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RACIAL MIXTURE AND CIVIL WAR: THE HISTORIES OF
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RACIAL MIXTURE AND CIVIL WAR:
THE HISTORIES OF THE US. SOUTH AND MEXICO IN THE NOVELS
OF WILLIAM FAULKNER AND CARLOS FUENTES
By

Emron Lee Esplin

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2008

ABSTRACT
RACIAL MIXTURE AND CIVIL WAR:
THE HISTORIES OF THE U.S. SOUTH AND MEXICO IN THE NOVELS
OF WILLIAM FAULKNER AND CARLOS FUENTES
By
Emron Lee Esplin

This dissertation is an endeavor in inter-American literary criticism with three
primary arguments. First, I argue that the afﬁnities and differences between the histories
of the U.S. South and Mexico require us to redeﬁne the terms “America” and “American”
according to their original hemispheric context and to adopt a transnational approach
when studying American literature. Second, I claim that the ways in which race and
racial mixture are viewed in the Americas—speciﬁcally, the discourse of miscegenation
in the United States and the discourse of mestizaje in Mexico—are national not natural.
These discourses are connected to lengthy colonial and national histories and to speciﬁc
moments of crisis in the formation of U.S. and Mexican national identities that took place
during the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. Third, I argue that William
Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes participate in these discourses of racial mixture when their
novels both replicate and challenge the essentialisms of miscegenation and mestizaje,
respectively.

In my introduction, I develop a historiographic approach to inter-American
literary studies that I follow in chapter one by laying the historical groundwork for
comparing the U.S. Civil War to the Mexican Revolution and in chapter two by

examining how the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje which grew out of these

conﬂicts disparately favor(ed) whiteness—miscegenation through overt segregation and

mestizaje through public praise for racial mixture and private desires for assimilation.
Chapter three explores how Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom !, and Go
Down, Moses and Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Gringo viejo repeat the
essentialist underpinnings of miscegenation and mestizaje by describing so-called racially
mixed characters as fragments. Chapter four examines how Light in August and Gringo
viejo challenge the discourses by assigning violence to whiteness. Chapter ﬁve analyzes
how Light in August and La muerte de Artemio Cruz offer ﬁctional portrayals of both
miscegenation’s and mestizaje’s erasure of Mexico’s Aﬁican past. I conclude the project
by offering a critique of current hybridity theory and by arguing that Go Down, Moses

and La muerte de Artemio Cruz demonstrate the impossibility of positive hybridity.

Cepyright by _
EMRON LEE ESPLIN
2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my committee for their quality teaching in the classroom, for
their guidance through my exams, and for their feedback and support with this
dissertation and with the job market. Thanks to Kristine Byron for a well-craﬁed and
challenging course on “Writing Revolution.” Thanks to Maria Mudrovcic for helping me
revise my early writing on Pancho Villa. Thanks to Scott Michaelsen for challenging my
inchoate reading of the concept of mestizaje, for pointing me toward the nineteenth-
century debate around hybridity in the United States, and for helping me wrap my mind
around the problematic idea of the hybrid. Thanks to Salah Hassan for being a continual
source of positive energy, for ﬁlling the administrative role on the committee, and for
always asking how Marlene, Moses, and Anya are doing. Thanks to both Scott and Salah
for reading the original version of this project from cover to cover and for providing
quality critiques and ideas for revision. Thanks to the entire committee, in the end, for
their interest in my inter-American project and for their own efforts to expand the ﬁeld of
the literatures of the Americas.

I would also like to offer special thanks to my family—Marlene, Moses, and
Anya—for their support throughout this long and intense academic journey. Thanks to
Moses for bringing me back to the loud but wonderful world of a child—even if these
trips usually start in the dark hours of the morning. Thanks to Anya for a smile that
softens even the roughest days. Many thanks to Marlene for asking difﬁcult questions
about my work, for providing me with time to accomplish it, and for always ﬁnding

another book that I need to read. I am especially grateful for her patience and sincerity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
METHODS FOR INTER-AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES ............................. 1
CHAPTER 1
WAR IN THE TWO SOUTHS: PRESENT PASTS AND CIVIL WAR
IN THE U.S. SOUTH AND MEXICO ......................................................... 23
CHAPTER 2
DISCOURSES OF RACIAL MIXTURE BORN IN CIVIL WAR: CREATING THE
NATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO ...................................... 84
CHAPTER 3
RACIAL MIXTURE AS FRAGMENTATION ............................................. 142
CHAPTER 4
ANCESTRY, BLOOD, AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE WHITE FATHERS 167
CHAPTER 5
BLACK, MEXICAN, AND BLACK MEXICAN .......................................... 196
CONCLUSION
POSITIVE HYBRIDITY? . .................................................................... 223
WORKS CITED ................................................................................. 248

vi

Introduction
Methods for Inter-American Literary Studies

In 1990, Gustavo Perez F irrnat edited one of the ﬁrst volumes of inter-American
literary criticism—Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?. In his introduction, he
claims that “the ﬁeld of inter-American literary studies is something of a terra incognita.
Other than a few pioneering inﬂuence studies, scholarly forays in this ﬁeld have been few
and mostly very recent” (2). The 19905 marked a signiﬁcant shiﬁ in the amount of and
theoretical approaches to inter-American literary studies. Whether in response to Pérez
Firmat’s “invitation or come-on” (5), as he puts it, in reaction to the shrinking size of the
hemisphere via globalization, or as a reﬂection of ﬁscal treaties (e. g. NAFTA, and later,
CAFTA) and current immigration trends that economically and physically bring people
from various parts of the hemisphere into closer contact, literary critics have published
several titles in recent years that juxtapose the literatures of Latin America, the
Caribbean, Canada, and the United States.1 Academia also demonstrates this shift. In the
university system in the United States, for example, departments of comparative
literature, and in somecases, English departments, have started to offer Literatures of the

Americas as a speciﬁc emphasis or ﬁeld of study.2

 

1 Throughout this project I use both Latin America and Spanish America as regional markers, but not
interchangeably. When I use the term Latin America, I am speciﬁcally including Brazil in the discussion.
Both Latin America and Spanish America can refer to parts of the Caribbean, but I do not consider myself
redundant when I list the Caribbean as a separate entity because of the French and English Caribbean
islands that do not linguistically or culturally ﬁt within the parameters set by the other terms.

2 Earl E. Fitz’s claim “that inter-American literary studies, naturally of a comparative nature, will prove
themselves to be a major trend of the near future, one which will eventually establish itself as a permanent
and vital part of every comparative literature department and program in the country” (10) was almost
prophetic. The ﬁeld has certainly burgeoned in the quarter of a century after Fitz made this claim, but as
recent job postings demonstrate, inter-American literary studies increasingly ﬁnds its home in English
departments rather than in departments of comparative literature. Similarly, several academics who are
currently publishing inter-American scholarship are housed in language departments——English, Spanish,

and French.

Four years before Pérez Firmat published his volume, Bell Gale Chevigny and
Gari Laguardia made a landmark attempt in inter-American literary studies when they co-
edited Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States
and Spanish America.3 This volume might be the ﬁrst literary critique not directly from
Latin America to emphasize the nationalist and imperialist underpinnings of the United

”4 In their preface, Chevigny and

States’ symbolic takeover of the term “America.
Laguardia claim that “[r]einvention of the Americas must begin with exposure of the
rhetorical incoherence we commit each time we designate the United States by the sign
‘America,’ a name that belongs by rights to the hemisphere” (viii), and they continue,
“[b]y dismantling the U.S. appropriation of the name ‘America,’ we will better see what
the United States is and what it is not and at the same time permit Latin America to come
into sharper focus” (viii). Chevigny and Laguardia humbly label their project as a mere

“beginning” (x) to inter-American literary criticism, and while most inter-American

studies that follow in their wake more directly engage Pérez F irrnat’s volume,

 

3 As Perez Firmat suggests in his introduction to Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?, various
“pioneering inﬂuence studies” (2) which follow an inter-American comparative model were published
earlier in the twentieth century. Two such studies are John Englekirk’s Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic
Literature, published in 1934, and Arnold Chapman’s The Spanish American Reception of United States
Fiction 1920-1940, published in 1966, which both trace how U.S. writers served as major inﬂuences on
Spanish American authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This approach differs from
that used in later studies which also ﬁt within Perez Firmat’s “genetic” rubric like John T. Irwin’s masterful
Mystery to a Solution since Englekirk’s and Chapman’s books seem to suggest that inﬂuence is a one-way
street. Irwin, contrastingly, not only demonstrates how Edgar Allan Poe’s work inﬂuences Jorge Luis
Borges but also how Borges improves upon and moves beyond Poe’s analytic detective genre.

‘ Various historians in the United States had made similar comments decades earlier. As early as 1898,
Bernard Moses suggested that historians and teachers in the United States needed to teach “American
history in its true light [. . .] where the whole continent lies within our horizon” (56) in order to avoid
“falling into what we may call a national provincialism [. . .] the beginning of a return to barbarism” (57).
In a similar manner, Herbert Bolton suggested in his presidential address to the American Historical
Association in 1932 that “[t]here is a need of a broader treatment of American history, to supplement the
purely nationalistic presentation to which we are accustomed. [. . .] In my own country the study of thirteen
English colonies and the United States in isolation has obscured many of the larger factors in their
development, and helped to raise up a nation of chauvinists” (68). And, of course, Latin American writers
have viewed the United States’ monopolization of “America” in negative terms since the early nineteenth
century when their American nations began.

Chevigny’s and Laguardia’s groundbreaking suggestion that “America” needs to be
redeﬁned on hemispheric lines becomes central to several inter-American literary
projects of the late 1990s and the early twenty-ﬁrst century. Since the publication of
Reinventing the Americas, the small number of literary critics who were “prepared to
undertake” (viii) the hemispheric approach which the editors advocated has certainly
increased.5

The prevalence of Pe’rez F irmat’s compilation over Chevigny’s and Laguardia’s
earlier collection rests, in part, on the later success of several of the critics whose works
are collected in his volume. Out of the thirteen essays in Do the Americas Have a
Common Literature?, ﬁve became chapters in quality book-length projects that
demonstrated the increasing momentum of inter-American criticism and served as the
ﬁeld’s early critical canon.6 More importantly, Perez Firmat was the ﬁrst, and remains
the only, critic of inter-American literary studies to create and advance a framework that
attempts to deﬁne the possible methods for conducting comparative readings of the
literatures of the Americas.

Pérez Firmat creates a template for how to read the volurne’s disparate essays in
his “Introduction: Cheek to Check.” He claims that “[t]he essays themselves adopt four
distinct approaches, which can be labeled generic, genetic, appositional, and mediative”

and continues, “[t]he generic approach attempts to establish a hemispheric context by

 

5 Fitz also acknowledged the difficult nature of bringing this new ﬁeld of literary study into existence. In
1980, he suggested that “[t]he dearth of high quality comparative studies involving Latin American,
Canadian, or Caribbean literature makes it extremely difﬁcult for anyone to enter into this type of work[,]
but he responded with optimism that “this problem” would “soon be rectiﬁed” as more students and
scholars began to follow the inter-American model (10).

6 See Lois Parkinson Zamora’s The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the
Americas, J 056 David Saldlvar’s The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and
Literary History, Antonio Benltez Rojo’s The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern
Perspective, Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, and John
T. Irwin’s previously mentioned The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story.

,3

using as a point of departure a broad, abstract notion of wide applicability” while the
genetic method “examine[s] actual genetic or causal links among authors and texts” (3
italics in original). The appositional method, he states, “involves placing works side by
side without postulating causal connections” so that “conﬂuence takes precedence over
inﬂuence, and causal links, even when they exist, are deemed less relevant than formal or
thematic continuities” (4). And ﬁnally, he claims that the mediative approach
“concentrates on texts that already embed an inter-American or comparative dimension [.
. .] texts that place themselves at the intersection between languages, literatures, or
cultures” (4). Pérez Firmat admits that these four methods “are not mutually exclusive
nordo they (for this reason) necessarily appear in pure form” (4), but his effort to place
all of the essays in the volume within one, and only one, of his newly constructed
boxes—an attempt that appears forced at times—implies that the four methods provide an
exhaustive descriptiOn of possible approaches to inter-American criticism and that one or
another of the approaches will dominate any project that mixes them. Similarly, the
tendency of later critics to refer to Pe'rez Firmat’s terminology, occasionally
problematizing his framework but never redeﬁning his categories, suggests that they, too,
see the value of his rubric outside the parameters of the collection itself.

Pérez Firrnat’s deﬁnitions for the genetic and mediative approaches are
sufﬁciently clear. The former refers to inﬂuence and afﬁnity studies which can either
revolve around one author’s inﬂuence on an entire tradition—e. g. Poe’s inﬂuence on and
afﬁnities with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish American writers——or one
writer’s inﬂuence on another speciﬁc writer—e. g. William Faulkner’s inﬂuence on

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As Pérez Firmat suggests, a nuanced genetic critique does more

than uncover literary or literal markers of inﬂuence. The critic should analyze these
points of contact to elaborate on “the uses to which a given author or text have been put
by his or her successors” (3). In other words, the critic moves away from the idea that the
later writer is somehow inferior to the precursor simply because the follower comes after
and demonstrates the inﬂuence of the earlier author toward a model in which the literary
offspring affects, or even creates, the literary parent.7 The mediative approach,
contrastingly, does not describe the method of the critic as much as it does the piece
which the critic engages. This approach wrestles with texts that are inherently inter-
American, texts whose plots, settings, characters, and/or critiques already transgress
national, political, and linguistic boundaries. Much Chicano/a and Latino/a ﬁction and
literary criticism ﬁts under this umbrella as do the novels of an author like B. Traven or
the short ﬁction and opinion pieces that Katherine Anne Porter wrote about Mexico.
Perez Firmat’s apparently clear rubric, however, becomes muddled when he tries
to differentiate between the generic and appositional approaches. The ﬁrst problem with
Perez F irmat’s explanation of the generic approach is that it tries to allow for two
different types of study. He identiﬁes several essays that follow his deﬁnition for the
generic, “using as a point of departure a broad, abstract notion of wide applicability” to
“establish a hemispheric context” (3), but then he claims that David T. Haberly’s
contribution to the volume, an inter-American study of the legend, “is generic in the
literary sense” (3) without ever discussing how such a genre study ﬁts within the previous
deﬁnition for the generic mode. However, the term “generic” seems to be a better label

for Haberly’s type of cross cultural or transnational genre study than it does for the other

 

7 Speaking of inﬂuence, Perez Firmat’s descriptions of the genetic approach to inter-American literary
studies certainly reveal the inﬂuence of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Inﬂuence.

essays which Perez F irmat dubs as generic since these essays also fall into what he calls
the appositional—focusing more on “conﬂuence” than “inﬂuence” and paying more
attention to “formal and thematic continuities” than to “causal links” (4). Even Haberly’s
essay could be considered appositional since genre studies are all about formal
connections.

If the uncertainty between the generic and the appositional is not enough to
confuse later critics who pick up on Perez F irmat’s model, then the deﬁnition of the
generic mode itself can be called into question. What, for example, does Pérez F irmat
mean when he refers to “a point of departure a broad, abstract notion of wide
applicability” (3)? He provides no further explanation to illuminate his vague wording,
and the examples that he suggests follow the model appear to be based on very speciﬁc
rather than general or abstract subjects—Lois Parkinson Zamora’s essay on American
writers’ preoccupation with history and Eduardo Gonzalez’s article on mulatez. Pérez
Firmat’s imprecise description of his generic mode demonstrates a genetic connection
between his volume and Lewis Hanke’s edited collection Do the Americas Have a
Common History? . Pérez F irmat afﬁrms, “[t]he title of this collection was inspired by”
Hanke’s book (4), but he does not suggest that the connection runs deeper than the title.
His rubric, however, reveals his replication of his reading of Hanke’s volume, a reading

that concludes that the Americas do not share a common history.8 The center of Hanke’s

 

8 Perez Firmat reads Hanke’s volume very much with the grain provided by the editor—“A Critique of the
Bolton Theory”—-as the book’s subtitle suggests. However, several of the essays which Hanke claims
criticize Bolton’s theory end up supporting Bolton’s larger argument—that the Americas do hold certain
historical elements in common that require a hemispheric rather than a national approach to American
history. For example, Hanke describes Sanford Mosk’s essay in the volume as “a sober description of the
economic differences between the United States and Latin America” (165) even though Mosk goes to great
lengths to show similarities between economic and agricultural systems in the U.S. South and Latin
America both before and after the U.S. Civil War (182-84). Mosk claims that “[t]his emphasis was not
intended to suggest that the two regions have had an identical historical experience” (I 84), but his larger

collection is Bolton’s 1932 address to the American Historical Association entitled “The
Epic of Greater America.” Several of the essays that Hanke reprints in the volume admit
that Bolton’s efforts to shift the study and teaching of American history from nation to
hemisphere make sense, but the overall sentiment of the volume suggests that the
differences between American histories trump any shared experience and that Bolton’s
thesis, which glosses over differences to highlight broad similarities in American
histories, falls apart in the face of these differences.9
Pérez Firmat intemalizes this critique when he deﬁnes his own approaches to
inter-American literary studies. Tellingly, the only essay he quotes from Hanke’s volume
is the most overt attack on Bolton’s thesis—Edmundo O’Gorman’s “Do the Americas
Have a Common History?”—citing some of O’Gorman’s most disparaging commentary
as follows: “According to the Mexican philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman, for example,
the unity of the Americas is no more than a ‘beautiful, fallacious illusion’ and a
‘geographical hallucination’” (5). '0 Anxious to avoid a similar critique, which he claims
actually predates his volume since writers such as Roberto Fernandez Retamar have
argued for years that historical differences divide the literatures of Spanish American

from literature written in the United States (5), Pe'rez Firmat refuses to deﬁne any of his

four approaches to inter-American literary studies as historical. He does list Zamora’s

 

focus on economic differences reveals that both historical differences and similarities between disparate
American nations allow for a hemispheric approach to their histories.

9 Bolton does cover what he calls the “larger historical unities and interrelations of the Americas” (98)—

e. g. European colonialism, revolution, and expansion—with very broad brush strokes that, in hindsight,
ahnost appear sloppy. However, Hanke argues that Bolton “acknowledged differences in the Americas”
but refused to emphasize them since the majority of historians in the United States had already created a
“gulf between the United States and the nations to the south” by focusing solely on differences (46-47).

’0 Pérez Firmat’s citation of O’Gorman oversimpliﬁes the latter’s critique and makes it appear more cynical
than it actually is. O’Gorman calls Bolton’s thesis “a beautiful, fallacious illusion” (107) because Bolton
does not, and O’Gorman suggests that he cannot, establish “the existence of an American culture” ( 107
O’Gorman’s italics). He does not call Bolton’s thesis “a geographical hallucination” (109). He uses this
barb, instead, to describe Bolton’s (and Hegel’s) tendency to view “the difference between the Americas in
terms of degree, not of essence” (109).

“demonstration that there exists a New World historical consciousness that cuts across
national boundaries” as an example of the generic mode (3), but by doing so, he diverts
the critiques of O’Gorman, F emandez Retamar, and others who see no historical links
between the Americas away ﬁom his rubric and toward the speciﬁc essay. Perez
Firmat’s suggestion that the generic approach discovers “broad, abstract notion[s] of wide
applicability” (3) is simply a coded way to describe historical comparative readings of
American literatures.

According to Pérez F irmat’s own deﬁnitions, then, the generic and the
appositional approaches collapse into one another; the only real difference between the
two methods is that the generic “us[es] as a point of departure a broad, abstract notion of
wide applicability” (3) while the appositional does not. In other words, the texts being
compared in a generic study need some sort of historical connection while those in an
appositional study do not. If we strictly follow Perez Firmat’s deﬁnition of the
appositional, the connections made through this approach should remain completely
between the texts themselves.ll Not only should inﬂuence be overlooked, but context
should be ignored as well. Once again, the essays that Pérez F irmat claims fall within the
appositional framework do not completely agree with his deﬁnition—Wendy Faris’
comparison between Faulkner and Alejo Carpentier pays attention to both context and
text. We are left to ask whether Faris’ essay is generic and whether Zamora’s and
Gonzalez’s pieces are appositional. If we label all three essays both generic and
appositional, we do very little to differentiate between them. Calling them both is

tantamount to calling them nothing at all.

 

” Such an approach would be a comparative model very much in line with the New Criticism. The
formalist model can provide quality close readings of literature, but it ignores historical and biographical
details which appear increasingly important when one is trying to write inter-American literary criticism.

Pérez Firmat’s vague deﬁnitions and applications of the appositional and generic
approaches and his refusal to overtly connect any of his methods to history lead to
confusing moments in the otherwise clear work of various inter-American literary critics
who employ his terminology to describe their own comparative methods. For example,
Deborah Cohn claims that she takes an appositional approach in History and Memory in
the Two Souths, describing the approach as follows: “I rechannel the question of
inﬂuence away from direct textual contacts in order to examine convergences, similar
features and strategies that have developed as responses to analogous sociopolitical and
historical circumstances” (7 my emphasis). Cohn’s focus on “similar features and
strategies” rather than on direct authorial inﬂuence certainly ﬁts within Pérez F irmat’s
appositional method, but her claim that these attributes and tactics are connected to
shared conditions—whether political, cultural, or historical—goes beyond the limitations
that Pérez Firmat sets for the appositional approach. Cohn’s interest in “shared histories”
(2) steers her work toward the generic method, but, as I have already suggested, the
imprecise nature of Pérez F irmat’s deﬁnition of the generic method distorts any attempt
to connect American literatures through speciﬁc historical moments, events, or
institutions that affect authors across and through the borders and barriers that might
otherwise divide them. Cohn’s description of her work as appositional is not so much a
misreading of Pérez Firmat’s terminology as it is a demonstration that his rubric is not
comprehensive. Pérez Firmat simply does not provide a label to describe the type of

historically grounded work which Cohn and others are doing, or, at least, he does not

admit to provide such an approach.12 History and Memory in the Two Souths

 

’2 Cohn brieﬂy returns to Pérez F irmat’s rubric in the volume she co-edited with Jon Smith, Look Away!, a
complex collection of essays which demonstrates “multiple ways of doing New World studies”

inadvertently challenges the totality of Pe'rez F irmat’s suggestion that the approaches to
inter-American literature can be contained within four terms, especially when none of
these terms account for historical connections between the Americas. At the same time,
Cohn’s description of her approach as appositional sells her own work short since this
label, by deﬁnition, does not allow for the very key to her study—the shared past.
Deborah J. Rosenthal and Monika Kaup also return to Pérez Firmat’s framework.
In the introductory comments to their co-edited volume Mixing Race, Mixing Culture,
they describe their project as generic, claiming, “our theme, race and cultural mixture,
belongs to Pérez Firmat’s ﬁrst category (generic), deﬁned as transnational concepts of
‘wide applicability’ in the hemispheric context (3)” (xviii-xix). However, Kaup and
Rosenthal skillfully problematize Pérez Firmat’s labels in a manner that demonstrates
that the inter-American literary criticism they espouse, like the theme of their collection '
itself, is hybrid or mixed:
Race mixture is an all-American phenomenon, but its discrete regional and
national instances do not stem from One single origin. Thus, our theme is situated
between the ‘appositional’ and the ‘genetic,’ or halfway between constituting a set
of concepts that belong to the same literary/cultural inter-American ‘blood’ family
and a dialogue between foreign languages. In short, in inter-American criticism,
race and cultural mixture occupies a hybrid position between difference and
sameness—indeed, a mirror image of itself. (xix)
This adroit move by Kaup and Rosenthal puts Pérez Firmat’s rubric, regardless of any of

its problems, to work to both describe and mirror the approach of their collection, but it

 

(“Introduction” 14 italics in original). Their references to the appositional approach in the brief
introduction to the “William Faulkner and Latin America” section of the book (304) demonstrate the same

attempt to assign historical speciﬁcity to the approach itself.

10

does not clarify nor improve upon any of the terms themselves. This lack of
clariﬁcation—their refusal to disentangle the generic from the appositional while
purposefully blending the appositional and the genetic—could be another subtle
argument by Kaup and Rosenthal about mixture, a suggestion that like race, literary
criticism is always already mixed; there are no pure races and there are no pure critical
approaches. ’3

The essays in Mixing Race, Mixing Culture do not revolve around Pérez Firmat’s
terms, but Rosenthal does return to them in her contribution to the anthology. In “Race
Mixture and the Representation of Indians in the U.S. and the Andes,” she seeks to
“familiarize scholars of U.S. literature with the Andean categories of Indianismo and
Indigenismo to demonstrate how, when we speak of comparative literature of the
Americas, similar literary concerns (here, white-authored novels about Indians) ﬁnd
various modes of critical discourse” (124). Rosenthal goes on to call her approach
appositional, but her essay hovers between the appositional and the generic and
approaches history in a way that Pérez F irrnat’s terms do not admit. Rosenthal’s
approach could be called generic (genre studies) since she traces similar preoccupations
in a speciﬁc genre—the novel—written by one particular race about another, or it could
be called generic in the other sense used by Perez Firmat since her theme has “wide
applicability” (3) throughout the Americas. Whether generic or appositional, Pérez
Firmat’s terms do not really apply to Rosenthal’s article since a common background of
European conquest, forced Indian displacement, and European/indigenous mixture

connects the novels she analyzes even though each author’s home country has a distinct

 

‘3 This echoes Pérez Firmat’s own admission that the approaches “are not mutually exclusive nor do they
(for this reason) necessarily appear in pure form” (4), but it cuts against the totality that I see in Pérez
Firmat’s desire to create-four boxes and subsequently cram each of the essays in his book into one of them.

11

relationship with its indigenous populations. Rosenthal’s essay, like Cohn’s study, shows
the need to clarify and/or revamp Perez F irmat’s rubric to include a
comparative/historical approach even while the undercurrent of the collection, Mixing
Race, Mixing Culture, suggests that no pure literary approaches can exist.

The very element of Pérez Firmat’s discussion of the literatures of the Americas
that continually brings other critics back to his work, his attempt to name the ways in
which inter-American literary study can be accomplished, is, paradoxically, the very part
of his thinking that needs to be revisited. His four-tiered rubric must be revised for
clarity and to include the type of historically grounded comparative scholarship in which
several inter-American critics are currently engaged. One could certainly question the
need to go through the effort of redeﬁning Pérez F irmat’s framework rather than simply
breaking away from his model. After all, his collection is now eighteen years old, and
what was the inchoate ﬁeld of inter-American studies in 1990 is currently thriving. In
some ways, the critical discussion has moved on, and several critics do inter-American
' criticism without obsessing over Pérez F irmat’s early efforts to frame the ﬁeld. As I have
already suggested, however, multiple critics still return to Pérez Firmat’s framework—in
spite of the slippery nature of some of his terms—in order to locate their work within the
growing ﬁeld. The continuing utility of his rubric for these critics, the fact that it remains
the ﬁrst and only attempt to map out the possible approaches for inter-American literary
studies, and the fact that many of the books which became the early critical canon for this
ﬁeld grew out of the essays published in Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?

demand that we re—examine and revise his framework.

12

Pérez Firmat’s genetic and mediative labels do not need to be changed since they
both mark off a clear type of study without collapsing into each other or into the other
two approaches.14 The generic label, I suggest, should only be used to refer to
comparative genre studies, and the appositional label should be used to describe studies
which juxtapose texts with similar concerns but no obvious historical links. Limiting the
generic approach speciﬁcally to genre studies should prevent the confusion caused by the
particularly vague wording in its original deﬁnition. '5 This new, speciﬁc delineation
between the generic and the appositional should obviate the possible confusion between
the two terms when read in their original context. Finally, we must coin a new term to
describe the type of inter-American criticism that values thematic convergence over
direct authorial connections while paying particular attention to both shared and
divergent historical moments that create and/or challenge the thematic link. The term
historiographic, I suggest, best captures the elements mentioned above.

A historiographic approach emphasizes the common anxieties, preoccupations,
and themes that various American literatures reveal when read side by side, and it
considers direct literary inﬂuence as secondary to speciﬁc moments, events, and/or
institutions that create historical afﬁnities between the disparate areas and/or nations from

which the literatures originate. Historiographic, like Perez Firmat’s original terms, is

 

‘4 In claiming that Perez F irrnat’s mediative and genetic approaches do not collapse into one another, and
thus, do not need to be revised, 1 am not suggesting that these labels do not have any problems. The use of
a biological term such as genetic to describe inﬂuence studies suggests that certain traits are passed down
from one writer to the next regardless of the will of the later writer. Similarly, mediative implies that this
inherently inter-American ﬁction acts as a reconciler or arbitrator between distinct American traditions and
identities when the political power of some of this ﬁction—early Chicano/a literature, for example—is
found in its ability to agitate the points of tension, the supposed sites of in-betweenness, rather than
assuaging them. Even with these problems, however, the terms genetic and mediative still work as simple
identiﬁcation tags to describe certain types of inter-American literature and criticism while the terms
generic and appositional do not.

5 Another reason why the generic label should be closely connected to genre studies is that without this
link the term almost sounds like an insult. No one wants to hear their work described as generic, especially
critics who are not familiar with Perez Firmat’s usage of the term.

13

certainly not a perfect word to illustrate the approach I am describing. The term,
however, does underline the importance of history within this approach which none of
Pérez Firmat’s terms accomplishes. Other possible labels that also emphasize the
historical bent of such an approach have more downfalls than the term historiographic.
Calling the approach historical, for example, could confuse the approach with much
earlier (pre New Criticism) types of literary scholarship while calling it a new
comparative historicism (which is actually what the approach is) would run the risk of
confusing the method with Stephen Greenblatt’s subversion and containment model.16
Finally, a broad term such as historiographic allows for several types of
comparative/historical readings of literature; each critic can choose how they read the
historical connections between the literary texts—e. g. a liberal history, a Marxist history,
etc.

Unlike Pérez Firmat’s terms, the historiographic label aptly describes the careful
attention paid to shared pasts in the following inter-American literary studies: George
Handley’s Postslavery Literatures in the Americas which juxtaposes English Caribbean,
Spanish Caribbean, and U.S. southern novels whose themes reveal a shared plantation
past dependant on the institution of slavery; Rosenthal’s Race Mixture in Nineteenth-
Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions, Suzanne Bost’s Mulattas and Mestizas, and
Juan Castro’s Mestizo Nations which all connect the themes of mestizaje and
miscegenation to the formation of national identities throughout the Americas; J osé

LirnOn’s American Encounters which unveils the erotic nature of the United States’

troubled relations with Greater Mexico; and Cohn’s History and Memory in the Two

 

'6 The phrase “new comparative historicism” is also redundant; the comparative angle is already embedded
in Pérez Firmat’s four terms and in my deﬁnition of a historiographic approach since we both discuss these
terms speciﬁcallyin the context of inter-American literary studies.

14

Souths which links literary afﬁnities between Spanish American and U.S. southern ﬁction
to the military defeat and subsequent poverty of both regions.

I do not want to confuse the historiographic approach to inter-American literary
studies with historiography per se. In describing the importance these critics ascribe to
history, it is important to remember that we are still discussing literature as opposed to
history. Handley explains that literature differs from history because it suggests that not
all things can be remembered:

While historiography has emerged with valuable (if always tentative) New World

death statistics, a poetics that recognizes oblivion—that is, not what is

remembered but what is forgotten and therefore unsayable—offers a potentially
more ethical way to give representative shape to these elusive historical patterns

that link the U.S. South to other regions of slavery. (“A New” 27)

Handley’s commentary is speciﬁc to what he calls postslavery literature, but I feel that it
also helps to differentiate between literary studies which follow a historiographic
approach and historiography itself.

I adopt a historiographic approach in my efforts to interrogate the discourses of
racial mixture that both affect and grow out of the United States’ and Mexico’s most
exaggerated moments of internal violence. I place primary documents about racial
mixture ﬁ'om the U.S. South and Mexico side by side in order to create a conversation
between the seemingly opposite but furtively similar discourses of miscegenation and
mestizaje, and I offer three comparative readings of the novels of William Faulkner and
Carlos Fuentes to reveal the overarching power of the discourses of miscegenation and

mestizaje to shape national opinions about race and racial mixture and, contrastingly, the

15

creative power of an individual author to challenge these nationally accepted views. My
approach to both the historical texts and the ﬁction crosses the linguistic and geopolitical
borders that separate the U.S. South and Mexico and serves as a practical example of how
to write inter-American literary criticism.

This study reveals what we can learn by reading American literatures in their
hemispheric contexts—that linguistic, geographic, and political distinctions (differences
between nations) do not bury the experiences that authors and people in general share
across these boundaries. In short, national markers should not determine how we study
literature. However, the historiographic approach which I adopt in this project runs the
risk of erasing difference, of meshing Mexican and U.S. southern literatures into a bland
mass of sameness. In simple terms, if followed without caution, this approach could add
to the already visible problem of institutional giants—e. g. departments of English—and
all-inclusive movements in literary studies—e. g. the elusive ﬁeld of Cultural Studies—
colonizing and/or devouring the ﬁelds of Latin American Studies and Latin American
literature. ‘7 Handley repeatedly warns in both Postslavery Literatures in the Americas
and “A New World Poetics of Oblivion” that while comparative approaches to literature

best allow literary critics to move beyond “the myopia of nationalism” (“A New” 34)

 

'7 I call Cultural Studies elusive here because, when put on the spot, one is hard-pressed to deﬁne what the
ﬁeld of Cultural Studies actually is. Like inter-American literary studies, Cultural Studies has something to
do with breaking through boundaries. I ﬁnd Neil Larsen’s commentary quite useful here: “I would propose
the following empirical generalization: ‘cultural studies’ when not simply an explicit reference to the
tradition of the Birmingham school, is the Anglo-North American name we now generally give to the
dominant current of left-tending poststructuralist criticism—especially, for practical purposes, that
stemming from the work of Michel F oucault—as it crosses from the humanities into the social sciences”
(729). This deﬁnition of Cultural Studies does not make it appear threatening to Latin American Studies,
but it is a common, and paradoxical, error of some Cultural Studies approaches to interpret either the
literatures and arts of a speciﬁc tradition or the “‘discourses’ of a cultural but not necessarily literary or
linguistic character” (729) of that same tradition without placing the studied artifact within its own cultural
context. The idea here is that under the guise of conducting Cultural Studies, critics in the dominant ﬁelds
within the humanities (particularly English) with little or no linguistic or cultural training can appropriate
literary or cultural objects from other traditions, and thus, academically subaltemize these smaller ﬁelds.

16

they can also “result in an elision of important regional differences” (25). He suggests
that unless “Latin America and the Caribbean are understood as protagonists and not
simply as sites of U.S. irnperialistic aspiration and exploitation” (Postslavery 28) that the
effort to move American Studies ﬁ'om nation to hemisphere could simply become “a
neoimperialist expansion into the ﬁeld of Latin American studies” (28).

I try to avoid these pitfalls in my historiographic study through various strategies.
First, I offer a rigorous comparison between the U.S. Civil War, the Mexican Revolution,
and U.S. southern and Mexican literatures that reveals both a shared past and several key
areas of difference. I draw clear connections between internal warfare cast as fratricide,
racial mixture, and nation building by analyzing what the two regions share and
where/how they divergefrom one another. Second, I approach the primary texts in their
original languages, Spanish or English, in order to avoid what may be added to or
subtracted from the texts through the process of translation.'8 Finally, I seek to read both
Mexico and the U.S. South as protagonists. It is difﬁcult, if not impossible, for a critic of
U.S. hegemony and a student of Mexican literature and culture to interpret the U.S.-
Mexican War as anything other than an imperial exercise in which Mexico (tragic
protagonist or not) played the role of the victim. I suggest that the U.S.-Mexican War
served as a catalyst for the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution, but my focus on
William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes (whose novels focus on the later wars) allows me to

approach both the U.S. South and Mexico as protagonists (with all the ambitions and

 

'8 In this sense, I follow the older Area Studies model which suggests that a serious scholar of any given
literature must be able to read that literature in the original. However, I recognize that the efforts to
redeﬁne American literature on hemispheric lines must heavily rely on translations since the actual practice
of teaching inter-American literatures at the undergraduate level could not be accomplished to any large
extent without them. And ﬁnally, I must offer my own translations of all Spanish language texts or cite
published English translations of these texts since I cannot assume that my audience is Spanish/English

bilingual.

l7

tragic ﬂaws that the term implies) of civil wars without glossing over important
differences.19 My historiographic approach allows for a new comparative reading of the
Mexican Revolution and the U.S. Civil War which views both conﬂicts as separate
nationalist projects and reveals that the discourses of racial mixture which accompanied
them were nationalist constructs—tools for deﬁning who did and who did not belong to

the newly deﬁned nations.

My project focuses primarily on William Faulkner’s and Carlos Fuentes’ literary
portrayals of racial mixture in their novels about the U.S. Civil War, the Mexican
Revolution, and the racialized societies which grew out of each conﬂict. I follow the
historiographic method I have developed by basing my three readings of Faulkner and
Fuentes, chapters 3 through 5, on my two primarily historical chapters in which I lay the
grounds for why the Mexican Revolution and its discourse of mestizaje and the U.S. Civil
War and its discourse of miscegenation should be interpreted alongside one another.

In the ﬁrst chapter, “War in the Two Souths: Present Pasts and Civil War in the
U.S. South and Mexico,” I suggest that a similar obsession with the past in both the U.S.
South and Mexico begs that we interpret the histories and literatures of each region side
by side. I argue that the U.S. North’s relationship with the U.S. South during the U.S.
Civil War mirrored, ironically, the U.S. South’s relationship with Mexico in the U.S.-

Mexican War of 1846-48—an economically and militarily dominant north subdued and

 

'9 The problem with viewing the U.S. South as a protagonist in a war that eventually became a war about
race is that such a view could fall (and for many twentieth century apologists for the U.S. South already has
fallen) into nostalgic longings for the days of the plantation and/or racist justiﬁcations for the region’s
reliance on the hideous institution of slavery. However, reading any nation as a protagonist could lead to
similar downfalls. In order to avoid nationalism, nostalgia, and ﬂat out racism, the protagonist’s/nation’s
faults must receive more attention than the positive attributes it lost during war.

18

occupied a weaker south. These commonalities challenge the aura of U.S. southern
exceptionality and allow for a critical discussion of multiple Souths. I offer a meta-
critique of the concept of the two Souths to obviate an inherent risk in this approach of
glossing over important differences between the U.S. South and Mexico. Finally, I
analyze civil war as a concept and suggest that the Mexican Revolution and the U.S.
Civil War continue to function as the primary historical markers which bring each
region’s past into its present due to the ethos of defeat which grew out of each war, and,
more importantly, because the internal nature of both wars ingrained them upon the
national and regional consciousnesses as fratricidal tragedies.

My second chapter, “Discourses of Racial Mixture Born in Civil War: Creating
the Nation in the United States and Mexico,” is an interrogation of the concepts of
miscegenation and mestizaje, how they grew out of the violence of the U.S. Civil War
and the Mexican Revolution, and how they disparately function(ed) to control how
individuals view race and racial mixture in the United States and Mexico. I map out how
contrasting views about racial mixture held by British and Spanish colonizers eventually
created distinct racial atmospheres in the young United States and Mexico which,
tempered by the fratricidal ﬁres of the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution,
crystallized into the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje. I read the founding
documents for each discourse—David Goodman Croly’s and George Wakeman’s
Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White
Man and Negro and José Vasconcelos’ La raza césmica [The Cosmic Race]—alongside
one another to differentiate between miscegenation and mestizaje and to emphasize their

disturbing (and often ignored) similarities. My analysis of these texts reveals that both

19

miscegenation and mestizaje favor whiteness—miscegenation through overt segregation
of blacks from whites and mestizaje through public praise for racial mixture paired with
the secret agenda of assimilation toward whiteness.

In chapter 3, “Racial Mixture as Fragmentation,” I argue that each author’s
tendency to depict so-called mixed race subjects as fragments re-creates the essentialist
underpinnings of the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje, regardless of the
sympathy each author might or might not show toward the individual characters. The
rewards Fuentes creates for Tomas Arroyo and Artemio Cruz versus the punishments
Faulkner provides for Joe Christmas and Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon also testify to
the power of miscegenation and mestizaje as racial discourses; Fuentes allows his
supposedly mixed race protagonists relative to extraordinary success while Faulkner
dooms his fragmented characters to lives of vagrancy and self-violence.

Chapter 4, “Ancestry, Blood, and the Violence of the White Fathers,” in contrast
to chapter 3, demonstrates Fuentes’ and Faulkner’s ability to challenge mestizaje and
miscegenation even while writing within the conﬁnes of each discourse. I suggest that
Fuentes offers an overt critique of mestizaje’s attempts to whiten Mexico in Gringo
viejo/ The Old Gringo by having Arroyo hypocritically repeat the violent lifestyle of his
wealthy white father while claiming to love and protect his poor, raped Indian mother.
The critique in Faulkner’s Light in August is more subtle since, on the surface, Faulkner
creates a blatant blood discourse in which various characters assign positive traits to
“white blood” and negative traits to “black blood.” Joe Christmas’ murder of Joanna
Burden, however, reveals that Christmas repeats the violence of Doc Hines and

McEachern—his maternal grandfather and his foster father. Both Arroyo and Christmas

20

learn and/or inherit violence from their “civilized” white father ﬁgures rather than from
their “barbaric” Indian and/or African bloodlines.

In my ﬁnal chapter—“Black, Mexican, and Black Mexican”-—I argue that
Faulkner’s Light in August and Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz [The Death of
Artemio Cruz] each offer ﬁctional portrayals of the historical erasure of black Mexican
identity. Through the disparate lives but surprisingly similar racial views of Calvin
Burden and Eupheus (Doc) Hines, Light in August simultaneously collapses Mexican
identity into blackness and describes Mexican and black as polar opposites which cannot
co-exist. La muerte de Artemio Cruz, contrastingly, erases Mexico’s Aﬁican past by
suggesting throughout the novel that Cruz is the ideal mestizo (the product of Indian and
European mixture, the new national type after the Revolution) only to reveal through
extended ﬂashbacks inside Cruz’s mind that he is the illegitimate son of a white
plantation owner and his mulatta servant.

My historiographic approach to Faulkner’s and Fuentes’ novels demonstrates a
fruitful method for future work in the growing ﬁeld of inter-American literary studies, but
more importantly, my study emphasizes the artiﬁcial nature of national and racial
identities. My project reveals that Mexico was essential to how both the U.S. South and
the United States in general deﬁned themselves as nations. This connection strips the
U.S. South of its exceptional aura and challenges both U.S. nationalism and Mexican
nationalism (and, of course, the regional version of so-called southern nationalism) by
afﬁrming that the divisions between these nations and/or regions—whether political
borders such as the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo or supposed cultural dividers like the Mason-

Dixon line—do not exist a priori but are national/regional inventions. My juxtaposition

21

of the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje insists that racial identities—black,
mestizo, Indian, white, mulatto—are constructs which, in both the cases of Mexico and
the United States, are closely connected to the creation of national identities. Reading
mestizaje and miscegenation alongside one another also reveals that both segregationist
and assimilationist strategies for approaching so-called racial mixture create hierarchies
which favor the category of whiteness at the cost of all others. Finally, reading Faulkner
and Fuentes side by side reafﬁrms that American literatures are best understood when
studied on hemispheric lines that pay attention to shared pasts, repeated themes, and
important historical differences while willfully crossing linguistic divides and arbitrary

geopolitical and national borders.

22

Chapter 1
War in the Two Souths: Present Pasts and Civil War in the U.S. South and Mexico

The ﬁrst obstacle to overcome when conducting a comparative study between the
U.S. South and Mexico is to reﬁrte a longstanding argument that the United States and
Mexico are too different to provide any real grounds for comparison. On the surface
level, the proximity of the two countries quickly disqualiﬁes any reliance on geography
and demographics to support such an argument; the two countries literally and
metaphorically bleed into each other. The increasing number of Mexican immigrants
seeking work in U.S. cities and agricultural regions (not to mention the millions of U.S.
citizens who have Mexican ancestry) and the thousands of U.S. tourists who travel south
to Mexico every year all suggest that no inherent barrier (physical or mental) divides the
two countries. The argument of extreme difference ﬁnds its teeth in obvious linguistic
and political differences and in long-held racial prejudices.l This argument can be used
to support various essentialist agendas on either side of the Rio Grande—whether they be
nationalist or just plain racist—but it also ﬁnds its way into the work of Mexico’s most
renowned cultural critic—Octavio Paz.

Paz was certainly not the ﬁrst Latin American intellectual to describe Latin

America and the United States strictly in terms of difference. This tradition can be traced

 

' Ironically, the racial prejudices held by many U.S. citizens toward Mexicans in the middle of the
nineteenth century may be credited with saving Mexican sovereignty. At the end of the U.S.-Mexican War,
calls for U.S. annexation of Mexico as a whole were thwarted, in part, by the essentialist argument that
large numbers of “inferior Mexicans” could not possibly be integrated into the United States’ contemporary
version of white democracy. An article from an 1847 volume of The United States Magazine, and
Democratic Review (a publication which typically supported the war against Mexico) summed up the
aforementioned sentiments as follows: “The annexation of the country to the United States would be a
calamity. 5,000,000 ignorant and indolent half-civilized Indians, with 1,500,000 free negroes and
mulattoes, the remnants of the British slave trade, would scarcely be a desirable incumbrance [sic], even
with the great natural wealth of Mexico” (“Mexico” 101).

23

at least back to the nineteenth century.2 Cuban poet and freedom ﬁghter José Marti,
Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodo, and Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos all
described Latin American and U.S. relations in terms of difference before Paz, and
contemporary writers such as Carlos Fuentes and Cuban Roberto F ernéndez Retamar
follow this tradition after him. One important difference between Paz’s El laberinto de la
soledad [The Labyrinth of Solitude] and the observations of these other thinkers is that
Paz describes what he considers a speciﬁc problem between the United States and
Mexico while the others juxtapose the United States with the entire region of Latin
America.

Paz bases his whole discussion of Mexican Solitude (and, eventually, the solitude
of all humans except the gringos) in El laberinto de la soledad on the dichotomy he
establishes between U.S. citizens and Mexicans. He examines dozens of differences that
he believes divide the two groups, and in an addendum to the text that he added nineteen
years after its original publication, he claims that these differences will probably,
although not absolutely, destroy any chance of dialogue and coexistence between the two
countries. He states:

For more than a century that country has presented itself before our eyes as a

gigantic reality, but barely human. [. . .] It is impossible to detain a giant; it is

possible, although it is not easy, to make it listen to others: if the giant listens, the
possibility for coexistence opens. Because of their origins (the Puritan speaks

with God and with himself, not with others) and, more than anything, because of

 

2 This tradition of difference could even be traced all the way back to Bartolomé de las Casas—himself a
Spanish colonizer turned priest—and his sixteenth-century denunciation of Spanish colonialism in the
Americas which created a black legend that other European powers (and later, European and U.S.
historians) used to contrast and justify their supposedly more docile versions of colonialism.

24

their power, North Americans excel in monologue: they are eloquent, and they

also know the value of silence. But conversation is not their strength: they do

not know how to listen nor reply.3 (“Postdata” 252)

Paz refutes his own conditional statement, his only hope that Mexico and the
United States can get along, by asserting that the giant does not know how to
communicate with its neighbors to the south. Current political relations between the
United States and Mexico do little to paint a silver lining on Paz’s bleak appraisal of
U.S.-Mexico affairs, but his entire argument ignores the possibility of difference within
the United States itself. Paz suggests that the United States is a homogenous whole, but
even a summary reading of U.S. history demonstrates otherwise. Racial, economic,
religious, political, and regional differences within the United States—from the colonial
period through Paz’s twentieth century—make his argument appear far too clean-cut.

Fuentes, both a Mexican diplomat and scholar like Paz himself, repeats but
problematizes the divisions between the United States and Mexico that Paz so ardently
maintains. In a series of lectures sponsored by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
and later published as Latin America: At War with the Past, Fuentes juxtaposes the
United States with Latin America in general:

We are different, we are other: North Americans (by which I mean only the

citizens of the United States) and Latin Americans. But we cannot impose our

vision of the world on the United States, nor can they on us. We must try to

bridge our differences without denying them: We are worried about redeeming

 

3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of works from Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad y otras obras are
my own. At times, I will contrast Paz’s original and/or my translations with Lysander Kemp’s, Yara
Milos’ and Rachel Phillips Belash’s well-known English translation. In these cases, I will mark their
translations in the text or via footnotes.

25

the past. They are accustomed to acclaiming the future. Their past is assimilated;
and, too often, it is simply forgotten. Ours is still battling for our souls. We
represent the abundance of poverty. They, the poverty of abundance. They want V
to live better. We want to die better. North Americans are accustomed to
success. Latin Americans, to failure.4 (9 my emphasis)
Even while supporting Paz’s basic division between the United States and Mexico——or,
in this case, between the United States and the entire region of Latin America—Fuentes
opens the door for at least one part of the United States to be considered in Latin
American terms; this part of the United States is, as Fuentes himself suggests, the U.S.
South—a region obsessed with the past, and the only part of the United States, according
to Fuentes, that is haunted by the “image of defeat” so common in Latin America (“La
novela” 66).5 Unlike Paz, Fuentes accounts for the historical differences between the
U.S. North and the U.S. South. Indeed, his discussions of the vanquished U.S. South in
“La novela como tragedia: William Faulkner” [“The Novel as Tragedy: William

Faulkner”] and in his published interview with Jonathan Tittler almost read like

 

" This passage is intriguing on several levels. Not only does it follow Paz’s divisions between the United
States and Mexico while leaving open a new space within the dichotomy (as I explain later in the text), but
it also demonstrates how Fuentes simultaneously collapses the regional value of a term like “North
America” while upholding the regional value of “Latin America.” Rather than contrasting the United
States with Mexico alone, he points to differences between the United States and the entire region of Latin
America. His reliance on the term “Latin America” groups nations as disparate as Argentina and
Guatemala or Mexico and Chile into one entity. This move ﬁts well within the tradition of Marti, Rodd,
Vasconcelos, and others. However, Fuentes does the exact opposite when referring to the United States.
While the term “North American” technically refers to Mexicans as well as Canadians and U.S. citizens,
the term is often used to divide the primarily English speaking Americas (those ﬁ'om Canada and the
United States) from the primarily Spanish and Portuguese speaking Americas (from Latin America).
Fuentes realizes this common interpretation of the term and re-deﬁnes it to separate the United States from
Canada—“only the citizens of the United States” (9). Thus, he employs one regional term to describe a
single nation-state at the same time that he uses another regional term to describe a conglomeration of
nation-states.

5 All translations from Fuentes’ “La novela como tragedia: William Faulkner” are my own.

26

appendices to C. Vann Woodward’s well-known volume—The Burden of Southern
History.

Woodward’s famous treatment of the U.S. South reads the U.S. South as
exceptional when compared to the rest of the nation while opening a space to discuss the
U.S. South in international terms. His driving thesis is that a common history of defeat,
occupation, poverty, and ﬁ'ustration connects the disparate parts of the U.S. South to one
another while distinguishing the region from the nation as a whole (17-19, 190). This
thesis resurfaces in several volumes about the history and literature of the U.S. South that
follow in the wake of his study.‘5 These later works typically interpret Woodward’s
argument as one more support of the U.S. South’s exceptionality, and by doing so, they
gloss over the international context in which Woodward places the history of the U.S.
South, a history that he suggests is representative of the world norm. He states, “the
South had undergone an experience that it could share with no other part of America—
though it is shared by nearly all the people of Europe and Asia—the experience of
military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction” (190), and he suggests that the U.S.
South’s shared experience of defeat reveals that the United States, not the U.S. South, “is
unique among the people of the world” (188). This comparison of the U.S. South’s
history to those of Europe and Asia contains a strange blind spot that fails to see the
examples of defeat and occupation that are nearest (both geographically and historically)
to the history of the U.S. South—the frustrated histories of Latin America and the

Caribbean.

 

6 For example, see The Immoderate Post by C. Hugh Holman and The Myth of Southern History by F.
Garvin Davenport Jr.

27

Fuentes’ analyses of the society that produced Faulkner read much like
Woodward’s thesis. In “La novela como tragedia: William Faulkner,” he claims that
“[d]efeat is the core of Faulkner’s work, and the defeat of the South was the only one that
North Americans had suffered. Only in these lands between the Virginian mountains and
the Mississippi delta had North American men participated in an experience so common
for men outside the borders of the United States” (66), and he echoes these sentiments in
his interview with Jonathan Tittler: “Defeat, which is so common to mankind, which is
the lot of eighty percent of the people of the world, and suddenly there is the specter of
failure facing a country based on success. Then you can write Absalom, Abaslom! and all
the other great novels of Faulkner” (50). Fuentes, like Woodward, sees defeat as a bridge
between the U.S. South and the globe, but like Deborah Cohn, Jon Smith, and other
contemporary inter-American literary critics, he looks to Latin America rather than
Europe or Asia forother examples of ﬁ'ustration and defeat to compare with the history
and literature of the U.S. South. In Latin America: At War with the Past, he states, “Yes,
Latin America has been touched by defeat: the epic denial of Utopia by the conquest and
the colony, the enstatement [sic] of rigid, dogmatic, vertically ordained structures of
power and religion” (13). Fuentes’ statement suggests that the speciﬁc causes of Latin
America’s sense of perpetual failure differ from the historical circumstances that create
the U.S. South’s ethos of defeat, but the sensation remains the same. More importantly, a
summary reading of Latin American history reveals that military defeat, occupation, and
the poverty that follows—the speciﬁcs of Woodward’s thesis—practically deﬁne the

region.

