Mixed Race Studies

Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance

University of Michigan Press
2006
256 pages
6 x 9. 29 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-472-09955-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-472-06955-2

Alicia Arrizón, Professor of Women’s Studies
University of California, Riverside

• Winner of the Outstanding Book Award for 2008 from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE)
• Co-winner of the 2007 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

Rethinking mestizaje and how it functions as an epistemology of colonialism in diverse sites from Aztlán to Manila, and across a range of cultural materials

Queering Mestizaje employs theories of postcolonial cultural studies (including performance studies, queer and feminist theory) to examine the notion of mestizaje—the mixing of races, and specifically indigenous peoples, with European colonizers—and how this phenomenon manifests itself in three geographically diverse spaces: the United States, Latin America, and the Philippines. Alicia Arrizón argues that, as an imaginary site for racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, mestizaje raises questions about historical transformation and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites.

Arrizón offers new, queer readings of the hybrid, the intercultural body, and the hyphenated self, building on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Walter Mignolo, and Vera Kutzinski, while challenging accepted discourses about the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Queering Mestizaje is unique in the connections it makes between the Spanish colonial legacy in the Philippines and in the Americas. An engagingly eclectic array of cultural materials—including examples from performance art, colonial literature, visual art, fashion, and consumer products—are discussed, and included in the book’s twenty-nine illustrations.

Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata Body

Theatre Research International
Volume 27, Number 2 (2002)
pages 136-152
DOI: 10.1017/S0307883302000226

Alicia Arrizón, Professor of Women’s Studies
University of California, Riverside

A Cuban cocktail called mulata inspires an examination of the mulata body. Beyond an analysis of the cocktail as a commercial commodity, the mulata body can be placed within an intercultural space shaped by the processes of colonization, slavery and race relations. By examining the grammars in the mulata cocktail, the discussion moves the subject through other texts and discourses in order to mediate the mulata’s embodied genealogy as a form of transculturation. As a hybrid body that inhabits a ‘racialized’ performativity, the mulata’s subaltern agency is imagined beyond the exoticism charged to its presence in the Latin American and Caribbean contexts. A closer look at the mulata body helps to trace not only the process of objecthood affected by masculinist power and desire, but also by the way the process of subjecthood is performatively achieved.

Read or purchase the article here.

Reducing Race: News Themes in the 2008 Primaries

The International Journal of Press/Politics
Volume 15, Number 4 (October 2010)
pages 375-400
DOI: 10.1177/1940161210372962

Catherine R. Squires, Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity and Equality
University of Minnesota

Sarah J. Jackson
University of Minnesota

This article presents a content analysis exploring how racial issues were addressed in newspaper and news magazine coverage of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Despite the presence of Latino and biracial candidates, discussion of race was limited by binary racial frames, resulting in the construction of racial groups as competing voting blocs (including frequent references to white voters) and few references to Barack Obama’s biracial heritage. The dominant framing constricted the range of racial issues to matters of interpersonal insensitivity and misguided statements and ignored matters of public policy and racial equity.

Read or purchase the article here.