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AT: BORDERLANDS

CASE DEBATE

Affirmation of Mestizo consciousness assimilates minorities into a system of dominance and intelligibility and brushes over racist violence

Bailey and Telles 2013 (Stanley, Professor of Sociology at UC Irvine- Edward, Professor of Sociology at Princeton, “Understanding Latin American Beliefs about Racial Inequality”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 118, No. 6 (May 2013),

Although the tide may be turning toward multicultural afﬁrmation in much of Latin America, some scholars have suggested that the hegemony of the mestizaje myth has been central to slowing ethnoracial mobilization and challenges to the racial status quo, both in the past and today Hanchard 1994; Paschel 2010 . As illustration, Wade 2003, p. 275 writes: “So long as mestizaje discourse is prevalent, it will be hard to link racial identity to citizenship and rights” in Latin America. In a similar vein, Safa 2005, p. 317 remarks: “Because of the co-optive strategy of mestizaje, which convinced mulattos they were more like whites than like their black brothers, there is also a reluctance to create ½in Latin America confrontational racial blocs such as exist in the U.S.” The fact that many Afrodescendants and indigenous peoples were gradually absorbed into amorphous national mestizo populations, and that blackness and indigeneity were systematically ignored, provides a partial explanation for Latin America’s scant record of multiculturalism Marx 1998; Paschel and Sawyer 2008. The widespread denial of systematic disadvantage suffered by racial and ethnic minorities is another important mechanism through which, scholars argue, mestizaje slowed ethnoracial mobilization and antiracism policy. Latin American mestizaje racial ideologies obfuscated the structural causes of ethnoracial inequality, leading to “color blindness” Paschel 2010, p. 729 or “false consciousness” Winant 1999, p. 99 that “denies the existence of any racism” Sidanius et al. 2001, p. 826 , even in the minds of nonwhites themselves Twine 1998, p. 8 . Beck et al. 2011, p. 106 write that, in Ecuador, “mestizaje, and the wide swath of people who clearly identify as mestizo, produces a perceptual prism in which it is quite easy to ignore, hide, downgrade, and ultimately deny processes of prejudice and discrimination.” Perhaps clearest in connecting myths of mestizaje with a claim that nonwhite Latin Americans are colorblind, Warren and Sue 2011, p. 50 write that, across Latin America, “nonwhites” have “scant understanding of how race, both its contemporary and historical forms, is directly linked to the particular conﬁgurations of the labor market, social welfare, taxation policies, housing, educational opportunities, and so forth.” Using ethnographic research, these authors conclude: “In short, like U.S. whites, they ½Latin American nonwhites do not link race to economic and social marginalization” p. 50 . While noting the assimilationist core to these mestizaje myths in Latin America, we contend that their role as hegemonic ideologies blinding Latin American populations to racial discrimination and disadvantage, that is, conditioning their stratiﬁcation beliefs, is an empirical question needing further examination. While most research to date on mestizaje has been based on qualitative methods, large-sample survey data may be uniquely suited to exploring generalized attitudinal orientations; to date, the absence of those data and analyses using advanced survey methods constitute a gap in the literature. New survey data may simply conﬁrm earlier ethnography, extending its explanatory power; survey data could also reveal new patterns that complicate localized perspectives. With the goal of bringing the lens of survey research to the study of Latin American racial attitudes, we look ﬁrst at general framings for understanding the effects of hegemonic racial ideologies on explanations for racial inequality before laying out a series of hypotheses about the Latin American context.

The notion of “mestizaje” in debate claims to be all-inclusive, but in reality, all the 1AC does is marginalize blackness and indigenousness for the sake of hybridity

Wade 2005 [Peter Wade is a British anthropologist who specializes in issues of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Peter Wade is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester; Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience; http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/peter.wade/articles/JLAS%20article.pdf]

