Fungible Indigeneity and Blackness: On the Paradigmatic Domination of Borderlands Theory
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In the academy, NGOs, government forms, and elsewhere, it is common practice to see Latinx people referred to as ‘people of color.’ The term ‘people of color’ is itself fraught with divisiveness — it emerged in popular use in the 1970s as a way of referring to non-white people, and as a strategy of coalition building between many non-white organizers and creatives. While I don’t want to give the impression that I think this term is not politically or taxonomically useful, it is often used to obscure the specificity of the lived experiences and unique oppressions that Black people face in particular. While non-Latinx folks well-versed in race theory may certainly tell you that Latinx is “an ethnicity, not a race,” the only scholar they can likely point you to who theorizes race in Latin America is Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work Borderlands / La Frontera has now swiftly become an institutionally sanctioned text.
I posit that the paradigmatic domination of Anzaldúa’s understanding of racialization and Mexican-American culture stems from a liberal-capitalist anxiety in the academy. I also assert that this unquestioning acceptance has material consequences for indigenous, mestizx, and afro latinx subjects in the past and present, both Chicanx and other Spanish-speaking ethnicities. Indigeneity and Blackness become fungible commodities under this theory of racialization, rendering disposable and invisible indigenous and Black people still struggling for sovereignty and against racist domination. I begin by offering a contextualization of broader concerns of political economy and theoretical precarity within the liberal capitalist academy.
In “Post-Identitarian and Post-Intersectional Anxiety in the Neoliberal Corporate University,” Tiffany Lethabo King outlines how intersectionality (as a Black feminist analytic) has been marginalized to a place of the past in the academy. She claims that the very logics of capital accumulation and precarity of the neoliberal academy produce this marginality and refers to these behaviors as that of “anxious subjects” (116). King reflects upon her own experiences as a graduate student and young faculty member and the push to be ‘marketable’ through distancing oneself from intersectionality and Black lesbian theory as a trend of the past, rather than a “dynamic and shifting theory over time” (121). We might also understand the dominance of borderlands theory for understanding Latinidad as a byproduct of the neoliberal capitalist nature of the academy.
Jodi Melamed outlines racial liberalism as a project that “polices the epistemological boundaries of what counts as a race matter by creating a discursive terrain that facilitates certain ways of posing and resolving questions” (4). Per Melamed’s reading, racial liberalism not only determines what discourses around anti-racism are appropriate (and can be used to justify US imperialism and capitalist exploitation), but also what should even be addressed through the lens of race. She gives the example of Black folks post-1965 — liberal state discourses both pathologized Black Americans as deviant and tried to incorporate them within “state representation as an equivalent for the American ideal (a race-erased “general American culture”)” (8). This liberal multiculturalist discourse is also prevalent in the academy, as a microcosm of the liberal capitalist state. One need only search academic databases for a critique of Chicanx nationalism, borderlands theory, or mestizaje narratives to note the dearth of academic writing on this. Most critiques of Anzaldúa, Moraga, and other nationalist writers center on their inattention to colorism. Though colorism is certainly an important and overlooked material reality, darker skin does not (and has not, historically) been equivalent to indigeneity or Blackness in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
Anzaldúa uses Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’ concept of la raza cósmica (the heavenly/cosmic race) to propose that the colonization of present-day Mexico by Spaniards created a “race that had never existed before. Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, are the offspring of those first matings” (Anzaldúa 5). Anzaldúa is quick to set up “pure Indians” as dead, noting that immediately after initial conquest of Mexico, “the Indian population had been reduced to under seven million” (5). Not only does this narrative present a figure of the indigenous in the past, but it posits that the Aztecs were the only tribal nation in present-day Mexico upon colonization. Further, it ignores the ways that some tribes (such as the Tlaxcalteca, Texocan, Comanche, Apache, and Huetzocinco) actively aligned themselves with Spaniards in order to defeat Aztec rivals and gain different legal and social privileges under Spanish colonization and casta systems.
