Latin American nation-building assimilated diversity into a white-dominant body

Evidence

So, the making of a new nation, of new nations across Latin America, of alchemical combi-nation, involved drawing those marked as distinct and so threatening to national coherence into fusion, flavoring the national recipe. If to a bowl of white rice you add up to 25 percent black beans and 25 percent red chili peppers, you end up with an inflected, flavored meal – of white rice. Demographic and cultural heterogeneity are filtered into the homogeneous national body, more or less self-consciously. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1143

Categorization

• CANDY: The white rice metaphor — add 25% black beans and 25% red chili to still end up with white rice — is a vivid, shareable image for assimilation.