El Que No Tiene Dingo, Tiene Mandingo: The Inadequacy of the "Mestizo" as a Theoretical Construct in the Field of Latin American Studies - The Problem and Solution

Authors

Andrew Rosa, Western Kentucky UniversityFollow

Abstract

At a recent lecture at Temple University titled The African Presence in Puerto Rico, a young African woman from the island proclaimed to the audience that the Black experience in the United States is indeed unique and, because of her "mestizo" heritage, acculturation, racism, and struggle were not a part of her historical experience. As I looked on the face of my beautiful African sister, my heart shattered into a thousand little pieces. The lessons passed down to us from our African ancestors in the oral tradition-el que no tiene Dingo, tiene Mandingo-have finally fallen on deaf ears. Their struggle and perseverance to hold on to all that was Africa in the midst of brutal oppression had been, at this moment in time, for naught. The European had succeeded in colonizing the mind of my sister, for instead of locating herself within a rich tradition that dates back to ancient Kemet (Ancient Egypt), she could not look beyond the 500 years of colonial oppression-what I term the mestizo heritage. Hence, in honor of my African ancestors and their legacy of struggle; and for the love of my historically dislocated sister, I feel it necessary to expose the fallacy of the mestizo heritage and begin what Asante (1990) calls "a holistic intellectual adventure" back to Africa (p. 257).

A popular approach to the study of Latin Americans in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America is through what I term the mestizo paradigm. The mestizo (or mestizaje) paradigm is commonly used by Eurocentric scholars in the field of Latin American studies to define the cultural identities of the people within Latin America. Simply put, the mestizo is a sterile, static, and monolithic racial mixture of Indian, European, and African ethnicity.

The problem with this mestizo identity construct, especially when used as a theoretical construct, is that it denies the historical and cultural contributions of Africans to Latin American society by, as Jackson (1976) asserts, "white-washing history" (p. 2). It implies that Latin American identity came about through European contact in the Americas and, as a result, serves to only historically dislocate and assign the African to the historical and cultural periphery of Latin America. The mestizo construct, in the words of Aime Cesaire, "cuts him [the African] off from his roots, from his [the African's] universe, from his [the African's] own humanity and isolates him [the African] in a suicidal prison" (Cesaire, 1995, p. 15) by limiting the African to what Clarke (1995) coined "the figurative five hundred year old room" (p. 75) beginning with Christobal Colon's voyage to the New World on that dark day in October 1492. Hence the following discussion (a) exposes the fallacy of the mestizo as a theoretical construct, (b) highlights the way in which the traditional field of Latin American studies undervalues the African factor in Latin America, and (c) concludes by highlighting the necessity for an African Latino component within the discipline of Africology

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | History | Indigenous Studies | Latin American History | Latin American Languages and Societies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Recommended Citation

Rosa, Andrew. El Que No Tiene Dingo, Tiene Mandingo: The Inadequacy of the “Mestizo” as a Theoretical Construct in the Field of Latin American Studies – The Problem and Solution, Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1996.