“Latinidad Is Cancelled”

Adopting a hemispheric perspective, this essay problematizes the construct of latinidad by foregrounding how it reproduces Black erasure. I argue that “Latin America,” rather than being a geographical designator, is an imagined community that is Eurocentric to the degree that its conceptual boundaries exclude African diaspora spaces. I then turn to understandings of whiteness across borders, contrasting perceptions of racial mixture in the United States and the Hispanophone Americas. Lastly, I examine works by (Afro-)Latinx artists whose nuanced views on race demonstrate the potential of visual representation to provide insight into this complex topic beyond the black-white binary.

Rancor: Sephardi Jews, Spanish Citizenship, and the Politics of Sentiment

In 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claims about Sephardi Jews, but also making claims on them. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.

Race, Science, and Social Thought in 20th-Century Brazil

Race is a fundamental theme in the sciences and social thought of 20th-century Brazil. The republican regime, inaugurated in the country in 1889, was already born troubled by questions concerning the viability of the nation, which, from the viewpoint of European scientific theories on race, was doomed to fail due to the high contingent of black and indigenous people, and its racial mixture. The solution proposed by the country’s scientific and political elites was characteristically the theory of whitening, which, without breaking completely from scientific racism, established its own path for nation building. The 1910s were marked by the growth of the sanitarist movement led by the medical elite, the country’s leading scientific community at the time, which shifted the explanation for the country’s ills from its racial constitution to parasitic diseases. The eugenics movement emerged in Brazil closely connected to the sanitarist movement and was dominated in the 1920s by a Lamarckian conception of heredity, seeking to improve the “Brazilian race” through social medicine. This eugenics framework did not signify the absence of more racial interventionist proposals, however, such as the sterilization of the “unfit” and immigration restrictions. The latter proposition acquired the force of law under the 1934 Constitution and was maintained under the 1937 Constitution, which lasted throughout the Estado Novo. Nevertheless, the first Vargas government (1930–1945) invested in strengthening the image of a country with harmonious race relations and the identity of the Brazilian as miscegenated, an idea sustained by the social thought and intellectual production of the period. Following the end of the Estado Novo dictatorship and the Second World War, Brazil became a field for research on race relations promoted by UNESCO. The project’s starting point was the notion that the country could provide an example of harmonious race relations for a world traumatized by war and the Holocaust. The research findings, though, pointed to the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination. From the 1950s, research in the social sciences and the black movement deepened the investigation and the denunciation of racial inequalities in Brazil. Concurrently, research in the genetics of human populations insisted that the Brazilian population was characterized by racial mixture and biological diversity. After the 1970s, during the military dictatorship still, the black movement emphasized negritude as an identity and denounced racial democracy as a myth that concealed inequality. In this context, the sociology of race relations began to affirm race as one of the determinant variables of class structure in Brazil. In the 1990s, some sectors of the black movement and the social sciences asserted that antiracism should strengthen race as an identity and the black/white polarization. At the same time, in dialogue with the tradition of social thought and with modern research on the human genome, other intellectuals highlighted miscegenation as characteristic of the Brazilian population and advanced the need to combat prejudice and discrimination. The clashes of the 20th century eventually resulted in affirmative actions and quota policies being implemented by the Brazilian government from the 2000s.

Dancing Mestiçagem, Embodying Whiteness: Eros Volúsia's Bailado Brasileiro

This article analyzes the processes of branqueamento (whitening) contained within the ideology of mestiçagem (racial miscegenation) through the work of Brazilian dancer, choreographer, and dance pedagogue Eros Volúsia (1914–2004) in the context of the establishment of the myth of racial democracy in early twentieth-century Brazil. I argue that Eros Volúsia not only embodied Brazil's allegedly harmonious racial mixture through her stylized “folk” dances, but her bailado brasileiro (Brazilian ballet) in fact choreographed Brazil's modernity and aspirations of whiteness. I compare Volúsia's prominent career as a performer and pedagogue in Brazil with her brief film career in the United States, where Volúsia had the opportunity to follow in Carmen Miranda's footsteps and become the next “Brazilian bombshell,” but instead chose to return to Brazil, where she was able to maintain her white privilege and her status as author and artist.

