Differences in miscegenation policy shaped each region’s national fiction of erotic union

Evidence

Rather than a national eroticism, it is, I suspect, an eroticized nationalism that is at work. Male-male bondings in a Protestant society which from the start rigidly prohibited miscegenation are paralleled by male-female ‘holy loves’ in the nationalist fiction of Latin America, where Catholicism permitted the growth of a large mestizo population. (It is telling that English has had to borrow ‘mestizo’ from Spanish.) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 777

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later scholars of nationalism and sexuality (e.g., Katherine Verdery, gender and nation) and to the myths of settler-indigene unions explored in ‘Grafting & Growth’.