28

In the cases of the U.S. South and one particular nation in Latin America-—
Mexico—this history of defeat has created an obsession with the past and its continued
existence in the present. Allen Tate, for example, describes the literature of the Southern
renascence as “a literature conscious of the past in the present” (545) while Faulkner’s
character, Gavin Stevens, famously claims that “[t]he past is never dead. It’s not even
past” (Requiem 92). This ever-present past in the U.S. South resonates with both Paz’s
and Fuentes’ descriptions of time in Mexico. Paz claims that during the ﬁesta the past
and the future combine in the present: “the succession of time stops and time returns to
what it was, and is, originally: a present where the past and the future are ﬁnally
reconciled” (El laberinto 69).7 Fuentes uses similar logic to describe the mythical time
that he tries to re-create in his ﬁction. He states, “mythical time, which as I say is a
present, does not admit the past as such. It considers what we call the past—in the
western linear system—as a present which is accreting, which is constantly enriching the
moment, the instant. The past is never condemned to the past in a mythical system. It is
always there with you” (“Interview” 50).

The Mexican and U.S. southern proclivities for the past in the present are clearly
linked to each region’s defeat in war.8 Both the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican
Revolution were internal nightmares (typically cast in the terms of fratricidal tragedy)

that continue to haunt writers in both the U.S. South and Mexico.9 In short, these wars

 

7 Paz uses this beautiful phrase to describe the days surrounding December 12, the day of Our Lady of
Guadalupe. This speciﬁc portrayal, however, correlates with Paz’s descriptions of how time functions
during all Mexican ﬁestas.

8 In the case of Mexico, a nostalgic longing for a romanticized version of Mexico’s indigenous past also
plays a major role in the nation’s afﬁnity for the past in the present.

For Mexico, the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848 also functions as a painful reminder of the past in the
present. As Fuentes states, “[t]he searing, open wound of the historical memory of Mexico is the War of
1847 with the United States and the loss of half our national territory because we were a weak and
disorganized nation” (Latin America 53). The Mexican memory of this war, however, does little to connect

29

create the ethos of defeat which differentiates both the U.S. South and Mexico from the
U.S. North while bringing the former regions into conversation with one another. Even
as these two catastrophes move farther into the past, they remain, or perhaps expand, in
the eyes of the authors who later approach them. Paz, born during the Mexican
Revolution but not a participant in it, calls the Revolution “a movement trying to re-
conquer our past, assimilate it, and make it alive in our present” (El laberinto 178).
Katherine Anne Porter, born twenty-ﬁve years after the U.S. Civil War terminated, once
complained, “I am the grandchild of a lost War, and I have blood-knowledge of what life
can be in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation” (160). For many Mexican
and U.S. southern writers, then, these wars are the events that bring the past into the
present, regardless of whether their ﬁction deals directly with one of the wars, e.g.
Fuentes’ Gringo viejo/T he 01d Gringo, or grapples with the wars’ political and social

fallout decades later, e. g. Faulkner’s Light in August.

The U.S. South and the Two Souths

Both historians and literary critics in the United States commonly treat the history
and literature of the U.S. South as atypical entities that participate in but remain separated
from U.S. history and literature in general. For example, W. J. Cash explains the U.S.
South’s exceptional nature as follows in The Mind of the South:

[I]f it can be said there are many Souths, the fact remains that there is also one

South. [It] proceeds from the common American heritage, and many of its

 

the literatures of Mexico and the U.S. South because the memory is so one-sided. The U.S. South (and the
United States in general) does not relive this war through ﬁction. In fact, the U.S.-Mexican War is almost
erased from the U.S. southern historical mindset because it was overshadowed by the cataclysm of the U.S.
Civil War that began only thirteen years later.

30

elements are readily recognizable as being simply variations on the primary

American theme. To imagine it existing outside this continent would be quite

impossible. But for all that, the peculiar history of the South has so greatly

modiﬁed it from the general American norm that, when viewed as a whole, it

decisively justiﬁes the notion that the country is—.—not quite a nation within a

nation, but the next thing to it. (viii)

Cash does not explain what “the next thing to [. . .] a nation within a nation” (viii) is, but
he conﬁnle suggests that the U.S. South is a unique phenomenon.

Current scholars of the U.S. South contest several parts of Cash’s treatise, but his
description of the region’s exceptionality is not one of them. ‘0 Contemporary
discussions of the U.S. South such as Larry J. Grifﬁn’s and Don H. Doyle’s 1995 edited
volume The South as an American Problem and John Lowe’s 2005 edited collection
Bridging Southern Cultures also deﬁne the region as a rarity or exception. In “How
American is the American South?”—David L. Carlton’s contribution to The South as an
American Problem—Carlton admits that “the region is, at least on some levels, an
intellectual construct” and that “it is a commonplace to acknowledge, with W. J. Cash,
that there are and have been ‘many Souths,”’ (33). He continues, “[n]onetheless, all of us
concerned with studying the region join Cash in his leap of faith regarding the existence
of ‘one South’: the assumption that there is a deﬁnable community by that name, one that

is distinguishable from the remainder of the United States in signiﬁcant ways” (3 3).

 

“’A short anecdote here demonstrates the tendency among some scholars of the U.S. South to avoid Cash’s
work. During a question and answer session at a recent Faulkner and Twain conference held at
Southeastern Missouri State University’s Center for Faulkner Studies, I asked M. Thomas Inge to elaborate
on his discussion of the irony of Miss Eunice Habersham’s separating the white lynch mob from Lucas
Beaucharnp in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust considering Cash’s idea of the “rape complex” (1 15). Inge
quickly responded that while Cash’s book claims to be about the South’s mind it is really about Cash’s own
mind, and he then moved on to the next question.

31

Carlton divests the U.S. South of the possibility of existing per se—the possibility which
any regional myth already takes for granted—by acknowledging that the region is a
construct. However, his willingness to follow the one South model demonstrates that his
admission of the construct of region is merely a side step before analyzing the very
construct as something more than a construct. This move is typical of southern studies in
the United States post Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities while an occasional
voice still suggests that the U.S. South exists in and of itself. In the end, both types of
study grant the imagined community that is the U.S. South more than imaginary status.
The discussion of a singular South is replete with problems. First, no one can
really agree what/where this “one Sou ” is. Cash suggests that the region includes the
states of the defeated Confederacy and various border areas, particularly Kentucky (vii).
More recently, William Ferris sets the conversation in Lowe’s volume by claiming that
“[w]e can map the former Confederate states and show a clearly deﬁned territory that we
call ‘the South.’ Within its border are a people and a landscape that are distinguished by
history and memory from the rest of the nation” (31). As I have already discussed, the
U.S. South’s obsession with the past is well-known, but to suggest that this trait stops at
the exact boundaries of the short-lived nation that was the Confederacy both ignores the
possibility of a similar preoccupation south of the U.S. South and oversimpliﬁes what
some of Ferris’ own peers’ view as the indeﬁnable borders of the region. John Shelton
Reed suggests that “[t]he South has always been a messy assortment of landscapes, local
societies, economic modes, peoples, and cultures” (“The South’s” 258) in the very
volume for which Ferris’ comments about “a clearly deﬁned territory” (31) serve as the

preamble. Reed then asks, “[w]hat do Georgia and Arkansas have in common, after all,

32

or Kentucky and Louisiana?” and responds, “[t]here certainly are a lot of differences, and
it is tempting to dwell on them. But bring Massachusetts into the picture, or California,
and then it is a different story. South Carolinians will allow of Tennessee that at least it
is not populated by Yankees. And South Carolinians will believe that means something”
(258). Reed’s description of the U.S. South approaches that of a collage, and as such, it
functions better than Ferris’ clearly delineated map of the former Confederacy. However,
Reed’s attempt to explain the connections that create the U.S. South via a deﬁnition of
Yankee absence falls short of Ferris’ suggestion that the glue that keeps the U.S. South
together is a shared preoccupation with the past. Yankee absence cannot function as the
primary qualiﬁcation for belonging to the U.S. South since this region, today, is full of
Yankees and since the multiple states which did not yet exist during the U.S. Civil War or
did not participate directly in it (states like California which Reed pairs up with
Massachusetts to juxtapose against the U.S. South) cannot simply be dubbed Yankee.ll
Another problem with the single South model is that when it is not deeply rooted
in the old mentality of equating the region with whiteness (the South really means the
white South or even the white, landowning South), it creates a black/white dichotomy.

Southern studies have certainly moved beyond the earlier tendency to equate the U.S.

 

n In 1999, Reed and his colleagues at the Southern Focus Poll at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill completed an interesting project that does not deﬁne the U.S. South via Yankee absence, the
states of the former Confederacy, nor the geographical lines used by the U.S. Census Bureau which include
Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Washington DC. Instead, this project deﬁnes the U.S. South
based on the percentage of people in a given state who “believe that they are in the South” or who consider
themselves southemers. The results suggest that the U.S. South consists of ten of the eleven confederate
states, Kentucky, and possibly, Oklahoma. Florida, a state in the Confederacy, might be excluded since 90
percent of Florida residents polled said that their community was in the South while only 51 percent of the
same people identiﬁed as Southerners. In Kentucky, 68 percent claimed to be Southerners while 79 percent
said their community was in the South, and in Oklahoma, 53 percent of the residents polled claimed to be
Southerners while 69 of these respondents said their community was in the South. According to this
survey, Texas, which was a part of the confederacy but is often left out of the discussion of the U.S. South,
is clearly part of the U.S. South (with numbers similar to those of Kentucky) while the Census Bureau’s
extra southern states (West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Colombia) are clearly not a
part of the region according to these criteria (“Where” 1 16-18).

33

South strictly with the region’s white population toward a discussion which includes
African Americas as participants in the dialogue rather than mere objects of the critical
conversation. However, most examinations of race and racial mixture in the U.S. South
focus so much on the tensions between blacks and whites that they erase the strong
presence of various Amerindian groups in the region before the policy of Indian Removal
in the 18305, and, more important to my project, they ignore the different racial groups
and the distinct discourse on racial mixture which existed in the Mexican states that
became a part of the U. S. South—particularly Texas which reinstituted slavery,
abolished in Mexico since the late 1820s, and seceded from the Union along with most of
the slaveholding states. '2

Finally, the one South model plays directly into the shortsightedness of
nationalism. The idea that the U.S. South exists as an exception within the United States
as a whole suggests the possibility that the local sense of community (a U.S. southern
nationalism) could exist apart from U.S. nationalism, but while the deﬁnite article in the
South implies that no other South exists, it also situates the region within the nation at
large. Southern nationalism was only vitriolic toward the United States when it was
actually part of a separate national project from 1861-1865. In the twentieth century, it
has been a pillar to a broader U.S. nationalism, and at times, U.S. southern nationalism

could even be considered the anchor of nationalism in the United States.13 The

 

’2 Faulkner’s ﬁction stands out as an atypical example since he does bring Mississippi’s indigenous tribes
into several portrayals of Yoknapatawpha County. As I will discuss at length in chapter 5, however, his
ﬁction still collapses Mexican views of race and racial mixture into the U.S. South’s black/white
dichotomy.

’3 Several writers suggest that the Spanish-American war of 1898 allowed the U.S. South back into the
discussions of U.S. patriotism and nationalism. From that time on, the U.S. South has probably been the
most patriotic region within the nation, particularly in the early twenty-ﬁrst century after the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001. Patriotism is not synonymous with nationalism, but the latter cannot exist
without the former. Is the U.S. South, then, the current leader in U.S. nationalism?

34

nationalism of the U.S. South is not only myopic, like all nationalisms, it is also heavily
ironic since it was the very nationalism of the U.S. North that led the Union to declare
war against and eventually colonize (or, reconstruct, as it was termed) the U.S. South
when the Confederate states sought to create a separate nation.

Cohn’s and Smith’s recent collection, Look Awayl, demonstrates how several
contemporary literary critics challenge the concept of a singular south by creating a
conversation between the U.S. South and the farther south of Latin America and the
Caribbean. In their introduction, Cohn and Smith revisit Woodward’s thesis to place the
U.S. South’s exceptionality within its hemispheric context, arguing that “[i]f we deﬁne
‘America’ hemispherically, for example, the experience of defeat, occupation, and
reconstruction—particularly if this historical trauma is broadened to include the African
American experience of defeat under slavery—is something the South shares with every
other part of America” (2 emphasis in original). By looking both across the Rio
Grande/Rio Bravo and out into the Caribbean Sea rather than across the Paciﬁc and
Atlantic oceans, we ﬁnd other American sites of defeat and suffering. We realize through
this hemispheric approach that the United States—not its southeastern region—~43 as
much of an anomaly in the western hemisphere as Woodward suggests that it is in the
world in general and that the very peculiarity of the U.S. South in a national framework
serves as a common link between it and the majority of the hemisphere.

Cohn’s and Smith’s hemispheric interpretation of Woodward’s argument stands
out as one example in a growing body of inter-American literary criticism that frnds
afﬁnities between the histories and literatures of the U.S. South, Latin America, and the

Caribbean. This “comparative Souths” or “two Souths” model allows the critic to

35

formulate, critique, and analyze a literary region the might be called “the greater South”
or the “expanded Caribbean.”l4 Several of these studies follow a methodology similar to
the historiographic approach to inter-American literary studies which I developed in my
introduction, providing readings that go beyond a discussion of possible literary inﬂuence
to emphasize the shared themes and concerns that the juxtaposed literatures expose when
read side by side. ‘5
Handley’s sketch of what he calls “Plantation America” in “A New World Poetics
of Oblivion” succinctly describes the connections between the U.S. South and the greater
South:
The historical patterns that characterize the U.S. South also connect it to a larger
region of the Americas. These patterns, most notably European colonization,
Amerindian genocide and displacement, and African slavery, have served to
create a region of perplexing but compelling commonality among Caribbean
nations, the Caribbean coasts of Central and South America and Brazil, and the
U.S. South (which in this broader context, of course, would then be a ‘north’), an
area know as Plantation America. (25)
Placing the U.S. South within the geographic and historic Contexts of the hemisphere
obviates the one South model’s problems with deﬁning a speciﬁc location and feeding
into U.S. nationalism. There is no longer a need to draw a line between Virginia and

Maryland or between Louisiana and Texas to delineate what is and what is not southern

 

'4 An even broader comparative model—a “global south”—-that reads U.S. southern literature alongside the
literatures ﬁ'om several peripheral societies is also gaining theoretical momentum. For example, see
Hosam Aboul—Ela’s recent Other South: F aullmer, Coloniality, and the Maricitegui Tradition.

‘5 This is not to say that these critics ignore direct connections between authors from different nations or
linguistic traditions within the expanded region. Rather, they interpret literal inﬂuence between authors as
one manifestation of a broader historical afﬁnity between the regions.

36

since the entire region (not just the Antebellum South nor the former Confederacy, but
also the border states and the areas of the U.S. North which also held onto slavery)
pertains to the “Plantation America” which becomes visible when we allow for more than
one South.

In the “greater South” or “Plantation America,” the region typically called the
South or the American South is replaced with a clearly national term—the U.S. South. In
a strange twist of logic, nationalizing these markers challenges rather than supports U.S.
nationalism since taking national ownership of the local region both implies that other
Souths exist and permits the broader term “American” to function at its hemispheric level
as an adjective that describes the greater region rather than just the southeastern section
of the United States. In short, the phrase the “U.S. South” overtly admits that the south in
question is a speciﬁc region within a speciﬁc nation—a construct within a construct.

The focus on the greater South also avoids creating a black/white dichotomy since
a historiographic approach to inter-American studies acknowledges the distinct
discourses of race and racial mixture throughout the hemisphere, and thus, allows for a
complexity in the dialogue about race which is often masked in academic discussions of
race in the Unite States. However, basing the idea of the two Souths on a shared sense of
defeat (the hemispheric expansion of Woodward’s thesis) runs the risk of replicating the
older tendency in U.S. southern studies of automatically equating the South with its white
male population. In his introduction to Bridging Southern Cultures, Lowe recognizes the
necessity to overcome this problem. He states, “[p]erhaps the most important need [for

southern studies], however, is an explosion of the monopoly that white males have had on

37

the terms ‘the South’ and ‘the southemer’” (5). ‘6 Two of the essays in Lowe’s collection
directly link Woodward’s discussion of defeat in the U.S. South to the tendency of
identifying the U.S. South as white: Anne Goodwyn Jones claims, “to continue to see
‘the South’ as ‘grounded in loss and defeat’ exposes a continuing commitment to yet
another white idea of the South—southem slaves did not in general construct happy
myths of the Old South, nor did most of them see its loss as a defeat” (l 83) while Charles
Reagan Wilson concurs that Woodward’s “‘burden’ mostly dealt with the white southern
identity, coming especially out of the experiences of the guilt of slavery and defeat in the
Civil War. Blacks had no reason to feel guilt over slavery, and the Civil War was not a
defeat for them but a victory” (299). Emancipation was not really the catalyst of the U.S.
Civil War, but it was a signiﬁcant outcome of the conﬂict. The U.S. South’s loss of the
war guaranteed, at least on paper, the freedom of millions of black slaves; the
Confederacy’s defeat was a triumph for African Americans even though the nation failed
to defend their newly-won rights for at least a century.

One manner in which a model that connects the U.S. South to the greater South
via the ethos of defeat can avoid repeating the error of equating U.S. southern identity
with whiteness, as warned against by Jones and Wilson, is to expand the deﬁnition of
defeat beyond its military meaning to include “the African American experience of defeat
under slavery” (2) as Cohn and Smith attempt in their introduction to Look Away! . Cohn

and Smith add a “more globally recognizable kind of defeat: the South’s continuing

 

'6 Lowe’s collection does bridge some southern cultures, giving southern studies “the ﬁrm interdisciplinary
grounding that has been developed in recent years by American studies, black studies, and women’s studies
programs” that Lowe wants the ﬁeld to adopt (5). Yet, the collection is only interdisciplinary to a point
since all of the comparisons stop at the U.S. South’s national borders. Lowe’s introduction and Jones’
essay acknowledge the inter-American approach to the U.S. South that other scholars are attempting, but
none of the entries in Bridging Southern Cultures adopts this approach.

38

experience of New World plantation colonialism” (2) to Woodward’s discussion of the
defeat of the U.S. South’s white population by the Union Army, and thus, demonstrate
how both black and white populations in the U.S. South suffer under the region’s
mentality of defeat and frustration.

This response, however, is not sufﬁcient for my study since the ethos of defeat
that I claim connects the U.S. South to Mexico is a particular type of military defeat, the
bitter fruit of internal war. In response to Jones’ and Reagan’s critique of Woodward’s
discussion of defeat in the U.S. South, a critique which very aptly applies to my own
study for the aforementioned reasons, I make two suggestions. First, we must admit that
the literary fascination with and return to the U.S. Civil War is primarily the obsession of
white writers in the U.S. South while this is not the case with the literatures that look
back on the Mexican Revolution in Mexico. This admission provides another distinction
between the two wars and the literatures that follow them: The U.S. Civil War serves as
the historical moment or backdrop in the history and literature of the U.S. South, and this
moment is racially marked (i.e. the war remains the historical moment of loss,
destruction, and tragedy for white writers in the U.S. South and not for black writers in
the same region). The Mexican Revolution serves as the historical marker in Mexico,
and this marker is not racialized (i.e. the Revolution serves as a symbol of positive

change and/or disillusionment for several racial groups in Mexico).17

 

I7Regardless of the racial identity of the writers of ﬁction who fascinate about the Mexican Revolution, the
class identity of these writers is almost as homogenous as the racial identity of the group of white U.S.
southemers who obsess over the U.S. Civil War. The writers of the Revolution may self identify as criollo,
mestizo, Mexican, or Spaniard, but they almost always come from Mexico’s small middle and upper
classes. Here, I am referring to the writers of ﬁction that looks back on the conﬂict rather than the memoirs
of some of the Revolution’s most important participants who were peons rather than landed gentry.

39

Even though black writers of the U.S. South are not as preoccupied with the U.S.
Civil War as white writers of the same region, a vast amount of ﬁction by African
American southerners obsesses over the fallout of that war—the racial tensions and
segregation born during and after the failed project of Reconstruction—and this literature
commonly delves into the theme of miscegenation which is so central to the ﬁction of
white southern writers in the U.S. South. James Kinney argues that white authors in the
United States almost always portray miscegenation as taboo (199) while black authors
simply treat the subject as a part of reality that has existed since the days of slavery (189,
198). The theme is important to both groups of writers, but it is connected to different
moments/institutions and fulﬁlls distinct purposes for each group. For African American
writers in the U.S. South, miscegenation adds an element of realism to the text and
thematically links the ﬁction to the institution of slavery, which protected and hid the
forced mixture between white slave master and black slave, not to the U.S. Civil War.
Their portrayals of miscegenation critique the antebellum South, the slave system, and
the hypocritical enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws from Reconstruction through the
twentieth century.

Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition provides a clear example of how
African American writers approach miscegenation as an element of realism with the goal
of critiquing the white society of the U.S. South and of the United States in general. The
novel’s narrator describes life in the U.S. South as follows, “Southern life, which, with its
as yet imperfect blending of old with new, of race with race, of slavery with freedom, is
like no other life under the sun” (42), and while miscegenation repulses the novel’s white

characters, neither the narrator nor the novel’s black characters see racial mixture as a

40

bugbear. This difference between taboo and reality can best be seen in the non-
relationship between Olivia Merkell Carteret and Janet Miller—half sisters with the same
white father. Olivia is so disgusted that her father had a child with his former slave, Julia
Brown, that she completely denies any kinship ties to Janet until she reaches a point of
crisis in which only Janet’s husband can save her dying baby. Janet, contrastingly,
accepts herparentage as reality and deals with the painful fact that Olivia’s maltreatment
drove Janet and her mother into a life of poverty (328). Olivia’s thoughts on
miscegenation reveal the hypocrisy of the white community’s stance toward racial
mixture: “To have lived with her [Julia] without marriage was a social misdemeanor, at
which society in the old days had winked, or at most had frowned. To have married her
was to have committed the unpardonable social sin” (266). This biting commentary
suggests that even for the white community of the U.S. South miscegenation is not taboo
as long as it remains hidden and illicit and as long as the relationship takes place between
a white man and a black woman.18 Chesnutt’s portrayal of miscegenation has nothing to
do with the U.S. Civil War and everything to do with the racially bifurcated society that
followed the war.

For white writers in the U.S. South, miscegenation either represents a feared
outcome of emancipation and political equality between blacks and whites, or it
represents the guilt-ridden memory of a past that forced miscegenation on slaves and a

present that uses supposed miscegenation as the excuse to torture and kill black citizens.

 

'8 Several passages in The Marrow of Tradition demonstrate how the white community of the U.S. South
views miscegenation with different eyes depending on the gender of the participants. Any reference to
sexual relations between black men and white women in the novel is instantly condemned by the white
characters who view these relationships as a threat to the white race and its pedestal or temple of white
womanhood. Chesnutt’s juxtaposition of this reaction with the “wink” or “ﬂow” (266) that white society
gives to white men who have sexual relations with black women serves as one of the novel’s most powerful

critiques.

41

Thomas Dixon’s radical racist ﬁction of the early twentieth century reveals the former
opinion while Faulkner’s work demonstrates the latter. Both authors cast miscegenation
as taboo, as Kinney suggests, and both writers collapse this taboo into the more universal
taboo of incest. The similarities end here, however, since Dixon continually portrays
miscegenation as an overt threat to the white community while Faulkner portrays it as a
personal and a family battle that repeats itself and creates both guilt and empathy in later
generations—the Sutpen and McCaslin families both serve as clear examples.

In stark contrast to the complex manner in which Faulkner depicts miscegenation,
Dixon’s ﬁction is completely Manichean. The Leopard ’s Spots and The Clansman both
contain scenes in which animal-like black men rape innocent white women, and both
novels suggest that this is the primary path miscegenation takes and that this behavior is
the direct outcome of the political equality granted to Aﬁican Americans at the end of the
war. In a similar fashion, Dixon’s The Sins of the Father and The Clansman both show
miscegenation between white men and black women, not as the outcome of white men’s
lust, but as the result of mulatta evil and chicanery.19 The Clansman goes as far as
suggesting that the entire project of Reconstruction was a vindictive effort of a northern
Republican whose mulatta lover coerced him into taking vengeance on the U.S. South
(94,371)

Dixon’s novels rhetorically reverse the roles of victim and predator from the

typical sexual relationship between blacks and whites during slavery and the violent years

 

'9 Dixon’s portrayal of the mulatta as a devilish ﬁgure begs the question of how these so-called racially
mixed women he portrays came into existence. Although he does not approach this subject, it would not
have been a stretch for Dixon to make similar outlandish claims about relations between black, female
slaves and white, male masters—assigning innocence to the master whom history suggests was anything
but guiltless.

42

that followed. In From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope Franklin describes the racial
mixture that took place in the U.S. South of the antebellmn period as follows:
The extensive miscegenation which went on during the slave period was largely
the result of people living and working together at common tasks and the
subjection of Negro women to the whims and desires of white men. There was
some race mixture that resulted from the association of Negro men and white
women, but this was only a small percent of the total. Despite all the laws against
the interrningling of the races, the practice continued; and its persistence is
another example of the refusal of the members of the dominant group to abide by
the laws which they themselves created. (204)
In Dixon’s ﬁctional world, the opposite takes place; black men rape white women and
mulatta women (equated with black in the U.S. South) coerce and abuse white men even
though most historical documents and the logic of the slave system and the system of
segregation that followed it demonstrate that white men—under the guise of master
before the U.S. Civil War and under the hood of organized white supremacy
afterwards—continually coerced and/or raped black women while lynching black men
who supposedly threatened the sanctity of white womanhood. For Dixon, miscegenation
is a present and future threat; for Faulkner, it is a past and present tragedy. For these two
writers and other white southerners like them, miscegenation links not only back to the
system of slavery but to the U.S. Civil War itself since for Dixon the outcome of the war

creates the possibility of miscegenation while for Faulkner the war seems to serve as the

43

ﬁrst step in a cleansing of the U.S. South for the sins of slavery, including the coerced
racial mixture that often took place on the plantation.20

For my second response to Jones’ and Reagan’s warning, I suggest that just as
Woodward’s argument about the sentiment of defeat in the U.S. South is an
overgeneralization, so too are Jones’ and Reagan’s claims that the U.S. Civil War was a
victory for African Americans. In general terms, the fall of the Confederacy provided
newfound freedom for millions of slaves, but thousands of them resisted the U.S. North
just as violently as their white counterparts. These slaves’ resistance against the Union
could have been driven by the sense of loyalty to their masters, by promises of
manumission from their masters, or by a shared aversion for the Yankees. Bell Irvin
Wiley suggests that with some slaves, and especially with body servants who
accompanied their masters to the war, “the sense of family attachment and the feeling of
personal affection engendered by years of association on the plantation” helped to
maintain “the slaves’ loyalty amid the tempting inﬂuences of the war” (143). He claims
that some slaves even bragged about being the slaves of particular families and that body
servants “felt a responsibility for the protection of their master” (142). For these slaves,
the Confederacy’s collapse was also a defeat, and Reconstruction was also a threat to
their way of life.

Faulkner provides a ﬁctional example of such a slave via his characterization of
Ringo in The Unvanquished. Ringo despises the Yankees even more than his

ﬁiend/former master Bayard Sartoris; he helps Bayard’s grandmother create a business

out of swindling the Union Army by selling their own stolen mules back to them; and he

 

2° For the moment, I merely summarize Faulkner’s treatment of miscegenation since I offer several in-depth
readings of his portrayals of racial mixture in chapters 3 through 5.

44

continues to live with the Sartoris family long after the war has freed him. Ringo delivers
the message to Bayard that his father, Colonel John Sartoris, has been killed in a duel,
and he even tries to be the one to take vengeance if Bayard declines. Ringo’s actions are
similar to those that Wiley ascribes to the body servants of rich white southemers who
went off to war. Although Ringo was only a young boy during the war, his desire to
avenge John Sartoris’ death and to protect Bayard demonstrate this same type of deep
loyalty long after the master/slave relation had ofﬁcially ended.

The former slaves who remained faithful to the families of the former masters
certainly were a minority, and giving their sensation of defeat too much attention runs the
risk of apologizing for the institution of slavery because it glosses over the institution’s
brutality with a narrative of mutual love and respect between slave and master. However,
even the majority of freed slaves who embraced their freedom soon realized that the
victory offered them by the outcome of the U.S. Civil War was ephemeral. Those who
remained in the U.S. South faced a more brutal separatism than what had existed before
while those who migrated to the U.S. North had to deal with that region’s own ﬁerce
racism. Even closer to the war itself, the black southemers who followed and/or joined
the Union Army during the war were certainly not treated like victors. The Union
Army’s tendency to turn its back on the freed slaves (although several Union soldiers did
return to the region after the war in an unsuccessful attempt to help secure political
equality for the liberated slaves) foreshadowed the federal govemment’s eventual
abandonment of the U.S. South’s African American population once the government
realized that Reconstruction was a failure. In short, the reality of the Aﬁican American

experience of freedom that grows out of the U.S. Civil War cannot simply be read as a

45

victory even though we must admit that the war is not a point of obsession for black
writers in the U.S. South and that the white southern writers’ fascination with the war is
oﬁen a racist nostalgia for a past that never really existed or a wrestling match with the
ugly elements of the past that could be akin to liberal white guilt.

The two Souths model creates other problems besides the tendency of equating
the U.S. South with its white population. The juxtaposition of U.S. southern literature
with the literatures of Latin America and the Caribbean can, as I suggested in my
introduction, treat the latter literatures as uncharted territories which can be colonized or
even cannibalized by literary critics without experience with these regions’ languages and
literary traditions. The discussion of a hemispheric (or even a global) South is also a new
veneer on the old First World, Second World, and Third World model, replacing the First
World with the term North and the Third World with the term South while perpetuating
the implied superiority of the former over the latter. These risks are inherent to the inter-
American approach under which the two Souths model ﬁts. However, I suggest that
careful scholarship that remembers the differences between the histories and literatures of
the regions in comparison even while discussing their shared pasts—scholarship that, as
Handley suggests, considers Latin America and the Caribbean “as protagonists”
(Postslavery 28) rather than as mere tools to say something provocative about the history
and literature of the United States—can shed new light upon the relationships between
these American regions and create a better understanding of American literatures in the
hemispheric sense.

My study follows Cohn’s and Smith’s hemispheric revision of Woodward’s thesis

by juxtaposing the histories of Mexico and the U.S. South and the novels of Faulkner and

46

Fuentes that return to each nation’s most egregious internal conﬂict, but at the same time,
I problematize the two Souths model by demonstrating that a consistent thread of irony
underlines the ethos of defeat which connects the U.S. South and Mexico. This irony
might be present in other comparisons of the U.S. South to Latin America in general, but
it is far more pointed in a speciﬁc discussion about the U.S. South and Mexico because of
the peculiar role the U.S. South played in Mexico’s history. For Mexico, the U.S. South
is not only a north in the geographic sense, as it is for the rest of Latin America, but it is
also the north in a military sense.

Woodward suggests that there are several “Southern ironies that demand
attention” (260-61), but one of the greatest ironies in the history of the U.S. South does
not appear in Woodward’s discussion—the relationship between the U.S. South and
Mexico since the middle of the nineteenth century.” Woodward’s failure to address this
relationship is not surprising. Most histories of the U.S. South do not place the region in
a hemispheric context and fail to realize that the U.S.-Mexican War foreshadowed the
victory of North over South that took place in the U.S. Civil War less than two decades
later. Similarly, most Mexican versions of the U.S.-Mexican War interpret “the
invasion” on national lines that fail to differentiate between Yankee and Cavalier
invaders since they both belonged to the same federal army of the United States. In
simple terms, the U.S. South did to Mexico in 1848 the very things which the U.S. North
would do to the U.S. South in 1865—they defeated, occupied, humiliated, and drove their

southern neighbors into a repeated cycle of poverty.

 

2' Woodward reevaluates his thoughts on irony and the U.S. South several times by adding essays to the
second (1968) and third (1993) editions of The Burden of Southern History. By analyzing a particular
irony of the U.S. South that he does not approach, I offer a critique of the national and/or local terms in
which the U.S. South is typically cast rather than a criticism of Woodward’s continued effort to grapple
with the subject of irony in the history of the US South.

47

One study that begins to point out the irony which connects the U.S. South to
Mexico is José LimOn’s American Encounters. LimOn suggests that the United States’
role in the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848 should be viewed as a U.S. southern
enterprise since “the president of the United States, James K. Polk, a Southerner, ordered
a fellow Southerner, general Zachery Taylor, to march his army to the edge of south
Texas, in what was ostensibly a Show of support for the Texas claim but also in support
of the eventual annexation of the territory” (12). The United States’ invasion of Mexico
appears even more of a U.S. southern project when we recall, as Clement Eaton claims in
A History of the Old South, that the majority of the U.S. military brass involved in the
war—not just Taylor—were from the U.S. South (365), 22 that a majority of the
volunteers who made up the army were also U.S. southemers (3 65),23 and that the U.S.
South believed that the massive amount of territory that was Texas “would give vitality to
Southern slavery by increasing the demand for additional slaves, thus enhancing the
value of slave property in the Sou ” while simultaneously providing “additional slave
states to strengthen [the South’s] political position in Congress against an aggressive
antislavery movement” (367). The legislative body that ﬁrnded the war—the United
States Congress—and the military bodies which carried it out—the federal army and
navy—both ofﬁcially pertained to the United States, and thus, the war cannot be
completely divorced from the U.S. North. Still, the location of the war, the political and

military leadership of the war, the soldiers who fought in the war, and, most importantly,

 

‘2 The other primary U.S. general in the U.S.-Mexican War—Winﬁeld Scott—does not really ﬁt within this
description of the U.S-Mexican War as a U.S. southern endeavor or a conspiracy of slaveholders. Scott
was a U.S. southemer—a native Virginian—but when war broke out between the states in 1861, he
remained faithful to the Union and urged several of the men who eventually became the Confederacy’s
generals (particularly Robert E. Lee) to do the same.

Eaton claims that “[t]he Mississippi Valley states and Texas supported this war of conquest with
enthusiasm. In fact, Tennessee sent so many volunteers that it was called ‘the volunteer state’” (360).

48

the cause and a part of the eventual outcome of the war (Texas’ ofﬁcial annexation into
the United States as a slave state that would eventually secede from the Union) all cast
the war as an endeavor of the U.S. South.

At least two levels of irony surface if we interpret the U.S.-Mexican War
primarily as a war between the U.S. South and Mexico. First, as Lirnén suggests, “[h]ere
we have both paradox and irony, namely that the South—with its own sense of itself as a
culturally distinct and beleaguered weaker region relative to the Yankee North—should
be party to an imposition of U.S. federal authority on a culturally and structurally similar
Greater Mexico” (13). The U.S. South’s imperialist adventure in Mexico is ironic
because of the region’s shared past with Mexico and due to both the U.S. South’s and
Mexico’s comparative weakness when juxtaposed to the north (both the U.S. North and
the United States in general). The second and harsher level of irony reveals itself when
we juxtapose the U.S.-Mexican War with the U.S. Civil War and notice that the U.S.
North’s repossession of the U.S. South almost mirrored the U.S. South’s conquest of
northern Mexico. Just as the U.S. South had done in the U.S.-Mexican War, the U.S.
North waged its war campaign primarily in the enemy’s territory, threatening the
enemy’s infrastructure and citizen population. The U.S. North occupied the U.S. South
in a manner similar to the U.S. South’s occupation of northern Mexico; the primary
difference was that through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the United States/U.S.
South severed and ingested over half of Mexico’s territory, leaving the remnants of the
Mexican govemment behind to govern an amputated fraction of their former land, while
through Reconstruction the U.S. North completely enveloped (or, better put, re-

enveloped) the U.S. South into the Union without leaving any fragment of territory where

49

the leadership of the Confederacy could continue to govern. Finally, the victory of the
US North over the U.S. South and the previous victory of the U.S. South over Mexico
both sent the vanquished into an economic tailspin that resulted in long-term poverty and
suffering. Decades after the U.S. Civil War, the U.S. South was marked by an excess of
disease, unemployment, and under-education that was atypical of the U.S. experience, as
Woodward and so many others have noted, while decades after the U.S.-Mexican War,
particularly during the Porﬁriato, Mexico’s peasantry continued to lose land to the point
that the meager sustenance of the Mexican peasants was worse than it had been before
Cortes toppled Tenochtitlén.

The U.S.-Mexican War is essential in my juxtaposition of the U.S. Civil War and
the Mexican Revolution because it acts as a catalyst for the two later wars. For the
United States, the victorious outcome of this war marks the moment when the nation ﬁrst
moves toward the status of empire. Shelley Streeby explains that “1848 was a ‘watershed
year’ in the history of U.S. empire, a year when the boost to U.S. power in the world
system provided by the U.S.-Mexican War, combined with the distracting social
upheavals in Europe, made the United States a major player in the battles for inﬂuence in
and control of the Americas” (8). The annexation of Texas and the acquisition of the
territory west of Texas all the way to the Paciﬁc vaulted the young nation onto the
world’s power scene for the ﬁrst time, but this same acquisition threatened to tear the
nation at its seams. The already seething tensions between the supporters and the
opponents of slavery were only exacerbated by Texas’ entrance into the Union. Eaton
explains the views of the two parties as follows: “New Englanders, who since 1803 had

opposed westward expansion, were hostile to the annexation of Texas, because they

50

regarded it is a ‘slaveholder’s conspiracy’” while “[t]he South was eager for the
annexation of this region since it offered a ﬁeld for the expansion of the cotton kingdom
and of slavery. Moreover, perhaps as many as ﬁve slave states could be carved out of
this imperial domain and thus afford a reserve of future slave states to keep the balance of
power in the Senate” (346).24

The U.S-Mexican War, besides adding to the growing tensions between pro- and
antislavery factions across the United States, can also be seen as a catalyst of the U.S.
Civil War because the additional territory allowed the U.S. South to conceive of itself as
a nation in the present while promising a future of expansion. The Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo officially opened the frontier for the entire United States to expand west, but this
newly acquired territory had a nationalizing effect on the U.S. South that it did not have
on the U.S. North. The acquisition of Texas gave the U.S. South enough physical space
to begin to conceive of itself as a distinct body from the U.S. North, not just a nation
within the greater nation, but a separate nation all together.25 The territories of the
southwest allowed the U.S. South (and eventually the Confederacy) to dream of a future
that included the westward expansion of slavery. Quincy Wright states that “[t]he South
was convinced that with victory, the Confederacy could maintain its way of life” and
“extend its inﬂuence in the Southwest” (“The American” 40). Even if U.S. southern

fears that the outcome of bleeding Kansas would be repeated throughout the west (both

 

2" When Scott’s army entered Mexico City, some groups in the United States called for annexation of the
entire territory of Mexico. One reason the U.S. Congress refrained from this drastic measure was that no
one really knew “whether the acquisition of Mexico would strengthen the pro-slavery position or the
antislavery cause” (Eaton 368).

25 Here, we ﬁnd even more irony since the Old South, to this day, has trouble accepting Texas as a part of
the region. For most U.S. southemers outside of Texas, the state is certainly not Yankee but it is not a part
of the South either. The U.S. South’s inabilityto identify with Texas is doubly strange. Not only did
Texas provide the U.S. South with enough land to consider secession as a real option, but as Easton claims,
the state was primarily settled by former residents of Tennessee and Alabama (342).

51'

above and below the line drawn in the Missouri Compromise) cast doubts on the region’s
hopes of ﬁrture expansion, Texas already increased the total size of the U.S. South by a
third and made the U.S. South large enough to visualize its Survival at worse and its
ﬂourishing at best with Mexico as a neighbor to the south and the Union as a neighbor to
the north and west. In short, the U.S. South was only able to conceive of itself as a
completely separate entity from the U.S. North (separate in government and economy,
not just culture and tradition) after Texas ofﬁcially became a state within the greater
nation and a part of the region known as the U.S. South.

Finally, the U.S.-Mexican War was a catalyst for the U.S. Civil War in a very
literal sense because it acted as the military and political training ground for most of the
leadership of the Confederacy and for several of the leading ﬁgures in the Union during
the U.S. Civil War. Eaton states that the war “furnished the training school of practical
experience for most of the Confederate and Union officers who participated in the Civil
War” (365). Speciﬁcally, the Confederacy’s P. G. T. Beauregard, Thomas (Stonewall)
Jackson, and Robert E. Lee and the Union’s James Shields and Ulysses S. Grant all saw
their ﬁrst real military action while marching into Mexico with Taylor, Scott, or both.
Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, was dubbed “the hero of Buena
Vista” for his exploits at this key battle in the war’s northern front (Eaton 364) while the
Union’s future president, Abraham Lincoln, decried the U.S.-Mexican War from home as
a war of imperialism. The war itself and the debate that surrounded it at home shaped the
ideals and honed the skills of the most important political and military personalities from

both sides of what would become the bloodiest war in the history of the United States.

52

For Mexico, the humiliating outcome of the U.S.-Mexican War literally cut the
nation in half, divesting Mexico of just over ﬁfty percent of its territory. This national
catastrophe created an ethos of defeat that lasted up to and through the much bloodier
Mexican Revolution—and along with the eventual disillusioned fallout of the
Revolution—this sentiment of violation continues to deﬁne Mexico. The combined
weight of Mexico’s loss in the U.S.-Mexican War and the eventual disappointment in the
undelivered promises of the Revolution created an ethos of defeat in Mexico that was
deeper, more widespread, and longer lasting than that of the U.S. South. The U.S. South
was overpowered, occupied, and humbled by the U.S. North, but this all took place in the
context of its re-integration into a body in whose formation it had originally been
instrumental. Mexico, contrastingly, was humiliated and robbed by a foreign power and
subsequently deceived and cheated by its own nationals in the name of revolutionary
change.

In Latin America at War with the Past, Fuentes paints the U.S.-Mexican War as
the greatest soar in Mexico’s history while connecting the outcomes of this war to the
eventual stance of the leaders who took control of the country almost eighty years later in
the second and somewhat less violent decade of the Mexican Revolution. He states:

The searing, open wound of the historical memory of Mexico is the War of 1847

with the United States and the loss of half our national territory because we were

a weak and disorganized nation. The leaders of the Mexican Revolution decided

that this should not happen again: all the policies of the revolution were subsumed

under a will to nationalism that made it possible to negotiate with the Americans

frankly, ﬁrmly and with dignity. Nationalism at the cost of democracy. (5 3)

53

Fuentes’ claim must be taken with a grain of salt since the radicals of the Revolution (the
Villas and Zapatas) were not the ones who came into power. Mexico’s adoption of
nationalism over democracy is not that surprising since Carranza, and later, Obregén and
Calles, were conservative from the very onset of the upheaval. At the same time,
however, calls from the press, powerful business magnates, and various leaders in the
U.S. government to intervene in Mexico during the Revolution suggest that Fuentes
makes a fair appraisal of the Revolution as a nationalist movement which helped Mexico
to maintain its sovereignty while squelching Mexican democracy. Fuentes does not call
the U.S.-Mexican War the cause of the Mexican Revolution; instead, he suggests that the
men who came to power in Mexico after the Revolution adopted conservative, nationalist
policies—rather than the radical policies that various branches of the Revolution had
espoused—out of a speciﬁc fear that if Mexico lacked a strong national face, it could
once again be pillaged by the United States. The U.S-Mexican War, in this sense, could
be seen as a cause of post-Revolution Mexico rather than as a catalyst toward the
Revolution itself.

Fuentes also offers a ﬁctional connection between the U.S.-Mexican War and the
Mexican Revolution in his novel Gringo viejo/T he Old Gringo. 2" When colonel Frutos
Garcia exhumes the old gringo’s body (the body of Fuentes’ characterization of Ambrose
Bierce) to have his men send it back to the United States, he asks the “sunken blue eyes”

of the corpse, “[h]aven’t you ever thought, you gringos, that all this land was once ours?”

 

2" It is nearly impossible to decide whether the English or the Spanish version of this novel should be
considered the deﬁnitive text. As Drewey Wayne Gunn explains in “A Labyrinth of Mirrors: Literary
Sources of The Old Gringo/Gringo viejo”, “both versions have authorial validity of an exceptional kind”
since “[a]ccording to [Margaret Sayers] Peden, the novel was originally written in English, but Fuentes,
unsatisﬁed with the results, translated it into Spanish. This version he sent to Penden to retranslate into
English. [. . .] Throughout the process he carefully reviewed her translation and made suggestions” (61). 1
will cite the English version of the text, but I will also cite the Spanish version (marked by my own
footnotes) when its speciﬁc wording is critical to my argument.

54

(9). As Inocencio Mansalvo escorts Harriet Winslow and Bierce’s cadaver back toward
the United States, Harriet realizes that “for Mexicans the only reason for war was always
the gringos” (184), and Mansalvo laments that the dividing line between the United
States and Mexico “isn’t a border. It’s a scar” (185). Harriet’s epiphany and Mansalvo’s
critique share the same immediate cause, the shared moment of their literal glance at the
U.S.-Mexican border, which implies a connection between the former war which made
the scar—the U.S.-Mexican War—and the later war in which both Harriet and Mansalvo
participated—the Mexican Revolution.27 Finally, Fuentes returns to the idea of the
border in the previously cited Latin America at War with the Past, connecting the
outcome of the U.S.-Mexican War (the border) with the personiﬁed cause of the Mexican
Revolution (president/dictator Porﬁrio Diaz): “[The U.S.-Mexican border] is the frontier
between two memories: a memory of triumph and a memory of loss, best expressed by
Mexican dictator Porﬁrio Diaz’s famous exclamation: ‘Poor Mexico! So far ﬁom God
and so near to the United States!’” (8).

The U.S.-Mexican War, in contrast to its elevation of the U.S. from nation to
empire, forever crushed the imperial hopes of Mexico and even threatened Mexico’s
possibility of surviving as a nation-state. The shattered nation fell into a civil war
between conservative centralists and liberal federalists (whose disagreements predated
both Mexico’s war against Texas and its war against the United States) which ﬁnally

brought the legendary Benito J uarez into power only to be temporarily ousted by a

\

27 The entire premise of The Old Gringo offers a comparison of wars in the United States and Mexico. Not
Only does Fuentes connect the U.S.-Mexican War to the Revolution, but he also links the U.S. Civil War to
the U.S-Mexican War; the ﬁctional Bierce, like the real Bierce, was a veteran of the Union Army, and he
has visions of his father, a veteran of the U.S.-Mexican War, while ﬁghting in the sierra with Arroyo’s
tT'OOps. The novel’s speculation about what happened to the real Bierce, who actually disappeared into
revolutionary Mexico, also connects the U.S. Civil War to the Mexican Revolution.

55

French invasion and ﬁnally replaced by one of his own generals—Porﬁrio Diaz.
Mexico’s post-war ﬁnancial straights,28 particularly its inability to pay off foreign debt,
led to an invasion by France in which Napoleon III sought to colonize Mexico by placing
Maximilian of Habsburg and his wife Charlotte on a newly created throne as Emperor
and Empress of Mexico. Juarez returned to power in 1867, and shortly after his death,
Diaz took control of the government. Diaz had been one of Juarez’s most successful
generals, but he had also recently campaigned against J uarez with a soon to be ironic
platform of no re-elections. Diaz ruled Mexico for over thirty years, and while his
willingness to outsource the nation’s industries and utility services and sell large plots of
land to foreigners modernized the Mexican capital and the national railway system, his
ﬁnancial policies made the poor poorer and his political window dressings of democracy
alienated a signiﬁcant segment of the elite. In this oppressive atmosphere, Francisco
Madero’s call for a new president served as the ﬁrst spark to the tinderbox in what would
become the chaotic, destructive, repetitive, and, in some cases, the regenerative ﬂame of
the Mexican Revolution.

The U.S.-Mexican War was not the direct cause of the Mexican Revolution which
followed well over a half century afterward, but the U.S.-Mexican War was the ﬁrst link
in the chain of events that brought about the Revolution. If Mexico had not lost half of
its patrimony to the United States, it is unlikely that J uarez or any other leader would
have needed to put a moratorium on the nation’s foreign debt since the gold found in

California shortly after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo would have gone a long way for

 

2" Mexico’s ﬁnances were in ruins after decades of Santa Anna’s corrupt rule, the U.S.-Mexican War, and
the war between conservatives and liberals. In an attempt to jumpstart the national economy, Juarez froze
the payments of the national debt to foreign creditors. This move brought serious reactions from Spain,
England, and France although only the French decided to wage an all out war on Mexico.

56

the struggling nation; if the French had not invaded Mexico, then Diaz would not have
become a war hero and would not have come into power; and without the thirty plus
years of the Porﬁriato, the Mexican Revolution would not have taken place at the same
time nor with the same key participants.29

My study of Faulkner’s and Fuentes’ novels which return to the Mexican
Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, then, follows the two Souths model since I place the
U.S. South within the hemispheric context of what lies directly to its south—Mexico. At
the same time, my project realizes that out of all the similarities and differences between
Mexico and the U.S. South and between the Mexican Revolution and the U.S. Civil War
one difference stands out—the hybrid posture of the U.S. South. As Cohn and Smith
suggest, “the U.S. South comes to occupy a space unique within modernity: a space
simultaneously (or alternately) center and margin, victor and defeated, empire and
colony, essentialist and hybrid, northern and southern (both in the global sense)”
(“Introduction” 9). The U.S. South serves as a bridge between the United States—a
nation which, according to Fuentes, has no history because it “was founded out of
nothing” (“Interview” 52) and a nation where, according to Woodward, “success and
victory are still national habits of mind” (1 9)—and Mexico—a nation that often functions
as a synecdoche, at least in the United States, for Latin American suffering and poverty.
The U.S. South might wave its history of defeat like a banner, but it cannot hide its
history of triumph as a part of the nation at large while Mexico has no shared victory to

grasp and recalls defeat squared in the U.S.-Mexican War (defeat to the U.S. South and

 

2” It is impossible, of course, to guess at what would have happened in Mexico and the United States had
the U.S.-Mexican War never been waged or if Mexico had won the war. My speculation, however, does
show the chain of events which connects the outcome of the U.S.-Mexican War to the eventual outbreak of

revolution in Mexico.

57

defeat to the United States) and defeat internalized in the Mexican Revolution. The U.S.
South shares a sense of defeat with Mexico, but it also sits over Mexico as a victor. This
discussion of the U.S. South’s strange hybridity also alludes to the other focus of this
study—racial mixture. The juxtaposition of the Mexican Revolution and the U.S. Civil
War, especially when considering their shared catalyst, brings each nation’s discourse of
racial mixture—mestizaje and miscegenation—face to face in a dialogue that will reveal
important differences and eerie similarities in both nations’ efforts to control these

concepts as they attempt to create a national identity.

Juxtaposing the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution

The historiographic approach I adopt to interpret the U.S. Civil War, the Mexican
Revolution, and Faulkner’s and Fuentes’ novels about these wars and their subsequent
discourses of racial mixture bridges the unnecessary geographic, political, linguistic, and
nationalist chasms that often quarantine the conversations about these conﬂicts. My
approach, however, runs the risk of glossing over important differences between these
two wars. The use of simile in excess when comparing the Mexican Revolution and the
U.S. Civil War oversimpliﬁes the complex condition that is war and dilutes the parallels
that actually do exist between the two conﬂicts. It is paramount, then, to clearly
differentiate between these two wars even while arguing that key Similarities between
them qualify them for comparison.

Both conﬂicts fall under the broad label of “internal war” that Harry Eckstein
calls a “genus” of war under which the “more commonly used terms, such as revolution,

civil war, revolt, rebellion, uprising, guerrilla warfare, mutiny, jacquerie, coup d ’état,

58

terrorism, or insurrection” exist as “species” (133). The U.S. Civil War, however, was
also a war of secession—an attempt to break away, to create a new nation. In “The
American Civil War (1861-65),” Wright explains the opposing regional perspectives of
the U.S. Civil War. He states, “[f]rom the point of view of the South the war was an
international war as indicated by the name given it, ‘the war between the states,’ and the
North was the aggressor. From the point of view of the North the war was a civil war and
the southemers were traitors, as indicated by the ofﬁcial name given it, ‘the war of the
rebellion’” (30-31). The U.S. Civil War was simultaneously internal and external since
the two sides disagreed about the status of the U.S. South. The Confederacy was either a
conglomeration of rebellious although not autonomous states or a newly born nation-
state.

The Mexican Revolution was also an attempt to make a fresh start, but it was
primarily an internal affair between various national factions. Foreign powers,
particularly the United States and Great Britain, certainly played their roles in the
Revolution, but the war never reached international status since these countries ofﬁcially
watched the outcome ﬁom the sidelines. The Revolution also never gained the odd
international perspective which the U.S. South assigned to the U.S. Civil War because
none of the Revolution’s signiﬁcant power players sought to carve out new nations from
the larger territory of Mexico. Francisco Villa, for example, simply became a regional
chieftain in his northern stronghold after his defeat at Celaya signiﬁcantly decreased his
inﬂuence on the national scene rather than trying to create a separate nation out of the

northern territories that remained faithful to him until his death.