The fixation on ‘blood’ in Borderlands also assumes a false equivalency of Spanish colonial law with British ‘one-drop’/rule of the mother and Black folks. Indeed, the declaration of what made someone ‘indigenous’ vs mestisx was highly subjective and variable, and many indigenous folks may have had some European or African relatives. In one of her most-cited essays, “La conciencia de la mestiza”, Anzaldúa quotes Vasconcelos, saying that he
envisaged una raza mestiza, una mezcla de razas afines, una raza de color — la primera raza síntesis del globo [a mixed race, a mixture of related races, a colored race]…Opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan, and to the policy of racial purity that white America practices, his theory is one of inclusivity…this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a rich gene pool (77, translation mine)
Though Anzaldúa tries to distance her fetishization of racial mixing from eugenicist projects (“opposite to the theory of the pure Aryan”), her literal reference to gene pools conjures up exactly that. If mestizo people are genetically superior, as she claims, what is the implication for indigenous and Black people? Marilyn Grace Miller explains the willful misreading of Vasconcelos by Anzaldúa, noting that in Vasconcelos’ work, “Mexicans and Mexican Americans living north of the Rio Grande are frequently the target of criticism and sometimes scorn” (37). Though Anzaldúa claims that Vasconcelos’ theory was not one of white supremacy, La Raza Cósmica says that the ultimate project of creating mestizos is the eradication of indigenous and Black people, or what he calls “blanqueamiento, or whitening” (44). Vasconcelos (who lived from 1882–1959) initially praised racial mixing, but it was for the express purpose of erasing Blackness. Wendy Trevino, a Chicana poet from Anzaldúa’s hometown, explains Anzaldúa’s use of Vasconcelos: “He sounds like a Nazi as he lays out / A hierarchy of races with Black / At the bottom & white at the top, though / He imagines a mixed race, a new shade / Of white, that will trump them all. He sounds like / A Nazi who believes ‘the Indian’s / A good bridge’ between the Black race & white” (Trevino 13). Mestizaje therefore becomes a eugenicist tool for eradicating the never-acknowledged and spectral Black Mexican. Blackness becomes fungible, interchangeable, and disposable in this narrative.
Maria Saldaña-Portillo usefully outlines the differential constructions of “the Indian” in her work on racial geographies of the US and Mexico. Through a careful survey of Spanish colonial documents and travel logs, Saldaña-Portillo explains how the making of ‘the Indian’ became both a way of determining who was included in the category of ‘the human’ but also a question of whether or not the “Indians [could be turned] into property as a race” (34). She charts multiple constructions of the native: savage, gentle, and barbarous, and is cautious to note that this was not purely done for the purpose of racial othering. Rather, she considers it a statebuilding project for the emerging Mexican nation, one in which native people willing to work with Spaniards and mestizx colonizers “were reduced to a singular barbaric Indian difference around which an emphatically multiracial and multiethnic nation could ally” (114). Further, the relationship of whiteness to indigeneity in the US has been complicated and tribally variant, with the US simultaneously stripping indigenous folks of their sovereignty and committing acts of genocide against them, even as they occasionally are declared provisionally white (or at least, not Black).