This article explores a key concept in the complex of ideas around race, nation and multiculturalism in latin America, that of mestizaje-essentially the notion of racial and cultural mixture. I address mestizaje not just as a nation-building ideology - which has been the principal focus of scholarship on the issue, but also as a lived process that operates within the embodied person and within networks of family and kinship relationships. I consider how people live the process of racial-cultural mixture through musical change, as racially identified styles of popular music enter into their per- forming bodies, awakening or potentialities in them; through religious practice, as racialised deities possess them and energise a dynamic and productive embodied diversity; and through family relationships, as people enter into sexual and procreative relations with others identified as racially-culturally different, to produce 'mixed' children. This approach emphasises the ways in which mestizaje as a lived process, which encompasses, but is not limited to, ideology, involves the maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and homogeneity. Scholars have recognised that mestizaje does not have a single meaning within the Latin American context, and contains within it tensions between sameness and difference, and between inclusion and ex- clusion.' Yet a scholarly concern with mestizaje as ideology has tended to privilege two assumptions: first, that nationalist ideologies of mestizaje are essentially about the creation of a homogeneous mestizo (mixed) future, which are then opposed to subaltern constructions of the nation as racially- culturally diverse; and second, that as a nationalist ideology appears to be an inclusive process, in that everyone is eligible to become a mestizo, but in reality it is exclusive because it marginalises blackness and in- digenousness, while valuing whiteness. Both assumptions are too simple. Firstly, nationalist ideologies of mestizaje contain and encompass dynamics not only of homogenisation but also of differentiation, maintaining permanent spaces, of a particular kind, for blackness and indigenousness, and creating a mosaic image of national identity. The standard formulation which counterposes elite and subaltern, and homogeneity and diversity is therefore unsatisfactory. If one looks at mestizaje as a lived process, the relationship between inclusion and exclusion is not best conceived of as one of superficial mask and underlying reality. Rather it can be understood as the interweaving of two processes, both of which have symbolic and structural reality. These, in turn, constitute a mosaic, at the level of the embodied person and the family as well as the nation. The concept of mestizaje is not of interest only to Latin Americans and Latin Americanists; in the USA and Europe increasing attention has been paid to processes of racial and cultural mixture, usually referred to by a series of different terms such as hybridity, syncretism, metissage, melange and creoli- salion, all or some of which may be related to other concepts, such as diaspora, which evoke the kinds of migrations and movements that lead to mixture.' For some theorists, mixture, hybridity and the formation of diaspora have positive connotations of being able to break with essentialist ideas of identity and destabilise hierarchical relations of power which often depend on rigid categorisations.' However, in this article I argue that a Latin Americanist perspective on mestizaje can contest some of these more opti- mistic ideas about processes of hybridity.

New Mestizaje theory reentrenches the very problems that it seeks to eliminate: 3 warrants.

Turner 2014

[Turner, Jessie D. PhD in Chicana and Chicano Studies from UC Santa Barbara, Instructor of women’s and gender studies at University of Southern Florida. “Reconsidering the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed-Raced Identity Models”. Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies. 2014.]

New mestizaje theory is well-known for its discussion of liminality, multiplicity, fluidity, selfintegration, and self-creation, and multiracial studies has undeniably employed this work in its own development. For example, several authors cite Anzaldúa in theorizing multiracial identity.40 Such use of her work demonstrates the fundamental similarities between new mestiza/o and new multiracial day-to-day experiences of self. Not only can the latter inherit from the former, but the former can also learn from extensions of the original theory, such as its central applicability to contemporarily mixed people who do not singularly identify as Chicana/o. While both new mestiza/o and new multiracial identity constructions have great liberatory motivations and potential, they can also support racial erasure, essentialism, binaries, and white supremacy. For instance, for all of Anzaldúa’s theorization of identity fluidity and multiplicity, it has been argued that she preferences a romanticized bygone indigenous identity that exists at the cost of erasing a present indigenous subjectivity.41 In a similar vein, several scholars critique and warn of the dangers of factions of the multiracial movement’s inattention to racism and white supremacy, or even its employment of white supremacist ideologies in order to escape blackness.42 Furthermore, it has been suggested that multiracial identity discourse, while aiming to break down racial binaries, actually creates a new binary between multiracial- and monoracial-identified people.43

Theories of multiracial identity rely on heteronormative assumptions

Turner 2014

While conceptions of new mestizaje emphasize Mexican indigeneous and Spanish mixing, they also move beyond ethnoracial terms to critically and consistently prioritize considerations of gender and sexuality.53 In fact, these theorists are foundational to not only Chicana feminism, but also to queer studies. Conversely, mixings within the context of sexuality are not yet adequately attended to or centrally framed in discourses of new multiracial identity. It is important to mention that there are, however, a handful of scholars who challenge the heteronormativity implicit in mixedrace theorization.54 Not surprisingly, the scope of this work emphasizes parallels between biracial and bisexual experiences and identities specifically, though some work does extend to gay, lesbian, and queer sexualities more broadly. It can be argued that heterosexuality is normative within mixed race studies because conceptions of racial mixing and being first- or second-generation mixed race are largely based in biological conceptions of race and reproduction. The primary battles revolved around questions of legal heteronormative marriage, families, and racial proscription. This national discourse was emphasized not only for African Americans, but also for Mexican Americans and other racial groups. For Mexican Americans, however, there was not the same inevitable sense of permanence.55 Furthermore, though Chicano nationalism did promote in-group procreation, new mestizaje is no longer delimited in such a way. Even as the focus on biological ethnoracial mixing in multiracial studies is understandable given the social and legal history of race in the United States, the field can learn from new mestizaje theorization by prioritizing a more intersectional analysis of mixed-race identity that does not continue to reproduce predominantly heteronormative, and many times without gendered analysis, understandings of race and self that singularize possibilities of being.

