Mestizaje and Globalization: Transformations of Identity and Power - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816530904 ISBN 13: 9780816530908

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2014

Synopsis

The Spanish word mestizaje does not easily translate into English. Its meaning and significance have been debated for centuries since colonization by European powers began. Its simplest definition is “mixing.” As long as the term has been employed, norms and ideas about racial and cultural relations in the Americas have been imagined, imposed, questioned, rejected, and given new meaning.

Mestizaje and Globalization presents perspectives on the underlying transformation of identity and power associated with the term during times of great change in the Americas. The volume offers a comprehensive and empirically diverse collection of insights concerning mestizaje’s complex relationship with indigeneity, the politics of ethnic identity, transnational social movements, the aesthetic of cultural production, development policies, and capitalist globalization, with particular attention to cases in Latin America and the United States.

Beyond the narrow and often inadequate meaning of mestizaje as biological and racial mixing, the concept deserves an innovative theoretical consideration due to its multidimensional, multifaceted character and its resilience as an ideological construct. The contributors argue that historical analyses of mestizaje do not sufficiently understand contemporary ways that racism, ethnic discrimination, and social injustice intermingle with current discourse and practice of cultural recognition and multiculturalism in the Americas.

Mestizaje and Globalization contributes to an emerging multidisciplinary effort to explore how identities are imposed, negotiated, and reconstructed. The chapter authors clearly set forth the issues and obstacles that Indigenous peoples and subjugated minorities face, as well as the strategies they have employed to gain empowerment in the face of globalization.

About this title

About the Author:

Stefanie Wickstrom is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Central Washington University. She has published in journals such as Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Latin American Perspectives, and American Indian Quarterly.

Philip D. Young taught at the University of Oregon from 1966 until 2002. He was an ethnographer, applied anthropologist, cultural ecologist, and a specialist in Indigenous cultures of Latin America until his death in 2013.

Review:

“The volume provides an impressive array of essays that make important interventions in the study of mestizaje and indigeneity in the Americas while helping us also understand racial struggles elsewhere.”—American Indian Quarterly

“Mestizaje and Globalization is illuminating. Readers will especially appreciate the definitions and evolution of terms presented in the editors’ introductory essay. Readers will come away with a thorough understanding of mestizaje over time and its meaning in the era of globalization.”—AlterNative
 
“The first ‘classic’ elaboration of mestizaje interpretative frameworks.”—Miguel Gonzalez, co-author of Etnicidad y nación: El desarrollo de la autonomía de la Costa Atlántica de Nicaragua

“Mestizaje and globalization are worthy and long-lasting areas of inquiry and have huge impacts on understanding the Americas and Latin@s in the United States.”—Arturo J. Aldama, co-editor of Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands
 

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0816530904
• ISBN 13: 9780816530908
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Wickstrom Stefanie, Young Philip D.