Guest Speaker Dr Didier Zuniga

Mestizaje as Neocolonialism: Racelessness, Homogeneity, Improvement

Through an examination of the emergence and consolidation of mestizaje in Mexico, I challenge the prevalent view of mestizaje as providing the conditions of possibility for decolonial and anti-racist futures. I situate mestizaje within postrevolutionary Mexico and show how its ideologues framed it by mirroring the formation of the Western imaginary. This involved a retrospective curation process that served to both ‘purify’ the Mesoamerican past and elevate selectively appropriated histories and cultures to undergird Mexico’s present and future national identity. Contrary to the deep-seated idea that miscegenation provided the basis for the subversion of race-based hierarchies, I argue that it served as an instrument of Indigenous erasure. I also dispute the widely held belief that mestizaje was a peaceful process through which willful and consenting peoples mixed each other. Moreover, I show that mestizaje is cast as the means through which Mesoamerican peoples can ascend into modernity, which is yoked to the idea of ‘whiteness’ as a normative rather than purely racial ideal. Finally, I examine the intertwinement of mestizaje with technologies of improvement whose goal is to move Mexico towards a progressively ‘higher’ nation. I ultimately argue that mestizaje is used to ‘improve’ peoples and territories through developmental prescriptions that generate homogeneity and uniformity in human and more-than-human worlds.

Bio: Didier Zúñiga is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Montreal’s Centre for Research in Ethics, the Canada Research Chair in Feminist Ethics, and the Research Group on Environmental and Animal Ethics. He received his PhD in Political Theory from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in July 2020. His work has appeared in Contemporary Political Theory, Hypatia, Constellations, and the University of Toronto Press (among others). His current research project examines the intersection of ecology, technology, and ontology, with a particular focus on Mexico and Mesoamerican worlds.