Mestizaje and Conviviality in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico

This paper explores the history and meanings of mestizaje in Latin America, with a focus on Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, and assessing its relationship to practices of conviviality. A brief overview of the colonial origins and significance of mixture is followed by an exploration of the way mestizaje figured as a nation-building discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Challenges to the image of the mestizo nation that were strengthened by the regional turn to multiculturalism are then assessed, before re-evaluating mestizaje as a resilient ideology that has not been easily toppled, partly because it contains within it contradictory tensions between conviviality and racism, which make it adaptable. Finally, the paper reviews recent work in genomic science that reiterates the image of the mestizo nation.