In present-day Mexico, groups such as the Zapatistas (a coalition of mostly Mayan and other indigenous people in Chiapas) have long been struggling for sovereignty, control of land and resources, and freedom from the Mexican state. When natural disasters and political violence occur in Mexico, it is no coincidence that indigenous people are the largest group displaced (not mestizx) and the last to receive resources. The precarity of indigenous subjects (historically and presently) in Mexico becomes lost in the current understanding of Mexican mestizaje and ethno-nationalism. It is difficult to even track the systemic poverty and violence that is inflicted against indigenous and afro-Mexicans. The pervasiveness of Vasconcelos’ idea of la raza cósmica is such that the Mexican government does not even account for race or ethnicity in its national census, though it does note what percentage of its population by sex speaks indigenous languages. This reflects the Mexican state’s strategic equivalency of indigeneity with linguistic capability, rather than with broader socio-economic factors or self-identification. Further, within cultural nationalisms that posit indigenous people as only present in the past, indigenous bodies become pawns for propping up racial mixing narratives. For instance, the figure of La Malinche (a Nahau woman who gave birth to the supposed first mestizo child with Cortes) is recuperated for this very mission in Anzaldúa’s work. Poet Wendy Trevino points out in an interview with Chris Chen:
Anzaldúa sees her [Malinche] not as a traitor but as a survivor… as the reason for the survival of its [Aztec] culture into the present… I was also baffled by her inattention to the legend’s erasure of African people, who have been in Mexico since Cortés. Anzaldúa does say in a sentence somewhere in Borderlands that Mexicans tend not to deal with their African ancestry (The New Inquiry)
This recuperation of Malinche renders her fungible within a narrative of mestizaje. Put succinctly, if all Mexicans are hijos de la chingada, then all were equally harmed by and responsible for colonization (and if we render everyone as equally Black), contemporary indigenous and Black redress is unnecessary, and national culpability is deflected. We can also understand the fungibility of Malinche’s body as part of a process of value extraction. In their important work on trans necropolitics, C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn outline how a simultaneous “devaluation of trans of color lives [can occur alongside] the nominal circulation in death of trans people of color” (67). According to Snorton and Haritaworn, this value extraction expropriates the deaths of trans women of color to serve transnormative subjects. If trans women of color are always dead victims, we have no obligation or ability to do anything to make their lives safer and better. Likewise, if indigenous and Black Latinx people are only present in the past as killed by Spanish colonizers or ancestors of mestisx people, we have no obligation to deal with anti-indigenous and anti-Black violence, since they are rendered already dead.
We might understand this relegation of ethnicity and race to the realm of the private as a way of eliding state responsibility for anti-Black, anti-indigenous violence. As Saldaña-Portillo notes, Marx’s On the Jewish Question shows us that liberal political emancipation relegates religious and ethnic difference to the private sphere, and thereby no longer of public concern. Likewise, the state of Mexico (which is a liberal settler-colonial state) strategically relegated ethnic and racial difference to the realm of the private through the creation of a national racial mythology. Here, I will turn to the racial mythologies that shaped my own racialization (and whiteness) and explain how I understand them within the larger project of liberal multiculturalist state-building and the capitalist academy.
At different points in my childhood, my mom would describe relatives or friends by saying ‘they probably have more Taino in them’ (meaning that the person was darker and appeared more indigenous). Years later, I referred to another Latinx person as a “person of color.” My mom stopped me and asked me what I meant by that, to which I responded “someone who is not white.” She shook her head in disbelief, and said “Well, I think Latinos are white. Your abuelo always said we were white” (as if whiteness could be spoken into being). In 1942, my abuela and abuelo arrived at his parents’ house in New Jersey, having recently been married in Humacao, Puerto Rico. My abuela says that she was freezing cold because my abuelo hadn’t warned her, in his then-limited Spanish, about the New Jersey winter. When she told me this story as a child, she always did so with a forced laugh. She said “When his mother saw me, I knew she thought I was black! So I pulled up my dress so that she could see my stomach and said ‘Look, I’m white like you!’” Evidently, this wasn’t enough for my abuelo’s mother, who treated my abuela with distrust and outward hatred for the rest of her life.
No amount of disavowal of Blackness or controlled sun exposure could convince my great-grandmother that my abuela was white enough for her son. Toni Morrison has written that whiteness and ‘American’ (read: white, hegemonic) culture is defined by distancing itself from what she calls “Africanism” (8). Therefore, my abuela saw this disavowal of Blackness as her way into whiteness/American-ness. Though Puerto Rico is technically a part of America, its status as a modern-day colony renders the citizenship of its citizens complicated and tenuous.
