Latin American nation-building consciously alchemized Africans and Indians into a new race

Evidence

So race in post-abolition Latin America has factored centrally and more or less self-consciously into the project of nation-building. Nations either were articulated by leading national(ist) intellectuals as “a new race” (Freyre, for example, concerning Brazil, or Vasconcelos’s “La raza cosmica” in the case of Mexico) or as incorporating all members of the population, regardless of race, into the national body. The nation, in this formulation, was to be raceless (as in Jose Marti’s conception in the Cuban case). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1210 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Latin American nations were deliberately constructed as raceless or new-race projects — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1210; Latin American nation-building assimilated diversity into a white-dominant body — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1143; Latin American nation-building absorbed racial difference into a whitened core. (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Latin American nations were deliberately constructed as raceless or new-race projects #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1210
• Latin American nation-building assimilated diversity into a white-dominant body #complicates (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1143