Before even reading the articles, I was a little confused. Looking at the header in which they were placed under, I couldn’t really grasp what the reading was hinting at. “Theories of Mixture 1: Mestizaje”. I had no clue what that meant. To me, it sounded like a potion book or something of the sort. However, once I got into the reading, it finally came clear to me. When reading “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience” by Peter Wade, the first word that stuck out to me in the text was “Mestizaje”. And it was there that I finally got a definition of that peculiar word. The notion of racial and cultural mixture; that is what mestizaje means. After finding out that, everything seemed to piece together. I understood what this had to do with our course and why I was reading this on a snowy Sunday evening.

Peter Wade’s article went into depth on the history of the mestizaje and how it came about. I found it interesting when it mentioned that mestizaje was an ‘all-inclusive ideology of exclusion’. Which basically meant a system of ideas that appeared to include everyone but excluded blacks and indigenous people. When reading this article, it occurred to me that there was never such a phenomenon when other regions where conquered by the Europeans. However, this might be due to my lack of history knowledge. For example, when the Spaniards conquered the Philippines in 1521, I don’t recall there being any large sharing of cultures. But then again, it might be because I haven’t gotten there yet in this course.

When reading “The Cosmic Race” by Jose Vasconcelos, it seemed to me that he was doing a lot of comparing between the Latins and Anglo-Saxons. He says that “Our age became, and continues to be, a conflict of Latinism and Anglo-Saxonism. Shockingly, after reading the logic behind what he says, I can definitely see where he is coming from.