59

The same criterion Wright uses to differentiate between the U.S. North’s and U.S.
South’s perspectives on the U.S. Civil War—the difference between the names used to
describe the war—also helps to differentiate between the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican
Revolution. The names for the U.S. Civil War—“the war between the states,” “the war
of the rebellion,” or the more generic name generally used today—always contain the
term “war” rather than revolt or revolution. Even the U.S. North’s name for the war
brings the term “rebellion” within the concept of war, not the other way around.
Accordingly, the confrontation took place between two well deﬁned adversaries with
contradicting goals—maintaining the Union versus creating a new nation—who declared
war on one another and sent their state and national armies into battle. The war lasted
from 1861 to 1865 when General Lee surrendered unconditionally and the U.S. South
was forcefully brought back into the Union.30

The Mexican Revolution, contrastingly, was a multifaceted upheaval in which
several competing groups vied for power. The greater number of variables in the
Mexican Revolution made it much more complex than the two-sided U.S. Civil War.31
The Revolution was full of alliances that various leaders forged, broke, re-forged, and
shattered once again. For example, Villa and Victoriano Huerta both participated in
Madero’s squelching of Pascual Orozco’s (himself a former Maderista) rebellion, but
Huerta sentenced Villa to death (Madero stepped in and changed the punishment to exile)

and then overthrew Madero. The constitutionalists—a strange combination of the forces

 

3° One could argue, however, that even when the war ofﬁcially ended it continued as an insurrection via
vigilante groups of white supremacists.

3 ' There certainly were differing degrees of rebellion among the populations of the U.S. South who seceded
from the Union (including those who remained faithful to the Union) and differing degrees of zealousness
for their re-establishment in the Union among the citizens of the U.S. North. However, these differences
seem fairly simple when compared to the multi-sided and chaotic nature of the Mexican Revolution.

60

of Villa, Alvaro Obregbn, and Venustiano Carranza—then waged war against Huerta
only to turn against one another (Obregén defeated Villa at Celaya) once they ousted
Huerta from power. Finally, Obregbn turned on Carranza and took his place as president
after having him killed. All the while Emiliano Zapata and his army had also been in
open rebellion—ﬁrst against Diaz, then Madero, then Huerta, and ﬁnally Carranza.32 The
Revolution dragged on for nearly twenty years, although the ﬁrst ten years were by far
the most violent, until it was politically institutionalized, and thus, rhetorically waged
until the late twentieth century.

The two conﬂicts also differed greatly in ideology. The U.S. South’s secession
from the Union was an elitist movement that eventually relied on the bodies of the
masses (both black and white) to ﬁght its battles while the Mexican Revolution was a
grassroots movement that included members of the Mexican elite (Madero and Carranza),
the Mexican middle class (ObregOn and Orozco), and the Mexican peasantry (Villa and
Zapata) alike. Both conﬂicts required a temporary alliance between classes, but each
partnership took a different view toward race. In the U.S. Civil War, the plantation
owners, the so-called “white trash,” and by the end of the conﬂict, even some of the
slaves joined forces in an attempt to repel the invading Yankees. The slaves, however,
were only brought into the alliance as a desperate last resort which reﬂected the elitist
roots of a movement waged with the goal of maintaining race-based slavery. In the

Mexican Revolution, peons joined with certain hacienda owners to combat against Diaz,

 

3‘ This paragraph only begins to point toward the complexity of the Mexican Revolution. The conﬂict
becomes even more intricate when we consider the scores of lesser generals and colonels who often
switched sides and/or forgot their original reasons for taking up arms once they moved from the local to the
national scene. Mariano Azuela’s famous novel Los de abajo (translated as The Underdogs) provides a
ﬁctional portrayal of the intricacies of the conﬂict as his caudillo ﬁgure—Demetrio Macias—wages a local
rebellion, gets sucked into the broader Revolution, forgets his roots, and eventually becomes a mirror
image of the caciques and the federal troops who support them.

61

against Huerta, and ﬁnally against each other. This class alliance was simultaneously a
coalition between so-called mestizos, Indians, and criollos that revealed both the criollos’
willingness to temporarily remove social barriers in order to obtain power and certain
indigenous and mestizo groups’ (particularly Zapata’s army) desires to end indigenous
and mestizo peonage.

Neither the U.S. Civil War nor the Mexican Revolution can be called a race war
per se, but each conﬂict was somehow connected to the racial tensions that existed in
each nation. These tensions and their outcomes, however, were quite distinct from one
another. To suggest that the U.S. Civil War was “fought over slavery” oversimpliﬁes the
economic, political, and social tensions between the U.S. North and U.S. South that
eventually erupted in war. This claim also ignores Abraham Lincoln’s original
justiﬁcation for the war—the preservation of the Union—and ﬁmctions as an
anachronism by assigning a purpose to the war that did not really exist until at least 1863.
However, to suggest that race was not a driving force in this war ignores the fact that in
the U.S. South slavery was race-based and that the very economic, political, and social
precipitants to the war often grew out of the opposite stances each region took on the
issue of slavery. A serious study of the U.S. Civil War must wrestle with the intricate
questions about race that became intertwined with the war itself. William Ferris claims
that “[t]he southern experience pivots around the relation of the regions’ black and white
people. No student of William Faulkner or Richard Wright, of the Civil War, of religion,

or of policies can understand these topics apart from the complex web of Afro- and Euro-

62

American cultures that have shaped the region so deeply” (34).33 The U.S. South’s
reliance on Aﬁican slavery, the tensions this “strange institution” caused with the U.S.
North, and the fact that the war dismantled this institution all point to the importance of
the topic of race when discussing the U.S. Civil War. The central position of race in this
conﬂict does not, however, suggest that the U.S. Civil War was a race war since the
actual conﬂict was not between two races but between two powerful factions of one race
who disagreed about the status of another.34

The Mexican Revolution is usually considered a class confrontation rather than a
war about race. The romanticized myths about the Revolution—that the impoverished
masses joined bandit leaders to overthrow an oppressive govemment—and the more
cynical interpretations of the conﬂict—that middle- and upper-class leadership usurped
the fervor of the Revolution to meet its own economic and social objectives while paying
little heed to the concerns of the peasants who made up the competing armies—all
support this conclusion. The myths about and critiques of the Revolution are both
oversimpliﬁed. Most serious studies of the Mexican Revolution point toward its
complexity, admitting that the conﬂict gave real peasant heroes and outright thieves,
philanthropic dreamers and self-serving Charlatans, a political and military ﬁeld in which
they could act. This more nuanced description of the Revolution also allows for class

analysis.

 

3’ Ferris’ statement once again reveals two of the problems within the one South model—the tendency to
create a black and white dichotomy, which ignores other groups, and the myopic assumption that the term
“southern” inherently refers to the U.S. South and not to other places.

3" With this statement, I do not want to suggest that U.S. northemers did not demonstrate racial prejudice
against blacks. The existence of racism in the U.S. North did not, however, alleviate the tensions between
the two regions surrounding the question of slavery.

63

However, the issue of race becomes increasingly signiﬁcant to our understanding
of the Mexican Revolution when we recall that the categories of race and class oﬁen
collapse into one another in Mexico. To argue that the Mexican Revolution was a
temporary alliance between frustrated members of Mexico’s middle and upper classes
who were not included in the Diaz regime and the oppressed peons whom Diaz either
ignored or persecuted is to suggest that the Revolution was also an alliance between self-
identiﬁed white, criollo Mexicans and the so-called mestizos and Indians who fought ‘
under them. The majority of the soldiers in every army that fought in the Mexican
Revolution was either mestizo or indigenous, and while scores of generals and colonels
belonged to these same racial groups, the eventual presidents—Madero, Carranza,
ObregOn, Calles—and the failed candidates like Vasconcelos did not.35 So while the
battle fronts in the war were not drawn on racial lines, the battles among the leadership
itself (e. g. Zapata’s discontent with both Madero and Carranza, Carranza’s attempt to
slow down Villa’s march toward Mexico City, ObregOn’s contempt and later hatred for
Villa) can be read on personal, social, or racial lines.36

Eckstein’s differentiation between precipitants and preconditions of internal wars
can also help distinguish the Mexican Revolution from the U.S. Civil Wars. He states:

A ‘precipitant’ of internal war is an event which actually starts the war

(‘occasions’ it), much as turning the ﬂintwheel of a cigarette lighter ignites a

 

3’ It is impossible to argue that any of these Mexican leaders’ ancestry was one-hundred percent European,
but none of these leaders self-identiﬁed as mestizo or indigenous. Reading the Mexican Revolution against
the grain, one could argue that it was actually a racial conﬂict whose ﬁrst hero (Madero) used mestizo
and/or indigenous armies (like Villa’s) to overthrown a mestizo president (Diaz). Calling Diaz’s regime
mestizo, however, is purely biological since Diaz himself hoped to whiten Mexico’s indigenous and
mestizo populations.

’6 Emiliano Zapata’s indigenous army stands out as a more overt example of the racial undertones of the
Mexican Revolution. Unlike Madero and his followers, and later, the Constitutionalists and their armies,
Zapata’s army fought for a speciﬁc racial goal—the restoration of the ejidos or indigenous communal lands

in southern Mexico.

64

ﬂame. ‘Preconditions’ of internal war, on the other hand, are those circumstances

which make it possible for the precipitants to bring about political violence, as the

general structure of a lighter makes is possible to produce a ﬂame by turning the

ﬂintwheel. (140)

The immediate precipitants of the two wars were surprisingly similar—Diaz’s farcical re-
election as the president of Mexico and Lincoln’s initial election as the president of the
United States. Diaz’s unwillingness to relinquish power through the ballot box made
Madero——typically described as a paciﬁst or as “the Christ-Fool” (Pinchon 122)—realize
that only violence would bring change to Mexico, and thousands of Mexicans ﬂocked to
his cause as the revolutionary spark seemed to spontaneously burst into ﬂames
throughout the country. Lincoln’s rise in popularity left several states in the U.S. South
threatening to break away from the Union, and upon his actual election, South Carolina
made secession a reality. Less than four months later, Confederate troops attacked Fort
Sumter, and this skirmish opened the door to the most violent and destructive war in the
United States’ history.

The preconditions or long-term societal factors that allowed the outcomes of these
two elections to erupt into fratricidal warfare, however, differed greatly. The social
divisions between Diaz’s regime and a select number of families in the Mexican elite
and, more importantly, the economic divisions between the large land owners and the
peasants served as the preconditions of the Revolution in Mexico. The economic
divisions were particularly dramatic since Diaz’s push to modernize Mexico was
accompanied by stagnant wages, decreases in basic food production, and increases in

food prices. Eric Wolf states that “per capita production of maize declined from 282

65

kilograms in 1877 to 154 in 1894, to 144 in 1907. Similar declines are noted for beans
and chile, similarly vital food crops. Not only did the amount of maize produced per
capita decline, but corn prices rose, while wages remained stationary” (19). The
Porﬁriato was an economic paradox, a boom for Diaz and his cohort and a complete bust
for the vast majority of Mexico’s population. In the United States, the primary
precondition of civil war was regional discord about the institution of slavery and the
issue of sovereignty. Woodward explains the rift that grew between the U.S. North and
South as follows: “In the course of the crisis each of the antagonists, according to the
immemorial pattern, had become convinced of the depravity and diabolism of the other. [.
. .] Paranoia continued to induce counterparanoia, each antagonist infecting the other
reciprocally, until the vicious spiral ended in war” (68). The key precondition of the
Mexican Revolution, then, was the gap between the haves and the have-nots while the
principal precondition of the U.S. Civil War was the rift between the empowered
populations of the U.S. North and South.

Finally, the half century that divided the starting points of each of these wars
witnessed signiﬁcant advancements in military technology. The U.S. Civil War has been
called “the ﬁrst modern war” (Williams 33), but the weaponry was typical of other
nineteenth century wars. The soldiers carried one-shot muskets, and the officers were
armed with sabers (almost relics) and pistols (the most contemporary weapons used on
any large scale in the war). The various factions of the Mexican Revolution,

contrastingly, usually fought with dynamite (or homemade grenades), riﬂes, and pistols.37

 

37 With these lists, I do not mean to suggest that no artillery was used in these wars. Big guns played a role
in both conﬂicts, but the contrast between the personal arms and side arms used in the two wars shows the
advancement in military weaponry better than a comparison between the different types of artillery would

accomplish.

66

The cartuchera or cartridge belt which held the ammunition for these newer ﬁrearms was
so common that it became a symbol of the Revolution. Ultimately, the use of even newer
weapons like the machine gun played a decisive role in the outcome. For example,
Villa’s ranks were repeatedly mowed down at Celaya each time they charged Obregén’s
entrenched machine gunners.

These distinctions demonstrate that when comparing the U.S. Civil War and the
Mexican Revolution the two conﬂicts cannot merely be treated as northern or southern
versions of one another. At the same time, the differences between the two wars
accentuate the key elements that the conﬂicts actually did share. I have already
suggested that the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution shared a common catalyst
in the U.S.-Mexican War, but even more important to the dominant position which the
respective war takes in U.S. southern and Mexican collective memories are each war’s
internal nature—which paints each war as fratricidal—and each conﬂict’s role in deﬁning
national identity along speciﬁc racial lines. The internal character of both the U.S. Civil
War and the Mexican Revolution invites historians and ﬁction writers to depict the
confrontations as acts of both literal and metaphorical fratricide—the killing of the blood
brother and/or the killing of the political brother. Indeed, the discourse of fratricide that
surrounds each of these wars masks the fact that the overwhelming majority of casualties
in each conﬂict was not caused by the family members of the dead. The theme of
ﬁatricide also serves as an interesting foil for the racialized outcome of each war; death
in the family (national or literal) leads to cleaner-cut divisions about who does and does

not belong within the family/national circle.

67

The shared experience I trace between Mexico and the U.S. South is not so much
the shared history of defeat, which Cohn examines to connect the U.S. South to Spanish
America in general, as it is the speciﬁc shared experience of massive internal conﬂict
understood as fratricide. This distinction becomes necessary when we remember that
most participants in the Mexican Revolution saw it as a victory, or, at least, a step in the
right direction, even though the Revolution failed to deliver all of its promises of reform.
The common elements of political and/or literal fratricide in the U.S. Civil War and the
Mexican Revolution, however, connect the histories and literatures of the U.S. South and
Mexico in a manner very similar to the ethos of defeat discussed by Cohn, Smith, and
others.

In his exhaustive A Study of War, Wright suggests that civil wars tend to be much
more “costly both in lives and in economic losses” than their “contemporary
international” counterparts (247). The death statistics from the U.S. Civil War and the
Mexican Revolution clearly support Wright’s claim. War historian T. Harry Williams
describes “the human costs” (33) of the U.S. Civil War as follows: “in terms of human
costs it was a ﬁightful struggle by any measurement, the most terrible war we have
known. The total service deaths aggregated 618,000: 360,000 from the North and
258,000 from the South” (33). The U.S. North lost more soldiers, but the U.S. South had
a smaller population overall, and thus, suffered almost double the death rate per capita.
Williams demonstrates this horrid fact by comparing the death rates of the U.S. Civil War
with the rates of U.S. soldiers lost in World War II: “In World War II the American
service deaths were 384,000 out of a total population of 135,000,000. If the World War

11 deaths had equaled the Northern ratio of service casualties to population, they would

68

have reached 2,500,000; and if they had equaled the Southern ratio, they would have
climbed to almost 5,000,000!” (33). The destruction of the U.S. Civil War increases
beyond Williams’ numbers if civilian casualties, and, especially in the U.S. South, if
civilian privation are considered. No less startling are the death statistics from the
Mexican Revolution. Fuentes claims that at least 1,000,000 Mexicans died during the
Revolution (Latin America 52), and other sources suggest that the total might have been
as high as 2,000,000 (Cumberland 241, 245-46). Luis Aguirre Benavides, former
secretary of Pancho Villa’s northern division and of the failed provincial government that
came out of the Aguascalientes Convention, brings these outrageous numbers back to a
personal level, claiming that “[e]very Mexican, every Mexican home, paid, as we did,
their quota of blood to live and enjoy the conquests obtained in that liberating struggle”
(61).38 Aguirre Benavides’ statement certainly sheds a positive light on those who died
for the Revolution, but the language itself—“the conquests obtained”—foresees the sense
of disillusion that ultimately envelopes several Mexican writers who look back on the
Revolution as a failed opportunity. The outstanding death rates, combined with civilian
privation during the wars, begin to clarify why these two wars became the historical
markers from which memory is created in Mexico and the U.S. South, respectively.

If we add the mental anguish of the survivors who later lament that the loss of so
much life, time, and money was self inﬂicted, then we can argue that civil wars also cost
the societies that suffer through them more psychologically. Eckstein claims that internal

wars “[a]ll tend to scar societies deeply and to prevent the formation of consensus

indeﬁnitely” (134). Both of these elements existed in the long term outcomes of the U.S.

 

3" All translations of Aguirre Benavides’ De Francisco I. Madero a Francisco Villa: memorias de un
revolucionario are my own.

69

Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. Reconstruction served as a visible scar for white
U.S. southemers who felt that the program existed solely to humiliate them. The rise of
the Ku Klux Klan and other groups that preached white supremacy through violence
demonstrates the lack of consensus between the northern victors and the southern
vanquished. In turn, the violence spread by these groups, the federal government’s
abandonment of Reconstruction, and the U.S. South’s adoption of new Jim Crow Laws
scarred the black population of the U.S. South, and thousands of Aﬁican Americas from
the U.S. South migrated to the cities of the U.S. North. The racial tensions and regional
struggles that deﬁned the U.S. South at least until the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the
19608 reveal the perpetual lack of consensus between the two belligerents of the long past
war—the U.S. North and South—and the two major racial groups in the U.S. South
before and after the war.

During the Mexican Revolution, the lack of consensus was evident in the war
itself which dragged on and/or restarted for two decades. Perhaps the most palpable
example of the complete lack of accord among revolutionary leaders was the almost
farcical convention at Aguascalientes and the impotent and short-lived government of
Eulalio Girtiérrez to which it gave birth.39 Eckstein’s claim that “[i]n some societies, the
most manifest cause of internal war seems to be internal war itself, one instance
following another, often without a recurrence of the conditions that led to the original
event” (150) clearly applies to the Mexican Revolution and the repeated cycles of

violence that it generated. Some of the psychological scars of this vortex of violence

 

’9 Martin Luis Guzman participated in Gutiérrez’s government and points out its inability to inﬂuence
Carranza because he did not recognize the government and Villa since he was the military arm of that
government (El ciguila 396). Guzman also suggests that Gutiérrez’s government inexplicably helped
Carranza’s troops defeat those of Zapata even though the former was the government’s worst enemy and
the latter was an important ally (420).

70

were also made visible by massive migrations. The ﬁrst numerically signiﬁcant
migration of Mexicans to the United States since 1848 took place during the most violent
decade of the Revolution from 1910 to 1920.40

The long term mental scars that the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution
left behind continually reveal themselves through the creative outlet of literature. As I
have already suggested, the literatures of the U.S. South and Mexico which obsess over
the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution bring the past into the present. These
wars are particularly vexing for creative minds who look back on them through the lenses
of hindsight and critique (rather than through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia)
because all of the violence and destruction was self inﬂicted, in a sense, familial, and
because both wars politically (and, less often, literally) broke the taboo of fratricide.

The outrageous violence of the Mexican Revolution and the U.S. Civil War and
the tendency to cast both wars as fratricide depend(ed) on the wars’ internal natures, the
closeness between the enemy parties. Many of the classic war theorists do not primarily
focus on internal war; however, they do discuss how proximity and an intimate
knowledge of the enemy affect warfare. 4’ In his Leviathan, for example, Thomas
Hobbes uses distance to differentiate between desire and love and between aversion and
hate: “[T]he presence of the object [or the person],” he states, moves it (him/her) from the
level of desire to that of love or from the level of aversion to that of hate (34). The

enemy in war, accordingly, is only the object of the soldier’s aversion since the enemy

 

’° While millions of Mexicans who lived in the territories lost to the United States with the signing of the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 became U.S. citizens almost overnight, 1848 was not really a year of
Mexican migration to the United States since the border, not the people, migrated.

4' Carl Von Clausewitz certainly emphasizes external rather than internal war in On War. Hobbes,
however, writes on civil war to a great extent in his Behemoth: The History of the Civil Wars of England.
His discussion of war in Leviathan, contrastingly, has an external focus except for his suggestion that the
sovereign is created or empowered when individuals give up their right to a single person in order to avoid
the constant war between man and man (34-35, 1 14-15).

71

soldier is absent from the soldier’s life except in the literal times of invasion or in the
speciﬁc moments of battle. This interpretation of Hobbes correlates well with Carl Von
Clausewitz’s claim that “in the large-scale combat that we call war hostile feelings often
have become merely hostile intentions. At any rate there are usually no hostile feelings
between individuals” (137 his italics). The physical, cultural, and linguistic distance
between enemy soldiers in an international war shifts the “primordial violence, hatred,
and enmity” (89) which Clausewitz ﬁnds inherent to war onto a national rather than a
personal level so that “hatred between nations [. . .] serves more or less as a substitute for
hatred between individuals” (138). The inverse, however, holds true for internal wars
since the distance between enemy armies disappears. In a civil war, the soldiers know
their enemies—they are self not other—and the more intense emotions of hate and love
rather than aversion or desire play an active role in the conﬂict. The proximity of space,
language, and culture between the antagonists in both the Mexican Revolution and the
U.S. Civil War bred both enmity and love. The hate aggravated the violence that was
already present while the love added to the tragic nature of these supposedly fratricidal
conﬂicts.

Aguirre Benavides casts the outcome of the Mexican Revolution in positive
terms, but his memoirs also demonstrate the violence increased by hate and the tragedy
caused by love in the conﬂict which he calls “a bloody, fratricidal war” (54). The rivalry
between Villa and ObregOn created the strongest example of how proximity turned
aversion to hate and how this enmity exacerbated the violence of the Mexican
Revolution. According to Aguirre Benavides, the two wary generals ﬁrst met in Villa’s

stronghold of Chihuahua in August of 1914, and again in September of that same year, in

72

a Carranza-sanctioned attempt to discover a solution to the growing rift between the
current governor and military strongrnen in ObregOn’s home state of Sonora (165). A
rivalry already existed between the two successful Constitutionalist generals, especially
since Obregbn maintained a close relationship with the First General—Carranza—while
Villa and Carranza had a rocky alliance at best. Aguirre Benavides suggests that Villa’s
mistrust of ObregOn grew as he received word from Sonora that Obregén was trying to
double-cross him and as several of his closest military advisors warned him that Obregén
was perﬁdious (167-68). Anacleto GirOn—one of Villa’s subordinate generals who, like
Obregén, was from Sonora—was sick during Obregén’s stay in Chihuahua and sent Villa
a scathing message from his deathbed: “‘My General, I will not rise from this bed, and I
want to recommend that you not believe the evil and treacherous Obregén. Do not let
him leave Chihuahua with his life’” (qtd. in Aguirre Benavides 167). ObregOn’s stay in
Chihuahua elevated Villa’s contempt toward him to aversion, and ﬁnally, hate. He
threatened to execute ObregOn; then, due to the prodding and pleading of several of
Villa’s friends, he decided to send Obregbn unharmed toward Mexico City; and ﬁnally,
he sent a telegram instructing one of his generals to halt ObregOn’s party and kill them all
(170-71). After ObregOn’s near fatal encounter with Villa in Chihuahua, his hate for
Villa became renowned.”2 Edgcumb Pinchon describes ObregOn’s desire to squelch
Villa’s rise to power as “an obsession, dominating his days” (229).

The enmity between Villa and Obregén grew with Villa’s continued military
triumphs and Obregbn’s/Carranza’s attempts to slow La DivisiOn del Norte’s march

toward Mexico City. Villa’s and Obregén’s personal feelings toward one another were at

 

‘2 Various scholars and popular opinion in Mexico suggest that the assassins who gunned Villa down
almost ten years later in the small town of Parral were secret agents working for Obregbn who was
Mexico’s president at the time of Villa’s death.

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least partially responsible for Carranza’s and Obregén’s refusal to participate in the
Aguascalientes Convention, and their hatred eventually played itself out on one of the
most violent battleﬁelds of the Revolution. The battle of Celaya was a rout that
catapulted Obregén from Carranza’s favorite to his eventual rival and pushed Villa and
his vanquished division northward for the remainder of the conﬂict. It was also a
gruesome moment of national, political, and class fratricide (indeed, a miniature version
of the Revolution itself) as Obregén’s Mexican, Constitutionalist, and mostly peasant
troops sent four thousand of Villa’s Mexican, Constitutionalist, and mostly peasant
soldiers to their graves.43
Villa also played a part in one of the most powerful examples of love ending in
tragedy in the Mexican Revolution. All signiﬁcant studies of Pancho Villa describe his
close friendship with Tomas Urbina to whom Villa always referred as his compadre.
Their relationship predated the Revolution and was probably the longest lasting
ﬁiendship Villa ever shared. Martin Luis Guzman relates an almost comical anecdote
that Villa shared with him and with Vasconcelos about how he once had to tie the sleep-
deprived Urbina to a horse in order to continue to ﬂee from a group of rurales that had
been tracking them for days (El ciguila 353-56), and Aguirre Benavides recounts that
when Urbina was ill Villa “nursed him personally, placing his medicine in his mouth as
though he were his own brother” (252). Urbina, however, retired to his own hacienda
(built on the land and with the livestock he had acquired during the Revolution) and

switched his loyalty to Carranza after Villa’s defeat at Celaya. Urbina’s treachery stung

Villa so deeply that he led a secret nocturnal assault on his compadre’s stronghold which

 

‘3 Pinchon, in his melodramatic fashion, casts the battles at Celaya as fated events in which Villa’s “[l]ove
for his brother, betraying him into unpreparedness, hate of his enemy, driving him to premature attack,
combine[d] against him” (311).

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left Urbina with gun shot wounds in his arm and Villa only partially appeased. Villa sent
Urbina toward Chihuahua for medical treatment, but Rodolfo Fierro—probably the most
bloodthirsty of Villa’s generals—killed Urbina en route.44

The intimate nature of the Mexican Revolution increased the hate between
enemies and created personal tragedy between friends, and this closeness, ultimately,
exploded into the bloodiest civil war in the history of the Americas. On a national level,
both the violence between enemies and the violence between friends boiled down to
metaphorical fratricide. In Paz’s words, “[t]he revolutionary explosion is an
extraordinary party in which the Mexican, drunk on himself, ﬁnally meets—in a mortal
embrace—the other Mexican” (180). The Mexican Revolution was a chaotic
whirlwind—Mariano Azuela famously called it both a “volcano” (139) and a “hurricane”
(69) in Los de abajo—that pitted Mexicans against one another in a fratricidal battle that
has become a central point in the nation’s communal memory, a moment that brings the
past into the present as noted by Paz’s and others’ descriptions of what the Revolution
“is” not what the Revolution “was.”45

The internal nature of the U.S. Civil War had similar effects on how the war was

waged and how the conﬂict became engrained in the national mindset. Williams suggests

that the conﬂict “was an intensely personal war” (36), and he claims that soldiers from

 

’4 Sources agree that Villa ambushed Urbina, but they disagree about Villa’s direct role in Urbina’s death.
Aguirre Benavides claims that he does not know whether Fierro was following Villa’s orders when he
killed Urbina, or if he was acting of his own accord (253). Nellie Campobello, in a ﬁctional rendition of
Villa’s attack on Urbina in Cartucho, tries to distance Villa from Urbina’s death by suggesting that Villa
calmed down after talking to Urbina, that he tried to persuade Fierro to show mercy to Urbina, and that
Urbina died when his car rolled over on his way to receive medical treatment for the wounds he sustained
in the standoff (105-106).

‘5 In an interview between Hank LOpez and Katherine Anne Porter, Porter responds to one of LOpez’s
questions by speaking about the Revolution in the past tense. Throughout the interview, she remains
disillusioned with the Revolution in general; however, she admits that she “‘never heard of a revolution
more successful than this one was’” to which LOpez responds, “‘[t]he Mexicans would say is...”’ (124).

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both sides “had the same cultural and historical heritage, [. . .] it was possible for them to
communicate because there was no language barrier between them as might have existed
between the armies of two nations. In some cases individuals knew each other ﬁom
before the war” (39). The latter statement explains the former. The U.S. Civil War was
such a personal affair because no linguistic, cultural, nor physical distance separated the
soldiers of the Union from those of the Confederacy. Under these conditions, both
enmity and fraternity emerged between individuals on the rival sides.

Williams focuses on the fraternal bonds between the Yankee and rebel soldiers,
but he also admits that the conﬂict bred enmity rather than simple aversion: “As the war
settled into the long haul, inevitably real animosities and ﬁnally hatreds deveIOped.
These emotions were in part a natural outgrowth of the conditions created by the war, its
shortages, sacriﬁces, and losses” (3 7). Williams suggests that the shift from aversion to
hate that took place in the U.S. Civil War is inherent to war by calling it “natural” and by
listing three near universal elements of war—“shortages, sacriﬁces, and losses” (37), but
as Clausewitz suggests, hate on a personal level between soldiers is not inherent to war
since the enemy remains alien and distant. Instead, aversion shifts to hate in an internal
war because the soldier knows the enemy too well and can actually see himself in the
enemy. One example of this shift can be seen in the ﬁgure of William T. Sherman
“who,” as Edmund Wilson claims in Patriotic Gore, “knew the South, who had always
got on well with the Southerners and who did not much object to slavery” but who

“became more and more ferocious to devour the South” as the war continued (xxxvi).46

 

4" Sherman demonstrated his growing anger by demonizing the U.S. South even while he was a demon
incarnate to the region. Edmund Wilson states that “a demon posses [Sherman] now to abase and lay waste
the Confederacy. Yet of course it is the enemy who he sees as demonic” (185), and he continues by

76

Another example, although more political in nature, was provided by the Radical
Republicans who, after Lincoln’s death, designed a more vindictive program of
Reconstruction than Lincoln had ever suggested with the purpose of punishing and
humiliating their recently subdued southern enemies—a project that Wright claims
“treat[ed] the South as ‘conquered soil’” (“The American” 73). From the perspective of
the U.S. South, at least, Reconstruction was a project of hatred, not mere aversion.

More well-known, however, are the strange examples of fraternizing which took
place during the U.S. Civil War. A shout of praise for a group of enemy soldiers who
had just performed a heroic act, conversations between opposing pickets and sentinels,
and even barnyard dances with Yanks and Rebs in attendance have all worked their way
into the annals of U.S. history and popular legend about the war. Williams explains that
such friendship made sense in the context of the conﬂict as a civil war: “Men fraternized I
because they had something to communicate to each other. Originally and only recently
they had been members of the same political and social organism” (39). The similarities
between the opposing armies of the U.S. Civil War allowed for a type of communication
that would generally not exist between belligerents, and at times, the friendship between
the two sides made the entire war seem like a game. This tendency, however, reveals the
true tragedy of the U.S. Civil War. As Williams argues, “There is a terrible pathos in [the
episodes of the U.S. Civil War] that reminds us of something we should never forget,

[. . .] The pathos comes from our realization that two people so much alike were ﬁghting

each other” (41).

 

quoting one of Sherman’s messages to Grant in which Sherman labels generals Forrest, Wheeler, and Hood
a “batch of devils” (qtd. in Wilson 185).

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Williams provides a pointed example of love between enemies as he describes the
relationship between Confederate General George E. Pickett and Union General George »
B. McClellan. He states:

In the late spring of 1862 General Pickett writes in a letter that his friend of

prewar days, General George B. McClellan, commander of the Federal Army of

the Potomac, is ill: ‘I have heard that my dear old friend, McClellan, is lying ill

about ten miles from here. May some loving, soothing hand minister to him. He

was, he is, and he will always be, even were his pistol pointed at my heart, my

dear, loved ﬁiend. May God bless him and spare his life.’ (39)

In the collective memory of the United States after the war (both U.S. North and U.S.
South), the tragedy of this war was that Pickett’s conditional statement played itself out
throughout the conﬂict. The discourse of fratricide that surrounds this war in the national
mindset suggests that time and time again acquaintances, friends, and even brothers were
forced to aim their weapons at one another, even through such literal acts of fratricide
were rare. The U.S. Civil War was ingrained on the national conscience as a tragedy, but
it was especially engraved on the collective memory of the U.S. South since the moment
of tragic fratricide was also combined with a complete destruction and replacement of
what had previously existed. The U.S. Civil War is the moment which brings the U.S.

South’s past (both the war itself and the past that the conﬂict annihilated) into the present.
Approaching taboos is almost inherent to the literatures that look back to the U.S.

Civil War and the Mexican Revolution since each war is typically cast as fratricidal. This

focus on fratricide may explain, at least in part, the popularity of the theme of incest in

78

the U.S. southern ﬁction that obsesses over the U.S. Civil War, but it fails to explain the
near lack of incest in the Mexican ﬁction which relives the Revolution. Incest appears
and reappears throughout the ﬁction of the U.S. South and the United States in general
(whether the ﬁction focuses on the U.S. Civil War or not) from the tradition of the tragic
mulatta, to the racist ﬁction of Thomas Dixon, to the complex ﬁctional world of
Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, to the modernist mastery of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man. The same cannot be said for Mexican literature, particularly Mexican literature that
focuses on the Revolution. Incest is central to the ﬁction of Juan Rulfo and to the
theoretical work of Paz, but most Mexican authors who bring Mexico’s revolutionary
past into the present by tackling the taboo of fratricide do not approach the incest taboo.
The ﬁction of the U.S. South suggests that it is easier to speak about sleeping with one’s
sister when one has already killed his brother. Both scenarios reveal an extreme reaction
to sameness. With fratricide, the familial reﬂection of the self is annihilated—etemally
removed—and with incest, it is devoured—made one with the self. Mexican ﬁction,
however, does not suggest that breaching the taboo of fratricide leads to a violation of the
incest taboo; in this literature, killing the brother is not a ﬁrst step to sleeping with the
sister.

The appearance and re-appearance of incest in the literatures of the U.S. South
that cast the U.S. Civil War as fratricide and the lack of this emphasis in Mexican ﬁction
about the fratricidal Revolution might suggest a difference in U.S. southern and Mexican
interpretations of fratricide itself, but I argue that this divergence in literary themes is
more closely connected to the distinct ways in which the U.S. South and Mexico deal

with a third taboo that saturates both the literatures of the U.S. South and Mexico—racial

79

mixture. On the surface level, miscegenation and mestizaje literally mean the same thing,
but as discourses of racial mixture they are not equal. Both discourses rely on the
essentialist claim that racial purity does exist, and they both posit a Speciﬁc racial group
as normal, but they do not function in the same way nor do they create similar
interpretations on the mixing of race. In simplistic terms which I will expand upon and
problematize in the next chapter, the discourse of mestizaje in Mexico is more accepting
of racial mixture than the discourse of miscegenation in the U.S. South.

In the discourse of miscegenation, incest can serve as the binary opposite of racial
mixture, but as a part of the discourse of mestizaje, incest does not function as the polar
opposite of racial mixture since this mixture is accepted as typical (although certainly not
applauded by empowered elite) rather than as exaggerated exogarny.47 Eric Sundquist
claims that in the United States “the miscegenation taboo was as strong as, even stronger
than, the incest taboo” (122) which suggests that authors in the U.S. South who approach
the theme of racial mixture can continually return to the theme of incest because they
have already marked their discussion as taboo. For Mexican authors, incest still
represents a sexual union that is “too close,” but mestizaje does not represent a union that
is “too far,” especially after Mexico embraced mestizaje as the national identity in the
mid 19205. Thus, the portrayal of mestizaje in Mexico is not taboo and does not

transition as easily into the portrayal of incest.

 

“’7 On a theoretical level, the combination of these taboos within one piece of ﬁction—especially when
incest and racial mixture actually collapse into the same sexual act—represents the fusion of a binary since
the extreme of endogamy—incest—is the polar opposite of exaggerated exogamy—racial mixture. Sollors
comments that in anthropological terms incest is “forming a union with someone ‘too close’” while racial
mixture is “uniting with someone ‘too far’” (313). At the same time, incest and racial mixture can also be
seen as uncanny doubles for one another. Rather than opposites, racial mixture and incest may better be
described as reverse mirror images.

80

When incest does appear in ﬁctional and theoretical texts that approach the
Revolution, it is connected to the discussion of fratricide, patricide, or suicide rather than
mestizaje."8 Rulfo’s Pedro Pciramo, for example, directly portrays the act of incest in the
ghost town of Comala, years after the Revolution failed to change the way things
functioned in Paramo’s pseudo kingdom, without any reference to mestizaje. The novel,
instead, is framed by the act of patricide which Abundio Martinez commits against
Paramo. Rulfo’s short stories “En la madrugada” [“At Dawn”] and “Anacleto Morones”
also portray the act of incest but connected to familial and/or class violence rather than to
mestizaje or any type of racial violence. The collection that contains both stories—El
llano en llamas [The Burning Plain]—shows literal patricide (“La herencia de Matilde
Arcangel” [“Matilde Arcangel’s Inheritance”]), metaphorical fratricide (“La cuesta de las
comadres” [“Godmothers’ Slope”]), and all sorts of violence that has nothing to do with
race or with mestizaje.49

Paz also describes the Revolution in incestuous terms: “Es la Revolucién, la
palabra magica, la palabra que va a carnbiarlo todo y que nos va a dar una alegria
inmensa y una muerte rapida. Por la RevoluciOn el pueblo mexicano se adentra en si
mismo, en su pasado y en su sustancia, para extraer de su intimidad, de su entraﬁa, su
ﬁliacibn” (“It is the Revolution, the magic word, the word that is going to change

everything and give us immense joy and quick death. Through the Revolution, the

 

’8 One clear exception to this statement is Fuentes’ novel The Old Gringo which describes the so-called
mixed race relationship of Tomas Arroyo and Harriet Winslow as metaphorical incest. The relationship
between these two characters, however, is almost cast as miscegenation rather than as mestizaje since it is
continually compared to the negative portrayal Harriet offers of her father’s affair with a black woman.

’9 Pedro Pdramo and El llano en llamas are certainly not texts that focus primarily on the Mexican
Revolution. However, the Revolution serves as a background to both texts, and both books suggest that the
victory of the Revolution did little to change the lives of Mexico’s poor. In this sense, Rulfo’s ﬁction
approaches the Revolution in the same way that some of Faulkner’s more indirect novels approach the U.S.
Civil War, wrestling with the social fallout of the wars rather than the conﬂicts themselves.

81

Mexican people deeply penetrate themselves, their past and their substance, to extract
from their private life, from their core, their afﬁliation”; 179).50 The erotic nature of the
language in this passage casts the Revolution as an act of incest, and when read with an
understanding of the massive amount of violence which took place during the Revolution
(a violence to which Paz alludes in suggesting that the Revolution offers “quick dea ”)
the penetration of the self can also be read as fratricide or suicide. Paz criticizes
mestizaje elsewhere in his treatise by condemning La Malinche, but he does not connect
his critique of racial mixture to his discussion of the Revolution nor does he link
mestizaje to incest. In short, incest fails to function as the binary opposite of racial
mixture in the literature that brings the Mexican Revolution into the present since
mestizaje in Mexico is not the same taboo that miscegenation is in the U.S. South.51

The U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution were cataclysmic events that
forged national identities out of internal violence cast as fratricide. These identities are
steeped in blood—the literal blood shed by those who died on and near the ﬁelds of battle
and the blood discourses that were deﬁned and reworked during these conﬂicts to
categorize the national self on racial lines, the racial other within the nation, and the
mixture of the two. The documents which create these racial discourses and the ﬁction
that combines the descriptions of the wars with the discussion of race and racial mixture

illuminate one another across disciplines (science, politics, philosophy, history, and

 

5° Kemp, Milos, and Phillips Belash translate the latter sentence of this quote as follows: “By means of the
Revolution the Mexican people found itself, located itself in its own past and substance” (The Labyrinth of
Solitude and Other Writings 148). Their translation is easier to understand than the literal translation which
I offer, but it completely de-eroticizes and/or decreases the violence of Paz’s description of the Revolution
in Spanish.

5' Paz’s fascination with incest among indigenous groups in Mexico before the arrival of Cortés might
suggest that in Mexico incest, also, is less of a taboo subject than it is in the U.S. South. However, this
would be a difficult point to argue since the most powerful entity in post-Cortes Mexico, the Catholic
Church, casts incest as a heinous crime. Rulfo’s portrayal of the guilt connected to incest in Pedro Pdramo
suggests that incest carries the same, if not greater, stigma in Mexico than in the U.S. South.

82

literature) across languages (Spanish and English) across geography (the Rio Grande/Rio
Bravo, the Gulf of Mexico, the Sonoran Desert) and across regional and national
constructs (Mexico, the United States, the U.S. South)—revealing that neither Mexico,

the U.S. South, or the United States should be studied in a vacuum.

83

Chapter 2
Discourses of Racial Mixture Born in Civil War:
Creating the Nation in the United States and Mexico

The discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje grew out of the U.S. Civil War
and the Mexican Revolution, respectively, moments in which both nation-states deﬁned
themselves on racial lines. The U.S. North reshaped the nation by bringing the U.S.
South—including millions of now emancipated slaves of African descent—back within
its boundaries while Mexico sought to redeﬁne itself according to the European myth of
the nation as a homogenous racial whole. Race, of course, is only one of many markers
that might be used to form a nation. However, as Juan de Castro explains in Mestizo
Nations, nation creation is typically connected to the concept of race.1 He states:

Although it would seem possible to separate the concepts of race and nation [. . .]

one cannot ignore the fact that any attempt to deﬁne a nation, or to establish a

national identity, inevitably becomes entangled with the question of race. The

imbrication of these two concepts is evident in the attempts at national deﬁnition

with which we are familiar in Europe and the Americas. (11)2

The births of both discourses from the ashes of civil wars that racially redeﬁned
each nation-state and the past and present power of miscegenation and mestizaje support

the critique of the state as a construct of white supremacy which Charles W. Mills puts

 

’ French philosopher Ernest Renan’s inﬂuential deﬁnition of the nation from the late nineteenth century
speciﬁcally distances the idea of nation from race. In “What is a nation?,” Renan claims that “A nation is a
spiritual principle, the outcome of the profound complications of history; it is a spiritual family not a group
determined by the shape of the earth. We have now seen what things are not adequate for the creation of
such a spiritual principle, namely, race, language, material interest, religious afﬁnities, geography, and
military necessity” (18-19). However, Renan admits that others equate race with nation, stating,
“[n]owadays, a far graver mistake is made: race is confused with nation and a sovereignty analogous to that
of really existing peoples is attributed to ethnographic or, rather linguistic groups” (8).

2 Castro does not deny that, theoretically, a nation can be created according to any parameters; instead, he
suggests that, in practice, race tends to play an integral part in the forming of nations.

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forth in The Racial Contract. Mills argues that the European Enlightenment and the
creation of modern nation-states in Europe and the Americas are founded upon a Racial
Contract between Europeans which created race by granting citizenship to themselves as
so-called whites while casting non-Europeans as nonwhites, denying them citizenship,
and relegating them to the level of subhuman (26-27, 63, 122). My reading of the
discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje as parts of the Racial Contract does not call
for an in-depth analysis of the racist founding moments of Mexico and the United States.
Instead, I accept Mills’ argument that these former colonies’ foundational points included
the Racial Contract, and I focus on how that contract was rewritten during the civil wars
that re-created each nation-state. I argue that even though nonwhites “won” or “gained”
new rights and paper inclusion in the national politics of the United States and Mexico
during the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution, the nations which materialized
after the conﬂicts wrote the Racial Contract anew in terms that appeared to erase racial
barriers but actually underscored them.

The discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje that emerged from the U.S. Civil
War and the Mexican Revolution, respectively, appear to be polar opposites on the
surface level. A summary juxtaposition of the two discourses reads something like this:
In the United States, the newly coined term “miscegenation” replaced the previously
popular “amalgamation” and relegated all people with any African ancestry to the
supposedly inferior level of blackness via the so-called “one-drop rule” which was ﬁrst
put into action during Reconstruction. Summarily, blacks were segregated from whites
throughout the U.S. South and persecuted throughout both the U.S. South and North. In

Mexico, positive mestizaje replaced an outdated (but still existent) caste system, and both

85

mestizos and Indians emerged from the Revolution as either an early example of the
cosmic race or as the bridge to that race of the future.

This reading of miscegenation and mestizaje both glosses over the disturbing
similarities between the two discourses and naively romanticizes one while demonizing
the other. To comprehend the intricacies of the discourses of mestizaje and
miscegenation, we must unpack the two terms via a historiographic reading which is both
synchronic and diachronic, both national and intemational—a comparative approach
which pays attention to both discourses’ existence per se, their changes through time, and
their interactions with one another. My historio graphic reading of the primary documents
which moved miscegenation and mestizaje from concepts toward racial discourses
reveals that each discourse was born out of the conﬂict of civil war; that each discourse
regulated (and to an extent, still regulates) how racial mixture was/is interpreted in the
United States and Mexico, respectively; and that both discourses, whether overtly or
secretly, favor(ed) whiteness over all other racial types.3

In the following pages, I argue that miscegenation and mestizaje function as
discourses in that they dictate how society views racial mixture in the United States and
in Mexico. The U.S. Civil War was instrumental in shaping the discourse of

miscegenation—an obsession with the false notion of racial purity—while the Mexican

 

3 I want to be clear that my critique of the discourse of mestizaje refers speciﬁcally to how the discourse
functions in Mexico rather than to the adaptation of this discourse by various groups in the United States
(particularly Chicano/a movements). As Amy Karninsky explains, “In Mexico, postcolonial mestizaje is
the creation of a new race on which to found new nations. Functioning as a dominant discourse of national
identity, the invocation of mestizaje oﬁen threatens indigenous cultures. [. . .] In the United States, in
contrast, mestizo is an oppositional racial ﬁction, barely recognized by the dominant culture, for whom
mixed ancestry originating elsewhere resolves into simple ‘othemess’” (24 her italics). In Mexico,
mestizaje is the racial discourse while in the United States it acts in opposition to the dominant force of
miscegenation. Still, several elements of my critique of Mexican mestizaje—e. g. the romanticization of the
indigenous past and the ignoring of the indigenous present—can also apply to versions of mestizaje that are
praised as subversive or counter-hegemonic within the United States.

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Revolution institutionalized the discourse of mestizaje—an attempt to create homogenous
unity out of racial difference. Both miscegenation and mestizaje are biological
discourses which claim that physical, mental, and/or spiritual traits are literally carried
within the blood. Both discourses favor whiteness but in distinct ways which become
signiﬁcant in each nation’s history and literature. Miscegenation is a segregationist
discourse that seeks to negate the existence of racial mixture between blacks and whites,
to label any person with any portion of African ancestry as black, to cast all racial
mixture as abhorrent, and to collapse all nonwhite racial groups into one category—
black. Mestizaj e, contrastingly, is a two-faced, assimilationist discourse that publicly
champions racial mixture between so-called European whites and indigenous Mexicans
but privately seeks to whiten Mexico. Both public and private faces of mestizaje
romanticize Mexico’s indigenous past, ignore Mexico’s indigenous present, and try to

erase any connection between Mexico and Africa.4

Miscegenation, Mestizaje, and Language

The words mestizaje and miscegenation describe the same process, but their
distinct connotations hint toward the signiﬁcant differences between how the two terms
function as discourses of racial mixture in Mexico and the United States. These
differences, however, are difﬁcult to express when seeking to translate the Spanish term
into English and vice versa because mestizaje cannot carry the racist weight of a term

coined in satirical fashion in the midst of the U.S. Civil War while miscegenation cannot

 

4 Miscegenation’s public face is its real face. In other words, the discourse proposes division between races
and actually supports such division. This same statement cannot be made for mestizaje whose public face
supports racial mixture while the discourse itself (as I will prove in the pages that follow) favors whiteness
and views whitening as the ultimate end of the project.

87

portray the historical baggage—both positive and negative—of a term originally invented
during the Spanish Conquest of the Americas and more recently co-opted as a national
identity in Mexico. Doris Sommer approaches this translation problem in her inﬂuential
reading of nineteenth century Latin American novels, Foundational Fictions, calling the
term miscegenation “an unfortunate translation for mestizaje” (22 her italics), and in
“Plagiarized Authenticity” she states in language even more bold that “the ideal of
mestizaje” is “pejoratively translated into English as miscegenation” (151 her italics).5
The linguistic gap between the two terms creates odd moments in several analyses
and translations of one or both terms. For example, in “Race Mixture and the
Representation of Indians in the U.S. and the Andes,” Debra Rosenthal chooses to frame
her discussion of racial mixture in both North and South America through the lens of
miscegenation rather than using both terms, even though she admits that the “term
[miscegenation] is extremely problematic” (136 n. 2). The use of the word
miscegenation to describe the process of mestizaje is awkward at best because the
negative connotation attached to the former term taints the idea portrayed by the latter.
Or, to avoid using language saturated with the idea of purity, the term miscegenation
negates the positive connotation that mestizaje can convey. An even stronger example of
the gap between the terms comes in Didier T. J aén’s otherwise solid translation of J osé
Vasconcelos’ La raza césmica, which appears in the Johns Hopkins’ bilingual edition of
the text. J aén maintains the Word mestizaje as the title of the ﬁrst section of the book, but

in one of the other few cases in which the particular word mestizaje is actually used in the

 

5 Sommer’s article “Plagiarized Authenticity: Sarrniento’s Cooper and Others” was ﬁrst published in
Gustavo Perez Firmat’s Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? in 1990. A revised version appeared
as the second chapter of Sommer’s Foundational Fictions one year later. The chapter maintains the same
judgment about the translation of mestizaje as miscegenation but replaces the word “translated” from the
article with the word “rendered” (78).

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original Spanish text—a moment in the prologue in which Vasconcelos refers to the
superior creativity of the mixed periods of ancient civilizations like Egypt by asking the
question “gcémo se comparan los periodos de mestizaje con los periodos de
homogeneidad racial creadora?” (44 his italics)——Jaén translates the passage as “how do
the periods of miscegenation compare with the periods of homogeneous racial
creativity?” (4). The use of miscegenation in this instance is surprising on one level and
jarring on another. First, it is strange that the translator is not consistent with his usage of
mestizaje as a title and as a term within the text. Second, the use of the word
miscegenation in the prologue conjures up a negative image for the reader of the English
version of the text which contradicts whatis typically read as the point of Vasconcelos’
entire essay—that mestizaje is not only positive, but that it is the gateway to the future.
Phrases such as “racial mixture” and “mixtura de razas” provide less politicized
replacements for the terms miscegenation and mestizaje, but they are both less
economical.6 Translating miscegenation as mestizaje and vice versa remains the only one
word option for the translator unless he or she chooses to keep each term in its original
language due to the difﬁculties of translating them. This alternative provides a simple
solution for the translation gap between the two terms, a solution which I follow here.
However, as Catherine Poupeney-Hart suggests, foreign terms that describe racial
mixture are usually “marked with a distinguishing graphic sign [. . .] the use of italics”
when incOrporated into another language (48). This approach, too, can become
problematic since it exoticizes the word or phrase and inherently suggests that it does not

belong within a speciﬁc language’s ability to convey meaning. For this study which

 

6 Even the phrase “racial mixture,” which I use throughout my work to describe the concept in general
rather than the speciﬁcs of one discourse or the other, is problematic in that it implies that essential
differences between races exist—differences that can be mixed.

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interrogates both miscegenation and mestizaje and analyzes how they become discourses
on how the idea of racial mixture is thought in the United States and Mexico, the need to
use both terms rather than relying on one as the translation of the other should already be
apparent. However, I purposefully choose not to italicize mestizaje, not as an exercise of
code switching that favors the bilingual reader, but in an attempt to suggest that other
ways of viewing racial mixture exist above and beyond the myOpic term miscegenation
which monopolizes the discussion of racial mixture in the English language.

In “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Gary B. Nash suggests that
prominent U.S. politicians, e. g. Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, made several
attempts to create a mestizo United States by supporting and even rewarding mixed
marriages between Amerindians and white settlers (943). Had these efforts been more
successful, perhaps the nation would have developed a more open mind about inter-racial
sexuality and marriage, and the discourse of miscegenation as it exists today might have
never come into being. However, even if the European settlers of what eventually
became the United States and the Amerindians they encountered had founded and
maintained a tradition of racial mixture, the concept of miscegenation would probably
have been invented anyway due to the rigid black/white divide which grew out of race-
based plantation slavery, the war that eventually destroyed the plantation and its system
of slave labor, and the project of Reconstruction which followed. In fact, the original
miscegenation pamphlet actually suggests that the term apply to all types of race mixture
while the neologism “melaleukation,” obtained from the Greek words for black and
white, apply to the offspring of people with Aﬁican and European ancestries (Croly ii).

The rejection of the term melaleukation by U.S. whites could imply that they feared racial

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mixture in general rather than the speciﬁc mixture of whites and blacks, but their
adoption of miscegenation—not only as a general term, but as a term whose connotation
soon identiﬁed racial mixture speciﬁcally between blacks and whites—more overtly
suggests that for U.S. whites (both during the aﬁermath of the U.S. Civil War and now)
racial relations were/are seen as a black/white dichotomy, a partition that either ignores
other races or groups them on the black side of the divide.

Poupeney-Hart argues that the lack of a term like mestizaje (and the
noun/adj ective mestizo which derives from it) originates in how U.S. whites view this
racial divide: “The lack of a ‘neutral’ option in current Anglo-American expression
manifests probably the difﬁculty this society has in dealing with the historical reality of
‘race mixturez’ it has also very probably much to do with the profound White/Black
(Black including a very large chromatic range) fracture existing presently in the United
States” (48). Her repeated use of “probably” in this statement demonstrates a reluctance
to assign speciﬁc reasons to why the English language does not include terms which cast
racial mixture in either a neutral or positive light. However, this caution—especially
when compared to the more radical argument of Francoise Lionnet which I will approach
below—is unnecessary. In slightly more direct language, I support Poupeney-Hart’s
argument and suggest that the lack of a term like mestizaje in U.S. English is
symptomatic of how the white population in the United States conceives both racial
mixture and current race relations.

