¿Porque Mestizo?/ Why Mestizo?
Like most Latinas and Latinos, I’m mestizo—I’m “mixed.” My mother’s family hails from the U.S. South; my father’s from Puerto Rico. Mis padres met and married in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Eventually they had me and my siblings. We are their “mixed” children, the mestizas/os. The term mestizo, like its English translation “mixed,” carries painful connotations. The mixed are the impure, the adulterated. During the colonial period, European empires racialized this concept. The Spanish colonizers, for example, deemed mestizas/os mixed-breed persons lacking white perfection. On this view, non-white blood—Indigenous, African, or Asian—contaminated white Spanish blood. Historically, then, mestizo/a and its cousin term mestizaje bore pejorative connotations. The Mexican scholar and presidential candidate José Vasconcelos labored to shift these connotations. In 1925 he wrote La raza cósmica—“The Cosmic Race”—arguing that mestizas/os were a new, healthy race of that included all the world’s races. Roman Catholic priest Virgilio Elizondo drew upon Vasconcelos’ essay to name the experience of people in the overlap of multiple cultures, societies, and political regimes. Latinas/os, Elizondo argued, live within and embody this experience. They dwell within the hyphen—e.g., “Mexican-American”— and the neplanta—the land in between, between two lands. As Justo González summarizes:
To be a mestiz[a/o] is to belong to two realities and at the same time not to belong to either of them.
The pain of not belonging to any group characterized my childhood and plagues me still. And I’m keenly aware that my Trinitarian adoption into the Church is another facet of my mestizaje. I am not merely the son of the Cartagenas and Smiths. I’m a child of God. And God has called me to love and serve the Church as a race scholar. This calling, like my family heritages, requires inhabiting competing and contested traditions, each occupied by those challenging my place among them. “How can you write on Thomas Aquinas and Critical Race Theory?” “You’re Reformed and a Thomist?” “Why are you reading Baldwin rather than your own people?” So the interrogations go. Scholar or not, any mestiza/o recognizes the temptation to cop out—to identify solely with a part of their heritage rather than the whole. Yet as Gloria Anzaldúa notes, copping out impairs self-knowledge and promotes injustice. My blog posts, then, are mestizo meditations aimed at holding together all that the Lord has given me, all that God calls me to cultivate and pursue. This requires navigating terrains rarely paired and inhabited by warring peoples. For some, this sounds dangerous, foolish, or both. For a mestizo, it sounds familiar. It sounds like home.
