Mestizaje, Métissage, and Mixedblood: Tracing Some Political Terms of Racial and Cultural Mixture Across the Americas

This essay offers a genealogy of race mixture in the Americas. It examines conceptions of race mixture that have been used to support various forms of settler nationalism in the Americas and ways that Indigenous and Afro-diasporic communities have both resisted and strategically utilized these conceptions of race to advance their claims to land, rights, and belonging in the Americas. This genealogy shows that racial categories many people take for granted are neither natural nor fixed; instead, they emerged within a distinctive and contingent historical context. The final section argues that this genealogy clarifies what is at stake in contemporary political contestations regarding discourses of racial and cultural mixture, including debates among Latinx and Indigenous scholars and activists today.