Francoise Lionnet claims that rather than being a symptom of how U.S. whites
view racial mixture, English’s lack of a term like mestizaje shapes how race and racial

mixture are viewed by people who speak English. In “The Politics and Aesthetics of

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Métissage,” Lionnet suggests that the primary difference between mestizaje and
miscegenation exists at the linguistic level. She argues that not allowing for words like
“métis” or “mestizo [. . .] is a serious blind spot of the English language,” and she
suggests “that for all English-speaking peoples the very concept of race is different from
that of the French, Spanish, or Portuguese speakers” because a lack of vocabulary in
English “implies that persons of indeterminate ‘race’ are freaks” (327-28). Lionnet’s
argument is compelling, and her critique of the English language demonstrates an
important difference between the connotations of the terms mestizaje and miscegenation
that I hope to historically ground. However, her complete reliance on language
differences creates its own blind spots. She ignores the complex distinctions between
French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonization in Africa and the Americas, and worse, she
implies that these colonial efforts were somehow more benign than those of the British
because the languages of these Latin conquerors better allowed for racial mixture. The
very creation of a caste system in Mexico and throughout Spanish America with separate
tiers for mixed offspring demonstrates that the Spanish, like the British, saw mestizos,
mulattos, and other children of mixed parentage as abnormalities. Miscegenation
certainly carries a negative connotation that mestizaje does not—at least, not since the
early twentieth century when mestizaje was redeﬁned as a positive rather than a
problem—but this does not mean that the children, literary or literal, of mestizaje in
Mexico and Spanish America in general inherently receive better treatment than the
children of miscegenation in the United States.

Below, I include a rather large passage form Lionnet’s article in order to

demonstrate more completely the drastic jump she makes when she argues that a gap in

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the English language causes essentialist views toward racial mixture in English speakers
rather than reﬂecting the essentialist views of certain English speakers:

The Anglo-American consciousness seems unable to accommodate miscegenation

positively through language. [. . .] When we attempt to understand the full range

of connotations of our racial terminologies, we are forced to reexamine the
unconscious linguistic roots of racial prejudice and to face the fact that language
predetermines perception. This is why a word like métis or mestizo is most
useful: it derives etymologically from the Latin mixtus, ‘mixed,’ and its primary
meaning refers to cloth made of two different ﬁbers, usually cotton for the warp
and ﬂax for the woof: it is a neutral term, with no animal or sexual implication. It
is not grounded in biological misnomers and has no moral judgments attached to
it. It evacuates all connotations of ‘pedigreed’ ascendance, unlike words like
octoroon or half-breed. (328 her italics)

The evidence which Lionnet uses to argue that distinct perceptions of racial
mixture are based on linguistic differences is problematic on several fronts. First, she
suggests that because the Latin root for mestizaje and mestizo (and their equivalents in
French and Portuguese) is neutral that these words are detached from any “moral
judgments.” Yet, even a rudimentary understanding of the Spanish caste system reveals
that terms like mestizo do carry moral baggage. In The Limits of Racial Domination:
Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1 720, Douglas Cope claims that by the
late 15003 “colonials [in Mexico City] came to regard the terms ‘mestizo’ and
‘illegitimate’ as practically synonymous” (18). Colonial Spaniards’ obsession with

protecting the virginity of the sisters and the chastity of the mother in the colonial family

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is well documented. Illegitirnacy had damning effects on both mother and offspring.
That illegitimacy and mestizaje became synonyms in colonial Mexico directly contradicts
Lionnet’s claim that neutral terms have no “moral judgments attached to” them.

Second, by juxtaposing the Anglo’s lack of ability to conceive miscegenation in a
positive light with her discussion of etymologically neutral terms like mestizo and métis
and by calling this terminology “most useful[,]” Lionnet implies that these neutral terms
are positive. Again, the caste system, along with the nineteenth century tradition in
Spanish America Of vilifying the mestizo, suggest otherwise. Finally, her praise for the
Latin term mixtus could just as easily be applied to the English term amalgamation which
was the popular term in England and in the United States for describing racial mixture
before the coining of miscegenation in 1863. The term amalgamation was borrowed
from metallurgy, and like mixtus, it literally describes a mixture of inanimate objects
rather than sexual or biological union. Amalgamation cannot be transformed into a
convenient word (“amalgate” or “amalgon”) to describe the offspring of a so-called
mixed race relationship, so English relies on biological and “pedigreed” terms like “half-
breed” or “octoroon” as Lionnet suggests.‘ However, even with the existence of neutral
terms such as mestizo, Spanish, like English, still relies on negative biological terms such
as mulato—a term which implies that the mixture is between different species and that
the offspring will be infertile. Indeed, mulato is far more popular in Spanish than mulatto

is in English.”

 

7 The miscegenation pamphlet also coined speciﬁc terms to describe the offspring of mixed race
relationships, but the terms “miscegen” and “melaleukon” (Croly ii) never caught on and were not adopted

into the English language.
8 Both French and Portuguese also have their equivalents of this biological term—mulatre and mulato—
although pardo is more commonly used in Brazilian Portuguese than mulato.

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The English language’s lack of a term to describe racial mixture in a neutral or a
positive light is disturbing, but this problem reﬂects prejudice rather than creating it.9 We
cannot blame racism and an aversion to racial mixture in the United States on the English
language rather than placing the culpability on historical events that created the discourse
of miscegenation, and more importantly, upon individuals who practice racism and
continue to decry racial mixture. '0 At the same time, we cannot allow the overt
essentialism of the discourse of miscegenation to mask the also sordid history and hidden
essentialism of the discourse of mestizaje. For, as I hope to show, both the creation and
the current strength of the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje have more in

common than a linguistic comparison of the two terms makes apparent.

From Amalgamation to the Discourse of Miscegenation
The story of racial mixture in the United States cannot be told without considering
the story of African slavery in this country. The colonies’ shift from a labor system that

included both white and black indentured servants to the institution of chattel slavery

 

9 In his recent text, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn ’t, and Why, Jabari Asim describes how, in
the case of British encounters with Africans, the English language revealed the prejudices of English
speakers rather than creating them. He states, “[t]he intensity of English neuroses regarding most things
black practically ensured that the language they chose to describe Africans and their ‘progenie’ would be
anything but neutral. Instead, it reﬂected their obsessions. [. . .] From the outset, the British and their
colonial counterparts relied on language to maximize the idea of difference between themselves and their
Aﬁican captives” (12). The active agent, then, is not the English language itself but the speaker of the
language who uses it to degrade the racial other.

’0 In her article “‘The Direction of the Howling’: Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom,

Absalom!,” Barbara Ladd analyzes the clash between racial discourses in the Louisiana Territory after the
French sold it to the United States. She suggests that the United States tried to supplant the French’s
“assimilationist colonial policy with respect to racial relations” with “a segregationist and nationalist policy
which demanded that one prove title as white in order to be assimilated to any degree whatsoever into the
redemptive New World nation” (528). Accordingly, the differences between French métissage and U.S.
segregation (still amalgamation rather than miscegenation at this moment) were historical—the former was
a colonial strategy while the latter was a national strategy—rather than linguistic. In other words, what
Ladd calls “the racist ideology of American nationalism” (528), not the English language, carries the blame
for the United States’ aversion to racial mixture.

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created a negative perception of racial mixture which would eventually develop into the
discourse of miscegenation. This discourse became so overarching that the nation’s
history of racial mixture is oﬁen forgotten, and the general population accepts various
fallacies about the nation’s history of racial mixture without thinking twice. One of the
most common misconceptions about racial mixture in the United States is the idea that
the so-called “one-drop rule” existed when the nation was originally founded. Another
misconception is that because of this “rule” very little racial mixture (not only between
whites and blacks but also between both groups and Amerindians) took place in the
colonies and in the new nation since neither whites nor Indians wanted to relegate their '
offspring to the inferior social and economic positions reserved for all people with traces
of black ancestry. It is true that early attempts to form a mestizo nation between
Amerindians and white settlers were ultimately unsuccessful and that white mixture with
blacks was frowned upon (and even made illegal in several states) due to the latter’s slave
status, but racial mixture was not a completely uncommon practice in the colonies and in
the young United States. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, this mixture was
dubbed “‘amalgamation’ after the process of combining mercury with another metal to
create a uniform alloy” (Kinney 8-9).

Mixture between whites and blacks, speciﬁcally, was much more common than
the discourse of miscegenation suggests. In Amalgamation!: Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in
the Nineteenth-Century American Novel, James Kinney argues that “during nearly 250
years of slavery in America, black and white men and women lived together and loved
together, shared joys and sorrows together, and together produced a race of mulatto

children” (3). He afﬁrms that “by the time the English colonies became the United

96

States, more than 60,000 people of mixed black and white ancestry lived in the new
country” (4). Any estimation of the number of so-called mixed race individuals in the
country at the time slavery was abolished would have to be much higher than Kinney’s
ﬁgure since his ntunbers do not account for the eighty some-odd years between U.S.
independence and the Emancipation Proclamation nor do they include the children born
to Anglo/Amerindian and African/Amerindian couples.

Still, the young United States was certainly not a safe haven for mixed race
populations, and amalgamation was scorned in law and in the media. As tensions
between the U.S. North and the U.S. South increased over the latter’s continued reliance
on slavery, amalgamation became an even more volatile, popular, and sensational
subject. Abolitionists argued that amalgamation demonstrated the immorality of the
slave system since the system allowed slave owners to coerce their slaves into sexual
relations and then either sell or commit incest with their own mixed offspring. Slavery’s
advocates, in turn, argued that amalgamation was a moral outrage and suggested that it
was the driving force of the abolition movement, claiming that abolitionists wanted to
free blacks from slavery so they could openly inter-marry with them. The collapse of
slavery, they warned, would lead to a dangerous future in which no social or legal
constraints would separate blacks from whites. In this charged atmosphere, various
scientists, theologians, apologists for slavery, and abolitionists waged an academic war
over the very origins of humankind. Many opponents of slavery and several theologians

and religious leaders supported the doctrine of monogenism, suggesting that all people,

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regardless of race, descended from the same original pair—Adam and Eve.ll A group of
inﬂuential scientists and an increasing number of slave owners gathered around the idea
of polygenism and argued that the different races were actually different species with
separate origins.

As Scott Michaelsen suggests in Anthropology ’s Wake, an important part of this
monogenism and polygenism debate took place in the science and medical journals of the
U.S. South in the 18403 and 18503 as various professed experts argued about
amalgamation and mixed race offspring (169-70). This discussion about human
hybridity—particularly the views expressed by the side arguing for polygenism—
foreshadowed the repugnance which was soon attached to racial mixture once the term
miscegenation was coined.

One of the primary exchanges in this hybridity debate was between the famed
natural scientist Doctor Samuel George Morton and Reverend John Bachman, a pastor
and an avid natural scientist in his own right. In an interchange of six articles—three
from each writer—from early 1850 to early 1851 , Morton and Bachman ﬁlled the pages
of the Charleston Medical Journal and Review with their contrasting arguments about
hybridity and how it concerns the unity of the human race. Rather than providing a close
reading of all six articles, I will summarize both authors’ arguments and connect these

arguments to their more global theses on the genesis of humankind.

 

1’ By suggesting that some theologians, religious leaders, and abolitionists held the same beliefs about a
singular creation, I am not arguing that these groups necessarily agreed on other issues since there were
pe0ple who both supported slavery and held to the doctrine of monogenism.

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Morton redeﬁnes the term species as “a primordial organic form” (“Additional
Observations” 760 his italics).12 He claims that nature provides scores of examples of
reproduction between species and that the hybrid offspring of species mixture is
occasionally fertile. The existence of fertile hybrids in nature, he argues, eliminates
sterility as a proof of hybridity even if these fertile hybrids are the exception to a larger
rule. Upshot one: the fertility of mixed race humans does not prove that the distinct races
are of the same species. Upshot two: the existence of multiple species of humans opens
the possibility for multiple creations or multiple primordial pairs. In support of this last
point, Morton suggests that monogenism is ﬂawed since it would require incest at every
level, and since “incestuous intercourse tends eventually to the deterioration and
extinction of the races that are subjected to it” (“Letter” 342).13 Morton claims that such
a “plan” would fail “unless a miracle had been wrought at every stage of it” (342), and he
suggests that God would not create a plan that required divine intervention every step of

the way (343).”

 

'2 Michaelsen notes that Morton soon presented this new deﬁnition to the Academy of Natural Sciences in
a shorter paper in September 1850 (Anthropology ’s 178). Morton also returned to this deﬁnition in his last
letter in his exchange with Bachman. Seeking to obviate the ﬁrture criticism that his opponents might
suggest that his “new deﬁnition of species—a primordial organic form—is necessary to the doctrine of
diversity of origin[,]” Morton frankly states, “[s]uch, however, is not the case” and claims that he has
offered his new deﬁnition in good faith “in the hope that it may cover the whole ground better than those
which have preceded it” (“Notes on Hybridity” 145 his italics). This early defense, however, does not
prevent the critique. In 1855, Bachman criticizes Morton’s new deﬁnition, suggesting that those who argue
for multiple human species “have been driven as a last resort, to the necessity of inventing a new deﬁnition
for the word species, to accommodate their new theory (“Characteristics” 209).

’3 It is interesting to note that while Morton cites incest as a critique of monogenism, the logic of white
supremacy which his work buttresses is inherently incestuous.

'4 Morton’s “moral objection” (“Letter” 342) to monogenism and his claim “that the laws of Nature were
ordained of God, and [. . .] a special interposition at every step would disjoint the mighty mechanism and
mar the harmony of creation” (343) appear to leave the realm of science for that of theology. Bachman
criticized Morton and other supporters of polygenism who tried to back their science with religion stating,
“I presumed you were desirous of discussing this subject on the principles of science alone. The believers
in the unity of the human race had long been charged with unfairness, in resorting to the Scriptures for
arguments in favor of their theory, instead of conﬁning them to those facts which were presented by an
interpretation of the laws of nature. I have met you on the very principles which those of your school
insisted on, as the only philosophical mode of treating this question. Why is it that, after making such a

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Bachman, contrastingly, argues “that species are original creations by an act of
God” (“A Reply” 499), “that the union of the two species, when'this can be effected,
produces a hybrid, which in ninety-nine cases out of an hundred, is stamped with
hopeless sterility at birth” (499), that infertility can be used as proof of hybridity, and
vice versa, that fertility is proof of a lack of hybridity. Upshot one: the fact that humans
from different races can and do mix to create fertile offspring means that human
amalgamation is an example of mixture between types or varieties within a species, not
hybridity. Upshot two: the existence of only one human species means that only one
original creation of humans took place.

Both Bachman and Morton used hybridity to support their disparate theories
about the origins of humankind, but their polygenism/monogenism debate often took a
back seat in their articles to the pages and pages each author dedicated to proving or
disproving that hybrid animals were infertile. '5 In other words, while the subtitle of the
debate—as concerning the unity of the human species—reveals that real stakes to the
discussion did exist, the debate became an esoteric exercise of natural science that, when
read today, appears quite detached from the humans which the authors hoped to

demonstrate did or did not belong to the same species.” Perhaps the juxtaposition of

 

poor show of defence [sic], as it appears to me, in favor of hybridity, you should now hide yourself behind
the panoply of those very Scriptures which it was so pertinaciously insisted on should be kept out of the
discussion” (“A Reply” 504). However, Bachman walks a ﬁne line when critiquing Morton for the usage
of scripture. Bachman does not quote scripture to support his argument, but by stating “that species are
original creations by an act of God” (499), he, too, mixes the spiritual with the scientiﬁc.

’5 For example, Bachman uses a majority of his article “An Investigation of the Cases of Hybridity in
Animals on Record, Considered in reference to the Unity of the Human Species” to throw doubt on the
reliability of Morton’s sources and to offer counterpoints to Morton’s myriad of exammes of fertile
mixtures between several distinct species of animals. He frames the article by arguing for the unity of the
human species, but once he becomes lost in his rebuttal of Morton’s strange animal mixtures—e.g. caribou
and milk cow (l76-77)—he fails to conclude with any allusion to his purpose of proving that all human
races belong to the same species.

'6 Indeed, each author’s extreme efforts to contradict his opponent reveal that something greater than
strange animal mixtures lies at the heart of the debate. Michaelsen argues that Morton and Bachman take

100

Bachman’s theses alongside the earlier ideas of Josiah C. Nott can provide an even more
valuable picture of the stakes of the hybridity discussion since this comparison is less
about whether certain animals can/cannot mix and more about whether people of mixed
ancestry—especially mulattos—are hybrids. ’7 In the early to mid 18403, Nott published
several articles in the journals of the U.S. South in which he claimed that mulattos were
hybrids and that amalgamation between blacks and whites in the United States could lead
to extinction. A juxtaposition of Bachman and Nott, too, reveals the increasing tension
over the slave question in the United States since Bachman’s attempt to prove the unity
of the human species matched contemporary abolitionist rhetoric while Nott’s claim of
complete difference between blacks and whites was used as justiﬁcation for the
increasingly controversial practice of chattel slavery in the U.S. South.18

The clearest contrast between the two thinkers is how they interpreted the very
visible proof that mixture between the races was taking place. Bachman claims that the
existence and continued growth of mixed race populations proves that they are not

hybrids: “Our neighbors of Mexico, and the mulattoes in the United States—the latter

 

one another so seriously that each thinker arrives at conclusions in their rebuttals that are radical enough
that they directly undercut their own stated beliefs. He claims that in Bachman’s response to Morton’s
discussion of incest “the matter of difference and relation is radicalized so as to produce a shcemetization
of what one might call the non-relation of all related kin. [. . .] Bachman’s argument becomes unhinged
from monogenism proper (from an insistence on generalized likeness or sameness)” (Anthropology ’s 173),
and he “is quite literally on the threshold of conceptualizing persons as radically individuated monads”
(174). Similarly, Michaelsen claims that in Morton’s responses to Bachman he “incorporates hybridity into
his account of the races” (177) and “swallows it whole, adopts it as his foundational historical gesture”
(179). In other words, Bachman, the monogenist, ends up arguing for the lack of relation between what he
supposedly sees as a uniﬁed human species while Morton, the polygenist, winds ups suggesting that
primordial mixture is foundational to what he supposedly calls the disparate human species.

7 Nott, along with George R. Gliddon, became famous in 1854 with the publication of Types of Mankind in
which he analyzed several monuments, pieces of art, and the theories of various scientists (including
Morton who had been dead for three years by the time the book was published) to argue that the rulers of
ancient Egypt had been white rather than black. His bias against Aﬁ'icans is visible from the early journal
articles he wrote while practicing medicine in Mobile, Alabama.

’8 Although Bachman’s monogenist thesis can certainly be read as supporting the tenets of abolition,
Bachman followed the U.S. South in its secession from the Union.

101

now numbering according to the last census, 405,751 give sufﬁcient evidence that they
are far removed from the characteristic condition that belong[s] to hybrids”
(“Characteristics” 208) while Nott argues that “the Mulatto is a Hybrid. By this term is
understood the offspring of two distinct species—as the mule from the horse and the ass”
(“The Mulatto” 254 his italics). Bachman sees the proof of racial mixing—the growing
population of mulattos in the United States—and accepts it as evidence to support his
theory of human unity and his agenda of monogenism, but Nott questions the visible
proof by repeatedly asserting that the supposed poor health of mulattos suggests that they
are hybrids, and that in time, they will die out if they do not breed with either whites or
blacks. Nott, however, uses very little data to support his claims. Instead, he attempts to
back up his assertions of mulatto hybridity with simple, matter-of-fact type statements
such as “it is an every-day remark, at the South, that [mulattos] are more liable to be
diseased, and are less capable of endurance, than either whites or blacks of the same rank
and condition” (“Unity” 47) as if the “every-day” nature of the “remark” outweighs the
tangible evidence that the mulatto population is increasing with every census. The apex
of his denial of the reality of racial mixture in the U.S. South lies in his outlandish
suggestion “that if a hundred Anglo-Saxon men, and one hundred Negro women, were
put together on an island, and cutoff from all intercourse with the rest of world, they

would in time become extinct” (47).19

 

'9 Morton repeats this logic almost a decade later during his exchange with Bachman, speculating thus: “let
us suppose the mulatto offspring of a black man and a white woman (or the reverse) were compelled to
marry among themselves, without any access of other individuals of either race, how long do you suppose
this mixed breed would last? Not beyond the third or fourth generation” (“Letter” 342-43). Bachman
responds to Morton’s claim anecdotally by discussing several so-called mulatto families that he claims to
know personally who “have for generations past married with those of their own colour and grade”
(“Second Letter” 636). Speaking directly to Morton, he states, “[c]ould you favour me with a visit here,
and examine some ﬁfty families that I would be prepared to point out to you, I am conﬁdent you would
greatly modify your statement of their dying out after three or four generations” (636).

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Such a colony would die out, according to Nott, because the children born to these
two hundred stranded men and women would not be able to procreate with one of their
“parent stock” which Nott suggests is the only way that hybrids can ﬁnd fertility (“The
Mulatto” 254). Nott’s doomsday scenario resonates with Bachman’s own claims of
hybrid infertility since he repeatedly argues that a hybrid can only reproduce “with either
of the original species; hence it returns to one or the other of the original stock” (“An
Investigation” 176). Bachman’s point, however, is that unlike hybrids, the offspring of
so-called racially mixed human couples can and do procreate with each other because the
human races are merely varieties rather than species. Restated in racial terms, two so-
called mulattos can have children together just as easily as any other couple. The
offspring does not need to “breed back” into the race of one of the parents in order to
avoid the termination of the family line.

Nott’s writings reveal the connection between this debate and slavery. For Nott to
be consistent, he would need to argue that all human races are distinct species and that all
race mixture in humans leads to sterile hybridity. Instead, he claims in a footnote that his
“remarks are meant to apply particularly to the Anglo-Saxon cross [with Aﬁicans]” (“The
Mulatto” 255), and he argues “that there would be nothing very unphilosophical, or
contradictory” in believing that his suggestions on human hybridity apply only to the
mulatto and not to the mestizo (“Unity” 43). Nott’s condemnation of the mulatto, and
only the mulatto, clearly connects his thoughts on hybridity to what was a growing
tendency in the U.S. South to justify race-based slavery by degrading and dehumanizing
Africans. His ideas on hybridity preﬁgured the rhetoric of the increasingly violent

movement of white supremacy throughout the U.S. South and North that not only

103

survived the U.S. Civil War but mushroomed during Reconstruction, and they
foreshadowed the subsequent divide between blacks and whites that the discourse of
miscegenation attempts to cast as inherent.

While Nott, Bachman, Morton, and others debated about hybridity in scholarly
journals, newspaper editors and cartoonists kept the theme of amalgamation on the public
mind with editorials and comics that relied on negative stereotypes of blacks, mulattos,
and abolitionists. Scores of newspaper articles and cartoons that lampooned the idea of
amalgamation were actually published in the U.S. North. Knowing this, it appears less
surprising to discover that the neologism “miscegenation” was also coined in the U.S.
North. The strange manner in which David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman
presumably advocated, but actually derided miscegenation, however, is somewhat more
surprising.

In December of 1863, a pamphlet entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the
Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro appeared on the
streets of New York City. The author of the pamphlet claims to be a staunch Republican
but withholds his name “because he prefers that a great truth should spread by the force
of its own momentum” (ii). The anonymous writer coins several new terms in the
introduction to the pamphlet, including the publication’s title itself. “Miscegenation”, as
the author states, originates “from the Latin Miscere, to mix, and Genus, race” and it “is
used to denote the abstract idea of the mixture of two or more races” (ii his italics).
Throughout the pamphlet, the writer avidly supports miscegenation, suggesting that the
United States will only reach true greatness when the nation’s disparate races willingly

merge politically, socially, and sexually.

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The pamphlet drew almost immediate attention from both political parties.
Leading democrats lashed out against the document, claiming that it proved what they
had been arguing for years—that the Republican Party was a group of radical
abolitionists who not only sponsored emancipation of the slaves but also planned to force
whites and blacks to marry one another. The republican response was varied; most
republican politicians tried to distance themselves from the anonymous text since they
stressed that emancipation was not tantamount to miscegenation, most abolitionists
suggested that the pamphlet was well intended but overly zealous, and only a few
supporters of abolition welcomed the pamphlet without reservations.

This controversial document was actually a well-timed ruse, written by two
northern democrats who hoped to thwart Abraham Lincoln’s bid for re-election by
connecting his party to one of the most contentious issues of the day. Sidney Kaplan
explains in “The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864” that “David Goodman
Croly, managing editor of the quasi-Copperhead sheet [New York’s the World], and his
young friend, George Wakeman, a reporter on its staff, were the joint, forever
unconfessed, authors of the pamphlet, Miscegenation. Croly himself footed the printing
bill” (284).20 The pamphlet, then, only appears to advocate miscegenation since Croly,
Wakeman, their newspaper, and the northern democrats all despised and belittled racial
mixture.

The satirical nature of the pamphlet requires a reinterpretation of Croly’s and
Wakeman’s assertions about miscegenation and a reevaluation of their stated reasons for

coining the term. The pamphlet pretends to offer a critique of the idea of racial purity,

 

2° Although the pamphlet was co-authored, the most recent republishing of the text—~in 1981 by Lost Cause
Press—cites Croly as the sole author.

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asserting that “[i]f any fact is well established in history, it is that the miscegenetic or
mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically, and morally, to those pure and
unmixed. Wherever on the earth’s surface we ﬁnd a community which has intermarried
for generations, we also ﬁnd evidences of decay both in the physical and mental powers”
(8-9).21 Reading the passage as a satire reveals that the authors cling to the fantasy of
racial purity and that the negative outcomes they ascribe to such purity—the corrosion of
both mind and body—actually describe their true feelings about miscegenation. The very
syntax of the claim reveals the pamphlet’s hidden intentions since the authors pair the
“unmixed” races (groups of supposed decay) with “pure”—a term that carried a
substantial amount of positive weight for white readers, especially as the U.S. South
continued to try to justify the racial divisions of slavery, and later, Jim Crow—while
describing the “mixed races” with the awkward and shrill adjectival form of their own
neologism.22 The same type of syntactical clue reappears when Croly and Wakeman
claim that “[t]he evil of a pure and the beneﬁt of a mixed race is strikingly shown in the
history of Spain” (10) since pairing the terms “evil” and “pure” creates an oxymoron for
their targeted audience.

The introduction to the pamphlet provides three reasons for why new terms need
to be coined to describe racial mixture:

(1.) There is, as yet, no word in the language which expresses exactly the idea

they embody. (2.) Amalgamation is a poor word, since it properly refers to the

 

2' The ﬁrst sentence of the citation makes it clear that the verb “intermarry” is being used here to describe
marriage within one racial community in contrast to the common usage of “intermarry” in the twentieth and
twenty ﬁrst centuries to describe marriages between racial groups.

22 “Miscegenetic” actually appears as one of the seven new terms which Croly and Wakeman coin in the
pamphlet (ii). This term, unlike miscegenation, did not catch on and is rarely, if ever, used in discussions

of racial mixture in the United States.

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union of metals with quicksilver, and was, in fact, only borrowed for an
emergency, and should now be returned to its proper signiﬁcation. (3.) The words
used above are just the ones wanted, for they express the ideas with which we are
dealing, and, what is quite as important, they express nothing else. (ii)
The ﬁrst two reasons appear sufﬁciently straight forward. No term existed in the
language to describe racial mixture without conjuring up images of the discipline ﬁom
which the word was borrowed—amalgamation linked back to metallurgy while hybridity
suggested botany and animal biology—thus, it was necessary to invent new terms. The
third reason, however, cannot be read at face value since the new term miscegenation
expresses far more than its Latin roots suggest; I will elaborate on this point later on. The
press and the public both agreed with Croly’s and Wakeman’s line of reasoning and
accepted miscegenation into the English language. The London newspaper which
actually broke the story that the pamphlet was a hoax—the Morning Herald—claimed in
November 1, 1864 that the neologism would remain even though the authors’ duplicity
had been revealed: “[the authors] have achieved a sort of reﬂected fame on the coining of
two or three new words—at least one of which is destined to be incorporated into the
language. Speakers and writers of English will gladly accept the word ‘Miscegenation’
in the place of the word amalgamation” (qtd. in Kaplan 278 n. 6). The Morning Herald’s
alacrity to adopt the new term stood in sharp contrast to Croly’s and Wakeman’s the
World which argued that “[t]he name [miscegenation] will doubtless die out by virtue of
its inherent malformation. We have bastard and hump-backed words enough already in
our verbal army corps” (qtd. in Kaplan 331). This shrewd attempt to distance the

anonymous authors of the pamphlet from the editors and writers of the World may have

.107

protected Croly’s and Wakeman’s identities as the real writers of Miscegenation, but it
could not bury the term in the past. Instead, Croly’s and Wakeman’s quip, as the
Morning Herald suggests, soon replaced amalgamation as the accepted term to describe
racial mixture in the United States.

Kaplan states that no one from the most devout abolitionist to the strongest
Democrat suspected that Miscegenation was a ruse (327), but the pamphlet itself reveals
its true agenda several times, besides the examples of contradictory syntax which I have
already analyzed. For example, the pamphlet repeatedly equates political equality, social
equality, and marriage—suggesting that emancipating the slaves automatically leads to
marriage between blacks and whites. This slippery logic follows the rhetoric of anti-
abolition groups which Elise Lemire, in “Miscegenation: ” Making Race in America,
shows were equating emancipation with forced amalgamation since the early 18303 (6).
While the opponents of slavery had been striving to make blacks politically equal for
years, a majority of republican politicians, along with their political opponents, were not
comfortable with the idea of allowing newly freed slaves (not to mention the thousands of
already ﬁ'ee blacks and mulattos) into their social circles and families. That an
anonymous author would so adamantly praise racial mixture when the official party line
tried to avoid the even less controversial issue of social equality should have reeked of
trickery. Similarly, the pamphlet’s claim that “[i]t is idle to maintain that this present war
is not a war for the negro. It is a war for the negro. Not simply for his personal rights or
his physical freedom—it is a war if you please, of amalgamation, so called—a war
looking, as its ﬁnal fruit, to the blending of the white and black” (18) directly contradicts

Lincoln’s stated purpose of the war—restoration of the Union—and, again, dovetails

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nicely with the rhetoric of apologists for slavery in the U.S. South and Copperhead
Democrats in the U.S. North alike.

In the end, Miscegenation did not accomplish its primary goal since Lincoln’s
second bid for the presidency was successﬁrl.23 The pamphlet did, however, create a
negatively charged neologism that would become the primary term in the English
language to describe racial mixture. According to Lemire, miscegenation becomes the
“one word” that evokes “all of these scientiﬁc and aesthetic justiﬁcations against” racial
mixture (140). From the day it was coined, she suggests, “use of the term invoked all of
the reasons inter-mixing was monstrous” (140). Lemire’s analysis of the anti-
amalgarnation novels and political cartoons of the early nineteenth century demonstrates
how both media continually argued that whites and blacks were inherently different and
that whites should have been repulsed by these differences. She argues that the term
miscegenation relies on these earlier stereotypes and claims that “any use of the term
‘miscegenation’ demonizes inter-racial coupling precisely by reminding Americans of
this idea that ‘whites’ should have the instinct to recognize that ‘blacks’ are physically
different from and inferior to them, unattractive, and therefore socially unacceptable”
(141). Lemire’s analysis destroys the innocent facade of Croly’s and Wakeman’s
supposed reasons for coining their terms which concluded with the claim that “[t]he
words used above are just the ones wanted, for they express the ideas with which we are
dealing, and, what is quite as important, they express nothing else” (ii). The term
miscegenation expresses much more than the simple idea of racial mixture which its

Latin roots imply. The satirical nature of its foundation—a pamphlet which mocks the

 

2’ Although Lincoln won the election in a landslide, Kaplan notes that the pamphlet did harm him in New
York City where he garnered less than ﬁfty percent of the votes won by McClellan (326).

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ideas of emancipation, racial equality, and racial mixture by purportedly defending
them—casts upon miscegenation the stigma of hatred and bigotry that was present in the
purpose of its creation. The term denotes racial mixture but connotes abnormality,
inferiority, and disgust. Perhaps Croly’s and Wakeman’s third reason for coining the
term remains a greater hoax than the pamphlet itself.

The idea of miscegenation began functioning as a discourse almost immediately
in that it placed a far heavier stigma on racial mixture than amalgamation had previously
suggested. Lemire argues that “the invented concept of ‘miscegenation’” actually acts as
a prohibition against sexual contact between members of different races (8), and Kinney
states that “with slavery’s end, miscegenation declined until the brutal segregation of the
18903 made such relationships practically impossible. By 1915, a generation had come
of age—black and white—who knew only that miscegenation was forbidden” (3).
Miscegenation’s power as a discourse is upheld by the unofﬁcial “one-drop rule” which
emerged from the early years of the discourse during the northern project to reconstruct
the U.S. South.24 This so-called rule identiﬁes any person with Aﬁican ancestry, or, in
the rules’ terms, any person with any “black blood,” as black, and this identiﬁcation can
ﬁrnction as both a social and a political punishment since the discourse of miscegenation
brands blacks as inferior persons and limits their political rights and their social mobility.

The decrease in the number of interracial relationships between emancipation and the

 

2" In contrast with the common opinion, shaped by the discourse of miscegenation, that the “one-drop rule”
has always been a part of U.S. history from colonial times forward, judicial records show that no such rule
existed until the late nineteenth century. Kinney states that before Reconstruction “the laws and the courts
operated against an otherwise ‘white’ person’s being classiﬁed as a mulatto because of as little as one-
eighth of ‘Negro blood.’ The legal standards did not change until after the war and Reconstruction. Late in
the nineteenth century, bolstered by ‘scientiﬁc’ racism, states attempted to set the standard that ‘one drop of
Negro blood’ meant classiﬁcation as black, particularly for the purpose of preventing intermarriage” (23).
As I noted in footnote 20, the usage of “intermarriage” in the twentieth century, as seen here in Kinney’s
discussion of the “one-drop-rule”, is the opposite of how Croly and Wakeman used the term.

110

18903 that Kinney notes seems logical when we recall that much racial mixture took
place within the institution of slavery as masters took sexual advantage of their slaves.
But, the fact that a common (although often disputed) relationship became taboo in such
a short period of time suggests that the prohibitive power of the discourse of
miscegenation (augmented by and the pejorative power of the “one-drop rule”) steered
blacks and whites away from each other.

Even though Mills’ argument that the United States was founded on the Racial
Contract holds true, it took over eighty years for the United States to replace the negative
concept of amalgamation with the oppressive discourse of miscegenation. This shift,
however, does more than prove that racism increased between the foundation of the
United States and the waging of the U.S. Civil War; instead, it suggests that there was
simply no real need to deﬁne the national identity on racial terms which did not include
so-called mixed races as long as a large majority of these individuals were already denied
entry into the racial polity because they were slaves. Robert J. C. Young claims in his
analysis of hybridity, Colonial Desire, that “[f]ixity of identity is only sought in
situations of instability and disruption, of conﬂict and change” (4). The U.S. Civil War
certainly created a new need to “ﬁx” the national identity since the outcome of the
conﬂict granted paper citizenship to millions of previously enslaved racial others.

In Mills’ terms, then, the birth of the neologism and the grth of the discourse of
miscegenation (including the enforcement of the so-called “one-drop rule”) ﬁt within the
Racial Contract’s purpose of racializing the state in order to beneﬁt self-proclaimed

whites. He states:

111

[T]he Racial Contract establishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial
juridical system, where the status of whites and nonwhites is clearly demarcated,
whether by law or custom. And the purpose of this state, by contrast with the
neutral state of classic contractarianism, is, inter alia, speciﬁcally to maintain and
reproduce this racial order, securing the privileges and advantages of the full
white citizens and maintaining the subordination of nonwhites. (13-14)
Thus, the discourse of miscegenation supplanted the less powerful idea of amalgamation
during the U.S. Civil War speciﬁcally because Emancipation, and various new
amendments to the national constitution that shortly followed, threatened the special
beneﬁts which the racial state guaranteed whites under the Racial Contract. In order to
avoid a dramatic increase in the number of people who qualiﬁed for these now unwritten
rights of whiteness, miscegenation—as a discourse—culturally prohibited racial mixture
even as actual anti-miscegenation laws were passed and eventually repealed into

extinction.

Mestizaje: From Tolerated Reality to Mexican Nationalism

In contrast to British and early U.S. tendencies to outlaw amalgamation, colonial
governments in Spanish America rarely outlawed racial mixture.25 Instead, the Spanish
created an elaborate racial hierarchy, e1 sistema de castas or caste system, which
recognized and rewarded individuals according to the amount of Spanish ancestry they
could prove to have. Much like the discourse of miscegenation which later blossomed in

the United States, the caste system was a blood discourse that relied on social pressure to

 

25 The only racial mixture occasionally outlawed in colonial Spanish America was mixture between Indians
and Africans which suggests that while the Anglos feared a mixed race that was part self and part other, the
Spaniards feared a mixed race that was other squared.

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regulate racial mixture. However, the caste system always accepted racial mixture as a
reality, a reality that was tolerated but not embraced,26 and it created new names for each
new type of racially mixed individual rather than automatically deﬁning them as black or
Indian.

The common ﬁve-tiered version of the caste system—Spaniard,27 mestizo,
mulatto, Indian, Aﬁ'ican—and the slightly elaborated seven-tiered version—Spaniard,
castizo, morisco, mestizo, mulatto, Indian, African—both demonstrate how the caste
system placed Spaniard over Indian, Indian over African, the mixed races with some
Spanish ancestry over both Indian and Aﬁ'ican, and the mixed races with the most
Spanish ancestry above those with less Spanish ancestry even if this favored an
individual with some Aﬁican ancestry. Thus, a mestizo was above a mulatto while a
morisco (the child of a mulatto and a Spaniard) was above a mestizo because he had more
“Spanish blood” than a mestizo but below a castizo (the child of a mestizo and a
Spaniard) because he had a quarter “African blood” which was considered inferior to the
castizo’s quarter “Indian blood.” The caste system also suggested that “Indian blood”
could eventually whiten completely and that a trace of “African blood” always remained

since the child of a castizo and a Spaniard was considered a Spaniard while the child of a

 

26 As I mentioned earlier, in the early years of the colonial period in Spanish America—particularly alter
the various conquests were concluded and Spanish men were more able to bring women with them to the
Americas—mestizaje became linked with illegitimacy. Poupeney-Hart explains that “[m]estizaje is thus
initially perceived as a stigma because of its association with illegitimacy, with the frequently ﬂirtive or
violent—in any case not sanctiﬁed by marriage—circumstances of sexual encounters between members of
different social castes, then between the castas themselves” (38 her italics). ‘

27 It was also a common practice to divide the Spaniards into two groups with the penninsulares, Spaniards
born in Spain, on the top of the hierarchy followed by the criollos or American-bom Spaniards.

113

morisco and a Spaniard was called an albino and the child of an albino and a Spaniard
was dubbed negro toma atras or black turns back.28

The Spanish used the caste system, not only to proclaim their superiority, but also
to ostracize mixed offspring from both sides of their ancestry. Mestizos and mulattos
were not Spaniards like one of their parents, and they were not Indians or Aﬁ'icans like
their other parent. They were something completely different with more privileges than
their Indian or African progenitors but markedly less than their Spanish parents. These
divisions did not always separate mestizos and mulattos from the group of the parent with
the lower social position (although sometimes this is exactly what took place) but the
racial hierarchy did ostracize mestizos and mulattos from the power-holding Spaniards.
This process of hierarchical fragmentation allowed the Spaniards, an extremely small
minority, to maintain control over all other groups because the distinctions between
groups (that Indians were “superior” to blacks, that mulattos were “superior” to Indians
and blacks, etc.) prohibited the groups from identifying with one another.

The independence movements in Spanish America in the early nineteenth century
weakened the caste system. Blacks, Indians, mulattos, and mestizos who were involved
in the military were often rewarded with social and economic mobility. However, race
mixture or mestizaje still carried negative connotations for those in power. Liberators
like Simon Bolivar had been educated in Europe and wanted to follow European models

of nation building, models (or, better stated, myths) that suggested that the nation was

 

2’ During the eighteenth century, it became a popular practice to paint the caste system, and thus, create a
visible image of what the offspring of certain racial mixtures supposedly looked like. Some models of the
caste system and some versions of the casta paintings were so complex that they contained over forty racial
groups which included heavily derogatory categories such as negro toma atras (portrayed in the paintings
as a black child born to an apparently white couple) and note entiendo—I don’t understand you or I don’t

know what you are.

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built of a homogenous racial population. Mestizos, mulattos, and other individuals of so-
called mixed race—the racial majority in most Spanish American countries—were a
constant reminder to those in power that the new Spanish American nations were not
racially homogenous. Throughout the nineteenth century, Spanish American politicians
and scholars remained frustrated with their nations’ mixed populations and continued to
describe their nations in racially hierarchical terms that resembled the former caste
system. Mexican intellect Francisco Pimentel, for example, still broke Mexico’s
population into groups of Spanish origin, Indians, castes, foreigners, and blacks in 1864
(196), and as late as 1909—the year before the Mexican Revolution—Mexico’s Andrés
Molina Enriquez analyzed race and class divisions in Mexico with charts that nearly
reproduced the most basic models of the caste system only with foreigners on top and no
trace of Aﬁicans (220-21).

Mexico’s tendency to re-create the hierarchy of the caste system and its continued
contempt toward mestizaje in the nineteenth century is particularly ironic since the nation
owed its newly found independence, in large part, to rebel leaders like José Morelos and
Vicente Guerrero—who both had African and indigenous ancestry—and since the
nation’s president/dictator for the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the ﬁrst
decade of the twentieth, Porﬁrio Diaz, was considered mestizo. However, Mexico’s
disapproval of mestizaje through the nineteenth century makes more sense when we
recall that the criollo elite, who eventually took over the young nation’s government, had
originally distanced itself from Miguel Hidalgo’s call for independence and had never
trusted his followers, Morelos and Guerrero, and when we remember Diaz’s own

proclivity for the European notions of progress and modernity.

115

Even though Mexico did not openly embrace its history of mestizaje in the
nineteenth century, several Mexican thinkers—including Pimentel and Molina
Enriquez—began to see positive traits in Mexico’s mestizo population long before the
famous essay of J osé Vasconcelos. Yet, these same intellectuals held onto and re-created
negative stereotypes about mestizaje and mestizos. Pimentel, for example, tried to
combat the long-held belief that the mestizos were heirs of only the worst traits of both
sides of their ancestry.29 He states, “it is not true that mestizos inherit the vices of the two
races [. . .] [W]hen they have a good education the opposite occurs, in other words, they
inherit the virtues of the two races” (234).30 However, Pimentel’s optimism about the
virtues of well-educated mestizo’s did not keep him from suggesting that with mestizos
there was no middle ground. In the same text, he claims that mestizo valor leads to either
heroism or banditry: “The mestizos were those who sustained the war of Independence,
and they are those who form the gangs of audacious highwaymen who infest our streets”
(236). For Pimentel, then, the mestizo is a binary opposite, a hero or a thief.

Like Pimentel, J usto Sierra claims that mestizos were essential to Mexico’s
independence: “If our history were studied it would be seen that Independence and the
Reform are no more than acts of immense energy of the ‘bastard race’ of Mexico. The
most energetic man who has appeared in our brief and tragic annals is J osé Maria
Morelos, the great mestizo” (130).31 However, Sierra’s praise for the mestizo past

demonstrates fear of Mexico’s mestizo future if certain groups are allowed to participate

 

29 Molina Enriquez suggests that early bias against mestizos came both from the Spaniards above and the
Indians beneath: “The creoles, representatives of the Spanish blood at the time, saw in the mestizos the
vices and defects of the indigenous race: the indigenous, the vices and defects of the Spanish race” (41).
3° All translations of Pimentel’s Memoria sabre las causas que han originaa'o la situacio'n actual de

la raza indz'gena de México y medias de remediarla are my own.

3' All translations of Sierra’s “México social y politico” are my own.

116

in the mixture. He admits that Africans “represent an important role” (127) in Mexican
mestizaje but also claims that increasing Aﬁican immigration to the country would be
problematic because Africans “obscure every social question” (136), and he shows a
similar bias against the Chinese “whose habits and whose ideals[,]” he claims, “are
profoundly antithetical” to those of Mexico (135). Sierra’s fear of African and Asian
immigration suggests that long before mestizaje became a nationalist discourse in Mexico
Mexican intellectuals favored the idea of racial mixture between Europeans and Mexican
Indians over other types of mixture.

Finally, Molina Enriquez, on the eve of the Mexican Revolution, offered his
juxtaposition of the mestizo’s strengths and weaknesses in Los grandes problemas
nacionales [The Great National Problems]. His comparisons typically look something
like this: “The mestizo, who has always been poor, is vulgar, rough, suspicious, restless,
impulsive; but also obstinate, faithful, generous, and long-suffering” (333).32 He admits
that mestizos are goal oriented and self motivated (333), attributes which he criticizes as
much as praises, but he overtly states that the “mestizo was and is an inferior racial type”
(271). Indeed, his backhanded praise for the mestizo seems contingent on his belief that
mestizos were the “strongest [. . .] most numerous [. . .] [and] most patriotic” (271) group
in the nation—their numbers, then, were far more important than any of their purported
positive or negative traits.

For these members of Mexico’s intelligentsia, mestizaje was seen as a possible
solution to some of Mexico’s problems—the poverty and suffering of Mexico’s
indigenous population (commonly referred to as “the Indian problem”) and the resulting

lack of a national identity—but not as an end in and of itself. When confronted by the

 

32 All translations of Molina Enriquez’s Los grandes problemas nacionales are my own.

117

problems that Mexico’s white elite faced when trying to “civilize” the Mexican Indians,
Pimentel asks, “will it be necessary for us to decapitate the Indians like the North
Americans have done?” (233-34). His confusion, along with that of Mexico’s elite in
general, about how to peacefully (and productively) co-exist with (or assimilate)
Mexico’s indigenous population demonstrates Mexico’s inability to solidify or identify
itself as a nation at this point in time:
While the naturals maintain the state they are currently in, Mexico cannot aspire
to the rank of nation, strictly speaking. Nation is a meeting of men who profess
common beliefs, who are dominated by the same idea, who tend to the same end.
[. . .] It is impossible to obey for long the same government and live according to
the same law when there is not homogeneity, analogy, between the inhabitants of
a country. And, what analogy exists in Mexico between the white and the Indian?
(217 his italics)
Pimentel’s answer to both “the Indian problem” and Mexico’s lack of a national identity
lies in mestizaje. Rather than killing the Indians, he suggests that Mexico should increase
its amount of European immigrants so that they will mix with and “transform” the
Indians: “Fortunately there is a means through which a race is not destroyed, only
modiﬁed, and this means is transformation. We will achieve the transformation of these
Indians with European immigration” (234 his italics). This push for mixture falls short
of a call for mestizo nationalism and becomes nothing more than an attempt to whiten
Mexico’s indigenous population. In fact, Pimentel goes as far as to call the mestizo
population a temporary condition on the path toward whiteness. He states, “[b]ut the

mixture of Indians and whites, some will say, doesn’t it produce a bastard race, a mixed

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race that inherits the vices of the others? The mixed race, we respond, would be a race of
transition, in a short while all would become white” (234 his italics).33 For Pimentel,
mestizaje was merely a means to an end; the process would decrease Indian poverty and
suffering by decreasing the number of Indians, whitewashing them into oblivion, while
simultaneously solving Mexico’s lack of racial homogeneity by creating a homogenous
white whole. This mestizaje appears very different from the mestizo nationalism which
emerged from the Mexican Revolution; however, as I will argue, the attempt to whiten
Mexico’s population was central to Vasconcelos’ concept of the cosmic race and remains
embedded in the discourse of mestizaje which grew out of his theory.

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 as a rebellion against Porﬁrio Diaz but
quickly morphed into a convoluted civil war between several sparring factions with
distinct pasts and disparate goals. Kelly Swarthout suggests that along with all of the
competing interests the Revolution was also waged in order to form a national identity in
Mexico: “A Mexican national identity was still a work in progress at the time of the 1910
Revolution. In fact, it was a war fought to resolve many of the lingering impediments to
the formation of such an identity” (86). Mestizo and Indian participation in the
Revolution was extremely high, but the war cannot be considered an outright victory for
either group since the generals who eventually took control of the government shared
little in common with and did little to reward Mexico’s indigenous and mestizo

populations.34 These new leaders, however, understood Mexico’s racial dynamics and

 

’3 Molina Enriquez also suggests that mestizaje leads to the formation of a single race. He praises what he
calls Mexico’s “civil equality which has much favored contact, mixture and confusion of races, preparing
the formation of one single [race]” (37).

3" Mexico’s so-called mestizo and indigenous populations certainly gained some social and economic
mobility through their participation in the Revolution, but the promises of freedom and land reform were
typically not fulﬁlled until at least the Cérdenas era since the new caudillos—Carranza, Obregon, and

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knew that mestizos, in particular, were a key element to re-casting Mexico as a nation. In
this atmosphere, J osé Vasconcelos—the former Minister of Education— wrote La raza
co'smica, a short essay which soon became the champion call for mestizaje in Mexico and
throughout Spanish America. I say “became” rather than “was” because the discourse of
positive mestizaje which grew out of the essay diverged sharply from the Hispanophile
rhetoric of the essay itself. Vasconcelos’ racial theory, as I will analyze in turn, actually
repeated several of the essentialisms and racist fears of earlier Mexican thinkers like
Pimentel, Sierra, and Molina Enriquez. The primary differences between Vasconcelos’
mestizaje and that of Pimentel are: First, for Pimentel mestizaje was merely a means to an
end—the path to a white Mexico—while for Vasconcelos mestizaje was both a means—
the path toward his “spiritual or aesthetic” utopia (28) or “mysterious eugenics of
aesthetic taste” (3 O)—and an end in and of itself since in this utopia mestizaje would
continue to take place as part of the joyous reproduction of the beautiful (3 0-32).35
Second, Vasconcelos’ idea of the cosmic race was read (or, better stated, misread) in
Mexico and throughout Spanish America as a new and optimistic interpretation of
mestizaje that championed racial mixture as a positive model for how to produce racial
homogeneity out of heterogeneity, and thus, create a nation, even though a close reading
of the theory reveals that Vasconcelos’ cosmic race is much whiter in complexion and
culture than anything else. To understand the discourse of mestizaje, we must re-read La

raza cosmica itself to reveal what it really suggests and analyze the inﬂuence of the essay

 

Calles—had their own backs to watch once in ofﬁce and since none of these three presidents
wholeheartedly supported land reform in the ﬁrst place.

’5 Throughout this project, I cite the versions of the essay which appear in the Johns Hopkins bilingual
edition: The Cosmic Race/La raza co'smica. Jaén’s English translation of Vasconcelos’ text is quite
impressive. Except for rare cases—which I cite with footnotes—all English translations of La raza
co’smica in this project are J aén’s.

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to expose how it reshaped mestizaje into a nationalist discourse which still dominates
discussions of race and racial mixture in Mexico.

La raza co'smica, like the earlier work of J osé Marti and J osé Enrique Rodo, ﬁts
comfortably within a longstanding tradition in Latin American letters of deﬁning the
region in contrast to the United States. Vasconcelos continually criticizes U.S. Anglo
Saxons and offers a particularly biting critique of how British colonialism and U.S.
policy prefer(ed) extermination of the Indians to racial mixture: “Spanish colonization
created mestizaje; this signals its character, sets its responsibility, and deﬁnes its future.
The English continued to mix only with whites and exterminated their indigenous
population; they continue to exterminate it in a sordid economic battle that is more
effective than armed conquest” (58).36 This interpretation of Spanish and British
colonization serves as a reverse “black legend” since it demonizes the British and paints
the Spanish as benevolent colonizers; it also allows Vasconcelos to draw a moral line
between Mexico and the United States and suggest that Mexico deserves positive rewards
for its willingness to allow racial mixture: “[TJhey committed the sin of destroying those
races, while we assimilated them, and this gives us new rights and hopes for a mission
without precedent in history” (17 his italics). Even when he is not speciﬁcally describing
how/when the cosmic race will come about, Vasconcelos reveals that his notion of
mestizaje is a project of assimilating “them”—Indians, Africans, all racial others—into
“us” rather than a project of complete mixture. The “new rights” he describes appear to
be those of a cultural conquistador—the rights to pick and choose an occasional trait from

“them” that will, in small doses, improve “us” while erasing “them” off the map.

 

3° This is my translation.

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Vasconcelos claims that somewhere in the tropics of Spanish America the four
races of humankind—the yellow, black, white, and red—will combine, not into a mere
“ﬁfth or sixth race” but into the “deﬁnitive race, the synthetical race, the integral race,
made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples and, for that reason, more capable of
true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision” (20). His claim that the new cosmic
race will be a true synthesis of the four existing races is overshadowed by the fact that he
suggests that certain traits from each group will remain visible in the new race. On the
surface level, this could be benign (or, at least, all-inclusive in its essentialism) since the
cosmic race reveals characteristics of all four of the previous races, but the traces which
Vasconcelos claims will remain visible in the new cosmic race greatly favor the white
over the red, black, and yellow. He suggests that the red strand will give the cosmic race
an “infinite quietude,” that the black strand will invigorate this calm with sensual desires,
that the yellow strand will allow the cosmic race to see things ﬁ'om “newer dimensions”
due to the “strange angle” of the “slanted eyes,” and that the “clear mind” of the white
strand “intervenes” in the process (22). Three of these traits reiterate the emotional
stereotypes of the stoic Indian, the erotic black, and the rational white; the fourth trait is
even more absurd since it relies on a physical stereotype of Asian eyes.

