Mestizaje was promoted as Latin America’s unifying national ideology

Evidence

The post-abolition mandate to fuse indigenous with existing Africans whose presence was facilitated by slave legacies into the dominant European demographic was supposed to produce a harmonious and dynamic body politic as much socio-politically and culturally as biologically for most if not all Latin American societies. Mestizaje, supposedly melding the color and culture of Afro-Indians with the presumed intellectual and political prowess of Europeans, was pushed as the New World’s organic answer to the challenges facing twentiethcentury modernity. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1063

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines mestizaje as a post-abolition state ideology fusing Afro-Indians with European blood and culture.
• XREF: Connects to critiques of state multiculturalism and racial harmonization ideologies—echoes of Brazil’s ‘racial democracy’ myth; resonates with Parable of the Sower’s treatment of social fragmentation.