UC Berkeley

The history of race in Latin America is commonly glossed as mestizaje, a phenomenon itself defined as the movement from original purity into increasing racial or cultural mixing. This dissertation tells a different story: it investigates and historicizes particular formations of mixing and purity, the operations through which they are produced and rationalized, and the political logics according to which they are deployed. I examine three historical moments marked by the specter of racial insurgency: "Indian" uprisings (1692), "mestizo" rebellions (1566-1567), and "black" conspiracies (1612). As eruptions of racialized paranoia, these episodes of political crisis in and around what Ángel Rama calls the colonial "lettered city" generate a rich archive of discourse on bodies and boundaries. By analyzing these moments, I argue that racial discourse is always already mediated by and articulated through particular categories of mixing and purity which, like race, are themselves contested and contingent. At times, race is best seen through sideways glances that reveal the mechanisms of its production at the margins. Mixing and purity are two modalities of a single operation, and it is in the play between them that racial formations emerge.

Colonial actors perceived, organized, and intervened in the world around them through a grid of intelligibility structured by categories of mixing and purity. These categories were embedded in, permeated, and tied together the human body and the material world. Divergent formations of mixing and purity filled and in many ways structured debates over the chemical composition of beverages like pulque, a traditional indigenous alcohol made from the fermented juice of the maguey plant; the built environment and segregated layout of the cityscape; the Colegio de Niños Mestizos in Mexico City, dedicated to converting mestizo boys into missionary priests fluent in indigenous languages; and the nature of black blood and Nahua conceptualizations of lineage. These debates, intensified by crisis, demonstrate that mixing and purity were far from self-evident but emerged only through conflict, even among "lettered" elites. They also generate particular modes of engaging with the colonial world, from state interventions and regulatory mechanisms to alternative solidarities rooted in different kinds of political projects and imaginaries. Mixing and purity operate as tactics and strategies, and the genealogy of mestizaje maps the field of conflict on which they are deployed.