Vasconcelos’ reliance on racial/racist stereotypes and his claim that these very
traits will be visible in the new, deﬁnitive race reafﬁrm his contemporaries’ belief that
racial differences are real rather than constructed, and throughout the essay, these
differences carry positive or negative weight. Only one of the traits—the “clear mind” of
the whites—holds a positive connotation in Vasconcelos’ context which reveals the

privileged position he creates for this race. By suggesting that the clarity of white thought

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“intervenes” in the mixture, Vasconcelos places whiteness on a pedestal so that it can
oversee and control mestizaje deeming which types of mixture should and should not
take place and assuring that the less desirable traits—stoicism, eroticism, “slanted”
vision—only enter the mix in small doses. In short, whiteness takes upon itself the “new
rights” that Vasconcelos claims belong to the whites of Latin America who have mixed
with rather than slaughtered the racial other.

Vasconcelos masks this privilege by continually suggesting that once the
synthesis takes place whiteness will disappear along with the other three races, but he
repeatedly notes the supposed negative traits of the other races without suggesting that
there is much wrong with the white race. His only real critique of whites—and it is a
weak critique at that since it is really only aimed at Vasconcelos’ nemesis, Anglos, rather
than at Latin whites—is that they tend to be too prideful to mix with other races (16).

In contrast, he claims that the Indians are devastatingly stuck in the past (16), he links
over-fertility to the Chinese (19), and he implies that blacks are ugly (32). He suggests
that each of these traits (along with the white’s pride) will slowly disappear through his
“aesthetic eugenics” (32).

La raza co'smica, then, is an assimilation narrative. This becomes painfully clear
in a larger passage in which Vasconcelos suggests that what he calls superior stock will
slowly ingest and conceal the negative traits of the lower stock. Not surprisingly, he
assigns Aﬁ'icans, Asians, and Indians to the lower tier of his hierarchy while placing
whites in a position that is already on the verge of cosmic perfection:

The lower types of the species will be absorbed by the superior type. In this

manner, for example, the Black could be redeemed, and step by step, by voluntary

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extinction, the uglier stocks will give way to the more handsome. Inferior races,

upon being educated, would become less proliﬁc, and the better specimens

would go on ascending a scale of ethnic improvement, whose maximum type is

not precisely the White, but that new race to which the White himself will have to
aspire with the object of conquering the synthesis. The Indian, by grafting onto
the related race, would take the jump of millions of years that separate Atlantis
from our times, and in a few decades of aesthetic eugenics, the Black may
disappear, together with the types that a free instinct of beauty may go on
signaling as fundamentally recessive and undeserving, for that reason, of

perpetuation. (32)

In short, Vasconcelos’ mestizaje becomes a whitening project through which Aﬁ'icans
can beautify themselves into extinction, Asians can practice birth control to the point of
extinction, and Indians can modernize themselves into extinction by blending into this
new race whose physical appearance and mental operations are predominantly white.
The cosmic race is nothing more than a spiced up version of Vasconcelos’ view of white
Latin society—slightly improved by a dab of Indian seriousness, a dash of African
passion, and a sliver of Asian vision.

When read at face value, it is difﬁcult to comprehend how Vasconcelos’ theory
could be the catalyst to the discourse of positive mestizaje which dominates how race and
racial mixture are viewed in Mexico ﬁom the time La raza cosmica was published until
today. However, the historical context of the essay’s publication reveals how La raza
co'smica, regardless of its essentialisms, was re-interpreted to champion mestizaje.

Vasconcelos ﬁrst published the piece in 1925 during what has become known as the less

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violent stage of the Mexican Revolution. During this decade, the Calles-Obregon
political machine was desperately trying to unite a country that had literally been torn
apart by over a decade of vicious civil war. Anne Doremus describes the atmosphere as
follows:

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, many Mexicans demanded new

articulations of the national identity that reﬂected the changed historical

conditions. Constructions of national identity under Porﬁrio Diaz, which had
privileged wealthy Mexicans of mainly European descent, were simply no longer
valid. At the same time, new myths of Mexicanness were critical to the

nationalist project. (378)

Mexico’s heterogeneous racial makeup made the European myth of forming the nation
around a supposedly homogenous racial population impossible unless a new myth
allowed mestizaje itself to serve as the homogenizing element since racial mixture was
the one trait that most Mexicans had in common. Vasconcelos’ suggestion that mestizaje
should be seen in a positive light as the gateway to the future resonated in this
atmosphere, but a signiﬁcant shift took place in his theory as it grew in popularity.

The cosmic race shifted away from a predominantly white type that was slightly
improved by mixing with other racial groups toward a mestizo who was a modernized (or
slightly whitened) version of Mexico’s romanticized indigenous past. In other words, the
indigenist movement, which was at its apex when Vasconcelos published La raza
co'smica, replaced Vasconcelos’ favoritism for the white Latin strand of the cosmic race

with its own bias which favored Mexico’s indigenous past. In José Vasconcelos and the

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Writing of the Mexican Revolution, Luis Marenetes explains how Vasconcelos’ theory
was co-opted into indigenist and nationalist discourses:

Articulated in the public sphere, however, and removed from the ideological

apparatus that shaped the concept in the author’s mind, the concept of raza

cosmica suffers spectacular transformations unbeknownst to the original author.

As a political slogan, the concept of a selected cosmic race ﬁts well into a

nationalist discourse. The ambiguity of the terms raza and mestizo allows for

subtle—or not so subtle—changes in emphasis. Just as easily as Vasconcelos

foregrounded the Hispanic-Latin part of the cosmic race, indigenista proponents

foregrounded the Indian. (60 his italics)
Vasconcelos’ pro-Hispanic, or pro-white, discussion of mestizaje was tweaked to favor
the red or indigenous line and subsequently adopted as a nationalist phrase. With this
twist, La raza co'smica really did appear to embrace mestizaje, and through this mixing
process, Mexico could both integrate its still problematic indigenous population and
create a sense of racial homogeneity out of heterogeneity. Doremus emphasizes this two-
tiered outcome of Mexico’s new racial discourse, stating that the desire of the Mexican
state was that mestizaje would “racially homo genize[e] the nation” in order to “greatly
diminish racial conﬂict and truly unify the Mexican populace” (3 76 her italics).

With the help of Vasconcelos’ tweaked theory, mestizaje became the discourse of
race and racial mixture in Mexico proper and throughout various parts of Latin America.
The suggestion that racial heterogeneity could somehow function toward rather than
against national cohesion echoed throughout the region, and the once maligned concept

of mestizaje took center stage in several nationalist narratives. Castro explains how the

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concept of positive mestizaje allowed the Latin American intelligentsia to envision the
various countries throughout the region as nations according to the European model. His
description of how mestizaje affected nationhood in Latin America in general is very
applicable to how the discourse functioned in Mexico in particular:
Mestizaje permitted Latin American thinkers to claim for their countries the
racial unity of a nation as conceived of in European thought. Mestizaje or, better
said, the discourse of mestizaje, thus became a way for the three numerically
dominant races living in the Americas—white, Amerindian, and black—to
become incorporated into the same national project: they would commingle to
form a new mestizo race, in which the constitutive qualities of each original race
would contribute to and form a new and different whole. (19)
Castro interprets mestizaje’s ability to provide national cohesion in an optimistic fashion,
and for several decades, mestizaje was viewed in positive terms as a less racist discourse
of race and racial mixture in the region and in Mexico speciﬁcally. Such interpretations
of mestizaje, however, romanticize the discourse and ignore the fact that the concept still
creates a racial hierarchy. 37 Sollors suggests that just like miscegenation, mestizaje
(although this was mestizaje before its positive reinterpretation in the early twentieth
century) allowed for and justiﬁed race-based slavery (122), and Mills argues that
mestizaje is just a less overt “local variety in the Racial Contract” that still places “the

white tribe [. . .] on top of the social pyramid” (30).

 

37 Even today some comparisons between mestizaje and miscegenation still cast the former in utopian terms
while demonizing the latter. Perhaps the most overt example of this type of romanticization of mestizaje in
Latin America can be seen in the now outdated myth of Brazil as a racial democracy which suggested that
due to Brazil’s history of mesticagem, the nation functioned as a racial paradise in which blacks and whites
were social and political equals.

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As I have argued, the discourse of mestizaje ﬁrnctions as a whitening project in
Mexico. However, the discourse purports to favor mixture between Europeans and
Mexican Indians rather than privileging whiteness. Once tweaked by Mexico’s indigenist
movement, the discourse of mestizaje successfully erased two of the four racial groups
who were supposedly going to participate in the cosmic mix by casting itself in binary
terms. Joseﬁna Saldaﬁa-Portillo explains, “[u]nder the regime of these paired identity
tropes of mestizaje and indigenismo, the ‘black’ and ‘yellow’ aspects of the cosmic race
were systematically forgotten as mestizo identity was reduced to a Spanish and Indian
binary” (406-407). The discourse of mestizaje portrayed the racial mixture of Mexico’s
past as a two party encounter between Spanish whites and Mexican Indians, and the term
mestizo applied speciﬁcally to the offspring of such couples. While Mexico had received
some immigration from Asia before the twentieth century, the erasure of Mexico’s
African past was more numerically signiﬁcant; Aﬁ'ican slaves ﬁ'om the time of the
conquest, and their posterity afterward, had played a sizable role in Mexico’s history.38
The discourse of mestizaje did not deny that Aﬁ'icans were brought to Mexico; instead, as
Marco Polo Hernandez Cuevas suggests, mestizaje labeled Mexicans with black ancestry
as mestizos which effectively erased their Aﬁ'ican past since the ofﬁcial discourse
deﬁned mestizos as the mixed offspring of Indians and whites (xv, 2-3).

While suggesting that Mexico’s ancestral lines only tie back to Europe and

Mexico itself, the discourse of mestizaje also tends to ignore the presence of

 

’8 Sierra’s earlier and Vasconcelos’ contemporary anti-Asian, particularly anti-Chinese, sentiments were
fairly common in Mexico during the early twentieth century, and these sentiments limited the number of
Asians who immigrated to Mexico and the amount of mixture between Asians and Mexico’s other racial
groups. Alan Knight claims that although “Chinese immigration to Mexico” had been “actively
encouraged by the Diaz government” it “had never been extensive—the total Chinese population in 1910
was probably less than 40,000” (96). These immigrants, he argues, “were repeatedly intimidated, attacked,
robbed, and murdered” during the Revolution and eventually expelled in 1931 (96).

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contemporary Indians in Mexico while romanticizing those Indians who are long dead
and gone. This tendency can be traced back to Vasconcelos’ essay itself in which he
waxes philosophical about “the illustrious Atlanteans from whom Indians derive” (16)
while criticizing Mexico’s contemporary indigenous population. The indigenist or
nationalist version of Vasconcelos’ cosmic race was even more overt in its fawning over
Mexico’s indigenous past (speciﬁcally and almost exclusively the Aztecas or Mexicas)
while virtually ignoring the existence and needs of modern day indigenous communities.

In the end, mestizaje might be an even more problematic discourse of racial
mixture than miscegenation since it allegedly favors racial mixture but actually hopes for
a gradual assimilation toward whiteness while miscegenation openly and shamelessly
divides white from black and ignores all others. The mestizo as national type overtly rids
Mexico of its connections to Asia and Africa by suggesting that neither Asians nor
Africans are part of the mix and covertly rids Mexico of its Indian present by assigning
the mestizo “noble” traits from the Indian of yesteryear and “modern” traits from the
white of today, all the while casting a progressive image to the world by claiming to be
the positive fusion of the latter two races.

Much like the change from amalgamation to the discourse of miscegenation in the
United States, it took a cataclysmic civil war to fully shift ﬁom negative mestizaje to
positive mestizaje as discourse in Mexico. In “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo:
Mexico, 1910-1940” Alan Knight explains:

Between 1910 and 1920 the chaos of civil war had shattered the state and reduced

Mexico to a patchwork of warring factions. [. . .] The task of creating a viable,

coherent nation—a nation that was more than a mere ‘geographical

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expression’—was never more daunting, never more pressing. [. . .] The cult of the

mestizo, like so much revolutionary ideology, was not new. [. . .] But it was with

the Revolution that the mestizo cult blossomed. (84—85)
In the aftermath of the Revolution, Vasconcelos’ theory pushed the concept of mestizaje
away from the negative connotations that had surrounded it since the time of the
conquest. Even though his descriptions of the cosmic race relied on old racial
stereotypes, and even though he never gloriﬁed the mestizaje that was really taking place
in Mexico at the time, his theory was modiﬁed to the point that it rhetorically
championed Mexico’s (and Latin America’s) mixed past, present, and future. All the
while, the discourse of mestizaje actually continued a favoring of whiteness that can be
traced back to the hierarchy of the caste system and all the way through the nineteenth-
century discussions of mestizaje. Mexico moved from a recently shattered country
without a national identity to a newly uniﬁed nation by theoretically embracing
mestizaje, and mestizaje as a national discourse allowed for the positives and negatives of
the remainder of Mexico’s twentieth century under the hegemonic banner of the now

institutionalized Revolution.

Miscegenation versus La raza césmica

Both mestizaje and miscegenation as discourses end up doing the same work of
insisting that racial differences exist, creating racial hierarchies that rank the various
groups, and enforcing how mixture between the groups is understood. Both discourses
also created a national identity based on race during a time of civil conﬂict, and these

constructed identities served as markers around which each nation could rally in an

130

attempt to recover from the devastating effects of civil War. There remains, however, an
important difference between miscegenation and mestizaj e—the ways each discourse
functions in the public mind. Mestizaje does favor whiteness like miscegenation, but
since the former discourse does not overtly reveal this favoritism (instead, it explicitly
claims to support mixture) mestizaje allows for some social and political mobility for so-
called mixed groups that miscegenation resists. Mestizaje creates unity through
exaggerated inclusion (to the point that the racial other disappears through assimilation or
engulﬁnent into the already mixed-race majority) while miscegenation creates unity
through ardent exclusion (the racial majority unites together to deny social mobility to the
racial other).

Surprisingly, the primary documents which opened each discourse and set
completely distinct standards for interpreting racial mixture are often so similar that they
appear to be quoting one another. With these textual similarities, the differences in how
the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje evolved can be linked, at least in part, to
the satirical nature of Croly’s and Wakeman’s pamphlet and the sincerity of Vasconcelos’
treatise. When Croly and Wakeman preach the need for political equality, social
equality, and racial mixture in the United States, they actually ridicule these ideas and
argue for racial segregation and intolerance. In contrast, when Vasconcelos claims that
beauty and harmony will grow out of a mestizo society—even if it is a type of mixture

which degrades Indians, Aﬁicans, and Asians—he speaks in earnest. 39 For Croly and

 

’9 I grant that I might be walking on shaky ground that nearly falls into the “intentional fallacy” when
trying to claim that Vasconcelos’ text is sincere since I cannot get inside his head to prove or disprove his
intentions when writing La raza co'smica. However, at least two details about Vasconcelos’ piece,
especially when juxtaposed with Croly’s and Wakeman’s pamphlet, suggest authorial sincerity. First,
Vasconcelos openly publishes the essay in his name while Croly and Wakeman not only publish their piece
anonymously but never claim authorship—even after their hoax was revealed. Second, in l948—twenty
three years after the original publication of La raza co'smica—Vasconcelos republished the essay with a

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Wakeman, miscegenation was taboo and needed to remain so, but for Vasconcelos,
mestizaje Was a reality that needed to be re-deﬁned in positive terms. Mestizaje, as a
discourse, (even with its essentialisms) functions in the public sphere of Mexico just as
the indigenists’ tweaked version of Vasconcelos’ La raza cosmica suggested—as a tool
of national uniﬁcation that praises and promotes racial mixture. Miscegenation, as a
discourse, functions in the public mind of the United States in the exact opposite way the
original pamphlet suggested (which was precisely the way Croly and Wakeman hoped it
would function)—as a tool of national white Lmiﬁcation that prohibits racial mixture. I
will pair several passages from Miscegenation and La raza cosmica to demonstrate that
even when making almost identical claims Croly’s and Wakeman’s text reinforces the
public face of miscegenation (racial division) while Vasconcelos’ essay occasionally
supports the public face of mestizaje (mixture as national model) but also sustains
mestizaje’s private face (mixture with the intent of whitening the nation).

Both documents contain sweeping claims about the supposed superiority of
mixed-race societies throughout history. Vasconcelos states that “[t]he most illustrious
epochs of humanity have been, precisely, those in which several different peoples have
come into contact and mixed with each other. India, Greece, Alexandria, Rome are but
examples that only a geographic and ethnic universality is capable of giving fruits to
civilization” (32) while Croly and Wakeman aver, “[i]f any fact is well established in
history, it is that the miscegenetic or mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically,

and morally, to those pure or unmixed races. [. . .] [W]herever, through conquest,

 

new prologue that reiterated the thesis of the original text while Croly and Wakeman, as I have already
discussed, not only ridiculed the concept of miscegenation in their newspaper but even attacked their own
neologism.

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colonization, or commerce, different nationalities are blended, a superior human product
invariably results” (8-9).

In a similar vein, both texts offer an extended analysis of ancient Egypt as a
speciﬁc historical example to support their claims. Vasconcelos states that the ﬁrst
Egyptian empire, which was “predominantly white and relatively homogenous[,]”
eventually fell into decay and was replaced by “the Second Empire, a new, mestizo race,
with the characteristics of both white and black” (4). 40 This empire, he argues, “was
more advanced and ﬂourishing than the First. The period in which the pyramids were
built, and the Egyptian civilization reached its summit, is a mestizo period” (4).41
Vasconcelos’ description of Egyptian civilization offered an optimistic appraisal of
Mexico’s future. Instead of being condemned to mediocrity because of the abundance of
racial mixture in Mexico, an inferiority complex which had plagued Mexico’s leaders for
decades, the example of Egypt provided historical hope to Mexico’s post-Revolutionary
leadership that Mexico, too, could achieve greatness as a mestizo nation.42 Such
optimism reiﬁes the public facade of mestizaje by suggesting that the discourse really is

about positive mixture rather than assimilation or ethnic erasure.

 

4° Vasconcelos’ analysis of Egypt did not appear in the original 1925 publication of La raza cosmica but
was part of the prologue he added in 1948. In this prologue, he also describes ancient Greece as a mixed
civilization although he suggests that “the contrast between black and white was not present; it was rather a
mixture of light colored races. Nonetheless, there was a mixture of races and cultural currents” (4). The
examples of Egypt and Greece elaborate upon Vasconcelos’ earlier claims about the superiority of mixed
race societies rather than altering these claims which remain in the re-publication of the essay.

4' As Jaén notes, “Vasconcelos’ chronology seems somewhat confused, and even reversed” but this does
not throw doubt upon his assertion “that Egyptian civilization was the product of a mixed race” (82).

‘2 Ironically, neither Vasconcelos nor the various governments of Mexico in the years that followed the
Revolution seemed to notice the pyramids which existed much closer to home. Mexico’s contemporary
indigenous population, already heirs to great, pyramid building empires of the past, was theoretically
absorbed into Vasconcelos’ cosmic race and usually ignored by the central government throughout the
twentieth century. Even the indigenist movement, which did notice the ancient pyramids, could not move
beyond fantasies about the indigenous past in order to enact any sort of positive change for Mexico’s
indigenous present.

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Croly and Wakeman provide a similar reading of Egypt, suggesting that “the
Egyptians were a composite race. It was here that civilization dawned, because it was
here that the ﬁrst conditions for civilization existed” (21). But the authors of
Miscegenation go even further than Vasconcelos, claiming that Egypt’s eventual
rejection of the racial mixture which had made it great directly led to the fall of the
empire:

Egypt decayed because her people forgot the lesson their own history should have

taught them. After the race became thoroughly composite, they intermarried only

one with another, and even carried the breeding in-and-in practice to such an
extent that brothers married sisters and mothers sons. Physical degeneracy and
mental imbecility rapidly set in; the nation sank as swiftly as it had soared; and by

the operation of the same great law. (22)

Croly’s and Wakeman’s duplicitous praise of a mixed-race Egypt is fascinating on
multiple levels. The face value of the statement directly contradicts what Nott and
Gliddon had argued nine years earlier in Types of Mankind, but the satirical nature of the
pamphlet requires that its major claims be re-read to signify their opposite which means
that like Types of Mankind the miscegenation pamphlet also argues that the ancient
Egyptians were white.43

Croly’s and Wakeman’s critique (or not) of incest reveals the complex and
contradictory manners in which various nineteenth-century groups in the United States

theorized racial mixture via discussion of incest. At face value, Croly and Wakeman

 

’3 Apart from their discussion of Egyptian whiteness in Types of Mankind, Nott also discussed Egypt in his
articles on hybridity. In “Unity of the Human Race—A Letter, addressed to the Editor, on the Unity of the
Human Race,” he suggests that Egypt’s decline could be blamed on racial mixture as much as on poor
government (48).

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argue that incest leads to physical and mental decay on a personal and a national level.
This critique falls in line with both the abolition tradition, which listed incest among the
many evils propagated by the slave system, and with the likes of Morton, Nott, and
Gliddon who criticized monogenism because of its incestuous implications while openly
preaching white supremacy. At the same time, the underlying satire of Croly’s and
Wakeman’s pamphlet reverses their critique of incest to suggest that Croly, Wakeman,
and any ardent critic of racial mixture in the United States really would prefer incest to
miscegenation. Both of these readings, however, accept miscegenation and incest as
opposites of one another, but as Sollors suggests, it has also been a common practice to
collapse incest and racial mixture into one another (314). 44 He cites Henry Hughes’
1852 claim that “consanguineous amalgamation forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both are
incestuous. Amalgamation is incest” (qtd. in Sollors 298) as an extreme example of such
logic, but he reveals the same thinking in the work of the famous professor Louis
Agassiz, a contemporary of Morton, Nott, and Gliddon whom both Morton and Bachman
cite while trading barbs in their letters on hybridity. In a letter dated August 9, 1863,
Agassiz told Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe that “[v]iewed from a high moral point of view
the production of halfbreeds is as much a sin against nature, as incest in a civilized
community is a sin against purity of character” (qtd. in Sollors 298). The August 1863
inscription date on this letter, a mere four months before Croly’s and Wakeman’s
publication of Miscegenation, suggests that the tendency to link miscegenation to incest

rather than describing them as opposites was typical for the time period. In fact, Kaplan

 

4" Sollors points out that several disparate groups have equated miscegenation with incest. He states, “it is
startling that proslavery thinkers, racial conservatives, and fascists on the one hand as well as racial liberals
and antislavery writers on the other have felt impelled to blur the boundaries between incest and

miscegenation” (3 14).

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summarizes a March 24, 1864 article in which Croly’s the World makes the very same
connection between incest and miscegenation in a tirade about the miscegenation
pamphlet itself (3 08-3 09). It would not be a stretch, then, to interpret Miscegenation’s
portrayal of incest and miscegenation as opposites as the ultimate satire which rids the
concepts of their binary division and couples them with an equal sign. Croly’s and
Wakeman’s false praise for Egypt’s racially mixed past reinforces the discourse of
miscegenation’s prohibition on racial mixture by covertly mocking the idea that an
advanced civilization could have been based on racial mixture and by equating
miscegenation with the taboo of incest.

Another moment of textual similarity between La raza co'smica and
Miscegenation appears when Vasconcelos and Croly/Wakeman discuss Spanish
bloodlines. As Vasconcelos describes how the white strand will affect the cosmic race,
he states, “Judaic striae hidden within the Castilian blood since the days of the cruel
expulsion now reveal themselves, along with Arabian melancholy, as a remainder of the
sickly Muslim sensuality” (22).45 Vasconcelos’ suggestion that the white or Spanish
bloodline was already mixed supports mestizaje’s public face by simply adding another
layer to the mixture. However, since the text itself actually favors whiteness, this passage
appears antithetical to Vasconcelos’ agenda since it shows that his favored Spanish line
contained the two racial elements which, as the Inquisition proved, Spaniards despised
more than all others. Still, the passage can also be read to demonstrate mestizaje’s '
whitening power, for if the supposed traits of the Moors and the Jews that the Spanish

abhorred could disappear into the Spanish bloodline to the point of only revealing

 

’5 Sierra also mentions that the Spanish were already a mixed race before they began to mix with the
indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. He suggests that mixture was much more prominent among
Spaniards before the conquest than among Mexico’s indigenous populations (127).

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themselves in a way that leads a Hispanophile like Vasconcelos to ask “[W]ho has not a
little of all this, or does not wish to have all?” (22), then mestizaje should also be able to
accomplish the same thing with Mexico’s early twentieth-century African, Indian, and
Asian bloodlines—none of which the Spanish whites ever loathed as strongly as they did
the Jews and Moors.

Croly and Wakeman more overtly connect the Spanish success to the mixture
which took place between Spaniards and Moors, stating that “[W]hen the Moors overran
the Spanish peninsula and gave their blood to the Spanish people, it resulted in a
civilization as remarkable of its kind as anything which has existed in Europe” (10-11).
And, as with Egypt, they blame Spain’s fall from power on their eventual reaction against
racial mixture: “the downfall of Spain dates ﬁ'om its cruel expulsion of the Moors from
that peninsula. The pride of race, which led it to reject the rich blood of the Morisco,
signaled the decadence of its power” (11). Their satirical description of Spain’s rise and
decline, like their analysis of Egypt, must also be read with suspicion. Miscegenation
covertly suggests that the Spaniards’ openness to mixture was the catalyst of their
downfall rather than the reason for their former greatness, and this critique can apply to
Spaniards of the old world who only expelled the Moors and other racial minorities from
the peninsula centuries after they had already mixed with the Spanish population and to
Spaniards in the new world who openly mixed with Indians and Africans in a way that
horriﬁed the anti-amalgamationists in the United States. Either way, Croly’s and
Wakeman’s pretended praise once again strengthens the prohibitive power of the

discourse of miscegenation in the United States by linking the concept of racial mixture

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to the crumbling Spanish Empire, a society which whites in the United States already
viewed as decrepit and racially inferior.

Finally, both documents link intelligence to whiteness while merely delivering
backhanded compliments—emotional, creative, and/or spiritual—to the other races.
Vasconcelos’ cosmic race maintains an “inﬁnite quietude” from its indigenous stock
which “is stirred with the drop put in our blood by the Black, eager for sensual joy,
intoxicated with dance and unbridled lust” and altered by the “folds and newer
dimensions” as seen through the “slanted eyes” of the Asian (22). The entire mix, in the
end, is controlled by “[t]he clear mind of the White” (22). Similarly, the so-called
“Miscegen” of Croly’s and Wakeman’s pamphlet “will blend in himself all that is
passionate and emotional in the darker races, all that is imaginative and spiritual in the
Asiatic races, and all that is intellectual and perceptive in the white races” (25).46 Croly’s
and Wakeman’s privileging of the white strand of the “Miscegen” is not surprising since
the authors’ own views and the discourse which grows out of the document overtly
propose white superiority. Indeed, this partiality serves as a subtle hint that the pamphlet
is a hoax. For Vasconcelos, however, this favoritism becomes problematic. His

composite race retains a positive trait from its white progenitors and only pseudo-positive

 

’6 A signiﬁcant difference between the details which Vasconcelos assigns to the strands which create the
cosmic race and those which Croly and Wakeman assign to the strands which make up the “Miscegen” is
that Vasconcelos saves spirituality—which Croly and Wakeman list as an Asian trait—as an attribute of the
cosmic race itself. Connecting the cosmic race to spirituality falls in line with the famous motto
Vasconcelos gave UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico), “Por mi raza hablara el
espiritu” or “Through my race the spirit will speak.” However, Vasconcelos once again reveals how the
traits that he calls positive within the cosmic race can be traced back to whiteness. Even though he does
not directly assign spirituality to whites in the original edition of La raza cosmica, he does so in the 1948
prologue—in direct contradiction to Croly’s and Wakeman’s suggestion of Asian spirituality. Vasconcelos
ends the prologue by playing Christianity as a trump card which he claims “civilized” the Indians and could
have “saved” the Asians: “In fact, the decline of Asiatic peoples can be attributed to their isolation, but
also, and without doubt, primarily, to the fact that they have not been Christianized. A religion such as
Christianity made the American Indians advance, in a few centuries, from cannibalism to a relative degree
of civilization” (5).

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qualities (traits that can actually be seen as negative if they exist in excess or if they are
not controlled by the intervening white mind) from its other ancestors; this implication
challenges the public version of mestizaje as positive mixture. Still, Vasconcelos’ essay
allows these other traits, at least when mixed at the “appropriate” levels with supposed
white intelligence, to be viewed as positive additions to the mix while Croly’s and
Wakeman’s piece degrades Africans and Asians for their supposed passion and
spirituality while simultaneously ﬂaunting an alleged white intellect.

Regardless of the positive and negative connotations of the various traits which
the mixed races of Miscegenation and La raza cosmica retain, both documents are
inherently essentialist simply because they suggest that these qualities are, themselves,
racial and that distinct racial characteristics can be traced back to various racial origins in
the physical and mental makeup of the so-called mixed race subject. However, we must
ask ourselves how much worse Croly’s and Wakeman’s essentialist attitudes really are
compared to those of Vasconcelos, for while their document was duplicitous, the
discourse of miscegenation which grew out of it is extremely straight forward—it is a
white supremacist discourse. Vasconcelos’ essay was in earnest, but it does not actually
champion racial mixture when read at face value, and the discourse of mestizaje which
emerged from La raza cosmica is two-faced—publicly championing a certain type of
racial mixture while privately attempting to whiten the Mexican population. Still, we
cannot ignore the fact that even the secret side of the discourse of mestizaje does allow
so-called mixed race subjects more social mobility in Mexico than had been possible
before the Revolution/Vasconcelos’ re-interpretation of the concept while the acceptance

of mixture by both the public and the private faces of mestizaje challenges

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miscegenation’s assertion that racial mixture is inherently abnormal. We should not
overlook the positives of mestizaje’s public face, but we cannot suggest that mestizaje
functions as a utopian model for race-mixed societies. In the end, the discourses of
mestizaje and miscegenation are both fraught with racist baggage and intentions, but each
discourse’s essentialisms ﬁmction in distinct manners, and thereby, distinguish one

discourse from the other.

Regardless of the power of various nationalisms to suggest otherwise, no nation
exists per se; a nation must be created. These ideas, of course, are less than radical in the
years following Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and they can be traced at
least as far back as Renan’s deﬁnition of the nation from the late nineteenth century.
Renan vigorously divided the idea of the nation from the concept of race (14-19) even
while recognizing that his contemporaries typically used the latter to define the former
(8).47 Such was the case with both the post-Civil War United States and post-
Revolutionary Mexico—each sought to create the nation on racial lines. Through the
discourse of miscegenation, the white majority of the United States tried to draw a clear
line between what it saw as the real nationals and those who just happened to live within
the national boundaries. This line separated white from black and equated mixture with

blackness. Through the discourse of mestizaje, Mexico’s elite accepted the fact that

 

’7 Renan based his division between nation and race on his judgment that the best nations of Europe were
racially mixed. He states, “[t]he truth is that there is no pure race and that to make politics depend upon
ethnographic analysis is to surrender it to a chimera. The noblest countries, England, France, and Italy, are
those where the blood is the most mixed” (l4), and he avers that “[r]ace, as we historians understand it, is
therefore something which is made and unmade. [. . .] The instinctive consciousness which presided over
the construction of the map of Europe took no account of race, and the leading nations of Europe are
nations of essentially mixed blood” (15). While his descriptions of race appear far more progressive than
the views of Croly/Wakeman and Vasconcelos, his praise for Italy, England, and France as “mixed blood”
nations resonates with Croly’s and Wakeman’s purported descriptions of Egypt, Spain, and Greece and
with Vasconcelos’ praise for these same nations.

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racial mixture was prevalent among the Mexican population and used it as the element to
claim national homogeneity.

The national identities formed by the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje
certainly differ from one another, but they both support Mills’ suggestion that white
supremacy itself is a political system—that the Racial Contract functions across national
and linguistic borders and through various guises to favor the construct of whiteness and
degrade so-called nonwhites. Miscegenation seeks to quarantine whiteness from
otherness so that no trace of the racial other enters the realm of whiteness while mestizaje
condones mixture in order to whitewash the racial other until no trace of that other can be
found. These discourses are so powerful that, as we shall see in the following chapter,
even voices that challenge them tend to reify their existence and repeat their

essentialisms.

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Chapter 3
Racial Mixture as Fragmentation

Why is a comparative study of two literary giants, William Faulkner and Carlos
Fuentes, productive? Apart from the alluring alliteration that makes any short synopsis of
the project almost irresistible, the ﬁction of both writers lends itself to comparison on
multiple levels; a comparative approach to the work of these two authors allows for
analyses of inﬂuence, of modernist literary techniques, and of Fuentes’ and Faulkner’s
shared themes and preoccupations. F uentes—as his own literary criticism and several
interviews reveal—is an avid reader of Faulkner’s ﬁction, and valuable work could be
(and has been) done along the lines of Pérez F irmat’s genetic mode to assess Faulkner’s
inﬂuence on Fuentes and to examine Fuentes’ internalization of, re-writing of, and
breaking away from Faulkner. Likewise, each writer’s attempts to create complex
narratives through multiple levels of narration, through contrasting and contradicting
memories of the past, and through their consistent and sometimes jarring assaults upon
linear time provide plenty of room for critical inquiry.

My readings of Faulkner and Fuentes, however, primarily emphasize their
preoccupation with racial mixture and its connection to the devastating civil wars which
deﬁne the regions that each author calls home. My readings follow the historiographic
approach to inter-American literary studies that I have proposed in my introduction,
paying particular attention to the speciﬁc historical contexts of the post-Civil War U.S.
South and post-revolutionary Mexico which I have analyzed at length in the previous two

chapters.1 Reading their ﬁction side by side in this manner connects the U.S. South to

 

‘ Faulkner and Fuentes serve as an ideal pairing to demonstrate the value of the historiographic approach to
the literatures of the Americas since their work can and has been compared on so many other levels. The

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Mexico on an authorial level by showing Fuentes’ and Faulkner’s similar obsessions with
the past—particularly with the internal wars that created their disparate nations’
discourses on race and racial mixture. This approach also connects Mexico to the U.S.
South on a broader level by revealing the power of the discourse of mestizaje in Mexico
and the discourse of miscegenation in the United States, by demonstrating the disparate
ways the two discourses function, and by exposing the common thread that connects the
assimilationist discourse that is mestizaje to the segregationist discourse that is
miscegenation—the creation and privileging of whiteness.

Faulkner’s and Fuentes’ collected works ﬁll numerous volumes, but only certain
novels by each author conﬁ'ont the issues of mestizaje and miscegenation via narratives
of internal war cast as fratricide. Mestizaje is a hidden theme in Fuentes’ famous novel
of the Revolution and its aftermath—La muerte de Artemio Cruz—and it is a central issue
in his lesser known The Old Gringo which follows a ﬁctional version of Ambrose Bierce
into revolutionary Mexico. Miscegenation is the driving force in Faulkner’s Light in
August—a novel haunted by the U.S. Civil War and the tradition of violence that springs
up from the ashes of the defeated Confederacy—and together with its inverse image of
incest, miscegenation is the central fascination of Absalom, Absalom! . Finally,
miscegenation connects at least six of the seven stories and novellas that comprise Go
Down, Moses. Not all of the plot lines in these novels take place during the wars, but the
characters and/or the narratives themselves are haunted by the violent past and burdened
by personal and communal memories of fratricide, defeat, and futility. In each of these

novels, the past enters the present and reminds the characters that these internal wars,

 

arguments I make in the following chapters show that even with two authors whose biographies and written
work reveal a clear genetic connection, the historiographic approach provides both new and signiﬁcant
details about how their texts create conversations between their historical contexts and between each other.

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which served as cataclysmic foundations for the racialized societies in which the
characters live, created new racial discourses of exclusion and segregation or inclusion
and assimilation—miscegenation or mestizaje.

In the following chapters, I offer three paired readings of Faulkner’s and Fuentes’
novels to demonstrate their tendencies to portray racial mixture as fragmentation, to both
repeat and challenge previously established blood discourses, and to treat racial mixture
that includes Aﬁicans differently than mixture between Europeans and indigenous
Americans. Each of these readings connects the authors’ portrayals of racial mixture to
their obsessions with the civil wars of their nations’ pasts, and each reading reveals how
the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje function on the cultural level that is
literature. Both Faulkner and Fuentes have been criticized as racist authors, and while
this critique certainly has its place, I feel that it glosses over the complexity of each
author’s treatment of race. Faulkner’s and Fuentes’ novels do re-inscribe the
essentialisms of the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje, respectively, but they
also provide both overt and covert critiques of how race and racial mixture are

constructed in the U.S. South and Mexico.

Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses and
Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo all contain signiﬁcant
characters and/or protagonists who are cast as fragmented subjects with racially mixed
identities. My analysis of these characters reveals that while Faulkner and Fuentes
problematize previous portrayals of mulattos and mestizos, their penchant for casting

these characters through strategies of fragmentation ultimately relies on and creates anew

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the competing essentialisms of the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje by
suggesting that mulattos, mestizos, and other so-called persons of mixed race are
something less than whole. Faulkner’s and Fuentes’ tendency to show these characters
viewing their own bodies as fragments—in shattered mirrors or in running water—recalls
Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the mirror stage” and Sigmund Freud’s discussion of
“primary narcissism.” I offer a critique of how these characters develop or fail to develop
an identity in these “mirror” scenes and throughout the novels, but my reading is not
psychoanalytic per se since I am less concerned with the psychoanalytic repercussions of
their identity formation than I am with what the racialized presentation of this process
suggests—the internalization and repetition of miscegenation’s and mestizaje’s blood
mathematics by the characters themselves. In short, the fragmented depictions of these
characters support both discourses’ ﬂawed logic of racial purity.

An important distinction between Fuentes’ fragmented characters and those
created by Faulkner is that Fuentes’ novels reveal that what Mexican society considers
racial mixture or mestizaje has really taken place in the ancestry of Artemio Cruz and
Tomas Arroyo while what the U.S. South calls miscegenation may or may not have
occurred in the bloodlines of Charles Bon and Joe Christmas.2 Indeed, the crux of the
tragic portrayals of Christmas, Bon, and even Bon’s illegitimate son by his octoroon
mistress—Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon—relies upon the possibility that no mixture
has even taken place while Faulkner’s Lucas Beaucharnp, Clytie Sutpen, Sam Fathers,

and Boon Hogganbeck (all characters who are overtly portrayed as racially mixed) enjoy

 

2 This ambiguity about miscegenation is not necessarily a rule in Faulkner’s work. Go Down, Moses, for
example, reveals that Lucas Beauchamp’s paternal grandfather, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (who
is also his great grandfather), was a white plantation owner and that the rest of Lucas’ ancestry was either
black or mulatto while Absalom, Absalom! shows that Clytie’s mother was one of Thomas Sutpen’s
African slaves from the Caribbean isles and that her father was Sutpen himself.

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a type of wholeness that Bon, his son, and Christmas never come close to realizing.

Another important difference between Fuentes’ and Faulkner’s mulatto and
mestizo characters is the amount of success each author allows them, or, in more active
terms, the rewards or punishments each author provides for these characters. In general
terms, Fuentes rewards Arroyo and Cruz with relative success while Faulkner tends to
punish most of his characters who are the offspring of supposedly miscegenational
relationships.3 This generalization is debatable since Cruz and Arroyo both die within
their respective novels. Still, Cruz’s death—no matter how revolting the physical
descriptions of the inﬂammation of the mesentery seem—comes only after a long life of
social and economic success. He is not a heroic ﬁgure, but he is certainly not a self-hater
like Faulkner’s Joe Christmas. Arroyo’s life and death are more difﬁcult to cast in the
light of success since he dies young at the hand of his own military superior and hero
Pancho Villa. But, before his demise, Arroyo completes his chief goal in life; he raids,
possesses, and then destroys the hacienda where he was born, the hacienda that could
have been his but was not because he was only the hacendado’s bastard son.4

The characters that Faulkner portrays as mixed, on the other hand, tend to suffer
ignominious deaths at young ages or after lives of misery. In Absalom, Absalom!, Bon is
shot dead by Henry Sutpen—his friend, and possibly, his half brother—in a fratricidal
scene which serves as a microcosm of the U.S. Civil War itself. Charles Etienne Saint-

Valery Bon lives an extremely violent life and dies of yellow fever, and Clytie slowly

 

3 The tradition of punishing the mixed character in U.S. ﬁction can be traced at least as far back as James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans in which Cora—in love with the Mohican Uncas and herself
a carrier of “black blood”—dies under Magua’s knife while her very white sister, Alice, survives the
novel’s adventures and marries the British army ofﬁcer Duncan Heyward.

’ While Arroyo’s early death at Villa’s hand can be read as a punishment, it can also be read as the only
way in which Arroyo, Villa, and Fuentes as author can help Arroyo avoid the corruption of a young
military hero turned dictator like Porﬁrio Diaz whom Arroyo suggests only became corrupt with age (The
Old Gringo 79).

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wastes away in the rotting big house on the abandoned Sutpen’s Hundred until the day
she takes her own life and that of her half brother, Henry, by lighting the ediﬁce on ﬁre.
In Light in August, Joe Christmas lives a life of self-hate and ﬁnally allows himself to be
shot, and subsequently castrated, by Percy Grimm. Lucas Beaucharnp, one of the
primary characters whose narrative connects various stories in Go Down, Moses, is the
visible exception to Faulkner’s tendency to punish the offspring of so-called
miscegenational relationships. He lives to an old age (in fact, none of the sections of the
novel ever suggest his death) and enjoys some economic success. However, the portrayal
of Lucas stands out in sharp contrast to that of the other characters that Faulkner calls
mixed in Go Down, Moses—Lucas’ progenitors, his siblings, some of his offspring, and
the son of an Indian chief and an African slave, Sam Fathers.5 In light of the suffering
the other characters endure, Lucas’ good fortune hardly shifts the novel toward a positive
portrayal of miscegenation. In the end, Lucas is an anomaly in Faulkner’s long list of
racially mixed characters, a strange hybrid to which I will return in the conclusion of this
project.

An analysis of punishment versus reward may not be the most fruitﬁrl way to
compare Faulkner’s and Fuentes’ characters. However, in light of the discourses of
miscegenation and mestizaje, it is important to examine this difference since the

punishment of Faulkner’s supposedly mulatto characters coincides with the discourse of

 

5 Lucas’ strange autonomy on the McCaslin-Edmonds plantation is challenged in Faulkner’s later novel
Intruder in the Dust in which Lucas is nearly lynched after being found at the scene of a murder of a white
man. While Intruder in the Dust also demonstrates Lucas’ ability to survive in nearly impossible
circumstances (he orchestrates a bizarre series of events ﬁ'om within a jail cell that lead various other
characters to exhume the dead man’s body, ﬁnd another corpse, and prove that neither man was killed with
Lucas’ gun), it also shows that outside of the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp family triangle Lucas is
considered “uppity” rather than being respected as the oldest man on the land with old Carother’s
McCaslin’s blood. In fact, Go Down, Moses suggests the same when Lucas leaves the family farm. For
example, when he goes to court to stop his possible divorce, the clerk continually rebuffs by claiming

“‘[w]hy, you uppity— ”’ (124).

147

miscegenation’s viliﬁcation of racial mixture while the reward, or at least the mobility,
Fuentes allows his so-called mestizo characters reﬂects the social, economic, and
political movement enjoyed by these groups in the wake of the Mexican Revolution.

Faulkner’s Light in August and Fuentes’ The Old Gringo rely on fragmentation in
at least two ways. First, the very portrayals of Christmas and Arroyo are fragmented.
Second, the narrative structures themselves are fragments—broken, non-linear stories
that require the reader to gather the scattered pieces and place them into some type of
order to be able to understand the respective plots. An analysis of the fragmentary
portrayals of Christmas and Arroyo reveals the complexity of each character, but at the
same time, it shows how both Christmas and Arroyo buy into the false notion (more
virulent in the discourse of miscegenation but also possible in the discourse of mestizaje)
that having various racial backgrounds forces individuals to envision themselves as
partial persons—to look at themselves as halves, quarters, etc. The fragmented narrative
styles, too, suggest that mestizaje and miscegenation can best be discussed in pieces or
strands much like Pimentel’s and Molina Enriquez’s depictions of mestizaje and
Vasconcelos’ description of the speciﬁc characteristics that each group supposedly brings
to the cosmic race.

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas is one of the better known mixed race characters in the
literatures of the Americas, but his fame as a mulatto is ironic since Christmas’ racial
identity is never clearly deﬁned. Most literary critics follow Christmas’ own faulty
premonitions and read Christmas as a black or mulatto character who oﬁen “passes” as

white.6 John Irwin’s analysis of Christmas in Doubling and Incest/Repetition and

 

6 Similarly, most critics also accept Charles Bon as a mixed race character. Both Irwin (Doubling 25) and
Peavy (36) discuss Bon as a mixed or partially black individual (which both equal black under the terms of

148

Revenge, for example, follows this pattern since he accepts Christmas as “the product of
miscegenation” without questioning Christmas’ assumptions about his racial identity
(62). Others admit that Christmas might not be racially mixed—for example, Charles
Peavy confesses that Christmas’ status as “part Negro” is not “certain” (37)—and still
others argue that Christmas is white. John T. Matthews compellingly makes this
argument in “This Race Which Is Not One” by stating:

Joe is not a person of mixed race who is struggling to ﬁnd his true identity as

black or white; he is not a black person seeking to pass for white, nor a white

person who has discovered he is black; nor ﬁnally is he a person of unknown race
seeking proof of his ‘true’ racial identity. Rather, he ‘is’ a white person, whose
only known surviving relatives are white, who lives as a white man at every
moment pictured in the novel, but who comes to suspect that his whiteness is not

pure or original. (206)

Matthews’ appraisal of Joe Christmas cuts through all of the levels of speculation
that both the novel and the literary criticism surrounding it create about Christmas’ racial
identity to suggest that Christmas’ identity crisis is not based on a fear of being part black
as much as it is couched in an apprehension that whiteness itself does not equal racial
purity. Matthews’ convincing logic, however, cannot hide the fact that while the novel
does not clarify Christmas’ racial identity, most of the other characters in the novel (most
brutally Percy Grimm and most pseudo-scientiﬁcally Gavin Stevens) read Christmas as a

mulatto, which is the equivalent of black according to miscegenation’s “one-drop rule.”

 

miscegenation) even though Peavy admits that this might not work for Christmas. Barbara Ladd suggests
that Bon’s supposed blackness is “a detail that is considered fact by most Faulkner scholars and probably
comes as close to fact as any other detail concerning Bon, which is to say not very close at all” (536) since
this element “only [appears] in Quentin’s narrative” (540) and could easily have been “misconstrued, or

invented [. . .] for [Quentin’s] own purposes” (536).

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In the end, each of the racial labels used to describe Christmas falls short. He cannot be
called black because he is physically white and “passes” as white at all moments in the
novel besides those when he chooses to tell people that he fears that he is black, yet he
cannot be called white both because he thinks that he is black and because the other white
characters in the novel sense something in him that makes them doubt his whiteness and
leads them to describe him as a “foreigner” (98) up until they hear from Joe Brown/Lucas
Burch that Christmas is supposedly part black. The novel links Christmas’ supposed
blackness to his father—a character that Christmas has never met and knows absolutely
nothing about—but Christmas’ father’s race is anything but clear.7

Light in August continually provides ﬁ'agmented images of this not black, not
white, not mulatto, somehow foreign character. These images are never directed at the
reader or at any other character; instead, they are repeatedly directed at Christmas
himself. Each time that Christmas looks at himself, he only sees himself in fragments.
This typically happens when Christmas is grooming himself, and thus, needs to look at
his own face. The reﬂection that he sees is either broken or wavy and ephemeral due to
the shards of mirror and/or rtmning water that Christmas always uses to contemplate his
own image. On the day before he kills Joanna Burden, Christmas uses both of these
methods to see his face as he prepares to go to Jefferson: “Nailed to the wall was a shard
of mirror. In the fragment he watched his dim face as he knotted the tie. [. . .] Kneeling
beside the spring he shaved, using the water’s surface for glass, stropping the long bright
razor on his shoe” (110-11 my emphasis). The partial and ﬂeeting images of the self that

Christmas sees every time he looks at his own face reveal a shattered self-identity. At the

 

7 The ambiguity of Christmas’ father’s racial identity is central to my interpretation of Light in August
along with La muerte de Artemio Cruz in my last chapter—“Black, Mexican, and Black Mexican.”

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same time, these images connect Christmas’ broken ego to his supposed mixed race. The
face that he sees in the broken glass is neither black nor white but “dim,” and in a
different moment when he shaves in the stream at the crack of dawn, “it is still too dim to
see his face clearly in the water” (236 my emphasis). The repetition of the adjective dim
in two of the scenes that show Christmas’ divided self connect the dimness itself to the
concept of fragmentation. If Christmas were dark or light, perhaps he could ﬁnd ways to
see himself as a whole. But, since he is the mixture of dark and light, since he, like the
dawn which is neither night nor day, is dim, he does not see his own image clearly nor
completely, and he does not conceptualize himself as a whole (both undivided and
healthy) individual.

Key sections of dialogue between Christmas and Joanna Burden also connect the
repeated images or symbols of fragmentation to Christmas’ supposed racial mixture
while reiterating the fact that Christmas’ “mixed blood” is mere speculation. One
evening, Christmas and Joanna have a long conversation about her family’s past. Her
story becomes a detailed description of her family’s ideas about race. Christmas also
connects the idea of family to race, even though he does not know any members of his
family. The conversation continues like this:

‘You dont have any idea who your parents were?’ If she could have seen his face

she would have found it sullen, brooding. ‘Except that one of them was part

nigger. Like I told you before.’ She was still looking at him; her voice told him
that. It was quiet, impersonal, interested without being curious. ‘How do you
know that?’ He didn’t answer for some time. Then he‘ said: ‘I dont know it.’

Again his voice ceased; by its sound she knew that he was looking away, toward

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the door. His face was sullen, quite still. Then he spoke again, moving; his voice

now had an overtone, unmirthful yet quizzical, at once humorless and sardonic:

‘If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.’ (254 my emphasis)

Christmas, then, simply assumes that he has “black blood.” He cannot prove nor
disprove that he has black ancestry, but he lives his life convinced that he does and
convinced that such ancestry is a problem, a curse. If he does not have “black blood,”
then the self-hate he practices throughout the novel loses its already ﬂawed reason, and
the wandering life of violence that he has forced himself to live is all a waste of time and
energy.

This same passage, however, subtly reinforces Christmas’ premonitions about his
ancestry by repeating the language found in the scenes in which Christmas contemplates
his fragmented image. Twice in this passage, the narrator describes Christmas’ face as
“sullen.” Christmas does not see his face because there is no mirror or reﬂective surface
in sight. The dialogue shows that Joanna does not see his face either, “if she could have
seen his face” and “he was looking away, toward the door” (254). The reader, however,
is left with the repeated image of Christmas’ “sullen” face. The primary deﬁnition of
sullen—“gloomily or resentfully silent or repressed” (“sullen” 1180)—certainly describes
Christmas’ mood in this speciﬁc scene and Christmas’ character in general. Yet, a
secondary deﬁnition for sullen is “dull or somber in sound or color” (1180-81), and
“dull” is a common synonym for “dim” which the narrator repeatedly uses to describe
Christmas’ image in the shard of broken mirror and the stream. The very passage that
clearly reveals that Christmas’ claim of black ancestry is merely a guess highlights his

face, links this description of his face back to other scenes that depict it as a dim

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fragment, and thus, sustains his intuition and fear that he is a child of miscegenation.
Even if the reader fails to connect Christmas’ “sullen” face to his “dim” image, Christmas
does not. In other words, his admission to Joanna that his whole life of self punishment
is a waste of time if he is not part black does not lead him to question his assumption. He
continues to doubt his racial purity and to punish himself according to the distorted logic
of the discourse of miscegenation which equates mixture with blackness and condemns
both.

Ironically, the repetition of the symbols of Christmas’ fragmentation actually
connects the otherwise disjointed sections of his narrative. The scrap of mirror, the
running spring, and the fragmented self identity they symbolize allow the reader to recall
the plot and re-grasp Christmas’ narrative thread after it has been signiﬁcantly interrupted
by the narratives of Lena Grove and Reverend Gail Hightower and by the ﬂashbacks
within Christrnas’ narrative itself. Before the end of the novel, the shard of broken mirror
even connects Christmas’ narrative to that of Lena Grove, who only days after Joanna’s
murder moves into Christmas’ cabin and uses “a comb” and the same “shard of broken
mirror” to freshen up for her short reunion with Joe Brown/Lucas Burch (410).

The repeated images of Christmas standing before a mirror shard or above a
running stream of water also reveal another level of fragmentation—that of the so-called
miscegenational love affair. Christmas uses the mirror ﬁagment and the stream the day
before he kills Joanna (110-11), he uses the spring to shave almost immediately after
killing her as he runs from the law (335-36), and he uses the piece of mirror to knot his
tie on the day that Joe Brown/Lucas Burch discovers that Christmas and Joanna are

lovers (272-73). These are all key points in Christmas’ and Joanna’s relationship. The

153

reappearance of the fragmented symbols at these deﬁning moments in their violent love
affair—the day someone else learns about the affair, the day before Christmas ends the
affair by murdering Joanna, and the actual day of the murder as Christmas ﬂees from
Joanna’s decapitated body—suggests that the affair itself, which both Christmas and
Joanna treat as miscegenational, is also an impossibility, a failed fragment.

