Beyond “fixed” and “mixed” racial paradigms:
Abstract
This essay juxtaposes the proliferation of discourse on and about the Hispanic in the wake of the 2000 U.S. Census with performative representations of American cultural identity by Mexican-Chicano Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Native Canadian Monique Mojíca. In opposition to the new multiracialism of the 2000 U.S. Census, both anti-racist critical theorists of whiteness and conservative anti-Hispanic analysts decry the loss of a binary racial paradigm that clearly defines Euro-American culture against its non-English-speaking others. These theorists mistakenly blame multiracialism—and the Hispanics who define themselves in this distinct register—as a problematic threat to a one-drop racial paradigm, based on notions of racial purity. By contrast, multilingual, trans-American representations in Gómez-Peña and Mojíca look beyond the false dilemma of mixed and fixed racial paradigms in order to criticize the assimilationist legacies of European coloniality. They comparatively reconstruct the traumatic history of mestizaje in order to envision alternative representations and distinct futures for the Americas.Downloads
Published
2005-01-01
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Copyright (c) 2005 Laura Lomas
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.