Racial mixing in Latin America replaced violent erasure of Indians with assimilative disappearance.

Evidence

Latin America differed from both India and South Africa, however, insofar as racial mixing came to define racial latinamericanization. But this mixing became elevated by making the mimicking of the European habitus the defining aspiration, if not the condition of possibility of racial elevation. Where in an earlier historical moment the Indian would be disappeared through violent death, from the late nineteenth century on the vanishing of the Indian was sought through amalgamating metamorphosis, through its own social suicide. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1123

Categorization

• SEED: The shift from genocidal erasure to assimilation as ‘social suicide’ could anchor an essay on how modernization discourse replaced explicit violence with cultural disappearance.
• DEEPTHINKING: The condensed paradox here — mestizaje celebrated nationally while functioning as the Indian’s ‘social suicide’ — is dense enough to sit with.
• ADDENDUM: Relates closely to the Grafting & Growth article’s theme of assimilation as a form of erasure, though via race rather than ecology.