This volatile love affair, perhaps more than any other element in Light in August,
reveals and re-inscribes the venomous prejudices of the discourse of miscegenation.
Since the birth of the discourse of miscegenation (at the end of the U.S. Civil War and
during the period of Reconstruction) sexual relations between black men and white
women have been maligned by white men as the ultimate taboo. Kinney historicizes the
taboo and suggests that before 1850 “relationships between black men and white women”
were not uncommon (15). White men became so obsessed with preventing these
relationships between Reconstruction and the 19605, however, that they lynched
thousands of black men, typically claiming that these men were rapists although the vast
majority of the victims never had any sexual involvement with white women.8

Light in August shows the sexual relationship between Christmas and Joanna as

one of choice rather than as a rape, which might appear to challenge the discourse’s

efforts to portray sexuality between black men and white women as taboo. This

 

8 In her analysis of violence in more recent literature of the U.S. South, Louise Gossett provides the
following statistics about lynching in the United States: “[N]early 90 per cent of the 1,886 lynchings
committed in the United States from 1900 through 1930 took place in the Southern states. The highest
incidence of lynching ﬁ'om 1882 to 1956 occurred in Mississippi, where 537 Negroes and 40 whites were
lynched” (20-21), and in a much earlier study focused speciﬁcally on lynching, Arthur Raper claims that
“[t]hree thousand seven hundred and twenty-four people were lynched in the United States from 1889
through 1930. Over four-ﬁfths of these were Negroes, less than one-sixth of whom were accused of rape
(1), but “despite [this] fact [. . .] there were always those who defended [lynching] by the insistence that
unless Negroes were lynched, no white woman would be safe” (20). Even Cash, in his somewhat
rationalized discussion of lynching that forms a part of his concept of the “Southemer’s rape complex”
openly admits that “the offenses of by far the greater number of the [black] victims [of lynching] had
nothing immediately to do with sex” (1 17).

154

challenge is sustained by the actual details of Christmas’ and Joanna’s deadly encounter
in which Joanna tries to ﬁre an ancient pistol at Christmas as the ﬁrst half of her attempt
at a murder-suicide (282-83, 286). Christmas’ killing of Joanna, then, can almost be cast
as self defense, and any violence which the discourse of miscegenation could try to
assign to his “black blood” or to his “mixed blood” is preceded and provoked by the
violence of Joanna’s “white blood.” However, Christmas’ and Joanna’s relationship only
appears to subvert the taboo and, conversely, fully supports the discourse of
miscegenation in at least three ways. First, Joanna plays a perverse role in the
relationship and is continually depicted as sexually corrupt which links directly to the
stereotypical “view that no respectable white woman would have anything to do with a
black man” (Kinney 15). Second, Christmas’ and Joanna’s consistently violent
relationship ﬁnally explodes into extreme violence—murder—even though the affair
itself was chosen rather than coerced. Third, and most signiﬁcant, the murder allows the
community of Jefferson to hypocritically elevate J oanna—a woman who “[W]hile she
was alive they would not have allowed their wives to call on” and who they chided by
calling “‘Nigger lover! ”’ (291-92)—from hated carpetbagger to the epitome of southern
white womanhood, and thus, in a fashion similar to Cash’s rape complex, feel justiﬁed in
delivering Christmas into the hands of a one-man lynching crew in the form of Percy
Grimm.9 Light in August suggests that a sexual relationship between a black man and a

white woman is impossible for the lovers and unthinkable for the white community.

 

9 I owe this argument to Sundquist’s informative reading of the novel in Faulkner: The House Divided. He
claims that “once Joanna has been murdered, the community’s antiabolitionist sentiments are forgotten and
completely engulfed by racial hysteria. As the nan'ative puts it, she is killed ‘not by a negro but by Negro’;
and when the community, hoping ‘that she had been ravished too,’ begins to ‘canvass about for someone to
crucify,’ Joanna becomes more than anything else a ‘white woman,’ archetypically embodying Southern
gynealko and its concomitant ‘rape complex’” (82).

155

In short, the novel’s portrayal of this relationship implies that miscegenation is
wrong and that people who practice it will suffer a life of frustration and a death of
fragmentation—Joanna is decapitated and Christmas castrated. However, this seemingly
complicit depiction of miscegenation simultaneously mocks the discourse since the
“racial mixture” which takes place between Joanna and Christmas is all fantasy or fear—
positive or negative conjecture. Even though the characters read Christmas as black, and
even though the narrative suggests that this is the case, the doubt remains. Christmas’
and Joanna’s relationship can also be read as white on white domestic violence that seeks
to excuse or justify itself by casting itself as black or mixed.lo ’

In The Old Gringo, Fuentes uses similar symbols to demonstrate the fragmented
experience of the mestizo during the Mexican Revolution. One of the novel’s three
primary characters, General Tomas Arroyo, is the illegitimate son of a wealthy
hacendado, Seﬁor Miranda, and one of his indigenous peons. The novel demonstrates
over and over that Arroyo’s supposedly split identity or “mixed blood” torments him in a
manner similar to how Joe Christmas’ supposed black ancestry causes him to suffer.

However, at a young age, Arroyo is partially rescued from his fragmentary
identity through a life changing visual experience. As a young boy, he discovers the full-
body mirrors in the Miranda’s dancehall and sees that he has a body and a face: “‘I spent
my childhood spying. No one knew me. From my hiding places I knew them all. All
because one day I discovered the ballroom of mirrors and I discovered I had a face and a
body. I could see myself. Tomas Arroyo’” (166). Unlike Christmas, Arroyo is able to

conceptualize himself as a whole because he has recognized his own image; he sees the

 

1° I return to this theme of how the so-called white characters in Light in August continually attempt to
frame white violence as black in my next chapter, “Ancestry, Blood, and the Violence of the White
Fathers.”

156

completeness of his face and his body. This experience is coupled with a second moment
of visual climax in which one of Arroyo’s fellow peons forces the Miranda family to look
at Arroyo—the invisible son of an even less visible indigenous house servant—to see him
and admit that he exists. This fellow peon is an old man named Graciano who guards the
keys to the Miranda home. On the evening before Graciano dies, he takes little Tomas
Arroyo into the Miranda’s dining room, and while winding the family’s clock, places the
keys to the house in the boy’s hand. The gesture has the desired effect, “they stopped
their chatter and their drinking and smoking [. . .] I saw huddled movements, heard low
voices, then an embarrassed silence [. . .] Then the man who was my father barked:
‘Graciano, take those keys away from the brat’” (131-32). Graciano’s gesture suggests
that Arroyo, the bastard son, is really the legitimate owner of the house and the hacienda.
By placing the keys in Arroyo’s hand, Graciano makes the Mirandas contemplate the
little boy and understand that “[h]e is not air, he is blood. He is ﬂesh, not glass. He is
not transparent” (134). This experience could also be read as a moment of ego formation
for Arroyo; accordingly, he comes into being when he sees his master/father, who will
not ofﬁcially recognize him, see him. However, the novel suggests that Arroyo’s view of
himself in the mirrors trumps the gaze of Miranda his father since it is the mirror
experience that allows Arroyo to see himself as both autonomous and whole and since it
is this event—not the patriarchal moment—that he seeks to replicate for his followers.
Most of Arroyo’s followers, poor mestizos like himself, are not so lucky.
Reminiscent of Joe Christmas they “had never shaved looking at themselves in a mirror,
they had done it blindly, or worse, in the swift reﬂection of a river” (26).11 Before the

Revolution, they “‘had never seen themselves in a full-body mirror. They didn’t know

 

” This is my translation of the passage from the Spanish version of the novel.

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that their bodies were something more than a piece of their imaginations or a broken
reﬂection in a river’” (5 7).12 Like Light in August, The Old Gringo casts the so-called
racially mixed characters through fragmentation. They cannot picture themselves as
complete ﬁgures because they have never seen themselves.

Arroyo rewards his followers with the same gift that he received in his youth.
When his army conﬁscates the Miranda hacienda, he lets, or better said, he makes his
followers destroy the ranch. The revolutionaries burn every building except the
dancehall which Arroyo purposefully spares because he “had to give them that big gift,
that ﬁesta” of being able to see “their full bodies” (124). Arroyo claims to be proud that
his followers can now see themselves, but his philanthropic efforts are really plain
narcissism. He needs his followers to go through the same experience of identity
recognition in order to truly convince himself that he is whole. ‘3

As I mentioned earlier, Arroyo claims to have overcome the supposed
ﬁ'agmentation of his mestizo identity by seeing himself in the ﬁrll-body mirrors, and this
moment outweighs his experience with the patriarchal gaze when Graciano presents him
with the hacienda’s keys within his father’s view. But the ephemeral incident between
Seﬁor Miranda and Arroyo continues to haunt the latter since the moment of tension and
ocular recognition between father and son does not cause Seﬁor Miranda to ofﬁcially
recognize Arroyo. Instead, this moment serves as a painful reminder of what could or
should have been but what cannot be—even though the discourse of mestizaje claims to

embrace European and Indian mixture—precisely because of Arroyo’s mixed

 

'2 This, too, is my translation from the Spanish version.
’3 By making his followers see themselves, Arroyo has surrounded himself with several versions of
himself—individuals who have seen their own bodies but are not legitimized in the eyes of Mexico’s white,

landowning elite.

158

background. Although he is Miranda’s son, he also carries the “blood” of his indigenous
mother, not that of the ofﬁcial Spanish wife. In the eyes of Miranda, then, Arroyo is
mestizo in the colonial sense noted by Douglas Cope, not just a mixture of Spanish and
Indian, but an illegitimate being, someone who should not have been born.

Arroyo reveals his preoccupation, his obsession with his illegitimacy, to Harriet
Winslow after he has already possessed and destroyed the hacienda. He asks: “‘Did you
have a house you could call your own when you were a girl, gringuita? Or did you also
look at a house that could have been yours, that somehow was yours, you know?, but was
more distant than a palace in a fairy tale’” (124-25). In the end, destruction is the only
way that Arroyo can overcome what he sees as his fragmented racial status. The ﬂames
of the Revolution are like the keys to the house that he momentarily held, but now he is
allowed to use them. He burns the hacienda to the ground and saves the mirrored salon
where he ﬁrst saw himself. The image that looks back at him now is no longer that of a
hiding little boy but of a man who takes what he wants when he wants it—a Miranda.

The difference between Arroyo the man and Arroyo the boy who has not yet
entered the dancehall, as well as the difference between Arroyo and his cohort who have
only recently visualized their own bodies, demonstrates the discourse of mestizaje’s
private face—the face which favors whiteness even while claiming to embrace mixture
between Indians and Europeans. Arroyo was “not [born] in [his] father’s plush canopied
bed, but on a straw petate in the servants’ quarters” (124 Fuentes’ italics), and he was
consistently ignored by the legitimate family of the hacienda, but he did live there—a
signiﬁcant step closer to the lifestyle of the criollo elite than any of his followers ever

comes. Arroyo’s partial whiteness qualiﬁes him for small luxuries which most

159

indigenous Mexicans would not have had the privilege to enjoy, and the class of his
“white blood” (his father’s high social status) allows him to remain near the Miranda
family rather than living in a primarily indigenous or mestizo community. But mestizaje
does not really allow Arroyo to enjoy this lifestyle because, according to the discourse, he
is only half white. He can see everything that his father has, but he is told that he cannot
have it because he is not his father’s white/legitimate son. Even though he can see
himself as a whole, and even though he shares this precious prize with his followers, he
has to destroy what he wants in order to possess it. The Old Gringo suggests that
mestizaje leads to fragmented beings, that so-called mestizos can only momentarily ﬁnd
wholeness through visual experience, and that the only way to combat such vertigo is
through violence—the very same violence practiced by Arroyo’s white father.l4
Compared to the depiction of Tomas Arroyo and his band and Light in August’s
portrayal of Joe Christmas, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! relies much less on images of
fragmentation to describe the novel’s two primary “racially mixed” characters—Clytie
Sutpen and Charles Bon. However, the portrayal of Bon’s illegitimate son, Charles
Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, returns to the shard of broken mirror to reveal that, like
Christmas, Valery Bon only sees himself in fragments. Valery Bon grows up in a
luxurious void as the son of Bon and a New Orleans octoroon, but upon his mother’s
death, he is thrust out of New Orleans—the one city in the U.S. South that did not judge
race according to a dualistic white/black model—and onto Sutpen’s Hundred near
Jefferson, Mississippi in the middle of Reconstruction. At Sutpen’s Hundred, Valery
Bon goes through an experience of linguistic, material, and racial fragmentation. He

lives only with Judith Sutpen and her half sister Clytie, neither of whom speaks French.

 

'4 I return to Arroyo’s ingestion and repetition of his father’s white violence in chapter 4.

160

As he learns English, he has a shift in racial identity and also learns that he is black with
either Clytie, Judith, or both as his teachers (161).ls His lush garments are replaced with
rough, homemade clothes that he receives from the two women “with no thanks, no
comment” (162). He appears to adapt to his new surroundings, learning English, learning
how to do physical labor, wearing his coarse clothing, and adjusting to his new racial
status. But, after he has lived at Sutpen’s Hundred for over a year, “one of them, Clytie or
Judith, found hidden beneath his mattress the shard of broken mirror: and who to know
what hours of amazed and tearless grief he might have spent before it, examining himself
in the delicate and outgrown tatters in which he perhaps could not remember himself,
with quiet and incredulous incomprehension” (162).

The image of Valery Bon in front of a piece of mirror in tattered, “rags of silk and
broadcloth” (162) repeats and exaggerates Joe Christmas’ fragmented portrayal. Like
Christmas, Valery Bon can only see a portion of his body, and worse, the fragment in the
mirror is draped with another fragment, an old yet once-lavish cloth that remains as a
symbol of his former life. Like Christmas, Valery Bon reacts against his piecemeal
existence through violence. Both characters purposefully goad other people into
questioning their racial identities so they can beat them down or be beaten down by them.
Both men, it seems, want someone to tell them who or what they are because they are not

sure themselves. ‘6

 

‘5 It is tempting to suggest that Valery Bon’s acquisition of English brings about this shift in racial identity.
But, as I have already argued in chapter 2 in my analysis of Francoise Lionnet’s discussion of mestizaje and
miscegenation, racial identity and racism both rely more on history than on language.

'6 As I will elaborate in chapter 4 when I treat Christmas and violence, it is not the violence per se that is
negative. One problem with the violence Valery Bon and Christmas create is that it becomes self-
destructive. The primary difference between the violence enacted by each character is that Valery Bon
actually does lash out against the white community and the racial rubric they create for him (subsequently,
he also lashes out against the black community) while Christmas merely repeats the white community’s

161

The character of Valery Bon provides a pointed contrast between a dualistic racial
discourse like nriscegenation and a somewhat more inclusive—although assimilating—
racial discourse like mestizaje (although, in Valery Bon’s case, a better label for the
contrasting discourse that prevailed in New Orleans would be the French term
métissage). Métissage, like mestizaje, allows Valery Bon and his so-called octoroon
mother to exist in a sort of racial in-between zone that does not ﬁt into either of the “one-
drop rule’s” divisions of black and white. Valery Bon, like his mother, is considered
octoroon while he remains in New Orleans.17 Yet, he has been coddled and raised with
all sorts of luxuries—one of which seems to be the luxury of a raceless existence—and he
probably has no idea of what octoroon 'or any other racialized label signiﬁes. By calling
the young Valery Bon raceless, I am not suggesting that New Orleans society (or even his
own father, Charles Bon) drink of him in terms beyond race. In fact, the very usage of
the term octoroon—and Bon’s own description of his son and mistress as “niggers”
(94)—shows that in both New Orleans and Mississippi (métissage and miscegenation)
some sort of racial label is attached to Valery Bon.18 However, the novel does suggest
that Valery Bon was oblivious to these labels when Clytie and Judith took him to
Mississippi since he had to learn on Sutpen’s Hundred:

that he was, must be, a negro. He could neither have heard yet nor recognized the

 

white violence. Thus, Valery Bon’s use of violence can be read as rebellion against the discourse of
miscegenation while Christmas’ violence is complicit with the discourse.

‘7 While the term octoroon could speciﬁcally refer to an individual with “one-eighth black blood” or one
black great-grandparent, it was also used in both Latin America and the U.S. South as an umbrella term to
describe lighter skinned blacks regardless of their precise ancestry. Valery Bon, then, could be described as
octoroon under the discourse of métissage due to his fair features, or, if one accepts Quentin’s and Shreve’s
speculation that Bon himself carries “black blood,” then Valery Bon could be called the octoroon son of
two octoroon parents.

'8 According to Jason Compson’s narration of the Sutpen saga to his son, Quentin, Bon downplays his
marriage to his mistress by asking Henry, “‘Have you forgot that this woman, this child are niggers? You,
Henry Sutpen of Sutpen’s Hundred in Mississippi? You, talking of a marriage, a wedding, here?”’ (94).
Bon’s questions also juxtapose miscegenation and métissage since his mistress and son are “niggers” for
Henry and the population of Mississippi, but not for Bon and the population of New Orleans.

162

term ‘nigger,’ who even had no word for it in the tongue he knew who had been

born and grown up in a padded silken vacuum cell which might have been

suspended on a cable a thousand fathoms in the sea, where pigmentation had no
more moral value than the silk walls and the scent and the rose-colored candle

shades. (161)

The sheltered Valery Bon of New Orleans, raceless on a personal level, was
allowed special privileges via métissage, but he is soon forced into the violent
segregation and the dualistic discourse of miscegenation, where, as Bon suggests, he will
be seen as a “nigger” (94). The new Valery Bon sees himself as a ﬁ'agment in tattered
clothing, but this racial fragment carries with it the pejorative label of “nigger” which is
used to describe what the discourse of miscegenation casts as a racial whole—any person
with any African ancestry. So while the term octoroon literally names Valery Bon as a
fragment or fraction, the multi-tiered discourse of métissage allows him to consider
himself as a whole (since he did not have to consider race at all as a sheltered child in
New Orleans) in a manner that miscegenation does not allow even while it uses a term of
negative wholeness to describe him.

Like Faulkner’s Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! and Fuentes’ The Old
Gringo, Fuentes’ fragmented masterpiece—La muerte de Artemio Cruz—also pairs racial
mixture and ﬁagmentation. A few scenes in which the reﬂections of Cruz and his ﬁrst
love, Regina, irnaginarily meet on the waves of the Paciﬁc Ocean at a port in Sinaloa
recall the scenes of fragmentation from The Old Gringo and Light in August. However,
the fragmented image that opens the novel and repeats itself throughout is that of Cruz’s

face, from his deathbed, as reﬂected in the incongruent pieces of glass on his daughter’s

163

handbag. His reﬂection is completely disjointed with “the eye very near the ear and very
far from its pair, with the mocking face distributed in three circulating mirrors” (10).19
Cruz does not want to look at the grotesque reﬂection, but once he does, he identiﬁes
with it, stating, “I am this old man with his features split by the uneven squares of glass”
(9).

Cruz’s fragmented face is not presented alongside any discussion of his racial
identity, and the novel downplays Cruz’s race to the point that the novel can be read as
symptomatic of the erasure of the African roots of Mexican mestizaje.20 Fuentes strews
the novel with small clues about Cruz’s racial identity, but the reader pays little attention
to these clues until the novel overtly reveals that Cruz is the son of a violent white
landowner and his mulatta servant—like Arroyo, a child of rape. Read alongside novels
like Fuentes’ own The Old Gringo and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Light in
August, the connection between the ﬁrst scene in the novel—the reﬂection of the broken
face from the deathbed—and two of the last scenes of the novel—Cruz’s birth in a poor
mulatto’s but and his death in a rich man’s mansion—is almost inevitable. So while the
fragmented reﬂection that opens the novel originally appears to have little to do with
Cruz’s racial identity, it is actually the very symbol of this identity—an image that serves
as a clue that Cruz’s character is not a “racial whole” under the terms dictated by the
discourse of mestizaje whose public face champions European and indigenous mixture
but whose public and private faces try to ignore the presence of Aﬁicans in Mexico.

The fragmentation that I have traced through the portrayals of these so-called

racially mixed characters is not the only element of these novels that connects racial

 

'9 All citations from Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz are my translations of the Spanish text.
2° 1 will return to this point in greater detail in my ﬁfth chapter, “Black, Mexican, and Black Mexican.”

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mixture to fragmentation. The narratives themselves are all fragmented in one way or
another. As I mentioned previously, Light in August tells three separate stories—the
narratives of Joe Christmas, Lena Grove, and Gail Hightower, each full of ﬂashbacks and
jumps in narrative time—and tries to weave them all together in one violent weekend in
Jefferson. Go Down, Moses intertwines seven disparate stories revolving around the
white and black family lines of Carothers McCaslin from 1859 to the latter years of the
great depression. Absalom, Absalom! pieces together the mysteries behind Thomas
Sutpen’s “design” and Henry Sutpen’s shooting of Charles Bon from the experiences of
one character—Rosa Coldﬁeld—and the speculations of four—Rosa, Mr. Jason
Compson, Quentin Compson, and his roommate Shreve. The Old Gringo is the most
linear of the novels in discussion, and it still begins with its ending as Harriet, already
back in the United States, returns via memory to her experiences with Arroyo at the
hacienda. Finally, La muerte de Artemio Cruz is the most fragmented narrative of them
all. The novel constantly switches between three narrators. An outside narrator tells
about Cruz’s past in the third person, an interior narrator attacks and interrogates Cruz—
discussing his past in future tense verbs and foretelling his future all in the second
person—and Cruz, in the ﬁrst person, contemplates his life and his quickly approaching
death in the present.

What, then, is the upshot of all of this fragmentation? In short, these fragmented
images of mulattos and mestizos reiterate the logic of the discourses of miscegenation
and mestizaje—the essentialist logic of the myth of racial purity. I have gone to great
lengths in chapter 2 to show how these two discourses differ from one another while both

favoring whiteness—miscegenation through segregation and mestizaje through

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assimilation—by placing white atop their distinct racial hierarchies. The fragmented
portrayals of Joe Christmas, Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, Tomas Arroyo, Artemio
Cruz, and other so-called racially mixed characters, regardless of the sympathy that the
characters might or might not produce in the reader, identify the supposedly racially
mixed subject as an incomplete being who sits several rungs below the myth of pure
whiteness on both miscegenation’s and mestizaje’s racial ladders. However, as I have
begun to suggest at times in this chapter, and as we shall see in greater detail in chapters
4 and 5, these so-called racially mixed characters simultaneously challenge the very

racial/racist discourses that their very fragmented depictions support.

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Chapter 4
Ancestry, Blood, and the Violence of the White Fathers

Faulkner’s Light in August and Fuentes’ The Old Gringo each revolve around the
fragmented life of a character that the authors describe as being internally divided by
“mixed blood.” Most literary critics who write about Faulkner’s Joe Christmas tackle the
theme of miscegenation while almost no critics who write about Fuentes’ Tomas Arroyo
do more than gloss over the theme of mestizaje.l Yet, the theme of racial mixture is just
as central to The Old Gringo as it is to Light in August. A juxtaposition of the tendency
of readers of Light in August to focus on Christmas’ portion of the novel with the
proclivity of readers of The Old Gringo to focus on Ambrose Bierce’s and Harriet
Winslow’s characters (although Bierce’s and Winslow’s lives do have more to do with
Arroyo’s than Gail Hightower’s and Lena Grove’s narratives have to do with Christmas’)
also reveals a difference between the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje; Both
discourses favor whiteness, but the former obsesses over race to the point that Light in
August becomes a novel about racial mixture, even though Christmas’ “mixed blood” is
mere speculation. The latter discourse demystiﬁes racial mixture to the point that The Old

Gringo is not read as a novel about mestizaje, even though Arroyo is cast as the

 

l Lois Parkinson Zamora and Jane Creighton, for example, each use the term “amalgam” in their readings
of The Old Gringo. Zamora states, “[t]he Bierce that crosses the Rio Grande/Rlo Bravo into the pages of
The Old Gringo is an amalgam of his journalism, his ﬁction, and his biography” (“Novels” 52) while
Creighton claims, “[t]he Bierce that Fuentes gives us is an amalgam of the journalist, ﬁction writer, and
veteran ﬁagmented by the divorce of disciplines that still plagues his presence in the literary canon” (69).
Apart from the strange parallelism between the two statements—which seems less strange since Creighton
cites Zamora as an inﬂuence on her essay (79 n. 2)—the speciﬁc word each critic uses to describe Fuentes’
ﬁctional creation of Bierce stands out. Both critics choose to use the term amalgam, which in the discourse
of miscegenation is laden with racial connotations, to describe the only primary character in the novel who
is not involved in what Fuentes casts as multi-racial sexual relations. Apart from their anti-racial use of
amalgam, neither critic approaches the themes of miscegenation and mestizaje in their readings of The Old
Gringo.

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problematic child of a forced relationship between a white landowner and his indigenous
servant, even though supposed racial differences continually highlight his relationship
with Harriet, and even though their “interracial” affair is cast as a mirror of the
“miscegenation ” relationship between Harriet’s father and his black mistress in Cuba.2
Arroyo and Christmas are more than mere types. They are complex characters
whose internal battles drive the plots of their respective novels. Both novels ﬁt well
within Mexico’s and the United States’ respective discourses on racial mixture—The Old
Gringo by portraying a character who chooses to follow the pattern presented to him by
his white father even though this choice mocks what he sees as his precious relationship
with his indigenous mother and Light in August by creating a rhetoric of blood which
assigns violent traits to Christmas according to the supposed “black blood” of his father.
However, both novels also demonstrate Fuentes’ and Faulkner’s ability to challenge the
concepts of mestizaje and miscegenation even while writing within the conﬁnes of each
discourse. The Old Gringo links Arroyo’s ﬁ'ustrations back to his illegitimate birth, and
while the blame for his illegitimacy supposedly lies with Arroyo’s indigenous mother, the
novel demonstrates how Arroyo holds his white father responsible for his bastard status
while simultaneously seeking to become his father by repeating his father’s acts of
violence. Light in August, contrastingly, shows Christmas’ internal struggles as literal
battles of blood in which one side of his ancestry wrestles with the other. The novel’s

characters continually assign Christmas’ violent nature to his “black blood” even though

 

2 My reading of the two novels reﬂects this difference in the literary criticism that surrounds them. I refer
very little to the literary criticism about The Old Gringo because it rarely, if ever, approaches the theme of
mestizaje while I cite various readings of Light in August since they typically read miscegenation as one of
the primary themes of the novel.

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a close reading of Light in August demonstrates how Christmas both learns and inherits
violence from his white father ﬁgures.3
Both novels, then, peg violence to race. In Fuentes’ novel, this appears to be an

overt critique of white violence. In Faulkner’s novel, the subtle critique of white violence
is so overpowered by the narrative links between blackness and aggression that it runs the
risk of disappearing behind the characters’ prejudice toward blacks. The Old Gringo and
Light in August repeat the essentialist thought espoused and propagated by the discourses
of mestizaje and miscegenation, but by assigning the violence to “white blood,” each

author writes a critique of mestizaje’s or miscegenation’s fascinations with and favoring

of whiteness.

Tomas Arroyo: Son of Malinche, Son of Miranda

Fuentes’ The Old Gringo is a nonlinear novel which follows a ﬁctional Ambrose
Bierce into Mexico where he meets a confused school teacher ﬁ'om Washington DC.—
Harriet Winslow—and a young, hotheaded general in Pancho Villa’s army—Tomas
Arroyo. The three protagonists cross paths amidst the violence of the Mexican
Revolution, and their encounter eventually ingests the intrigue, seduction, rebellion, and
murder that characterize the Revolution itself.

Fuentes does not portray a blatant blood discourse in The Old Gringo as Faulkner

does in Light in August; there is no talking blood, and no blood is shed with the intent of

 

3 My critique of Christmas’ and Arroyo’s violent actions is not a critique of violence per se. In other
words, I am not arguing that positive violence cannot exist when aimed against oppression. The problem
with Christmas’ and Arroyo’s (racialized) violence is that it is never a revolutionary violence against the
(white) oppressor. In Arroyo’s case, his violent acts replicate the violence of his white father against two
foreigners rather than against the father’s group of white Mexican elite. In Christmas’ case, his violence is
not a liberating black violence against white oppression in the U.S. South, rather, it is a complete
internalization of white racist violence which he aims primarily at himself.

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discovering its color. Nevertheless, Fuentes’ portrayal of Arroyo relies on the character’s
split self, and Arroyo’s personal struggle between his indigenous and Spanish ancestries
becomes every bit as problematic as Christmas’ overt battle of blood even though
Fuentes clearly links Arroyo’s penchant for violence to his white father—Senor
Miranda—rather than to his “mixed blood” or his indigenous mother. Arroyo clings to
the indigenous identity of his mother while both berating and longing for the power and
recognition that his white father denies him.

Arroyo embraces his indigenous ancestry by accepting the assignment to carry his
people’s ancient land titles and by vigilantly fantasizing over his mother’s virtue. He
receives the box of papers from Graciano, the oldest Indian on the Miranda hacienda, at
the tender age of nine years and swears that he will protect it “as if it were [his] own life”
(134). The papers in the box date back to the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico,
and although Arroyo cannot read the papers himself, he knows that they prove the
Indians’ legal claim to the land that has been usurped by Senor Miranda. Arroyo, by
accepting the papers, takes upon himself the memory of his mother’s people and seeks to
legitimize their claim to the land. He takes his charge so seriously that when Bierce
burns the papers in order to provoke him, Arroyo murders Bierce in cold blood. His
fascination with the papers exposes his preoccupation with legitimacy, an obsession that
connects him to his mother and reveals his desire to be accepted by his father.

Arroyo unleashes his wrath upon his father’s hacienda by burning it (with the
exception of the mirrored dancehall) to the ground. As he forces Harriet to watch the
smoldering buildings, he tells her, “I am the son of some man’s wild oats, the son of

chance and misfortune, seﬁorita. No one protected my mother. She was a young girl.

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She had no husband, no one to defend her. I was born to defend her” (62). In this
moment of vengeance against his father, Arroyo clings to his mother’s ancestry and
suggests that her honor must be defended from the rapist that is his father. He later tells
Harriet, “I was not a sin, I [my mother’s] only possession was not, I repeat, a sin” (189).
This statement shifts Arroyo’s concerns away from the defense of his mother toward his
true obsession which is a defense of himself, an attempt to legitimize his own birth. He
tells Harriet that his goal was not to watch his father die, but to arrive after his death and
watch his ﬂesh slowly decay (189). However, during the same conversation, he reveals
that he used to daydream that his mother was Miranda’s ofﬁcial wife and that Miranda’s
real wife was a pining spinster (188-89). Arroyo’s fantasy validates his own birth and
suggests that his father’s recognition would alter Arroyo’s vengeful attitude. His hatred
toward his father is not based on his father’s actions (the rape of his mother) as much as it
is based on his father’s inactions (not marrying his mother nor officially recognizing
Arroyo as his son). His tendency to focus on his father’s sins of omission rather than
commission foreshadows his repetition of his father’s violence.

Arroyo commits several acts of violence throughout the novel; most notably, he
ransacks his father’s hacienda, he coerces Harriet into a violent love affair, and he
murders Bierce in a ﬁt of rage. When Harriet tries to convince Arroyo’s men to construct
shelters out of the rubble that was the hacienda, Arroyo approaches her “with whip in
han ” and demands to know who gave her the right “to rebuild the hacienda” (59). In the
argument which ensues, he exposes his vindictive nature, stating plainly: “‘I want this
place to be a ruin. I want the house of the Mirandas to remain a ruin’” (59 Fuentes’

italics). The destruction of haciendas was a common occurrence during the Mexican

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Revolution, but Arroyo’s desire that his father’s property “remain” desolate reveals that
he attacked the Miranda hacienda more out of personal revenge than as a strategic part of
Villa’s campaign. According to the European-created stereotypes about indigenous
Americans that were prevalent in Spanish America (and in the United States) from the
encounter through the early twentieth century, Arroyo’s willingness to destroy the
hacienda’s luxurious buildings rather than possessing them reveals the savage nature of
his “Indian blood.” But, none of the indigenous or mestizo characters in The Old Gringo
show this type of “savagery.” The only other characters in the novel who take such
vindictive steps are the white hacienda owners—particularly the former husband of Cara
de Luna (Arroyo’s Mexican lover) and Seﬁor Miranda himself.

Arroyo’s sexual relationship with Harriet cannot be called rape per se (indeed, she
leaves Mexico because their affair awakens a passion in her that she refuses to accept)
but it is coerced since Harriet gives herself to Arroyo in order to protect Bierce. A verbal
exchange during their ﬁrst erotic encounter suggests that both Arroyo and Harriet see the
beginning of the affair for what it is: “‘Don’t look at me like that, gringa.’ ‘That’s howl
feel.’ ‘You are here of your own will.’ ‘Yes, but only for the reason I gave you. You
know that.’ ‘Ah, yes, because you like the old man.”’ (116). Later, Harriet justiﬁes her
actions to the incensed Bierce by explaining that “[Arroyo] said he was going to kill you.
I told him he could have me if that would save your life” (141). Arroyo’s relationship
with Harriet, regardless of his attempts to convince himself that it is consensual, repeats
what he wishes he could have somehow spared his mother from suffering at the hand of
his father—a forced sexual relationship. In this case, the old gringo switches places with

Arroyo and becomes the unsuccessful defender of female virtue. Just as Arroyo could

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not defend his mother from his father because he was not yet born, Bierce cannot save
Harriet from Arroyo’s advances since she sees Arroyo’s sexual desire as the only way to
save Bierce and since Bierce “s[ees] Arroyo’s face, Arroyo’s body, Arroyo’s hand, and
he surrender[s]” his own chance to woo Harriet as a lover and gives her as a surrogate
daughter to his surrogate son (106). Again, the relationship is tainted by force. Bierce
only abandons his own desires for Harriet when he sees the hostility and determination in
Arroyo’s attitude when “[Arroyo] seize[s] Harriet’s wrist” (106).

Arroyo’s violent nature eventually explodes into murder when Bierce burns his
ancient land titles. Arroyo’s action is provoked, but it is also extreme and unnecessary
since he and his army already possess the land of the Miranda hacienda by force without
relying on the legal claim of the papers. Their military actions have legitimized what the
papers claim, making the documents redundant and outdated.4 Arroyo’s killing of Bierce
also contradicts his superior’s commands and costs Arroyo his life.5 Pancho Villa later
tells Arroyo, “[w]e’ll kill a few gringos, all right, [. . .] but in good time and when I
decide” (177) right before he has Arroyo shot for killing Bierce and for remaining on the
Miranda hacienda (178). Finally, Arroyo’s murder of Bierce shatters his promise to
Harriet and adds another reason to the argument that his sexual relationship with her can
be seen as rape.

Arroyo’s acts of violence do not stand out as particularly base or exaggerated

when cast in the context of the Mexican Revolution; however, The Old Gringo never

 

‘ The papers, of course, were already outdated before Arroyo took control of the hacienda since they were
signed by the Spanish Crown, which had been supplanted by the Mexican independence movement and
replaced by the Mexican government for almost a century by the time Arroyo received the documents.

5 Several of Arroyo’s actions contradict the orders he has received from Villa. He tells Harriet, “Pancho
Villa hates anyone who thinks about going back home. It is like treason, almost. I have gambled heavily
by taking the Miranda hacienda and remaining here” (198).

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suggests that the Revolution itself gives Arroyo a penchant for violence nor that his
violent nature helps to advance the revolutionaries’ cause. Instead, the novel implies that
Arroyo learns violence by spying on his father and the other ofﬁcial members of the
Miranda family and that his virtual rape of Harriet and his murder of Bierce impede the
Revolution by causing trouble between the United States and Villa’s army. Indeed,
before killing Arroyo, Villa tells him that he does not “want to be dragging around the
body of any dead gringo that could give Wilson an excuse to recognize Carranza or
intervene against [him] in the north” (177).

The offenses which Arroyo watches his father and the other hacendados commit,
and the other acts of violence which Arroyo later speculates that his father has
committed, inﬂuence him deeply to the point that he imitates these violent acts even
while claiming to despise such behavior. Arroyo tells Harriet how the young
hacendados, when bored, found entertainment by raping the “weakest” peon women and
“castrating bulls” (61-62). He also describes to Harriet how his father raped his mother
(62) and speculates on how his father was ﬁnally killed after raping a young indigenous
girl while visiting southern Mexico (194-95). Arroyo’s acts of violence are closely
connected to those of his father and his father’s ofﬁcial family. Like his father, he
becomes a rapist, and although Arroyo never claims that he saw his father kill anyone, it
is not difﬁcult to image that a man in Miranda’s elevated position—nearly a god on the
hacienda who did what he pleased when he pleased—could take the life of another.
Arroyo describes the castration of the bulls and the rape of peasant women in the same
scene, and his violation of Harriet also collapses castration and rape into one scene since

this very act metaphorically emasculates Bierce.

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Arroyo, with his desires for justice, his fantasies about purity and legitimacy, and
his violent temperament, becomes a ﬁctionalized version of Octavio Paz’s archetypal
Mexican male from El laberinto de la soledad, particularly of the men whom Paz
describes in the chapter entitled “Los hijos de La Malinche”——aptly translated as “The
Sons [not the children] of La Malinche.” In this essay, Paz argues that all Mexicans (and
by all Mexicans he means all Mexican men) are the sons of Malinche, the indigenous
mistress of Cortes, whom he reads as the original violated mother (98).

According to Paz, the Mexican male is inherently humiliated and suffers from an
eternal inferiority complex because he knows that he is the son of a violated mother._ Paz
describes this feeling of despair by contrasting a typical Mexican insult with a common
Spanish slur, suggesting that “(f)or the Spaniard dishonor rests in being the son of a
woman who voluntarily gives herself up, a prostitute; for the Mexican, it rests in being
the fruit of a violation” (103). He avers that Mexican men, in reaction to their status as
sons of a raped mother, have no choice but to become violators or to be violated
themselves (101-102). The binary choice Paz offers the sons of Malinche is both
gendered and racialized. Paz’s Mexicans must choose to follow the father or the mother,
the white or the Indian. In choosing violence, the sons of Malinche also choose
masculinity and whiteness, and by choosing passivity, Paz’s Mexicans simultaneously
choose femininity and Indianness. For Paz, there is no in-between space, no mestizo.
The son of Malinche, who according to the discourse of mestizaje is the archetypal
mestizo, must be macho enough to rape (like the white father) or passive enough to let
himself be violated (like the indigenous mother). He cannot be a mixture of the two

parents; he must follow one or the other. Contemporary scholars, with good reason, have

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taken issue with several elements of Paz’s treatise—the lack of acceptable choices he
offers Mexicans, his attempt to vilify La Malinche, and his overt and caustic sexism
throughout the piece. Yet, Paz does make an unlikely, although essentialist, move for his
time period (and for his own social status as a renowned Europhile) by connecting
violence to whiteness.6
Through the character of Arroyo, Fuentes supports Paz’s descriptions of the sons
of Malinche in numerousways.7 Arroyo, like Malinche’s sons, is obsessed with his
illegitimate origins. He is literally the son of a violated mother, and his father’s rape of
his mother mirrors Paz’s descriptions of Cortés’ relationship with La Malinche in terms
of violence, gender, and race. Most importantly, Arroyo repeats the violence of his
father. Paz claims: “the Mexican’s primary characteristic resides, in my judgment, in the
violent, sarcastic humiliation of the Mother and the no less violent affrnnation of the
Father” (103). Arroyo claims to love his mother and hate his father, but his actions—
especially his virtual rape of Harriet and the suggestion that he, like his father, would
steal a young indigenous girl from her lover (196)—repeat the humiliation that his father
forced upon his mother, and thus, afﬁrm the father’s violent position while mocking the
mother. Arroyo lusts after the power and property of his father that cannot be his because
of his mother’s racial and social standing: “I have been enchanted by this house since I

was born here, not in my father’s plush canopied bed, but on a straw petate in the

servants’ quarters. The hacienda and I have faced one another for thirty years, [. . .] I was

 

" Or, perhaps this move is not so surprising since Paz is also an aﬁcionado of ancient Meso-American
history—particularly Aztec history.

7 Fuentes supports several of Paz’s ideas throughout his written corpus. As I discuss in my ﬁrst chapter,
Fuentes’ literary criticism and lectures also appear heavily inﬂuenced by Paz—especially Fuentes’
tendency to create a dichotomy between the United States and Latin America which closely resembles
Paz’s dichotomy between Mexico and the United States. However, an important difference between their
ideas is that Fuentes sees the U.S. South as a distinct part of the United States that shares some historical
afﬁnities with Latin America.

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paralyzed by the stone and adobe and tile and glass and porcelain and wood” (124
Fuentes’ italics). So, Arroyo adopts the violence of his white father in order to obtain
Miranda’s privileges even though he claims that he was born to protect his violated
mother.

Arroyo’s relationships with both Harriet and Bierce show that like Paz’s Mexican
male, he violates in order to avoid being violated. However, this violence cannot be seen
as revolutionary since it merely repeats the violence of the white father against two weak
victims rather than being aimed at Miranda or at the ruling class of Mexico. It is possible
to read Arroyo’s killing of Bierce as a rebellion against the oppressor or the white father
ﬁgure since Bierce is metaphorically cast as Arroyo’s father in several scenes and since
he hails from the United States which has maintained a father-like oppression over
Mexico since 1848. Contrastingly, no revolutionary spin can be placed on his
relationship with Harriet since she exists in the same space as Arroyo’s mother—a female
in a dangerous place who needs protection from sexual predators. When Arroyo forces
Harriet into a sexual relationship, he mimics the very act which has scarred his entire
existence.

Fuentes’ portrayal of Arroyo does steer away from Paz’s dichotomy in at least
one moment. In his youth, Arroyo stared at his father’s house and imagined that he and
his mother were his father’s legitimate family (188). In Arroyo’s imagination, then,
possession of the hacienda legitimizes him and makes both him and his mother clean.
According to this fantasy, Arroyo’s adoption of his white father’s violence is not a
complete rejection of his Indian mother; instead, it is what transforms her ﬁ'om the

receptor of violence (a raped woman) into Miranda’s legitimate wife. Arroyo is cast as

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racially mestizo throughout the novel, but for a moment, he is also both sides of Paz’s
dichotomy—the imagined mixture of his white father’s violence and his indigenous
mother’s passivity.

While Fuentes does not create an overt blood battle in his descriptions of Arroyo
as Faulkner does in his portrayal of Joe Christmas, Arroyo’s life does revolve around his
personal struggle to identify with both sides of his ancestry (whether described as
white/Indian, violent/passive, male/female). Indeed, Arroyo tries to mesh the two sides
by using his father’s violent tactics to legitimize the indigenous community—by seizing
the hacienda by force he validates the ancient papers which say that the property belongs
to the Indians. However, Arroyo’s attempt to mesh both sides of his ancestry ultimately
fails since violence and passivity cancel one another out, or, more speciﬁcally, since his
adoption of violent methods casts him as the mirror image of his violent white father—
the violator, not protector, of his mother.

Arroyo’s violence is connected to his struggle over racial identity, but it is never
connected to his indigenous bloodlines. Instead, it is overtly connected to his white
ancestry—his father. Perhaps the most telling passage of the entire novel comes from
Harriet’s lips as she derides Arroyo for killing Bierce: “murderer, pig, greaser, stinking
coward! [. . .] You had me but you had to kill him, too. [. . .] [Y]ou provoked yourself to
prove to yourself who you are. Your name isn’t Arroyo like your mother’s; your name is

Miranda, after your father” (165).8 Arroyo’s violence simultaneously acts as an embrace

 

8 The narrator claims that Harriet delivers these words “savagely, wanting to wound him [Arroyo] [. . .]
with rage for the sake of justice, to remind him that she, too, could ﬁght, ﬁght back, blow for blow” (175)
which resembles Paz’s portrayals of violent Mexican men. Harriet, then, becomes the assertive, or even
violent, woman which contradicts Paz’s portrayal of the female as “pure passivity, unprotected against the
outside world” (100). However, Fuentes’ descriptions of Harriet do not really challenge Paz’s description
of men and women in Mexico since Harriet is an outsider, a gringa who belongs on the other side of Paz’s
other famous dichotomy—the divide between Mexico and the United States.

178

of the white father he claims to hate and a rejection of the indigenous mother he claims to
love, shifting him from bastard to motherless child. The Old Gringo, in the end, assigns
violence to whiteness by casting the white father as the origin and/or teacher of violence

and the supposedly mestizo son as the offspring and/or pupil of brutality.

Joe Christmas: Son and Grandson of White Violence

Faulkner’s Light in August, like Fuentes’ The Old Gringo, is a nonlinear novel
with two male and one female protagonist—Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower, and Lena
Grove. Christmas’ narrative is doubly fragmented in that it repeatedly jumps from the
past to the present and back again and since it is routinely interrupted by the other two
narrative strands that never really combine in the way that the lives of Fuentes’ three
characters mesh in The Old Gringo. Like The Old Gringo, Light in August links violence
to whiteness, but this connection is almost hidden since the novel’s characters, including
Christmas himself, see race as a blood discourse in which racial identity literally lies in
the blood and reveals itself through hidden physical characteristics and/or character
behavior. Thadious Davis claims that in Light in August “[t]he lines of blood distinctions
are clearly drawn. Cowardice and criminal tendencies are the by-products of black
blood. White blood accounts for the rational and humane side. Black blood is equivalent
to primitive lust, instinct, and irrationality; white blood is the civilizing and moral
inﬂuence” (168). The novel’s critique of white violence, then, comes through action
rather than through any of the characters’ words or theories. Christmas’ murder of
Joanna Burden (the one moment of action that joins the novel’s three distinct narrative

strands) reveals that Christmas repeats the violence of Doc Hines and McEachem—his

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radical white supremacist grandfather and his white, religious-fanatic foster father—
rather than giving into the so-called violent tendencies of his supposed “black blood.”
Various readers of Light in August have pointed out that even while the novel’s
characters link Christmas’ behavior to biology or blood the narrative suggests that
Christmas’ environment molds him. Cleanth Brooks’ well-known reading of Light in
August in William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, for example, plainly states
that “Joe does not know what he is. Throughout his life, he lashes out at both the white
community and the Negro community. But the warping of his mind and spirit—Faulkner
has been at great pains in this book to show just how it has been done—is the result of the
way in which he has been reared from infancy. The biological matter is quite irrelevant”
(51). A close reading of Light in August supports Brooks’ suggestion that nurture rather
than nature shapes Christmas, but Brooks’ dismissal of biology as “quite irrelevant” begs
the question—irrelevant to whom? Biology is certainly signiﬁcant to several critics who
tackle Light in August since most literary critics, whether they support or contest the
discourse of miscegenation’s attempts to cast race in biological terms, buy into
Christmas’ racial/racist fears and read him as mulatto. More important, however, “the
biological matter” is anything but “irrelevant” to Christmas himself who constructs his
whole life on an ill-founded belief that one of his parents had African ancestry. Brooks’
attempt to make quick work of the racial issues surrounding Christmas’ character in the
early pages of his reading of Light in August paired with his complete lack of attention to
race in the rest of the chapter suggest that questions of race, whether biological or not, are

of little relevance to him.9 Christmas’ adoption of the violence of his white father ﬁgures

 

9

9 As I mentioned early in this chapter, most critics of Light in August (myself included) focus on Christmas
narrative thread and read the novel as a book about miscegenation. Brooks offers an original reading of the

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does prove the power of environment, but in a strange way, it also suggests that violence
can be biologically inherited since Christmas mimics Doc Hines’ white supremacist
violence even though he never sees Hines’ actions and even though he never knows that
Hines is his maternal grandfather. In Christmas’ case, violence is passed down through
“white blood” rather than through black ancestry.

Not every section of Christmas’ complex narrative depicts his race in the terms of
blood, but every major part of his life—his childhood, his youth, and his adulthood—is
ﬁlled with experiences in which he and/or the people around him describe him in
racial/racist terms linked to his physical characteristics and to his blood itself. In the
orphanage where Christmas receives his name and passes the earliest years of his
childhood, the other children continually ridicule him by calling him “Nigger” (127, 133)
and the dietician who fears him claims to see Christmas’ supposed blackness in “his face
now, his eyes and hair” (134). The malice of his fellow orphans and the dietician’s
callous revenge convince Christmas at an early age that he is somehow racially inferior to
those around him. He carries this sentiment with him for the rest of his life even though,
as he later admits to Joanna Burden, he does not really know his racial background (254).
This inferiority complex drives Christmas to a life of aimless, violent wandering.

Being ostracized at the orphanage due to supposed racial differences, however,
appears tame when compared to the physical violence Christmas suffers when a group of
brothel rufﬁans attempts to discover his race by literally viewing his blood:

Is he really a nigger? He don 't look like one That ’s what he told Bobbie one

night. But I guess she still don’t know any more about what he is than he does.

 

novel which does not focus on racial mixture, but his reading ignores how race and racial politics affect
both the outcasts and the white community (although Brooks never adds this racialized adjective) that are
central to his discussion.

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These country bastards are liable to be anything We ’11 ﬁnd out. We’ll see if his
blood is black Lying peaceful and still Joe watched the stranger lean down and
lift his head from the ﬂoor and strike him again in the face, this time with a short
slashing blow. [. . .] Just one more Joe lay quietly and watched the hand. Then
Max was beside the stranger, stooping too. We’ll need a little more blood to tell
for sure[.] (219 Faulkner’s italics)
This passage reveals the extremes to which a racial discourse based on blood can be
taken. The last blow that the stranger inﬂicts upon Christmas is nothing but racial
violence in the guise of curiosity. Christmas has already been beaten and laid out for his
naiveté—showing up at the brothel to propose marriage to Bobbie after “get[ting] [her] in
a jam with clodhopper police” (218) by attacking his stepfather at the dance—so this ﬁnal
punch punishes him for the possibility of having “black blood” rather than for any of his
actions. This scene also demonstrates the absurdity and impossibility of linking race to
blood. The brothel crowd cannot distinguish Christmas’ race any better after looking at
his spilled blood than they could beforehand. If read alone, this scene could be
interpreted as a critique of the blood-as-race discourse since the passage shows the
futility of looking at the blood, but within the context of the novel and particularly within
the context of Christmas’ belief about his ancestry, this scene is simply the most
exaggerated example of how the blood-as-race discourse can play out.
Christmas fully accepts the blood-as-race discourse by the time he reaches
adulthood, and his adult life is marked by battles between what he sees as his “black
blood” and his “white blood.” Christmas alternately supports one or the other side of his

divided self depending on the place and the circumstances. He attempts to reject his

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white background and self identify as black while residing in the northern cities of
Chicago and Detroit:

He lived with negroes, shunning white people. He ate with them, slept with them,

belligerent, unpredictable, uncommunicative. He now lived as man and wife with

a woman who resembled an ebony carving. At night he would lie in bed beside

her, sleepless, beginning to breathe deep and hard. He would do it deliberately,

feeling, even watching, his white chest arch deeper and deeper within his ribcage,
trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and
being of negroes, with each suspiration trying to expel ﬁ'om himself the white
blood and the white thinking and being. And all the while his nostrils at the odor
which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being

writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial. (225-26)

In this passage, Christmas falls headlong into biological essentialism by
attempting to change racial identity, not merely by shunning whites and living with
blacks, but by forcing his “white blood” out of him and breathing in the essence of
blackness. The assertion that each race has a fundamental nature—in this case that
blacks have an inherent “odor” which is somehow connected to their supposed
“inscrutable thinking and being” (225-26)—links directly back to eighteenth and
nineteenth century discussions of race in the United States and the U.S. South which
sought to justify slavery by arguing that blacks were inherently inferior to whites, and
that one sign of this inferiority was that they gave off a smell that whites could not
tolerate. In “Miscegenation: ” Making Race in America, Elise Lemire demonstrates how

anti-amalgamation newspaper writers, novelists, and cartoonists from the early 18003

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through the U.S. Civil War continued the odor argument offered years earlier by Thomas
Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia by continually suggesting that abolitionists and
leaders of the republican party needed to wear clothespins on their noses or douse
themselves (or their black colleagues) in strong cologne in order to stand the smell of the
black men and women they beﬁiended (73-79).lo She claims that Croly’s and
Wakeman’s pamphlet, Miscegenation, simply repeats this logic by “remind[ing] [their
audience] that ‘Negroes’ and ‘whites’ are different species who have different blood and
that ‘Negroes’ are aesthetically on a different plane than ‘whites”’ (140-41).

Christmas’ attempt to inhale blackness re-inscribes this biological/aesthetic
argument, and the suggestion that this so-called essence can be ingested through the nasal
passage is just as impossible as viewing race in shed blood. Even though Christmas
believes and re-creates the biological, essentialist rhetoric of the discourse of
miscegenation by attempting to breathe in blackness, the fact that he does not “become”
black by doing so once again reveals the absurdity of biological racism while
simultaneously suggesting that environmentalist racism is equally ridiculous. The black
woman does not have a black essence that Christmas can ingest (biology), and Christmas
does not become like the black woman by living with her (environment). However, this
scene does remain tied to biology by foreshadowing the favoritism that the “white blood”
receives in each of Christmas’ blood battles. Even though Christmas is trying to purge
himself of whiteness, it is the “white blood” which physically and spiritually resists the

contact with blackness.

