| CAS Public Colloquium Wednesday, 25/01/2012 |
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Claudio Lomnitz
International Borders and the Origin of the ‘Mexican Race’ ...................................................................................................................................Lecturer: Claudio Lomnitz (Columbia University, New York City, USA) Date/Time: Wednesday, 25/01/2012, 5 – 7pm Location: Centre for Area Studies | Thomaskirchhof 20, 1st Floor | 04109 Leipzig Organisation: Centre for Area Studies (CAS) ................................................................................................................................... Abstract: How did the idea of a national race come to be a credible and widely spread notion in Mexico? This paper frames the question comparatively, by noting that the racialization of national identity, that is, the naturalization of national difference, is a common strategy, particularly when a state is too weak to impose collective identity by way of equality before the law. The Mexican case, however, is peculiar with regard to the success of a racialized idea of national identity because of its border with the United States, a situation that makes Mexico unique in the Americas. The essay demonstrates with historical detail and primary sources that the border dynamic that emerged in the late 19th century is the key to understanding why Mexicans in the 20th century represented themselves as members of a unitary race. The paper offers a close historical description and argument that tracks the consolidation of the ‘Mexican race’ as a figure that had real and convincing experiential referents.
Biographical Note: Claudio Lomnitz, the Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology as Columbia University, works on the history, politics and culture of Latin America, and particularly of Mexico. He received his PhD from Stanford in 1987, and his first book, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Mexico City, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico. After that Claudio developed an interest in conceptualizing the nation-state as a kind of cultural region, a theme that culminated in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (California, 1992). In that work, he also concentrated on the social work of intellectuals, a theme that he developed in various works on the history of public culture in Mexico, including Modernidad Indiana (Mexico City, 1999) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minnesota, 2001). Around 10 years ago Claudio began working on the historical anthropology of crisis and published Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), a political and cultural history of death in Mexico from the 16th to the 21st centuries. He is currently finishing a book on anarchism, socialism and revolution in Mexico (c. 1910) that inspects the cultural and political history of transnationalism. Claudio will be spending 2011-12 on a research fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin. |
