The Cosmic Race: The Mission of the Ibero American Race by Jose Vasconcelos was a very interesting and important introduction to the ideology of mestizaje. The romanticizing of the violence of Spanish colonization namely on page 17 “This mandate from History is first noticed in that abundance of love that allowed the Spaniard to create a new race with the Indian and the Black, profusely spreading white ancestry through the soldier who begat a native family, and Occidental culture through the doctrine and example of the missionaries who placed the Indians in condition to enter in to the new stage, the stage of the world One” (17) demonstrates why it is important to think through the foundations of mestizaje and its links and investments in white supremacy. While Peter Wade doesn’t frame it so bluntly in Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience, the whitening that occurs in processes of mestizaje is historically linked to investments in white supremacy as illustrated by Vasconcelos. While Vasconcelos is critical of the Anglo-Saxons and challenges the existing racial hierarchy through this critique, much like whiteness, Vasconcelos demonstrates the ways in which mestizaje parallels the same exclusionary and hierarchical practices that feed and sustain white supremacy. By failing to see agency and resistance of both Indigenous and Black peoples in the Americas , Vasconcelos illustrates how the foundation of many Latin American country’s national identities rely heavily on the dehumanization, exclusion, and invisibilization of the history of colonization. One example of this is the exclusion of the Haitian Revolution in an understanding of race in Latin America.

“In this manner, a selection of taste would take effect, much more efficiently than the brutal Darwanist selection, which is valid, if at all, only for the inferior species, but no longer for man” (32). While Vasconcelos distances his theory from Darwanism, it is impossible to not see the ways in which The Cosmic Race is a poetic and romanticized explanation of Social Darwinism. Biological essentialisms are the foundation of his analysis, and the dehumanization of Black and Indigenous peoples are necessary in this process. Although difficult to read, as a light skinned Mexican women, this reading illustrates the discourses that maintain Méxican mestizo identity as national identity. Although I challenge anti-black racism and anti-Indigenous racism in my community, I benefit from the ambiguity of my personal familial history that through my identity as Mexican inherently depends on racial hierarchies.

I also think this reading is very timely in the anti-Latino political climate in the United States because much of the discourse of the “togetherness” that has been used to challenge racism and xenophobia continues to perpetuate the exclusion of marginalized people’s lived experiences. Both the United States’ melting pot as well as multiculturalism in Canada, don’t recognize the violent history of colonization and settlement. Much like Vasconcelos understanding of mestizaje that sees the process of blending as one in which power is manifested in more ways than one, simultaneously, the discourse of togetherness does the same. It attempts to homogenize many lived experiences of oppression with the idea that this unity will lead to progress. Vosconcelos’ theories on race rely on single dimension understandings of power, obscuring the impacts of factors such as class, gender, sexuality and ability and their influences on racial hierarchy. Because of this single dimension analysis Vasconcelos sees things similarly in that the fifth race would lead to progress, but only once full unity was achieved. Reading The Cosmic Race serves as a warning for dependency on these types of discourses.

I think Peter Wade offers a response to the lack of focus of race as a social construct, by looking at the ways in which music, religion, family, and geography inform understandings of race. By arguing for mestizaje to be understood as a lived process through the consideration of its symbolic and material foundations, Wade challenges much of the existing scholarship. By complicating the dichotomy of inclusion and exclusion, however, Wade demonstrates the inherent problematic aspects of this discourse of mestizaje and the ways in which this discourse is not the straight cut answer to essentialisms. Wade’s understanding of the dependence of mestizaje on constructions of Indianess, Blackness, and whiteness elaborate my analysis of Vasconcelos’ investment in white supremacy.