 

'0 Edward W. Clay’s cartoons commonly showed blacks and white abolitionists eating, ﬂirting, and
dancing together. These cartoons, and even more overt ones like Clay’s Practical Amalgamation (The
Wedding) (Lemire 97), provided a visual image for slavery supporters’ claim that abolition equaled
amalgamation.

184

The blood-as-race discourse in Light in August culminates in Gavin Stevens’
appraisal of Christmas’ death as a literal blood battle in which Christmas’ passive “white
blood” subjugates his violent “black blood” for the last time and lets him be sacriﬁced.
Stevens, district attorney that he is, calmly hypothesizes, “‘[b]ut his blood would not be
quiet, let him save it.[. . .] [I]t was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the
white blood which would not let him ﬁre it. [. . .] He crouched behind that overturned
table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unﬁred pistol in his hand’”
(449). ‘1 More than any other passage in the novel, Stevens’ theory (much like Croly’s
and Wakeman’s pamphlet) assigns speciﬁc behaviors to race——passivity and civilization
to whiteness, aggression and violence to blackness. From Stevens’ perspective,
Christmas’ choices (in life and in death) were not choices at all but instinctual reactions
brought about by inherent racial attributes in contradiction and competition with each
other. If Stevens’ hypothesis were one of various detailed explanations for why
Christmas, already a murderer, allows himself to be butchered without ﬁring a single
shot, perhaps it would not hold so much critical weight in various interpretations of this
novel. However, Stevens’ theory is only juxtaposed with a few simple guesses made by
the other residents of Jefferson and with the narrative description itself which is all action
and no explanation.12 Stevens’ theory appears to be Faulkner’s own commentary on the

discourse of miscegenation, his own reading of the mixed race subject.13 This theory is

 

” Davis offers a fascinating note to this excerpt, suggesting that Faulkner’s manuscripts show that he
switched black for white and vice-versa in various parts of this passage (168 n. 21).

'2 As Walter Benn Michaels demonstrates, the moment in which Grimm shoots and castrates Christmas
epitomizes the blood discourse of the novel since this scene answers the question posed hundreds of pages
earlier by Bobbie’s cronies—“Is he really a nigger? [. . .] We 'llﬁnd out. We ’11 see if his blood is black”
(Light 161 Faulkner’s italics)—-by describing the blood that gushes from Christmas dismembered body as
black (Michaels 149).

‘3 Various literary critics also read Gavin Steven’s musings (whether in Light in August or in other Faulkner
novels) as Faulkner’s voice entering his ﬁction. Charles D. Peavy, for example, suggests that both the

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biological (race equals blood), essentialist (“black blood” is violent; “white blood” is
civil), and deterministic (mixed race causes external and internal violence that will end in
the destruction of the self). However, the novel does not reveal how this theory is
supposed to be interpreted. Is Faulkner merely re-inscribing the essentialist claims of a
discourse of racial mixture in which he fully believes, or, is he critiquing the discourse of
miscegenation itself? If read only alongside the other characters’ words and ideas about
race, Stevens’ (and Faulkner’s?) theory blatantly supports the discourse of
miscegenation’s attempts to divide black ﬁom white and cast any mixture between the
two as negative, but when read with an eye that pays attention to the types of violence
Christmas commits and the origins of this violence, the theory falls apart and serves as a
critique of rrriscegenation’s essentialist claims.

Christmas commits three acts of exaggerated violence throughout the novel. The
ﬁrst act and the third act mirror one another in both nature and setting—he breaks open
the head of his foster father, McEachem, with a chair in a one room schoolhouse and
cracks open the head of a young black man named Roz in a small, country church. The
decapitation of Joanna Burden, however, overshadows the other two acts. It is for this act
that Christmas is pursued and eventually killed, but more importantly, it is his killing of
Joanna combined with the new knowledge that Christmas may be part black and that
Joanna and Christmas were lovers that allows Stevens and the other inhabitants of
Jefferson to connect Christmas’ violent nature to his blood. Without these revelations

from Christmas’ business partner, Joe Brown/Lucas Burch, the investigation and pursuit

 

character and the author are contradictory men who simultaneously claim to be liberals while still
supporting states’ rights (46-48). Contrastingly, Davis warns that “identifying Faulkner the Mississippian
too closely with his individual characters or narrators has resulted in some hysterical and misleading
writing on the race issue in his ﬁction” (15-16).

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of Christmas would have never taken a racial/racist angle, and Stevens’ would have no
racial grounds on which to base his theory. When Brown/Burch asserts that Christmas is
black and reveals that Christmas and Joanna were sexually involved, the people of
Jefferson immediately demote Christmas from somewhat odd foreigner to “nigger” rapist
and murderer while catapulting Joanna from despised carpetbagger to virtuous white
woman. Under the discourse of nriscegenation, the new, stereotyped identities of
Christmas and Joanna provide Jefferson’s white population with a quick and easy
explanation for Joanna’s nearly decapitated corpse and an epiphany about their previous,
strange feelings toward Christmas. The novel, however, undermines the community’s
(and Stevens’) assumptions by showing Joanna’s and Christmas’ relationship in detail
and by subtly connecting Christmas’ violence to his white father ﬁgures.

The rhetoric of blood in Light in August, especially when combined with Stevens’
explanation of Christmas’ death, connects Christmas’ violent nature to his supposed
mixed race—speciﬁcally to his so-called “black blood.” But, the novel shows more than
once that Christmas does not really know his race and that he only assumes that one of
his parents was part black. Even the reader’s knowledge that Christmas’ mother claimed
that his father was Mexican does nothing to clarify the issue since no one believes her,
since the other characters collapse Mexican and black into one another throughout the
novel, and since Christmas’ father could have been a black Mexican. ‘4

The reader, however, does know that Christmas’ maternal ancestry is considered
white, and more importantly, sees the violent examples of McEachem, his foster father,

(which Christmas also sees) and of his grandfather, Eupheus (Doc) Hines, (which

Christmas does not see). Christmas’ violent lashing out against McEachem merely

 

‘4 I return to these issues in greater detail in my ﬁfth chapter—“Black, Mexican, and Black Mexican.”

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follows the violent nature of McEachem’s punishments of Christmas when he was
younger. For example, when Christmas lies to McEachem about what he has done with
the money he earned when he sold the cow that his foster father gave him, McEachem
“str[ikes] at Joe with his ﬁst” and lands two hard “blows” directly in the face (164).ls
The violence that Christmas learns from McEachem, then, is environmental rather than
biological—learned rather than inherited. This supports Brooks’ suggestion that nurture,
not nature, forms Christmas’ character, but Christmas’ uncanny inheritance of violent
white racism from Doc Hines also suggests that violence is canied in “white blood.”

McEachem is a stern, cold individual, but it would be difficult to jump from his
brand of violent castigation to murder. Doc Hines serves as the primary example of
violence in Light in August, and his horriﬁc actions trump those committed by Christmas
himself. Hines murders Christmas’ father in cold blood when he catches him sleeping
with his daughter (Christrnas’ mother) Milly Hines; he guards the door with a shotgun
when Milly is about to deliver so that his wife cannot bring a doctor, causing his daughter
to die in childbirth; and in his old age he suggests that the people of Mottstown should
lynch his grandson.

Christmas’ own acts of violence do not necessarily mirror the three brutal acts of
his grandfather, but his crimes are similar to those of his grandfather in either motive or

theme. Christmas attacks Roz, it seems, on racial grounds (he bursts into the Sunday

 

‘5 While Christmas’ misogynistic tendencies mirror those of his grandfather Hines, the reader is left to
believe that he also learns to hate women from McEachem whom he overhears forcing his wife to kneel
and beg forgiveness from God for lying to protect Christmas: “His voice came, measured, harsh, without
heat, up the cramped stair to where Joe lay in bed. He was not listening to it. ‘Kneel down. Kneel down.
KNEEL DOWN, WOMAN. Ask grace and pardon of God; not of me’” (165). The increasing violence of
the demand and the fact that McEachem never shies from physical violence when confronting Christmas
imply that McEachem may abuse his wife in the same way he physically abuses Christmas. Ironically, the
ﬁrst woman Christmas seems to hate is McEachem’s wife whose “soft kindness [. . .] he hated more than
he did the hard and ruthless justice of men” (168-69).

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services of an all black church hoping to cause trouble) while Hines murders Christmas’
father not because he has fomicated with Milly but because Hines thinks that he is black.
Christmas murders Joanna, at least in part, over issues of sexuality and childbirth—she
tries to end her sexual relationship with Christmas by claiming that she is pregnant with
his child while he guesses that her new aversion is due to menopause—and Hines
effectively murders Milly by barring her any access to medical care during a violent
childbirth because he ﬁnds the child doubly illegitimate—both bastard and black. Hines’
crime against Milly is also similar to Christmas’ attack on McEachem since each act of
violence can be cast as parricide. Christmas even incorporates Hines’ desire for a
lynching by sacriﬁcing himself to Percy Grimm whose ﬁnal act of violence against
Christmas resembles the sadistic brutality of a lynch mob.l6

Christmas did know Hines as the orphanage janitor when he was a very young
child, but he never saw any of Hines’ acts of violence (even though these very acts were
what turned Christmas into an orphan with no real idea of his parentage). Christmas’
repetition of the racist violence of his grandfather cannot be connected to the
environment in which he grows up; instead, it can, like the blood discourse which various
characters have espoused for the entire novel, be described in biological or genetic terms
as an inheritance. The narrator describes a strange connection between the child and the
old man early in the novel before the reader knows that they are blood relations: “Even at
three years of age the child knew that there was something between them that did not
need to be spoken” (137-38). This “something” is certainly the kinship between the

janitor and the child that the reader later learns, but it could also be read as a penchant for

 

'6 Brooks goes to great ends to argue that Grimm’s murder of Christmas is not a lynching (52, 61), but the
fact remains that Grimm’s castration of an already mortally wounded Christmas mirrors the sadistic
mutilation often performed by lynch mobs who claimed to be protecting white women ﬁ'om black men.

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violence. Both readings collapse into one another when considered in the blood
discourse of the novel that already suggests that violence, or any other trait for that
matter, can be genetic.

Christmas’ violent nature remains tied to his blood when read as an inheritance
from Doc Hines. This connection between Hines and Christmas ﬂips the blood discourse
maintained by the characters of Light in August on its head. According to the action of
the novel rather than any of the character’s theories, Christmas’ violence is clearly
connected to his “white blood.” The example of McEachem and the blood inheritance of
Hines both pin a racial label onto Christmas’ most vile acts; Christmas’ real white fathers
spawn the violence rather than his imagined black father who may be black, Mexican, or
black Mexican. The blood discourse of Light in August is certainly essentialist since it
casts blood-as-race and attaches certain behaviors, tendencies, and characteristics to the
blood, but Faulkner’s twist of this blood rhetoric suggests that while white characters
equate violence with blackness they actually cast violence as the inheritance of

whiteness.

Christmas’ and Arroyo’s personal battles over racial identity reﬂect the disparate
discourses of racial mixture that grew out of the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican
Revolution. Christmas lives in a society in which the discourse of miscegenation has so
well established the so-called “one-drop rule” that he is immediately rejected and
viciously hunted down by southern whites once they suspect that he has “black blood.”
Christmas’ supposedly “mixed blood” even works against him retroactively in that

Bobbie and her crew, Joe Brown/Lucas Burch, Jefferson’s sheriff and marshal, and even

190

Byron Bunch all use their newfound knowledge of Christrnas’ supposed ancestry to
explain the strangeness or foreignness that they had previously sensed while in his
presence. For example, when Brown/Burch mocks his interrogators by stating, “[t]he
folks in this town is so smart. Fooled for three years. Calling him a foreigner for three
years” (98), the marshal responds, “‘A nigger, [. . .] I always thought there was
something funny about that fellow’” (99). Christmas is also spurned by southern blacks
because he appears to be white; upon ﬂeeing Freedman Town on his way to Joanna’s
house—one of the most overt scenes of the novel’s blood-as-race discourse as Christmas’
“black blood” talks to him in Freedman Town, “almost betray[ing] him” (116)—
Christrnas encounters a group of black men and women out for an evening stroll. They
identify Christmas as white and immediately place a barrier between him and themselves.
“‘It’s a white man, [. . .] What you want, whitefolks? You looking for somebody? [. . .]
Who you looking for, cap’m?”’ (117). Christmas’ rejection of/by whites ﬁts clearly
within the discourse of miscegenation. He cannot allow himself to be white since
miscegenation has taught him that a person with any African ancestry (which Christmas
assumes that he has) cannot be white. Similarly, the white population does not accept
him once they discover that he is supposedly part black, which, for them, means that he is
black according to the bizarre calculus of miscegenation. Christmas’ rejection by blacks
seems connected to his rejection of them, and again, both refusals are grounded in the
discourse of rrriscegenation. Since the discourse has brainwashed Christmas into
believing that blacks are inferior, he will not willingly accept blackness as his racial

identity. His rejection of blackness and his attempt to live as “a white man” cause the

191

blacks who come into contact with him to reject him since they also follow the
segregated structure dictated by the discourse.

The self torture that Christmas continually inﬂicts upon himself is far more telling
of the power of the discourse of miscegenation and its “one-drop rule” in the early
twentieth-century United States than his rejection by’both blacks and whites. Christmas
will not let himself “pass” in the white society of Jefferson.17 Instead, he continually
reveals to the people closest to him—Bobbie, Joanna, Brown/Burch—that he thinks that
he is the offspring of miscegenation and that such ancestry is problematic. Both the idea
that Christmas—a man who looks and acts like a white foreigner—would have to “pass”
in order to ﬁt in with whites in Jefferson and the fact that Christmas will not allow
himself to do so because he sees himself as a racial problem reveal the discourse of
miscegenation’s power to frame racial mixture as aberrant and to assign so-called racially
mixed individuals to the supposedly inferior realm of blackness. Christmas refuses to
self identify as black at a time when this identiﬁcation would be beneﬁcial—rejecting
Joanna’s offer to earn a law degree and take over her handling of various schools for
black children (268-69, 276-77). Contrastingly, he tries to force himself to identify as
black while living in the U.S. North by living “with a woman who resembled an ebony
carving” (225). Both scenes, however, reveal that Christmas ﬁnds blackness revolting—
in the scene with Joanna he asks in quiet shock, “Tell niggers that I am a nigger too?”’
(277), and in the scene with the dark woman, which I have already analyzed in greater

detail, “his whole being writhe[s] and strain[s] with physical outrage and spiritual denial”

 

’7 In “Cant Matter/Must Matter”, Philip Weinstein suggests that “passing” is “never a temptation for
Faulkner’s ﬁgures” who choose “self-cruciﬁxion” instead (365). He refers speciﬁcally to Charles Etienne
Saint-Valery Bon, but his comment aptly describes Christmas who chooses a life of self hate and a violent
death over “passing.”

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as he tries to inhale what he thinks is the essence of blackness (226). Christmas torments
himself about his supposed “black blood” for the entire novel, and his personal suffering
only ends when he is shot and subsequently castrated by Percy Grimm, a moment that
can be read as state-sponsored execution, murder, or suicide. The ﬁnale of Christmas’
life suggests that the only options that the discourse of miscegenation provides for so-
called racially mixed individuals are those of self-violence and vagrancy.

Arroyo, contrastingly, lives in a society that sees racial mixture as a common
occurrence, although this mixture is certainly not praised nor officially recognized by the
white, power-holding minority. He grows up living between the two worlds of his
indigenous, peon mother and his white, hacendado father, but he is also part of a larger
group of self-identifying mestizos on the hacienda, and later, in the Revolution. Like
Christmas, Arroyo is rejected by the white population, but he is accepted by the
indigenous population—the ancient Graciano favors Arroyo and puts his people’s sacred
land titles in Arroyo’s charge—and he is accepted into the Revolution by both followers
and superiors as a fellow mestizo.18 Arroyo is also different from Christmas in that he
does not practice the vicious self loathing that almost deﬁnes Christmas’ character.
Arroyo tries to obtain what he sees as the positive attributes of both sides of his
ancestry—his mother’s indigenous traditions and connection/claim to the land and his
white father’s wealth, power, and actual control of the land—while rejecting that which

he ﬁnds repulsive—his mother’s and his own illegitimacy and his father’s arrogance

 

'8 While the novel suggests that only the white population rejects mestizos, this is not historically accurate.
Mestizos typically found more acceptance in indigenous communities than in white society in Mexico, but
as Andrés Molina Enriquez suggests in Los grandes problemas naCionales, the Indians also rejected
mestizos at times because they saw in mestizos “the vices and defects” of their Spanish ancestors (41).

193

toward them. However, as I have already argued, Arroyo repeats his father’s arrogance
and his father’s violence through his virtual rape of Harriet and his murder of Bierce.

Arroyo, like Christmas, dies a violent death, but his death comes at the hand of
another self-proclaimed mestizo—Pancho Villa—and Arroyo’s mestizo army continues
the Revolution after he is gone. Even death cannot erase the temporary fulﬁllment of
Arroyo’s desire to possess the Miranda hacienda. His success, no matter how limited by
his early death, suggests that the discourse of mestizaje provides additional and more
positive alternatives for so-called mixed race subjects, and if read without paying
attention to Arroyo’s mirroring of his white father’s violence, his success hides
mestizaje’s private face which seeks to whiten Mexico. Arroyo’s character ﬁts well in a
society that was beginning to embrace publicly a certain type of mestizaje as the symbol
of the new nation while privately clinging to ideas of and new hopes for white
supremacy.

Even while reifying the essentialisms of the discourses of mestizaje and
miscegenation, The Old Gringo and Light in August challenge each discourse’s pedestal
treatment of whiteness. The Old Gringo assigns Arroyo’s violent nature to his white
ancestry. Whether Arroyo learns to be violent by watching (by spying on) his white
father or whether he somehow genetically inherits this violence (the novel suggests both
possibilities), the assignation of violence to whiteness is almost as essentialist as if
Fuentes, like Mexican authors of previous generations, were to assign violence or
savagery to Indianness; the primary difference is that Fuentes’ essentialism challenges
the authority of the socially accepted white violence while the tradition of linking

savagery to Indians supports or justiﬁes white violence against them. Fuentes’

194

connection between violence and whiteness casts doubt on utopian readings of Mexican
mestizaje since the private face of mestizaje serves as a project of assimilation with the
ﬁnal goal of whitening the nation to the point that the term Mexican would denote a
white individual who appreciates a romanticized version of an indigenous past. Fuentes
suggests, by equating whiteness with violence throughout The Old Gringo, that mestizaje
itself is a project of white, racist violence.

Faulkner, on the other hand, offers a more subtle critique of the discourse of
miscegenation that is so overshadowed by Gavin Stevens’ discussion of Christmas’
battling blood and by the entire novel’s blood-as-race discourse that, at times, it is almost
drowned out. Christmas’ actions show that he, like Arroyo, has both learned and
inherited violence from his white father ﬁgures, that violence is a white, not a black or
mixed characteristic. This would certainly stand out as a harsh critique of the discourse
of miscegenation were it not for the discourse’s power to talk around the action. For
many readers, Light in August reinforces the discourse of miscegenation rather than
challenging it because Stevens’, Hines’, the town of Jefferson’s, and Christmas’ own
thoughts and words about a supposed black inferiority/penchant for violence speak much

louder than Christmas’ violent white bloodline.

195

Chapter 5
Black, Mexican, and Black Mexican

Faulkner’s Light in August and Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz each offer
ﬁctional portrayals of the historical erasure of black Mexican identity while once again
both re-inscribing and challenging the terms of each author’s national discourse of racial
mixture.l Light in August is clearly not a novel about Mexico, but Mexicans play pivotal
roles in both Joe Christmas’ and Joanna Burden’s known and unknown pasts.
Scholarship which focuses on Christmas’ race, as I have already brieﬂy mentioned,
generally reads Christmas as a mulatto or black character while a few critics claim that he
is white. With the exception of Ramon Saldivar, literary critics almost never link
Christmas’ race to the racial/national marker that his mother claimed for his father—
Mexican.2 The characters in the novel, most literary critics, and Faulkner himself all
seem to deny that one can be both black and Mexican.3 Indeed, Doc Hines suggests that
“black blood” cancels the possibility of being Mexican: “‘Telling old Doc Hines, that
knowed better, that he was a Mexican. When old Doc Hines could see in his face the
black curse of God Almighty’” (3 74). Doc Hines’ violent denial of the racial/national
identity which Milly Hines assigns to her lover appears to cast black and Mexican as

binary opposites, but his judgment ﬁts into a larger pattern within Light in August of

 

’ For detailed descriptions of African presence in Mexico and mestizaje’s erasure of Mexico’s African past
see the groundbreaking work of Patrick Carroll, particularly his article “Los mexicanos negros, e1 mestizaje
y los fundamentos olvidados de la ‘Raza cesmica’: Una perspectiva regional” and his earlier book Blacks
in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development.

2 In “Looking for a Master Plan: Faulkner, Paredes, and the Colonial and Postcolonial Subject,” Saldivar
brieﬂy discusses how Mexican identity functions in Light in August. This theme, however, is merely an
aside since the article compares Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to Américo Paredes’ George Washington
Go'mez.

3 Besides Saldivar, Matthews stands out as another exception to this general rule. Although he claims that
Christmas is white (206), he acknowledges that his father could have been both black and Mexican—not
just one or the other—(2 1 5-16) which leaves one or both of these identities as possibilities for Christmas.

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collapsing Mexicanness into blackness. Christmas’ ancestry and Joanna Burden’s
genealogy both demonstrate how the discourse of miscegenation casts racial mixture as
abnormal and labels any sort of racial other—in this case Mexican—as black in order to
quarantine whiteness from all other races and to protect the special interests and
advantages enjoyed by the white community in a dualistic racial hierarchy.4

Much like the critical discussion around Fuentes’ The Old Gringo, most
scholarship about his more famous La muerte de Artemio Cruz does not read the novel as
a narrative about mestizaje or mulatez. Instead, literary critics tend to focus their
attention on some of the novel’s more overt themes (e.g. the Revolution, the eventual
institutionalization and corruption of the Revolution and its surviving leaders, Cruz’s
maltreatment of women, Cruz’s lust for power, etc.); on questions of style (e. g. Fuentes’
brilliant use of the modernist techniques of fragmentation and stream of consciousness
narration or his rotation between narrators in the ﬁrst person present, second person
future, and third person past); or on questions of inﬂuence (e. g. Faulkner’s and James
Joyce’s novels and Orson Welles’ blockbuster Citizen Kane). The reading of La muerte
de Artemio Cruz which Marco Polo Hernandez Cuevas offers in his recent Aﬁican
Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation, however, casts the book as the novelistic
offspring of Vasconcelos’ desire to whiten Mexicans of Aﬁican descent via mestizaje
(8 8). His reading is heavy handed and, at times, oversimpliﬁed, but Hernandez Cuevas

does foreground race and racial mixture as crucial themes within the novel, and he

 

‘ I realize that the term Mexican is a national rather than a racial identiﬁer. Indeed, my suggestion that
Christmas’ father could be a black Mexican implies that several racial options exist for an individual who
claims to be Mexican. However, in my reading of Light in August, I will, at times, approach Mexican as a
racial marker since the novel continually does so, and more importantly, since the discourse of
miscegenation typically approaches Mexican as a racial rather than a national marker by identifying
Mexicans as non-white.

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suggests that Cruz’s story is emblematic of the African experience in Mexico under the
discourse of mestizaje. At one point, Hernandez Cuevas argues “that in the depth of his
heart he [Cruz] despises his negritude” (88), but Cruz’s relationship with his African past
is not as clear-cut as Hernandez Cuevas hopes to display. Cruz’s successful attempt to
ﬂee from the ruined plantation where he was raised by his mulatto uncle, Lunero, can
either be read as a repression of a past he despises or as a tragic, ﬁnancial necessity.
Cruz’s ability to survive the Revolution and eventually become a powerful landowner
and business magnate demonstrates how the discourse of mestizaje allows for the success
of the supposed mestizo under the post-Revolutionary banner of national mestizaje while
simultaneously erasing Mexico’s African past.

My analysis of Light in August is primarily a close reading of how Mexico and
Mexican identity function within the novel with very few references to secondary sources
since next to nothing has been written on this theme. My examination of La muerte de
Artemio Cruz, contrastingly, grapples with Hernandez Cuevas’ analysis of the novel since
his work is the principal piece of literary criticism that reads La muerte de Artemio Cruz
as a ﬁctional portrayal of mestizaje’s power to erase Mexico’s Aﬁican past. These paired
readings of Light in August and La muerte de Artemio Cruz shed further light on how the
discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje disparately approach Aﬁican identity and
racial mixture between so-called whites and blacks. The former maintains blackness as
one essential category in a binary system, assigns all racial others and/or supposed racial
mixtures to this category, and exploits this group for the beneﬁt of the other side of the
binary—whites. In contrast, the latter provides individuals with African ancestry

possible mobility on Mexico’s socioeconomic ladder but only after erasing their Aﬁican

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past by disguising it as European/indigenous mestizaje. In the end, Light in August and
La muerte de Artemio Cruz suggest that miscegenation and mestizaje are merely different

methods for creating and favoring whiteness.

Collapsing Mexican and Black Identities

In Light in August, Joe Christmas’ genealogy is anything but clear, especially to
Christmas himself who never meets any of his blood relatives personally except for his
maternal grandfather, Doc Hines, whom he only knows as an orphanage janitor, not as a
family member. Throughout the novel, no character has any real knowledge of
Christmas’ father’s racial identity except for Christmas’ father himself. Arguing that
Christmas’ father claims Mexican identity may take too much for granted since the
character has absolutely no voice in the novel and since Milly’s assertion that he is
Mexican could simply be an attempt to asSuage her father’s murderous temper when he
ﬁnds her breaking what he considers the ultimate taboo—sexual relations between a
white woman and a black man. As we have already seen, this taboo became so strong
between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the mid twentieth century (the
same time period in which Milly has her affair, bears Christmas, and dies; and the same
time period in which Christmas lives his entire life) that Sundquist argues that it
overshadowed the incest taboo (122). It would not be surprising, then, for Milly to seek

to describe her lover in terms that obviate the taboo.5

 

5 Milly, unlike the other characters in the novel, sees Mexican as a third space—as an additional category
beyond the discourse of miscegenation’s black/white dichotomy. However, her perspective still divides
Mexican, black, and white from each other which follows the segregationist model of miscegenation rather
than the assimilationist logic of mestizaje.

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Milly’s claim that her lover is Mexican instead of black not only suggests racial
difference between black and Mexican, but it also implies racial difference between
herself and her lover. The difference between Mexican and white is juxtaposed with the
supposedly drastic difference between black and white. Thus, her claim casts her love
affair as international and/or interracial but not as miscegenational. Yet, reading Milly’s
assertion of her lover’s Mexican identity as a mere invention to protect the couple from
her father and/or to nullify the prohibition that she might see in a black/white relationship
also goes too far since Light in August never proves nor disproves that this claim was or
was not her repetition of information that she actually learned ﬁ'om the otherwise silent
character. Either way, Milly’s and/or her lover’s declaration of a Mexican identity for the
father of her child casts Mexican and black as two distinct categories. When she tells her
father that the man is Mexican, she is really shouting out to her father that her lover is not
black.

Milly’s assertion, however, is not nearly as clear as she might hope. The possible
ambiguity of the claim—the fact that the label Mexican does not clarify Christmas’
father’s race or color—apparently provides several racial options for Christmas; with a
white U.S. southemer for his mother and a Mexican for his father, Christmas could be
considered mestizo, mulatto, or white depending on which type of Mexican his father
claimed to be.6 In the ﬁrst two cases, the violence Christmas inﬂicts upon himself and

suffers at the hands of the white community can be explained by the discourse of

 

6 Each of these equations implies that Christmas’ otherness hinges upon the racial identity of his father
since the narrative reveals that his mother is white and suggests that her racial identity is stable or pure.
However, with a knowledge of the discourse of miscegenation, the racial and sexual politics of the U.S.
plantation past, and Faulkner’s tendency to reveal racial mixture at the very origins of several white
families in his ﬁction (for example, the McCaslin family in Go Down, Moses), the reader should question
whether the Hines family itself is white or whether Doc Hines’ virulent racism is symptomatic of an
unspoken personal knowledge that he, himself, is not what he considers racially pure.

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miscegenation’s tendency to group all racial others with blacks in order to similarly abuse
them for the advantage of whites. In the latter case, this violence would be white on
white which seems to contradict itself but actually ﬁts well with the novel’s repeated,
although almost hidden, suggestion that violence is genetically and/or environmentally
white—a claim I have examined in chapter 4. However, the novel disallows all of these
racial alternatives, not only through Milly’s assertion of Mexican and black difference,
but more emphatically through the violent actions and words of her father. Doc Hines
silences Milly’s lover with a bullet before he can ever attach any preﬁx of race or color to
his national identity: “‘Go back yonder and look down in the mud and you will see. He
might have fooled her that he was a Mexican. But he never fooled me’” (3 77). Then,
Hines ﬁlls in the blank by labeling his daughter’s lover black.

Hines’ declaration that the man is black erases both his national identity and any
possibility of intermediate race. Like Milly’s claim of the man’s Mexicanness, Doc
Hines’ assertion segregates black from Mexican. Christmas’ father, according to the
discourse of miscegenation in which Hines so effectively plays his part, cannot be black
Mexican, mulatto Mexican, nor white Mexican. He cannot be Mexican at all; he is
simply black as Hines guesses and as the man’s former employer—a circus owner—later
conﬁrms. Mrs. Hines relates to Byron Bunch and Gail Hightower that “‘the circus owner
come back and said how the man really was a part nigger instead of Mexican, like
Eupheus said all the time he was, like the devil had told Eupheus he was a nigger’” (377).

66"

At the same time, Mrs. Hines tries to challenge these assertions by claiming that it was

just the circus man that said he was a nigger and maybe he never knew for certain’” (377-

201

78).7 Her efforts, however, fall short since Hightower, Bunch, and her husband (who sits
through the conversation in a trance until he adds his two cents to the bizarre tale) all
assign the possibly Mexican character the pejorative identity of “nigger” (or, in
Hightower’s case the slightly less offensive “negro”) and project this identity onto his
offspring—Joe Christmas. The assignation of these derogatory labels to Christmas’
supposedly Mexican father leaves only one racial option for Christmas. Since
miscegenation does not maintain an intermediate category such as mulatto and since
Christmas looks white, he becomes the stereotyped “white nigger” (344)—a self hater
who despises what he considers his hidden blackness, and the ultimate fear of white
supremacists since he has “black blood” but can “pass” as white. Even though Christmas
does not know the history of either of his parents, he is convinced “‘that one of them was
part nigger’” (254). In other words, he buys into his grandfather’s assertion that Milly’s
lover was black even though Hines never makes the claim to Christmas or to anyone that
Christmas actually knows.

If Christmas’ father were the only reference to Mexican/Mexico in the novel, then
Christmas’ narrative thread in Light in August could be read as an interesting challenge to
the tendency of the discourse of miscegenation to place all racial others into the category
of blackness. But, Joanna Burden’s genealogy, like Christmas’, also grafts Mexican,
black, and white into one family tree. The Burden family, however, continually collapses
the two identiﬁcations into each another rather than suggesting that black and Mexican

cannot be one in the same. According to the family history that Joanna maps out for

 

7 Surprisingly, Mrs. Hines’ doubt about the race of both Christmas and is father is the rule, not the
exception, in the novel. All of the characters except Old Doc Hines and Christmas himself doubt, at least
momentarily, that Christmas is black which suggests that most literary critics are seduced by the essentialist
logic of miscegenation when reading Christmas’ character.

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Christmas, the Burden family has no actual African lineage. Instead, the eventual
collapse of Mexican into black all depends on the gaze of Calvin Burden—the family
patriarch and Joanna’s paternal grandfather—who describes the various national/racial
strands in his marriage and in his offspring in terms of blackness.

Calvin’s wife, his son, and his grandson all have dark complexions which stand
out in stark contrast to his fair features. Joanna explains that Calvin hailed from a New
Hampshire family of Scandinavian roots while his wife was “the daughter of a family of
Huguenot stock which had emigrated from Carolina by way of Kentucky” (241). 8
According to mid-nineteenth century discussions of amalgamation, the Burdens’
marriage could technically be considered a mixed race relationship due to the supposed
racial and cultural differences between their French and Scandinavian ancestries.
However, the era of amalgamation, like the discourse of miscegenation that followed
shortly thereafter, ignored any difference that might have existed between groups that the
white community considered white while simultaneously emphasizing supposed
differences between the united divisions of whiteness and any group deemed non-white.
Following the rules of amalgamation, then, the Burdens’ marriage was not interracial
since both partners were considered white.

However, when Joanna paints Christmas a narrative picture of her grandfather and

her father, she does so in black and white—in terms that echo the descriptions of the

 

’ The idea of mixture is central to Calvin Burden’s character and to the Burden family in more ways than
one. Apart from the tones of racial mixture that run through the narrative Joanna creates to describe her
grandfather and her family, religious mixture creates just as stark of a contrast. Calvin is the son of a
Unitarian minister, but he adopts Catholicism in his youth when he runs away to California. When he
marries a protestant wife, he abandons Catholicism, not because of his wife, but because he links
Catholicism to slavery. He then tries to raise his children as Unitarians but only knows how to read the
Spanish version of the Bible which he received from Catholic priests in a Californian monastery (241-42).
Finally, Nathaniel and Juana wait several years to be married because Nathaniel cannot ﬁnd a protestant
minister and refuses to let one of Juana’s Catholic priests perform the ceremony (247).

203

offspring of so-called miscegenational relationships: “the tall, gaunt, Nordic man, and the
small, dark, vivid child who had inherited his mother’s build and coloring, like people of
two different races” (242).9 The contrast between the father and the son who looks like
the mother (a contrast which Joanna overtly describes in terms of racial difference)
suggests that Calvin and his wife are not of the same race. Joanna’s juxtaposition of her
grandfather to her grandmother and her grandfather to her father in the early twentieth
century reveals a shift in racial discourse away from amalgamation toward the discourse
of miscegenation. Her depiction of her own family in terms that mirror descriptions of
miscegenation could either reveal the overarching power of the discourse itself or
represent Joanna’s own critique of the discourse. The former line of logic would suggest
that the discourse of miscegenation has created such a fear of racial mixture, particularly
between so-called blacks and whites, that Joanna exaggerates what she sees as racial
difference in her family line and casts it as miscegenational. The latter argument
suggests that Joanna overtly rebels against the discourse of miscegenation, not only by
participating in a love affair with a man whom she exoticizes as black but also by
suggesting that such relationships are foundational to her white family line—a family that
is hated by Jefferson’s white population for being Carpetbaggers but accepted as white
nonetheless.lo Standing alone, Joanna’s description of her grandfather, grandmother, and

father deﬁes the discourse of miscegenation’s attempt to describe whiteness in terms of

 

9 Again, just as with the Hines family, the novel does not overtly suggest but does not rule out the
possibility that the Burden family could have African ancestry through Calvin’s wife’s family line since her
people could have owned plantations and slaves in Carolina or Kentucky. If so, Burden’s hatred for slavery
and his strange contempt for his dark offspring could be read as symptomatic of a fear that someone will
discover his family’s racial secret. As he states when he ﬁrst meets his daughter-in-law and his grandson,
“‘[f]olks will think I bred to a damn slaver. And now he’s got to breed to one, too’” (247).

‘0 Even if Joanna overtly rebels against the discourse of miscegenation, she just as openly perpetuates it by
acting out the stereotype of the ravished white female, projecting the stereotype of the black beast onto
Christmas, and relishing the supposedly forbidden nature of their love affair.

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purity since this marriage between two so-called whites reveals one partner as fair, the
other as dark, and their offspring as black.ll The Burden family’s racial status, however,
becomes even more convoluted when Nathaniel—the son who looks like his dark
mother—marries a Spaniard/Mexican named Juana, who “looked enough like his dead
[mother] to have been her sister” (246), and sires a son who is Calvin’s namesake but
whom Calvin calls “‘[a]nother damn black Burden’” (247).12

Much like Joe Christmas’ father, Juana’s racial/national identity remains
ambiguous throughout the novel. She is from Mexico, but the narrative refers to her as
“Spanish” rather than Mexican (247).13 Regardless of this claim, the novel provides
several reasons to consider Juana as Mexican rather than Spanish. First, the couple meets
in “Old Mexico” sometime around 1853 (243, 246).14 By this date, Mexico had been
independent from Spanish rule for over 30 years, and although some Spanish nationals
still lived in Mexico, the vast majority of the population identiﬁed itself as Mexican or as
part of one of Mexico’s several indigenous groups rather than Spanish. Still, several
families among the Mexican elite continued to attempt to trace their ancestry back to
Spanish bloodlines which could explain Nathaniel’s identiﬁcation of Juana as Spanish.
The novel, however, does nothing to imply that Juana is ﬁ'om the upper class; instead, it

suggests the opposite since Juana leaves Mexico with a gringo lover, Nathaniel, and their

 

” Joanna’s description of her family recalls the “negro toma atras” from the casta paintings in which the
Spaniard and the albino (a visibly white individual with one African great-grandparent) give birth to a
visibly black child.

‘2 Calvin’s derision might be aimed directly at Juana rather than at his grandson, but in the same passage he
discusses his namesake’s “black look” twice and Joanna calls the younger Calvin “dark like father’s
mother’s people and like his mother” (248). Whether aimed at Juana or at her son, Calvin’s remark
demonstrates his preoccupation with an increase in blackness in the family, and either way, this blackness
is actually Mexicanness.

'3 No character speaks Juana’s identity, but the narrator states that Nathaniel “listened quietly, not even
attempting to tell his father that the woman was Spanish and not Rebel” (247). Nathaniel, then, appears to
be the only character who might argue for a Spanish identity for Juana.

” I arrive at this date since Nathaniel ﬁnally meets up with his father again in 1866 when his own son,
Calvin, is “about twelve” (246).

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illegitimate son in order to roam the plains of the United States in search of Nathaniel’s
family and a protestant priest to marry them. Second, Juana’s brief appearance in the
novel is continually marked by discussion of her dark pigmentation which suggests
indigenous, mestizo, or possibly Aﬁican heritage. Indeed, the portrayal of Juana’s skin
matches the racial proﬁles of Mexican mestizos propagated by Mexico’s intelligentsia
during the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Molina Enriquez, for example,
describes “[t]he mestizo” as “dark-skinned, [. . .] more dark-skinned than the southern
European, although less than the pure Indian” (42). Third, Nathaniel’s reference to Juana
as Spanish merely repeats the combination of the labels Spanish and Mexican that
Nathaniel’s messenger to his father’s family revealed years earlier when describing
Nathaniel’s adventures in Mexico. The messenger told the family, “‘[h]e killed a
Mexican that claimed he stole his horse. You know how them Spanish are about white
men, even when they don’t kill Mexicans [. . .] Folks claim it wasn’t the Mexican’s horse
noways. Claim the Mexican never owned no horse. But I reckon even them Spanish
have got to be strict’” (244).15 Nathaniel’s description of Juana as Spanish instead of
Mexican, just like his friend’s story, reveals the tendency among the English speaking
population in the United States to call speakers of the Spanish language Spanish instead

of Mexican (or any other national label) more than it proves Juana’s Spanishness or

 

‘5 This is a fascinating passage. Who, in this short tale, is white? The messenger suggests that only
Nathaniel Burden, whom the rest of the novel casts as dark, is white while both Spaniard and Mexican are
not. Read alongside the rest of the Burdens’ genealogy, this message suggests that for U.S. whites certain
white foreigners are not white simply because they are foreign while certain (although not African) foreign
blood lines, although dark, can be white if they are national. In other words, it appears that for the Burden
family nation trumps pigmentation since Calvin’s wife’s dark Huguenot ancestry is cast as white once in
the United States while Spanish ancestry in Mexico is cast as non-white.

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disproves her Mexicanness.16 Nathaniel’s claim aside, Juana is from Mexico, and the
narrative casts her as Mexican.

Calvin Burden’s disgusted description of his grandson as “‘ [a]nother damn black
Burden’” (247) begins to reveal his surprising likeness to his political opposite Doc
Hines. Both men are religious fanatics; they both create the racial/racist gaze that acts as
the official view of race for their families; they are both fathers of children who
purposefully have sexual relations with individuals whom they deem non-white; they are
both grandfather’ s of the characters who form the novel’s central portrayal of
miscegenation, and ﬁnally, they both fear becoming the white grandfathers of black
grandchildren. Politically, Calvin Burden and Doc Hines could not be more distinct.
Hines preaches violent white supremacy and segregation while Calvin is murdered as he
tries to secure black votes in Jefferson, Mississippi during Reconstruction. But
philosophically, Calvin appears to be every bit as racist as Hines. His description of
African Americans as “‘ [d]amn, lowbuilt black folks: lowbuilt because of the weight of
the wrath of God, black because of the sin of human bondage staining their blood and
ﬂesh’” (247) mixes religion and race in the same bizarre way that Hines does with the
only difference being where the sin lies—for Calvin blacks are black because whites

sinned and made them slaves while for Hines blacks are black because they are cursed by

God. ‘7

 

‘6 This tendency still exists in the twenty ﬁrst century in the United States. In casual conversation, English
speakers in this country often talk about their Spanish neighbors, co-workers, friends, acquaintances, or
even enemies, but when pressed, they reveal that the Spanish people they are describing are actually
Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Peruvian, Guatemalan, etc.

'7 Calvin further demonstrates his conviction that blackness depends on slavery by suggesting that after
emancipation the former slaves will “bleach out now. In a hundred years they will be white folks again”

(247-48).

207

Calvin collapses Mexican into black just as Hines erases Mexican with black, and
their disparate but strangely similar views on race reveal how the discourse of
miscegenation functions in the United States by grouping any racial other and all so-
called mixed race offspring on the black side of a black/white binary. Calvin’s approach
to race views Mexicanness and blackness without seeing any difference between the two,
and thus, uses the same derogatory terms to describe both of them. Hines’ approach,
contrastingly, views the two identities as contradictions to one another. The ﬁnal
outcome of each patriarch’s racial strategy, however, remains the same since both
collapsing Mexicanness into blackness and denying Mexicanness because of blackness
effectively disallow the combination of the two. Light in August, via Doc Hines’ and
Calvin Burdens’ approaches to race, suggests that racial identiﬁcations such as mulatto
Mexican or black Mexican are impossibilities. In a strange way, the drastic color line of
the discourse of miscegenation does the same thing to Mexico’s Aﬁican past that the
assimilationist discourse of mestizaje accomplishes—it denies an Aﬁican presence in
Mexico. The discourse of miscegenation exaggerates Aﬁican ancestry rather than
erasing it, but this very exaggeration of blackness disqualiﬁes Christmas and his father
from Mexican identity—at least in the eyes of the white community of Jefferson—which
simultaneously implies that Africa has no part in Mexico’s past.

Similarly, the ephemeral nature of Mexicanness in Light in August almost
completely nulliﬁes the existence of Mexican identity per se, regardless of the preﬁxes
attached. The Mexican identity of both of the characters who are possibly Mexican either
resides in or contradicts their lovers’ claims about them. Milly asserts that Christmas’

father is Mexican in opposition to all other characters’ claims that he is black, but

208

Christmas’ father says nothing for himself. Nathaniel thinks that Juana is Spanish in
contrast with Calvin’s belief that she is black and against the details of the narrative that
suggest that she is Mexican, but like Christmas’ father, Juana never speaks. Throughout
the novel, miscegenation’s dominant framework—the black/white dichotomy—silences
any identity that is not black or white by forcing them to one side of the color divide.
Light in August casts Juana and Christmas’ father, whether Mexican or not, as other or
non-white and automatically places them on the black side of the U.S. racial dichotomy.

All of these claims, assertions, denials, and collapses of identity, in the end, rest in
Faulkner’s hands. He re-inscribes the discourse of miscegenation by creating two
political opposites—Doc Hines and Calvin Burden—who approach Mexican and black
identities in opposite ways but both suggest that no such identity as black Mexican can
exist since the Mexican element is either negated by or swallowed up in black identity.
At the same time, Faulkner questions miscegenation as discourse by inserting Mexican,
identity into the supposedly black past of Joe Christmas and the so-called white past of
Joanna Burden. Mexico/Mexicans could certainly be considered tangential to the stories
that Light in August seeks to tell. However, Mexico and Mexican identity are central in
Christmas’ and Joanna’s families’ attempts to remember the past, create their own
identities, and maintain what they see as “proper” racial hierarchies. Since Christmas and
Joanna are the primary characters in one of the novel’s trifurcated plots and essential
characters in the other two narrative streams, a critique of how Mexico/Mexican identity
functions in the novel is long overdue. The novel’s distant yet important relationship
with Mexico mirrors the connections between the U.S. Civil War itself (the violent

birthplace of the discourse of miscegenation) and Mexico. Mexico is certainly not a

209

primary player in the internal conﬂict of the U.S. Civil War, but as I have argued in my
ﬁrst chapter, this war would not have taken place in the same time, space, or
circumstances were it not for the United States’ previous conﬂict with Mexico in 1846-
1848. Light in August suggests that like the U.S. Civil War the discourse of
miscegenation that comes out of it also relies on a strange relationship of denial and/or

engulfment of the further South—Mexico.

Erasing Mexico’s African Past

Of course, Mexico and Mexicans play a prominent role in Carlos Fuentes’ La
muerte de Artemio Cruz. However, the themes of race and racial mixture do not appear
to be central issues until the end of the novel. In fact, the more the three narrative voices
reveal about Cruz’s past, the more he appears to ﬁt the mold of Mexico’s new national
identity which grew out of the Revolution—the positive mestizo. Like so many other
revolutionaries, Cruz comes from somewhere or nowhere (most of the novel suggests that
the revolutionaries’ origins do not matter since the Revolution is cast as their violent
birth), is swept into the violence of the Revolution, and successfully climbs Mexico’s
socioeconomic ladder by taking advantage of the opportunities he ﬁnds and creates both
during the war and after.

During his rise to power, Cruz seems to think very little about race. He does not
boast about having a mestizo or a criollo background—both of which were common

forms of identiﬁcation among the revolutionary soldiers and/or leadership.18 Indeed,

 

’8 Cruz’s reluctance to brag about a mestizo background makes sense, but his reluctance to claim a criollo
background in order to ﬁt in with his military superiors is surprising. Even though mestizo identity
eventually becomes Mexico’s national identity in the years that follow the Revolution, the different factions
within the Revolution praised or ridiculed mestizos in varying degrees. Cruz claims loyalty to Obregon

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Cruz’s only attempt to claim a racial identity is not a claim at all but a negation of
indigenous humanity. The novel never suggests that Cruz thinks about Mexican Indians
as less than human, in fact, he teaches himself the Yaquis’ language, but in a pointed
scene in which one of his loyal Yaqui soldiers lies injured in prison, Cruz looks at the
solider and ﬁnally realizes that he has a face:

The Indian groaned. Cruz moved closer to the copper face that rested against the

stone headboard of the naked bench that served both as bed and seat. His cheek

stopped next to Tobias’ and for the ﬁrst time, with a force that obligated him to
move away, he felt the presence of that face that had never been more than a dark

lump, part of the troops, [. . .] Tobias had a face: he saw it. (187) ,
Realizing that Tobias has a face is akin to recognizing the Yaquis’ humanity. The power
with which Cruz receives this revelation suggests that Cruz, although he never discusses
his own race, previously thought of himself in racial terms that were simply not Indian
rather than ascribing himself a speciﬁc racial background.

Even though Cruz and each of the three narrators are all but silent about race until
the final stages of the novel, the last forty or so pages of La muerte de Artemio Cruz
focus so exclusively on Cruz’s hidden racial identity that the entire novel suddenly feels
like a detective story written in bad faith since the reader does not really know that the
plot contains a mystery (revolving around Cruz’s racial identity) until the narrative
shocks her by revealing the solution to that mystery (his Aﬁican-Mexican heritage). In
one of the last scenes of second person narration, the accusing narrator suddenly portrays

Cruz in overt racial terms: “they will thank the pelado Artemio Cruz because he made

 

(196), and both Obregbn and his superior Carranza came from middle to upper class backgrounds that
claimed criollo identity. At the same time, both of these leaders despised Pancho Villa and his army who
were typically described as mestizos.

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them respectable pe0ple; they will thank him because he was not content with living and
dying in a negro shack” (276).19 This narrative moment reveals Cruz’s racial identity just
before the last two sections of third person narration show that Cruz is the bastard son of
a washed up white plantation owner in Vera Cruz and one of his mulatta servants. Like
his ﬁctional counterpart of Fuentes’ much later The Old Gringo, Tomas Arroyo, Cruz is
the son of the raped mother. 7

The de’nouement of La muerte de Artemio Cruz stands out as a clear example of
how the discourse of mestizaje erases the Aﬁican past from Mexico’s national/racial
identity by casting the so-called mixed race majority as mestizo, as the children of
Mexican Indians and Europeans. The discourse of mestizaje, which grows out of the
Revolution in which Cruz plays an active role, provides Cruz with social and economic
opportunities, but this mobility is only available because Cruz can play the part of the
mestizo rather than remaining mulatto or black Mexican. Once Cruz’s racial identity is
revealed, several subtle comments about his skin and other physical characteristics from
earlier in the novel suddenly take on more meaning. Yet, no physical description
connects Cruz to African stereotypes, not even after his racial secret has been told. The
following passage demonstrates the third person narrator’s most overt reference to Cruz’s

physical features: “Now there was a large white smile on the boy’s face. The green

 

’9 As Hernandez Cuevas notes, “pelado” can refer to a “mestizo of Aﬁican descent” (92), but the term is
typically used as a class identiﬁer rather than as a racial adjective. In her book on Mexico City’s lower
classes, Ana Maria Prieto Hernandez deﬁnes “Peldado, da” as follows: “without means; speciﬁcally,
without money. [. . .] Simple-minded, plain, [. . .] Popular type of the lower classes, ragged, wretched and
uneducated, but generally kind. Figuratively speaking, a poor mannered person who uses obscene language
and manners” (268 my translation). Robert M. Levine deﬁnes “Pelado” as “A nineteenth-century Mexican
term for someone with brown skin, synonymous for riff-raft” (104), but his reference to skin color could
describe Mexican Indians and mestizos as well as Aﬁicans and mulattos. So even though Remigio Paez
refers to Cruz as a “pelado” (47) much earlier in the novel, the context of this early scene reveals that he is
describing Cruz’s behavior rather than his race. Even if Paéz were describing Cruz’s skin color, no textual
evidence suggests that he sees Cruz as black. Cruz’s use of the term later in the novel is more easily read
as a racial adjective since it is connected to a racialized space—“a negro shack” (276).

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reﬂections of the river and the humid ferns accentuated the pale, bony structure of his
face. Combed by the river, his hair was pasted over his wide forehead and his dark neck.
The sun had given it copper tones, but the roots were black” (283). The very passage
which provides the most detailed description of Cruz’s physical attributes simultaneously
demonstrates how these traits cannot reveal his race. The “green reﬂections” remind the
reader of the multiple occasions in which other characters and/or the narrators describe
Cruz’s green eyes. His neck is dark, but his face is pale, and his hair is both black and
brown due to the bleaching effect of the sun. These attributes reveal nothing certain
about Cruz’s supposed race, and the reader only realizes that Cruz is mulatto because the
third person narrator continually refers to Cruz’s uncle by this term (280-89, 295),
because the novel ﬁnally reveals that Cruz’s mother was a mulatta named Isabel Cruz
(286, 306), and because the second person narrator claims that Cruz abandoned the
“negro shack” where he was born (276). The third person narrator describes Cruz’s hair
with the same word used in the earlier scene to describe Tobias’ face—copper—
suggesting a physical commonality between the two. Through this brief description of
Cruz, Fuentes, at least momentarily, collapses blackness and Indianness into the same
thing in a manner that resembles Faulkner’s tendency to collapse blackness and
Mexicanness into one identity. However, this collapse functions between two racial
identities which are disparately engulfed in mixture (Indianness shifts to mestizo identity
by mixing with whiteness while blackness disappears completely in the mix of Indian,
white, and mestizo) rather than between two identities which cannot both exist in a dual

racial system that always maintains white and black as its two principle categories.

213

In a sense, Cruz “passes” as mestizo even though the concept of passing does not
really function within the discourse of mestizaje in the same way that it works in the
discourse of miscegenation since mestizaje does not require the individual to identify as
one of two races which are cast as binary opposites. However, the assimilationist goals
of the discourse of mestizaje as seen in Pimentel’s early claim that Mexico’s mixed
population “would all become white” in the near future (234) and Vasconcelos’ later
favoring of the white ancestry of the cosmic race which brings a “clear min ”to the
mixture (22) also suggest a type of “passing.” The discourse of mestizaje suggests that in
the short term Mexicans with an African past “pass” as mestizo and that in the long term
mestizo Mexicans “pass” as white. Following this logic, Cruz’s attempt to “pass” is only
distinct from that of a character like Joe Christmas in that Cruz’s “passing” is not
punishable by Mexican society (or by himself) because the entire society is involved in a
similar game whether it be “passing” from African, mulatto, or Indian to mestizo or from
mestizo to white.

Cruz’s violent birth and his early life almost mirror the discourse of
miscegenation rather than the discourse of mestizaje, but his participation in the Mexican
Revolution and his entire adult life clearly ﬁt within the parameters of the latter
discourse. Cruz is born in a rundown hut on a plantation in Vera Cruz. The rape of his
mother by the plantation owner and the subsequent denial of recognition by his violent
father resonate with the discourse of miscegenation and the plantation system of the U.S.
South. Like many former slaves of African descent in the U.S. South, Cruz and his uncle
Lunero are forced to labor to support the now defunct white plantocracy in order to

survive (very much like sharecroppers but with the primary responsibility of candle

214

making rather than cotton or tobacco farming). Their little family is shattered when
Lunero is killed for trying to avoid forced labor on a different landowner’s tobacco
plantation, and Cruz runs away from the plantation to start a new life alone. These events
sound so analogous to those suffered by African Americans in the U.S. South that Cruz’s
childhood could very well be told ﬁ'om the banks of the Mississippi rather than from the
gulf coast of Vera Cruz.

