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Mariátegui). See Siete ensayos de

Index 347 interpretación de la realidad peruana (Mariátegui) Sierra, Justo, 152–78 on creating the national soul, 150n16 on education, 22–23 —lay university, 168–69 on Indians, 53n19 —capacity for education, 140 life and works, 171–72 positivism and, 11, 154, 158–59 Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Mariátegui), 244 on cultural inferiority of colored races, 234 on demographic predominance of the Indians in Peru, 230–31 on ethnic nature of nation, 240 on evolution of European society, 247n17 on political relevance of ethnic groups, 237 on “problem of the Indian,” 229, 230 —dismissal of miscegenation as solution to, 233 slavery abolition in Cuba, 114 Aristotle’s doctrine of, 129–30 Bolívar —on abolition of, 70–71 —on legacy of, 67–68 —on slave owners, 71 by nature, 129, 131 slaves, African Bolívar on, 69

threat to moderate governments, 71 social Darwinism. See positivism: Spencerian (evolutionary) socialism as solution to the problem of the Indian, 232 Socialist Doctrine of the Association of May, The (Echeverría), 151n22 social order aesthetic conceptualization of, 209–10 Bolívar’s concern with, 64 society Bolívar’s theory of, 65, 66–67 Catholic education and stratification, 162 foundation for a fully integrated, 114 Martí —acquaintance with different types of, 102–3 —symbolic order, 119 nobility of Aztec and Inca, 147n8 Sierra on social classes, 165 Sorel, Georges, 241 Spain abolition of slavery in Cuba, 114 humanism in, 252 legacy of, 67 Martí in, 102 miscegenation in, 251 Spanish, defined, 8 Spanish American, defined, 8 Spanish-American War, 106 Spencer, Herbert, 11, 155 Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 58

348  Index stereotyping in Las Casas’s Brevíssima, 35–36 Rodó and, 197 Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality (Gracia), 280–81 Taine, Hippolyte, 191 Tampa speech (Martí, 1891), 117 Temas de nuestra América (Themes from Our America) (Mariátegui), 230 Theory of Man (Romero), 13 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 216, 217 praise by Vasconcelos, 224n12 Tiempo, El (newspaper), 243 Travels in the United States in 1847 (Sarmiento), 148n11 tyranny as cause of underdevelopment of Latin peoples, 208

relation to Latin America, 279–80 Rodó on pervasive moral and political power of, 181 unity as concern of Rodó, 198 Latino identity and search for, 271–302 mestizo identity and, 275 racism as impediment to national, 109 sense of, in Chile, 88 university, national in Mexico, 168–71, 264 University of Chile, 85, 95, 145 Ureña, Pedro Henríquez, 199n3 Uruguay European immigration to, 189 Martí consul of in New York, 120 Red Party (Colorados), 198

Unamuno, Miguel de, 194 United States epistemic situation of blacks in, 4–5 immigration to —Hispanic immigration as cultural event, 275 —of non-Europeans, 2–3 —racist treatment of Cubans, 289–90, 291 Latin Americans in, 26, 269–302 —mestizo identity, 275 Martí on necessity of stopping expansionism of, 106 “politics of difference,” 2

Vacano, Diego von, 23, 24 Vaihinger, Hans, 33 Valladolid debate (1550), 50, 130–34, 131 Zea on, 252 Vargas, Manuel, 224n16 Varona, Enrique José, 11, 170 Vasconcelos, José, 203–27 autobiographical works, 223n4 cited by Zea, 256 in generation of founders/ patriarchs, 12, 171 on Latin American identity, 24 life and works, 221–22 and National University, 171

Index 349 speeches —in Mexico (Oct. 12, 1920), 207 —in Santiago de Chile, 207 Vatican Council II, 53n18 Declaration on Religious Freedom, 41–42 Vaz Ferreira, Carlos, 12 Velásquez, Ernesto Rosen, 26 Venezuela, 74 Versos Libres (Martí), 120 Versos Sencillos (Martí), 120 Viajes por Europa, Africa y América (Sarmiento), 137 Villa, Pancho, 221 violence ethnic, 122n12 racist, 112 Viroli, Maurizio, 59 Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Alcoff), 281–82, 288, 296 vitalism, influence of French, 12, 15 Vitoria, Francisco de, 32, 52n4, 252

Vives, Juan Luis, 252 Wade, Peter, 189, 190, 192 war, racial. See race war “What Is a Nation?” (lecture, Renan), 195 Wheaton, Henry, 89 white legend of Spain, 35 Wilson, Jason, 200n12 Winchester, James, 223n5 Yack, Bernard, 59 Yañez, Agustín, 172 Zack, Naomi, 258 Zea, Leopoldo, 249–68 critics of, 259–61 influenced by —Erasmus, 252 —Ortega y Gasset, 250–51 life and works, 264 on Mexican Revolution and unity, 25–26 Zumárraga, Juan de, 10