The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada - Softcover

Rappaport, Joanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822356368 ISBN 13: 9780822356363

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2014

Synopsis

Much of the scholarship on difference in colonial Spanish America has been based on the "racial" categorizations of indigeneity, Africanness, and the eighteenth-century Mexican castas system. Adopting an alternative approach to the question of difference, Joanne Rappaport examines what it meant to be mestizo (of mixed parentage) in the early colonial era. She draws on lively vignettes culled from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century archives of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia) to show that individuals classified as "mixed" were not members of coherent sociological groups. Rather, they slipped in and out of the mestizo category. Sometimes they were identified as mestizos, sometimes as Indians or Spaniards. In other instances, they identified themselves by attributes such as their status, the language that they spoke, or the place where they lived. The Disappearing Mestizo suggests that processes of identification in early colonial Spanish America were fluid and rooted in an epistemology entirely distinct from modern racial discourses.
 

About this title

About the Author:

Joanne Rappaport is Professor of Anthropology, and Spanish and Portuguese, at Georgetown University. She is the author of Intercultural Utopias: Public Intellectuals, Cultural Experimentation, and Ethnic Dialogue in Colombia and coauthor (with Tom Cummins) of Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes, both also published by Duke University Press.

Review:

"Joanne Rappaport has revealed what her historical subjects, labeled as mixed-race, mestizo, or mulatto, knew all along: that their identities, as perceived from the outside, and their self-identities, configured from within, were malleable, negotiated categories. Taking the peripheral Spanish colonial region of the Nuevo Reino de Granada–today's Colombia–as her case study, Rappaport debunks the notion that such definitions were monolithic and empire-wide and shows that reliance on them fails to capture the richness of lived experience that she culls so engagingly from the archives. Through its vividly reconstructed life stories, Rappaport's book successfully combats received ideas about the fixity of racial and ethnic labels that have allowed us to imagine, erroneously, that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were simpler times than ours." (Rolena Adorno, Sterling Professor of Spanish, Yale University 2014-02-06)

"The Disappearing Mestizo is a compelling work with important implications for colonial race studies. Considering how diversity was visualized, recorded, and experienced in colonial Spanish America, Joanne Rappaport argues against ethnoracial constructs as strictly genealogical or based on skin coloration, and she challenges the assumption that the fluid classifications of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hardened into a more elaborate caste system by the eighteenth. Above all, Rappaport questions how scholars of colonial Latin America have created models to explain disparities and discrimination." (Nancy E. van Deusen, author of Between the Sacred and the Worldly)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0822356368
• ISBN 13: 9780822356363
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368