The Mexican Revolution, the novel suggests, shifts Cruz’s life away from the
hard, daily labor of a share cropper like Lucas Beaucharnp and the self hate of a so-called
“white nigger” like Joe Christmas toward astonishing success. The Revolution provides
a space for thousands of poor Mexicans whose racial status (whether Indian, mestizo, or
mulatto) previously held them down to a life of servitude on the plantations of the coast
and the haciendas of the highlands to take up arms and move. The literal movement
away from the haciendas, the plantations, and even the small plots of personal or
communal land toward the U.S.-Mexico border, the sierra, Mexico City, or anywhere that
was not home granted an enormous amount of freedom to these revolutionaries. As the
discourse of mestizaje grew out of the Revolution, the revolutionaries’ literal movement
was often rewarded with social and economic movement. La muerte de Artemio Cruz
suggests that if the survivors of the Revolution and the members of the ”new mestizo
nation—the mestizos, and those who could “pass”-as mestizos—were strong, savvy,
and/or ruthless enough, their military skills and newfound legitimacy opened doors of
opportunity which were previously unavailable to them: “we are young but we wear the
halo of the prestige of the anned and triumphant revolution: Why did we ﬁght? To die of

hunger? When it is necessary, force is just: power is not shared” (124). The Revolution,

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then, makes even a shack on a Vera Cruz plantation—more similar to a plantation of the
U.S. South (in terms of crops, economics, and racial dynamics) than to an hacienda of the
Mexican highlands—the birthplace of a successful industrialist and newspaperman.
However, this success comes at the cost of assimilation, and although early to mid-
twentieth century Mexico had not yet become the pool of whiteness that Pimentel and
Vasconcelos were waiting for, Cruz is required to leave any memory of an Aﬁican past
behind him as he becomes the epitome of the new mestizo nation.

I suggest that Fuentes’ Artemio Cruz is a complicated character rather than a
stereotype of the Mexican with African ancestry and that Cruz’s abandonment of his
African identity in favor of the mestizo mask both reveals and re-creates the discourse of
mestizaje’s attempt to erase Mexico’s African past. Fuentes’ failure to provide an
outright critique of the discourse of mestizaje in the novel, however, demonstrates the
power of the discourse more than any personal desire on his part to buttress the national
project of assimilation via mestizaje. Hernandez Cuevas offers an opposing view of La
muerte de Artemio Cruz and suggests that through this novel Fuentes carries out the
whitening goal of Vasconcelos and the post-Revolutionary Mexican government:

The modern nation builders adopted Vasconcelos’ views as the unequivocal road

toward modernization. La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) (The Death of

Artermio Cruz), by Carlos Fuentes, reintroduces and reinforces the myth of the

Mexican populace’s willing submission to whitening. [. . .] [T]he central

character, a post-revolution Mexican prototype, on a level, appears as a ‘mestizo’

oblivious of his Aﬁican family tree; but as he reels through memory from his

deathbed, the reader is informed that in the depth of his heart he despises his

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negritude. He is convinced that ‘the whiter the better.’ [. . .] La muerte continues

the construction of a false national identity. The novel depicts and perpetuates

stereotypes of blacks. It posits that for black characters to be rebellious, or to

show intelligence, they have to be whitened.” (88)

I agree with Hernandez Cuevas’ larger critique that Fuentes’ re-creation of
mestizaje’s attempts to erase Mexico’s African past is problematic, but I ﬁnd the
implication that Fuentes wrote the novel as an attempt to build the mestizo nation too
strong, and I disagree with Hernandez Cuevas’ claim that the novel relies on stereotypes
of blacks. Instead, I argue that La muerte de Artemio Cruz is symptomatic of the
discourse of mestizaje rather than an intentional bolstering of the discourse or a deliberate
attempt to deny the existence of black Mexicans. Hernandez Cuevas’ own “Afrocentric”
reading (91) of the novel, as he calls it, becomes just as questionable as the novel itself
when Hernandez Cuevas insists that Cruz is portrayed as a villain and claims that Cruz
hates his blackness.

Hernandez Cuevas asks, “Why make a ‘pelado’ (47, 276) or mestizo of African
descent the villain? Is the novel repeating and reinforcing the white myth of the ‘evil
nature’ of Aﬁican blood?” (92). This pair of questions implies that Hernandez Cuevas
considers Cruz’s actions iniquitous, and his critiques of Cruz throughout his reading of
the novel reafﬁrm this moral judgment.20 However, Cruz’s villainous behavior—possible
cowardice on the battleﬁeld; abuse of status and personal contacts made during the

Revolution to gain property, wealth, and power afterwards; inﬁdelity toward his wife and

 

2° Reading Cruz as a villain is not unique to Hernandez Cuevas. Such interpretations of Cruz resonate with
the tendency in Faulkner criticism to read Thomas Sutpen as the villain that Rosa Coldﬁeld makes him out
to be. This connection between Sutpen and Cruz and several other similarities between them (e.g. their
goals to create family dynasties and their thwarted desires to enter the big house in their youth) could lead
to a provocative reading of the two characters.

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maltreatment of women in general; involvement in political intrigue in Mexican politics
and U.S.-Mexican business relations; defamation of his political enemies in his
newspapers; etc—all ﬁts perfectly within the Mexican literary tradition which
continually depicts Mexican revolutionaries as ﬂawed characters. In his famous novel of
the Revolution, Los de abajo, Mariano Azuela demonstrates the character ﬂaws of the
revolutionary leadership through his portrayal of Demetrio Macias and the self-interested
nature of revolutionary idealists through his depiction of Luis Cervantes. Martin Luis
Guzman also criticizes various ranks of revolutionaries in his novel La sombra del
caudillo and describes Villa, Obregon, Carranza, and several other revolutionary generals
as tragically ﬂawed in El dguila y la serpiente. In Vdmonos con Pancho Villa, Rafael M.
Munoz depicts a completely corrupt and vindictive Villa who still maintains the ﬁdelity
of his followers, and the list could go on.

Cruz’s villainy, then, is not connected to his negritude but to his status as a
corrupt survivor of the Revolution. He is certainly not a hero, but his faults are the very
attributes which guarantee his success in Mexico’s emerging capitalist economy post-
Revolution. Even though Fuentes’ portrayal of Cruz does not offer a critique of the
discourse of mestizaj c, it does offer a class critique of the political and business leaders
who emerged from the Revolution. The suggestion that Fuentes connects Cruz’s
treachery to his Aﬁican ancestry is a misreading of the novel since La muerte de Artemio
Cruz never even hints that Cruz’s behavior is connected to his race (unlike Faulkner’s
Light in August and Fuentes’ own The Old Gringo which both connect personal conduct
to either blood or ancestry) and since Cruz is merely beating the other Revolutionary

survivors and former abusers of power (his wife’s landowning father, the local Catholic

218

priest Paez, etc.) at their own games of manipulation and intimidation. Cruz’s ironic
replacement of previous caudillos with himself as the caudillo-capitalist is not racialized.

The fact that Cruz’s recollection of his African ancestry comes via the second and
third person narrators while he lies on his deathbed rather than ﬁom any of his ﬁrst
person narrations suggests that Cruz has either forgotten or repressed his racial identity.
To survive and succeed in mestizo Mexico, he must bury his blackness in the past just as
Mexico itself has long denied the distinct place of Aﬁicans in its national project.
However, there is no textual evidence to support Hernandez Cuevas’ claim that Cruz
hates his Aﬁican roots. On the contrary, the novel shows that Cruz has no other options
than to abandon the plantation and his identiﬁcation as a mulatto servant after killing his
drunken, white uncle Pedro in a misguided attempt to save Lunero and after seeing
Lunero die at the hands of the enganchador. Upon entering the Revolution, Cruz ﬁnds a
space where he can and does ﬁt in, and as a mestizo member of the new nation, he attains
an incredible amount of worldly success. Cruz’s willingness to forget his Aﬁican past or
his ability to mask that identity by acting out the part of the mestizo revolutionary are
certainly open for criticism, but since the novel never shows Cruz mistreating other
characters with Aﬁican ancestry, despising himself for his Aﬁican ancestry, or thinking
about anyone’s race except that of his revolutionary companion Tobias the Yaqui, it is
impossible to assume that he hates blackness. Instead, the novel suggests that Cruz takes
the path of least resistance by opting to identify as a mestizo in a society which had

recently adopted the discourse of mestizaje and began to privilege such identiﬁcation." _

 

2' Indeed, Cruz’s ability to create a comfortable life for himself as a mestizo in post-Revolutionary Mexico
should make us ask a very difficult question about assimilation via mestizaje and segregation via
miscegenation. Why should the individual who “passes”—whether he/she be a person with African
ancestry in the United States who can “pass” as white, a person of African ancestry in Mexico who can live

219

Fuentes, too, takes the path of least resistance by demonstrating how the discourse
of mestizaje which grew out of the Revolution erased Mexico’s African past without
offering a critique of this process. In the end, La muerte de Artemio Cruz, like Faulkner’s
Light in August, suggests that the identity of black Mexican does not exist. Or, perhaps
the novel suggests the opposite—that the identity of black Mexican exists from the very
origins of Mexico’s costal plantation system, becomes an integral part of the Revolution,
and participates in the new power oligarchy which takes control at the Revolution’s end
but that this identity is always hidden from View, always called something else. Either
way, the Aﬁican roots of Mexico’s past and present remain invisible due to the

overarching power of the national myth of mestizaje.

If we read La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Light in August side by side and bring
an understanding of both the discourses of mestizaje and miscegenation to our
interpretations of Artemio Cruz and Joe Christmas, rather than focusing only on the
primary racial discourse of the nation of each author, we realize that Cruz and Christmas
act as uncanny doubles for each other and reveal how the other character might have
lived had he been born under the disparate discourse of racial mixture. If Christmas,
whether the son of a black father, a Mexican father, or a black Mexican father, had been
born in Mexico, perhaps he could have avoided his identity crisis by self identifying as

mestizo in the manner of Cruz, and like Cruz, found a shred of personal satisfaction and

 

as mestizo, or a person of any persecuted racial, ethnic, or even religious background who can identify as
something other than that background—receive the ridicule of the community he/she leaves behind? Are
these identities so valuable that they trump an individual’s desire for a peaceful life? I do not want to
glorify the choice some people make to forget their families’ pasts (particularly the sacriﬁces made by past
generations) in exchange for worldly success, but 1 suggest that when such a choice decreases the amount
of social, verbal, and physical persecution that an individual might experience, it should be respected by
those who choose to cling to their identity and the tribulation it might bring.

220

even some worldly success.22 If Cruz had been born in the U.S. South, his rags-to-riches
tale would have been doomed from the beginning because in this setting the young
teenager of Aﬁican and European descent would have no national upheaval in which he
could cast his racial and economic backgrounds in the terms of a national myth that
claims to champion mixture.

The actual characters, Christmas and Cruz, react to their supposed mixed race in
almost opposite fashions. Even though they can both be read as black Mexicans,
Christmas never considers this identity as an option and refuses to take advantage of
either racial identity that the discourse of miscegenation offers him (black or white). He
eventually lets his belief in his so-called racially mixed identity destroy him. Cruz,
contrastingly, either suppresses his racial identity completely or tweaks it to ﬁt within the
national model of mestizaje for his own gain and advantage. Reading the two characters
side by side also demonstrates the primary difference between miscegenation’s tactics of
segregation and mestizaje’s tactics of assimilation—the fact that while both discourses
favor whiteness, miscegenation relies more on violence while mestizaje requires amnesia.
Since the discourse of miscegenation does not allow for any sort of racial identity other
than black or white, Christmas and the community of Jefferson read him as black, and as
a black man who sleeps with and eventually kills a woman that the community has
identiﬁed as white, he is hunted down by a representative of the law, shot, and castrated.
Cruz also participates in so-called interracial love affairs, but since the discourse of

mestizaje publicly allows for racial mixture, Cruz is able to survive the violent

 

22 My musings about Christmas’ possibilities if he had lived in Mexico are not all that hypothetical since
the narrator claims that Christmas traveled “as far south as Mexico” during his ﬁfteen years of wandering
between his crisis with Bobbie and his attempt to settle down with Joanna in Jefferson (224).

221

Revolution and its aftermath and rise to the top of the social, political, and economic
hierarchies of post-Revolutionary Mexico as long as he is willing to forget his past.

Light in August and La muerte de Artemio Cruz show that while the discourses of
miscegenation and mestizaje take disparate approaches to Aﬁican identity both racial
discourses deny the possibility of black Mexican identity in order to support or maintain
the privileges of the white elite. Mestizaje’s public face can claim that African erasure is
merely a necessary step to glorify the more numerically signiﬁcant mixture between
Indians and Europeans that serves to cast Mexico as a mestizo nation, but the private face
of the discourse reveals that the entire project rests upon an essentialist nineteenth-
century dream of creating a white nation, not only through African erasure but also
through the eventual assimilation of Indians and mestizos into white Mexican identity.
The discourse of miscegenation, contrastingly, denies the possibility of black Mexican
identity in order to maintain a dual racial system that favors whites and abuses blacks and

any racial other that can be cast in similar terms.

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Conclusion
Positive Hybridity?

During the twentieth century, the academic conversation about racial mixture
slowly shifted away from bodies and blood toward discussions of cultural mixture, and
ﬁnally, toward a resurrection of the concept of hybridity stripped of its etymological
connection to biology. In his detailed reading of the foundational ﬁgures of nineteenth-
century race theory—Colonial Desire—Robert J. C. Young states that “‘[h]ybrid’ is the
nineteenth century’s word. But it has become our own again. In the nineteenth century it
was used to refer to a physiological phenomenon; in the twentieth century it has been
reactivated to describe a cultural one” (6). Under this new guise, hybridity becomes, for
various postcolonial critics and border theorists, the space of resistance or rebellion
against colonialism, nationalism, racism, modernity, and the list goes on.1

The positive rebirth of hybridity and the academic shift toward cultural rather than
biological mixture appear, at least on the surface level, to challenge the discourse of
miscegenation and the private face of the discourse of mestizaje. If hybridity is positive,
then the segregationist goals of miscegenation in the United States are both negative and
antiquated as are mestizaje’s ambitions to whiten the Mexican nation. However,
everyday discussions of race and racial mixture outside the academy reveal that children
of miscegenation in the United States are still relegated to the black side of the
black/white dichotomy, which hybridity theory has not dissolved, while so-called

mestizos in Mexico are still expected to cling to white values in the present, venerate a

ﬁctionalized version of the indigenous past, and jettison any connections to Aﬁica.

 

' Advertisers have certainly cashed in on hybridity’s current positive connotations. Hybridity is hip, and it
can sell anything from razors to automobiles.

223

Hybridity theory certainly critiques the very nationalisms from which miscegenation and
mestizaje were born, but it merely glosses over both discourses, and thus, helps
miscegenation and mestizaje continue to enforce the racial/racist codes born out of long-
past civil wars by masking their continued existence. By making this argument, I am not
simply stating that a gap exists between theory and practice. Rather, I suggest that
hybridity theory negatively affects racial politics in both the U.S. and Mexico by fooling
us into thinking that we are more progressive than we actually are,.by suggesting that
society (whether in the Americas or globally) has moved beyond its obsession with the
construct of race.

Homi Bhabha and Nestor Garcia Canclini are two of the most inﬂuential voices in
the contemporary conversation about hybridity, and their disparate concepts of the hybrid
demonstrate the ground shift away from biological mixture toward various types of
cultural blending.2 Bhabha developed his views on hybridity in a series of essays he
wrote from the mid 19805 through the early 905 which are now collected in The Location
of Culture. He continually suggests that hybridity is “a Third Space of enunciation”
(“The Commitment” 54), an ambivalent space that exists between the colonizer and the
colonized that questions the colonizer’s authority and legitimacy by showing it “the split
screen of the self and its doubling” (“Signs” 162) but never “resolve[ing] the tension
between two cultures” (162). Garcia Cancilini’s primary discussion of hybridity appears

in his well-known text Culturas hibridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la

 

2 By pairing Garcia Canclini’s work on hybridity with Bhabha’s, I do not wish to formulate a relation of
inﬂuence between the two thinkers. As Hosam Aboul-Ela suggests in his article “The Political Economy of
Southern Race: Go Down, Moses, Spatial Inequality, and the Color Line,” the tendency of arguing that
Garcia Canclini “was inﬂuenced by, or even borrows from” Bhabha unjustly privileges Bhabha’s work by
placing it in the intellectual center while forcing Garcia Canclini’s scholarship into the academic
“periphery” (58). This favoritism of Bhabha, Aboul-Ela suggests, has made his work “required reading for
anyone aspiring to be current, theoretically speaking” while “Garcia Canclini’s impact remains primarily in
the area of Latin American cultural studies” (Other South 27).

224

modernidad—ﬁrst published in Spanish in 1989 and subsequently translated into English
in 1995 as Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity—in which
hybridity becomes an economic and temporal term that describes a certain type of
producer and consumer who can mix the traditional and the modern at will, or, as the
subtitle to the book suggests, consumers and producers that enter and leave modernity
through the purchasing and/or producing power they hold in the market. Bhabha’s and
Garcia Canclini’s writings on hybridity are foundational to hybridity theory in both
postcolonial and border studies, and while their versions of hybridity are cultural or
economic/temporal rather than racial, their work offers complicit support to the
discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje by suggesting that the discourses no longer
function since the dialogue has moved away from race and biology.

Young praises Bhabha’s work on hybridity, but he offers a general critique of
how Bhabha’s work—along with the scholarship of Edward Said and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, the scholars he dubs “the Holy Trinity of colonial-discourse
analysis” (163)——has created “a noticeable geographical and historical homogenization of
the history of colonialism” which centers too much on India (164). Young asks whether
“the theoretical paradigms of colonial-discourse analysis” can “work equally well” to
analyze all colonial projects, suggesting that the differences between colonial spaces,
colonizers, and colonized peoples require distinct models of interpretation (164). My
project serves as one example of how this can be accomplished. My historiographic
approach to the literatures of the U.S. South and Mexico could be described as
postcolonial since both regions were formed by literal and metaphorical colonialism—the

U.S. South contains bits and pieces of the colonial endeavors of British, Spanish, and

225

French empires, and it served as an internal colony to the U.S. North from 1865 through
the period of Reconstruction; Mexico is a former colony of Spain and occasionally
functions as a neo-colony for the United States. But more important than these colonial
experiences, I suggest that the shared U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48 and the disparate but
similar U.S. Civil War and Mexican Revolution created two discourses of racial mixture
which both illuminate and interrogate one another when placed side by side. The
juxtaposition of these discourses also demonstrates how Bhabha’s version of the hybrid
remains inapplicable to the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje because in its shift
of emphasis from biology to culture it fails to concede that the concepts of mixture in
both the United States and Mexico (and in the United States, the use of the exact same
term—hybridity) were originally biological/racial concepts. Any theorization of the
concept of hybridity that fails to mention hybridity’s racial/racist history inevitably
resurrects it.3

Both the U.S. and Mexico increasingly worried about national and racial identities
and how racial mixture affected national identity by the mid-nineteenth century. By this
time, however, neither nation was a colony, and the pseudo-colonial relationships
between the U.S. North and the U.S. South during Reconstruction and between the U.S.
and Mexico at various moments in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries do not
replicate the colonial relationship Bhabha describes between Britain and India. More

importantly, Bhabha’s claims that hybridity is ambivalent and that it exists as a third

 

3 Garcia Canclini, as I discuss in turn, also re-creates hybridity’s essentialisms, but for different reasons.
He does, however, admit that the concept of mixture is connected to the idea of race in Latin America. In
an early footnote, he states that “[o]ccasional mention will be made of the terms syncretism, mestizaje, and
others used to designate processes of hybridization. I prefer this last term because it includes diverse
intercultural mixtures—not only the racial ones to which mestizaje tends to be limited” (11 n. 1). My
citations of Garcia Canclini’s Culturas hr’bridas come from Christopher L. Chiappari’s and Silvia L.
L6pez’s English translation, Hybrid Cultures.

226

space—a space of resistance which challenges colonial authority without being pro-
native (thus, the ambivalence)—do not work to describe how hybridity ﬁrnctions in the
internal racial politics of miscegenation in the United States and of mestizaje in Mexico.

In the pre-Civil War United States, hybridity was certainly not a space of
enunciation. It was, as I have discussed in detail in chapter 2, the ground for a debate
between competing factions of whites about the identity and humanity of blacks. Thus,
even before the birth of the discourse of miscegenation, hybridity was not a space of
resistance in the United States. As the discourse of miscegenation crystallized during the
years of Reconstruction, hybridity became even more tied to biology, and the offspring of
so-called miscegenational relationships—typically called mulattos rather than hybrids—
were never allowed to live in a third space between blacks and whites. The very
existence of so-called mulattos in the United States during the nineteenth century proved
that blacks and whites were having sexual relations (supposedly taboo at this time and
place) and proved that they were of the same species (that their offspring were not really
hybrids in the nineteenth-century sense of the term). However, the discourse of
miscegenation not only emphasized supposed differences between blacks and whites, but
it also denied the very existence of the third space (whether hybrid or mulatto) by
identifying supposedly mixed race children as black (not as white, nor as mulatto).
So-called racial hybrids in the United States were certainly not “less than one and
double” (“Signs” 171), as Bhabha continually describes the space of hybridity in the
British colonial projects of Aﬁica and India, but one—a black self who, via the

Emancipation Proclamation and various amendments to the U.S. Constitution, eventually

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held new rights as an individual on paper even though he/ she was still treated as 3/5 (or
less) of a person.

Bhabha’s version of the hybrid ﬁnds more play in the colonial and postcolonial
histories of mestizaje in Mexico than it does in the discourse of miscegenation in the
United States. Leaders of Mexico’s push for independence from Spain like J osé Morelos
and Vicente Guerrero—both of whom Mexican history praises as positive examples of
mestizaje in the early nineteenth century—certainly ﬁt within Bhabha’s anti-colonialist
description of the hybrid. However, for Bhabha, the hybrid is not nationalist either;
instead, the hybrid exists between the colonists and the nationalists which disqualiﬁes
Morelos, Guerrero, or any other so-called mestizo who fought against the Spanish Empire
from being hybrid in Bhabha’s sense of the term.

Mexico’s public embrace of mestizaje during and after the Mexican RevOlution
could be read, in part, as a reaction to U.S. neocolonialism—as a move to differentiate
the possible neo-colony from the neo-colonizer—and thus, ﬁts within Bhabha’s
discussion of the hybrid. But once again, Mexico’s relationship with mestizaje is
explicitly tied to nationalism. Indeed, the discourse of mestizaje’s public proﬁle actually
becomes the face of Mexican nationalism which remains strong into the twenty-ﬁrst
century—the facade of the mestizo nation homogenous in its heterogeneity. In a similar
manner, the private face of mestizaje also denies Bhabha’s version of hybridity both
because it is nationalist and because its aspiration to whiten Mexico’s population is akin
to Spanish colonial desires rather than anti-colonialist.

In short, Bhabha’s version of hybridity is an ideal condition that fails to represent

the histories of racial mixture in both Mexico and the United States because it does not

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pay attention to the discourses of mestizaje and miscegenation. I grant that we cannot
expect Bhabha to be an expert in Mexican or U.S. racial histories, nor should we expect
him to wrestle with the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje in essays which deal
primarily with the colonial relationship between Britain, India, and Aﬁica. However, we
can and should expect Bhabha to acknowledge the racial/racist past of hybridity theory in
his attempts to overhaul it. I have shown how Bhabha’s discussion of the hybrid does not
function to describe so-called mulattos and mestizos in the United States and Mexico, but
the key to my critique of Bhabha’s hybridity is that his attempt to make hybridity positive
without historicizing its biological, racial, and racist roots allows for the continuation of
the very essentialisms his theory hopes to critique by suggesting that the conversation has
moved on. Indeed, Bhabha’s positive version of hybridity leaves the racist core of
nineteenth-century hybridity theory—that so-called racial differences are natural, real,
not constructs—untouched, and thus, readily available to support racist and nationalist
agendas in the twenty ﬁrst century.

Transitioning from Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity toward Garcia
Canclini’s discussion of economic/temporal hybridity and border cultures reveals that
Garcia Canclini’s distinct version of the concept of positive hybridity also fails to
challenge the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje, but for different reasons. The
primary problem with Garcia Canclini’s image of the hybrid is that it replicates the
reasoning of nineteenth-century hybridity theory by maintaining that the elements which
make up the hybrid can be traced back to inherently essential progenitors. In racial
terms, it maintains a rhetoric of purity that casts black, white, and any other racial

category as intrinsically distinct.

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Garcia Canclini suggests that hybridity is about being able to switch from pre-
modemity to modernity and back at will. He links culture to economy at the same time
that he connects the modem and the traditional, stating:

Being cultured—including being cultured in the modern era—implies not so

much associating oneself with a repertory of exclusively modern objects and

messages, but rather knowing how to incorporate the art and literature of the
vanguard, as well as technological advances, into traditional matrices of social

privilege and symbolic distinction. (46-47)

Garcia Canclini’s cultured consumer mixes the modern and the traditional; he/she is the
hybrid, and according to Garcia Canclini, we all become hybrids because we participate
in this mixture on a daily basis.4

One of the ﬁrst and strongest critique’s of Garcia Canclini’s formulation of
hybridity appears in the very forward to his book’s English translation. In this forward,
anthropologist Renato Rosaldo claims that hybridity has two “conceptual polarities” (xv);
it might be “a space betwixt and between two zones of purity” or it could be “the ongoing
condition of all human cultures, which contain no zones of purity because they undergo
continuous processes of transculturation” (xv). Rosaldo suggests that Garcia Canclini
“never resolves the tension between” these two conceptions of hybridity even though he
favors the former, the area between two purities (xv-xvi). The real thrust of Rosaldo’s
critique is not that Garcia Canclini never “resolves the tension” between the two possible

versions of hybridity but that Garcia Canclini prefers the wrong conceptualization. His

 

3 My assertion that Garcia Canclini says that we are all hybrids is certainly a simpliﬁcation of his work.
However, when he makes overarching claims like this one, “[t]he hybridizations described throughout this
book bring us to the conclusion that today all cultures are border cultures. All the arts develop in relation to
other arts; handicrafts migrate ﬁ'om the countryside to the city; movies, videos, and songs that recount
events of one people are interchanged with others” (261), my assertion does not appear too rash.

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entire book, as Rosaldo demonstrates, ﬁrmly maintains a “distinction between tradition
and modernity” and thus, fails to challenge the idea of purity, never becoming “hybridity
all the way down” (xv). In a similar mode, Scott Michaelsen’s critique of hybridity
theory in Anthropology ’5 Wake clearly applies to Garcia Canclini’s conceptualization of
the hybrid. Michaelsen warns that “[h]ybridity cannot really be hybridity—cannot really
be a mixture and confusion of categories, types, bodies—if it is still possible, in the end,
'to identify the individual elements that compose the hybrid” (175). Garcia Canclini’s
hybridity does this very thing by differentiating between the modern and traditional
precursors to current border culture, creating a hybrid that supports essential categories
rather than obliterating them.

Garcia Canclini’s analysis of hybridity, completely distanced from a discussion of
race and racial mixture, buttresses the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje in at
least two ways. First, like Bhabha’s cultural hybridity, Garcia Canclini’s marketplace
hybridity moves the conversation about mixture so far away from race and describes
hybridity in such positive terms that it allows people in both the United States and
Mexico to conceptualize the idea of hybridity in his terms without recalling the idea’s
sordid past and without realizing that the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje are
alive and well regardless of the positive buzz around hybridity. Second, and more
important, Garcia Canclini’s hybridity repeats the essentialist rhetoric of difference that is
the nucleus of both mestizaje and miscegenation—the claim that races are inherently
different in biological, mental, and/or spiritual terms. Garcia Canclini’s Hybrid Cultures,
as Michaelsen suggests about hybridity theory in general, “undergirds, belatedly, but,

ﬁnally, in the ﬁrst place, the idea of different entities—guarantees their space, their

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properties” (Anthropology ’s 183 his italics).5 If expressed in racial terms, Garcia
Canclini’s attempts to point out the traditional and modern strains of his hybrid or border-
crosser repeat the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tendency among intellectuals in
both Mexico and the United States to link both the physical characteristics and the
behavior of so-called mixed race subjects back to their disparate parental lines. His
theory of the hybrid is every bit as problematic as Vasconcelos’ cosmic race, and
tellingly, Garcia Canclini’s version of hybridity is typically misread as progressive in the
same way that La raza co'smica has been misconstrued as a tribute to mestizaje.

The concept of positive hybridity, in the end, reinforces the essentialist, white-
favoring agendas of the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje by remaining tethered
to the very idea of division that the theory purports to challenge. The shift from race to
culture does not mean that we have overcome our racism. In fact, as Young explains, the
concepts of race and culture are forever joined, and our current tendency of
congratulating ourselves that we have moved from biology to culture does not protect us
from merely repeating the racial/racist thinking of the past:

Hybridity in particular shows the connections between the racial categories of the

past and contemporary cultural discourse: it may be used in different ways, give

different inﬂections and apparently discrete references, but it always reiterates
and reinforces the dynamics of the same conﬂictual economy whose tensions and
divisions it re-enacts in its own antithetical structure. [. . .] Hybridity here is a key

term in that wherever it emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism. If

 

3 Michaelsen reiterates this point as part of his earlier critique of anthropology in The Limits of
Multiculturalism, claiming that “the thought of the hybrid, rather than confounding essentialisms, promotes
them through an inner logic that presumes that there were (and are) cultural essences from which to begin.
That is, hybridity utterly recapitulates anthropology. Hybridity analysis, in short, may multiply cultures,
may multiply heterogeneity, but only within a larger and very traditional anthropological frame” (20-21).

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so, then in deconstructing such essentialist notions of race today we may rather be
repeating the past than distancing ourselves from it or providing a critique of it. [.
. .] Today it is common to claim that in such matters we have moved from
biologism and scientism to the safety of culturalism, that we have created distance
and surety by the very act of the critique of essentialism and the demonstration of
its impossibility: but that shift has not been so absolute, for the racial was always
cultural, the essential never unequivocal. (27-28)

Before suggesting that positive hybridity has undermined, eroded, or replaced the

discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje, we should take a long look at this concept to

remember its convoluted past and to see how this past is being repeated through the

implementation of an old term in a new guise.

The (Im)Possibility of Positive Hybridity in Faulkner and Fuentes

As my readings of Faulkner’s and Fuentes’ novels suggest, both authors typically
cast race and racial mixture in biological terms when re-creating and/or critiquing the
discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje. However, each author offers at least one
portrayal of racial mixture that could be read as an early example of positive hybridity.
Faulkner’s Lucas Beauchamp from “The Fire and the Hearth” in Go Down, Moses and
Fuentes’ Artemio Cruz are both, momentarily, positive hybrids; yet, each author
eventually limits or derails his depiction of positive hybridity.

The white community in “The Fire and the Hearth” describes Lucas according to
the calculus of miscegenation, measuring the percentage of his blood that is supposedly

black and the percentage that is supposedly white, not with the intention of allowing him

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to exist in an in-between space, but in order to label him as “negro.” However, several
characters who contemplate Lucas’ face, particularly his white cousins Isaac (Ike)
McCaslin and Carothers (Roth) Edmonds, end up describing him in terms analogous to
Rosaldo’s description of “hybridity all the way down” (xv). Roth offers the clearest
description of Lucas as hybrid while staring into Lucas’ face:

[T]he face which was not at all a replica even in caricature of his grandfather

McCaslin’s but which had heired and now reproduced with absolute and shocking

ﬁdelity the old ancestor’s entire generation and thought—the face which, as old

Isaac McCaslin had seen in that morning forty-ﬁve years ago, was a composite of

a whole generation of ﬁerce and undefeated young Confederate soldiers,

embalmed and slightly mummiﬁed—and he thought with amazement and

something very like horror: He ’s more like old Carothers than all the rest of us
put together, including old Carothers. He is both heir and prototype
simultaneously of all the geography and climate and biology which sired old

Carothers and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even

nameless now except himself who fathered himself," intact and complete,

contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow
or red, including his own. (114-15 Faulkner’s italics)

In Roth’s mind, Lucas becomes the true hybrid. Lucas’ hybridity is so complete
that Roth views him as both offspring and progenitor, as both inheritor and archetype. In
his face there is no privileging of a pure space, color, or blood. Indeed, the contempt
Lucas shows toward “all blood black white yellow or red, including his own” (115) and

the suggestion that he is both repetition of and ancestor to old Carothers McCaslin imply

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that mixture or hybridity is foundational to, not just an outcome of, the plantation system
in the U.S. South, that the mythic “white” plantation owner/patriarch is already as mixed
as his “mixed-race” offspring.‘S Lucas’, and in this case, Roth’s, inability to distinguish
between red, white, black, and yellow bloodlines places this passage in direct
juxtaposition to Edgar Allan Poe’s description of multicolored water in the strange
altitudes of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. As Michaelsen argues in
Anthropology ’s Wake, Poe’s text “can be read as a polygenist response to the seemingly
incontrovertible, visible fact of racial intermixture. The integrity of the individual strands
puts the lie to any claim regarding hybridity” (175). Faulkner’s passage does the
opposite; the multicolored strains of Lucas’ blood cannot be separated, they are not
integral.7 This thorough mixture, or “hybridity all the way down” (Rosaldo xv), does not
allow for division. The strands cannot be traced, and the strains cannot be spliced. Has
Faulkner given us a true hybrid character?

Lucas’ behavior on the Edmonds’ farm (what is left of old Carothers McCaslin’s
plantation) also points toward current hybridity theory. In this locale, Lucas ﬁmctions as
a Bhabha-type hybrid who creates a third space of subversion and resistance. Unlike his
older siblings, Lucas reﬁrses to allow the town of Jefferson and the Edmonds/McCaslin
families to forget that miscegenation is foundational to both the town and the families; he
refuses to leave. Instead, he marries “a town woman” and takes permanent residence and

employment on the Edmonds’ farm (106). Lucas’ continued presence not only reminds

 

‘3 My reading of Lucas as the complete hybrid who demonstrates that the concept of racial purity is a
fantasy is informed by Michaelsen’s reading of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. He
claims, succinctly, “[W]hiteness is not something that needs mixing. Rather, whiteness needs to recognize
its always premixed condition; that is, that it is already mixed if it is to be anything at all. And, just
perhaps, it should not be anything at all” (The Limits 83).

Even the lack of punctuation in this passage denotes mixture rather than division. No conunas separate
“black white yellow or red” (115) although the use of the conjunction “or” between “yellow” and “red”
does imply division in a way that “black white yellow red” or even “blackwhiteyellowred” would not.

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Jefferson and the Edmonds/McCaslin families of their miscegenated pasts, but it also
ﬂashes the nightmare of literal incest in the white community’s face since Lucas is both
the grandson and great-grandson of Carothers McCaslin who sired Lucas’ father—Terrel
or Tomey’s Turl—with his own daughter Tomasina or Tomey.

Lucas does not, however, favor his “white blood” nor does he identify with his
black ancestry.8 Indeed, he resists both “bloods” by living as a fused version—as
something different, something in-between:

[I]t was not that Lucas made capital of his white or even his McCaslin blood, but

the contrary. It was as if he were not only impervious to that blood, he was

indifferent to it. He didn’t even need to strive with it. He didn’t even have to
bother to defy it. He resisted it simply by being the composite of the two races
which made him, simply by possessing it. Instead of being at once the
battleground and victim of the two strains, he was a vessel, durable, ancestryless,
nonconductive, in which the toxin and its anti stalemated one another, seethless,
unrumored in the outside air. (101 my emphasis)

The image of Lucas as a “vessel” that stands in opposition to whiteness and
blackness by simply being a mixture of the two recalls Bhabha’s descriptions of the
hybrid as the third space which resists both colonizer and colonized (“Signs” 162).
Lucas’ rebellion against the white community is most visible in his treatment of his white

cousins on the Edmonds’ farm, and his resistance to the black community becomes

 

3 Lucas’s conﬁdence and even arrogance is clearly connected to his positive appraisal of his McCaslin
ancestry. However, his pride in what Lee Jenkins calls his “double dose of McCaslin substance [. . .] each
time from the original source” (219) is not about race. Instead, Lucas is attracted to his ancestor’s very
McCaslinness—his powerful and ruthless nature—which Lucas contemplates in gendered rather than racial
terms. When Lucas attacks Zack Edmonds because he fears that Zack has slept with his wife, Molly, he
waits until sunrise “[b]ecause [Zack is] a McCaslin too [. . .] even if [he] was woman-made to it” (51).

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palpable in his relationship with the man who eventually becomes his son-in-law, George
Wilkins. Lucas refuses to show Zack or Roth Edmonds the respect which most
landowning whites of the U.S. South expected from all blacks in the early twentieth
century by refusing to call them mister. Or, in contrast, he emphasizes their position as
“usurpers” (111) by calling them “Mr. Edmonds,” subtly suggesting that his connection
as a male descendant of old Carothers McCaslin trumps the Edmonds’ relation to the old
patriarch through a female bloodline (101, 111, 113). Similarly, Lucas sees George as
“an interloper without forbears and sprung from nowhere and whose very name was
unknown in the country twenty-ﬁve years ago—a jimber-jawed clown who could not
even learn how to make whisky” (40), and he attempts to send George off to the chain
gang by ratting out his whiskey business to Roth (58). The image of Lucas as “a vessel,
durable, ancestryless, nonconductive” (101), ﬁnally, combines Rosaldo’s and Bhabha’s
views of hybridity into one character who is both a separate space and a complete
mixture whose parts cannot be traced back to essentially distinct ancestors.9
Despite Roth’s and Ike’s descriptions of Lucas as hybrid, Go Down, Moses rejects
, the concept of positive hybridity, whether via Rosaldo or Bhabha, on several fronts: The
novel challenges the image of Lucas as Rosaldo’s hybrid “all the way down” (xv) in at
least two ways. First, the descriptions of Sam Fathers—the other major “racially mixed”

character of the novel—suggest that hybridity is a battleﬁeld rather than a melting pot.10

Cass tells Ike that Sam is “‘a wild man’” whose “‘blood on both sides, except the little

 

9 Lucas, then, is hybridity squared or a hybrid-hybrid, a mixture of two versions of hybridity. This very
statement demonstrates the trouble with hybridity theory. The only way to call Lucas a double hybrid is to
point out both strains—his Bhabha-like and Rosaldo-like qualities—and by doing so, repeating hybridity
theory’s primary problem—maintaining and tracing the essential traits from the predecessors of the hybrid.
1° Two other ﬁgures in the novel are also cast as “mixed blood” characters—Boon Hogganbeck who has
“the ugliest face [Ike] had ever seen” (218) and Lion the wild hunting dog who is cast as a monster of
mixture (209).

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white part, knew things that had been tamed out of our blood [. . .] himself his own
battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his own defeat’”
(162). This description of racial mixture is much more akin to the blood battle of Joe
Christmas than it is to the image of Lucas as hybrid. Sam’s character suggests that the
complete hybrid is an impossibility because the various strains which make up the hybrid
exist in competition and contradiction to one another rather than fusing into something
new.

Second, and more important, the idea of “hybridity all the way down” (Rosaldo
xv) horriﬁes the characters who behold it. When Roth contemplates Lucas’ hybrid face,
he does so “with amazement and something very like horror” (114), and when Ike, in his
old age, sees his family’s foundational moment of miscegenation/incest repeated in the
relationship between Roth and Lucas’ great-niece, he mourns, “Chinese and African and
Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is
which nor cares. . ..No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution!
he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge” (347
Faulkner’s italics). Ike’s description of life on the Mississippi Delta resembles Rosaldo’s
complete hybridity in which strains cannot be divided. Ike’s terror in the face of
complete hybridity could suggest that this mixture really is a space of resistance, but the
passage creates a negative ethos toward hybridity rather than castng it in positive terms,
especially since this scene reveals that Ike, the sympathetic and progressive protagonist,
in the end, upholds the same racist tenets as his forbearers.—the very biases he has sought

to overcome by relinquishing the land where his ancestor’s slaves once bled. Indeed, it is

the idea of total hybridity in the racial sense which undoes Ike and demonstrates to him

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that the in-between space he has tried to carve out for himself—a niche somewhere
between wilderness and civilization, between landowner and day-labor carpenter, and
between white, black, and Indian—does not exist. In a strange way then, Ike’s gaze upon
hybridity destroys his own hybridity.

Just as Go Down, Moses challenges the image of Lucas as Rosaldo’s complete
hybrid, this novel and the rest of Faulkner’s written corpus about racial mixture negate
Lucas’ existence in Bhabha’s third space or space of resistance. In the ﬁrst place, any
challenge which Lucas offers to the discourse of miscegenation is completely intertwined
with and undermined by an even older and more complex hierarchy—patriarchy—since
Lucas ﬁnds conﬁdence and superiority in his nearness to old Carothers McCaslin (only
two generations away via a male bloodline) not in his hybrid nature. Lucas’ existence as
a hybrid who simultaneously shows the white community their mixed/incestuous
foundations, rejects white authority, and denies black kinship relies upon his acceptance
and repetition of patriarchal sexism and misogyny. His dismissal of the Edmonds’
legitimacy due to their female connection to old Carothers McCaslin’s bloodline is no
better than the Edmonds’ and the white community’s rejection of his legitimacy due to
his “black” connection to the ancient patriarch.

The fact that Lucas is a complete anomaly in this novel and in the rest of
Faulkner’s ﬁction also challenges the attempt to cast him as a positive hybrid who
occupies a rebellious space. No other “black” or “mixed” character in Go Down, Moses
lives in the privileged space that Lucas occupies; there is no textual evidence to suggest
that his wife, his children, or even his father—Terrel, who is old Carothers McCaslin’s

son/grandson—exist as total hybrids nor as voices of resistance. In fact, all of the

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members of Lucas’ family are complicit with the discourse of miscegenation by
accepting their roles as “blacks” without question even though their name should be
McCaslin rather than Beaucharnp. Lucas also stands out in sharp contrast to Faulkner’s
Joe Christmas from Light in August and to Clytie Sutpen, Charles Bon, Charles Etienne
Saint-Valery Bon, and Jim Bond from Absalom, Absalom! . Lucas’ opposition to the
discourse of miscegenation, when compared to the lives of these other characters, seems
more like a glitch or a personal feud than a representation of hybridity as an in-between
space of resistance.

The most convincing evidence against Lucas’ existence as a hybrid in Bhabha’s
terms, however, lies in the very nature of the resistance he offers to the discourse of
miscegenation. His rebellion is completely contained within the physical boundaries of
the Edmonds’ farm where Lucas’ blood relatives—both black and white—accept his
presence “with ambivalent tolerance and an understanding not found in the society at
large” (Jenkins 220). The white commmrity in Jefferson is not worried about nor
impressed by the fact that Lucas is the posterity of an old white slave owner. The
narrator comments that “[t]o the sheriff, Lucas was just another nigger” (43), and the
clerk of the court responds to Lucas’ lack of respect by calling him “uppity” while the
Chancellor only accepts Lucas’ appeal to strike his bill of divorce after Roth agrees that
the divorce is no longer necessary (124-25). Furthermore, this demonstration of Lucas’
lack of power outside the McCaslin/Edmonds/Beauchamp families is mild compared to
the portrayal of Lucas in Faulkner’s later novel Intruder in the Dust. In this novel,
Lucas’ pride, speciﬁcally his arrogance toward whites who do not have longstanding

names in the county, lands him in jail on the verge of being lynched for a murder that he

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did not commit. Intruder in the Dust, like Lucas’ encounter with the metal detector
salesman in “The Fire and the Hearth,” demonstrates Lucas’ uncanny ability to
manipulate difﬁcult circumstances to his advantage (even ﬁom a jail cell), but his
rebellion in this later novel suggests that Lucas has internalized the superiority complex
of the land-owning whites of Jefferson rather than challenging their privileged space.
Even though Lucas’ face creates fears of “hybridity all the way down” (Rosaldo xv) in
his white relatives, and even though he maintains a third space on the Edmonds farm, his
very rebellion supports the ideologies of white and male supremacy which undergird the
discourse of miscegenation.

Fuentes’ character Artemio Cruz is not, for the most part, cast as a hybrid in the
terms of contemporary hybrid theory. None of the passages that describe his physical
nature suggest that he is a thorough mixture in which the threads of the ancestors are
melded and lost. In fact, the physical portrayals of Cruz continually reveal supposed
remnants of his mulatta mother—Cruz’s skin and hair color—and his white father—
Cruz’s green eyes. So if Cruz is a hybrid, he is only the type of hybrid that maintains
rather than melds essential differences. While Cruz’s life is deﬁned by rebellion, he also
fails to become a third space of resistance since his participation in the Mexican
Revolution eventually places him within the ruling power structure rather than in
competition with it; the Revolution merely allows new caudillos of Cruz’s ilk to replace
the Diazes and Huertas of yesteryear.

In an obscure passage near the beginning of La muerte de Artemio Cruz, the
second person narrator (possibly Cruz’s conscience) interrogates Cruz and accuses him of

wanting to be like the North Americans with whom he has come into increasing contact

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through his business negotiations. This is the only passage in the novel in which Cruz is
cast as a hybrid (rather than as a mestizo or mulatto), and surprisingly, the passage has
little or nothing to do with race. Instead, the passage describes Cruz’s life as a mixture of
opposite threads (33-34), and the narrator claims that Cruz longs for an “intermediate
zone, ambiguous, between light and shadow” (33). According to the accusing narrator,
Cruz cannot truly enter the realm of the gringos because he is unable to view the world in
binary opposite terms like they supposedly do. The narrator asks, “has your vision of
things, in your worst or in your best moments, been as simplistic as theirs? Never. You
have never been able to think in black and white, in good and bad, in God and Devil”

(3 3). Cruz as hybrid, then, becomes another repetition of the philosophy of Octavio Paz
since his inability to be like the gringos, regardless of his affinities with them, reiterates
Paz’s dichotomy between the two nations.

Apart from supporting Paz’s views of U.S.-Mexico relations, this scene also
demonstrates the difﬁculty of performing the mental gymnastics required of Garcia
Canclini’s cultured consumer or hybrid who can supposedly shift gears between the
traditional and the modern at will. Cruz certainly has the purchasing power that Garcia
Canclini requires of his cultured consumer, but he has a difﬁcult time leaving the
traditional behind in his attempts to enter the modern. His consumer power has allowed
him to develop an appreciation for “the touch of quality cloth, the taste of quality liquors,
the scent of quality lotions” (32), but these goods only make him suffer through “the
nostalgia of geographic error” (32) as he laments over “the incompetence, the misery, the
ﬁlth, the apathy, the nakedness” of Mexico (33). Even though Cruz has not experienced

any of these negative conditions during the past forty-ﬁve to ﬁfty years, he cannot

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mentally overcome the poverty of his origin. No matter how much money he amasses
and no matter how many commodities he accumulates, his consumption in the modern
marketplace does not allow him to “be like them” (33). Instead, it emphasizes the
differences he sees between Mexico and the United States, between himself and the
gringos. Cruz ﬁnds bitterness rather than liberation in his ability to purchase his way into
modernity because he feels that the modernity he enters is only an artiﬁcial version of the
gringos’ world which he cannot enter. Ironically, Cruz’s desire for an in-between space
and his inability to think in binary opposites—the traits which could cast him as hybrid—
create a division between his modernity and U.S. modernity that he cannot surmount, or
in other words, his hybrid thinking creates a binary and traps Cruz inside, but not in-

between, the opposites.

Implications

I offer my critique of hybridity theory and my reading of Faulkner’s and Fuentes’
rejections of the concept of positive hybridity to bolster my argument that the discourses
of racial mixture which grew out of the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution—
miscegenation and mestizaj e—were central to the formation of national identities in the
United States and Mexico and still dictate how individuals in both countries understand
the concepts of race and nation. Hybridity theory is forever connected to the racial/racist
debates about Aﬁican humanity which grew in intensity as U.S. southemers saw national
and international support for race-based slavery shrink. The current buzz about positive
hybridity not only ignores this historic/etymological link to essentialist ideas of the past,

but it also glosses over the current power of the discourses of miscegenation and

243

mestizaje by appearing to have moved beyond the discourses. ” I would suggest that
instead of celebrating the arrival of a progressive understanding of race and racial
mixture which hybridity theory supposedly signals, we realize that the contemporary
fascination with hybridity is merely a phase within the discourses of miscegenation and
mestizaje that, contrary to the ideological thrust of the theory, actually supports these
long-standing discourses. Having made this realization, we can better continue to
interrogate the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje to unveil the essentialist
underpinnings of the constructs of racial and national identity in the hopes of avoiding
national (U .S. or Mexican) and international (whether between the U.S. and Mexico or
between any other nation-states) repetitions of our racist/nationalist pasts—the institution
of slavery in both nations, the U.S.-Mexican War, the U.S. Civil War, the Mexican
Revolution. Continuing to examine these discourses will also help us recognize and more
appropriately confront the socio-economic fallout from these conﬂicts which is still
overtly visible in both Mexico and the United States and in the relationship between

them.

 

” As a recent article in the New York Times suggests, efforts to connect race to biology—the link which
serves as the backbone of the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje—are alive and well. Amy
Harmon writes: “When scientists ﬁrst decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as
proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99
percent identical. But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between
people of different continental origins. Scientists, for instance, have recently identiﬁed small changes in
DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans’
resistance to certain diseases. At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and
into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different
DNA” (par. 1-3). According to Harmon, one of the upshots of this DNA research is that people, ﬁom
award winning scientists (e.g. Nobel Laureate Dr. James D. Watson) to everyday bloggers, are
using/abusing this information to make claims of black inferiority and/or white superiority. Scientiﬁc
racism, then, is not eternally wed to the nineteenth century; the twenty-ﬁrst century version might be even
more dangerous since it is supported by genetics—a science born in the nineteenth century which has only
grown in respect and inﬂuence since then—while nineteenth-century scientiﬁc racism was best supported
by the now debunked, and even then the new and somewhat tenuous, pseudo-sciences like craniology,
craniometry, phrenology, and trichology. Will genetics become the twenty-ﬁrst century eugenics?

244

The historiographic approach to inter-American literary studies which I present
and advocate throughout this project not only allows the literatures of the U.S. South and
Mexico to talk to one another, but it also gives other reasons for the conversation beyond
the possibility of direct authorial inﬂuence. Both shared and divergent historical
experiences with racialized civil wars create a dialogue between the literatures that look
back at these conﬂicts. Juxtaposing the discourse of miscegenation with the discourse of
mestizaje, and considering how the current concept of hybridity functions within these
discourses, once again exposes the political nature of the concepts of race, nation, and
border. Mestizaje’s public embrace of racial mixture demonstrates that miscegenation’s
binary approach to race—the segregation of black from white, the persecution of
blackness, and the assignation of mixture to the marginalized realm of blackness—is
national rather than natural, a tool of self defense and rationalization crafted and wielded
by a white-govemed nation that tore itself apart in a war that eventually granted blacks
political freedom but simultaneously denied them social and economic equality. At the
same time, miscegenation’s overt nature reveals the duplicity of mestizaje as a nationalist
discourse which claims to champion mixture while privately attempting to whiten the
nation. Indeed, the comparison between the two discourses shows that even though
segregation is harsher than assimilation it is also more prone to resistance since
assimilation engulfs and erases rather than ostracizes the racial other. Finally, reading the
discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje alongside one another reminds us that the
past—the U.S. Civil War, the Mexican Revolution, and the racialized societies which

grew out of these conﬂicts——continues to dictate how both nations interpret racial mixture

245

in the present and into the future even if the current fascination with positive hybridity
might suggest otherwise.

A careful comparative study of the literatures and histories of the U.S. South and
Mexico also exposes the contrived nature of the political and linguistic borders which
divide Mexico from the U.S. South and from the United States in general. My
historiographic approach to inter-American literary studies recognizes important
differences between Mexico and the U.S. South—distinct colonial pasts, differing
institutions of slavery, different independence movements, and disparate civil wars—but
it also pinpoints parallels within these dissimilarities and suggests that moments of
contact, e. g. the U.S.-Mexican War of 1848, reveal real and lasting connections between
the two regions—similar obsessions with the past, fascinations over wars cast as
fratricide, and anxieties about racial mixture. Paired together, these afﬁnities and
distinctions create a meaningful conversation between Mexico and the U.S. South and
strip both regions of any exceptional or mythic existence which regionalist and nationalist
agendas seek to maintain. Indeed, the increasing movement (of goods, labor, and literal
bodies) between Mexico and the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst
centuries (whether this movement is toward the U.S. South, the U.S. Southwest, or the
United States in general) marks a repetition or return of the past rather than a new
phenomenon or threat. The borderlands, and even the interiors of both Mexico and the
United States, like the quarantined space of whiteness and the marginalized space of
blackness in the discourse of miscegenation, are always already mixed. In the end, the
most signiﬁcant possibility created by my historiographic approach to the literatures of

Mexico and the U.S. South is a better understanding between Mexico and the United

246

States in general that can lead to a future of mutual respect and cooperation (a willingness

to see the other as co-protagonist) rather than tenuous co-existence or blatant antagonism.

247

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