{"id":53376,"date":"2017-04-10T02:09:26","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T02:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=53376"},"modified":"2017-04-11T00:44:41","modified_gmt":"2017-04-11T00:44:41","slug":"mexican-is-not-a-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=53376","title":{"rendered":"Mexican Is Not a Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mexican Is Not a Race<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Inquiry<\/strong><\/a>
\n2017-04-06<\/p>\n

Chris Chen<\/strong> and Wendy Trevino<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Poet Wendy Trevino argues that a radical new Chicanx<\/a> politics means forging an identity based on shared political struggle, not myths of racial homogeneity\u2013an idea rooted in anarchist struggles along the Texas-Mexican border a century ago<\/em><\/p>\n

WITH the recent publication of a chapbook of sonnets, Brazilian Is Not a Race<\/em><\/a>, poet Wendy Trevino excavates a history of racial violence at the borders of the U.S. and beyond. The chapbook<\/a> also describes a childhood spent in the Rio Grande Valley<\/a> where the narrator is pressured to internalize the social hierarchies that organize daily life in Harlingen, Texas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Blurring boundaries of polemic and historical description, the poems trace the roots of these social divisions through the legacy of murderous state and settler border violence. But Trevino balances this account with a less familiar counter-history of militant Tejano<\/a> resistance, embodied in figures like anarcho-syndicalist Ricardo Flores Mag\u00f3n<\/a>. By presenting both histories, the work shows how border-making congeals racist \u201ccommonsense\u201d assumptions over time, and also interrogates fundamentally anti-black and anti-indigenous Latin American state programs to cultivate cultural unity through \u201crace mixing.\u201d Attentive to the emergence of racial hierarchies out of a history of enslavement and the Spanish and English colonization of the Americas, Trevino\u2019s writing returns to an unsettled past where unity is not a precondition for political action, but a product of it…<\/p>\n

…CHRIS CHEN.<\/strong> I know Vasconcelos<\/a> and Gloria Anzaldua<\/a> have different understandings of the political implications of miscegenation. I\u2019m reminded here of critic Jared Sexton\u2019s<\/a> account of how Vasconcelos\u2019s version of mestizaje<\/em><\/a> preserves an anti-black and anti-indigenous racial order as a \u201cdream of unequivocally hierarchical global integration\u201d whose \u201ceugenicist impulses and implications are unavoidable, casting long shadows over whatever limited threats it presents to the \u2018ethnic absolutism\u2019 of Anglo-Saxon white supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

WENDY TREVINO.<\/strong> During \u201cnation building\u201d in both Mexico and Brazil, elites promoted strong mestizaje<\/em> ideologies that imagined the prototypical citizens of each country to be mixed-race, although the imagined mix was different in each country. To say a country or place is racially homogenous because everyone\u2019s a \u201cmix\u201d of the same peoples is to acknowledge existing racial divisions without acknowledging the racial hierarchies from which they stem, and as long as there are prisons, plantations, maquiladoras<\/em><\/a>, favelas<\/em><\/a>, etc., one can only ignore these hierarchies and their relation to the racialization of peoples. This conception of mestizaje<\/em> can also erase whole groups of people, which became clear to me when I returned to Gloria Anzaldua\u2019s Borderlands<\/em><\/a> and the story of Malinche<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poet Wendy Trevino argues that a radical new Chicanx politics means forging an identity based on shared political struggle, not myths of racial homogeneity\u2013an idea rooted in anarchist struggles along the Texas-Mexican border a century ago<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,459,13743,14646,1249,20],"tags":[26810,26815,26814,26811],"class_list":["post-53376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-history","category-interviews","category-latino","category-texas","category-usa","tag-chris-chen","tag-new-inquiry","tag-the-new-inquiry","tag-wendy-trevino"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53376"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53380,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53376\/revisions\/53380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}