Mestizaje identity is antiblack

Lovell Banks 2006

[Lovell Banks, Taunya University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. “Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self: No Hay Sangre Negra, so There is no Blackness” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal Vol 15 No 2. 2006.]

According to English professor Suzanne Bost, the words mestiza and mestizaje are unstable terms whose definitions varies depending on the context. Bost writes that the invocation of mestizaje by contemporary scholars “as a universal emblem for new frontiers of Americanness … potentially undermines universalist identity categories” because the term cannot escape the historical baggage that accompanied this mixture of races. Carole Boyce Davies, another English professor, is more explicit about the internal contradictions of these terms. She argues that often mestizo or mestiza is used as a term of separation to distance individuals from people who identify or are identified “as ‘African,’ ‘Afro-‘ or ‘Black.’” Bost is more explicit on this point saying that the embrace by American academics of mestizaje is suspect because it tends to privilege lighter-skinned people while ignoring “the continued oppression of darker-skinned peoples as the dominant culture seeks out the familiar (the whiteness) within the other.”

Mestizaje identity, or an inherently biracial identity, recreates a binary and otherizes monoracial people

Dunning 2004

[Dunning, Stefanie. “Mixing it Up: Multiracial Subjects: Brown Like Me: Explorations of a Shifting Self”. University of Texas Press. 2004.]

Root offers explication alongside each of her rights. For the ﬁrst right, the right not to justify one’s existence, she writes, “Questions such as . . . ‘Are your parents married?’ indicate the stereotypes that make up the schema by which the other attempts to make meaning of the multiracial person’s experiences” (7). She emphasizes the term “other” by italicizing it, drawing attention to her otherizing of those not of mixed race, and therefore problematically aligns herself against all those whom she terms monoracial, or other.By doing so, she reinscribes the us/them dichotomy she argues that multiracial people undercut. If it is true, as Root argues, that “Multiracial people blur the boundaries between the ‘us’ and ‘them,’” then why re-create an “us” (as racially mixed) and “them” (as monoracial) binary that risks reproducing all of the other troubling constructions which arise from such a division? My vision of revolution, and of resistance, is one in which no one is otherized. I do not want the right to otherize, nor do I want to shake off the shackles of racism (nor can I) while other others continue to suffer.

Anzaldua’s Mestiza consciousness romanticizes pre-Columbian indigenous identities, erasing difference

Yarbro-Bejarano 1994

[Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne PhD in Spanish at Harvard, BA in German Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford Unviersity. “Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La frontera: Cultural Studies. “Difference.” And the Non-Unitary Subject”. Cultural Critique, No. 28. 1994.]

Borderlands maps a sense of "the plurality of self" (Alarc6n, "Theoretical" 366), which Anzaldua calls mestiza or border con- sciousness. This consciousness emerges from a subjectivity struc- tured by multiple determinants-gender, class, sexuality, and con- tradictory membership in competing cultures and racial identities. Sandoval has theorized this sense of political identity that allows no single conceptualization of our position in society as a skill devel- oped by those marginalized in the categories of race, sex, or class for reading the shifting of the webs of power ("Report" 66-67). She sees the term "women of color" not as a single unity but as a conscious strategy, a new kind of community based on the strength of diversities as the source of a new kind of political movement. Her theory legitimates the multiplicity of tactical responses to the mobile circulation of power and meaning and posits a new, shifting subjectivity capable of reconfiguring and recentering itself, de- pending on the forms of oppression to be confronted. Anzaldua enacts this consciousness in Borderlands as a constantly shifting pro- cess or activity of breaking down binary dualisms and creating the third space, the in-between, border, or interstice that allows contra- dictions to co-exist in the production of the new element (mestizaje, or hybridity). Crucial in her project are the ways "race" works in the complex "interdefining" and "interacting" among the various aspects of her identity.8 Her essay "La Prieta" (the dark-skinned girl or woman), published in Bridge, already introduced the con- cerns she will explore in Borderlands: her relationship to her dark Indian self and the denial of the indigenous in Chicano/Mexicano culture. It is the representation of the indigenous in the text that has evoked the most critical response from Chicana/o and non- Chicana/o readers alike. Primary among these concerns are what are seen as the text's essentializing tendencies, most notably in the reference to "the In- dian woman" and the privileging of the pre-Columbian deity Coat- licue, which obscures the plight of present day Native women in the Americas.9 This wariness toward the invocation of "Indi- anness" and the pre-Columbian pantheon must be contextualized in the contemporary critique of the cultural nationalism of the Chi- cano Movement, which engineered a romanticized linking be- tween Chicanos and indigenous cultures as part of the process of constructing a Chicano identity. Many of us are engaged in an on- going interrogation of the singular Chicano cultural identity pos- ited by dominant masculinist and heterosexist discourses of the Chicano Movement and the role indigenismo played in this exclu- sionary process.10

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