Fateful Triangles in Brazil: A Forum on Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Part II

Stuart Hall, a founding scholar in the Birmingham School of cultural studies and eminent theorist of ethnicity, identity and difference in the African diaspora, as well as a leading analyst of the cultural politics of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher years, delivered the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University in 1994. In the lectures, published after a nearly quarter-century delay as The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), Hall advances the argument that race, at least in North Atlantic contexts, operates as a ‘sliding signifier,’ such that, even after the notion of a biological essence to race has been widely discredited, race-thinking nonetheless renews itself by essentializing other characteristics such as cultural difference. Substituting Michel Foucault’s famous power-knowledge dyad with power-knowledge-difference, Hall argues that thinking through the fateful triangle of race, ethnicity and nation shows us how discursive systems attempt to deal with human difference. In ‘Fateful Triangles in Brazil,’ Part II of Contexto Internacional’s forum on The Fateful Triangle, three scholars work with and against Hall’s arguments from the standpoint of racial politics in Brazil. Sharon Stanley argues that Hall’s account of hybrid identity may encounter difficulties in the Brazilian context, where discourses of racial mixture have, in the name of racial democracy, supported anti-black racism. João Nackle Urt investigates the vexed histories of ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ in reference to indigenous peoples, particularly Brazilian Indians. Finally, Thiago Braz shows, from a perspective that draws on Afro-Brazilian thinkers, that emphasizing the contingency of becoming in the concept of diaspora may ignore the myriad ways by which Afro-diasporic Brazilians are marked as being black, and thus subject to violence and inequality. Part I of the forum – with contributions by Donna Jones, Kevin Bruyneel and William Garcia – critically examines the promise and potential problems of Hall’s work from the context of North America and western Europe in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter and Brexit.

Critical Latinx Indigeneities: Unpacking Indigeneity from Within and Outside of Latinized Entanglements

This article engages an important, but difficult conversation about the erasure of indigeneity in narratives, curriculum, identities, and racial projects that uphold settler colonial logics that fall under the rubric of Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Chicana/o/x. These settler colonial logics include violence by these groupings against Indigenous people, or indios, that has been part of Mexican and U.S. history in the Southwest. We examine Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and Chicana/o/x settlers’ complicity with myths that support white settler futurity, including through social studies curricula and contemporary discourses of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. The problematics of Hispanidad and Latinidad are also engaged as part of officialized U.S. state regulation and as an expression of mestizaje based on indigenism (indigenismo). Indigenismo worked hand-in-hand with mestizaje and functioned not so much as a celebration of racial mixture, but as state eugenicist programs of Indigenous erasure throughout Latin America, and by extension in Latino communities in the U.S. Finally, we provide diverse examples of how this process works to advance a theory and praxis of Critical Latinx Indigeneities to decolonize Latinidad and mestizaje in order to envision Indigenous futurities within and outside of the Latinized entanglements of the present.

The Way Forward

This chapter will first summarize how the book’s review of multiracial discrimination cases reveals the enduring power of white privilege and the continued societal problem with non-whiteness in any form. Specifically, the cases illustrate the perspective that non-whiteness taints rather than the concern that racial mixture itself is worrisome. Yet this insight is lost in the midst of the multiracial-identity scholars’ singular focus on promoting mixed-race identity. Multiracial victims of discrimination will be better served by legal analyses that seek to elucidate the continued operation of white supremacy. Such a focus will also better serve all Equality Law and public policies. But this can only be done by shifting away from a focus on personal individual identity recognition to a focus on group based racial realities. The chapter concludes with a proposal for an explicit “socio-political race” lens for analyzing matters of discrimination rather than the Personal Identity Equality perspective that misapprehends the social significance of race in the assessment of equality problems. The book’s emphasis on a socio-political race perspective meaningfully preserves an individual’s ability to assert a varied personal identity, while providing a more effective tool for addressing racism and pursuing equality.

Personal Racial Identity Equality

This chapter will delve into the question of what fundamentally concerns multiracial-identity scholars about the discrimination cases despite the fact that the empirical record does not by and large show anti-mixture animus. For multiracial-identity scholars, the primary locus of multiracial discrimination is in any societal resistance to the assertion of multiracial identity. The chapter calls this “Personal Identity Equality” and discusses its dangers. This is because the exotification of racial mixture is something that is now being drawn upon to undermine the pursuit of racial equality public policies. Tracing the challenges to race-based affirmative action over the last ten years, this chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Supreme Court litigation has referred to the growth of mixed-race persons as undercutting the legitimacy of affirmative action policies. The chapter will also demonstrate the ways in which the Supreme Court affirmative action litigation references to mixed-race persons parallels the public discourse notion that the growth of multiracial identified persons signals the decline of racism. The chapter concludes by identifying how the association of multiracial identity with the decline of racism poses challenges to addressing the continuing discrimination against all non-white persons including those who are mixed-race.