As soon as I was able to make sense of this story as a young adult, I was torn — on the one hand, I was sympathetic to the xenophobic and racist (because of her perceived proximity to Blackness/indigeneity) that my abuela received, and on the other hand, I did not understand why she didn’t express solidarity with Latinx and Black folks. Isar Godreau writes about how Puerto Rico discursively constructed the ‘Puerto Rican race’ as an object of civic and national pride, as a homogenized blend of Taíno, Spanish, and African. Godreau charts how post 1950s, the “ideology of race mixture” became a state-building project in Puerto Rico (178). Prior to this, Blackness was treated as something that could be eliminated from Puerto Rico via interracial marriage and white culture. Both the US and Puerto Rico’s local government paid social scientists, health specialists, etc to examine the island’s residents, where they declared Puerto Rico a race-blind utopia. Puerto Rican populist politicians also actively encouraged interracial families and offspring, with the nuclear family as a unit of the nation-state. The Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (Institute of Puerto Rican Culture) explicitly describes the nation in racial terms, with a discourse of racial mixture in which distinct racial identities are a relic of the past. Unique afro-Puerto Rican cultural art forms became incorporated under the general header of “Puerto Rican music and art.” Blackness (and anti-Blackness) therefore becomes subsumed in a larger project of civic pride and cultural nationalism. Once again, both indigeneity and Blackness become fungible commodities, along with the erasure and homogenization of Black and indigenous Puerto Ricans.
I bookend my critique of borderlands theory with an academic analysis of my own experiences as a white, mixed Puerto Rican woman for several reasons: first, my interpellation as a white Latina in the mainland US (and all of the privileges that come with that) means that I am easily commodified within a blanqueando narrative of eugenicist race mixing: as I am sure many other multiethnic and multiracial folks can attest to, I often hear that mixed folks have “such pretty babies” and that I look “exotic” (read: just white enough for comfort but interesting enough for commodification). Particularly, as a graduate student who is vocal about my Latina identity, it is often assumed that I identify as a woman of color simply because I am Latina. Though I undoubtedly receive occasional uncomfortable moments of fetishization and stereotyping, this is not because of some inherent racial character I supposedly possess. Rather, I attribute this to the fungibility of indigeneity and Blackness that comes at the expense of actual indigenous and Black Latinx folks. If the liberal academy ‘reads’ some markers of indigeneity onto my white body, they avoid responsibility for the systemic mistreatment, underfunding, and devaluation of Black and indigenous women in the academy. My presence is seen as a testimony to their magnanimous liberal multiculturalism, not as a result of economic and racial privileges accorded to me by my skin color and class. It is imperative that I understand my conditional acceptance within the academy within this paradigm, and not allow the liberal allure of multiculturalist discourse to obscure my own whiteness.
Works Cited
“Anuario estadístico y geográfico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos.” Instituto Nacional de Estatistico y Geografia, 29 May 2018, http://www.beta.inegi.org.mx/app/biblioteca/ficha.html?upc=702825097912.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Print.
Godreau, Isar P. “Flowing Through My Veins: Populism and the Hierarchies of Race Mixture.” Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico. University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 177–202. Print.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. “Post-Identitarian and Post-Intersectional Anxiety in the Neoliberal Corporate University.” Feminist Formations, vol. 27, no. 3, 2015, pp. 114–138.
Melamed, Jodi. “The Spirit of Liberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism” Social Text, Vol. 24, no. 4, 2006, pp.1–24.
Miller, Marilyn Grace. “José Vasconcelos’ About-Face on the Cosmic Race.” The Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America. University of Texas Press, 2004. pp. 27–44. Print.
Morrison, Toni. “Dark Matters.” Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1992, pp. 1–28. Print.
Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States. Duke University Press, 2016. Print.
Snorton, C Riley, and Jin Haritaworn. “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Death, Violence and the Trans of Color Afterlife.” The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker, Routledge, 2006, pp. 66–76.
Trevino, Wendy. Brazilian is Not a Race. Commune Editions, 2016. Print.
Trevino, Wendy. Interviewed by Chris Chen, “Mexican is Not a Race”, The New Inquiry, 6 April 2017, https://thenewinquiry.com/mexican-is-not-a-race/.
