This week, I will reflect on the words mestizaje and mestizo as I thought Ata, Ashley, Jeremiah and Claire were very insightful in how they described them.<\/p>\n
Growing up in El Salvador, a country in Central-America, I heard the term mestizo a lot. I even remember learning about it in elementary school. To be honest with you, as a Latina, yet not member of any Indigenous group, I can only relate to how non-indigenous Latinos perceive the term. I think that just as Ata, Ashley, Jeremiah and Claire put it, I agree with Vasconcelos\u2019 belief of \u201cmestizaje\u201d being a unifying term. I\u2018ve always viewed being mestizo as almost a sort of ethnicity of its own. As Latinos, we are neither purely indigenous, neither purely European, so I do find that putting a name to what we are simplifies things and unite us as a race. I believe that all the negative connotations of the term have slowly been erased and that the term is no longer viewed as \u201cimpure\u201d, but rather as any other ethnicity. There\u2019s always been that question to Latinos of \u201cwhat are we?\u201d and I think \u201cmestizo\u201d is the answer.<\/p>\n
A few years ago, out of pure curiosity, I decided to take a DNA test to know more about my ancestry. And of course, the results weren\u2019t shocking, I was about 50% European and 50% Salvadorian which in theory, is what being mestizo is. Nevertheless, I thought it was very interesting and later found, after doing a bit of research that that’s the result of most people in Latin America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week, I will reflect on the words mestizaje and mestizo as I thought Ata, Ashley, Jeremiah and Claire were very insightful in how they described them. Growing up in El Salvador, a country in Central-America, I heard the term mestizo a lot. I even remember learning about it in elementary school. To be honest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58837,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,5,4],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-keyword-reflections","tag-last303","tag-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58837"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions\/19"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/aquintana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}